It remains a commonplace that what historians write bears some relation to their own time and particular angle of vision. Less often remarked, however, is the tendency for historical interpretations to acquire lives of their own, at least partly independent of the original circumstances that produced them, and to enter as it were the intellectual bloodstream of subsequent generations. A good illustration of this latter proposition is afforded by the history of the English Church. For, since at least the seventeenth century, the very radicalism of the Reformation has proved a continuing source of embarrassment to a section of Church of England opinion; rather than frankly admit their own dissent from the views of many of the Tudor founding fathers, they have regularly sought to rewrite the past in the light of the present. This conservative vision has come to be expressed in terms of a so-called via media, which is deemed to have characterized the English or “Anglican” way of religious reform.

Until quite recently, the historiography was heavily influenced by these same Anglican insiders, other historians being prepared largely to take on trust their claims—especially as regards theological change. Moreover, willingness to follow what is in effect a party line has now received powerful reinforcement from certain revisionist historians, who discern a congruence between the alleged moderation of Anglicanism and their own commitment to a consensual model of English politics in the decades before the Civil War. The old idea of the English Church as epitomizing a mean between the extremes of protestantism and catholicism is once more being pressed into service.

The central argument of this article is that English political thinking in the early seventeenth century was not distinctively English. More particularly, we shall see that a number of English writers put forward political doctrines that were precisely the same as those of Continental theorists who are usually described as absolutists. If the Continental thinkers were absolutists, then so were the English writers. The theory of absolutism vested sovereign power in the ruler alone and forbade disobedience to the sovereign's commands unless they contradicted the injunctions of God Himself. It is with the theory of absolutism and not with its practice that this article is concerned.

To claim that English and Continental ideas closely resembled each other, and that absolutism flourished on both sides of the Channel, is to challenge not only the old Whig interpretation of English history but also the newer views of so-called revisionists. True, the revisionists often say that they reject Whig ideas. But in fact they adopt some of the central contentions of the Whigs. In order to set what follows into a broad historiographical context, it may be worthwhile to elaborate a little on this theme.

Whig historians of the nineteenth century were keen to emphasize the distinctiveness of England's political development. The Anglo-Saxons, they argued, brought free and democratic institutions into England from their Teutonic forests. Elsewhere in Europe, liberty succumbed to the authoritarianism of popes, kings, and Roman lawyers, but the sea kept foreigners and their unpleasant ways out of England, and there freedom lived on. When the Conqueror came, the old English liberties were for a while in jeopardy.

In an 1989 article in Irish Historical Studies, Brendan Bradshaw challenged the current practice of Irish history by arguing that an “ideology of professionalism” associated with the modern historiographical tradition established a half century ago, and now entrenched in the academy, “served to inhibit rather than to enhance the understanding of the Irish historical experience.” Inspired by the cautionary injunctions of Herbert Butterfield about teleological history, T. W. Moody, D. B. Quinn, and R. Dudley Edwards launched this revisionist enterprise in the 1930s, transforming Irish historiography which until then was subordinating historical truth to the cause of the nation. Their mission was to cleanse the historical record of its mythological clutter, to engage in what Moody called “the mental war of liberation from servitude to the myth” of Irish nationalist history, by applying scientific methods to the evidence, separating fact from destructive and divisive fictions.

Events in the 1960s and 1970s reinforced this sense that the Irish people needed liberation from nationalist mythology, a mythology held responsible for the eruption of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and which offered legitimation to the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the nightmare of history from which professional historians could rouse the Irish people. Nationalist heroes and movements came under even more aggressive, critical scrutiny. But much of this was of the character of specific studies. The revisionists seemed to have succeeded in tearing down the edifice of nationalist history, but they had offered little in the way of a general, synthetic history to replace it.

The narrative stories of nineteenth-century British history have been pulled seriously out of joint. At one time, not too long ago, the master narrative of nineteenth-century history seemed fairly straightforward. The nineteenth century raised the curtain on the modern age; its politics, economics, social relations, and culture presaged the world we know from our own times. If there was one organizing principle that the historiography privileged above all others, it was the idea of change. This was the century of growth and change—generally of a progressive kind. But new stories are now being told that force us to reconsider this picture. The spotlight is being directed toward themes of continuity that challenge the representation of the nineteenth century as the moment of modernity. It is this shift from change to continuity as the basic organizing principle of the field that is the starting point for this article.

The touch of continuity is everywhere. The traditional historiography rested secure in the conception that the nineteenth century was shaped and dominated by the fact of Britain as the first industrial nation. But current research has dissolved the Industrial Revolution into the long-term trends of economic growth; now the very name itself is jeopardized. Whereas the nineteenth century was once regarded as the age of the bourgeoisie, it is the landed elites and their various allies who now occupy center stage. The urban middle class has been returned to the provincial peripheries.