Parlamentary History before Conrad Russell and the rise of revisionism (Copyright: Christopher Thompson)

 Parliamentary history before Conrad Russell and the rise of revisionism

Whatever view one takes of the merits of his arguments, there can be no doubt that Conrad Russell was a major figure in seventeenth-century historiography. His rise to eminence began in the 1970s when he first challenged many of the assumptions which he then considered to underlie the analysis of early Stuart political history. Traditional ideas about conflicts between Crown and Parliament, on Parliament as a ‘great power’ in the State divided between supporters of ‘government’ and ‘opposition’, on debates as a contest for ‘power’ between these two sides and over a ‘High Road’ leading inexorably to Civil War attracted his critical scrutiny. He objected to reading Parliamentary history backwards from the 1640s with all the teleological implications of doing so whilst making a powerful case for the proposition that early Stuart Parliaments were not powerful and did not contain an ‘opposition’.

Russell had his own positive arguments about the fiscal difficulties and functional breakdown of the English State, on the importance of local interests to M.P.s and their constitutional conservatism as well as on the absence of fundamental ideological divisions to put in the place of this older interpretation. To those wedded to Whig or Marxist presuppositions, these arguments constituted a profound challenge.

Exactly who the well-known historians were who held the views Russell criticised was not at all clear, especially since he partly cleared Wallace Notestein from subscription to such contentions. His demolition of this antique intellectual structure proved deeply attractive to younger historians for whom it opened up previously sealed areas of high politics to renewed exploration. New approaches to political structures and religious divisions became practicable within a wider comparative framework. It was and is no surprise that his analytical adventure should have attracted so much praise.

Nonetheless, I was not persuaded by Russell’s advocacy of this case in the 1970s. As someone present when this enterprise began, I have very serious reservations about his account of the state of historical scholarship when he began writing on early Stuart Parliaments. His description of historians’ understanding by the mid-1970s of the Parliamentary politics of the period between 1604 and1629 was, in my view, wrong and his depiction of the state of scholarly opinion then throws a sharp light on his strengths and weaknesses as an historian.

The truth is that Russell was not the first to offer a fundamental challenge to the traditional interpretation of early Stuart Parliamentary history. J.H.Hexter had done so in his famous essay, Storm over the Gentry, first published in 1958. His case was that, from 1558 to 1641, the gentry in the House of Commons “made no consistent or concerted effort to win permanent control and direction of the government.” They did not claim or seek sovereign authority over the king nor did they maintain that the king-in-parliament was always sovereign over the king-out-of-parliament. When what appeared to the eyes of modern historians to be issues of power were clearly posed, the lower House adopted intricate arguments and manoeuvres to transform them into claims of ancient and traditional right despite the legal difficulties. M.P.s, he concluded, “neither talked nor acted like would-be rulers of the realm.”

Hexter went on to deny that a political or social group occupying a strategic position in the power structure would necessarily and always seek supreme political power for itself. It might instead try to define the conditions under which the existing supreme authority operated. Some of the purposes of such a group might, moreover, b e shared with other segments of society. The gentry in the House of Commons had their own particular concerns over wardship, purveyance, etc., but they were also vitally concerned like other Englishmen in the survival of representative institutions, in freedom from arbitrary arrest and capricious fiscal exactions, and in the preservation of the rule of law. That is why they gave far more attention and time to issues of wider concern than to their sectional interests.

By giving up the notion that the House of Commons aimed at supreme power, it became easier, according to Hexter, to explain the backing and filling its members engaged in when facing the problems of power. The Commons proved indecisive and uncertain over the locus and nature of supreme authority in the realm. Its members did not know what they wanted for themselves in the way of power but understood very clearly what they did not want for the King. In their localities and at Westminster, they showed remarkable skill in ensuring that successive monarchs did not get what they did not want him to secure. The development of constitutional and fiscal, political and religious grievances certainly evoked widespread opposition to the Crown. Its critics in the lower House rather than forming tight, well-knit interests in late seventeenth-century fashion arranged themselves in loose ‘connections’, inchoate groupings linked from time to time with like- minded peers but not controlled by them. Nonetheless, a consistent course was followed from 1604 to 1688 in defending the liberties of Englishmen. Hexter was aware that, in making the last point, he might be charged with abetting a Whig interpretation: to that, at least, he pleaded guilty.

The key elements of the ‘revisionist’ interpretation – the absence of a struggle between Crown and Parliament over sovereignty, a denial of the existence of a fixed or formal ‘opposition’, the suggestion of localist and central obstruction of royal policies, the hints about loose political groupings and bi-cameral connections and the repudiation of Marxist claims about the class interests of landowners – were all present by 1958. To postgraduates concerned as I then was with Parliamentary politics in the 1620s, his arguments seemed highly important. It is impossible to believe that Russell never read Hexter’s essay, Storm over the Gentry, but he never cited or considered these arguments at all in his work after 1973.

There were many other signs well before the mid-1970s of the difficulties the traditional interpretation was facing. The importance Russell placed on the local priorities of the gentry had been elegantly anticipated by G.M.Trevelyan. Margaret Judson’s book, The Crisis of the Constitution, which originally appeared in 1949, had argued that there was no ideological split between Crown and Parliament over the fundamentals of the constitution but important differences about where the line between the rights of sovereign and subjects was to be drawn. John Ball’s brilliant and seminal Cambridge Ph.D. thesis of 1953 was composed, as Russell himself rightly recognised, outside the Whig tradition of historiography. R.W.K.Hinton had written four years later about the weak position of early Stuart Parliaments despite their increasing procedural sophistication and of the threat to their continuing existence. In his book on the Addled Parliament of 1614, T.L.Moir had commented on the unrealistic views of members of the lower House in matters of financial policy and of their nominal leaders’ lack of control over other M .P.s. Menna Prestwich had challenged the teleological line of argument employed by Notestein in 1966. Her Oxford colleague, J.P.Cooper, argued in 1970 that it was misleading to envisage Court and Country as two monolithic blocks: factions as Court sought allies in the ‘country’ and in the House of Commons when it was sitting for their own purposes, claims later endorsed by Alan Smith. My essay – written in 1968 but published in 1972 – on the political antecedents of the Providence Island Company had broken new ground in describing the evolution of a bi-cameral grouping. I was, moreover, the person who suggested to Russell that he should undertake a study of the career of John Pym and of the Parliaments of the 1620s.

Russell’s accounts from 1976 to 1979 of the principal features of historians’ understanding of the Parliaments of the early Stuart period can thus be seen to have been much too schematic. They may have had some point as a teaching device in a lecture theatre or seminar room but the “traditional interpretation” as he described it had been fundamentally challenged in general and in selective detail long before he wrote about it. It would have been better if he had acknowledged this explicitly. Naturally enough, the straw man he erected when he came to compose his essay on Parliaments in perspective between 1604 and 1629 and his major book on Parliaments and English Politics between 1621 and 1629 was easily demolished. Its articulation testified to his own taste for dramatic argument and the theatrical refutation of established orthodoxies. Unfortunately, this approach was open to serious objections and rejection itself. However great the stimulus he may have given to the study of the high politics of the early Stuart period, his discussion of the work of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries was unnecessarily flawed. That is to be regretted even now.