h i s t o r y excursions lengthen. Prudence could be invoked to temper a few overenthusiastic speculations: there are no grounds, for instance, for excluding an intermediate alphabetical text between the cuneiform and biblical versions of the flood story, and the Old Testament’s roll call of longlived patriarchs is not necessarily modelled on Sumerian king lists. And Finkel is, on the whole, better on the parallels between Babylon and the Bible than the differences. Two unresolved issues clamour for attention. First, Noah’s boat was glaringly different in shape and construction from Mesopotamian prototypes (though, as Finkel points out, similar in size). Finkel’s solution is to imagine Hebrew scribes consulting an unknown Sumerian version, in which the ark imitates the long reed boats of the Marsh Arabs. But every traditional, culturally transgressive story tends to get warped by updating or adaptation in successive versions. Second, the biggest difference the Hebrew version makes is to the moral framework of the myth: in Mesopotamian accounts, gods unleash the flood capriciously, or for no declared reason, or to eliminate a distractingly, irritatingly ‘noisy’ world that is becoming uncontrollably overpopulated. The Jews’ God, by contrast, acted justly, to punish evildoers and spare the only righteous man.
Noah, in other words, is a hero in a long literary transition which documents the rise of notions of a moral universe in place of a world of chaos and caprice. Early in the second millennium BC – at about the time Mesopotamian scribes arrested the development of the flood myth by writing it down as part of the court librarians’ canon – Egyptians began to paint scenes of interrogation after a moral preparation for the next life: the earliest evidence I know of a sense of a morally ordered cosmos. The jackalheaded underworld god, Anubis, supervises the weighing of the souls of the dead. In written accounts of these divine trials, the examined soul abjures sacrilege, sexual perversion and the abuse of power against the weak. Then the good deeds appear: obedience to human laws and divine will and acts of mercy, such as offerings for the gods and the ghosts, bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked ‘and a ferry for him who was marooned’. Irving Finkel has clinched the question of where Judaeans in the sixth century BC got the story of Noah. The problem that remains is where they found the moral cosmology that animates that story. To order this book for £20, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 10
j ohn a damson
Scots at the Top Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings, 1567–1642
By Tim Harris (Oxford University Press 588pp £30)
When, in 1884, the great Victorian historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner published his pioneering History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1603–1642, it took him ten substantial volumes to cover just those 39 years. Tim Harris’s impressive new book manages to survey the same historical terrain rather more briskly, in a single plump volume. But it is not only its succinctness that distinguishes his book from Gardiner’s. In the intervening century, the years between the arrival of James I in London in 1603 and the descent into civil war in 1642 have remained one of the most intensely contested and controversial periods in English – and British – history, and Harris’s account reflects not only how our understanding of the period has advanced, but in important respects how it has doubled back to its Victorian beginnings.
The sharpest difference is in the realm of political ideas. For Gardiner – as for most of the writers who succeeded him – the early 17th century was an age of intense, and ultimately irreconcilable, constitutional controversy. In contrast, Harris’s portrayal of politics and ideas in the Stuart realms is of a world singularly innocent of revolutionary intent. Of course, he concedes, there were principles and practices that generated conflict – especially when it came to religion. But neither James I nor Charles I – nor, for that matter, any of their opponents – was trying to effect truly pervasive or permanent change to England’s inherited institutions (Ireland and Scotland were another matter). At least until 1642, secular politics took place in a world where a broad ‘consensus’ prevailed about the powers and responsibilities of political institutions, be they the crown, parliament or the law. True, Charles sought to strengthen the position of the crown; but to achieve this end, he acted within an essentially ‘traditionalist framework’. It would be wrong, Harris argues, to see Charles I as ‘trying to construct a new type of monarchy in England’.
When truly ‘revolutionary’ change did occur in the late 1640s (with the execution of Charles I, the abolition of monarchy and the establishment of a republic), this was as the unforeseen consequence of events that had run out of control. No one in 1642 had ambitions to initiate a thoroughgoing transformation of the English or the British state, still less to subvert the institution of monarchy. As late as 1641 (the eve of the outbreak of civil war), Harris suggests, there was a sense in which ‘everyone was a royalist’.
Whatever the truth of these claims, Harris’s emphasis on the resilience of monarchy as an institution and the coherence – indeed, the popularity – of many of the policy initiatives undertaken by the first two Stuart kings is one of his book’s most striking and boldly argued revisions. In recent decades, as the old Marxist emphasis on social and economic explanations of the Civil War have fallen from favour, there has been a renewed emphasis on the failings – both moral and managerial – of James I and especially Charles I.
While far from uncritical, Harris presents a much more sympathetic assessment of both rulers’ personalities and accomplishments. Indeed by 1618, Harris argues, James I was well on the way to ‘solving the problems facing his government’, when,
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