The Long Parliament of Charles II by Annabel Patterson (review)

217 Over the years, I have written at least as many words on Swift’s relations with the Oxford ministry, and his writings on its behalf, especially The Conduct of the Allies, as anyone else has done. I would have been immensely assisted to have had this volume at my disposal. J. A. Downie Goldsmiths, University of London ANNABEL PATTERSON. The Long Parliament of Charles II. New Haven: Yale, 2008. Pp. vii ⫹ 283. $45. It is probably best to read the last chapter of Ms. Patterson’s book first. Here she illuminates the eighteenth-century contexts in which a distinct genre of parliamentary history developed, and she makes a compelling case for the historian and ‘‘country’’ writer James Ralph as a contributor to Richard Chandler’s History and Proceedings of the House of Commons and editor of Anchitell Grey’s Debates of the House of Commons. This chapter demonstrates the clear rewards to be gleaned from an approach that ignores the artificial boundaries between the disciplines of history and English, and combines a close and careful reading of texts with a nuanced understanding of context. The rest of the book shamefully obfuscates those rewards, and may confirm those historians who seek to defend ‘‘their’’ territory from incursions by literary scholars in their erroneous opinions. The problem with the book, thus, is not one of simple methodology. It lies in the assumptions that are made about how the methodology should shape the work. Ms. Patterson is very clear about what she will not do. She will not be like ‘‘Proper historians.’’ They develop ‘‘a chronological narrative’’ and they do so ‘‘by way of effective summary, with the sources, for the sake of efficiency and clarity, relegated to footnote references, which they prefer procedurally curt and sometimes bundled.’’ (Given the number of ‘‘Proper historians’’ she thanks it can only be presumed that this characterization is knowingly parodic, but this does not stop her erecting her own position in contradistinction to it.) Ms. Patterson will instead concentrate more precisely on the sources themselves, and seek ‘‘to hear the voices of those who observed the Long Parliament.’’ Obviously there is nothing wrong with this: it reminds one of the utopian, but nonetheless insightful, adage that you should ‘‘go on reading till you can hear people talking.’’ But putting this method into action leads, for Ms. Patterson, to an oddly parcellated account. The second section of the book comprises three chapters that examine in turn the King’s speeches, memoirs, and what she calls ‘‘scofflaw pamphlets’’ as sources for parliamentary history. Again and again the reader longs for a greater integration of this analysis into a whole history of Charles II’s Long Parliament, which was called in 1661 and eventually dissolved in 1679. Instead , in these early chapters, while there are some occasions on which the sources are brought into contact with one another, the dominant focus on a single type of source puts the reader to a great deal of work for not much gain. At the end of the chapter on the King’s speeches, for example, we are told that ‘‘the story that the royal speeches in sequence and in context tell is entirely consonant with the larger account of the Long Parliament’’ offered at the beginning of the book. This story is 218 one in which ‘‘initial goodwill on the parts of both king and parliament was soon squandered by the Second Dutch War, then briefly rebuilt in 1670 (at least in terms of Supplies granted), then dissipated again with the deeper distrust engendered by the Third Dutch War and fear of the king’s engagements with France.’’ To tell an unsurprising story twice by different means requires serious justification. So what ‘‘peculiar’’ light do the King’s speeches throw on to events? ‘‘The persona Charles developed for himself as an orator was so patently in disharmony with events that mistrust grew even as it was urged against.’’ This is a point that might be well made within a more holistic parliamentary history, with the speeches located effectively within a broader account of events. Here the claim is too thin for the pages it captures . The sense that this book...