A London Life in the Brazen Age: Francis Langley, 1548-1602 by William IngramReview by: Frank F. FosterThe American Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Jun., 1979), pp. 746-747Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1855457 .

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746 Reviews of Books

tions in 1577, and continued until his death in 159I. Several early chapters, which deal more with pub- lic affairs than with Hatton, add little to our gen- eral understanding of Hatton's role in government. The effort falls regrettably short of success.

Although it is undoubtedly true that Hatton has not enjoyed the attention given by serious histo- rians to Burghley, Walsingham, Leicester, and Es- sex, we are not told why Vines has decided to redress the balance. One reason for Hatton's ne- glect may be the scarcity of evidence. Vines covers his family background, early years, and education in no more than eighteen lines; and she is forced, thereafter, to rely heavily upon two previous stud- ies-the earlier, a letter book and an important source. Eric St. John Brooks made a valiant effort to do Hatton justice in a 1946 biography, which Conyers Read, in his Bibliography of British History: Tudor Period (1959), termed inadequate. It is diffi- cult, however, to discover significant improvement in the present study. Indeed, there are many ways in which Brooks's Hatton has the better of it. Brooks, in much more graceful prose, provides valuable appendixes, more information about Hat- ton, and information about the sources-all of this alongside a more balanced view of him. Surely it cannot be agreed, as Vines suggests, that Hatton was "the Queen's right-hand man . . . in politics and religious policy . . ." (p. 30). This might be said of Burghley or Walsingham, but certainly not of Hatton. In her account of Hatton's income Vines overlooks the significant role of gratuities, a much discussed Elizabethan phenomenon. She also gives Hatton's great manor house at Hold- enby too little attention. There is, in short, little to commend the book, and there are no major inter- pretations at variance with Brooks. Most dis- couraging to the reader, however, is the writing, abounding as it does in eccentricities and in- felicities. Inadequate though it may be, anyone interested in Hatton will be better advised to con- sult Brooks's study, which remains the best we have.

RICHARD C. BARNETT

Wake Forest University

WILLIAM INGRAM. A London Life in the BraZen Age: Francis Langley, I548-i602. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1978. Pp. ix, 335. $17.50.

Some men are born to trouble others. Such a man was Francis Langley. As another younger son of an already large rural family, Francis troubled his parents. He was lodged in London from the age of eight with an ambitious uncle, whom he embar- rassed by misbehaving in the Company of Drap- ers. Through schemes that, if not scandalous, were

at least dishonest, he inflicted loss on those to whom he loaned money. He established himself as a landowner by taking advantage of others' in- debtedness. As a City officer he used his authority to inspect cloth in order to practice extortion. He quarreled with his parish over payment of the tithe. He was charged more than once with as- sault. He took advantage of family and civic con- nections when it suited him, but he never recog- nized the reciprocal claims of these ties. But the wheel of fortune turned both ways, and Langley took as much pain as he gave. Incidentally, he built the Swan playhouse on his Southwark manor called Paris Garden.

On the strength of his acquaintanceship with Langley, William Ingram indulges himself in the convention of age integration by deciding that Langley was "in many ways the embodiment of his times" (p. 7). Fortunately, his nod to this con- vention is just that, for Ingram has produced a thoughtful and satisfying biography of a unique and outrageous Elizabethan, which has the added benefit of demonstrating how biographies can be done against the backdrop of imperfect documen- tation, a typical problem for the early modernist.

The author's method is to squeeze as much juice from each aspect of Langley's life and career as the scanty documents permit and then to elucidate each by placing it in the larger context. Naturally, this method creates a tension between a sharply focused subject and his necessarily more blurred background; the balance is not always successful. The Cadiz expedition and the affair of the dia- mond (stolen from a Portuguese carrack) receive far more attention than Langley's slight participa- tion deserves. The production of "The Isle of Dogs" may or may not have been connected with the demise of the Swan. Even after a lengthy re- cital of the evidence we are uncertain, and subplots on censorship and the players themselves never develop.

On the other hand, the author is mostly in tight control of his material, and his discussion of finan- cial practices in the City, of manorial landholding in a suburban setting, and of the origin and early years of the Swan are richly rewarding. Best of all, we have a vivid and vital portrait of a human life, which asserts itself with sufficient complexity to defy categorization and detail enough to command credibility.

Implicit in the book are some refreshing attacks on the heroic cliches surrounding the Elizabethan age. What comes through is petty greed and con- tentiousness, the appalling delay in transacting any business, the frustrations and indignities of daily life, the constant threat of personal ruin, the inefficiency of local government, and the remorse- less "big brotherism" of the Privy Council, led by

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Modern Europe 747

that ubiquitous and hideous octopus, Sir Robert Cecil.

FRANK F. FOSTER

Denver, Colorado

GEORGE 1H. WILLIAMS et al., editors. Thomas Hooker: 1 'ritings in England and Holland, i626-i633. Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press. 1975. Pp. viii, 435.

This edition of Thomas Hooker's early writings is not complete, omitting as it does a major work, The Souls Preparation for Christ (1632). But it includes a representative collection of sermons and other occasional pieces that survived more or less fortui- tously from Hooker's ministry in England and from Amsterdam. They contain the earliest extant formulations of his thought in two areas of signifi- cance that he subsequently described more defini- tively and voluminously in America: the process of regeneration, or ordo salutatis, and church polity, later expounded as a version of the "New England Way" in the posthumously published A Survey of the Sumrne of Church Discipline. Two of these early works are also of great interest and appeal as a reflection, from the lips of this most affecting of Puritan preachers, of that premigration mentality that confronted the dreadful possibility of the spe- cial relationship between England and God ending in divorce. In the November the Fifth sermon, "The Church's l)eliverances," Hooker asked why God's fury had so far spared "this little cottage, this little England" (p. 67). (Was Hooker the first Little Englander?) In the famous "farewell ser- mon, " "The I)anger of Desertion, " which he preached, as is now clear, before the departure for Holland, Hooker pronounced the terrible verdict: "As sure as God is God, God is going from Eng- land" (p. 244).

Ten original documents are punctuated with es- says by the four editors. George H. Williams writes on Hooker's early biography, Norman Pet- tit on "The Order of Salvation in Thomas Hooker's Thought," Winfried Herget on "The Transcription and Transmission of the Hooker Corpus," and Sargent Bush, Jr., on the Hooker canon. The volume deals competently with textual and theological problems and ends with an ex- haustive bibliography of Hooker's published writ- ings.

But one may regret that the editorial team did not include any historian competent to relate Hooker to what George H. Williams calls "the new understanding of early Stuart nonconformity" (p. i, n.i). Williams and his collaborators betray little evidence of this understanding, and they have made no use of manuscript evidence. The impor-

tant correspondence of Samuel Collins of Brain- tree with Arthur Duck, Laud's chancellor, which tells us much about Hooker at Chelmsford, is cited only from the Calendar of State Papers Domestic and T. W. Davids's Annals of Evangelical Nonconformity in Essex (1863). And the account of John Rogers of Dedham (pp. 140-41) is taken from the Dictionary of National Biography almost word for word. There are mistakes, multiple mistakes in a series of com- ments on the Hampton Court Conference and re- lated events (p. 359). Within one paragraph (p. 223) we are told that the Puritans "observed com- munion by preference every Sunday," that there was such an institution as "the Maundy Thursday Holy Communion of the Church of England," and that prophesying of the congregational type may have been a longstanding tradition "in the weekly rhythms of Puritan Chelmsford." Such statements suggest some detachment from the realities of Eng- lish church life in the early seventeenth century. The consequence is a lack of informed comment where it is most needed-in connection with those writings that illuminate the gestation of Hooker's semiseparatist ecclesiology, The Carnal Hypocrite (1626), and the preface to William Ames's A Fresh Su'it Against Ceremonies (ca. 1633).

PATRICK COLLINSON

University of Kent, (Canterbury

H1. M. COLVIN et al. The IIistory of the Aing's Works. Volume V, I6(o--I782. London: Her Majesty's Sta- tionery Office. 1977. Pp. xxiv, 535. f25.00.

The fifth volume of this series marks the thirteenth year of the enterprise, which now consists of two volumes on the Middle Ages, one on the period 1485-1660 (part one only has appeared) and a fur- ther volume on 1782-1851. The volume devoted to part two of the period 1485-1660 is in active prepa- ration. No treatment of the modern period is planned, which is a shame since such a book would not only include new projects but would document changes in older ones-a crucial issue for historians of architecture and gardening. As a cutoff date i85i does, however, make a certain amount of sense. It was in that year that the Office of the King's Works ceased to be a department of the royal household and became a government ministry. The switch was from an old order of royal patronage to a new one of parliamentary responsibility.

The present volume's dates are equally logical. The monarchy was restored in i66o and continued to build in certain consistent ways until the re- forms of 1782 (described in volume six) rather thor- oughly remodeled the Office of the King's Works.

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