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| Lawrence Stone |
Quite by chance, I came across Lawrence Stone’s 1979
article on this subject yesterday evening. It was originally published in Past
and Present and subsequently appeared in his 1987 collection of essays, The
Past and Present Revisited. I have commented before on the way in which Stone,
who was at Princeton University from 1963, lost touch with the evolution of
historiographical thinking in the U.K. about the origins, course and outcomes
of the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. Inevitably,
perhaps, Stone was more than surprised by the development of ‘revisionism’ from
the middle of that decade onwards.
This sense of disassociation has something to do, I
suspect, with Stone’s account of the works of “the new British school of young
antiquarian empiricists” led by Conrad Russell and John Kenyon and urged on by
Geoffrey Elton. According to Stone, they were writing political narratives
implicitly denying that there was any deep-seated meaning to history save for
the accidents of fortune and personality and trying to remove any sense of
idealism or ideology from the two English revolutions of the seventeenth
century.
This was pure neo-Namierism just when that phenomenon was
dying as an approach to the eighteenth-century. Stone speculated that this
attitude to political history might stem from the inexorable economic decline
and reduced power of Britain.
There was something quite odd about this analysis. Elton
and Kenyon were historians of Stone’s own generation and, while Elton had
certainly objected to the kind of economic and social determinism that appealed
to Stone as an explanation of the English Revolution, neither he nor Kenyon
could be accurately described as a “revisionist”.
Russell himself was in his forties by 1979 and roughly a
decade or so older than figures like Kevin Sharpe or John Morrill. His act of
intellectual liberation from the presuppositions of Tawney, Stone and Hill was
a much slower process than that experienced by his younger contemporaries. It
was also based, although this point has not been fully grasped by most
specialists in seventeenth-century political history, on a mistaken reading of
early Stuart Parliamentary history.
From as far back as R. G. Usher’s work in 1924, the
existence of “opposition” had been disputed: John Ball’s brilliant Cambridge
Ph.D. on Sir John Elliot had dealt a death blow to Whig interpretations while
J.H.Hexter had repudiated the idea of a struggle for sovereignty in 1958:
J.S.Roskell had explained as early as 1964 that ideas about the House of
Commons exercising ‘power’ were fallacious before the end of the seventeenth
century.
Had Stone been better informed about political history, he might have
made much more telling criticisms of the so-called ‘revisionists’. Between
Stone and those he criticised in 1979, there was more than just a difference in
approach to the study of this period. Like Christopher Hill, he had been
considered up until the mid-1970s as being at the forefront of re-interpreting
the seismic events of the 1640s and 1650s.
But suddenly there had been a significant change in the
historiographical and intellectual atmosphere. The old assumption that
political history simply reflected material changes in the economy of English,
Welsh, Scottish and Irish societies, that, indeed, its course had been
essentially explained already, was exploded. Stone like many others was no
longer a fashionable guide to these events. Admittedly, he and others tried to
push back as the commentaries produced by Hexter and his allies showed. It was
too late. The ‘antiquarian empiricists’ now commanded the field, at least until
c.1990. Lament it as he did, Stone’s time was over.
C Thompson
