I first met Christopher Hill at the start of Michaelmas term in October, 1965. I had actually heard him deliver a series of lectures in Balliol College’s dining hall in Hilary term of 1963, lectures which drew upon his draft work on Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England subsequently published in 1964, and had been more than surprised to find that he was to be my postgraduate supervisor for the ensuing years. We met in his office which was located in the main quadrangle behind the small outer one through which one had to pass and to the east. He sat in a chair that hung down by a chain from the ceiling and seemed principally interested on this first occasion on my social origins and the cost of my watch which was one of the first to give the date as well as the time. I did find his willingness to remain silent for long periods, which I later learnt was an old Oxford teaching technique, rather disconcerting, but, that apart, we were always polite to one another even though I fundamentally disagreed with his interpretation of the early modern period in general and of the ‘English Revolution’ in particular. That was still true when we last met at the Huntington Library in San Marino in California in January, 1997.
Most people who heard Christopher Hill lecture would, I
think, agree that he was not an inspiring speaker. His delivery was affected by
his stammer and he frequently sniffed after two or three sentences which made
his performance a rather staccato one. Much more seriously, his work as an
academic supervisor was hampered by his ignorance of the manuscript sources for
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which form the overwhelming bulk of the
surviving documentary material for the period. This was the more remarkable
because the Bodleian Library, which is less than two hundred yards from Balliol
College, had and has one of the most magnificent collections of manuscript
documents covering this period but which he never examined. In several decades
of research, I never once saw him in the Public Record Office or in the British
Museum - now the British Library - or in any county record office. Printed
sources alone, especially the spectacular and profound disputes recorded in the
Thomason Tracts, are not in themselves enough for a comprehensive study of the
figures Hill was interested in. And his practice of selective quotation from
print rendered him liable as he found to serious criticism in the latter stages
of his career.
There is no doubt, that he was a major presence in the
historiography of seventeenth-century England for more than two decades after
1950. He was not, however, ‘the dominant figure’ in the field in Oxford or
elsewhere. The presence of Hugh Trevor-Roper, of Lawrence Stone (until
mid-1963), of J.P.Cooper, of Valerie Pearl, of Menna Prestwich, of Joan Thirsk,
and of younger historians like Keith Thomas and Roger Howell, meant that he was
surrounded by a strong group of influential scholars who did not subscribe to
his contentions. Further afield, there were important figures like Gerald
Aylmer in Manchester and then York, J.P.Kenyon in Hull, Peter Laslett in
Cambridge and J.H.Hexter in the United States who did not share Hill’s views.
Interest in ‘history from below’ was burgeoning in history departments across
the country quite apart from a stimulus from Balliol.
It is a mistake, too, to suppose that the re-writing of
early Stuart Parliamentary and political history, of constitutional, legal and
religious history only began in the mid-1970s. Whig interpretations just as
much as Marxist ones had been subject to serious challenges well before then.
What distinguished Christopher Hill in Oxford and Lawrence Stone in distant
Princeton was their failure to appreciate how the historiographical ground was
shifting under their feet as their discussion of the English Revolution on
Radio 3 in the summer of 1973 demonstrated. They had been ‘blindsided’ as one
of Stone’s pupils later put it. Stone subsequently tried to claim that his
analysis had actually been vindicated despite the arguments of the mis-named
‘revisionists’. Hill largely went on writing as if very little had happened and
maintaining that his case was still sound. That was, in my view, not a tenable
position.
An untenable position partly because Hill's adoption of
Marxist analytical terms compelled him to argue that there was a 'bourgeois
revolution' at first in its causes, later in its course and finally in its
results four or five decades later. That is having one's intellectual cake and
eating it several times over. There was never any possibility of a fundamental
transformation in the economic and social structures of England and Wales
whatever the Diggers and Levellers hoped for. They were, in any case, tiny
groups without significant political leverage. There was never any religious
millennium at hand. Hill was, moreover, completely blind to the realities of
much of life for the bulk of the population outside the urban centres,
especially London. Military rule, which the post-1646 regimes depended upon,
lacked the basic consent needed to survive. The existence of complex bargaining
arrangements within the early to mid-seventeenth century polity largely escaped
him just as it did Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. Furthermore, there still are
important sources on Hill's life - in the former Soviet Union, for example -
and on his role as Master of Balliol that have not been covered.
Nonetheless, in the last ten years or slightly more, a cult
has arisen around the works of Christopher Hill. He is still cited as an
authority in works published in South America. His books are treated in some
parts of Eastern Europe as if they were canonical. In this country, different
groups of people on the left in politics regard Hill’s oeuvre as inspirational.
I understand why. I also believe they are profoundly mistaken.
