King Pym and his ‘Happy, Scrappy Jester’

Abstract

AbstractThe Reign of King Pym took mid 17th‐century studies in a new direction when it was published in 1941. Anglo‐American collaboration in the field in the 1920s and 1930s had been rooted in making available in print to a scholarly readership one of the private diaries of the Long Parliament. J.H. Hexter's book, produced at a time when Anglo‐American collaboration was temporarily on hold under pressure of global war, changed the direction of academic discourse by its format (monograph), content (a detailed study of a brief period in a unique parliament) and tone (brash and unrestrained by the idiom of the academy). The book scoped out the power of John Pym, but also its limitations, and introduced to scholarly debate a categorisation of political groupings in 1642–3 that held sway for 40 years. The first direct attacks on Hexter's work, beginning in the 1980s, were weakened by overstatement. In the forthcoming History of Parliament volumes, Pym's signal importance is reasserted, but Hexter's concept of the ‘middle group’ is found to be untenable.