Hard, Soft, and Fuzzy Historiography

Readers of Common Knowledge will (would?) not find in this book specimens of the metacritical and metacultural literature to which they are largely though by no means wholly accustomed. It is instead a specimen of Anglo-British historiography, a discipline at once traditional, in the sense that it is at least as ancient as the events this book deals with, and professional, in the sense that it is constantly being challenged and reshaped by specialists in the fields that define it, who use techniques of interpretation both new and old. The phenomena with which Dr. Sowerby deals are largely recorded in county and borough archives of their period, scattered through England; and it is to his credit that he bought his brother’s car and drove to view the originals at their historic locations, instead of sitting in cyberspace and reading them as hyperreality. Archives tell us what the archivists wished; but it is a basic rule of historical interpretation that they tell us more than that, which is sometimes better perceived by turning them over with dirty fingers than by scanning them on a screen.

Research of this kind has been going on in England since the seventeenth century, but at the same time Sowerby has been engaged in exercises of historiographical interpretation that have concerned professionals in this field since at latest the middle of the twentieth. He inquires into the meanings of the term revolution and, in particular, into the question of whether the established model of “how revolutions break out” applies to the fall of James II of England in 1688–89. Here he might have cut a Gordian knot by saying firmly that the “Glorious Revolution”—a term now more in use among American than British historians—was a revolution in the early modern sense of a dramatic reversal of power relations, not one in the modern sense of a reversal of structures both social and political. But even in 1688, a peripateia was no longer considered a mere reversal of fortunes but was seen as a consequence of conditions “as well civil as ecclesiastical,” with which the English were acquainted to their cost. Here the key term in Sowerby’s title becomes not revolution but toleration. The fall of James II has to be seen as the consequence of his attempt to impose on his subjects a form of “toleration” that a successful opposition rejected as “persecution,” while claiming after his expulsion to institute a more limited form. There arose a version of history that presented the latter version as the origin of “toleration” in England, and it is this which is now under attack from a succession of historians, of whom Sowerby is the latest. It is part of a more general assault upon versions of history, characterized (sometimes stigmatized) by such terms as the “Whig interpretation” and the “Enlightenment,” of which Sowerby is aware but with which he does not oblige us to deal. It is important to realize, at this point, that his book is an exercise in professional, rather than universal, history: a narrative that may stand up independently of the conclusions about “toleration,” “revolution,” and “enlightenment” that may be drawn from it. For this reason, it is also an exercise in English, rather than European, history, which will probably be attacked, and may be open to attack, on these grounds.

The principal agent of intolerance in this narrative is the Church of England. The restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 had entailed a restoration of that church as its necessary support and an accompanying proscription and persecution of Protestant dissenters from it, and before James II succeeded his brother in 1685, his declared Catholicism had led to an attempt to exclude him from the succession. It had led, moreover, to a climate of near-rebellion in which even John Locke had been reduced to uttering a threat of civil war. The church had opposed exclusion, regarding James as the lesser evil, and the victory of church and...