Conflicts, 1956–60

Abstract

The troubles of the History of Parliament From the moment of its reincarnation in 1951 the History of Parliament enveloped itself in a cloud of super-optimism. With the benefit of hindsight, one can only smile on reading forecasts of likely completion dates, given that the first volumes, Namier's, eventually appeared in 1964, while Neale's Elizabethan section finally saw the light of day thirty years after the work was set in motion. But we have to remember that the shape the History was to take-in terms of research, structure and presentation-was not laid out clearly in advance, nor were any of those involved aware of the scale of the job they had taken on. It was as if they had set out to climb a high mountain dressed and equipped for a country walk. The trustees delegated responsibility for 'academic direction' to the editorial board, and the board in turn failed to decide whether the biographical research should take the form of a classical prosopography-closely focused and statistically driven-such as Neale preferred, or the open-ended approach advocated by Namier, disdaining brief factual entries in favour of articles which attempted to discover not only the key facts about a member's background and career, but also an insight into character and motivation. When Stenton tried to issue firm guidelines, he could not bring Neale and Namier to agree. In 1954 the board solemnly decided on the desirability of varying practice according to period, and produced a formula that was a masterpiece of vacuity: 'as a general rule, biographies should be as complete as knowledge and the limitations of space will allow'. 1 Namier carried on as he pleased. But he did not grasp the problem that he was creating. At first he had no idea how much time would be involved in writing a mass of biographies-roughly two thousand in all-in the style that he wanted. 2 The eventual realisation that this would take much longer than planned was continually delayed by over-confidence in his own abilities and anxiety not to miss anything. The determination to track down every scrap of evidence was too deeply