God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [348]
Bruno Ryves’s chronicles of parliamentarian excess were sourced, but hardly unbiased; Ricraft and Wharton’s chronologies of battles selective, though not invented.
Histories pretending to impartiality rested on another common contemporary practice – of collecting. In fact May’s history was published by Moses Bell for George Thomason, the greatest collector of them all. Collecting was not necessarily more neutral an activity than chronicling. Thomason’s politics are almost invisible to us – almost but not quite.5 Other collections had a more or less directly political purpose: Husbands’s collation of parliamentary declarations in the spring of 1643, perhaps, or the army’s book of (edited) declarations four years later. They were certainly put to use, immediately. Lilburne held Parliament to account using Husbands and at Putney the agitators and radicals held the army grandees to account using their own Book of Declarations, while the Agreement of the People was in turn measured against those declarations. Each cause was defined by public statements which were collected: historicizing and fixing, offering a point of reference in a wild polemical world. Clarendon, writing against May, also collected his papers; John Rushworth, subject of suspicion in 1640 because of his command of shorthand, collated important documents in his Historical Collections (the first part was also published by Thomason); Clarke took careful notes of the meetings at Putney. Without these histories, and these collections, we would have much poorer access to the experiences of the 1640s, but all of them are flawed, and partial. Many of the authors collected by Thomason were more deliberately so.
In these conditions, of partial or even false reporting, trust was essential to claims about truth – truthfulness was a social or rhetorical quality, something performed as much as demonstrated. May favoured a plain style which found applause among a Victorian audience, although his impartiality is less credited now.6 An unvarnished style, with copious factual support, was a common writing device during the 1640s. Tales of plots, wonders, miracles and prodigies were buttressed in these ways, and by external sources of authority: credible witnesses of social status, the origin of the information in a private (and therefore more reliable) communication, or in the revelation of a private collection – cabinet or closet. Truth was at a premium, and contemporaries were creative in their approaches to claiming access to it: trust was the crucial quality, and a very difficult one to foster.
In May we hear the voice of many contemporary anxieties: about the direction of current events, measured historically, and the related difficulty of agreeing what had happened and what it meant. In his anxiety to foster trust, as a necessary preliminary to promoting belief, he shares much with our own politicians – the projection of a reliable image was crucial to the arts of political, or historical, persuasion. Much contemporary polemic focused on these questions – the persistent whispering campaign, sometimes a shouting campaign, about Charles’s untrustworthiness, scurrilous accusations about Cromwell’s private life. In Thomas May’s appeal to a truth outside the subjective view of an individual historian we can also hear the voice of modern professional history in its hubristic pomp: in its claims to be able to arrive at a definitive account. If we ever really did have confidence in the possibility of such a definitive account, we have lost it now. Ours is in some ways a less historically conscious society than May