I first became aware of Christopher Hill in the Hilary
term of 1963. Once a week for eight weeks, I and my fellow undergraduates
crossed the snow-covered space between Balliol College’s lodge to its hall to
hear Christopher Hill deliver a series of lectures that later formed part of
his book, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England. Little of their
content remains in my memory although I was struck by his habit of apparently
sniffing every two or three sentences. I found this disconcerting.
I was more
impressed by his 1956 work, The Economic Problems of the Church, which I read
whilst preparing an essay on the origins of the English Civil War for Roger
Howell of St John’s College with whom I was studying the second half of the
paper in English History up to 1714. Of the great figures in the University’s
History Faculty – Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper, and others – Christopher Hill
made the least impression on me.
It was a great surprise to me when, on the point of
starting my postgraduate study of the career of Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of
Warwick, in the autumn of 1965, I received a letter from the History Faculty
informing me that Christopher Hill had been appointed my supervisor. I viewed
this choice with considerable trepidation: Christopher Hill was a Marxist, I
was not: he was a specialist in Church history and the literature of the early
modern period, I did not expect to be either the one or the other, at least,
not much of one since my concern in ecclesiastical matters was likely to be
more in the realms of patronage than in those of theology or of Church
politics. He, I suspect, had concerns about me since I had been a pupil of
Felix Markham and John Armstrong at Hertford College.
Our meetings passed amicably enough. He had just been
appointed Master of Balliol which meant he had one hundred and one things to do
apart from seeing me. He did, however, use what I subsequently learnt was an
old Oxford teaching technique, that of remaining completely silent in his chair
in one corner of his office whilst I sat nervously in a chair facing him. This
was intended to encourage me (and other pupils) to fill the silence by talking
more exhaustively about my research and discoveries.
I did find this a draining
exercise. My unease over this procedure remained throughout my time as a
postgraduate. He also invited me to a meeting of his other pupils held, to the
best of my recollection, on Monday evenings in his rooms where a barrel of beer
was available to those who came along with a large number of female
undergraduates and postgraduates mainly from St Hilda’s college invited by his
wife, Bridget. These proved to be very noisy events. Since I knew no one there,
I stopped going after two or three weeks.
I am afraid that both our apprehensions as postgraduate
pupil and supervisor were realised. I was definitely not his kind of historian
nor he mine. In the areas in which I was working, in colonial and political
history, on estate management and county government, he was not equipped to
help me and almost completely unfamiliar with the sources. I gravitated towards
Hugh Trevor-Roper, John Cooper and Valerie Pearl. Gradually, we grew apart as I
became much more critical of his approach to early modern history. The first
pre-monitory tremors of revisionism were already being felt in Oxford and in
the Institute of Historical Research. The intellectual parting of the ways was
inevitable.
After I left Oxford, I only saw him once before 1997.
That was in Malet Street in London in the late-1970s. I did teach a course for
the Open University in the late-1980s which he had had a large hand in
designing but it was hardly recognisable as a reflection of the state of
historiography by that time.
I did, however, meet him and his wife again in
January, 1997 when I and he had the privilege of holding Research Fellowships
at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Our discussions were much
more relaxed than they had been thirty years before. He still maintained the
position that the English Revolution was a decisive turning point in the
seventeenth century and the essential precondition for the emergence of
capitalism on the world stage. He was just as resourceful as ever in finding
literary evidence and material from the secondary sources to support his
claims.
But he was no less puzzled by the change in intellectual fashion that
had drawn the historical audience he had once hoped to command away from him
since the early-1970s and slightly annoyed by the criticism of figures like
Mark Kishlansky. He was still the old Christopher Hill. His wife, however, was
already concerned about how much his recent work in composing an introduction
to the Calendar of State Papers Venetian had apparently taken out of him. Sadly,
this was the first sign of the serious illness that was to take his life within
a few years. We corresponded for a short while thereafter but, soon, neither
Christopher nor Bridget could sustain such exchanges. She passed away shortly
before he died in February 2003.
I am glad to have known him. He was for a period of
twenty or twenty-five years one of the major figures in the historiography of
early modern England. Now he is to a considerable extent forgotten as John
Morrill has pointed out. Postgraduates do not, by and large, read his works any
more than established historians look to him for positive guidance. That there
will be a revival of interest in him and his output seems highly likely to me.
Perhaps his biographer is already at work. He was, as we all are, a product of
his time. That is of interest in itself. His intellectual influence may have
waned but it will not be forgotten.
