[In the essay below, Patterson argues that Holinshed's Chronicles offers a uniquely multi-vocal documentation of Elizabethan history, one which imagined a middle-class readership interested in drawing its own conclusions from the primary sources.]

More then ten Hollensheads, or Halls, or Stowes, Of triviall household trash he knowes.

—John Donne, Satire 4

Vast, vulgar Tomes … recover'd from out of innumerable Ruins.

—Edmund Bolton, Hypercritica

Voluminous Holingshead … full of confusion and commixture of unworthy relations.

—Peter Heylyn, Microcosmus

The project was large enough to absorb impure motives. So, at least, I have come to believe of the gargantuan work we continue to refer to as Holinshed's Chronicles, despite the fact that Raphael Holinshed was only one of nearly a dozen persons who contributed to the project over two decades and in two quite different editions, the first appearing in 1577, the second, expanded version of 1587 largely produced after Holinshed's death. In his grumpy old age, John Stow, one of the contributors of material for both editions, expressed his resentment at the way Holinshed's name had come to dominate it.¹ Rivalry and self-promotion were among the impure motives. What precisely pure motives would have been for a syndicate of middle-class entrepreneurs and antiquarians in the last quarter of the sixteenth century is itself a question of considerable subtlety.

The conception of a national history of Elizabethans originated with a printer, Reginald or Reyner Wolfe, originally from Strassburg, who had been patronized by both Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, and been employed as royal printer by Edward VI. By the mid-century he had imagined a great work, a universal history and cosmography, to be illustrated with maps and other images, and to that end acquired a considerable collection of documents in manuscript. Much of his own collection, in turn, was purchased by John Stow when Wolfe died in 1573. From the start, then, the intellectual making of the Chronicles was inseparable from their financing; and in the absence of public libraries or collections of records to which the scholar might have access, the purchasing power of ordinary citizens was an essential ingredient of the antiquarian process.

About Raphael Holinshed we know very little, except that he was university-educated and had taken clerical orders. Initially he was employed by Wolfe as a translator; and when Wolfe died, the financing of the project was taken over by three publishers, George Bishop and John and Luke Harrison, who employed Holinshed to finish it, with the assistance of William Harrison, who was to write the “Description of England,” and Richard Stanyhurst, who wrote the matching “Description of Ireland.” Stanyhurst also completed the history of Ireland on the basis laid down by Edmund Campion. The first edition covered the history of England up to 1572, of Ireland to 1547, and Scotland to 1571. When Holinshed himself died in 1580, the publishers' team expanded, in order to produce a new edition, to include Ralph Newberie, Henry Denham, and Thomas Woodcock, and the team of historians or antiquaries now contained John Hooker, alias Vowell, Abraham Fleming, Francis Boteville, otherwise known as Thynne, and John Stow.

The Chronicles, however, began to be devalued within a decade of the second edition's appearance. The first stage of this process is well represented by the hostile, or seemingly hostile comments (cited in my epigraphs) by early modern writers, comments which are not inconsistent with the almost universal disparagement of the Chronicles by modern historians. There has also developed a curious form of neglect of the Chronicles by scholars of sixteenth-century literature, precisely those, one would think, to whom this vast archive should be of most value. Indeed, if this exercise has any merit, it will reside not only in the disinterment of a project which, it might be said, was buried under its own weight, but in a procedural rapprochement between literary historians and historians proper in a new endeavor whose rules of procedure are being made up as we go along. That endeavor is the writing of cultural history, a mongrel species, and (as the owners of mongrels often declare) capable of producing mightily intelligent exemplars.

The reputation of “Holinshed's” Chronicles as it stands today can be quickly summarized. First, for its aphoristic clarity, stands the statement that “we care about Holinshed's Chronicles because Shakespeare read them.” The author of this dictum was Stephen Booth, distinguished Shakespearean critic and editor, in the course of introducing a special presentation volume, for the California Book Club, of some leaves of the 1587 edition of the Chronicles. This occasion led to a discussion of the bibliographical problems created by the censorship to which the 1587 edition of the work was subjected.² But Booth was explicitly uninterested in the motives for that censorship, or in the Chronicles themselves, other than as ancillary to Shakespeare studies, the raw material on which genius drew. This premise, in existence long before Stephen Booth declared it in so naked a form in 1968, ensured that attention to the Chronicles was concentrated only on those sections Shakespeare used as sources; its products are those excerpts of the Lancastrian history found at the back of the Arden editions of Shakespeare, which for many students constitute “Holinshed” forever, and even a volume of such excerpts published as Shakespeare's Holinshed, which for many libraries represents their only “edition.” Such overemphasis on the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century sections diverts us from precisely those materials that could broaden our cultural perspective on Elizabethan drama—the accounts of sixteenth-century events and persons—and it also created a formal and ontological distinction between literature and history as kinds of writing, objects of inquiry, that we are currently learning to abandon.

Two other attitudes about the Chronicles are likely to be shared by literary scholars and historians. These, however, contradict each other on an issue fundamental to the philosophy of history—whether or not grands récits, grand narratives, are necessary, desirable, or possible. By one view, the Chronicles were an insignificant historiographical achievement because they failed to produce a grand narrative. Thus F. J. Levy's Tudor Historical Thought, published in 1967, disapproved of the Chronicles, appearing in 1577 and 1587 respectively, as baggy and undisciplined, erratic in their coverage, overzealous in their inclusion of the full texts of primary documents, and lacking the analytical and structural skills of the continental historians. As Levy put it of the Tudor chronicles in general:

There was [then] no conception of history writing as selective: a historian did not remake the past in his own image or in any other but instead reported the events of the past in the order in which they occurred. The criterion by which a historian was judged was the quantity of information he managed to cram between the covers of his book; if the matter of quality arose at all, it was relevant to accuracy. Once facts could be established as equal in authenticity, they were assumed to be equal in all other ways as well.³

What for Levy was true of the Tudor chroniclers as a group was especially true of “Holinshed's” Chronicles, which were baggier still than their predecessors:

Holinshed had to the full the collecting instinct of the humanist historians—principally Polydore—but he lacked their scepticism. For him all sources were equal in value. … [He] demonstrated most fully the idea that history could be written by agglomeration. … All the old legends were included; sometimes Holinshed expressed a doubt, but he never made an attempt to resolve it. In any case, many of the doubts were Polydore's, and Holinshed followed his master in allowing the reader to make the final decision. … The result of this accumulation was that there was virtually no attempt to find the cause of events: without saying so, Holinshed leaves us with the impression that establishing causality is also the task of the reader. In a way, this made him the ideal source for the playwrights; everything needful (and a great deal more) was included, but the “construction,” the ordering of events, was left to others.⁴

In the italicized sentence, the historian's disapproval of the Chronicles as genuine history renders them, in a mirror image of Stephen Booth's assessment, useful only for literary purposes. In a more recent unpublished paper Levy still sees Holinshed's Chronicles as the product of a transition between providential history and the new, humanist methods, which results in incoherence.⁵ Holinshed was “plagued with discordant, almost irreconcilable authorities,” an excess of source material, and, it is implied, a level of interpretive indecision that “came close to abdicating [moral] responsibility altogether.” “This was to leave the reader to be his own historian.” Abraham Fleming, the source of the most evident moralizations added in 1587, “exacerbated the situation, for he insisted on the importance of understanding the whole picture while simultaneously blurring its outlines.” “Thus,” Levy concluded, “the book which goes by the name of Holinshed—and especially its 1587 edition—may be seen as a palimpsest, with each layer written over the incomplete erasure of the one below.” And he cites in support of this position both Peter Heylyn's and Edmund Bolton's later assessments: Heylyn's “voluminous Holingshead, full of confusion, and commixture of unworthy relations”; and Bolton's more generalized critique of the Tudor chronicles: “Vast, vulgar Tomes … [which] seem to resemble some huge disproportionable Temple … in which store of rich Marble, and many most goodly Statues, Columns, Arks, and antique Pieces, recover'd from out of innumerable Ruins, are here and there in greater Number than commendable order erected.” What Levy did not emphasize was the class bias that inhered, none too subtly, in Bolton's negative judgment. Following a lament that they had been initiated by commercial printers, rather than by royal commission, Bolton had cited with approval Sir Henry Savile's epistle dedicating his own translation of Tacitus to Elizabeth. “Our Historians (saith the Knight) being of the Dregs of the Common People, while they have endeavourd to adorn the Majesty of so great a Work, have stain'd and defiled it with most fusty foolerys.”⁶

It is an odd fact of intellectual history that new paradigms can sometimes be created by inversion rituals: not by discarding the views of the previous generation, but by retaining the insights and reversing the conclusions. There are strong signs throughout the Chronicles that what has been seen as incompetence was a deliberate policy, the consequence of holding a different set of historiographical principles than those that Levy assumes. Rather than being the author of a horrendous muddle, Holinshed initiated a procedure whereby, as Levy put it, “the reader was left to be his own historian,” not because the historian had abrogated his interpretive task, but because he wished to register how extraordinarily complicated, even dangerous, life had become in post-Reformation England, when every change of regime initiated a change in the official religion, and hence in the meaning and value of acts and allegiances. What at one moment was loyalty, obedience, and piety, could at the next be redefined as treason or heresy.

Consequently, Holinshed believed, and so set the tone for his collaborators and successors, in a humbler historiographical mission than that implied by Levy's standard of remaking the past in one's own image. These, I suggest, were its alternative principles:

• (1) One of the functions of a national history was to discover, salvage, and preserve in print ephemeral, manuscript, or otherwise endangered records; that is to say, the Chronicles were conceived from the start as “documentary history,” as much a part of the national archive as the enrolled statutes stored in the Tower of London.
• (2) Given the nature of post-Reformation experience, which set Protestants and Catholics against each other in changing patterns of domination and repression, a national history should not and could not be univocal, but must shoulder the responsibility of representing diversity of opinion. Wherever possible, moreover, diversity should be expressed as multivocality, with the Chronicles recording verbatim what they found in earlier historians or contemporary witnesses. A corollary of this principle was that although the individual chroniclers might hold and express strong opinions of their own, especially on religion, the effect of the work as a whole would be of incoherence, here used as a positive term. The term that the Chronicles used to express this principle was “indifferency.”
• (3) The third principle answers directly, and also reverses, the class bias of Edmund Bolton's attack on the “vast, vulgar Tomes” of the Chronicles. For not only were they produced by middle-class citizens self-consciously acting as such, but they registered, as part of the drive toward completeness and multivocality, a much greater interest than we have supposed in the voices and views of the groups below them, the common people, the artisanal and laboring classes. We might call this the anthropological level of the Chronicles, and it is invaluable in providing otherwise scarce data about subliterate and semiliterate culture in early modern England.
• (4) And the last principle, in combination and extension of the other three, it would not, I believe, be anachronistic to call “the right to know.” The chroniclers were extremely interested in what we now call rights theory, specifically in constitutional and legal rights, and in some abstract conception of justice; and included in this theory were the conjoined rights of writing and reading, which in the late sixteenth century were unduly constrained. The chroniclers had, as they constantly testify, good reason to believe that what they were doing teetered on the edge of the illegal—that the general restrictions on public expression had particular relevance to English historiography. That they chose to test the limits of the allowable in this arena of Elizabethan policy by carrying the second edition up to the minute, relating current events almost as they happened, and that the 1587 edition was consequently called in by the Privy Council and “castrated” before being released again to the booksellers, are both proofs of the brinksmanship they managed and of its motives—to make available to the reading public enough of the complex texture of the national history that the middle-class reader could indeed become his own historian—that is to say, a thoughtful, critical, and wary individual.

It follows from this last principle that the other, incompatible reason for derogating the Chronicles as a historiographical achievement should not be inverted, but can simply be discarded, or at least so heavily qualified as to be no longer recognizable. This is the assumption that the Chronicles succumbed to a grand récit so powerful as to ignore the evidence of historical events themselves. I refer to the belief that the Tudor chronicles were primitive in relation not only to the continental historians but also by comparison with the new school of antiquaries, in that they were bound to an ancient didacticism that distorted everything. Whether they called it “moral” as distinct from “political” history, or Ciceronian as distinct from Machiavellian/Tacitean history, or, more commonly, providentialism, those who have described the achievements of the Tudor chroniclers have consistently assumed that they could not see beyond the simplest of dichotomies: good and bad, obedience and disobedience. For (and here is another inconsistency) at the same time as their bondage to an absolute concept of value is asserted, it is claimed that they served a secular authority, that they worked, though within a moralizing and providentialist theory of history, to legitimate a particular dynasty. These ideas emanated from E. M. W. Tillyard, whose emphasis on providentialism in the Tudor chronicles was itself formulated in relation to Shakespeare's history plays,⁷ and therefore constrained by the values later epitomized by Stephen Booth; and it was also (since the first edition appeared in 1944) produced in the context of the Second World War, when a providentialist view of national destiny was particularly acceptable.

So entrenched have these ideas become, however, that they are repeated in the introductory chapters of D. R. Woolf's new book on historical thought in seventeenth-century England, as the ancient models against which his more modern practitioners can be appreciated. Woolf begins with the following premises:

Put simply, history in sixteenth-century England, particularly after the advent of a protestant metaphysics through such reformers as Melanchthon, was not in the realm of the contingent or the irrational. …

The Elizabethans and their early Stuart successors took it for granted that the sins of the wicked were punished on earth as they were in heaven. Providence, even more than pagan fortune, was the instrument of God, by which his will was done. Holinshed had described the fall of the house of York as the product of divine revenge on its bloodshed in the Wars of the Roses.

… [T]heir view of history, like Aristotle's view of nature, was teleological, since it ascribed motion and change to a final cause; and they wrote history accordingly, from its outcome back to its beginning. Edward Hall entitled his chronicle The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke because the union itself, the restoration of order, was the focal event, the natural point towards which the conflicts of the fifteenth century progressed. … For the Tudor historian and playwright alike, Henry VII's victory and the Tudor dynasty appeared as inevitable as the coming of spring after a harsh winter.⁸

In fact, even Hall's Union habitually reports facts incapable of absorption by such an ideology; and even the Dictionary of National Biography, scarcely the product of suspicious readers, hypothesized that Hall left the work unfinished because he found “the office of royal panegyrist beset with difficulties and dangers.”

But the charge that Holinshed and his colleagues were engaged in legitimation of the house of Tudor is even more in need of rebuttal. This is not to deny that there is a fair amount of editorial comment in the Chronicles, and that in some places, especially when Abraham Fleming was acting as editor-commentator, there is a heavy-handed emphasis on morality and political obedience. It is not necessary to conclude from this, however, that the project followed the ruling monarch's personal agenda, a goal achieved by Polydore Vergil and uncomfortably attempted by Hall. Even if we acknowledge that by the last quarter of the sixteenth century such a program would have become more complex—to legitimate the institutions and practices, both secular and ecclesiastical, of the Elizabethan state—the complexity of the task cannot alone account for the unevenness of tone, attitude, and opinion that the Chronicles, if read with different assumptions, now seem to register. Nor can it be demonstrated that those who produced it were in any sense servants of the crown.

What ought we to know about the members of this “syndicate” that might contribute to our understanding of their intentions, jointly and separately? First we might raise the question of their class. If we think back to the disapproval of Sir Henry Savile, repeated by Edmund Bolton, it is clear that, of the main living contributors, only Stow could conceivably have deserved the charge of being of “the Dregs of the common People.” Holinshed himself appears to have studied at Cambridge in the mid-1550s, and according to Anthony à Wood took orders. Stanyhurst was the son of James Stanyhurst, recorder of the city of Dublin and speaker of the Irish House of Commons from 1557 to 1568. Richard himself graduated from University College, Oxford, and studied law at two of the Inns of Court. Hooker had been educated at Oxford and may also have taken a degree in law. He sat as a member of the Irish parliament of 1568-69, of which he included an extremely self-serving account in the Chronicles; and he subsequently sat for Exeter in the English parliament of 1572. Francis Thynne was the son of the famous editor of Chaucer, and a friend of Sir Thomas Egerton. He became an active member of the Society of Antiquaries formed by Archbishop Parker, and managed, apparently thanks to Burghley, to become the Lancaster herald. Abraham Fleming was university-educated and became chaplain to the countess of Nottingham. William Harrison graduated from Oxford and became chaplain to William Brooke, Lord Cobham; John Stow, who liked to be known as “Citizen,” began as apprentice to a tailor, but he was clearly a formidable autodidact and, like Thynne, became a member of the Society of Antiquaries. We will need to look elsewhere than at the actual status of these men to account for the social stigma later attached to the Chronicles.

Second, the several dedications of parts of the work to different members of the Elizabethan government may itself be a signal of disunity in high places. Holinshed dedicated the first edition of the Chronicles to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, but in language that argues against an actual commission, or even patronage from the start.⁹ William Harrison dedicated his “Description of England” to William Brooke, Lord Cobham, who certainly was his patron; but Cobham was the inveterate enemy of Robert Devereux, earl of Leicester, to whom Holinshed dedicated the “History of Scotland.” Leicester and Burghley were themselves leaders of opposing factions in Elizabeth's court and council. Richard Stanyhurst dedicated his part of the “History of Ireland” to Sir Henry Sidney, Elizabeth's lord deputy in Ireland; but by the time the second edition of the Chronicles appeared Sidney had been recalled in some disfavor, which may help to explain why the eulogistic biography of him that had been included in the Chronicles was radically truncated during the 1587 censorship.

This leads to a third point, that the publication of both editions of the Chronicles suggests, if not scofflawry, at least a degree of circumvention of the regulations. The first edition was not registered with the Stationers' Company until after it was fully printed (the register entry is for 1 July 1578, whereas all copies bear the 1577 date). In his late complaint about unfair competition, John Stow complained that his own magnum opus was “prevented, by Printing and reprinting (without warrant, or well liking) of Raigne Wolfes collection.” Though this interested remark should not bear much weight, it should perhaps bear a little. There is at least one indication that the authorities in 1577 did not anticipate the appearance of this kind of chronicle. On 5 December 1577, two letters were written by the Privy Council in response to rumors they had heard. The first was to John Aylmer, bishop of London, telling him that a history of Ireland by “one Stanhurste” had recently been published, in which certain events were falsely recorded contrary to the ancient records of that realm. The bishop was ordered to summon the printer, for whose name a space was left in the record, and to discover how many of the histories had been printed, how many were sold in Ireland and how many remained unsold. He was further to order the printer to refrain from printing or selling any more copies. The second letter was to Gerald Fitzgerald, eleventh earl of Kildare, ordering him to send them “his servant” Stanyhurst, who would then learn their pleasure. We do not know the results of either of these interviews; and Anne Castanien finds no evidence that the first edition of the Chronicles, specifically the Irish history that Stanyhurst grafted upon Campion's work, was in fact subjected to official censorship.¹⁰ Nevertheless, the threatening tone implied by this correspondence is incompatible with the notion of an official national history appearing with the blessing of the authorities. As for the second edition, publication had been planned since 1584, when it was twice entered in the Stationers' Register, on 6 October and 30 December. It is evident, though, that the revision kept being expanded to give it up-to-the-minute topicality; and it was precisely the most recent materials that should have been reviewed before a license was granted.¹¹

There are other reasons for guessing that the chroniclers had reasons, as a group, to accept the principle of latitudinarianism. While Harrison and Fleming were ardent Protestants, Stanyhurst was as ardently a Catholic. Shortly before 28 August 1580, his house was searched for unspecified papers. Castanien discovered that on 26 November 1580 Stanyhurst was examined about a purported plot for conveying Gerald Fitzgerald, Lord Offaley, into Spain at the instigation of a Catholic priest.¹² His later history confirmed these suspicions. It was probably just after his November 1577 examination by the Privy Council that Stanyhurst left England for the continent, converted explicitly to Catholicism, and conspired with Catholic exiles in Flanders against Elizabeth's government. In 1568 John Stow, too, had been examined by the Privy Council on the charge of possessing Roman Catholic propaganda against Elizabeth; and in February 1569 a search of his house revealed “old fantastical books” with papist tendencies, and “a great Parcel of old M.S. Chronicles, both in Parchment and Paper.”¹³ It is much to the point that the list of “unlawful” books that was given to Archbishop Grindal included four chronicles. From his own independent historiographical projects, as well as from the character of some of the manuscripts he collected (though he must have kept them more carefully thereafter) it can be inferred that Stow was particularly interested in political protest and resistance. In the preface to his Abridgement (1570), and as an aspect of their rivalry as producers of condensed chronicles for wider audiences, Richard Grafton had complained that Stow's Summarie had contributed “to the defacing of Princes doinges,” and that in his historiography “the gates are rather opened for crooked subjects to enter into the fielde of Rebellion, then the hedges or gaps of the same stopped.”¹⁴

Finally, it may help to lay to rest the notion of the Chronicles as a tool of hegemony, as well as to define further the principles of multivocality, indifference, and the right to know, if I cite some of the chroniclers' own manifestos. Since I have already mentioned Stanyhurst, let us start with his 1577 dedication to Sir Henry Sidney. “How cumbersome … and dangerous a taske it is,” Stanyhurst began,

to ingrosse and divulge the dooings of others, especiallie when the parties registered or their issue are living: … if the historian be long, he is accompted a trifler: if he be short, he is taken for a summister: if he commend, he is twighted for a flatterer: if he reproove, he is holden for a carper: if he be pleasant, he is noted for a jester.¹⁵

We can recognize in the assumption that “if the historian be long, he is accompted a trifler” Stanyhurst's anticipation of the hostile evaluations I cited at the opening of this essay. Such standards, always expressed negatively, and impossible to reconcile, have in Stanyhurst's view created two types of historian, those who “taking the waie to be thornie … would in no case be medlers, choosing rather to sit by their owne fire obscurelie at home,” and others who, “being resolute fellowes … rush through the pikes.” Between these two extremes Stanyhurst claims to have chosen the middle path of proper caution. But, he adds:

[A]s for the passing over in silence of diverse events (albeit the law or rather the libertie of an historie requireth that all should be related, and nothing whusted) yet I must confesse, that as I was not able, upon so little leasure, to know all that was said or doone; so I was not willing for sundrie respects, to write everie trim tram that I knew to be said or doone.

This passage is particularly telling in its self-correction: the law “or rather the libertie” of historiography requires that everything be told, and nothing concealed; since the self-correction recognizes a conflict between law and individual liberty that the writing of history invariably brought to consciousness.

And Stanyhurst inserted into this otherwise ceremonial statement an anecdote which is typical of the project as a whole, in its comic, irreverent tone, its story of master-servant relations: for in exemplifying what he means by an inability to tell the whole story of Ireland during the reign of Henry VIII, Stanyhurst wrote:

And if anie be overthwartlie waiwarded, as he will sooner long for that I have omitted, than he will be contented with that I have chronicled; I cannot devise in my judgement a better waie to satisfie his appetite, than with one Dolie, a peintor of Oxford, his answer: who being appointed to tricke out the ten commandements omitted one, and pourtraied but nine. Which fault espied by his maister that hired him, Dolie answered, that in verie deed he painted but nine: howbeit, when he understood that his master had well observed and kept the nine commandments that alreadie were drawne, he gave his word at better leisure throughlie to finish the tenth.

This cheeky “answer” was not, evidently, aimed at Sir Henry Sidney, whose grasp of the chronicler's predicament is not in question, and who figures throughout the Chronicles as one of its exemplary figures. Because even with proper caution Stanyhurst anticipates that “misconstruction” of it may be “perilous,” he commits his work to Sidney's patronage, hoping “to be sheelded against the sinister glosing of malicious interpretors.”

My second exhibit is a quotation at second hand: that is to say, a statement about the historian's predicament that occurs in Giraldus Cambrensis's Expugnatio Hibernica, as translated by John Hooker for the 1587 edition. The Expugnatio, which Giraldus wrote as chaplain to Henry II, presented to Henry in 1188, and twice presented to King John, once when he was still only duke of Poiters, and again upon his accession in 1199, was in certain obvious ways the work of a king's servant. It is all the more interesting, therefore, to see what Giraldus had to say about his task as royal historian. Like Stanyhurst, but at the opposite end of the rhetorical and social scale, Giraldus had taken up the metaphor of history as painting, and promised to deliver a “lively portraiture” of the first conqueror of Ireland:

For he being so noble an ornament to this time and our historie; we might not well, neither dooth this historie permit us to omit and passe him over in silence. Wherein we are to crave pardon that we may plainelie declare and tell the truth: for in all histories the perfect and full truth is to be alwaies opened, and without it the same wanteth both authoritie and credit: for art must follow nature. And the painter therfore, whose profession and art is to make his protraiture [sic] as livelie as may be, if he swarve from the same, then both he and his worke lack and want their commendation.

If Giraldus had stopped there, we would be contemplating an orthodox preamble to a eulogy. In fact, Giraldus continues to discuss the problem of realist representation in a tone that anticipates Stanyhurst's stress on danger:

And therefore, as things spoken in commendation either of a mans good disposition, or of his worthie dooings, doo delight and like well the hearer: even so let him not be offended, if things not to be well liked be also recited and written. And yet the philosophers are of the opinion, that we ought to reverence so the higher powers in all maner of offices and dueties, as that we should not provoke nor moove them with anie sharpe speeches or disordered languages. … Wherfore it is a dangerous thing to speake evill against him, though the occasion be never so just, as who can forthwith avenge the same. And it is a matter more dangerous, and he adventureth himself verie far, which will contend in manie words against him, who in one or few words can wreake the same. It were surelie a verie happie thing, and that which I confess passeth my reach, if a man intreating of princes causes might tell the truth in everie thing, and yet not offend them in anie thing.

(6:175-76)

The brief biography that follows reproaches the now-dead Henry as lacking in religious devotion, a great promise-breaker, and as hostile to his grown children as if he were a father-in-law! It is impossible to tell what John Hooker was thinking as he translated these twelfth-century meditations on balanced and complete reporting; but that he did include them was, in its own way, a small contribution to the “indifferency” of the Chronicles.

But to complete this exercise, we should hear from Raphael Holinshed himself, in his “Preface to the Reader.” To this audience, the work was clearly not presented as a state history, but rather as a project of civic consciousness. Holinshed began, significantly by comparison with Stanyhurst and Giraldus via Hooker, as follows: “It is dangerous (gentle reader) to range in so large a field as I have here undertaken, while so manie sundrie men in divers things may be able to controll me. …” The purpose of the project is described in conventional didactic terms: “[T]he incouragement of … woorthie countriemen, by elders advancements; and the daunting of the vicious, by soure penall examples, to which end (as I take it) chronicles and histories ought cheefelie to be written.” But the method selected (and here Holinshed would have acknowledged Levy's description of himself) is implicitly at odds with didacticism, which requires from the historian the certainty that leads, if not to a grand narrative, at least to a tidy one:

I have collected [the history] out of manie and sundrie authors, in whom what contrarietie, negligence, and rashnesse sometime is found in their reports; I leave to the discretion of those that have perused their works: for my part, I have in things doubtful rather chosen to shew the diversitie of their writings, than by over-ruling them, and using a peremptorie censure, to frame them to agree to my liking: leaving it neverthelesse to each mans judgement, to controll them as he seeth cause.

If, as I have suggested, we take this statement seriously as a defense of a hands-off historiography designed to encourage independent judgment in the reader, Holinshed's Chronicles can be reconceived, not as the successor to Hall's Union, but rather as a counterstatement: the evidence of diversity that historical inquiry discovers must not give way to the principles of unity and order.

There must be a connection between the emphasis, in all three of the procedural statements I have cited, on danger, and Holinshed's insistence on his right to withhold judgment and encourage freedom of opinion in others. Although I was not unjust to D. R. Woolf in using him (like Levy) as a representative target, I was less generous to him than he to me: for there is a later paragraph in The Idea of History that considerably qualifies those opening premises, and does so in the light of my own theory of the hermeneutics of censorship.¹⁶ For, Woolf wrote:

… there existed by 1600 an identifiable “corridor” or safe zone of correct opinion about the past, which was flexible enough to allow for some deviation and nuance, a corridor policed partly by external authorities such as church and crown but mainly by historians themselves, through a process which looks very much like a collective version of that self-censorship ascribed … to poets and dramatists. … Early modern authors were able to protect themselves, at the same time that they presented gentle criticism of the regimes within which they wrote, by hiding political and moral messages between the lines of their texts, forcing the reader to tease out the meaning for himself. … Within limits generally accepted both by authors and by authority (which could, however, expand or shrink according to events), a certain amount of criticism or dissent could be tolerated without invoking punishment.¹⁷

I would now want to take this earlier position of mine in a different direction: to argue that Raphael Holinshed and his colleagues, as a group and over a decade, had evolved a larger and stronger notion than that of the safe corridor policed by self-censorship. That notion was philosophical in the sense that it went beyond specific criticisms to the idea of an open society in which dissent must be spoken, in the different voices recorded throughout the Chronicles, and not least as it was represented by the individual differences of opinion and belief among the chroniclers themselves.

For Holinshed, “indifferency” included religious toleration—up to a point. One of the last statements that he wrote for the 1577 edition is a meditation on the threat to Christianity posed by the Turks.

It were therefore to be wished of all those that tender the suertie of the christian commonwealth, that princes would permit their subjects to live in libertie of conscience, concerning matters of faith: and that subjects againe would be readie in dutifull wise, to obeie their princes in matters of civill government, so that compounding their controversies among themselves, with tollerable conditions, they might emploie their forces against the common enemy.

But, Holinshed adds, in terms directly pertinent to his own writerly endeavors, “for matters in variance about religion, rather to decide the same with the word, than with the sword, an instrument full unfit for that purpose” (4:264).

And crucial to the project as I am redefining it was the construction and education of a new kind of readership (already implied in the addresses to the reader cited above); a readership that would itself be composed of literate individuals spanning a fairly wide cross-section of socioeconomic groups, but predominantly, like the members of the “syndicate” themselves, middle-class citizens. Both the originality and the importance of this task, as well as of the historiographical ideals this newly constructed reader would have to absorb from this autodidactic process, may, paradoxically, be better understood if I here invoke two theoretical models articulated in and for our own culture, models which, when combined in ways that their authors never intended, may nevertheless be of use in establishing credibility for my claims.

The first of these is John Rawls, whose Theory of Justice, by which he really meant fairness or social justice, stirred the intellectual waters when it appeared in 1971, but subsequently acquired the somewhat inert status of a classic. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the 1990s, when post-Cold War societies must realign themselves both internally and externally, and the economy and the environment require new negotiations between short-term self-interest and long-term survival, Rawls's thought, especially in the later essays designed to clarify and defend the theory of justice, may once again appear therapeutic. In terms of my own project, itself in part a response to the diminished prestige and practice of liberalism in Anglo-American academic circles and beyond, Rawls has a particular appeal. Rawls is a liberal with a sense of history, and to sanction his convictions looks back to early modern England. With his memory fixed on the religious struggles of that era, Rawls explains where liberalism came from, that is to say, from the extended experience of illiberalism:

There are periods, sometimes long periods, in the history of any society during which certain fundamental questions give rise to sharp and divisive political controversy, and it seems difficult, if not impossible, to find any shared basis of political agreement. Indeed, certain questions may prove intractable and may never be fully settled. One task of political philosophy in a democratic society is to focus on such questions and to examine whether some underlying basis of agreement can be uncovered and a mutually acceptable way of resolving these questions publicly established. Or if these questions cannot be fully settled, as may well be the case, perhaps the divergence of opinion can be narrowed sufficiently so that political cooperation on a basis of mutual respect can still be maintained.¹⁸

The “essential point,” he says, is this: that “as a practical matter no general moral conception [or single, overarching theory] can provide a publicly recognized basis for a conception of justice in a modern democratic state.” This is because “the social and historical conditions of such a state have their origins in the Wars of Religion following the Reformation and the subsequent development of the principle of toleration, and in the growth of constitutional government.” Actually, Rawls might have written “the consequent development of the principle of toleration,” since he was here expressing, if rather tersely, the insight that people learn to reason toward rights like liberty of conscience by negative experience of enforced religious conformity. Given these genetic conditions, Rawls concludes, reasonable people with historical perspective will recognize, deep down, that “a workable conception of political justice … must allow for a diversity of doctrines and the plurality of conflicting, and indeed incommensurable, conceptions of the good.”¹⁹

It is likely, Rawls continues, “that the most that can be done is to narrow the range of public disagreement” by recourse to what he calls “intuitive ideas” of fair play. Intuitive ideas, themselves subject to historical change, are what societies may, if one digs deeply enough, be found to share, and which can form the raw material of an accommodation. This system is actually more a pragmatics than a political philosophy. Indeed, it is a philosophical statement that philosophy must resign its own claims to universal truth in the interests of social function. “Thus,” Rawls continues, “justice as fairness seeks to identify the kernel of an overlapping consensus, that is, the shared intuitive ideas which when worked up into a political conception of justice turn out to be sufficient to underwrite a just constitutional regime. This is the most we can expect, nor do we need more.”²⁰ The principle of just enough agreement to get the show back on the road is the only principle we need.

For all the instructive appeal of Rawls's theory of justice as fairness, it remains unclear how we would move it out of the enclosure of political philosophy. For this we can turn to another solitary defense in our own time of the rationalist tradition: Jürgen Habermas's ideal of communicative reason, which he conceived of as operating in a special territory halfway between the mind and the world. This territory Habermas designated bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit. This concept has recently been criticized by Robert Darnton as an overidealistic notion that posits a world of “unconstrained, rational debate among equals at a level above the common people and below the ruling elite,” a world, he maintained, that never existed in early modern Europe.²¹ In part his objection seems to have been to a misconception arising out of the translation of Habermas's term into French (“l'espace public”), which placed too much emphasis on actual physical locations where such unconstrained debate might be supposed to have taken place; and a different objection might be raised against one of its English renderings, as “the bourgeois public sphere.” If, for example, Öffentlichkeit were translated more literally as “openness,” space would return to the level of metaphor; and by the same token, bürgerliche might best be rendered by “citizen” or “civic,” thereby avoiding the ideological burdens that the term “bourgeois” has come to bear. Civic openness, moreover, is nothing but a concept, which may or may not be realized in practice by the institutions of a society whose members can nevertheless conceive of it.

Habermas seems to have recognized some of these problems in his later expression of the idea, which occurs in the climactic essay of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, published in 1985 and translated into English in 1987. Here Öffentlichkeit is translated “autonomous public spheres,” and carefully defined so as to avoid the charge of reification. By “autonomous public spheres” Habermas means the media of public communication, along with voluntary organizations or institutions “which are neither bred nor kept by a political system for purposes of creating legitimation”; rather they are sites where the “common consciousness” society has of itself “can be concentrated and more clearly articulated around specific themes and ordered contributions.” The emphasis on “specific themes and ordered contributions” shows that his definition applies to such organizations as have primarily an intellectual or thinking objective, as distinct from those formed merely for professional, recreational, or financial advantage. Autonomous public spheres work, Habermas claims, in two directions; the one internal, a kind of gathering and strengthening process for the opinions of their members, a process which Habermas elsewhere calls, more strikingly, “radical democratic will formation”; and externally, by way of bringing influence to bear on the seemingly immune, self-regulating, and self-sufficient systems of power and money, or government and the economy.²²

Although Habermas writes evidently of the modern or postmodern world, there is nothing to prevent our applying this concept to the early modern environment of the Chronicles. Indeed, one of his own complaints is that contemporary social thought and political philosophy have lost all sense of historical perspective by forgetting their origins in early modern Europe. For in the endless laments about alienation and other diseases of modernity, “the high price earlier exacted from the mass of the population (in the dimensions of bodily labor, material conditions, possibilities of individual choice, security of law and punishment, political participation, and schooling) is barely even noticed.”²³ As Rawls insists on the shaping force of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British history on the deep structure of American political thought, with its intuitive commitment to freedom of speech, Habermas posits an unconscious conspiracy among the European avant-garde to prevent that mnemonic activity from taking place; or, to put it differently, he complains that the contemporary intellectual's own freedom of critique was paid for at a very high price by early modern citizens, whose conditions of existence are either not remembered at all, or subjected to an uninformed, ahistorical nostalgia.

I propose that the principles outlined in the late twentieth century by these two very different believers in rational conflict resolution were also the principles expressed by Raphael Holinshed and his successors. There seems no doubt that they came to these principles by way of meditation on the effects of the Reformation in England, effects which had the most widespread consequences for everyday life and social consciousness. The shared intuitive ideas that Holinshed and his colleagues developed in response to these conditions certainly included justice-as-fairness in the following spheres: some degree of constitutional government; some degree of economic justice; and some degree of protection for the individual citizen from arbitrary or excessive coercion, especially in the arena of religion. And, I suggest, it was precisely this civic aspect of the Chronicles, which happened to be conceived and executed by an alliance of middle-class entrepreneurs, bookmen and bookish persons, reform-minded clergymen and, in the case of Hooker, parliamentarians, that disturbed Sir Henry Savile and others like him.

And if there were no physical spaces that were, by their very nature, democratic and egalitarian in late Elizabethan England, where in the 1570s educational seminars on scriptural exegesis were banned just because they were public and well-attended, it is possible, for that very reason, to turn Darnton's argument, as well as F. J. Levy's, upside down. Precisely because of these inhibitions, we can imagine that civic-minded people (though they might have disagreed on many other matters) could have agreed to construct a textual space—the huge space of the Chronicles—in which the public's right to information could to some extent be satisfied. On that penultimate phrase, “to some extent,” everything of course turns; and the extensive though extraordinarily obtuse censorship of the 1587 edition either proves my point or renders it invalid.

Notes

1. John Stow, The Annales of England … untill This Present Yeare 1605 (London, 1605), 1438: “To the reader” Stow speaks of

   a farre larger Volume (long since by me laboured, at the request and commandment of the reverend Father Matthew Parker Archbishop of Canterbury) but he then deceasing, my worke was prevented, by Printing & reprinting (without warrant, or well liking) of Raigne Wolfes collection, and other late commers, by the name of Raphael Hollinshead his Chronicles.

2. Stephen Booth, The Book Called Holinshed's Chronicles (San Francisco, 1968), 72.

3. See F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967), 168. I wish, however, to express my personal gratitude to Levy, who has generously admitted that, at least in this one area, his pioneering study, to date our definitive account of sixteenth-century historiography, might be due for revision.

4. Ibid., 183-84; emphasis mine.

5. F. J. Levy, “Holinshed in Context” (Paper delivered at the MLA Convention, December 1968; emphasis mine). I am grateful for having been able to see this paper, and push against it.

6. Edmund Bolton, Hypercritica; or A Rule of Judgment, for Writing, or Reading Our Historys (Oxford, 1722); repr. in Ancient Critical Essays, ed. Joseph Hazlewood (London, 1815), 2:237. In Saville's Latin the insults are even worse: for “the Dregs of the common People,” read “ex faece plebis.”

7. See E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London, 1944).

8. D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto, 1990), 6, 8-10.

9. Holinshed shaped his dedication to Burghley to explain how he was first induced to undertake so huge a project, “although the cause that moved me thereto hath (in part) yer this beene signified unto your good Lordship,” which indicates that Burghley has not commissioned the project.

10. Acts of the Privy Council, ed. J. R. Dasent (London, 1901), 10:114-15. See Anne Castanien, “Censorship and Historiography in Elizabethan England: The Expurgation of Holinshed's ‘Chronicles’” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 1971), 91. Castanien lays to rest a misinterpretation of some canceled leaves in the Irish history that derived from Sir Sidney Lee's article in the Dictionary of National Biography. She accounts for them by way of the confusion that occurred when Stanyhurst took over this section of the work from Holinshed, and argues that the toning down of some unsavory gossip does not indicate official censorship (see 89-126). She concedes, however, that perhaps “interest in some other problem connected with Irish administration led the Council to halt publication and sale of this history in Ireland until the motives behind it could be investigated. … At this time, the English were in conflict with the Anglo-Irish over the imposition and collection of cess … [and] Kildare was in London to present the Anglo-Irish view of this matter to the Council” (122-23). Castanien thinks it “remotely possible” that the Irish history could have been sold as a separate work (see 93 n. 12). It bore a title page of its own, and its separate index followed the text immediately.

11. At the end of his continuation of the Scottish history, Francis Thynne complained: “I protest to thee that both the histories of England and Scotland were halfe printed before I set pen to paper to enter into the augmentation or continuation of anie of them, as by the inserting of those things which I have doone maie well appeare” (5:756). This suggests that there was a radical change of plan for the second edition, perhaps developed after the 1584 license was granted.

12. Castanien, 92 n. 11. See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic (1547-80), 689.

13. See Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (New Haven, 1969), 2:312, where it is recorded that on 24 February 1569 the Bishop of London sent to the Privy Council a list of 38 “unlawful books” found in Stow's possession, including recent recusant works by Thomas Dorman, Thomas Heskyns, Robert Pointz, John Rastell, Richard Shacklock, and Thomas Stapleton. For the “great Parcell” of chronicles, see The Great Chronicle of London, ed. A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley (London, 1938), xvi. The Great Chronicle was itself owned and annotated by Stow.

14. This tends to undermine the transparency of Stow's claim, in the preface to his Annales (1592), that the primary function of chronicles is the “discouragement of unnatural subjects from wicked treasons, pernicious rebellions, and damnable doctrines.” I owe the Grafton reference to David Kastan.

15. Here, and throughout, I cite from Holinshed's Chronicles, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1807; repr. New York, 1965), 6:273.

16. As developed in my Censorship and Interpretation (Madison, 1984).

17. Woolf, Idea of History, 32.

18. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” in Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (Summer 1985): 226; see also “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (1987): 1-25.

19. Rawls, “Justice as Fairness,” 225.

20. Ibid., 228, 223, 246-47.

21. In a review of Roger Chartier's The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, N.C., 1991), in which Chartier had deployed Habermas's model, Darnton complained that Chartier had been misled by the French translation of Habermas's Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962) which had become in French L'espace public, a less flexible and more reified notion. On the one hand, Darnton suggests that this was a distortion of Habermas's intentions. On the other, he was critical of Habermas's thesis itself, or rather of its exemplification in Enlightenment France:

    If this space was actually constructed, both conceptually and as the site of action, where can we locate it? In the reception room of Mme. Geoffrin? The chambers of the Académie Française? The tables of the Café Procope? Or the columns of the Gazette de France? These are the kinds of institutions invoked by Habermas, but they confront his thesis with a second difficulty. Far from being democratic and egalitarian, they were complex structures with hierarchies of their own. … Yet Habermas has nothing to say about the realities of cultural life under the Old Regime. He conjures up a world of free and easy ratiocination among philosophic equals. That world never existed.

    See Robert Darnton, “An Enlightened Revolution?” New York Review of Books, 24 October 1991, 34.

22. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 363, 359.

23. Ibid., 337-38.