CHRISTOPHER HILL: Christopher Hill, who has died aged 91, was the commanding interpreter of 17th-century England, and of much else besides. As a public figure, he achieved his greatest fame as master of Balliol College, Oxford, a post he held from 1965 until 1978.
Yet it was as the defining Marxist historian of the century of revolution, the title of one of the most widely studied of his many books, that he became known to generations of students around the world.
His posthumous reputation may, however, be somewhat dented by revelations this week in the Times that Hill was assessed, after the event, by the Foreign Office to have been a Soviet "agent of influence" - someone who would be sympathetic to approaches without necessarily being a paid agent - during his years as head of its own Russian Desk.
It would be no exaggeration to say that Hill created the way in which the people of late 20th-century Britain looked at the history of the 17th century. From 1940, when he published his tercentenary essay, The English Revolution 1640, his own voluminously expanding and unfailingly literate work became the starting point of most subsequent interpretation, even for critics. He was, E.P. Thompson once said, the dean and paragon of English historians.
Hill was born in York, where his father was a solicitor. His parents were Methodists, a fact to which he attributed his lifelong political and intellectual apostasy.
At St Peter's School in York, his academic prowess was immediately evident. It is said that, when Hill was 16, the two Balliol dons - Vivien Galbraith and Kenneth Bell - who marked his entrance papers agreed to award him 100 per cent, before travelling to York to capture him for the college.
His association with Balliol was to continue, with only brief interruptions, from his arrival in 1931 until retirement as master 47 years later. Academic honours regularly fell his way: the prestigious Lothian Prize in 1932, a first-class degree in 1934 and an All Souls fellowship that winter.
Exactly when he became a Marxist and why is uncertain, since Hill was always notoriously inscrutable. He once claimed it came about through trying to make sense of the 17th-century metaphysical poets.
But he was also an undergraduate during the period of the great depression, the hunger marches, the New Deal, Hitler's rise and the first (favourable) impact of Stalin in the west. He attended G.D.H. Cole's Thursday Lunch Club, where, as he once put it, "I was forced to ask questions about my own society which had previously not occurred to me."
By the time he graduated, Hill had joined the Communist Party. In 1935 he spent a year in the Soviet Union, and formed a lasting affection for Russian life - and a somewhat less lasting one for Soviet politics.
After Moscow, he lectured at University College, Cardiff, before returning to Balliol as a fellow and tutor in modern history. In 1940 he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry, before becoming a major in the intelligence corps and being seconded to the Foreign Office from 1943 until the end of the war.
By this time he had begun to publish, articles and reviews which, among other things, did much to draw attention to the burgeoning Soviet school of English 17th-century studies. Then, in 1940, came the decisive The English Revolution 1640, a no-holds-barred assertion of the revolutionary nature of England between 1640 and 1660, and an assault on the traditional presentation of these years as an aberration in the stately continuity of English history.
"I wrote as a very angry young man, believing he was going to be killed in a World War," Hill later told an interviewer. The book, he said, "was intended to be my last will and testament." It has rarely been out of print since.
The discussions surrounding Hill's essay also produced, in 1946, the Communist Party Historians Group, an association he regarded as "the greatest single influence" on his subsequent work. This formidable academy, which included Edmund Dell, Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm, James Jeffreys, Victor Kiernan, George Rudé, Raphael Samuel, John Saville and Dorothy Thompson, has a good claim to have redefined the study of history in Britain.
In 1957, along with many in the CP, Hill had become disenchanted with the party's lack of democracy and its reluctance to criticise the Soviet Union, particularly on the suppression of the Hungarian revolution the previous year. He broke with the party after failing to persuade it to reform its inner workings.
A wartime marriage to Inez Waugh produced a home life which combined the high seriousness of Balliol Marxism with an extravagant bohemianism. It also produced their daughter, Fanny Hill, later a dashing figure on the Oxford scene, who drowned off the Spanish coast in her 40s. The marriage collapsed early and, in 1956, he married again, this time to Bridget Sutton, a history tutor with the Workers' Educational Association in Staffordshire. Turbulence was replaced by the single greatest happiness of Hill's life. With Bridget he had a son and two daughters, one of whom died in a car accident.
After 1957, Hill's career ascended to new heights as he began the remarkable output of books on which his reputation will rest, and which continued undiminished until he was well into his 80s. Central to the whole project was a fascination with religion, represented, in particular, in his attempt to understand the revolutionary power of puritanism.
The single, most striking and controversial aspect of his method was the way in which he subtly identified intellectual connections, currents and continuities between the most unlikely pieces of evidence - from scraps of court records to Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress. His use of literary sources was one of his most fascinating characteristics.
Many of the tasks he set himself were laid out in his book, Puritanism And Revolution (1958). They were further explored in Society And Puritanism In Pre-Revolutionary England (1964) and the remarkable Intellectual Origins Of The English Revolution (1965). Alongside came more popular works of exegesis - a Historical Association pamphlet on Cromwell (1958), the best-selling biography God's Englishman (1970), the textbook The Century Of Revolution (1961) and the hugely successful Penguin economic history, Reformation To Industrial Revolution (1967).
His 1972 study of radical and millenarian ideas, The World Turned Upside Down, would be one of the very few history books to be turned into a play (at the National Theatre).
Hill scythed through received tradition in his study of AntiChrist In 17th-century England (1971) and his controversial study of Milton And The English Revolution (1977), which, like many of his later works, was written at the house in Périgord which Bridget badgered him into buying in 1969.
In 1965, Hill had defeated Ronald Bell in the election for master of Balliol, a success which caused raised eyebrows and much press attention. He maintained his teaching and research amid the administrative and ceremonial duties and never hid his enthusiasm for the two main innovations of his mastership - the opening of Balliol to women, and the representation of students on the governing body.
Retirement found his productivity undiminished. He moved to Sibford Ferris, on the Cotswold hills, and for two years worked as a visiting professor at the Open University. Then he settled down to further books: Some Intellectual Consequences Of The English Revolution (1980); The World Of The Muggletonians (1983); and The Experience Of Defeat (1984), an account of the Restoration made poignant by the reverses 20th-century left-wing politics were suffering.
A marvellously vivid study of Bunyan followed in 1988, before The English Bible In 17th-century England (1993) and Liberty Against The Law (1996). Three volumes of essays were published in the 1980s.
Hill once gave a radio talk marking the centenary of the publication of Das Kapital. Heended it by telling how, in old age, Marx had bumped into a fellow revolutionary from the 1848 barricades, now prosperous and complacent. The acquaintance reflected that, as one got older, one became less radical and less political. "Do you?" Marx replied. "Do you? Well, I do not!"
Neither, he clearly intended us to understand, did Christopher Hill.