By Christopher Thompson
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 his work, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642,
published in 1972. It is with this account that this note is concerned.
Stone began the earlier version of his essay with a
description of the genesis of the controversy. He found it in R.H.Tawney's
article on the rise of the gentry between 1558 and 1641 published in 1941.
Tawney had detected important changes in the distribution of landownership in
the period before the English Civil War due to the decline in the fortunes of
old-fashioned landlords and the rise of a new class of gentry able to adopt
modern methods of estate management and to profit thereby. As a result, the
political structure of the country shifted in and after 1640 to accommodate
these economic and social changes. Tawney's argument was underpinned by
statistics claiming to show a fall in the size of the peerage's manorial
holdings compared to those of the gentry and a contraction in large manorial
holdings in contrast to a growth in medium-sized manorial holdings. Apparent
confirmation on the decline of the aristocracy was offered by Stone himself in
an article published in 1948 which argued that the late-Elizabethan peerage was
weighed down by debts due to over-spending and on the brink of financial ruin.
Only the largesse of King James VI and I averted aristocratic collapse.
Stone was admirably frank in retrospect in admitting to
his use of extravagant language in this article, to his statistical errors and
failings over his employment of corollary evidence in response to Hugh
Trevor-Roper's initial criticisms. Nonetheless, he maintained a revised version
of his original position in 1952. This proved the catalyst for Trevor-Roper's
wider assault on Tawney's thesis in the following year: according to
Trevor-Roper, the difficulties of the lesser or mere or small gentry were more
characteristic of the pre-Civil War period than the advance of newly-risen
gentry who were able to profit from Court offices, the law and mercantile
monopolies. These lesser gentry constituted the 'Country party' whose
supporters overthrew the Caroline regime in 1640, who advocated
decentralization, reform of the law, the reduction of offices, etc., and who
were the mainstay of the Independents in the latter half of the 1640s and in
the 1650s. Subsequently, J.P.Cooper demolished the framework upon which Tawney
and Stone had erected their manorial figures. By then, Stone asserted, the way
had been cleared for the general acceptance of the Trevor-Roper thesis.
In fact, according to Stone, it was not until 1958-1959
that Trevor-Roper's arguments were seriously criticised when Christopher Hill
and Perez Zagorin exposed the fragile nature of his assumptions about the lack
of profitability of agriculture for landowners in general, about the Court as a
highway to riches and about religious radicalism as a refuge from economic
decline. There were serious problems too over Trevor-Roper's analysis of the
Parliamentary politics of the 1640s and identification of the Independents as
the party of the small gentry. J.H.Hexter was equally critical of Tawney and
Trevor-Roper: the former was obsessed by the Marxist theory of the rise of the bourgeoisie
and the latter by economic motives rather than by ideals and ideology, politics
and religion. Hexter preferred and proffered an analysis based on the decline
of the aristocracy in military rather than economic terms, the assumption of
political leadership by the House of Commons instead of the House of Lords, and
the traditional constitutional and religious explanations for the breakdown of
the 1640s.
By the time Hexter's essay first appeared in 1958, Stone
was engaged in a major study of the aristocratic archives which had become
available since 1945 and which culminated in his book, The Crisis of the
Aristocracy, 1558-1641, published in 1965. He claimed in his discussion of the
social origins of the English Revolution that this book offered a synthesis of
his own and Hexter's ideas about the problems facing the late-Tudor and
early-Stuart peerage. Stone argued that the aristocracy had lost military
power, landed possessions and prestige: their incomes under Elizabeth had
declined due to conspicuous consumption but recovered under James and Charles
due to royal largesse and rising landed incomes. The King and the Church of
England were nonetheless left dangerously exposed by the crisis in the affairs
of the landed elite after pursuing unpopular constitutional and religious
policies up to 1640. The prior decline of the aristocracy made the upheavals of
that decade possible. He expected criticisms of his arguments in 1965 and
conceded that a range of questions over the fortunes of the gentry would be
raised: the debate would inevitably continue. Seven years later, there had
indeed been criticism but also, in his view, the development of a more
sophisticated view of the causes of the English Revolution.
This account of the historiography of the gentry
controversy looked straightforward enough and attracted no attention in 1965 or
1972. Lawrence Stone had claimed that the publication of Trevor-Roper's essay
on The Gentry 1540-1640 in 1953 and of J.P.Cooper's analysis of the statistics
on manorial holdings produced by Tawney and Stone himself had apparently
“cleared [the way] for general acceptance of the Trevor-Roper thesis.” He had
gone on to maintain that it “was not until 1958 and 1959 that the Trevor-Roper
thesis in turn came under serious criticism” from Hill, Zagorin and Hexter, the
latter of whom was also critical of Tawney. But these arguments were and are
fundamentally at variance with the record.
Take Hill for example. The essay Stone cited was entitled
Recent Interpretations of the Civil War. It had been given as a paper to the
Mid-Wales branch of the Historical Association in January, 1955 and was
published in Volume LXI of History in 1956. It had a number of specific
objections to Trevor-Roper's categorization of the gentry, to his alleged
elision of the terms “mere”, “lesser” and “declining” gentry, to his belief
that it was the Crown rather than the peasantry from whom rising gentlemen
secured their gains and so on. This essay was reproduced in Hill's volume of
essays entitled Puritanism and Revolution published in 1958. In Zagorin's case,
he had published a paper in the Journal of World History in 1955 entitled 'The
English Revolution 1640-1660' in which he took the view that Trevor-Roper's criticisms
of Tawney and Stone remained to be substantiated and that it was unlikely that
the revolution could be regarded as rising of the excluded “mere gentry.”A year
later, in 1956, Zagorin gave the paper entitled 'The Social Interpretation of
the English Revolution' at the meeting of the American Historical Association:
an enlarged version of his text expressing his objections to Trevor-Roper's
arguments appeared in the Journal of Economic History and is noted in Stone's
bibliography in 1965. It was incidentally at this AHA meeting that Hexter's
essay, Storm over the Gentry, was given its first outing. Furthermore, when
Past and Present organised a conference on seventeenth-century revolutions in
London in July, 1957, the consensus of historians present was, according to
Eric Hobsbawm, “unfavourable to Prof. Trevor-Roper's views that they [the
gentry] represented a declining class”, a verdict endorsed as far as this
meeting was concerned by J.H.Elliott many years later. J.H.Hexter's famous
essay in Encounter in 1958 was, as those who read it in its original version or
in the longer 1961 version, more hostile to Tawney and Stone and comparatively
benign in its analysis of Trevor-Roper's case. Conscripting Hexter to the ranks
of the latter's critics is a difficult exercise to perform. It was, in any
case, simply not true to argue that there was a delay until 1958-1959 until
Trevor-Roper's arguments came under critical scrutiny. On the contrary, there
had been serious, perhaps partially-organised, scepticism expressed well before
then.
Why did Stone offer this clearly erroneous account? There
are two possibilities. Either he had forgotten the facts and thus misled
himself and his readers. This seems unlikely, prima facie. Alternatively, this
exercise may have been undertaken deliberately. There is some evidence to
support the latter explanation. In the spring of 1964, Hexter invited Stone to
give a lecture at Washington University in St Louis “undoubtedly [as] some sort
of peace-offering to one of the many victims of his scalding wit” according to
John M.Murrin, then a colleague of Hexter and later of Stone at Princeton. Both
the invitation and the lecture were a success. But whereas, in 1958, Stone had
regarded Hexter's views on the military decline of the aristocracy as
inadequate in explaining the peerage's problems in the 1640s, by 1965, Stone
was prepared to claim that The Crisis “developed a new interpretation, an
amalgam of some of my earlier ideas and those of J.H.Hexter.” What contribution
Hexter had made to this new synthesis is difficult to detect since he was
mentioned only once in the text – and not at all in the chapter on Power – and
only twice in its footnotes. There is really no positive evidence for Hexter's
influence on Stone's opus. But a rapprochement had occurred. When Hexter
published his review of The Crisis in the Journal of British Studies in 1968,
his critical faculties so evident a decade before had been largely suspended
and his overall verdict was laudatory. Hexter had become a “friend” of Stone as
Murrin explained in the festschrift to mark Stone's retirement and contributed
to the volume of essays marking Hexter's own retirement.
Was Stone ignorant about the course of the 'gentry
controversy' between 1953 and 1958 or 1959? Given his direct participation in
it, this appears highly unlikely. On balance, the erroneous account he offered
in 1965 and again in 1972 and the unsubstantiated deference to Hexter seem to
owe more to a desire to placate and neutralise a potentially serious critic and
to recruit him to Stone's camp. If this is a tenable line of argument, it
illustrates Stone's failings as an historian in a particularly revealing way.
