Lucky Londoners!
'I SUPPOSE that indirectly Marx has had some- thing to do with this new approach.' So Sir John Neale wrote about the Namier method which he has himself so successfully adapted to the study of the sixteenth century. It is a remarkable tribute to the pervasiveness of Marx's influence, since neither Sir John nor Sir Lewis is among the most radical of our leading historians. But the method is Marxism without the notion of class struggle, which Marx regarded as his most im- portant discovery. Professor Neale's object as a historian, he tells us, was 'to get behind the formal architecture of constitutions to the men who worked them.' But man,' he adds, 'does not live in a vacuum, and on occasion it profits more to describe an environment than to write another biography.' His great achievement is to place con- stitutional ideas and individual politicians against their social background. MPs are important because in Elizabethan England the House of Commons represented the propertied ruling class, which 'was not unlike an enormous family, the gentry for the most part being known at court' and by name to the Queen. This strong and constant sense of the pressure of society gives Sir John's work an additional dimension lacking in some of Professor Namier's more funda- mentalist disciples, who seem to think the goings- on of MPs politically decisive in themselves.
This volume contains a number of essays, of very unequal value, published over the past thirty years. Most interesting is the confession of faith already quoted, 'The Biographical Approach to History.' Most important is 'The Elizabethan Political Scene,' with its devastating picture of the corrupt court where 'gratuities were funda- mental'; where office was bought and sold; where exclusion from the centres of patronage might mean not only political annihilation but bank- ruptcy, and might lead to rebellion, like that of Essex in 1601, 'an act of financial desperation.' Increasing corruption at the end of the reign 'has the appearance of an inflationary movement : too many suitors pursuing too few privileges.'
Other important essays include a closely argued paper clearing Elizabeth's Ambassador in Paris from the charge of selling secrets to Spain; and an equally technical essay on the finances of English intervention in the Dutch War of In- dependence. Elizabeth is vindicated from the traditional accusation of parsimony only—though Sir John does not say this—by attributing to her a scandalous frivolity in appointing to command a favourite so irresponsible, extravagant and corrupt as Leicester (and later Essex). Elizabeth alone appears, for Professor Neale, to rise above the social environment which moulded the other figures of her reign. 'Lucky Londoners!' he writes. 'They saw so much of their heroine.' Lucky Sir John! He has lived a lifetime with his heroine, and for him she remains Glbriana.
CHRISTOPHER HILL
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