Politics and the Nobility in Civil-War England
The suggestion that the nobility had a central role in the politics of the 1640s has recently been strenuously attacked by Professor Mark Kishlansky in his article, 'Saye what?'. 2 Professor Kishlansky argues, first, that such a view is so radical a break with the existing (and of course whig) historiography as to be implausible; and second, by way of a case-study, that the argument presented for the influence of the Lords in my article 'The English nobility and the projected settlement of 1647' 3 is entirely based on evidence which is at best tendentious and more often demonstrably false. 4 At stake is a fundamental tenet of the whig interpretation of the 'Puritan Revolution', one which as yet has been only partially eroded by revisionism: the dominance of the Commons and its political leaders within the political process. For over a century, that has been one of orthodoxy's most sacred cows. The suggestion that it should be put out to graze will, perhaps inevitably, be countered with accusations of heresy and falsifying canonical texts. of in I Kishlansky out of 5 the remainder of charges cannot be sustained. The case Professor Kishlansky up for is not mine.
Saye No More
What makes a historian master of his craft is the discipline of checking findings, to see whether he has said more than his source warrants. A historian with a turn of phrase, when released from this discipline, risks acquiring a dangerously Icarian freedom to make statements which are unscholarly because unverifiable. [C. S. R. Russell] In December 1990 I published an essay critical of the work of Dr. John Adamson. I cited numerous examples of what I consider systematic misuse of evidence, including selective quotation and misquotation, tendentious interpretation, and the citation of sources that either have no bearing on the point being substantiated or are so tangential to it that no reasonable researcher would consider the cited material to constitute evidence within the canons of accepted scholarly practice. I came to these conclusions after a long period of checking citations. What I found was that the evidence for these questionable practices was embedded in Adamson's work and concealed from the view of his readers. Because he uniformly preferred to cite from manuscripts and disdained cross-reference to readily available printed editions, only someone whose familiarity with the materials nearly rivaled his own could be aware of the problem. Dozens of manuscript citations were offered as evidence for self-confident assertions, but time after time no quotations were provided in either text or footnote to make the assertions concrete. When sources were quoted, the quotations were largely run into Adamson's sentences rather than appearing in their own contexts.
The Army and the Levellers: The Roads to Putney
The English Revolution began in the summer of 1647. It was a struggle to delimit power and authority which neither the constitutional reforms of 1641 nor the civil war that followed had been able to resolve. Shortly after the fighting ceased in 1646 the House of Lords propounded that ‘things that are to be perpetual might be settled in the old way, by the three estates’. Unexpectedly, however, it was conservative ‘presbyterian’ members of the House of Commons who conducted an experiment in government without the king. In the winter of 1646 Denzil Holies succeeded in obtaining sufficient personal support and institutional power to coordinate and implement a political programme. But the inability of the men at Westminster collectively to secure an accord with the king had encouraged some to question parliament's intentions and others its integrity. Moreover, Charles's defeat, flight to the Scots, and subsequent imprisonment revived the long deferred examination of sovereignty. This now centred on parliament, whose good intentions were, nevertheless, an insufficient justification for its rule. Beginning in the winter of 1646 and building to a climax in the summer of 1647, an assault mounted from both left and right struck at the conduct of Holles and his ‘faction’ and then at the foundation of parliament's role as a conservator of order and authority.