Books
The last Roundhead Whig
J. P. Kenyon
Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History PreserIN ted to Christopher Hill Edited by uonald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford £12.50) It Swell known that John Henry Newman's father, undecided whether to send his son to Oxford or Cambridge, postponed a final decision until the gig arrived at the front door. We are now told that John Edward Christopher Hill had a similar escape. Tired °f waiting for a decision from Oxford, he accepted the offer of a place at Cambridge, and the Balliol history don, Kenneth Bell, drove all the way to York to dissuade him. It is useless to speculate on precisely what Christopher Hill would have become in the Cambridge of the early 1930s, but almost certainly he would have been a very different creature from the one we know t°,daY. His social warmth was fanned by the ,‘e.nnintriier atmosphere of Oxford, its more nighly-developed, and very self-conscious, cultivation of a gregarious equality between die e tutors and the taught, and it is intersting to see the emphasis which the contributors to the memoir which prefaces this volume place on Hill's open-handed hosPitality at Balliol, even after he became Master. More important, Oxford pandered fo the romantic in him, as it did in Newman, ,and a romantic he remains. He ,passionately believes that there is a Right and a Wrong in Pot litics, especially in the seventeenth cenAu.rY and in movements like Puritanism he ubtscerns a strange moral and aesthetic eaufY. He is our most distinguished living vv,hig historian, but he is what Acton called +a, Roundhead Whig', one who thinks that `,..ne Great Rebellion was indeed a true Kevolution, that it ought to have produced Perrnanent results, and therefore that it did. Yet, however wrong-headed he may ebe, See et, from time to time, his great personal ar °m shines through all his work, dismantling criticism, There was a lack of dogism, a gaiety, a sense of innocence, even nis Communism, and as Maurice Keen itnarks, he was always free of 'the fashwun. able gimmickry that often goes along radicalism'. Another ex-pupil of his, Stretton, describes him as 'the puritan ',JIMc cavaliers always under-estimate; loving ifd loved, witty, funny, perceptive, delightti7rg life and genuinely fond of an extrare dinarY variety of its human repwsentatives'. Indeed, it comes as som hn 7Leotudes all his etig even ,I12 shock that a man so young in should now have retired, and ° he recipient of a Festschrift. 'eonce, the Festschrift is worthy of the llpient. That is not to say that the Pupils have caught the master's flair and style, and some of them are downright ponderous, but individually and collectively they make a significant addition to our corpus of knowledge on seventeenth-century England. The fact that most of the contributions reflect .Hill's own interests also gives it a greater unity than is usual in such compilations. Gerald Aylmer, for instance, contributes a questioning, introspective piece on 'unbelief' in seventeenth-century England, highlighting the lack of any working concept of agnosticism and the contemporary inability to distinguish between deism and atheism. In a rather discursive essay on Wales from 1649 to 1660 A.M. Johnson picks up Hill's work on 'the dark corners of the land', and Nicholas Tyacke carries a little further the debate on science and religion in the early seventeenth century launched by Hill in his Ford Lectures. Three further studies of individuals illuminate the relationship between Puritanism and society which has been one of his principal concerns. Thus Wilfred Prest contributes an interesting piece on Sir Henry Finch, father of the notorious Speaker and Ship Money judge, Sir John Finch, which shows how a devotion to Puritanism was compatible with a strictly conservative attitude to politics and the law; in fact Prest argues that the law as a profession always maintained a certain detachment from the constitutional issues at stake under James 1 and Charles I. Henry Marten, the subject of a mini-biography by C.M. Williams, was a witty, energetic and irrepressible radical well to the left of his fellow Members of the Long Parliament, and calculated to appeal personally to Christopher Hill, and Kenneth Haley recounts how the millenarist ideas which Hill analysed for the inter regnum in The World Turned Upside Down were carried on well into the 1670s by a Dutch Fifth Monarchist, Johannes Rothe, whose spirited campaign against William of Orange put him in prison from 1676 to 1691. This section is rounded off by two more analytical essays on Puritanism; Brian Manning clarifies our ideas on Puritanism and democracy by analysing Presbyterian attitudes to popular participation in church affairs, an exercise well worth taking, and Keith Thomas reconsiders the notorious 'Morality Ordinance' of 1650. He proves that the decision to make incest and adultery punishable by death was not the act of a few Puritan fanatics alone; the proposal had a long history in previous, more stable parliaments going back to Elizabeth's reign and may be seen as the culmination of steady middle-class pressure. Finally, Peter Clark's examination of 'The Alehouse and the Alternative Society' may be said to reflect the recipient's interests in more ways than one. It shows, amongst other things, that the alehouse was never the focus for popular discontent and lower-class agitation that the clergy and the magistracy thought it was. As he says, 'If it had been, the course of the English Revolution might have been rather different.'
In a review of this length there is no room to discuss or even mention all the contributions to this volume, but it is worth singling out two more, not only because of their intrinsic importance, but because they focus on the machinery of political negotiation and agitation, which I think it is true to say has never interested Christopher Hill very much. Donald Pennington examines in some detail the drift into civil war from 1640 to 1642, and shows that it was not so much a matter of 'hopes and ideals' but of 'worries and muddles', as MPs and administrators strove to cope with a totally unprecedented situation which was at the same time unnervingly fluid. It is too often assumed that we know all we need to know about this process — in fact, we know very little, though Mr Pennington moderates our ignorance to some extent. Finally, David Underdown comes to grips with a virtually unknown class of political agitators whom he calls the 'Honest Radicals'. The violent solution adopted by the Army in 1648 and 1649, of purging Parliament and executing the King, was equally opposed by the radical left and by the middle party (so-called), but Professor Underdown argues that it was not simply a putsch organised by Cromwell, Ireton and a few metropolitan republicans; it had widespread support from radicals who had organised themselves in the provinces, though they were as disappointed with the results of the 'revolution' of 1649 as were the Levellers. It is a wise and perceptive essay, which obliges us to re-shuffle many of our ideas.
But 'perceptive', 'challenging', 'original' are terms which could be used of almost all these essays, and it is a tribute to the vitality of Christopher Hill's teaching in the first place, and the regard and affection he has inspired in his friends and ex-pupils, that this should be so. Clearly they have given of their best, and it is appropriate that this should not be a vapid, formal memento but a book of vital interest to anyone working on, or teaching, seventeenth-century history.
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