Biographies​ of scholars often struggle to do justice to their subjects’ scholarship. Describing the slow, patient exploration of evidence and the stuttering formulation of interpretations need not be as exciting as watching paint dry, but scholarship remains an activity that is hard to communicate and nigh impossible to render in dramatic terms. The temptation is strong to concentrate on the more accessible or intelligible aspects of a life, perhaps an unusual family story, perhaps a more than averagely charged set of sexual or emotional experiences, perhaps the decoded (or imputed) political implications of the work. Scholars who were also public intellectuals are particularly prone to attract the interest of biographers and publishers alike, a deuxième carrière in politics or the media furnishing many more points of entry for the biographer conscious of the hoped-for general reader’s limited appetite for the arcana of specialised research. Good books can, of course, be written in this vein, but there is a risk that the activities to which the individual devoted the bulk of their working lives, and which most probably earned them the initial prominence that brought other kinds of opportunities, will be passed over, if not in silence then in the form of brisk external summaries of a book or article, concise enough not to interrupt the main narrative flow.

The problem is compounded by the often contrasting forms of competence in play. One writer may be an accomplished biographer, but without any real expertise in the field in which their current subject worked. Another may be a fellow specialist working on the same material and issues as their subject, but lacking any cultivated familiarity with the sources and problems of modern intellectual history and unpractised at turning their findings into a readable story. It’s a perennial debate: do you have to be a trained philosopher to write the life of an important philosopher (perhaps you do); do you need to be a specialist in the period on which a leading historian worked to write their biography (perhaps you don’t)?

Christopher Hill had a fortunate life on the whole, and his good fortune now extends beyond the grave in the shape of this excellent biography. Michael Braddick is himself a distinguished historian of 17th-century England, the period that was the focus of practically all of Hill’s copious writings, and he is especially well versed in the debates surrounding the causes and character of the English Civil War – for so long one of the consuming preoccupations of both professional historiography and national self-definition. What’s more, his research has been assiduous not just in the sources (many of them unpublished) bearing directly on Hill’s life, but also in the relevant scholarship about 20th-century Britain, higher education, and the long agonies of the left. The more than a thousand unobtrusive footnotes in the book testify to the thoroughness with which Braddick has addressed his task.

Experience suggests, however, that Braddick’s careful scholarship and considered judgments may do little to shift the received caricature of Hill. Wasn’t he a Marxist who selected his facts to fit his determinist template? Wasn’t he a communist who subordinated Britain’s interests to those of the Soviet Union? Wasn’t he a permissive progressive who encouraged student troubles in the 1960s and 1970s to the detriment of the country’s universities? Hasn’t subsequent scholarship pretty much trashed all of his work? That all these familiar claims are, stated in this bald form, false may not do much to prevent their repetition, not least because, as usual with such charges, there are odd grains of truth scattered across the lush meadows of falsehood.

Hill was born in 1912 into a well-off Yorkshire family. His father was a prosperous solicitor, and the substantial family home was serviced by a cook, a gardener and a live-in maid. One of Hill’s college friends who visited in the mid-1930s recalled a ‘magnificent residence’, the grounds of which included a river and a tennis court: ‘A servant brought us lunch at a table on the lawn.’ Nonetheless, his parents were zealous Methodists, given more to high-mindedness than high living: on Sundays the family attended two services and abstained ‘from all worldly activities’. Hill was to outgrow the religious beliefs but, like many on the left in late 19th and early 20th-century Britain, he cherished the ethical earnestness his upbringing had implanted in him. Cricket and rugby played their usual part in the school years of a boy from such a background (he attended St Peter’s School, York, first as a day boy, later as a boarder), but Hill was also intellectually precocious, reading his way through his father’s library before entering Balliol College, Oxford as a scholar in 1931. University prizes plus a fellowship at All Souls followed his graduation in 1934, and after a two-year interval as a lecturer at Cardiff he, almost inevitably, returned to Balliol as a tutorial fellow in 1938. The college was to remain his academic home until his retirement, as its master, forty years later.

Like many serious young people in the 1930s, Hill was appalled at what he saw as the failure of capitalism and the lurch towards fascism, finding in Marxism both a persuasive analysis of what was happening and a source of hope for a better world. In 1935 he spent six months in Russia, impressed by the Soviet experiment; he formally joined the Communist Party of Great Britain the following year. These were commitments for which he was never to be forgiven by sections of the British media, even though he became progressively disillusioned with the Soviet Union in the 1950s and resigned from the party in 1957. Braddick carefully teases out the strands in Hill’s Marxism, emphasising that it was far from determinist and that he was drawn as much to the prospect of a society that would make it possible to live a life of authentic self-expression as to any more narrowly economic analysis. This is sympathetically done, though some of Hill’s writings of the late 1930s and 1940s do sound like more orthodox Marxist fare. In particular, The English Revolution 1640, published first as a long essay in 1940 and subsequently as a separate volume, did advance a recognisably economic and class-based interpretation of the causes of the Civil War, taking aim at the complacent Whig view that revolutions didn’t happen in England (Hill, like so many of his contemporaries, spoke of ‘England’ where we might now think ‘Britain’ to be more accurate). His later comments about the book suggested that its confident materialism was something of an embarrassment to him, though it made a lasting mark by insisting that Britain, like France and the United States, had experienced one of the revolutions that shaped the modern world.

Hill had a relatively quiet war: a transfer to Whitehall saved him from the rigours of serving as an infantry officer. He had acquired some Russian during his months in Moscow and was given a job on the Russia desk of the Foreign Office in the later years of the war. This raised questions that his more excitable political critics were to return to throughout his career: did this committed communist really serve the national interest, or did he use his access to classified information to further the policies of the Soviet Union? Even decades later, at the time of Hill’s death in 2003, these charges were still being thrown around in the right-wing press. He was described, misleadingly, as ‘Stalin’s most devoted admirer’, and his role as an academic was called into question in the most lurid terms: ‘Surely someone who could stomach Stalin’s purges, his terror, famines and his subjugation of half a continent was no more suited to guide young minds than a recently convicted paedophile.’ So much for Hill the inspiring teacher and widely admired college head. Andrew Roberts in the Daily Mail went so far as to assert, as though it were an established fact rather than wild fiction, that Hill had been unmasked as a ‘spy’ and had been ‘revealed as an “agent of influence” for Stalin’s USSR at the very time he was in charge of the Russian desk at the Foreign Office’. Braddick patiently sifts the evidence, finding no indication that Hill’s acknowledged membership of the party ever compromised his war service, concluding that these charges seem to ‘have taken flight on the currents of hot air generated in the fevered atmosphere of the late Cold War mole hunts’.

For some years after 1945, the British security agencies kept tabs on Hill’s doings, as they did on other known party members. It must be doubted whether MI5 ever intended to provide invaluable assistance to future historians, but its obsessive logging of various suspects’ everyday doings (recording, for example, that Hill lent his car to a party organiser ‘to give a talk in Banbury’) has resulted in a small goldmine of sources in the National Archives, well exploited by Braddick as by Richard Evans in his biography of Hill’s comrade, Eric Hobsbawm. In this respect, biographers of leading left-wing figures have an advantage that those who write about less suspect individuals can only envy.

Khrushchev’s revelations in February 1956 about the crimes of the Stalinist era, followed by the brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising later that year, precipitated a crisis of conscience for many of the intellectuals in the Communist Party of Great Britain, an organisation whose hierarchy was still apparently committed to following the Moscow line. Hill did not rush to resign his party membership (he rarely rushed into things, it seems), attempting for some time to cajole the CPGB leadership into more open acknowledgment of unpalatable truths, while being reproached by more decisive, or more outraged, comrades such as Edward Thompson and John Saville, who left to establish an independent journal. But in the spring of 1957 he accepted the inevitable and left the party.

It can be hard now to recover what a volcanic existential crisis this was for those, like Hill, whose lives had for so long been given meaning and direction by their commitment to an organisation they saw as fighting for a noble political purpose. He and his second wife, Bridget, whom he had married at the beginning of 1956, shared this disorienting experience. She too was a member of the party who had become progressively disillusioned with its supine hierarchy, and they had jointly drafted critical statements while there had still seemed some hope of internal reform. (Bridget, an LSE graduate who went on to become a tutor in extra-mural education and for the Open University, subsequently made significant scholarly contributions to the history of the 18th century and of feminism.) After 1957, Hill continued to support a variety of left-wing causes, but could not be described as an activist. For his biographer, Hill’s leaving the party had the unfortunate effect of drying up the rich stream of detail recorded in the National Archives. By 1962, the future master of Balliol was, apparently, no longer a threat to national security.

In the decade since 1945, Hill had found his major intellectual stimulus in the discussions of the CPGB’s Historians Group, whose members included Thompson, Hobsbawm, Saville and Rodney Hilton. Drawing inspiration rather than dogma from Marxism, the group asked the kind of large questions about the transition from feudalism to capitalism that the orthodox historiography of the time regarded as too speculative and unprofessional. One major outcome of these discussions was the foundation in 1952 of the periodical Past and Present, subtitled in its early years ‘a journal of scientific history’. Though several Marxist historians were prominent in the venture, the journal’s central commitment was, more broadly, to structural, analytical and comparative history, explicitly repudiating the then dominant focus on political and constitutional narrative, and a number of leading non-Marxist historians were recruited to help to pursue this aim. Hill was one of the founding members of the editorial board and remained active in its affairs until 1968, by which time it had moved away from its origins within the Historians Group and towards becoming perhaps the most sought-after and fashionable English-language academic historical journal of its time.

The stimulus derived from discussions within the Historians Group is not immediately legible in the pages of Hill’s first major scholarly monograph, Economic Problems of the Church: From Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament (1956). This is an instance where the difficulties of writing a readable biography of a scholar come to the fore. Hill’s book was the result of a formidable amount of rather technical research into the consequences of the sale of church lands during the Reformation, bringing out how subsequent attempts to re-endow the church and assert its various rights over local communities generated resistance, especially among those intent on the economic exploitation of their recently acquired assets. This response found a voice in, without being reducible to, a Puritan critique of ecclesiastical hierarchies. It was a subtle argument, attending to material conditions without being determinist. The book was, obliquely, a contribution to the long-running debate, associated above all with Max Weber and R.H. Tawney, on the relations between capitalism and Protestantism, though Hill shied away from pitching it in conceptual terms (Braddick elsewhere observes that ‘Hill had a life-long aversion to explicit theoretical reflection’).

Economic Problems of the Church was a scholarly book primarily addressed to other scholars, but as Hill’s career advanced he increasingly wrote with non-specialist audiences in mind. Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (1958) was his first collection of essays, published by the ‘trade’ house of Secker and Warburg; The Century of Revolution: 1603-1714 (1961) became a popular textbook; Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (1964), also from Secker, presented a widely ramifying analysis of the social roots of religious dissent. In 1961 he received one of his profession’s major accolades in the invitation to deliver the Ford Lectures at Oxford (Braddick drily records that ‘the secret services kept a cutting of the Times announcement’). It was a sign of Hill’s increasing prominence (as well as a conception of public broadcasting that we have lost) that versions of Hill’s lectures were broadcast on the Third Programme and serialised in the Listener. In 1965 the same radio station devoted an entire programme to a discussion of his work, presented by Veronica Wedgwood, doyenne of popular history at the time, the advert for which described Hill as ‘the leading historian of 17th-century England’.

However, the book that issued from his Ford lectures, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), provoked critical responses by some fellow specialists, a harbinger of more serious attacks to come. Hill wanted to establish that ‘the English Revolution’, itself a somewhat polemical label, had intellectual origins in the way that the American and French Revolutions did, and that its roots were to be found not in the established institutions of learning but, above all, among Puritans and radical scientists, often operating in more marginal settings. His critics thought that the case depended on a somewhat selective handling of the sources and a tendency to exaggerate the connections, sometimes seeming to rise to a natural affinity, between science and Puritanism. The charge that Hill manipulated the evidence to fit a preconceived story became a refrain in the reception of all his later work. In some ways the most successful later book, certainly the most popular, was The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (1972). Its opening sentence announced its theme: ‘Popular revolt was for many centuries an essential feature of the English tradition, and the middle decades of the 17th century saw the greatest upheaval that has yet occurred.’ Hill proposed that the most radical challenge to the established order came from the wilder shores of religious dissent, from Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians and numerous other sects and splinter groups. They were driving forces of the ‘revolution which never happened’, the one that ‘might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the Protestant ethic’. At a time when countercultural ideas were enjoying considerable attention, the book seemed to chime with the zeitgeist: the paperback sold a remarkable 46,000 copies, and ten years after publication the book was still selling three thousand copies a year.

Some of Hill’s admirers regarded The World Turned Upside Down as his best, or at least most representative, book. C.H. George wrote: ‘The stories, quotations, personality portraits, evocations of forgotten crises; the warm, tireless patience with which Hill threads his way through the mad theology of angry, inspired, hopeful and hopeless religiosity; the final effort to see all the intellectual and emotional chaos as illuminating and relevant to both their revolution and ours … It is a totally successful work of historical imagination.’ Others saw yet another instance of Hill selectively mining a limited range of sources to produce a pleasing tapestry that turned out on closer inspection to be more holes than fabric.

Perhaps the fiercest such attack came from the American historian J.H. Hexter, reviewing Hill’s second collection of essays, Change and Continuity in 17th-Century England, in the TLS in 1975. Hexter pulled no punches in convicting Hill of being a ‘lumper’ who misrepresented the evidence so as to confer a convenient shared identity on diverse individuals. (I remember reading this attack when it was published; it led me to conclude that Hill was guilty but Hexter was nasty, and to wonder whether I really wanted to be an academic after all – over-hasty conclusions in each case.) Hill wrote a dignified reply, though mud stuck. In general he did not engage in disputation with his critics, moving on with what some found an irritating mixture of intellectual confidence and cheerful serenity.

Those temperamental qualities stood Hill in good stead during his time as master of Balliol from 1965 to 1978, since these were the years of the so-called ‘student troubles’. He was more sympathetic to many of the students’ demands than most of those in a comparable position, but also took seriously the duty of steering the college towards the least divisive outcomes. No head of an educational institution wins universal praise, but Hill emerged from these stormy years more admired than denounced. He navigated the cross-currents, as one assessment put it, by ‘avoiding confrontations wherever possible, imposing discipline when really necessary, and offering private help to some of those who got themselves into difficulties’. He was described as having an ‘instinctive sympathy for libertarian revolt … tempered by a dislike for gesture politics and self-indulgence’. On one cause dear to his heart he had to accept temporary defeat: in the early 1970s he had pressed for Balliol to be one of the first Oxford colleges to admit women as undergraduates; the governing body havered and obstructed, with the result that the change was achieved only in 1979, the year after Hill retired as master.

Although many of those who have not actually read Hill tend to assume that his work dwells principally on economic conditions, it became more evident as his career progressed that his own strongest inclinations were to intellectual history, and – even more surprising to some – that he devoted much attention, early and late, to literary texts. As early as 1946 he published a substantial essay on ‘Society and Andrew Marvell’, which was to be followed by many more, including ‘Clarissa Harlowe and her Times’ (1955), as well as a major study, Milton and the English Revolution (1977). Braddick has unearthed a revealing letter from Hill to the literary scholar Margot Heinemann in 1984 in which he reflected: ‘I secretly suspect I was rather more overawed by Leavis in the 1930s and 1940s than you suggest – after all, he had his good sides.’ Hill was critical of the nostalgic distortions evident in invocations of a lost ‘organic society’, especially as expressed in some of the volumes of the Leavisite-dominated Pelican Guide to English Literature, and he fiercely rejected Leavis’s demotion of Milton from his long-established place at the apex of the tradition of English poetry. Yet disagreement can also be a form of connection (Leavis had, after all, proposed to devote a whole year of his ideal English course to the study of ‘17th-century civilisation’), and Leavis’s intransigent radicalism would have engaged Hill’s sympathies. By the late 1980s Hill could remark that ‘the best history of England today is being written by literary critics and literary historians.’

The slighting of fellow historians that may seem to be implied by this remark partly reflected the fact that by this date the historiographical tide had turned against the search for large social-structural explanations of the Civil War, and indeed in some cases against the very conception of there having been one major upheaval rather than a contingently connected set of lesser developments with diverse and usually local causes. Some of this revisionism found expression in a series of small-scale regional studies, sometimes looking at the activities of the gentry in a single county, resting on formidably detailed research; other work redescribed events in terms of a crisis in the relations of the ‘three kingdoms’ in Britain or of the comparative history of wars of religion. In some ways this reaction could be seen as a triumph of professionalism, the puncturing of exaggerated generalisations by more and better scholarship. But it was also true that the new revisionism ran parallel to wider changes in politics and society in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, when a triumphant individualism was dismissive of systemic analyses, and anything smacking of a Marxisant approach was derided as outmoded as well as pernicious. Hill’s star waned accordingly, though he continued to publish prolifically in the 1990s. The words of an anonymous peer reviewer of an essay by Hill (more fruitful sleuthing by Braddick) capture the unsympathetic reception of much of his later work: ‘There is a sweep and scope to the article … Unfortunately there is a massive rehearsal of material discussed elsewhere and there is an immense amount of sleight of hand and an illusion of a case being built up where the evidence is actually incredibly thin.’

Braddick​ claims that Hill’s work reveals ‘the shifting relationship of the British left to the British past’. In so far as that’s true, one is tempted to suggest it reveals a shift from a time when that past, especially the Civil War, mattered a good deal to left politics to a time when it does not now seem to be regarded as directly relevant. This raises larger questions about what exactly is involved in situating oneself in relation to a particular slice of history. Given that no two situations are identical, and indeed that no two eras are strictly comparable, how far can relevant inferences be drawn for the present from how things used to be? Knowledge of the past may, in some cases, provide a series of inoculations against reductive or simplistic generalisations, but it cannot provide us with a template or an imitable model. Braddick suggests that Hill’s work showed that the fact that certain things could happen in the past demonstrated that they can, similarly, be done now, but does even that weak conclusion strictly follow? The circumstances of ‘now’ may be too different for any meaningful carry-over, and even the capacities or characteristics of the potential actors may have fundamentally changed, too.

Yet we do still feel that there may be something inspiring or enabling about finding predecessors with whom we can identify. The connection appears to be psychological rather than logical: the example of selected predecessors stirs and fortifies us even though it can provide no precise guide to action in the present. Hill wanted to document the English radical tradition, yet also thereby to take his place in it. But for something to count as a ‘tradition’, stretching from at least the 17th century to the present, much of the specificity of each moment or contribution has to be stripped out. After all, Hill had practically no beliefs or experiences in common with 17th-century Ranters and Muggletonians, yet he felt there was something about the task of recovering and documenting their dissidence, and its near suppression by an older style of Whig history, that validated a popular, oppositional resistance to official power in the present.

The 17th-century Civil War (more polemically termed ‘the English Revolution’) and the 18th-century industrial revolution were for decades the nodes around which historiographical and political energies were clustered, each of them seen not just as the key episodes in accounting for Britain’s distinctive history but also, without too much strain, as illuminating the development of ‘modernity’ more generally and as the testing grounds for the most ambitious explanatory schemas. As Braddick justly observes, ‘England’s route to modernity shaped not only Britain’s experience of modernisation, but that of the whole globe. Hill’s interests reflected these central preoccupations in academic life and resonated more widely because so much of British life from the 1950s to the 1980s was debated in these terms.’

Early in his career Hill had drawn inspiration less from other professional historians and more from those unclassifiable figures on the left who were exploring various aspects of the development of capitalism and Britain’s generative place within it – figures such as A.L. Morton, Dona Torr and Maurice Dobb. In time these figures, and the questions they were addressing, came to seem representative of, perhaps only relevant to, the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, displaced in the 1960s by more Europeanised and theoretical forms of radical thought, derided in the 1980s in the course of a wider reaction against left-wing ideas. Hill may seem to have morphed into an intellectual and literary historian by this date, but at a deeper level he was continuing, in his oblique and sometimes pointillist way, to ponder the big questions that had helped form him in the 1930s and 1940s.

‘His work is flawed, but few historians since have attempted to match its totalising ambition and moral seriousness as a contribution to the improvement of the world around us, nor its ambition to contextualise the strengths and weaknesses of the modern British state in a coherent understanding of its past.’ This, the closing sentence of Braddick’s book, is a generous tribute, though I wonder if its emphasis is quite right. Hill didn’t really connect his history to the modern state in the way that, say, Thompson did, and even ‘totalising’ seems somewhat exaggerated when compared to, say, the broad comparative canvases of Hobsbawm. Hill devoted his attention almost exclusively to 17th-century England; he wrote far more about intellectual and religious history than political history; he re-created the world of those who for the most part did not possess wealth and power and who, in their time, were conspicuously on the losing side in the defining struggle of the century. The manner of his writing was detailed rather than schematic, relying on patchworks of quotation rather than propositional bludgeoning or systematic theory-building. Yet Braddick’s study suggests Hill may have had a bigger impact on the scholarly understanding of 17th-century Britain than anyone in the second half of the 20th century, and, despite the criticisms of his work, for many he represented a model of how to combine serious history with serious politics. We can hardly be said to be in a situation at present that allows us to be condescending about such an achievement.