EMH EarlyModernHistory

 Quite by chance, one of the references in a Google alert led me to try to trace the works of one of the authors. I followed the name of one of the authors and came across an article from 2013 covering the subject in the title above. It can be read here . I should be exceptionally interested to learn what historians of the period make of it.

 

 The Fast Company has an intriguing post on the work of these two scholars on this subject. It can be read here .

 

 

 

 A recorded video of a talk on A.L.Morton can be viewed here .

 This review is worth reading but expresses some highly questionable views on the King's abilities.

 

The new edition of History Today has a review of Gareth Russell's book on James VI and I's homosexual relationships. It makes the remarkable claim that James was a successful monarch.

 

 There is to be an important exhibition of documents and artefacts in Edinburgh later this month organised by the National Records of Scotland and shown in the National galleries. Details can be found here .

The Literary Review is, I must admit, one of my favourite publications, partly because of the range of books it covers. April, 2025's edition is no exception. I have been particularly intrigued to read Peter Moore's assessment of Simon Park's book, Wreckers:Disaster in the Age of Discovery , which covers the trials and tribulations of European explorers in the period after 1492. This was less glorious, according to Simon Park, than it has traditionally been viewed. There were deaths, disasters and all sorts of humiliations experienced by seafarers like Vasco da Gama, Magellan and others. This shift in perspective helps to adjust one's appreciation of the period even though the inhabitants of Central and South America or India did not apparently draw serious conclusions from the appearance of travellers from so far away. There is also a review by the distinguished historian, John Guy, of Anna Whitelock's new book, The Sun Rising: James I and the Dawn of a Global Brit...

 

  Renaissance Lives - 'Thomas Nashe and Late Elizabethan Writing'   This will be a roundtable discussion.

An interesting afternoon spent listening to the late Brian Manning give a talk to a Socialist Workers' Party meeting on the subject of the English Revolution. Exactly when this happened is not clear but it can be heard on Youtube. His talk was admirably clear in its speech and equally clear in analysing a succession of interpretations of the events of the 1640s and 1650s. These involved a Whig or political interpretation of the period as a struggle for political liberty leading to the establishment of constitutional and Parliamentary liberties; a largely religious explanation of a struggle against the Church of England leading to the emergence of dissent and nonconfomity; and an economic interpretation entailing the decline of feudalism and the growth of capitalism. The overthrow of the monarchy (and execution of Charles I), the House of Lords and the Church of England were, in Manning's view, to have been welcomed. His emphasis was, however, on the growing gap in English socie...

 

I have just discovered John Crofts of the University of Brimingham via 'X' (aka Twitter). He is working on radicals in the New Model Army between 1647 and 1649.

 This interview can be seen here .

These papers, which were formerly deposited on loan in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane in London as PRO 30/15/205-426, were withdrawn in 1969 and subsequently offered for sale. The bulk of the manuscripts relating to Virginia are now in the Tracy W.McGregor Library in Charlottesville, Virginia while the Bermuda material is now to be found in that island's Archive Office. Fortunately, the Massachusetts Historical Society had photostatic copies made and these were deposited in the Library of the Congress of the United States in Washington, D.C. in 1933. They can be found in the catalogue under the name of William Drogo Montagu.

One of the puzzling features about Braddick's biography is his discussion of Hill's years as Master of Balliol College in the University of Oxford. Its focus is on Hill's dealings with student radicals and unrest in that college. What it does not do is to cover Hill's activities in dealing with its governing body, the Senior Common Room. Richard Cobb's correspondence (to which I have already referred) makes some serous points about Hill's deviousness and secretiveness: he "has a CABAL" (28 August, 1968). Later, Cobb observed that Hill "has always been an OPERATOR. He is DEVIOUS and as Master worked through Secret Committees, so that the Governing Body was largely disenfranchised" (Heald, Pp.35, 163). It would have been interesting to learn if these charges were true and what, if any evidence, bears on them.

 

Quite a few years  ago, I began making enquiries about the location of Lawrence Stone's papers. My initial overtures were to the H-Albion site and did not prove very productive. It appeared that much of his correspondence was left in the office of the Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton and was disposed of by his successor. His daughter, herself a distinguished academic, did not respond when I sent her an e-mail and other colleagues of his - e.g. Ted Rabb - were unable to help me. I subsequently learnt that Stone had destroyed much of his collection of papers leaving later scholars to reconstruct his views from his articles, books and other publications. However, a casual search on-line this morning revealed that the archives of King's College, Cambridge hold a very small group of nine letters between John Saltmarsh and Stone from the 1950s and early-1960s (GBR/027/JS/3/9). I suspect that there must be other such letters held by the descendants or literary e...

 Stephen Roberts's observations can be found on The World Turned Upside Down website here   .

 For a critical review of Braddick's book. follow the link here .

  Spring/Summer Term 2025: 6 May (online):  Bryn Blake  (KCL): 'The Western Schism in English Protestant Polemic c. 1530-1640'. 20 May (please note this takes place at 17:00 (GMT) in the Teaching Suite, The Warburg Institute in Woburn Square) :  Noah Millstone (Birmingham): 'The Religion/Politics Distinction in Early Modern England and Europe'. 3 June (online): Justin Schwarz (KCL): ''His Cause and Glory Lies at Stake': the Rhetorics of Martyrdom in Leveller Writings, c. 1638-1649'.   17 June (please note this takes place at 17:00 in the Bancroft Room in Lambeth Palace Library) : Arnold Hunt (Durham): 'The Forgotten Laudian? Richard Steward (1595-1651) and the Origins of Anglican High Churchmanship'.

 Let me begin by agreeing that the origins of large-scale petitioning on political and religious matters can be found in the records of the movement for a Presbyterian settlement for the Church of England in the 1580s. This was the precedent for the later petitioning activities in the early to mid-Stuart period although petitioning itself was common at all levels of English and Welsh society on local and other matters by then. Recognising that such appeals were one of the common features of bargaining between the Crown, the Privy Council and other organs of the State and Church at that time is appropriate. Charles I's critics in the 1620s and again by 1640 utilised such means. We can see this in the co-ordinated petitions submitted to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640 and later in and after November, 1640 when the Long Parliament met. The leaders of the so-called 'Junto', men like the 2nd Earl of Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele, the 2nd Lord Brooke, Jo...

  I only ever met Jack Hexter once in September, 1972 when he came to London to deliver the second J.E.Neale lecture at University College, London. He was staying with Valerie Pearl in Holden Road, Finchley. We had lunch in Southampton Row in London. I had expected Hexter to be a witty, engaging, very well informed figure. In fact, he proved to be very short and exceedingly dull as a conversationalist. I was surprised to say the least. It was a great deal later that I learnt of the course of his intellectual alliances in the United States. Valerie Pearl did tell me a few days later that she would never act as his host again.  

  LAWRENCE STONE AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE GENTRY CONTROVERSY   The controversy over the economic and social origins of the English Revolution was a topic that excited ferocious debate over sixty years ago. Historians of the calibre of R.H.Tawney and Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper, Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone advanced radically different interpretations to explain the violent events of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. American scholars, most famously of all, J.H.Hexter, like Willson Coates, Harold Hulme, Judith Shklar and Perez Zagorin also commented with varying degrees of sharpness on the issues at stake. But only one of the major participants, Lawrence Stone, offered an account of the historiography of the dispute, first of all in his introduction to the anthology of academic articles and documentary sources entitled Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640 which he edited in 1965 and then, in slightly revised form, in Chapter 2 of ...

For an introduction to Hill's papers now held by the library of Balliol College, Oxford, follow the link  here .

John Rees's new book, Fiery Spirits , arrived by post from Verso Books yesterday morning. I have it to review but was surprised to see my name mentioned in his acknowledgements. Dr Rees will be giving a talk on his work towards the end of this month as the image above indicates. The date for the annual Levellers' Day in Burford has been announced: it will be on 17th May next.