England's Ancien Regime as a Confessional State

Any model of English society during the “long” eighteenth century whether briefly characterized as an ancien regime or a confessional state must rest on some consideration of its seventeenth-century antecedents, and include some account of how and why a quite different historiography was worked out in the nineteenth century. Similarly, any critique, to be fully effective, would need to range as widely in time and theme. The preceding articles by James Bradley, John Money, and John Phillips offer useful challenges to part of the wider thesis but so far lack a broad perspective. This in itself focusses attention on my own books at the expense of those of my colleagues. The historiographical element in my work has made explicit my indebtedness to the many other scholars whose research over three centuries of British history is congruent with my own: only that restricted horizon which limits some enquiries to one or two decades could lead critics to fail to do justice to what is, after all, the work of a generation of authors and not one of “revisionist” alone.It is because the new thinking which I addressed has been the product of a diverse generation of scholars rather than of a “school” of “revisionists” (let alone of an individual) that the restatements of an old orthodoxy have been so few. There has been no general counter-attack on the “revisionists,” and no alternative synoptic vision of the English past which remotely looks as if it could be a blueprint either for a revival of the old history or for some quite new vision. Replies have tried instead to defend some part of the old model on increasingly restricted ground. It has been suggested, for example, that “meaningful popular politics” can indeed be found in the borough of Maidstone in the late eighteenth century; but such an argument can only be sustained by not attending to the reasons which made Maidstone, and a few boroughs like it, unusual. Here as elsewhere, the pattern of response has been to defend a previous thesis by narrowing the frame of reference chronologically or geographically, searching for one area at least where it can be made to fit.