Three British Revolutions: a postscript to the 1976 Folger Conference

Three British Revolutions: a postscript to the 1976 Folger Conference

In May, 1976, the Folger Institute of Renaissance and Eighteenth-Century Studies held a conference at the Folger Shakespeare Library to explore the relationships between the British Revolutions of 1641 and 1689 and their sequel in the rebellion of the American colonies in 1776. The contributors as the editor of its proceedings, J.G.A.Pocock, noted in his introduction apparently held that "something like a new perspective on all three Revolutions was emerging " but that they had announced that , although not the authors or originators of a new interpretation, they did feel "that they had announced the fact of its emergence from recent research and reflection." This was an oblique reference in the case of the English Revolution of 1641 to Lawrence Stone's claim at the conference that a consensus had now been reached on its origins as a revolt against a corrupt royal court. (Christopher Hill dissented.) Even so, Pocock went on to describe the historiography of the Tudor and early to mid-Stuart period in terms of Whig and later Marxist interpretatations that had become familiar before, during and after the 'storm over the gentry'. Unfortunately for Pocock and some of his contributors like Stone and, indeed, Hill, this account was seriously out of date by the time it was published in 1980.

Pocock was certainly able to highlight the problems arising from Whig claims that the early Stuarts had attempted to abrogate the constitutional conventions under which the English state operated and the attempts by Tawney, Hill and others to represent the gentry as a species of rural bourgeoisie rising to overthrow the Crown and the aristocracy. If Stone, moreover, was right in maintaining that there had been 'a crisis of the aristocracy' before 1640, the recovery of the peerage after 1660 constituted a serious puzzle. What was it that made the transition from the breakdown of an older Tudor aristocratic order to a Whig aristocratic order described by J.H.Plumb in the latter half of the seventeenth century possible? One of the implications of this process was that the office-holders and aspirants to power under Queen Elizabeth or King James VI and I were gradually transformed into the aristocratic managers of eighteenth-century parliamentary politics.

What was surprising about this introduction and, indeed, the essays by contributors dealing specifically with the revolution of 1641 was the lack of references to the reaction against Whig and Marxist interpretations that occurred in the mid-1970s. Critics of Lawrence Stone - figures like Paul Christianson, James Farnell and Mark Kishlansky - were mentioned. But there was only one reference by Stone himself to Conrad Russell's work and none in Christopher Hill's essay. Gerald Aylmer, who had not been at this conference, mentions John Morrill twice in his text and has three references in his footnotes to Conrad Russell but make it clear that his essay was composed before 1979. All this meant that the overall work was seriously out of date by the time it appeared in print. Pocock's analysis in any case came to no conclusion about the yawning gap between the arguments of Stone and J.H.Plumb, a gap which, in my submission, never existed since the position of the peerage and of the greater gentry in English (and Welsh) society strengthened noticeably in the late sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries.