George Lawson's 'Politica' and the English Revolution

Reflection on the past constituted a powerful idiom of political theorising in early modern Europe but whether subsumed under the unstable notion of historia, chronicle, or restricted to more piecemeal reference and allusion, it was not an autonomous sphere of discourse. Rather, it was a subordinate means of illustrating general patterns of abstract moral, political and theological principle even when it acquired scientific associations. In the broadest terms, the place of history had been fixed by Cicero. The historian had an especial responsibility to be fair, and to get things right; but this, generally, was in order that a received and morally potent past could play its part in the more important realm of rhetoric. In this respect the uplifting claims of rhetoric might be challenged by theology or philosophy but, regardless, hand-maiden Clio tagged along behind as, with more or less conviction, she has done in most people's eyes ever since. As Dionysius of Halicarnassus seems first to have put it: ‘history is philosophy teaching by examples’. Thus criticism and defence of historical writing were usually focussed on its efficacy in exemplifying the ethical and edifying. When examples were difficult to find, or to manipulate to one's ends, the authority of history could be rejected easily enough – for the time being. Conversely, assumed precept might be barely visible on the surface of what looks, prima facie, to be an autonomous historical narrative; but in most political writing there is some blend of precept and illustration.