ABSTRACT
In England’s first great age of historical politics it was Cotton’s influence and patronage that helped strike a balance between the study of history as record and the use of history as a weapon. If Cotton’s contribution to English politics and historiography had to be summed up in one word, that word would be ‘influence’. What gives Cotton a clear title to his fame is not so much what he wrote, but what he did for others who wrote and spoke on both the scholarly and the political issues of the times. Influence was, of course, a means of getting things done in an age when clientage was an approved social and political custom. The relation between patron and client is fundamental for an understanding of early Stuart England, and this relation now depended on influence, not on feudal status. The essence of the relationship in its political aspect, as David Mathew has pointed out, was that both the patron and the client should serve the State.1 Cotton served the State, but his career is
particularly interesting because he combined the Renaissance patronage of letters with the political and bureaucratic patronage and clientage that was to characterize English society until the coming of the great age of reform in the nineteenth century.
