Volume 34, Number 8 · May 7, 1987
Under the Tudor Bed
By Christopher Hill
Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia
by Lacey Baldwin Smith
Princeton University Press, 342 pp., $25.00
Over fifty years ago the great historian Sir Lewis Namier wrote three volumes about eighteenth-century England in which he argued that the high-sounding principles which Whig and Tory politicians mouthed bore little relation to their political actions. Here the spoils of office and the patronage of rival grandees were far more important. His books, written with a style and panache that few historians can rival, were a great success and established the credentials of 'the Namier method': close and detailed analysis of the family and patronage affiliations of members of Parliament, of their connections with economic interests—these were the keys to understanding eighteenth-century politics. Principles were fig leaves. Namier was accused of taking the mind out of history, but he was much more cautious than that, and made no claim to have discovered a universal key. He dealt with a period in which political and ideological issues were in fact of little significance among what he called 'the political nation' and what others might call the ruling class. Hence his success.
Review, 2522 words
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