FOR modern readers it is self-evident that serious historical writing should be conducted in prose. Today’s readers also have a clear sense of what rightly falls under the heading of history: we share a working definition of the subject that involves an account of past events in human affairs with a verifiable basis in truth.1 These key assumptions, however, were not shared by early modern thinkers. Not only was it commonplace for Renaissance theorists to claim that poets were the word’s first historians, there were still many contemporary poets who attempted to maintain this role.2 History, moreover, was not necessarily human in its focus or restricted to actions that were verifiably true. God’s deeds were also historical and, in the human sphere, historians felt at liberty to invent whole speeches and to report stories ranging in subject matter from encounters with giants to monstrous births. Horrible murders (indeed, some straightforward fictions) could comfortably fall under the heading of ‘true history’.
Renaissance England might be casual in the way it used the term ‘history’, but that category could also be more restrictive than it is today. When, for example, the antiquarian William Camden completed his great survey of ancient Britain, the Britannia, he made it very clear that he was not writing history, which in this context was a rhetorically and politically elevated form.3 The Britannia set out to reassess the nation’s past through research on fragmentary remains such as architectural ruins, coins, original manuscripts, and ancient languages; it might look to modern readers like advanced historiography, but Camden and his contemporaries did not necessarily understand the subject in this way. Certain kinds of writing (such as enquiries into the origins of laws, customs, or institutions) were considered egregiously non-historical. It was for this reason that a sniping rival herald claimed that ‘for a mere scholar to be an historian’ was ‘very unfit and dangerous’.4 The title ‘historical prose’ in early modern England is thus a complex and debatable category.
This chapter is headed ‘Raphael Holinshed and Historical Writing’ and (in this murky field) Holinshed’s Chronicles do give us certain parameters through which to explore the genres of early modern prose history. Holinshed has become famous above all through the work of William Shakespeare (who used the Chronicles extensively as source for his plays). He was not the most prominent or distinguished historian of his era, yet the chronicles that bear his name do provide a usefully inclusive example that gives us a snapshot of the time. The ambitious publisher’s original plan had been for a complete world history, but even the treatment of Britain alone that appeared in 1577 was a massive enterprise.5 The two folio volumes contained separate descriptions and histories of England and Wales; Scotland; and Ireland. In 1587 this became three volumes—a revised and expanded text in which Holinshed (who died around 1580) played no part. Both editions were collaborative efforts: not only were they written by multiple authors, those authors themselves also worked by patching from earlier texts. Within the Chronicle there were thus sections of elevated humanist history (in the form, for example, of Sir Thomas More’s elegant unfinished monograph on the reign of King Richard III), but these sat alongside less carefully written material including descriptions of pageants, frosts, banquets, plagues, rains, and fires, and details of the punishments meted out to heretics.6 The book is an extraordinary composite. For this reason, an anatomy of Holinshed’s Chronicles gives us a good basis for a survey of what counted in the early modern period as ‘historical prose’.
The intellectual status of Holinshed, which was never high in literary circles, declined steadily over the centuries and has only recently undergone a gradual rise. This low status comes because intellectual historians have conventionally pitched the Chronicles against the rising new form of the period: that of humanist historiography. This mode of writing emerged first in Italy and was based on the rediscovery of the great classical writers on history: most importantly Thucydides, Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus. Humanist historians, such as Niccolò Machiavelli in his Florentine Histories (1520–5), working in the light of these Greek and Latin authors, brought a new focus to their study of the past. First, they treated individuals primarily as rational agents, rather than moral subjects of divine judgement and Providence. Second, they selected more circumscribed topics (such as single reigns or rebellions) instead of chronicling a potentially endless series of events. Third and most important, they concentrated on political affairs and excluded material that was not directly relevant to the transfer of power: for this reason humanist historiography was often called ‘politic history’.
Taken en masse, Holinshed’s Chronicles clearly lacked this kind of discipline: indeed, F. J. Levy (one of the foremost authorities on the humanist historians) declared that Holinshed ‘represented the worst excesses of the old providentialism’.7 All the same, as Levy acknowledged, there were patches of the chronicle that were more humanist than others, even if this was only because they were copied wholesale from more scholarly hands. For this reason, the starting point of Holinshed still gives us access to what counted to contemporaries as the high end of early modern historical prose.
First amongst humanist histories (and shamelessly reproduced in Holinshed) was Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III (c. 1518). Unfinished though it was, More’s history remains a high point of English historical writing. In a way that is exceptional in early modern historiography (indeed, in early modern prose generally) it combines tight plotting, incisive characterization, coherent motivation, and unity of subject matter with elegance and variability of style. It is frequently observed that there is cross-fertilization between politic history and drama and More (who knew Roman tragedy as well as history) provides an exemplary case: he is a master of scene setting and the History, even incomplete, constitutes a powerful dramatic whole. All of these qualities were readily adopted by Shakespeare, who encountered the History by way of Holinshed’s chronicles. First amongst many is the character of Richard, crafted by More as a perfect Machiavel:
Richard the third son, of whom we now entreat, was in wit and courage egall with either of them [his brothers], in body and prowess far under them both, little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher then his right, hard favoured of visage, and such as is in states called warly, in other men otherwise. He was malicious, wrathful, envious, and from afore his birth, ever frowarde. [ … ] No evil captain was he in the war, as to which his disposition was more meetly then for peace. [ … ] He was close and secrete, a deep dissimuler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable where he inwardly hated, not letting to kiss whom he thought to kill: dispitious and cruel, not for evil will alway, but other for ambition. [ … ] Some wise men also weene, that his drift covertly conveyed, lacked not in helping forth his brother of Clarence to his death: which he resisted openly, howbeit somewhat (as men deemed) more faintly than he that were heartily minded to his wealth.8
In such passages of descriptive analysis More intercuts short and long sentences, uses lists and anecdotes, and employs parallelism to subtle effect. These character sketches combine with set-piece encounters in which More’s history brilliantly evokes suspense and terror. One good example is the arrest of Lord Hastings during a meeting in the Tower, where Richard arrives late, languidly apologizes for oversleeping, and asks the Bishop of Ely to send for ‘the good strawberries at your garden in Holborn’ (47). This courteous, yet imperious request from one who is not yet a king quietly establishes the centre of power. Thus, when Richard suddenly changes his tone to make angry and inexplicable demands the effect is chilling in the extreme:
With a wonderful sour angry countenance, knitting the brows, frowning and frothing and gnawing on his lips [ … ] thus he began: ‘what were they worthy to have, that compass & imagine the destruction of me, being so near of blood unto the king and protector of his royal person and his realm?’ At this question, all the lords sat sore astonied, musing much by whom this question should be meant, of which every man whist himself clear. (More, Richard III, 47)
There is a proto-novelistic energy to this writing that is uncharacteristic of the period. More derived much of his approach from Roman accounts of the tyranny of emperors, above all in the Annals of Tacitus. In several cases (such as the set-piece scene in which Richard first refuses and then, with feigned reluctance, accepts the throne) he appears to have gone directly to the life of Tiberius, using this (rather than any actual historical records) as the source for his account of the seizure of power.9
Although they are generally less dramatic in their reporting of action, other humanist histories share More’s willingness to adapt historical narratives, often on classical precedent. One spectacular case is provided by John Hayward’s First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie the IIII (1599), which landed its author in prison because of the apparent close connections between its account of the deposition of Richard II and the Earl of Essex’s rebellion against Queen Elizabeth. The case is an extreme instance of the tendencies of politic history: both because it followed Tacitus particularly closely and because (through its dedication to Essex) it sailed so close to the political wind. When Francis Bacon examined the book as a part of the government’s investigation he found Hayward innocent of treason but, he slyly observed, guilty of ‘felony’ on account of his extensive plagiarism.
Bacon may have disapproved of the undigested classical gobbets and poor political tact of Hayward’s history. Yet, he (having also been part of the forward-thinking Essex circle) nevertheless shared the essence of this methodology.10 In the writing of politic history current political experience tended to take priority over any historical research. Bacon’s own original composition, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622), like More’s History of King Richard III, thus involved little recourse to the archives. Admittedly, this was in part because Bacon was at this time forbidden to enter London, where the majority of records were kept, but such scholarly delving was in any case not really the providence of the great historian. Such a man, through his experience of great affairs and his reading of earlier learned histories, was primarily responsible for giving pre-existing subject matter moral and intellectual shape. It was his judgement and style, not the accuracy of the minutiae, that were the proper measure of success.
It was for this reason that Bacon and More, like the classical historians, felt at liberty to invent entire speeches and to put these into the mouths of their protagonists.11 In this respect, More and Bacon matched up to former great historians and men of affairs such as Thucydides, Sallust, and Tacitus.12 Their practice of imaginative composition (entirely alien to modern readers) shows history to be a rhetorical, moral, and political art much more than an indifferent scholarly discipline. One example of this within Bacon’s History is a long oration by Henry VII in which he justifies war with France. The book’s Victorian editor puzzled over this passage, not only because in the surviving records there is not even a hint of Henry’s presence in parliament, but also because war with France did not in fact occur at this time. The editor speculated that there were perhaps surviving manuscripts, known by Bacon, but not by historians today.13 This, however, is almost certainly to mistake Bacon’s methods, which had more to do with present political lessons than with the precise nature of past events. On inspection, we find that the speech attributed to Henry VII is studded with seventeenth-century vocabulary (words such as ‘malcontents’, ‘impostors’, and ‘populace’ that could not possibly have been used by the first Tudor monarch). These words fit in more with the current situation (which was the threat of war with Spain) than they do with early Tudor policy. Bacon, here, is composing a speech to a present audience, much more than attempting to reconstruct the most likely historical past.
The purpose that drives such imaginative endeavours comes to the fore most clearly in the final stages of the History. For as Bacon sums up Henry Tudor’s foreign policies the parallels with those of James I become increasingly evident:
[Henry VII] professed always to love and seek peace; and it was his usual preface in his treaties, that when Christ came into the world peace was sung, and when he went out of the world peace was bequeathed. And this virtue could not proceed out of fear or softness, for he was valiant and active; and therefore no doubt it was truly Christian and moral. Yet he knew the way to peace was not to be desirous to avoid wars. Therefore would he make offers and frames of wars, till he had mended conditions of peace. (238)
Henry’s prefaces on the love of peace are no more evident in his treaties than the parliamentary records show a speech of war against France. This closing oration does match closely, however, with the foreign policy vision that James pursued. This, in contrast to Hayward’s example, is a successful instance of the application and adaptation of past events to present needs. Bacon’s conclusion is a consummate piece of humanist historiography: rhetorically, its neat use of antimetabole and paradox (‘peace’, ‘war’, ‘war’, ‘peace’) lends his thesis an aphoristic quality that invites reapplication by the reader. That sense of reading history to a present purpose was, as I have argued, a vital part of humanist philosophy.14 Henry VII (a cautious prince, the first of a new ruling dynasty, and a maintainer of foreign influence through the marriages of his children) provided a fruitful parallel to Bacon’s monarch. The continual emphasis on the King’s excessive financial extractions perhaps also offered reflection on James’s difficulties in this area, which were the root cause of Bacon’s loss of office that year.
Humanist history, in spite of the risks, depended upon such parallels. It was a moot point, however, whether this made the form moral, because the lessons of history did not necessarily show reward for good deeds. Thus, though the case of Henry VII might show James I how to pursue a peaceful foreign policy, it might also show him that extortionate taxation could make a monarchy strong. In the same way, the study of tyrants might offer dangerous models: it is often suggested that it was on this logic that Thomas More abandoned his History of King Richard III.15 The idea that humanist history could foster immoral doctrines was certainly recognized in the period, not least because the greatest humanist historian, Niccolò Machiavelli, was also author of the most notorious manual of power: the historiography that he championed was therefore intimately connected to the most cynical theory of governance. Theorists of history, such as Justus Lipsius, attempted to nuance this problem, replacing Machiavelli’s morally neutral concept of virtù with the warmer notion of prudence in a Christian king.16 All the same, humanist history remained an uncomfortable if impressive presence. When Prince Henry asked John Hayward (who had survived the reign of Elizabeth) why English historical writing was of such poor quality, the latter replied from bitter experience that ‘men might safely write of others in manner of a tale, but in manner of a History safely they could not’.17
Compared to humanist histories, chronicles had an easier (if less sophisticated) way of proving their moral utility. Conventionally, chroniclers claimed to illustrate God’s justice through examples of Providence and divine retribution, and for this purpose, they tended to begin with the earliest days: ‘next unto the holy scripture’, declared Holinshed, ‘chronicles doo carry credit’.18 Because chronicle (though less perfectly than the Bible) set out to display evidence of God’s presence in history, it constituted entirely proper reading, not just for kings and counsellors, but for the common man. Chronicles were thus a popular medium and publishers set out cater for every species of demand. Unlike humanist histories, which were an elite form of literature, chronicles could be very basic productions, both in the quality of their prose and in their physical make-up as printed texts. In the early years of Elizabeth’s reign there was fierce commercial rivalry between two compilers of short chronicles, Richard Grafton and John Stow.19 Grafton’s Abridgement of the Chronicles of England, which appeared in February 1563, is a pocketsized book—written in short factual sentences and dominated by an extensive index—that outlines events all the way from the creation of Adam to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Grafton’s Abridgement was rapidly followed by Stow’s Summary (1563), which in turn sparked Grafton’s Manuel of Chronicles (1565). The conflict continued across Stow’s Summary of English Chronicles Abridged (1567) and Grafton’s Chronicle at Large (1568). In the prefaces to these works the two authors attacked one another’s credibility and in the main body of their texts they attracted readers by way of additional tables, almanacs, marginal summaries, running chronologies, and the like. These were lightweight volumes in octavo and duodecimo foldings and thus easy to carry and cheap to buy. Stylistically this was simple prose designed to give access to information, not to describe policy, character, or constitutional change.
As part of their service to readers, popular chronicles generally laid claim to up-to-the-minute topicality. At the same time, as we have seen, they also conventionally began their story from the earliest times. The Christian narrative of creation could admit no notion of the ‘prehistoric’.20 Logically, therefore, a history of the island of Britain should begin with God’s separation of the earth from the heavens and the waters, which could be calculated with near-certainty to 3,962 years before the birth of Christ.21 The physical history of the nation began at that point and commenced with perennial questions about the impact of the Flood, the original name of the landmass, and the origins of the indigenous population of giants.22 Human history on the island began in 1108 BC with the arrival of Brutus, the supposed grandson of Aeneas, who was bringing his Trojan heroes to a new land.23 In spite of increased scepticism about these long-established stories, the 1587 Chronicles of Holinshed could not avoid this material and even included (from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae) a letter from Brutus to Pandrassus, King of the Greeks.24
What such inclusions reflected was not simply credulity about evidence, but a fundamental failure to acknowledge anachronism. The medieval chronicles in which these stories were sourced had a very limited sense of ‘pastness’: as Peter Burke put it in a now perhaps unfashionably Whiggish study, the Middle Ages lacked a sense of the ‘differentness’ of history: ‘they saw it in terms of the present; they projected themselves back onto the men of the past’.25 That perspective still stuck firmly even to the Renaissance chronicle, which was in many ways still a medieval form.26 It was most graphically present in the 1577 version of Holinshed’s book through the repeated woodcuts of monarchs. These illustrations were simply recycled across the ages, so that kings hundreds of years apart were depicted as uniform in their armour and dress. This was also true of architecture, with the first construction of London by Brutus (supposedly more than a millennium before the Romans) illustrated with literally the same engraving of an august classical building as was used to depict a castle built by the Saxon King Ella in the sixth century AD.27 Prose and woodcut alike showed a lack of visual imagination: it was this that made it possible to conceive of the first settler of the island composing learned letters to his fellow monarch in faraway Greece.
The heading ‘chronicle’ in the early modern period established expectations for this kind of undiscriminating (or open-minded) inclusiveness. There were, in reality, only modest developments on the methodology of late fifteenth-century chroniclers, who (to quote Joseph Levine) ‘were usually unwilling and largely unable to make a clear distinction between fact and fiction, either in theory or in practice (though they sometimes attempted it)’.28 This openness went hand in hand with ambition. The original plan for what came to be called Holinshed’s chronicles (set out by the printer and publisher Reyner Wolfe around 1548) had in fact been for ‘an universal cosmography of the whole world, and therewith also certain particular histories of every known nation’.29 And although the scope of Holinshed’s Chronicles was ultimately more limited, this universal aspect continued to be in evidence in its earlier parts. Comprehensive world history was considered possible because of a presumption of truth in all stories: totalizing accounts such as Cooper’s Chronicle or Ralegh’s History of the World included, for example, the labours of Hercules within their narrative. Myths were often rationalized to fit within the bounds of the possible, but they were not understood as a fundamentally different category.30 For this reason, famous figures such as King Lear or King Arthur continued to appear in chronicles.
This mythic narrative was not the only material found in chronicles that was excluded from humanist politic histories. Thomas Blundeville, author of the only contemporary vernacular treatise on humanist historiography, was very explicit about the limits within which his discipline should direct its attention: ‘histories’, he observed ‘be made of deeds done by a public weal, or against a public weal, and such deeds, be either deeds of war, of peace, or else of sedition and conspiracy’.31 What Bacon called ‘vulgar’ (161) deeds were not part of high-level history, but they were readily included in chronicle. As Annabel Patterson has observed, chronicles were essentially a middle-class genre, and they therefore not only addressed, but also depicted the ordinary citizen.32 It is for this reason that a stage play about a murder, such as the anonymous Arden of Faversham, could have its source in Holinshed just as much as a stately tragedy.
The murder of Master Arden, which occurred in the reign of Edward VI, provides a good example of the kind of popular material that made its way into chronicle history. In Holinshed the report takes up many folio pages and (as with accounts of high political action) introduces verbatim reports of the protagonists’ words. Here, for example, is the account of how Alice Arden’s serving men take on the services of a hired killer, Black Will:
The serving men knew black Will, and saluting him, demanded of him whither he went. He answered, ‘by this blood’ (for his use was to swear almost at every word) ‘I know not, nor rate not, but set up my staff, and even as it falleth I go’. ‘If thou’ (quoth they) ‘wilt go back again to Gravesend, we will give thee thy supper’. ‘By this blood’ (said he) ‘I care not, I am content, have with you’. And so he returned again with them.33
This fairly casual prose gives access to the idiomatic speech and patterns of daily life of less privileged people (we learn, for example, that Master Arden enjoys a breakfast of butter and milk). Popular chroniclers like Holinshed thought such a story worthwhile (although ‘it may seem to be but a private matter, and therefore as it were impertinent to this history’) simply because the events were extraordinary.
Inclusiveness and direct quotation are Holinshed’s hallmarks. This makes its prose highly variable, covering the speeches of condemned criminals, public performances, civic legislation, and genuine transcriptions of historical documents. Only a few pages on from the report of Arden of Faversham’s murder, the chronicle thus shifts to a high political register, giving the full text of Queen Mary’s letter to the Lords of the Council upon the death of the King (Chronicles [1577] I, 1716). The second edition of the chronicles, even more than its predecessor, embraced this notion of inclusivity: in its account of Elizabeth’s reign it quotes popular songs, pageants, and even reports on the nature of children’s play. The book concludes in a way that exemplifies its status as an encompassing record: the final item is a proclamation concerning the preservation of cereal crops that was issued just months before the Chronicles went to press.34
Chronicles, I have been stressing, were a radically inclusive mode of prose history. Unlike more elevated humanist works, they reported the deeds of the common people as well as those of monarch. Also unlike those grander histories, they went back to the earliest ages and—as result—reported stories that readers today would consider mythical. Chronicles, though they might sometimes express doubt or offer a series of alternative narratives, tended to offer little discrimination on matters of fact. As D. R. Woolf has stated, history in the Tudor period tended to operate within narrow boundaries, with the orthodox stories (complete with fixed moral judgements) repeated from text to text.35 True, there might be religious conflict between authors and this might produce competing versions, but this was still something different from a coherent investigative mode.36 Neither the inclusive chronicles nor the selective humanist histories set themselves the overarching objective of establishing provable truth.
There was, however, a different species of prose that was concerned with this business and this was the writing of antiquarians. Leading intellectuals such as William Camden, John Selden, and Robert Cotton were asking new kinds of questions. They were interested in the history of such things as rights, customs, and institutions (researching, for example, the origins of particular taxes or the antiquity of parliament). As evidence, the antiquaries scrutinized such diverse sources as physical documents, coins, and inscriptions; historical developments in language; and archaeological remains. Like many Renaissance developments, the first wave of this thinking had occurred in Italy: in the words of Joseph Levine ‘by 1500 the Italian humanists had invented many of the problems and developed most of the skills that were to preoccupy European antiquaries for the next two centuries’.37 The great poet and intellectual Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) was a pivotal figure in this movement. His successor, Flavio Biondo (1388–1463), had established the model for architectural history in his Rome Restored (written 1440–6) and his national historical description Italy Illustrated (completed 1453).38 These works spearheaded a radically new format for the writing of prose history.
Such research was not compatible with the chronicle format. One aspect of Holinshed’s book, however, did have a mildly antiquarian bent. This was William Harrison’s ‘Historical Description of the Island of Britain’, which prefaced the narrative history with a geographical and cultural survey of a kind not uncommon in chronicle compilations of the time.39 In the ‘Description’ Harrison addressed topics such as the history of migration. He examined changes in the form of government and described the nation through its ancient tribes, local legends, and ruined buildings. As he did so Harrison was, in reality, still very largely dependent on secondary sources, but the questions he was asking inevitably brought new methods to bear. Similar questions were to be asked in the Society of Antiquaries which, by the time of the second (heavily revised) version of Harrison’s ‘Description’, had established a regular pattern of meetings at the Herald’s Office in London. In the years between 1590 and 1604, formal presentations were held on an enormous range of topics, including the history of noble titles, court offices, rights of property, land division, funeral customs, parishes, shires, cities, towns, and castles.40 Speeches in response to specific queries were recorded in manuscript, so these plain, deliberative orations could reasonably be considered a form of prose history.
The dominant prose form that set the Society of Antiquaries in motion, however, was that of William Camden’s Britannia, published in Latin in 1586 and finally rendered into English twenty-four years later by Philemon Holland (one of the age’s greatest translators of classical history). In the same way as Harrison’s ‘Description’ (and, more importantly, Biondo’s Italy Restored), the Britannia adopted a chorographic structure: i.e. it treated land and history at the same time. Chorography is literally ‘earth-writing’. In the Britannia this involves a systematic survey of the island’s landmass that works to uncover all that can be deduced about each region’s past. Of course, the same material could be presented through other forms of writing (members of the Society of Antiquaries, for example, also produced annotations and monographs). Yet, chorography offered a more comprehensive way of structuring historical information; as such, it constituted a third important genre of historical prose.
William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent (1576), described as ‘containing the description, history and customs of that shire’, was the first English antiquarian survey to reach print. The difference between its treatment of the early past and that of Holinshed is remarkable, with Lambarde (in a way comparable to present-day archaeologists) beginning with a picture of the nation divided between Celtic tribes. British history proper, for him, begins with Julius Caesar’s account of his expedition to the island. In this, as on all other matters, Lambarde’s prose is concerned with the weighing up of historical authority, a process that is aided by the geographic structure of his approach. By following the Kent coastline Lambarde examines the history of Saxon and Norman government in the following way:
But now I will make toward Sandwich, the first of the Ports (as my journey lieth) and by the way speak somewhat of the Five Ports, in general.
The Cinque Ports
I find in the book of the general survey of the realm, which William the Conqueror caused to be made in the fourth year of his reign, and to be called Doomsday, because (as Matthew Paris sayeth) it spared no man (but judged all men indifferently, as the Lord in that great day will do) that Dover, Sandwich, and Rumney, were in the time of King Edward the Confessor, discharged almost of all the impositions and burdens (which other towns did bear) in consideration of such service to be done by them upon the Sea, as in their Special titles shall hereafter appear. (Lambarde, Perambulation [1576], 92–3)
Lambarde is here interested in the history of towns, taxation, and conquest, and considers evidence in the form of charters, place names, chronicles, and physical remains. In a restrained and logical style he eliminates certain sources as unreliable and comes to cautious conclusions on the balance of probability. This deductive methodology is found neither in humanist histories nor in ordinary chronicles: it is the key to a fundamentally innovative perspective on the past.
John Stow, in 1598, took a comparable approach in his Survey of London, which is described on the title page as ‘Containing the Original, antiquity, increase, modern estate, and description of that city’. Stow’s approach is still more directly archaeological than Lambarde’s. He is concerned, above all, with the history of buildings and uses direct physical examination over and above the surviving written records. Reporting on the London Bridge Tower, Stow records the following detail:
This Tower was new begun to be builded in the year, 1426. John Reynwell Major of London, laid one of the first corner stones, in the foundation of this work, the other three were laid by the Sheriffs, and Bridgemasters, upon every of these four stones was engraved in fair Roman letters, the name of Jhesus. And these stones, I have seen laid in the Bridge store house, since they were taken up, when that Tower was of late newly made of timber. This gate and Tower was at the first strongly builded up of stone, and so continued until the year 1577 in the Month of April, when the same stone Arched gate, and Tower being decayed was begun to be taken down, and then were the heads of the Traitors removed thence, and set on the Tower over the gate at the bridge foot, towards Southwark. (Stowe, Survey [1598], 46)
More fully than Lambarde, Stow puts himself into the picture. His personal inspection of ruins and remains is apparent and we have a strong sense of his connection to the great men and institutions of the city. Although there is a folksy element to this involvement with local history, there is also a solid connection to the new antiquarian thinking. Stow can deduce that there is no substance to the old stories of British monarchs because from Tacitus and from the physical remains it is evident that the Celtic tribes did not build walls and ‘(for the most part) … went naked, painting their bodies, & c. as all the Roman writers have observed’ (6).
It is revealing that Stow, who could make such unequivocal antiquarian judgements, should have continued to write chronicles according to the old pattern. This tells us something about the way in which the genres of early modern historical writing (politic history, chronicle, chorography, and others) generally failed to interact. Sophisticated humanist histories still thought little about the nature of their evidence; conversely, forensic antiquarians declined to delve into the realm of court politics. The great collaborative project that goes by the name Holinshed can be thought of as a receptacle of these competing methods. It was in part an old-fashioned chronicle, but it also contained fragments of antiquarianism, Tacitean realpolitik, civic record, news sheet, and church history. Intellectually, this was an unstable combination. Thus, once historians did start to make comparisons across forms of history, the chronicle would be placed under considerable strain. In the seventeenth century, D. R. Woolf has argued, the chronicle did not so much decline as disintegrate into its constituent parts.41
Holinshed’s reputation declined within a few decades of its publication. It was mocked by self-consciously sophisticated gentlemen, who not only doubted its trustworthiness, but also bristled at its low-church Protestant tendencies. David Womersley has shown the way in which Holinshed generally pushed the record of history in an anti-papal direction. In its defence of the Church of England it had connections with another prose history treated elsewhere in this volume: John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. When John Davies scoffed at popular chronicles in his Epigrammes he seized on this combination of providential pattern finding and indiscriminate accumulation. Geron, the foolish reader, ‘corrects/Old Holinshed our famous chronicler,/with moral rules’:
The rising in the North, the frost so great
That cartwheel prints on Thames’ face were seen
The fall of money and the burning of Paul’s steeple
The blazing star and Spaniards’ overthrow,
By these events, notorious to the people,
He measures times and things forepast doth show.42
In this attack, published on the eve of the new century, Davies anticipated a general reaction against chronicle in the Stuart age.
Jacobean Britain would see the appearance of new leaner volumes, better equipped with antiquarian insight and more informed by the methodology of classical historians. In the preface to his Collection of the Historie of England (1618) the poet Samuel Daniel fixed upon the neatness and integrity of his book, using a favourite conceit of his that strongly implied a dismissal of Holinshed:
For mine own part I am so greedy of doing well, as nothing suffices the appetite of my care herein. I had rather be Master of a small piece handsomely contrived, than of vast rooms ill proportioned and unfurnished, and I know many others are of my mind. (Daniel, Collection [1618], A3a)
The controlled, single-voiced shapeliness of Daniel’s history was one of its great achievements. In an implicitly antiquarian analogy, he insisted that ‘the Reader shall be sure to be paid with no counterfeit coin, but such as shall have the stamp of Antiquity’ (A3b). Daniel was unafraid to dismiss the pre-Roman British history. It was characteristic of nations, he warned, to fabricate mythical origins. In reality, however, states commonly ‘rise from springs of poverty, piracy, robbery, and violence, howsoever fabulous writers (to glorify their nations) strive to abuse the credulity of after ages with heroical, or miraculous beginnings’ (1Ba). In the Collection, Daniel attempted to meld this caution about the historical record with a coherent analytical perspective on the workings of power. The result was a mode of writing quite different from that of sixteenth-century chroniclers. Daniel’s prose is complex and judicious, sometimes to the point of obscurity. This, for example, is the opening sentence of his account of the reign of Henry II:
That short time of peace, before the death of Stephen, had so allayed the spirit of contention, and prepared the Kingdom (wearied and defaced with war) to that disposition of quietness: as Henry Plantagenet (though a French-man borne, and at that time, out of the land: long detained with contrary winds, yet a Prince of so great possessions abroad, as to make him feared, to be too mighty a master at home; or doubtful, where he would set his feet: whether carry England thither, or bring those great States to this) was, notwithstanding generally admitted (without any opposition or capitulation, other then the usual oath) to the Crown of England: which he received at the hands of Theobold, the twentieth day of December, Anno 1154, about the three and twentieth year of his age. (Daniel, Collection [1618], 67)
In this opening sentence Daniel pins down one of the great themes of the reign of King Henry: the simultaneous strength and vulnerability of a kingdom that spans the sea. Daniel’s account of the reign is consistently concerned with the maintenance of Henry’s power: irrelevant material is excluded, quotation is precise and to the purpose, invented speeches are dispensed with, and a consistent (often present tense) narrative is maintained. By the seventeenth century, history had become a university subject: the older, less exclusive understanding of history was being replaced by a concept that was altogether more defined.
I began this essay by stating that, for the early modern reader, history was not necessarily a prose subject. By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, matters had begun to change. The career of Samuel Daniel is itself the most fascinating index of this development. He had begun by writing history as poetry, in his lament The Complaint of Rosamond (1592) and in his unfinished historical epic The Civil Wars (1596–1609). The failure to complete the latter suggests that Daniel lost faith in the possibility of combining verse and history: his final years were spent on the prose Collection and not on the Civil Wars. Michael Drayton’s famous verdict on Daniel’s historical poem (‘His rimes were smooth, his meters well did close,/But yet his manner better fitted prose’) says something, not just about the poet, but also about the emerging prosaic status of history.43 Drayton himself suffered under that transition, which likewise affected John Milton in his middle years. Famously, Milton made plans in the late 1630s and 40s for an historical epic, possibly on the reign of Alfred the Great. His decision to write his great poem on a different subject and to write in prose his History of Britain is another marker of the new divide.
Between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, history became, in more than one sense, increasingly prosaic. It is unfashionable to call the intellectual developments of this period ‘revolutionary’, but undeniably an accommodation of sorts was achieved between humanist politic history on the one hand and antiquarianism on the other.44 Daniel’s 1618 Collection (as well as marking the eclipse of verse history and the British legends) involves some kind of union between these historiographic disciplines. Early modern historical prose before that date is a more eclectic category. The two collections of chronicles published under Holinshed’s name provide a representative sample of what prose could fall under the heading ‘history’: the events of the Hebrew Bible, the victories of King Arthur, monstrous births, notable murders, archaeological survey, anti-papal invective, and astute political analysis.45 Historical prose ranged from elevated manuscripts addressed to kings to inexpensive popular print. If it is understood to cover all of these categories, then prose history is probably the most widespread secular literature of the Tudor and Stuart age.
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——— Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
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Woolf, D. R. The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and ‘The Light of Truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990)
——— Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).