King John Lackland was surely one of the most enigmatic figures ever to rule England. The dramatic ambivalence of his personality, the passions that he stirred among his own contemporaries, the very magnitude of his failures, have made him an object of endless fascination to historians and biographers. Whose interests would not be piqued by the man who was recently described by a distinguished scholar as “cruel and ruthless, violent and passionate, greedy and self-indulgent, genial and repellant, arbitrary and judicious, clever and capable, original and inquisitive”?

As one might expect, King John has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Nearly every historian who touches on any aspect of his reign feels compelled to offer his own judgment of John's puzzling character, his effectiveness, even his personal morality. The present century has seen, in addition to numerous specialized studies of various facets of John's reign, no less than three major biographies of that indefatigable but luckless king. The first of these, by Miss Kate Norgate, was published in 1902 and reflects the traditional viewpoint of the late nineteenth century. The second, Sidney Painter's work of 1949, stresses the monarch's relations with his baronial and administrative subordinates and presents a more genial and sophisticated interpretation of John himself. Hopes for a promised companion volume dealing with military and naval institutions and the development of the common law under John have been shattered by Painter's untimely death.

Once upon a time men who read and wrote about Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia and Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor, were convinced that he was a modern man, by which in some measure they seem to have meant their kind of man. This conviction became fully standardized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those, however, who saw him as a modern man — Lord Acton, Bishop Creighton, Principal Lindsay, Sir Sidney Lee — could not help but view More with impatience. For in their eyes he reneged on his modernity. He did not in the end stand firm for free thought, or for toleration, or for emancipation from the bondage of medieval bigotry and superstition. And although Karl Kautsky was sure that at the horizon Sir Thomas had seen the red light of the Marxist dawn, More did not even throw himself into the struggle for socialism. Instead he approved of the execution of men who were burnt at the stake because they rejected the spiritual control of the medieval church; and in the end he died a martyr for the unity which through the centuries that orthodox and persecuting Church had imposed on Europe.

In the sixteenth line of his Essay on Man Alexander Pope announced that his purpose was to “vindicate the ways of God to man.” John Milton waited until the twenty-sixth line of Paradise Lost to state that his aim was to “justify the ways of God to men.” It would be pedantic to inquire why Pope used the singular noun for the human race, Milton the plural. But it might be instructive to investigate why Milton chose to justify the ways of God, and Pope, two generations later, to vindicate them — especially since both words scan equally well. Moreover, even though Pope may have picked his verb to convey a hint of self-parody, Samuel Johnson two generations after Pope misquoted Paradise Lost when he wrote in his “Life of John Milton” that the epic's purpose was “to vindicate the ways of God to man.”

But before one proceeds down any such semantic-theological path he should be aware of two dangers. The first is the general warning that scholars who look for needles in haystacks almost always find them. The second is the specific caution that the word “justify” is a shaky foundation on which to build a case: its designations and connotations were — and still are — many-sided, and Milton may not have used it with any sense of defensiveness, even though today the word “vindicate” has a more positive, more assured ring. Yet despite these dangers, the path is inviting and the destination very possibly significant.

Mr. Frank's engaging argument is convincing up to a point. Milton was indeed a protestant of the protestants and in true protestant fashion kept pressing on in his thinking to ever more extreme conclusions which seemed to him of the very essence of rationality. Such a course pointed in one direction logically enough to the reduction of the many divagations of protestant doctrine to a religion of common sense free of dilemmas and miracles. But such a conclusion would seem more natural to minds seeking a repose that ever is the same from the uncharted liberties taken by protestant revolutionaries than to a poet whose devotion to protestant individualism was as unflagging as Milton's. Mr. Frank seems to me more convincing when he says that “perhaps the Milton who wrote Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes was more than an incipient deist, that he was what can be called a total Protestant.” But before one can say whether or to what degree Milton was even an incipient deist, surely one must consider what it amounted to in his case to be a “total” protestant, for not all total protestants turned out to be deists. In considering that question, since it was by way of their Pauline-Augustinian-Calvinistic theology that English protestants, not excepting Milton, arrived at their protestant ethic, it seems to me impossible to limit the term protestant as Mr. Frank suggests to its “ethical rather than theological signification.”

Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, like most other Restoration politicians, has suffered from a bad press. He has always been spoken of slightingly by what J. P. Kenyon calls the “bed-spring and chamber-pot” school of Restoration historians; and for once the serious scholars have agreed with the romancers. David Ogg, for instance, says of Arlington, “He had the gift for making the right friends and discarding them at the right moment; but as he lacked courage, he never rose to real greatness among the bad men of Charles's Court. … Always civil and obliging, his chief talent was that of anticipating and fostering what he thought to be the secret wishes of his royal master.” Arlington's biographer, Miss Violet Barbour, says nothing quite so harsh as that, but her implied opinion is clearly not very high. Of modern historians only Keith Feiling, in his work on British foreign policy from 1660 to 1672, is at all favorable. Most of Arlington's British contemporaries took an equally critical view of him. The attacks of Burnet and Clarendon are well known. Here is what the Duke of Buckingham, Arlington's great rival in the Cabal, had to say in his poem, “Advice to a Painter To Draw my L. A-----ton, Grand Minister of State”:

First draw an arrant fop, from top to toe

Whose very looks at first dash shew him so:

Two goggle-eyes, so clear, tho' very dead,

That one may see, thro' them, quite thro' his Head.

Let every nod of his, and subtle wink

Declare the fool would talk, but cannot think.

Let him all other fools so far surpasse

That fools themselves point at him for an ass.

Whether all this denigration is entirely deserved is open to serious doubt. Foreign observers had no such low opinion of Arlington. When he became secretary of state in 1662, the Venetian resident described him as "a man of wit and ability, affable and courteous, possessing several languages, . . . and competent for his position from his knowledge of the interests of foreign princes." And nine years later another Venetian resident called him "tried and prudent."

The recent death of Professor Sir Lewis Namier (19 August 1960) provides an occasion to assess, albeit most tentatively, if not the man (I did not know him well), then at least his contribution to the writing of English history. The need for such an assessment is a little ironic, for Sir Lewis, for all his renown, has left a somewhat indistinct after-image among historians in this country. Ever since the appearance in 1929 of his great work on the Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, his name has been a fixture in bibliographies and in the knowingness of knowing graduate student and cannier undergraduate. Yet few in this country have read his work through – that is, his monumental works on eighteenth century politics on which most of the estime of his succès d'estime has been built. Many more are familiar with the lectures, reviews and critical works on modern German and diplomatic history to which he devoted much of his productive effort between 1933 and 1953. Though these last are works of some importance, the ultimate reputation of Namier as a scholar must rest on his eighteenth century work — in fact upon his publications of 1929 and 1930. It is this work and some of the methodological questions it raises which are under discussion here.

There is a “black legend” about the climate of tropical countries, that lives on in spite of the knowledge geographers, meteorologists, and specialists in tropical medicine have gained over the past half century. With all the recent publicity given to West Africa, most people in the Western world carry a half-conscious image of “The White Man's Grave”. It is usually elaborated with such elements as “primitive tribes”, burning heat, fever-laden swamps, swarming insects, and miles of trackless jungle. Above all, West Africa is thought of as a place where white men cannot work. Only Africans can work there, and Europeans “go out” for brief periods at a considerable risk to their lives. Most of this image is, of course, quite false. Maximum temperatures on the West African coast would be moderate summer heat in the American mid-West. Insects are generally less annoying than they are in the United States. The forest is by no means trackless, but the home of sedentary agricultural people who have for centuries periodically cut it down to burn a place for their farms. Neither physical capacity for work nor immunity to disease is significantly different between Europeans and Africans on racial grounds.

Still, the image was not made up from imagination alone. In its British version, it was based on facts — facts misunderstood in Africa, reported “at home”, and repeated over several generations. Both the facts and the image have a part in shaping West African relations with Great Britain, and both the facts and the image have changed through time in significant ways. The early nineteenth century represents a crucial phase in these changes. British traders had been on the Guinea coast for two centuries before 1783, but the loss of the American War and the thirteen colonies brought a new phase in Anglo-African relations.

It has often been observed that the agreement underlying British politics today extends beyond the constitution to issues of public policy. To the historic consensus on “the rules of the game” the British have added a stalemate on “the welfare state.” Common sense dictates that electoral demands have shaped the terms of political debate, so that the Conservatives, whose interests obviously are served by lower taxation and less government interference in the affairs of business, have had to bow to the pressures for collectivism built up during World War II and institutionalized by five years of rule under a Labour Government. By the same token the Labour Party has had to re-evaluate its policies of government direction and control of social and economic affairs in the face of decided satisfaction recently with the Conservative operation of the welfare machinery.

Sole emphasis on electioneering, however, can overlook simultaneous and related developments on the ideological plane. For the community this can be observed in the gradual acceptance of Keynesian economics. The fact that government action can achieve and maintain full employment helped broaden and define the area of effective policy for both parties in Britain. More important for our purposes here is the inherent collectivism of British Conservatism — its “Toryness” — which permitted its adaptation to modern welfare policy and helped build the framework for that policy in the in ter-war years. It is my contention that British Conservatism exhibits its doctrinal element through its Tory tradition and that it is this tradition of the organic society, paternalism and authority, that served to interpret the demands of Conservative interests. The Tory tradition helps explain not only the collectivist similarity of the two main parties, it also contributes to an understanding of the endurance of Conservatism.