1 FEBRUARY 1957, Page 20

Elizabeth an Parliament

THIS volume completes one of the most important historical achievements of our generation. Thirty years ago we knew little more about the Parlia- ments of the reign of Elizabeth than Froude did. Over many years of devoted labour Professor Sir John Neale has revealed the astonishing range of MS. sources still untapped. Now these diaries have been tracked down, their contents analysed, collated and exploited with the most effortless technical skill. Sir John probably knows more about any Elizabethan House of Commons than most MPs know about their own. With the House of Lords it is different, owing to an almost com- plete absence of diaries. Since the Lords were still in a real sense the upper house, our knowledge of Elizabeth's Parliaments is still incomplete.

For the Commons there is an enthralling story to tell, full of vivid incident and fascinating per- sonalities. Sir John's new evidence leads to reassessments: Sir Christopher Hatton ceases to be the court butterfly of our textbooks and becomes an able leader of the House of Com- mons. Job Throckmorton emerges as a brilliantly witty speaker, and his claim to the authorship of the Marprelate Tracts is thereby strengthened. But more significant points are convincingly established. There was a great deal more organised Puritan opposition in early Elizabethan Parliaments than historians had previously realised. So the rhythm of English constitutional development is seen to be much more complex than we had suspected. Since a diary of the 1601 House of Commons happened to be printed in the seventeenth century, historians came to regard this as a very refractory Parliament. They con- trasted it with what they believed to be the docility of earlier Parliaments: 1601 appeared to usher in the conflicts of the Stuart century with an inevitable gradualness. Sir John has upset all that. There was a far more revolutionary spirit in the early Parliaments of the reign, culminating in that of 1589, when Puritans inside the Com- mons combined with an organised public opinion outside to put pressure on the government. After 1589, opposition in Parliament was muted. It became less ideological, more secular : anti-

clerical rather than Puritan. MPs showed more interest in social and economic problems than in religion. Sir John sees these last years of the reign as a time of growing corruption and repres- sion, dominated by the 'sinister figure' of. Arch- bishop Whitgift, 'whose practices were a menace to the emergent liberalism of English life.'

One reason for the Commons' declining interest in Puritanism may be the alarm which the proper- tied classes felt at the Puritan appeal to a wider public outside Parliament, in the Marprelate Tracts and in their organisation of petitions. Spokesmen of the government and hierarchy harped insistently and apparently successfully on the theme that 'as they shoot at bishops now, so will they do at the nobility also, if they be suffered.' Bishops had, no worse a title to their estates than lay landlords. A second reason was that the defeat of the Armada had freed men from fear of foreign Papist intervention : anti-Popery, of which the Puritans were the main exponents, had always been related to foreign policy. Under the Stuarts protestantism and English nationalism were again threatened by continental Roman Catholicism, and anti-clericalism regained ideo- logical overtones. The anti-clericals joined hands with those whose preoccupation with economic discontents had first been expressed in Elizabeth's last Parliaments. Although we use the word 'Puritan' for both, the opposition which fought the civil war was very different from that of 1559. There is no straight line of evolution.

Nevertheless, like all first-class history, Sir John's narrative has an air of inevitability about it, is always reverberating into the future. Time and again he draws our attention to views and practices which anticipate later and more sophis- ticated opposition techniaues. An MP in the Par- liament of 1584 specifically proposed that supply should not be voted until grievances had been redressed. The same House of Commons, to Elizabeth's indignation, envisaged a sovereign Parliament carrying on the government during an interregnum after her death, whilst it determined the succession. MPs in 1587 anticipated the Long Parliament in wanting to incorporate the Nether- lands within the English State, since 'there only is the means of your safely, . . . there only and nowhere else is the vent of your commodities.' Elizabeth, like James I, believed her prerogative to be so absolute that she might hang a man against her laws. She surpassed James in imprison- ing or sequestering seven MPs in one Parliament. Meanwhile, Mr. Cromwell, 'one of the most sur- prising of our discoveries, stands out as the model type of parliamentarian, . . . fearless in defence of liberty.'

Finally, there is Sir John's style. He does not believe that the ideal history would have no readers. Although he makes no meretricious con- cessions, he wants to be read and takes pains accordingly. The result is triumphantly success- ful. The narrative flows evenly, the dramatic moments skilfully spotlighted; qucitations are apt and never too long; characterisation is shrewd and vivid. The author does not withhold pungent comment, almost participating in the debates him- self. He makes free use of modern parallels, some- times illuminatingly. Perhaps he looks on the Puritans too much in the light of modern political groups which he dislikes, and so dismisses too lightly their criticisms as 'propaganda.' He him- self admits that there were real abuses in Church and State, and how does one get rid of an abuse except by attacking it?

One modern parallel Sir John does not draw is between conventional adulation of-Elizabeth and conventional adulation of Stalin. For Sir John himself worships the Queen, sometimes to excess. Can we really believe that Elizabeth was more far- sighted than all her advisers in refusing to allow any discussion of her successor? Simpler explana- tions suggest themselves. It worked out all right : but it was a terrible gamble with the lives of the Queen's subjects, who might have been exposed to civil war if her would-be assassins had been a little more competent. Nevertheless, Sir John poses the alternatives fairly : 'an astounding act of moral courage or wilfulness.' Partisanship of this sort makes far livelier reading than a bogus impartiality, and nobody's pocket is picked since the distinction between fact and comment is always clear. This is history as it should be