Derek Hirst

Catholics and Protestants in 16th-century England

Looking back on  the religious strife of  Reformation and post-Reformation England is a melancholy process in the eyes of modern people. Persecution for reasons of faith, torture and execution seem wholly abhorrent to the twenty-first century. Historians of  Tudor England have very largely freed themselves from the confessional biases that shaped their predecessors’  writings. For that reason, the letter from Brian Conneller in the letter column of today’s The Times newspaper is misconceived and inappropriate. No one denies the personal trauma that the Princess Mary suffered when her father, Henry VIII, and her mother, Catherine of Aragon, separated and were ‘divorced’ or that she felt deeply the changes to the practices of her Catholic faith introduced by her father and, after 1547, by her half-brother, Edward VI. She was persecuted for her faith and, in turn, persecuted Protestants when she came to the throne in 1553. But Thomas Cranmer was not principally responsible for her father’s divorces nor for the trials and executions of More, Fisher, the Carthusians and other adherents of Catholicism. It is absolutely untrue to claim that Mary’s successor, Queen Elizabeth, was a tyrant – she was, in fact, a conservative Protestant much less interested in theological niceties than her Privy Councillors. She was careful not ’to make windows into men’s souls’ and, as a result, saw Catholicism wither and largely die in the first twenty years of her reign. By 1580, England was an overwhelmingly Protestant country. The appearance of Catholic priests trained on the continent had two objectives: one was to shore up the faith of the one to one and a half per cent of the population that still adhered to the old faith; the second was to prepare the ground, in alliance with the Papacy and Philip II of Spain, for circumstances in which Elizabeth could be deposed and Catholicism be restored. Elizabeth’s regime naturally  took preventative measures and treated those working for her overthrow either as potential or actual traitors. It was not a pretty process; it did claim martyrs to Catholicism; and it did preserve England’s Protestantism. At this distance in time, we need to recognise why the participants acted as they did, not to make the mistake of painting Catholics as exemplars of virtue and Protestants simply as persecutors or vice versa. Mr Conneller’s defence of Queen Mary is a throwback to a historiography of religious conflict that died generations ago.

“Too cool for school”? Oliver Moore on the new history boys and girls

The Observer newspaper yesterday carried an article by Oliver Moore entitled “They’re too cool for school: meet the new history boys and girls” extolling the virtues of Dan Jones, Claudia Renton, Ben Wilson, John Bew, Francesca Beauman and Simon Reid-Henry as a group of fashionable young writers of history revitalising the subject (after the expiry of  theory) through a mixture of strong narratives, exciting personalities and quirky facts. The only danger according to Georgina Capel of the Literary Agency, Capel and Land, which represents four of the six, is that they might be regarded as “too pretty” to be taken seriously. They are  apparently highly regarded by the academic establishment although three of them have worked as actors, artists and journalists and one, Claudia Renton, is about to train as a lawyer. Moore’s article is amusing but it is difficult to take it seriously. I have yet to meet a “hip young historian” and, although I agree that “dullness” is to be avoided whenever possible, I suspect that there will be strenuous efforts to rescue ‘theory’ from the scepticism of resolute empiricists. Beauty may, moreover, be in the eye of the beholder but, the girls apart, I very much doubt if anyone could consider the four boys as “too pretty”.

O.U. Associate Lecturers

 

This week’s Times Higher Education Supplement contains an article by Derek Rowntree, the former Professor of  Education Development at the Open University, on the methods by which that institution has achieved its success. Expert academics and first class course materials naturally feature strongly in his analysis. But the main key to the O.U.’s record in educational provision lies, in his view, in its network of part-time tutors who teach its courses, mark its students’ assignments and are available by telephone, e-mail and via the web to guide each group of students through the courses they have chosen. There is far more contact and positive feedback to students than in conventional universities. This innovation, he believes, “is crucial to its success”: other universities should consider recruiting part-time tutors as “a cost-effective means of providing” personalised contact.

 

Current and former Open University tutors or associate lecturers as they are now known will recognise the nature of this panegyric all too well. For the truth is that they have provided and do provide over-worked and under-paid teachers to this institution. They represent a kind of academic proletariat whose enthusiasm for teaching wanes quite rapidly as they come to understand the implications of submission deadlines, the propensity of students (most of whom are admirably motivated) to seek contact at inappropriate times and a growing willingness to challenge marks that the student considers to have been far too low. The introduction of electronic marking on a widening range of courses has doubled the time it takes to mark assignments without any compensating financial reward.

 

The strange case of Fred Inglis

I have been surprised to see on the THES’s website an article (14 May) by an emeritus Professor from Sheffield University, Fred Inglis, that claims, inter alia, that Hugh Trevor-Roper was Lewis  Namier’s bagman. Over the course of my life, I have read some odd arguments but this is just about the oddest of all.

Gerald Aylmer

 

 

The late Gerald Aylmer was, so I understand, Christopher Hill’s favourite pupil. Like Hill, he was a man of the Left and a committed supporter of CND. Unlike his mentor, Aylmer was devoted to the study of the manuscript sources of the early modern period and produced  series of works on the servants of the Crown, of the Commonwealth and Protectorate and of the Restoration monarchy that reflected his tireless scholarship. The earliest of these was probably the most original of all his books. However, he was loquacious in conversation and it was often difficult to understand what his point was. In his later years, when he returned to Oxford as Master of St Peter’s College, he was surprised to find that his approach and that of Hill to the seventeenth-century had become old-fashioned and out of date.