Remembering Conrad Russell
It’s now just over three years since the death of Professor Conrad Russell, at the early age of 67, on 13 October 2004. I had the great privilege of being taught by him while an undergraduate at King’s College London in the early 1990s, in his little room overlooking The Strand, with the pilasters and windows of St Mary-le-Strand outside the window as a backdrop and a slight haze of cigarette smoke as an invariable accompaniment. He was a great historian and a great teacher; he was entirely committed to his students, invariably open-handed with his time and his ideas, a great listener (how rare that is), a dazzling talker, and a courteous, generous man.
I still have the essays I wrote for his course on early modern England at King’s. He read them as carefully as he would read the writings of the most eminent scholars, and the comments he left as he read were models of their kind - concise, clear (in terms of content at least, if not handwriting), relevant, provocative. I particularly value his comments on an essay I wrote on ‘Constitutional theories in Early Stuart England’. I began, as historians will when they can’t think how to start an essay, with a quote. It came from Christopher Hill’s Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution: ‘A great revolution cannot take place without ideas. Most men have to believe quite strongly in some ideal before they will kill or be killed’. Beneath this Conrad Russell wrote ‘Fear of being killed may be enough’. That one sentence encapsulates the difference between the traditional Marxism of Hill and the then radical revisionism of Russell and his followers. I didn’t entirely accept Russell’s view then, and I don’t entirely accept it now, but there it is in that seven-word sentence, thrown like a stone into the pool of ideas, sending ripples across its entire surface and distorting everything you thought you could see there. At the end he wrote ‘An excellent essay: it makes me want to argue with it at every turn’. I can’t imagine a compliment I would value more.
For Conrad Russell, to subject an issue to serious argument was the ultimate compliment. Ideas were there to be engaged with, and they had to be substantial enough to stand up to the rigours of analysis and argument (he could be ruthless - although always courteously ruthless - with those that weren’t). His first question when confronted with an idea, a theory, an explanation, no matter how elegant or superficially appealing, would be ‘Where is your evidence?’
He knew historical conclusions can only ever be provisional, and saw the writing of history, whether in weighty books or flimsy essays, as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. That end was understanding, and in a sense that was his view of history as a whole; a never ending engagement with the evidence, a never-ending attempt to understand the world of the past, and thus to enrich and inform the way in which we try to understand the worlds of the present and future.
More on Conrad Russell:
The best obituary is from The Times, 15 October 2004.
Obituary from The Daily Telegraph, 14 October 2004.
Nick Clegg, ‘A legendary Liberal’, The Guardian, 19 October 2004.
King’s College London: Conrad Russell obituary, 14 October 2004.
This search of the Royal Historical Society bibliography brings up Conrad Russell’s publications.
[Note: the quote from Christopher Hill with which I unimaginatively began my undergraduate essay can be found on page 1 of his The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).]
