I

The prehistory of what started out as The Cambridge Historical Journal begins in the 1880s and 1890s and extends up to the end of the First World War. One pronounced characteristic of these tumultuous years was a growing interest in the national past, in the United Kingdom but also far beyond. This was evidenced by the burgeoning ‘cult of commemoration’, marking anniversaries, centenaries, and jubilees on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, such structured retrospections included the two jubilees of Queen Victoria in 1887 and 1897, the bicentennial of the Glorious Revolution in 1888, the centenary of Edward Gibbon’s death in 1894, and the hundredth anniversary of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson in 1905.Footnote ⁴ This veritable ‘rage’ for centenaries and anniversaries was accompanied by the rise of what was termed ‘pageant fever’: dramatic representations of episodes in the history of a community or organization, again commemorating significant anniversaries, and involving a great deal of dressing up, articulating various notions of history, identity, and (often invented) tradition in places such as Sherborne (1905), Oxford (1907), Dover (1908), Bath (1909), and Colchester (1910).Footnote ⁵ The decades either side of 1900 also witnessed the creation of the National Trust, the Victoria county histories, the Survey of London, and the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts: preservationist societies and proselytizing organizations, all of which were concerned with promoting what we would now call public history; and so was the Dictionary of national biography, completed in sixty-three volumes, and published between 1885 and the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶

Behind these many local and national initiatives lay the powerful Victorian inheritance of such writers as Lord Macaulay, J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, J. R. Green, and S. R. Gardiner, who wrote narrative histories of Britain and the United Kingdom aimed at a wide general audience; and that reading public had become much broader following the passing of Forster’s Education Act of 1870, and the expansion of public schools and grammar schools during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷ At the same time, degree courses in history had recently been established at Oxford (1872) and Cambridge (1873), in the Scottish universities, and on the new, redbrick campuses of Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield, offering a new version of humanistic education previously dominated by the classics.Footnote ⁸ The result was a new, young, enlarged audience for history, for whom publishers such as Methuen, Longmans, and Macmillan created multi-authored textbook series and general surveys. Underlying this increased public appetite for history was the growing belief that a knowledge of the national past was essential to help ensure that the expanding national electorate would behave responsibly, and to train those statesmen governing the United Kingdom and ruling the rapidly expanding British empire. Thus was history repurposed and institutionalized as a growing, if still limited, component of late Victorian and Edwardian public culture, at both the local and the national level.Footnote ⁹

Much of this new activity promoting the past for the public was undertaken by those whom Geoffrey Elton later derided as ‘amateurs’ (Gardiner declined the Regius chair in Oxford in 1894 on the grounds that its onerous administrative duties would interfere with his history-writing).Footnote ¹⁰ But the years from the 1880s to the First World War were also transformative in the creation of bodies of professional, university-based historians, albeit at that time often eager to be associated with the ‘amateurs’ and their activities. By the late nineteenth century, the writing and teaching of history had become a more professionalized activity and scholarly discipline based in many universities in Europe and in the United States: in Germany, Rankean ‘scientific’ history was much more rigorous than anything that was happening in Britain; while the American Historical Association, representing all professional practitioners, as well as amateurs, had been founded in 1884.Footnote ¹¹ Only gradually did Britain begin to catch up, in significant part thanks to the pioneering endeavours of such figures as William Stubbs, E. A. Freeman, and Charles Firth in Oxford; Lord Acton, Sir John Seeley, Frederic William Maitland, and J. B. Bury in Cambridge; Sir George Prothero and A. F. Pollard in London; and T. F. Tout and Adolphus Ward in Manchester.Footnote ¹² Seeking to emulate the German and, increasingly, the American way of doing things, these men were eager to work on primary sources, they concentrated on medieval and early modern history, they were especially interested in constitutional and ecclesiastical subjects, and they wanted to train the first generation of graduate students in their own image.Footnote ¹³

This was also the time when, according to one authority, British historians ‘discovered the joys of scholarly communication and association’.Footnote ¹⁴ Some academics became active in the Royal Historical Society, which had been founded in 1868 for the ‘conducting of Historical, Biographical and Ethnological investigations’, but which at the outset was far from being a recognizably professional organization. During its first thirty years, qualifications for membership were minimal, and in 1889 Bishop Creighton described it as ‘a vast fraud’ where ‘a number of old fogies air their fads’. Only in 1889 was an historian of genuine distinction elected as president: Adolphus Ward, and he would later be followed by Firth and Tout, which meant the professionals were beginning to prevail over the amateurs.Footnote ¹⁵ The academics also recognized that if history was to become a serious subject in universities at undergraduate and graduate levels, it had to be better promoted in school classrooms. Hence, the creation of the Historical Association in 1906, largely thanks to the initiative of Firth, Tout, and Pollard, to ‘co-ordinate the efforts of all who are working in England towards the improvement of history teaching in our schools’.Footnote ¹⁶ Firth was the first president, and he was followed by both Tout and Pollard. These were significant initiatives. Less successful were Pollard’s attempts to create a School of Advanced Historical Studies based at the University of London, which would have mentored British graduate students as was already happening in Germany and the United States. But lack of funding meant nothing happened.Footnote ¹⁷

Yet there was some degree of growing professionalization, albeit in a ‘half-hearted and hesitant manner’, one indication of which was the appearance of the first British journals with national rather than local horizons, each of which would eventually be devoted to the scholarly study of history.Footnote ¹⁸ Germany and France had been the pioneers, with the Historische Zeitschrift, founded in 1859, and the Revue historique, established in 1876, along with the Rivista storica italiana eight years later.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1872, the Royal Historical Society began to publish its Transactions, but the early volumes appeared intermittently, and their contents were essentially antiquarian. Only since 1888 have the Transactions been published annually (except for 1938), and by the early twentieth century, they had become the recognizably professional, academic publication they remain today.Footnote ²⁰ As so often, the 1880s were a crucial decade, for they also witnessed the founding of The English Historical Review (EHR) in 1886. Like the Transactions, the EHR made a faltering start, beset by financial uncertainty, and unclear as to whether it should be another of the literary periodicals that had flourished for much of the nineteenth century, or an innovative and rigorous scholarly publication.Footnote ²¹ But by the 1900s, it too had become fully established as a serious academic endeavour, which could hold its own against The American Historical Review, established in 1895. In 1916, ten years after it had been founded, the Historical Association acquired its own quarterly journal, accurately if rather grandiosely entitled History, which was initially edited by Pollard. Originally intended for history teachers rather than academic historians, it would eventually evolve into a more scholarly and professional publication.Footnote ²² By the First World War, these three publications – the Transactions, The English Historical Review, and History – were all reasonably well established.

II

Such was the gradually evolving professional milieu and slowly developing scholarly infrastructure from which The Cambridge Historical Journal eventually emerged one hundred years ago. The more immediate context was the cluster of scholarly innovations that took place soon after the end of the First World War. In 1921, thanks to the energy of Pollard and the generosity of Sir John Cecil Power, a modified version of the abortive School of Advanced Historical Studies was realized in the form of the Institute of Historical Research, based at the University of London, and of which Pollard became the first director, with the aim of providing the rigorous, source-based historical training for graduate students that was not available anywhere else in Britain.Footnote ²³ Two years later, Pollard produced the first Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research (subsequently abbreviated to Historical Research), and in his introductory editorial, he took pains to stress that it would not compete with existing scholarly periodicals. On the contrary, the Bulletin’s prime purpose was to provide no more than ‘a record of the work done at the Institute’.Footnote ²⁴ Hence, the first articles on such subjects as the editing of historical documents, acquisitions at the Public Record Office, training in historical research, and ‘Summaries of Theses for the M.A. Degree’.Footnote ²⁵ The Bulletin would later print corrections to the Dictionary of national biography, and there were schemes to bring the Dictionary itself to the Institute on a permanent basis, although nothing came of them.Footnote ²⁶

In 1923, The Cambridge Historical Journal also first appeared, founded by the Cambridge Historical Society, published by Cambridge University Press, and overseen by an editorial committee consisting of E. A. Benians, Z. N. Brooke, J. H. Clapham, and J. Holland Rose. They were all men based in Cambridge, and their areas of interest extended from medieval to modern Europe and the British empire.Footnote ²⁷ The ‘moving spirit’ behind the Journal’s creation was Harold Temperley, who was its first editor. He was a fellow of Peterhouse, a University reader in modern history, and an expert on recent British diplomacy and foreign policy. In 1916, he had been seconded to the War Office, where for six years he served as an adviser on Balkan affairs, and following his reluctant return to academe (he would have preferred to stay in Whitehall), but in the aftermath of the death of his wife (which affected him deeply), he threw himself back into academe, and the founding of the Journal formed part of this necessarily energetic displacement activity.Footnote ²⁸ Like the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, the Journal’s initial instalments were slight, appearing only once a year, and running to little more than one hundred pages, and it was not until 1925 that they were consolidated into volume one. The first article in the first issue was by J. B. Bury, Regius professor of modern history at Cambridge and a strong supporter of the Journal, and there were contributions from the medieval historian C. W. Previté-Orton and the diplomatic historian G. P. Gooch.Footnote ²⁹ There was also a ‘Notes and Communications’ section, primarily concerned with source materials, with contributions from C. R. Fay, J. H. Clapham, and Temperley himself.Footnote ³⁰

As the contemporary counterpart to the IHR’s Bulletin, the Journal initially sought to provide a record of the historical work then being undertaken in Cambridge (Gooch never held an academic post there but was a graduate of Trinity College and very much a Cambridge man). Bury, Clapham, and Temperley published again in the Journal’s 1924 issue, where they were joined by J. Holland Rose, in the following year by E. A. Benians, and in 1928 by Z. N. Brooke.Footnote ³¹ For much of that time, Temperley was busy with two larger editorial projects; he produced a major account of Canning’s foreign policy, and was a frequent contributor to The English Historical Review, but he continued to publish regularly in the Journal.Footnote ³² Beginning in 1927, it included advertisements: for History, The English Historical Review, and the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research; for editions of the British and foreign state papers, published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office; for Cambridge University Press; for Foyles bookshop in London and for Bowes & Bowes store in Cambridge. In the same year, the Journal printed its first list of the twenty-two ‘Cambridge Students working for the M. Litt. and Ph.D. degrees in History’, which would be updated every year until 1955. In 1928, G. M. Trevelyan, who had recently been appointed Regius professor of modern history by Stanley Baldwin in succession to J. B. Bury (a job Temperley had vainly coveted), joined the Journal’s editorial committee, on which he would sit until 1952, although he does not seem to have made much of an impact.Footnote ³³

This was scarcely surprising, since Trevelyan had earlier left Cambridge in disgust when Bury claimed history was ‘not a branch of literature’ but ‘a science, no less and no more’ in his inaugural lecture as Regius professor.Footnote ³⁴ His only contribution to the Journal was an edited text with commentary he co-published in 1931, which was a by-product of his multi-volume England under Queen Anne. In the same issue, a much younger Trinity fellow, Steven Runciman, also appeared in the Journal, tracing the trajectory of an ancient religious relic across many centuries. Neither would publish in the Journal again, believing instead the prime purpose of history, and thus of historians, was to ‘record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destines of man’, which was not what the Journal had been created to do.Footnote ³⁵ In 1936, Temperley’s not-wholly-compliant protégé, Herbert Butterfield, another fellow of Peterhouse who also believed in the importance of diplomatic history, became the Journal’s acting editor, and he formally took over two years later.Footnote ³⁶ By then, he had produced The Whig interpretation of history which, despite his denials, must have had Trevelyan in mind, and he certainly thought so.Footnote ³⁷ Soon after, Trevelyan’s former research student, J. H. Plumb, published an article exploring party divisions and identities during the ‘Convention Parliament’ of 1689, which Butterfield accepted for the Journal, but by which he was not impressed.Footnote ³⁸ Like Trevelyan and Runciman, Plumb never again published an article in the Journal, and although he would continue to produce scholarly essays during the 1950s, he would soon follow Trevelyan and Runciman in writing primarily for a broader public.Footnote ³⁹

Some of Trevelyan’s near contemporaries contributed to the Journal during the first twenty years of its existence, among them Ernest Barker, G. N. Clark, V. H. Galbraith, F. M. Stenton, and Eric A. Walker.Footnote ⁴⁰ Like Runciman and Plumb, many of those who published their first articles in its pages had been born towards the close of the nineteenth century or in the years before the First World War, among them A. B. C. (Alfred) Cobban, Philip Grierson, David Knowles, J. H. Parry, John Saltmarsh, and E. E. Rich.Footnote ⁴¹ This cohort also included a significant number of women historians, especially among the medievalists: Helen Cam, Ethel M. Hampson, Irene M. Harper, Frances M. Page, Eileen Power, Beryl Smalley, and Kathleen L. Wood-Legh.Footnote ⁴² Two of them achieved notable professional success: Eileen Power at the London School of Economics, and as one of the founders of The Economic History Review; Helen Cam at Cambridge, where in 1938 she became the first women to join the Journal’s editorial committee, and subsequently at Harvard.Footnote ⁴³ The presence of these women helps explain why the Journal was initially strong on medieval (and thus religious) history, and economic and social history were also well represented, but its greatest coverage remained in modern diplomatic history, which was largely a male preserve.Footnote ⁴⁴ Throughout the first phase of its history, the Journal remained a small-scale enterprise: only one issue was published annually, of little more than one hundred pages, and until 1956 three such issues were still bound in a single volume.

Temperley died in the summer of 1939, mourned in the Journal’s pages as ‘the moving spirit in its foundation’ and as ‘the epitome of Cambridge history’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although the Journal continued to appear every year during the Second World War, shortage of paper and a lack of contributors meant that the issues shrank significantly in size, and it was not until 1947 that the pre-war pages were restored. In 1953, Patrick Bury succeeded Herbert Butterfield as editor. He was the nephew of Professor J. B. Bury, and an expert on nineteenth-century France and modern foreign policy.Footnote ⁴⁶ Three years later, J. H. Plumb joined the editorial committee, the list of Cambridge research students working for higher degrees was dropped, and review articles and book reviews appeared for the first time. Plumb may have been influential in bringing about these changes, but he did not stay long, soon acquiring a range of more lucrative and public facing editorial positions, as historical adviser to Penguin Books (1960–98), editor of the Fontana History of Europe (1963–87), and of The History of Human Society (1965–79).Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1957, this portentous ‘Editorial note’ appeared, signalling a major change:

This has been described as a ‘silent coup d’état’ for which no explanation was ever forthcoming, and it was even more remarkable, since one quarter of the articles published in the Journal between 1945 and 1957 were in ancient and medieval history.Footnote ⁴⁹ The restriction of its chronological range also meant that there would be significantly fewer articles authored by women in the next decades.

Perhaps this chronological restriction had been introduced as a means of controlling what had recently become an ever-expanding publication. The end of the war brought increased numbers of submissions from historians returning from war service to resume their university posts, or from a new generation entering academic employment for the first time. Volumes 9, 10, and 11, covering the years from 1947 to 1955, had each run to more than 350 pages. In 1956, that arrangement was terminated, and thereafter the Journal was published twice a year, with both issues forming one volume of 200 pages. A. H. M. Jones, C. N. L. Brooke (son of Zachary Brooke), R. C. Smail, and Walter Ullmann got in before the shutters came down for ancient and medieval history.Footnote ⁵⁰ Many who would become big names in post-war history writing, and all with strong Cambridge connections, made it into the Journal for the first time, among them Asa Briggs, J. H. Elliott, G. R. Elton, J. P. Kenyon, Peter Laslett, and J. G. A. Pocock, all of them born between 1915 and 1930, and two of them, Elliott and Pocock, former research students of Butterfield’s.Footnote ⁵¹ The Journal’s chronological range remained wide, and the size of its issues increased significantly; but the subjects it published were confined: principally government, politics, religion, foreign policy, and international relations, with an occasional dash of political thought, and all focused overwhelmingly on the United Kingdom and Europe. Marxist historians such as Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm were conspicuous by their absence, and there was nothing published in the Journal to match the vitriolic exchanges that characterized the ‘storm over the gentry’ and the controversy over the ‘standard of living in the industrial revolution’ that were published in The Economic History Review, or the wide-ranging speculations ventured and ventilated in the pages of Past & Present on the alleged ‘general crisis’ of the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁵²

III

The second phase of the history of what was now The Historical Journal extended from 1957 until 1994, and its two defining characteristics, the one structural, the other individual, were the unprecedented growth in its size, and the dominance of Geoffrey Elton on its editorial committee as well as on its pages. Behind the first of these transformations lay the unprecedented expansion in higher education that took place in Britain, both preceding and following the recommendations made in the Robbins Report, published in 1963. Thereafter, Oxbridge, London, and the civic redbricks all upscaled, and they were joined by a new generation of universities, among them Sussex, Kent, York, Lancaster, Warwick, and East Anglia, all with strong history departments, often teaching the subject in innovative and interdisciplinary ways, giving unprecedented emphasis to economic history and social history. The number of graduate students registered for research degrees in history took off: before the Second World War there had been scarcely 300; by 1975 there were 3,000. These converging forces of supply and demand explain the simultaneous explosion in the number of academics teaching history in British higher education. In 1950, there had been scarcely 500 of them, by 1960 there were 800, and by the 1980s there were more than 2,000 of them.Footnote ⁵³ They were also publishing more history than had ever been produced before – and not only in book form, but in article form as well.Footnote ⁵⁴

This revolution in higher education transformed the position of history and historians in British universities, and its impact on the Journal was correspondingly significant. It had begun to expand during the late 1950s, and its growth accelerated from the early 1960s. By the end of the decade, the Journal was being published in four instalments amounting to 700 pages, and by 1976 it had burst the 1,000-page barrier, making it one of the biggest historical periodicals circulating anywhere in the world.Footnote ⁵⁵ This massive enlargement was in response to a corresponding upsurge in the number of articles being submitted by a swelling number of historians working in a wider range of institutions and locations, both nationally and internationally. To be sure, Cambridge historians remained disproportionately represented in the Journal’s pages, but from the 1960s, the editors were accepting more articles from more scholars located elsewhere in the United Kingdom or based in the United States and in continental Europe. To take but one example: the first issue of the Journal of 1983 published authors from Odense University in Denmark, the University of Missouri–Columbia, Mississippi State University, Spurgeon’s College, London, the University of Edinburgh, the University of York, and the University of Wales at Aberystwyth.Footnote ⁵⁶

Yet this change had its limits, which was unsurprising since from 1960 to 1976, the Journal was edited by two more Cambridge-based academics, F. H. (Harry) Hinsley, and D. E. D. (Derek) Beales. Hinsley had been a codebreaker at Bletchley, was professor of international relations, and an expert on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British foreign policy.Footnote ⁵⁷ Beales was a lecturer in history, then writing on nineteenth-century England and Italy, who later became professor of modern history.Footnote ⁵⁸ During their time, most of the articles published were preponderantly on British and European subjects, and they remained largely concerned with the state and high politics, diplomatic relations and foreign policy, and religion. They were essentially monographic, and occasional wide-ranging pieces, such as Donald Coleman on mercantilism, Eric Stokes on the Hobson–Lenin thesis about imperial history, and Theodore K. Rabb on European expansion and capitalism were the exceptions that proved the rule.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Journal also continued to publish a large number of articles by young Cambridge academics, among them Quentin Skinner, Simon Schama, John Brewer, Tony Judt, and Roy Porter.Footnote ⁶⁰ There were also noteworthy early appearances by Zara Steiner, Margaret Bowker, Linda Colley, Susan Brigden, Sheila Lawlor, and Lisa Jardine. But the jettisoning of medieval history in 1957 meant that women were less in evidence during the second phase of the Journal’s history than they had been during the 1920s and 1930s. More opportunities for women in higher education were gradually opening but there was little sign of that at the Journal, where most of the female-authored articles were on familiar ‘male’ subjects.Footnote ⁶¹

Throughout the second phase of its existence, all the editors remined Cambridge-based men, although there were some significant variations and signs of change. Derek Beales was the last to discharge that task singlehandedly, and the first pair of joint editors were Vic Gatrell and Christopher Andrew. Gatrell represented a marked break from the earlier editorial pattern. Born in South Africa, he graduated from Rhodes University, then went to Cambridge, where he remained thereafter, apart from a brief spell at the University of Essex. Gatrell’s initial field of interest was the economic and social history of the mid-nineteenth-century Manchester middle class, which was a significant departure from the specialisms of his editorial predecessors.Footnote ⁶² Christopher Andrew, by contrast, was an editor in the more traditional mould – a protégé of both Harry Hinsley and Patrick Bury, he began as an historian of diplomacy and international relations, and spent the whole of his academic life in Cambridge.Footnote ⁶³ Gatrell and Andrew were followed by Tim Blanning and John Morrill. Blanning had been mentored by Derek Beales: he, too, never left Cambridge, and published widely on many aspects of eighteenth-century European history.Footnote ⁶⁴ Although a long-time Cambridge academic, John Morrill was the first editor who graduated elsewhere (at Trinity College, Oxford), and also the first whose primary field of interest was the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁶⁵ Both Blanning and Morrill were the first editors who worked primarily on the early modern period of British and European history.

From Beales and Hinsley to Blanning and Morrill, the most influential member of the editorial committee was G. R. Elton.Footnote ⁶⁶ This was partly because he was involved with the Journal for so long, succeeding J. H. Plumb on its editorial committee in 1961 (given their notorious enmities, there is surely a story there), of which he remained a member until his death in 1994.Footnote ⁶⁷ Elton was never a quiet or compliant committee man, dominating and often intimidating any group or gathering of which he was a member, and he published more pieces in the Journal than anyone else before or since: ten articles and thirty book reviews between 1951 and 1993. This was one way whereby he drove through his own reinterpretation of Tudor history, insisting ‘the years 1530–40’ were ‘the fulcrum of the story’, while the ‘age of Elizabeth’ was ‘essentially conservative’.Footnote ⁶⁸ But his contributions were often combative and controversial. He quarrelled with J. P. Cooper over the last years of Henry VIII’s reign, and got distinctly the better of the exchange, noting en passant that ‘a self-appointed hound of heaven ought to be more precise in his quest’.Footnote ⁶⁹ And in a withering review, Elton denounced Lawrence Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 as a ‘modish’ but unconvincing updating of the traditional Whiggish account, ‘shot through with tradition-hallowed but doubtful statements’ that were ‘much less secure than they are made to appear’, and called for a completely new approach to explaining the outbreak of the Civil War, free from the distorting perspective of hindsight, and focusing on the primary sources of politics rather than the misleading categories of class or the uncertain processes of economic and social change. Much of this work was published in the Journal.Footnote ⁷⁰ Stone retorted by labelling these ‘revisionists’ as ‘young antiquarian empiricists’, and in a revised edition of Causes reaffirmed his original argument.Footnote ⁷¹

Elton and Stone had first fallen out over the subject of state planning in Tudor England: Stone was influenced by the interventions of the post-war Labour government; and although Elton agreed that Cromwell exerted central policy direction, he was severely critical of Stone’s sources and of his use of them.Footnote ⁷² Elton later rejected Stone’s argument that the mid-seventeenth-century English aristocracy was in crisis, and mounted a broader attack on his methods in The practice of history; Stone responded by claiming Elton’s notion of a ‘Tudor revolution in government’ had been wildly overstated, and that his ‘close attachment’ to Thomas Cromwell meant he failed to recognize the draconian means whereby the Henrician Reformation had been enforced.Footnote ⁷³ Elton believed constitutional and administrative history provided the best route to understanding the past; Stone thought this a sterile and obscurantist approach. Elton disdained the social sciences; Stone welcomed and embraced them.Footnote ⁷⁴ Elton thought Braudel over-rated and the leading French journal, the Annales, Gallically pretentious; Stone thought he and they were innovative and important. Stone had joined the editorial board of Past & Present in 1958 and remained closely involved until his death in 1999. He was never as dominant there as Elton became at the Journal, but he was a major force, publishing seven articles, and many communications, notes, rejoinders, and reviews. Just as Elton’s view of history aligned closely with the Journal’s, Stone was at home at Past & Present with such kindred spirits as Christopher Hill, John Elliott, Keith Thomas, and Eric Hobsbawm.Footnote ⁷⁵ Stone published in the Journal only once, ‘communicating’ a letter from Sir Robert Vernon to Lord Hunsdon, accompanied by his own commentary, which was a very out of character and semi-antiquarian piece; Elton appeared twice in Past & Present, but reactively responding to invited criticisms of his views on the Tudor revolution in government emanating from Oxford, where they were widely regarded with scepticism.Footnote ⁷⁶

Formidable though they undoubtedly were, there was more to Elton’s influence on the Journal than his personality and his publications. The one major controversy it hosted from the late 1950s, debating the causes and describing the extent of the ‘nineteenth-century revolution in government’, took as its starting point the ‘Tudor revolution in government’ which Elton insisted had taken place in England 300 years before.Footnote ⁷⁷ And Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution was not the only ‘modish’ work of the 1960s and 1970s that was severely reviewed in the Journal’s pages. Michael Oakeshott acclaimed Quentin Skinner’s Foundations of modern political thought as a ‘major historical achievement’, but thought his attempts to trace the teleology of a developing ‘concept of the state’ was ‘unhistorical’ and ‘anachronistic’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Robert Beddard was distinctly unimpressed by J. H. Plumb’s efforts, in The growth of political stability in England, to link economic, social, and political change in the way that was so fashionable at the time. Behind the ‘lively piece of historical polemic’ and the ‘modish New Look’, Beddard insisted, lay ‘the traditional interpretation of the making of mid-Georgian England’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Geoffrey Best criticized E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English working class for failing to understand Methodism, for overstating the case of a unified proletarian class-consciousness, and for neglecting ‘the flag-saluting, foreigner-hating, peer-respecting side of the plebeian mind’.Footnote ⁸⁰ And Henry Pelling took issue with Harold Perkin’s Origins of modern English society, for failing to make the case for the social causation of the Industrial Revolution, for being confused about the reasons for population growth, for misunderstanding the issue of women’s emancipation, for the ‘awkward’ concept of the ‘entrepreneurial ideal’, and for neglecting canals and railways. ‘This really will not do’, Pelling noted at one point.Footnote ⁸¹

Such was what has rightly been described as the Journal’s ‘overriding, and almost intuitive, methodological predilection’ towards scholarly conservatism (or wisdom) that Elton both shared and reinforced, but he did not always get his own way and there were limits to his influence.Footnote ⁸² Although generally favourable, Joel Hurstfield regretted that, in reviewing the New Cambridge modern history volume on the Reformation, ‘Dr Elton as editor’ had failed to ask ‘Dr Elton as contributor’ to ‘attenuate his somewhat bold claims on behalf of Thomas Cromwell’ – claims which Elton did later partially retract, but by which he still generally stood.Footnote ⁸³ In another review, C. B. A. (‘Betty’) Behrens, a long-time contributor to the Journal, assailed Elton’s Practice of history, where one of his prime targets (along with J. H. Plumb, Lawrence Stone, and Keith Thomas) was What is history?, written by E. H. Carr, whom Behrens had married the year before Elton’s book appeared.Footnote ⁸⁴ She did not hold back. Elton wrote, she noted, ‘as the master accustomed to speaking with authority’, dismissing ‘nearly all the famous British historians’ except for Maitland and Namier, while showing little interest in ‘the foreigners’. She contested his ‘naïve’ claim that all an historian had to do was to ‘become the servant of his evidence’, since in many cases ‘a lifetime’ would be insufficient for total immersion in the mass of documentary material. ‘The historian of Professor Elton’s vision’, she concluded, was ‘not an intellectual but a technician’, and his ‘counterpart’ was ‘to be found in the middle ranges of many business and professional hierarchies’. He was, she went on, ‘a master of a narrow range of technical operations who judges his superiors harshly because he cannot appreciate the magnitude of their tasks but is well equipped to see their shortcomings’. Behrens also noted that Elton was ‘suspicious of general ideas’, which she thought ‘must surely be one of the most extraordinary claims to be put forward in the twentieth century in defence of a major subject of humane study’.Footnote ⁸⁵

The Journal’s pages also bear witness to the sad decline in Elton’s powers and in his relations with his former research student, David Starkey, who turned on his mentor just as Elton had earlier turned on his supervisor, Sir John Neale, regularly and repeatedly denouncing him at the Tudor seminar in Cambridge over which he presided for so long, and late in life writing an entire book with the aim of proving Neale wrong about Elizabethan parliaments.Footnote ⁸⁶ Thus was Elton paid out in his own coin, and he did not like it. In one review of a book Starkey had co-edited, he deplored and denounced Starkey’s own contribution: ‘the chronology and interpretation…will not do’, the ‘judgment errs in two ways’, he ‘handles his evidence with a somewhat casual hand’, his ‘treatment of Fortescue really does break the rules of learned discourse’, and so on.Footnote ⁸⁷ In a second review, published the following year, of another book Starkey had edited, Elton went further, deploring his ‘sharp and discourteous tone’, which he hoped ‘excused’ his ‘inability to take his attack lying down’, and he insisted, pace Starkey, there had, indeed, been ‘a Tudor revolution initiated in the days of Thomas Cromwell’s ascendancy’, as he had argued more than thirty years before.Footnote ⁸⁸ Starkey retorted by denouncing Elton for ‘pure bullying’, for making assertions ‘laced with error’, and for ‘falling into absurdity’. The ‘Tudor revolution’, he concluded, ‘has become a cave in which its author is imprisoned’. Elton ‘should come up and join his colleagues in the fresh air. He would be very welcome.’Footnote ⁸⁹

This was not an exchange from which Elton, Starkey, or the Journal emerged with much credit. As G. M. Trevelyan (someone else whom Elton never failed to disparage) had earlier observed, ‘professors’ quarrels’ were ‘always ridiculous and unedifying’ to those not in the know. By then ageing rapidly, Elton for once did not reply.Footnote ⁹⁰ But he continued to pay off scores against Lawrence Stone. In a late-life review, he again denounced Stone for having produced ‘a series of very large books, using successive social science techniques’, which he believed ‘erected great structures that tended to collapse as soon as they were closely examined’, and he deplored Stone’s ‘well-known power to savage’ those with whom he disagreed, seemingly unaware that the same criticism might be levelled at him with equal plausibility.Footnote ⁹¹ In a final 1993 ‘communication’, Elton insisted Muriel St Clare Byrne’s edition of the Lisle letters did not show Thomas Cromwell as being ‘cynical, cunning and corrupt’, which Stone had claimed they did. Stone’s own, earlier review, Elton went on, ‘revealed a determined hatred of Cromwell which, alas, reflects [his] disapproval of me’ (just as Elton’s article reflected his disapproval of Stone).Footnote ⁹² Elton continued to rail against what he deemed the corrupting influences of ‘economics, sociology and anthropology’, subjects about which he knew very little, while insisting to the last there had been a Tudor revolution in government and that Thomas Cromwell was a great man and transformative figure.Footnote ⁹³ This was his last publication in the Journal; he died the following year, and with his passing there would never be another member of the editorial committee so belligerently and intolerantly influential, and the second phase in its history came to an end.Footnote ⁹⁴

IV

By then, changes were already occurring in the broader historical landscape which ushered in the third phase of the Journal’s history: the ever-widening range of historical sub-specialisms, the growing number of women in the profession, and the increasing globalization of the academic world, to all three of which it gradually began to respond, beginning with the editorial committee.Footnote ⁹⁵ In 1991, the ‘Cambridge members’ were joined by two ‘American members’, Geoffrey Parker of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Harold James of Princeton, both of whom had been educated at Cambridge; they subsequently withdrew, to be replaced in 1997 by Paul Kennedy of Yale University (who had no prior Cambridge connection). By then, Christopher Bayly, the pre-eminent South Asian historian of his generation, had joined the committee, and so, in 1998, did Karen Kupperman. She was the first female member to be appointed since Helen Cam, sixty years before; she was based at New York University, and she worked on American history including indigenous peoples. Three years later, two more women went on to what was now described as the ‘Editorial Board, University of Cambridge’: Sheilagh Ogilvie (European economic history) and Betty Wood (colonial American history), and by 2013 women would be in the majority. Meanwhile, an international advisory board had been constituted, with members from other British universities, and from Ireland, France, Germany, and the United States. Of its fourteen members, six were women. One further change was to the way in which members of the editorial board were identified, as the previous elaborate paraphernalia of titles, initials, and post nominals was dispensed with in favour of more informal designations. Thus (for example) Professor D. E. D. Beales, Litt. D., FBA was repurposed as Derek Beales, and Professor Q. R. D. Skinner, FBA was reidentified as Quentin Skinner.Footnote ⁹⁶

Among the most recent editors Jonathan Steinberg was a Harvard graduate, but also a doctoral protégé of Harry Hinsley’s, a long-time lecturer in Cambridge, and an expert on modern Germany and central Europe.Footnote ⁹⁷ Mark Goldie migrated from Sussex to Cambridge, and was the first editor to be an historian of ideas and political thought.Footnote ⁹⁸ Robert Tombs wrote on nineteenth-century France in the tradition of Patrick Bury, and was another long-time Cambridge academic.Footnote ⁹⁹ Peter Mandler studied at Oxford and Harvard before eventually reaching Cambridge, shifting his interests from high politics to the social and cultural history of modern Britain.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Clare Jackson has spent most of her career at Cambridge, working on seventeenth-century Britain from a post-revisionist and continental perspective.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Julian Hoppit was an undergraduate and graduate student at Cambridge, writes on British economic and political history from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, and having departed to University College London, was the first editor of the Journal not to be Cambridge-based.Footnote ¹⁰² Phil Withington was the second, moving from Cambridge, via Aberdeen and Leeds, to Sheffield, and focusing on the social, urban, and cultural history of early modern Britain.Footnote ¹⁰³ Andrew Preston is Canadian, studied at the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics, has taught at Cambridge, was the first editor to be an historian of the United States, and has recently moved back there.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Sujit Sivasundaram was born in Sri Lanka, educated and employed at Cambridge, and the first global historian to be appointed editor.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Emma Griffin attended Queen Mary University of London and researched at Cambridge; the second female editor, she was based at the University of East Anglia, specializing in social, economic, and gender history.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Sarah Pearsall was Harvard educated, briefly at Cambridge, and is an historian of the Early Americas and the Atlantic world.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

As before, every editor of the Journal during its third phase has had a Cambridge connection, although in some cases it has been closer and longer than in others. In their areas of interest, Jonathan Steinberg, Robert Tombs, and Julian Hoppit were editors in a traditional mould. But there have been significant changes. Hoppit was based at UCL, while Steinberg was a Harvard-educated American, and so have been two of his successors. Another editor was born in Canada, and yet another in Sri Lanka. Three of the previous editors have been women. Their interests have been correspondingly varied. Those specializing in British history have often focused on social, cultural, and gender history. Other editors have ranged far beyond Britain and Europe, to North America, the Atlantic world, South Asia, and the entire globe. One of the two current editors is Rachel Leow: of Malaysian origin and a graduate of the University of Warwick now settled in Cambridge, she is an expert on modern East and Southeast Asian history and the fourth woman to hold the post.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Her co-editor, John Gallagher, graduated from Trinity College Dublin, before moving to Cambridge; he specializes in early modern British cultural and social history, and is based at the University of Leeds.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Editors also come and go with greater frequency than in earlier times: up to the 1990s, ten years or thereabouts was the norm, but more recently it has been closer to four years. There were only eleven editors between 1923 and 2001, but there have been another eleven since then across little more than twenty years, along with an additional six review editors (three women, three men), of whom Naomi Tadmor was the first woman to hold any editorial position at the Journal.

The early 1990s had already seen what seemed like a significant turning point, as Barbara Harris published ‘Women and politics in early Tudor England’, and Amanda Vickery authored ‘Golden age to separate spheres’, two pieces, by women and about women, intruding subjects into the Journal that had hitherto received scant attention and short shrift. Harris contested the Eltonian view that it was ‘both natural and inevitable’ to write Tudor history ‘as if the world of high politics, the world that really mattered’, was ‘exclusively male’, while Vickery sought to ‘open up debate on the basic categories and chronologies we employ in discussing the experience, power and identity of women in past time’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ These articles also signalled the return of women as contributors to the Journal on a scale not seen since the 1920s and 1930s, and there was some broadening of the subjects the editors accepted for publication. In the September 2003 issue, for example, articles treated such topics as deafness in early modern England, family portraits in a great country house, Sherlock Holmes, modernity and enchantment, women police, social work and crime prevention, and the American civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.Footnote ¹¹¹ The word ‘sex’ first appeared in the title of an article in the Journal in 2000, and reappeared twice the following year.Footnote ¹¹² Such words – and subjects – as ‘bodies’, ‘sexuality’, ‘homosexual’, ‘abortion’, ‘pornography’, ‘seduction’, ‘counterculture’, ‘cohabitation’, ‘alcohol’, ‘cannibal’, ‘transgression’, ‘feminist’, ‘intimacy’, ‘sodomy’, ‘rape’, ‘masturbation’, ‘disability’, ‘emotions’, and ‘victimhood’ soon followed.Footnote ¹¹³

By the 2000s, the editors were busier than ever, dealing with more submissions on more subjects, and this growing pressure of business may help explain why they have recently been staying in post for significantly shorter periods than their predecessors did before the 1990s. They have also had to adapt the Journal to the transformative IT revolution, one indication of which was that in 2019, they introduced a new, virtual section entitled ‘Retrospects’, drawing on digital collections from the Journal’s archive, highlighting ‘a theme of longstanding or emergent concern, both within the Journal and across the wider span of historical writing’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The following year, they upscaled the Journal again, to five issues a year, extending to 1,400 pages, one of which was devoted to a particular subject, ranging from Malthus to intoxicants to China.Footnote ¹¹⁵ And of the early career scholars getting into print, a greater proportion than before have been women, among them Catherine Merridale, Alex Walsham, Aileen Fyfe, Abigail Green, Annabel Brett, Selina Todd, Rosalind Crone, Claire Langhamer, Helen McCarthy, and Harriet Lyon.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Yet as so often in the Journal’s history, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. The articles dealing with what might be termed ‘fashionable’ subjects have never been more than a small minority of all those published, averaging less than one a year in recent times, while most contributions, whether written by men or women, remain concerned with high politics, governance, the state, international relations, foreign affairs, religion, and political thought, and still focus primarily on the United Kingdom and Europe than on the wider world beyond.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Many of them might have appeared in the Journal at any point since the 1950s, and some even before that.

Regardless of the changed interests of editors and members of the editorial board during the third phase of its existence, the Journal has remained a largely ‘traditional’ one, since the surest way to get published in it is to submit articles on appropriately traditional subjects, which is what a growing number of female contributors have recently been doing. The obverse is that feminist historians of women and gender are more likely to publish in such specialist periodicals as the Journal of Women’s History (1989), the Women’s History Review (1992), Gender & History (1989), and the Journal of the History of Sexuality (1990). There might also be a third explanation. There was an unhappy episode in 1982 that is worth recalling and might have had consequences. That year, the Journal published a review article by Patricia Hilden who had recently been awarded her doctorate at Cambridge, on some current work in women’s history. She was fiercely critical of two books, both by men, regretting that James McMillan had not benefited ‘from the slowly developing skills of feminist historians’, while adding that it was ‘difficult to see how he might have done, given their lamentable absence from most of British academia’, and she excoriated Brian Harrison’s volume as ‘a monument to unconscious sexism’ which ‘collapses into absurdity’. They replied in kind, denouncing her article as a ‘disgrace’ to the Journal, for propagating ‘misleading views’ and encouraging ‘unscholarly practice’, in a display of ‘feminist trahison des clercs’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ To be sure, Hilden’s own work was also criticized by some female historians, but this blistering attack may have discouraged feminist contributors to the Journal, few of whom have appeared in its pages.Footnote ¹¹⁹

There is one further episode in the Journal’s relatively recent history deserving of attention. In 1997 the editors accepted a scathing historiographical review by Ruth Bettina Birn of Daniel Goldhagen’s much-hyped book, Hitler’s willing executioners, a description he applied to most Germans, whom he believed were practitioners of what he termed ‘eliminationist antisemitism’, which he claimed had always been the very essence of the country’s national identity, having developed and intensified over several centuries.Footnote ¹²⁰ Birn, who at the time was the chief historian at the War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Section of the Canadian Department of Justice, challenged Goldhagen’s basic argument, noting that his book lacked a bibliography or list of archival collections, that it presented a ‘one-dimensional picture’ in a style characterized by ‘verbosity and repetitiveness’, that his use of sources was often ‘uncritical’ and devoid of context, that many of his conclusions were ‘without foundation’, and that his work ‘catered to those who want simplistic answers to difficult questions’ and to those ‘who seek the security of prejudices’.Footnote ¹²¹ Goldhagen responded by demanding an apology and a retraction, which the editors refused, and he was offered the opportunity of publishing a reply, which he declined. Instead, he threatened the Journal, its editors, and Cambridge University Press with a libel action, with the aim of silencing his critics. The episode received wide press coverage in Germany and the United States, which made it a unique episode in the Journal’s history. But the editors, Cambridge University Press, and their libel lawyers all held firm, and in the end the threat of a lawsuit died away.

V

Like any periodical devoted to the subject, the Journal is both a purveyor and a product of history, its century-long story involving individuals and events, but also contexts and processes. Its origins and foundations can be precisely dated and described, and it has grown, developed, and expanded over time, in some ways that Temperley and Butterfield might never have imagined. There is much to be learned about it from the articles it has published, but the Journal’s evolution can only be fully explained with reference to such wider issues as the changing scale and nature of higher education, the continuing transformation of the historical profession, and the innovations and samenesses in history-writing itself. Two extreme versions of what has happened might be the following (and it is not coincidental that they owe something to the opposed positions espoused by Stone and Elton). One would be that over the hundred years of its existence, the Journal has triumphantly transitioned from narrow, archivally-based scholarship to a broader recognition of what constitutes legitimate and stimulating historical enquiry. The alternative would be a pessimistic lament that rigorous, professional, source-based research had been abandoned for the mistaken pursuit of ephemeral fashionability and misguided interdisciplinarity. Neither of those descriptions gets the Journal right, as the balance between continuity and change has been differently struck throughout the three phases of its existence, and now as in the past, it is heading neither to paradise nor to perdition. History, E. H. Carr famously observed, is an ‘unending dialogue between the present and the past’, and for a century, the Journal has helped facilitate many aspects of those essential conversations.Footnote ¹²² That is a limited but significant achievement, and perhaps, even now, the fourth phase of its own unfinished history is already beginning.