Conrad Russell on Christopher Hill's The Experience of Defeat in 1984
Conrad Russell on Christopher
Hill’s book, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries, in The
London Review of Books (October, 1984)[1]
Encounters between historians of
different and contrasting generations are often illuminating: they show up more
than just differences of approach but also distinctions in views, sometimes of
a critical or hostile nature. Conrad Russell’s review in the LRB on the post-1660
reactions of supporters of the ‘good old cause’ to their eclipse is a case in point, antique though it now is. It
was not just a reflection on disagreements between the two men but, in
addition, the product of personal differences dating back to the period when
Conrad Russell had been one of Hill’s postgraduate pupils in Oxford and who had
left to pursue a teaching career at Bedford College in the University of London
where he had, after a decade and a half, risen to prominence as the first of
the ‘revisionists’ who had overthrown the materialist interpretation of the
English Revolution to which Hill had devoted his career. Hill actually had
little respect for Russell’s scholarship and viewed the latter as “a fraud”.[2]
Russell agreed with Hill on the
explanations supporters of the Revolution offered for their failure to
consolidate their military victories. Some like the lawyer and prosecutor of
King Charles I, John Cooke, accepted that their contemporaries resisted the changes
they, the victors, had wished to make while others like William Sedgwick
thought that the people as a whole had not been willing or fit to accept the
rule of the saints. Alternatively, there was the idea that their failure was due to a ‘sell-out’
by the soldiers’ leaders and by grandees aiming to hold places of power and
profit at the expense of their principles and had been the primary cause. This
second line of explanation was less convincing according to Russell. He
preferred the concept of competing radical causes incompatible with one another
as a more plausible line of argument.
It is, perhaps, surprising that
Russell did not make more of these points and develop them further. There was then
and still is now a tendency to account for the events of the 1640s and 1650s in
terms of antecedent changes, for example, in political and religious terms or
in demographic, economic and social causes and, more recently, in cultural
explanations, the growth of literacy and the impact of printed discourses. A
significant number of historians working on the period are clearly fascinated
by the appearance of groups like the Levellers and Diggers and the development
of sectarian religious groupings like the Fifth Monarchists, the Ranters, Quakers
and many others. There is a degree of hagiography involved here. However, these
long-term changes and explanations do not appear to apply so readily to the Restoration
of the Stuart monarchy, of the Churches of England, Scotland and Ireland in and
after 1660. The accidents of politics and diplomacy appear preferable to
antecedent factors. Similarly, the revival of rule by the landowning groups
partly displaced in the preceding decade and a half and the recovery of the
positions of clergymen and lawyers is explained as a by-product of the occurrences
of 1660. That experience of rule by a combination of commonwealth men and
republicans, soldiers and saints, might have been alienating for the bulk of
the populations of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland and have vindicated
royalist warnings about the dangers of civil war has attracted rather less
attention.
Russell’s attention then switched
to Hill’s choice of authors reflecting
on the reasons for their defeat and questions about his selection amongst them.
James Harrington’s allegedly discredited social analysis of his age raised
issues about why his inclusion rather than that of Thomas Hobbes was
appropriate. In the same vein, Andrew Marvell was too protean a figure to fit
into the straitjacket of a ‘Harringtonian’. Hostility to clergymen and even
more to lawyers in the Interregnum was clearly evident as it had been in the
case of the legal profession since the 1620s.
The unsung hero of Hill’s book
was in Russell’s estimation the collection
of contemporary tracts made by George Thomason now held in the British Library.
It had apparently no parallel in the previous history of the world. Hobbes and
Milton rubbed shoulders within its confines with doggerel, scandal sheets and
ephemera. There was no comparable body of pre-Civil War material and there was
always the danger that their contents might be given more importance than they
really deserved. Had the torrent of ideas they contained been held before 1640
or 1642 and only then found their way into print or were such ideas a reaction
to the breakdown of authority? Were they cause or consequence? This is a
surprising line of argument if only because the revolt of the Low Countries against
Philip II’s rule and the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century had
produced even larger archives of printed pamphlets. The number of printed works
surviving from the Frondes of 1648-1653 in France is at least twice the size of
the Thomason collection.
More surprising still was Russell’s
claim that there was a great dearth of archives including those relating to
private estate papers for the years between 1642 and 1660. This was and is complete
nonsense.
Russell closed his review with a
personal defence of his origins as an historian of ideas and the proposition
that, in 1642, the clashes between Royalists and Parliamentarians were between
people who shared the same body of ideas about the Great Chain of Being and the
importance of unity in religion. Pym and Strafford wanted, so he claimed, to
blame the other for the fact that these ideas were no longer workable. There
was no new draught of intoxicating ideas available at the outset of the
conflict as there was after 1645. Even so, no lasting transformation of English
landownership or society occurred, no strengthening of Parliamentary power
before, perhaps, the eighteenth century: on the contrary, the struggles of the
Civil War was a conflict “to preserve a unified church and a unified body
politic in which there were no parties [and] led to ‘the experience of defeat’
for all the major factions that took part in it.”
These conclusions testified to
Russell’s view of the events of the 1640s as the result of political accidents
and the absence of fundamental problems in politics and religion in England in
particular. Hill’s analysis was profoundly at odds with this vision. Both were
wrong but that is another story.
19th May, 2021
[1]
Conrad Russell, Losers. London Review of Books (4th October, 1984),
Volume 6 No.18. The subject of his review was Christopher Hill, The Experience
of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (July, 1984).
[2]
See My Dear Hugh, Letter from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and others,
edited by Tim Heald (Frances Lincoln Limited. 2011), page 166.
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