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.
Parties, Parliament and Pride's Purge: David Underdown as Political Historian
This piece reassesses the work of the late David Underdown, one of the most important historians of the early modern period of the last 50 years. In particular, it concentrates upon his work on political history, with specific reference to what is probably his most important book, Pride's Purge (1971). This book has had a profound effect on the historiography of the civil wars, and the aim of this article is not to question its overall narrative relating to the Independent faction, to the events surrounding the trial of Charles I, and to the broader Puritan revolution, but rather to assess Underdown's approach and methodology, and his treatment of sources. It discusses and critiques his prosopographical methodology, while at the same time arguing that scholars still have much to learn from the way in which Underdown analysed parliament and high politics, from the way in which he connected local and national aspects of the revolution and the disciplines of social and political history, and from his willingness to adopt a creative approach to the use of contemporary pamphlets and newspapers.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.