Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Professor Patrick Collinson
Oration given on 13 April 2000
Chanceor, the Senate of the University has resolved that the degree
of Doctor of the University be conferred upon Patrick Collinson.
Consult any compendium of quotations - be it The Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations or the less august 5000 Gems of Wit and Wisdom,
Memorable Quotations for All Occasions - and you will find that amongst the
longest entries is the one that appears under History. Many are somewhat
cynical, almost slick, aphorisms, such as Napoleon Bonaparte’s dictum that:
“History is a set of lies agreed upon”: or, as the Earl of Chesterfield put it:
“History is only a confused set of facts”; or there is James Joyce’s anguished
cry: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Or what
about Henry Ford’s universally known, but usually misquoted, remark that
appeared first in the Chicago Tribune of 25 May 1916: “History is more or less
bunk.” Indeed, if one were to judge by the many definitions of history
that are listed, one would be forced to the conclusion that a good few of those
that profess history, not to mention many who have made it, are quite unsure
about their chosen discipline.
That is the last charge that could be laid against Professor Patrick
Collinson, eminent historian, brilliant scholar, and someone who has made an
enormous contribution to the development of not just his own segment of history,
but also the discipline as a whole - never mind the generous encouragement that
he has given to those who practice it, especially young academics. There
are many in this university who have found him to be a source of inspiration and
support, for which we are very grateful.
Amongst Professor Collinson’s most notable distinctions (there are too many
to list all of them here) are his Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society,
his Fellowship of the British Academy and his receipt of the award of a CBE in
1993. And he was, of course, Regius Professor of Modern History at the
University of Cambridge from 1988 to 1996. Yet his earlier career could easily
serve as a template for aspiring historians graduating today.
Educated at the King’s School, Ely, and then Pembroke College, Cambridge (he
graduated with first-class honours in 1952), Patrick Collinson then embarked
upon a doctorate at the University of London and was awarded his PhD in 1957.
This was still several years before the massive expansion of higher education
that began in the 1960s. Jobs were not easy to come by; so, following
brief spells as a research assistant, he took himself off to Sudan, where he was
lecturer in history at the University of Khartoum from 1956 to 1961. One
can only guess, but these years probably gave him opportunity and time to
reflect upon his own country and society from a distance, and also to view his
chosen discipline in a wide and, as we might say today, multi-cultural context.
Following his return to Britain from Africa in 1961, Professor Collinson’s
career, although ever upwards in its trajectory, was also geographically
serpentine: assistant lecturer, then lecturer at King’s College, London; a chair
at the University of Sydney from 1965 to 1975, then back to the United Kingdom
to the University of Kent at Canterbury. His next venture was to Sheffield
University, where he was professor of modern history (some of his admirers
believe that his foray north to what was then commonly termed the “Socialist
Republic of Sheffield” was as much a statement of personal commitment as it was
a step up the career ladder of success).
It was while at Sheffield that his and his wife’s love of the Derbyshire
peaks and dales was implanted (they still have a cottage there); but in 1988 he
was tempted south again to All Souls College, Oxford, and then to the even
sunnier clime of California, where he was Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the
Huntington Library.
However, a recitation (particularly an incomplete one such as this) of the
stages in the seemingly inexorable rise of Patrick Collinson leaves out an
indispensable dimension. That is, the focus of his scholarship.
Nowadays there is much discussion about the decline of religion (or at any
rate, of Christianity), as expressed in such quantifiable data as the numbers
taking Communion at Easter-time. Certainly, few would deny that as we
enter the third millennium, Britain is a much more secular society than it was
even fifty years ago. Yet for much of its history, the lives of everyone
in this country were affected, if not directly, then at least tangentially, by
religion. Moreover, the struggles between different confessions were far
from being a purely doctrinal matter: one way or another they impacted upon
politics and society, so that, aware of it or not, much of what we today call
“our national character”, is the product of those conflicts.
Patrick Collinson is above all an ecclesiastical historian. One of his
earliest works concerned the Elizabethan puritan movement (in which our own
region - Essex and Suffolk - figures prominently, as in so much of his
research); another dealt with the struggle for a Reformed Church. These
were followed by the Ford Lectures, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in
English Society 1559-1625. Then came The Godly People: essays on English
Protestantism and Puritanism; The Birthpangs of Protestant England: religious
and cultural change in the 16th and 17th centuries, which in turn were followed
by Elizabethan Essays. The list is far from complete, but it does mark
some of the mile-posts on the highway of scholarly enquiry. What a simple
listing cannot do, however, is reproduce the tingling excitement that good
scholarship such as this can induce.
Professor Collinson is not someone who has, as it were, inoculated himself
from the contemporary world by resort to historical enquiry, as anyone who has
read his inaugural lecture to the University of Cambridge will know.
Entitled De Republica Anglorum, its sub-title is Or, History with the Politics
Put Back. It would take an insider to appreciate the subtleties of some of
the argument, much of which centres on disputations between historians.
But everyone would recognise his common sense when discussing what were then, in
1989, ill-formed criticisms about the teaching of history in British schools and
universities (an issue that has lost none of its topicality - the debate in the
House of Lords three weeks ago on this very issue revealed that, in certain
quarters, at least, those prejudices persist still). It was in that
inaugural lecture that Professor Collinson described himself as “an early
modernist with a prime interest in the history of England in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries;” but it says a great deal about him when, in almost the
same breath, he refers to the “lower echelons of government and public service”
in those days as being the “medieval precursors of N.U.P.E.” Indeed, his
fascination with the Levellers, those radical republicans prominent in England
during the Civil War and suppressed by Cromwell in 1649 is, in a way, his own
green badge of radicalism.
It would be a mistake, of course, to view religion and ecclesiastical history
as being synonymous. It was Machiavelli who said: “There can be no surer
sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.”
Whatever Professor Collinson’s subjective beliefs, it is ecclesiastical history
that has been the main focus of his scholarship. By his labours, he has
enriched our understanding of ourselves and of our society (and, not least, our
region, East Anglia). For that we are deeply grateful.
Chancellor, I present to you Patrick Collinson.