Clive Holmes
Historian and charismatic teacher whose studies included Charles I, witchcraft and the legal system
CLIVE HOLMES, who has died aged 78, was one of the most respected historians of the early modern era, with an unusually wide range of interests, notably the English Civil War, the legal system, witchcraft, fen drainage and colonial North America.
But Holmes was first and foremost a charismatic teacher who inspired generations of students at Cambridge, Cornell and Oxford. This was recognised with teaching awards at Cornell in 1975 and Oxford in 2005: he retained an extraordinary zest for communicating ideas in tutorials, seminars, and lectures throughout his long career.
Holmes’s scholarly centre of gravity was the tumultuous mid-17th century in England. Having edited important primary sources in The Suffolk Committees for Scandalous Ministers 1644-1646 (1970) with precocious skill while still in his twenties, Holmes really made his mark with his first monograph, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (1974). This remains unsurpassed as an account of the military and political entity that incubated the career of Oliver Cromwell, and from whose ranks the core of the New Model Army would be drawn. Scholars as different as JP Cooper and Christopher Hill agreed that a major new talent had emerged.
Holmes then developed his research in superficially paradoxical directions. On the one hand, he wrote Seventeenth-century Lincolnshire (1980), one of the finest county histories to emerge from two decades of intense engagement with local history in Anglo-american academic circles. But in the same year he also published a searing critique of one version of such history, the “county community” thesis.
Pioneered in particular by Alan Everitt, this stressed the extent to which England was a localised society, with even most gentry having horizons limited by county borders. In “The County Community in Stuart Historiography” (Journal of British Studies), Holmes argued against an excessive focus on the insularity of early modern communities, stressing instead their awareness of national issues and problems.
It is hard to evoke at this distance the impact this piece had on what had threatened to become a rather sterile orthodoxy; indeed it heralded a turning of the historiographical tide, and indicated an enduring temperamental scepticism about fashionable ideas. Bandwagons were there to be overturned rather than jumped on.
Holmes’s focus on the political societies of eastern England inspired him to develop numerous interests of much broader significance. If his passionate engagement in teaching helped to ensure that his published output would not rival in volume that of some of his contemporaries, it had the advantage of honing his ideas in dialogue and discussion, lending crisp, argumentative rigour to all his work.
One of his Oxford undergraduate courses led him to publish, jointly with his wife, Felicity Heal, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500-1700 (1994). Another led him to produce his last full-length book, Why Was Charles I Executed? (2006). The rather narrow title and deceptive appearance as a student primer led to it being undervalued by many of Holmes’s peers, who missed the analytical rigour that ran through every chapter, and were bemused by his almost aggressive lack of interest in the “three kingdoms” paradigm that dominated Civil War studies.
His fierce fidelity to the evidence as he read it was also evident in vigorous scholarly disputes with Mark Kishlansky over the nature of Charles I’s governance – Holmes thought him a disastrous and self-destructive ruler – and with Sean Kelsey over the purpose and character of the King’s trial in January 1649.
Holmes robustly defended an older sense of the trial as having been designed to kill the King, largely driven by the New Model Army’s bitterness about the necessity of fighting a bloody second civil war in 1648.
The archival resources available to him at Cornell inspired Holmes’s interest in the history of witchcraft. His numerous articles examined with peculiar insight the relationship between the mental worlds of the accused and the legal establishment. He was particularly strident in his assertion that gender and misogyny remained key categories for any discussion of witchcraft beliefs and prosecutions.
Holmes thought of himself primarily as an historian of law and legal institutions. He was bracingly clear-eyed about the self-interest of the early modern legal profession, and one of the few scholars capable of wrestling with the often intractable records it has left behind.
It is a major loss that he never completed a long-heralded monograph on the Court of Chancery
– no one else could have brought its arcane complexities to life and placed it within the wider social context.
Clive Holmes was born on November 10 1943, the first of two sons to Ralph, a Metropolitan policeman, and Lilian. A schoolboy scholarship took him to Dulwich College, prior to a superb undergraduate and graduate career at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.
Holmes retained a wary affection for his cantankerous doctoral supervisor, JH Plumb, but claimed to have been inspired to become a university teacher after a term working with the classical scholar, Moses Finley.
After Caius, Holmes took up a research fellowship at Plumb’s college, Christ’s. Plumb was greatly enamoured of the Ivy League and was instrumental in Holmes’s decision to accept a three-year appointment at Cornell University. He moved there in 1969 and blossomed personally and professionally.
The three-year appointment swiftly became a tenured full professorship, and the experience of giving “Western Civ” lectures to huge, diverse audiences consolidated the confidence as a communicator that became such a feature of his career.
Holmes returned to the UK in 1987, becoming Fellow and Tutor in History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He rapidly consolidated a reputation as one of the greatest college tutors of his generation and supervised more than 30 doctoral students with unstinting care and affection.
Holmes served as Waynflete Lecturer at Oxford in 1983-84. He claimed that his only real disappointment at Oxford was never to have been invited to give the prestigious Ford Lectures. The loyalty he inspired
was shown when a major conference was organised to mark his retirement, its proceedings later published as a Festschrift, Revolutionary England, c.1630 -c.1660 (2016).
Almost all the contributors were former students, most of whom would agree with the trenchant words of a stray student evaluation form surviving in his college personnel file: “Best tutorials I have ever had and the best tutor.”
Holmes had two sons with his first wife Patricia, Michael and Philip, of whose achievements and families he was immensely proud. His second marriage, to Felicity Heal, provided a devoted companion and a powerful intellectual collaborator. It also brought a beloved stepdaughter, Bridget Heal, now a leading historian of the European reformation.