Insolent proceedings: Rethinking public politics in the English Revolution

By Manchester University Press

Insolent proceedings brings together leading scholars working on the politics, religion and literature of the English Revolution. It embraces new approaches to the upheavals that occurred in the mid-seventeenth century, in daily life as well as in debates between parliamentarians, royalists and radicals. Driven by a determination to explore the dynamic course and consequences of the civil wars and Interregnum, contributors investigate the polemics, print culture and everyday practices of the revolutionary decades, in order to rethink the period’s ‘public politics’. This involves integrating national and local affairs, as well as ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture, and looking at the connections between everyday activism and ideological endeavours. The book also examines participation by – and the treatment of – women from all walks of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526164995

Book preview

Insolent proceedings

POLITICS, CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN

General Editors

Professor Alastair Bellany

Dr Alexandra Gajda

Professor Peter Lake

Professor Anthony Milton

Professor Jason Peacey

This important series publishes monographs that take a fresh and challenging look at the interactions between politics, culture and society in Britain between 1500 and the mid-eighteenth century. It counteracts the fragmentation of current historiography through encouraging a variety of approaches which attempt to redefine the political, social and cultural worlds, and to explore their interconnection in a flexible and creative fashion. All the volumes in the series question and transcend traditional interdisciplinary boundaries, such as those between political history and literary studies, social history and divinity, urban history and anthropology. They thus contribute to a broader understanding of crucial developments in early modern Britain.

Recently published in the series

Chaplains in early modern England: Patronage, literature and religion

Hugh Adlington, Tom Lockwood and Gillian Wright (eds)

The Cooke sisters: Education, piety and patronage in early modern England Gemma Allen

Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, polemic and Restoration nonconformity

David J. Appleby

Insular Christianity: Alternative models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c.1570–c.1700 Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó Hannrachain (eds)

Reading and politics in early modern England: The mental world of a seventeenth-century Catholic gentleman Geoff Baker

‘No historie so meete’ Jan Broadway

Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England

Paul Cavill and Alexandra Gajda (eds)

Republican learning: John Toland and the crisis of Christian culture, 1696–1722 Justin Champion

News and rumour in Jacobean England: Information, court politics and diplomacy, 1618–25 David Coast

This England: Essays on the English nation and Commonwealth in the sixteenth century Patrick Collinson

Gentry culture and the politics of religion: Cheshire on the eve of civil war Richard Cust and Peter Lake

Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) and the patriotic monarch Cesare Cuttica

Doubtful and dangerous: The question of succession in late Elizabethan England Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds)

Civil war London: Mobilising for parliament, 1641–5 Jordan S. Downs

Brave community John Gurney

Revolutionizing politics: Culture and conflict in England, 1620–60

Paul D. Halliday, Eleanor Hubbard and Scott Sowerby (eds)

‘Black Tom’ Andrew Hopper

Reformation without end: Religion, politics and the past in post-revolutionary England Robert G. Ingram

Freedom of speech, 1500–1850 Robert G. Ingram, Jason Peacey and Alex W. Barber (eds)

Connecting centre and locality: Political communication in early modern England Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey (eds)

Revolution remembered: Seditious memories after the British Civil Wars Edward James Legon

Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum Jason Mcelligott and David L. Smith

Laudian and Royalist polemic in Stuart England Anthony Milton

The crisis of British Protestantism: Church power in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–44 Hunter Powell

Lollards in the English Reformation: History, radicalism, and John Foxe Susan Royal

The gentlewoman’s remembrance: Patriarchy, piety, and singlehood in early Stuart England Isaac Stephens

Exploring Russia in the Elizabethan Commonwealth: The Muscovy Company and Giles Fletcher, the elder (1546–1611) Felicity Jane Stout

Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658–1727 Edward Vallance

London Presbyterians and the British revolutions, 1638–64 Elliot Vernon

Church polity and politics in the British Atlantic world, c. 1635–66 Elliot Vernon and Hunter Powell (eds)

Full details of the series are available at www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk.

Insolent proceedings

Rethinking public politics in the English Revolution

Essays in honour of Ann Hughes

Edited by

Peter Lake and Jason Peacey

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6500 8 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Notes on contributors

Preface: Ann Hughes as historian, friend and mentor – Peter Lake

List of abbreviations

Note on conventions

Introduction: rethinking public politics in the English Revolution – Peter Lake and Jason Peacey

1‘Great conformitants’ and ‘right ambidexters’: puritans, conformity and the challenge of Laudianism – Anthony Milton

2Killing (Catholic) officers no crime? The politics of religious violence in England in 1640 – John Walter

3Anatomy of the General Rising: militancy and mobilisation in London, 1643 – David Como

4‘In the hollow of his wooden leg’: the transmission of civil war materials, 1642–9 – Karen Britland

5Puritanism, parish and polemic in civil war London: the case of Thomas Bakewell – Elliot Vernon

6William Walwyn’s Montaigne and the struggle for toleration in the English Revolution – David Loewenstein

7An accursed family: the Scottish crisis and the Black Legend of the House of Stuart, 1650–2 – Thomas Cogswell

8Indemnity, sovereignty and justice in the army debates of 1647 – Sean Kelsey

9Milton and Winstanley: a conversation – Thomas N. Corns

10Women, print and locality: Richard Culmer and the practices of polemic during the English Revolution – Jason Peacey

11‘Threshing among the people’: Ranters, Quakers and the revolutionary public sphere – Kate Peters

Index

Notes on contributors

Karen Britland is Halls-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (2009), and has edited editions of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (2020), John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (2018) and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (2010). With Line Cottegnies, she edited Henry V: Continuum Renaissance Drama (2010), and she was also an associate editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (2012). She is currently working on a book about clandestine writing in the English Revolution.

Thomas Cogswell is Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (1989); Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State and Provincial Conflict (1998); and James I: The Phoenix King (2017). With Alastair Bellany he published The Murder of King James I (2015), and with Richard Cust and Peter Lake he edited Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (2011). He is currently writing books about early Stuart elections and a dual biography of the Duke of Buckingham and his assassin, John Felton.

David Como is Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (2004) and Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (2018), which won the 2019 Samuel Pepys Award. His many articles include: ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London’ (with Peter Lake, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 1999); ‘Orthodoxy and its discontents: dispute settlement and the production of consensus in the London (Puritan) underground’ (with Peter Lake, Journal of British Studies, 2000); ‘Predestination and political conflict in Laud’s London’ (Historical Journal, 2003); and ‘Secret printing, the crisis of 1640, and the origins of Civil War radicalism’ (Past & Present, 2007).

Thomas N. Corns is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Bangor University. His recent publications include: Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana (with Gordon Campbell, John K. Hale and Fiona J. Tweedie, 2007); A History of Seventeenth-Century English Literature (2007); John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (with Gordon Campbell, 2008); and he edited A New Companion to Milton (2016). He edited The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (with Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein, 2009); The Milton Encyclopedia (2012); and Milton and Catholicism (with Ronald Corthell, 2017). With Gordon Campbell, he is the general editor of The Complete Works of John Milton (2008–). He is an Honoured Scholar of the Milton Society of America, a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society and a Foundation Fellow of the English Association. His current projects include editing Paradise Lost for The Complete Works… (with David Loewenstein).

Sean Kelsey is a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Buckingham. He is the author of Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (1997), the first book in the series in which this present volume appears. His many articles include: ‘Staging the trial of Charles I’, in Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (2001); ‘The death of Charles I’ (Historical Journal, 2002); ‘The trial of Charles I’ (English Historical Review, 2003); ‘King of the sea: the Prince of Wales and the Stuart monarchy, 1648–1649’ (History, 2007); ‘The now king of England: conscience, duty and the death of Charles I’ (English Historical Review, 2017); and ‘Instrumenting the trial of Charles I’ (Historical Research, 2019).

Peter Lake is University Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of the History of Christianity and Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History at Vanderbilt University. His books include: Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (1982); Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (1988); The Boxmaker’s Revenge (2001); The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat (2002); Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (2015); How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (2016); and Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare’s Revenge Tragedies (2020). With Steven Pincus he also edited The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (2012).

David Loewenstein is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and the Humanities at Penn State-University Park. His publications include Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (1990); Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (2001; winner of the James Holly Hanford Award for Distinguished Book); The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (co-edited with Janel Mueller, 2002); The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (co-edited with Ann Hughes and Thomas N. Corns, 2009); Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2013); Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (co-edited with Michael Witmore, 2015); and Early Modern Literature and England’s Long Reformation (co-edited with Alison Shell, 2021). With Thomas N. Corns, he is currently editing Paradise Lost for The Complete Works of John Milton. He is an Honoured Scholar of the Milton Society of America.

Anthony Milton is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. His publications include Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (1995); The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) (2005); Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England (2007); and England’s Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England 1625–1662 (2021). He also edited volume 1 of The Oxford History of Anglicanism (2017). He has more books up his sleeve on a variety of historical topics.

Jason Peacey is Professor of Early Modern British History at UCL. He is the author of Politicians and Pamphleteers. Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (2004); Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (2013); and The Madman and the Churchrobber: Law and Conflict in Early Modern England (2022). He also edited The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (2001); The Print Culture of Parliament, 1600–1800 (2007); and Making the British Empire, 1660–1800 (2020). With Chris R. Kyle he edited Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England (2002) and Connecting Centre and Locality: Political Communication in Early Modern England (2020). With Robert G. Ingram and Alex W. Barber he edited Freedom of Speech, 1500–1850 (2020). He is currently working on Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century.

Kate Peters is a fellow and senior lecturer in History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. She graduated with a degree in History and French at the University of Manchester in 1988, and in her final year took Ann Hughes’ special subject on the Interregnum, completing a dissertation on Quaker women pamphleteers. Following an MA in Archives Administration at Liverpool University, she moved (on Ann Hughes’ advice) to Cambridge University to complete a PhD on early Quaker pamphleteering under Professor Patrick Collinson. Since then, she has held lectureships in History and in Records and Archives Management. She is the author of Print Culture and the Early Quakers (2005) and a number of articles on the early Quakers. She is currently working on the politics of record keeping in the English Revolution.

Elliot Vernon is the author of London Presbyterians and the British Revolutions, 1638–64 (2021). With Hunter Powell he edited Church Polity and Politics in the British Atlantic World, c. 1635–66 (2020), and with Philip Baker he edited The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (2012). His other publications include: ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’ (with Philip Baker, Historical Journal, 2010); ‘A ministry of the Gospel: the Presbyterians during the English Revolution’, in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England (2006); and ‘The quarrel of the covenant: the London Presbyterians and the regicide’, in Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (2001)

John Walter is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Essex. He is the author of Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (1999), which won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize, and Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution (2017) which was awarded the 2017 Samuel Pepys Prize. With Steve Hindle and Alexandra Shepard he edited Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England (2011), and with Michael Braddick he edited Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (2001). Many of his essays have been collected in Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (2013). His next book will be on the Tichborne Dole and its changing meaning from its medieval origins to the present day.

Preface: Ann Hughes as historian, friend and mentor

Peter Lake

When asked, in the course of a job interview, what sort of historian she was, Ann replied by describing herself as a ‘bog standard political historian’. This was clearly intended – entirely typically – as an ironical remark, only ostensibly self-deprecating and to be taken on a number of levels, but it seems there were people on the interview committee stupid enough to take it literally. (There are, in my experience, always people on interview committees stupid enough to do that.) Such are the times in which we live. But it seems clear what she meant. For Ann has always been interested in politics, again at multiple levels. After all, her approach to the topic has been anything but uninflected by her own political positions and commitments, but while her history has been influenced by, perhaps even in part been motivated by, her politics, it has never been simply determined by them. Unlike many left-leaning historians of the English Revolution, indeed unlike most historians of the Revolution until recently, she has written with real insight and sympathy about royalism. Indeed, her 1985 essay in the Journal of British Studies, comparing the capacity of the authority structures of the parliamentarian and royalist causes to mediate and incorporate tensions between the local and the national, and indeed between different factions or ideological groupings, into their overall war efforts, contained one of the most important analyses of the past thirty or so years.¹ But here her own politics did intervene; when told that there was a whole interpretation of royalism struggling to get out of this essay, and that she should really write a book about it, she replied that she just could not see herself devoting that much time and effort to a subject with which she felt so little sympathy. Luckily that has not entirely prevented her from working on various royalists in the succeeding years.²

However, when it came to the varieties of parliamentarianism her sympathies were remarkably catholic. An admirer, and, at a crucial stage of her career, a sort of protégé of Christopher Hill, for whose work she unfashionably (but quite rightly) retains a very high regard,³ she did not emulate Hill’s relegation of mainstream puritans and Presbyterianism to an undifferentiated ‘conservatism’ while whoring after the false gods of ‘radicalism’. Not that she was or is averse to radicals. Applying her own criteria here, no one would devote the years of minutely focused attention that she lavished on the edition of Gerrard Winstanley if they could not stand the fellow or see the point of his often elliptical works.⁴ But however great her interest in the likes of Winstanley, Ann’s abiding fascination with English Presbyterianism – centred for years on, but by no means restricted to, the fascinating, but also the, at first (and indeed second) sight, rather unsympathetic figure of Thomas Edwards – is a connecting link running through a good deal of her career. Unfashionable at the time she undertook it, as some of the contributions to this book show, that interest in Presbyterianism as an ideological nexus and political force and faction, has emerged as a growth industry in the history of the period, in no small part because of Ann’s work.⁵

Nor did her work on that subject remain contained within the conventional generic forms and intellectual subsets of the moment. Her book on Edwards, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution, which we take, to this point at least, to be her magnum opus, made the English Revolution look different.⁶ It was a book brilliant in the originality of its conception and the minutiae of its research. For someone who has been known to criticise certain of her contemporaries for being obsessed with detail, Ann herself displays many of the attributes of the truly talented fact-grubbing archival historian. But as with Gangraena, that formidable command of the sources and the narrative are always put in the service of a finely conceived and actualised set of analytic and argumentative structures.

It is tempting to think of Gangraena as being at least three or four books in one. It is an analysis of London politics and the role therein of Presbyterianism; it is an analysis of religious polemic and argument of a highly sophisticated sort; it is an analysis of the relations between the centre and the localities as exemplified in and through a fine-grained analysis of just how Edwards’ book was put together, and therefore of the relationship between both Edwards and his sources and allies and his book and its readers. It took up questions and techniques from new or newish sub-disciplines like the history of the book and of reading, and bent them to the purposes of the political and religious historian, in ways that, through a sort of feedback loop, also contributed to the histories of both the book and of reading.

At the most meta level, the book addressed itself to the classic revisionist dismissal of printed sources as providing no real guide to what was actually happening, and in particular to the claim, beloved of certain critics of Christopher Hill, that anything Edwards said about his enemies on ‘the left’ was so exaggerated, or indeed often so made up, that it could provide no sure ground for analysis of ‘radical’ opinion or religion during the period. Ann went straight at that proposition, deconstructing it on a number of levels. In so doing she might be thought to have been defending her mentor Christopher Hill. But if that was in part what she was doing, she was not doing it by merely retracing Hill’s steps, attempting to reinscribe his scholarly methods after the rude interruption of revisionist hectoring of the 1970s. On the contrary, she was breaking new ground. First by running to ground and contextualising the local sources for many of Edwards’ most incendiary stories about the horrors of Independency, and second by using the changing, unstable nature of his text in order to get at the way the Presbyterian cause constituted itself, ideologically, through accounts of its other, and, as it were, practically, through the many connections and almost dialectical interactions between the provinces and London, local opinion and print, which produced Edwards’ text in the first place and upon which that text itself had such a dramatic effect. In the process she was able to recuperate Edwards as a source for the study of his enemies and targets on the religious left in novel and interesting ways.⁷ The impact of that approach or rather series of approaches to political communication and print, to the interchange between, for want of a better word or words, popular and elite, local and national politics, can be seen running throughout many of the contributions to this volume.

Gangraena is thus about a lot of things, and none of the things it is about is given short shrift. For a lot of reasons, some personal, to do with Ann’s domestic arrangements and other commitments – crudely put, motherhood, and helping to run various university departments – but some intrinsic to the complexity and difficulty of its multiple subjects, the book took a long time to complete. But the result is, we think, a great book and thus a testimony to the need sometimes not to respond to the immediate carrot and stick pressures of the Research Assessment Exercise / Research Excellence Framework, or of university officialdom, but to take one’s time and let the thing get finished when it is finished, and not before.

But of all the many things that Gangraena is about, as its title proclaims, it is about above all else ‘the English Revolution’, that is to say it is about politics. And there is a fundamental sense that Ann always was and remains a political historian, provided we take politics in a broad enough sense. This is not something of which she is ashamed or about which she is bashful. Not that she has ever been a political historian of the bog standard high political sort; the sort of political historian whom David Sabean once described as the writer of leading articles about the politics of several hundred years ago; picking winners and losers; drawing specious comparisons between the politics of the present and the past; dealing in portentous generalisations about political ‘leadership’ or the nature of representative institutions or of parliamentary politics; distributing credit or blame across the spectrum of contemporary actors; and pontificating about whether or not the events and outcomes being described were ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ things. If that is what is meant by a ‘bog standard political historian’, then Ann Hughes was never one of those. But if what we mean by the term – and what she presumably meant by it – is someone who always keeps events, and the struggles for and uses of various sorts of power, at the centre of her account of the period, a period defined in her case by a generous construal of the ‘revolutionary decades’, then that is exactly what she was and is. A very good thing too. At a time when the political is in the process of being displaced, even effaced, by various sorts of cultural history, and the English Revolution is in danger of being swallowed up by versions of the ‘long’, ‘the very long’, or indeed of ‘the interminable reformation’,⁸ these are not merely admirable attributes but a seriously good guide to how to revisit and rewrite the histories of the English Revolution in the coming years, as many as the essays collected here show.

With Ann, along with a conviction that the events that she is describing, within which her various subjects found themselves, and to which they were reacting and trying to bend to their various purposes, mattered to them and thus to us as historians, you get a continuous attempt, if not to reinvent, then at least to expand and render porous the nature of politics; to keep asking and answering, again and again, the question of who counted as a political actor, and what sorts of actions might be taken to count as political. Here she consistently worried away at, problematised and sought to undercut crude dichotomies between popular and elite politics and religion. She was insistent that Presbyterianism could in certain situations and places represent a form of popular religious practice and political action; that the various attempts to establish godly reformation in the 1650s were not simply doomed to fail; that the Cromwellian church retained real resources of ideological and spiritual energy and dynamism.⁹ These have been central themes in Ann’s work, and although, as several contributions to this book show, she is by no means unique in this, there can be no doubt that in her work that attempt – an attempt, in effect, to keep in contact or dialogue species of political, cultural, social and religious history – has reached a consistently, indeed we are tempted to say a uniquely, high level among English early modernists.

Nowhere is that more true than in her work on gender and the English Revolution. Like many of her generation, enthusiastic readers of Spare Rib and other organs of the socialist feminist left, Ann was early into the cause of women’s history. Indeed, you can find on her list of publications an article, co-authored with Karen Hunt, on ‘A culture transformed? Women’s lives in Wythenshawe in the 1930s’,¹⁰ not to mention British Women’s History: A Bibliographical Guide.¹¹ But tellingly, within her chosen field, Ann has never really done women’s history of the classic sort. Rather, in a series of articles, and a book on Gender and the English Revolution, which masquerades as a sort of introduction to the topic, but which in effect helps to define and open it up, she has examined the myriad ways in which gendered identities and gender ideology shaped the personae and ideologies, the political subjecthood and agency of various actors, both women and men, and the notions of public and private, of political virtue and indeed of tyranny, of rule and misrule, in play and under contest, in the events conventionally described as the English Revolution.¹² Indeed, it is tempting to conclude that her contribution on this front rivals or perhaps even exceeds in importance and potential impact that of the Gangraena book and its pendant articles. Certainly, there is plenty of room both for her and others to make hay with the insights and prompts provided in what are, it seems to me, a series of seminal articles. Just as with the Gangraena project, where she was open to the insights of historians of the book, of print and of reading, so here, in ways that almost no other political historian of the period has been, she has been in constant dialogue with the work of a series of literary scholars. Again, there is the mark of Ann’s personal political and ideological commitments and friendships, framing and shaping – but not determining, or reducing to mere feel good agitprop, or pointless virtue signalling – the course of her scholarly output.

Ann’s work has always been historiographically engaged. Not for nothing was she in at the birth of ‘post-revisionism’.¹³ Whatever we now take that to have been, to those involved at the time it seemed like a thing; a distinct response to the challenge of revisionism, which accepted the revisionist turn to the political, as the heart of the matter, and took some of the central contentions of revisionism seriously, while vigorously disagreeing with, and sometimes rejecting, others; the aim being not to defend some sort of Hillian, Stoneian, Hexterian or even Gardinerian status quo ante, but rather to engage with, and move beyond, or rather through, revisionism to something else. What that something else would look like was not at the time entirely apparent, but the point was to push towards it though a vigorous campaign of research, argument and dialogue. It has taken the best part of thirty years but it might be thought that we are now at that other place, one in which labels like ‘revisionist’ and ‘post-revisionist’, rather than having any real purchase on the current scholarly scene, are best used to describe and analyse retrospectively the debates of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.¹⁴

But deeply engaged with that post-revisionist project as much of Ann’s work has been, it was never bounded or defined by the opinions and interpretations against which she was reacting. Nor has she ever been satisfied with simply negative conclusions. For her, critique is a matter of active, creative engagement, with the aim to end up somewhere other than where either side in the debate started. And so her second solo-authored article, published in Midland History, was a seminal assault on the notion of the county community, using her chosen county of Warwickshire as the means to critique the so-called localist model of English political culture.¹⁵ The result, even allowing for the peculiarities of Warwickshire – an inland county, whose boundaries were not coterminous with any coherent geographic or socio-economic unit or pays, all of which, by the way, were built into the analysis – was pretty conclusive. But this article had been preceded by another, in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, also set in Warwickshire, which saw localist sentiment used, not for classically conservative ‘localist’ purposes, i.e., to protect the county from the demands of an intrusive central authority, emanating either from King or Parliament, but rather by the earl of Denbigh’s radical parliamentarian opponents in the county, anxious to break his hold on local power in order to prosecute the civil war more aggressively in alliance with their allies at the centre.¹⁶ What emerged here was not merely a wonderfully neat inversion of the conventional account, but a dynamic model of the interaction between the centre and the localities, in which ‘localist’ arguments were a product of, and became a means of prosecuting, personal but also genuinely political, indeed in this case deeply ideological, differences. Here is the relation between the centre and localities rendered dynamically political. Localism and arguments based on a notional county interest or community have not disappeared, but, no longer rooted in the soil of whatever county we happen to be talking about, they have been located in an open-ended series of essentially political exchanges and manoeuvres, and thus rendered susceptible to genuinely historical analysis.

It has been said (more than once) that Ann’s book on Warwickshire was the county study that ate itself; that is to say, after which it was no longer possible to write any more county histories, at least of the up-until-then conventional sort. That comment was clearly intended to be complimentary but when it was once put to her she did not respond altogether well, and we can well see why. For that book, which had all the virtues of the best sort of local history – a deep immersion in all of the available sources, both local and national, an intimate knowledge of the local terrain and of both the central and local political narratives – did subject the organising assumptions that underlay the standard county study to a devastating going over. But in so doing, it represented not the end but the apogee of the local study as a genre and opened up a series of possibilities for further research. It was just that after that book and its pendant articles it became impossible to write local studies based on the old assumptions about the existence and coherence of the ‘county community’, and therefore also of the hermetically sealed nature of the local sources, that up to that point, had animated the county study, and rendered it so perfect a vehicle for the PhD thesis.

Now it is true that after the debate on localism ran out of steam, after, that is, the side represented by Ann’s work had in effect ‘won’, local history fell out of favour. But that was a function of intellectual fashion of the most meretricious sort, and of the prejudices of certain publishers.¹⁷ The old revisionist assumptions about the real history, history on the ground, history as it was lived by ‘the silent majority’, lying uniquely in the local manuscript sources, may be, if not entirely dead, then at least in serious abeyance, but long after the death of revisionist localism there remains an intellectual agenda, a series of questions about how to relate the local with the national, how to write often minutely local history in ways that contribute to wider questions and national and indeed transnational histories, without merely replicating or illustrating those histories. Recent interest in the structure and functions of the early modern English state, and indeed on the politics of public pitch making, of political communication and news mongering, even of an emergent or nascent ‘public sphere’ of sorts, have reinvigorated such concerns. And so lately that agenda has started to attract the attention of a number of scholars. Perhaps the most obvious evidence of that is a recent collection of essays edited by Jason Peacey and Chris Kyle,¹⁸ published in this series, not to mention various contributions to the present volume, and a whole slew of articles published and currently in progress by Ann herself.¹⁹

For throughout her career Ann has produced articles that use her extraordinary grasp of various local sources, to contribute to wider historical debates. Thus, in her article in Midland History on ‘indemnity proceedings and the impact of civil war’ she used her intimate knowledge of the Warwickshire materials to comment critically, indeed one could say definitively, on the topic of ‘parliamentary tyranny’, which certain historians had plucked from the realm of contemporary polemic and started to use almost as a term of art and analysis. That tendency Ann’s article cut off at the knees, and left us, once again, with a detailed and nuanced account of relations between often minute local interactions and events and the workings of central authority and the testimony and politics of certain central archives.²⁰ (Ann’s local researches had always been as centred in the Public Record Office (now The National Archives, Kew, TNA) as they were in the Warwickshire Record Office.)

Again, her deep knowledge of the Warwickshire sources and contexts allowed her to take the laconic Latin one-liners of Thomas Dugard’s diary and turn them into a vivid picture of life in a corner of Warwickshire during the Personal Rule. Only someone who knew who the people mentioned in these deeply gnomic entries were – this one Lord Brooke’s steward, that one someone else’s chaplain – could have deciphered the true significance of the document. Not only did the result take us inside the meetings and ruminations of the ‘junto’ in Warwick castle, providing, on the way, solid proof of the collusion between that group and the Scots, about the existence of which both contemporaries and modern historians had speculated but both been unable to prove, it also provided a vivid picture of just how far puritans like Dugard were able to go about their business throughout the Personal Rule.²¹

This capacity to find multum in parvo has been a feature of Ann’s career and continues in much of her current work in progress. One thinks here of her recent article using local accounts to excavate memories of the swathe cut through parts of the midlands by the Scots as they marched south during the wars.²² Again, there is a typically Hughesian meld between a meticulous knowledge of the sources and some of the most recent trends in the historiography, her interest in the dynamics of ‘memory’ and the politics of the archive. She is even threatening to take the ‘spatial turn’.