Geoffrey Holmes (historian)

Geoffrey Shorter Holmes (17 July 1928 – 25 November 1993) was an English historian of eighteenth century England.

Academic career

Holmes was born in Sheffield, England. He was educated at Woodhouse grammar school and Pembroke College, Oxford, graduating in 1948. He served in the British Army in India before returning in 1950 to Oxford to do research under historian David Ogg. In 1952 he graduated B.Litt. He taught for seventeen years at the university of Glasgow's history department. From 1969 until retirement in 1983 he taught at Lancaster University. During 1977-1978 he was a visiting fellow at All Souls, Oxford and was awarded the degree of D.Litt by the University of Oxford in 1978. He was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy in 1983 and was a vice-president of the Royal Historical Society (1985-1989).[1]

British Politics in the Age of Anne

Holmes' book on British politics during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) revolutionised understanding of the period. Whereas G. M. Trevelyan and Sir Keith Feiling had described the politics of Anne's reign as dominated by two parties (Whigs and Tories), Robert Walcott subjected the period to a Namierite analysis in which he claimed the period was dominated by various factions based on sectional interests.[2][3] Walcott's thesis was much criticised and Holmes' book provided a new, more convincing interpretation. Holmes used more than fifty manuscript sources that had been unavailable before 1945.[4]

Holmes' thesis is that the Whig/Tory division that was present during William III's reign crystallised into a more rigid two-party polarisation after 1702. His analysis of the division-lists for the House of Commons refuted Walcott's assertion that MPs were loosely attached to party: of 1,064 MPs all except 130 voted on consistent, partisan Whig/Tory lines.[5] MPs struggled over political principles as well as for places, with the Queen's desire for coalition government largely frustrated except when the strength of the two parties was evenly balanced. Only then could the Court function as a third force. The end of her reign witnessed the grudging acceptance of a two-party system.[6]

Henry Horwitz claimed that Holmes replaced Walcott's work with "a bold yet subtle analysis that puts Augustan politics in truer perspective than ever before".[7] J. P. Kenyon said the book was "The crowning achievement of this new school (of late 17th- and early 18th-century historians), and the only work of political history of this century which can stand alongside Namier's Structure of Politics".[8]

Works

Notes

  1. ↑ J. V. Beckett, ‘Obituary: Professor Geoffrey Holmes’, The Independent (27 November 1993).
  2. ↑ G. V. Bennett, ‘Review: British Politics in the Age of Anne’, The English Historical Review Vol. 84, No. 331 (Apr., 1969), pp. 358-359.
  3. ↑ Robert Walcott, 'English Party Politics, 1688-1714' in Essays in Modern English History in Honor of W. C. Abbott (Harvard, 1941) and Robert Walcott, English Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956).
  4. ↑ Bennett, p. 359.
  5. ↑ Bennett, pp. 359-360.
  6. ↑ H. Horwitz, ‘Review: British Politics in the Age of Anne’, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Mar., 1969), p. 93.
  7. ↑ Horwitz, p. 92.
  8. ↑ Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London: Hambledon, 1987), back cover.

Further reading

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