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Our debts to English history
by Keith Windschuttle
www.sydneyline.com
Published first, the final book of the new
eight-volume Penguin History of Britain is titled Hope and Glory: Britain
1900–1990, but its author, Peter Clarke, admits that the period of which
he writes has produced only moments of glory. [1]
Moreover, the best he can say of the hopes is that not all of them were
misguided. He acknowledges that at the end of the twentieth century, many
British historians, having seen their country decline from the greatest
power in the world, do not believe there is much to celebrate. Although the
publisher’s jacket blurb declares that Clarke “challenges this vision” by
pointing to a much improved standard of living for the general populace,
greater social mobility and an extended democracy, the undisguisable tone of
his story of political decline belies the feigned social optimism. Indeed,
the cover of the book, a black and white photograph of a slightly out of
focus Winston Churchill surveying the rubble of the blitzed House of
Commons, renders its title—once so rousing when sung to the strains of Elgar—
ironic. Since the book was written, the plebiscites for the devolution of
Scotland and Wales have set in place a process which, if it continues, means
that what was once known as Great Britain will dwindle to nothing more than
the European state of England.
Given this prospect, Penguin Books might seem to be indulging in
patriotic nostalgia rather than publishing acumen in bringing out yet
another historical series on a country that has been so often, and so well,
served by the genre. There have been so many multi-volume histories of
England published in the last fifty years that it may well appear there is
little left worth saying. The most monumental was the fifteen volumes from
Oxford published between the 1930s and 1960s, but other firms were also
prominent. Penguin produced an eight-volume set under its Pelican label in
the 1950s, Nelson had an eight-volume series in the 1960s, and Cambridge
published a three-volume social history as recently as 1990. And yet, on the
strength of the two volumes released so far, not only is the new Penguin
series justified but it should be positively welcomed. This is partly
because one of these volumes is such a brilliant job in itself, but it is
largely because, at a time when the Western world is awash with damning
intellectual indictments, both books provide popularly accessible accounts
of why the history of England has had such a defining and enduring influence
on Western culture and politics: in short, why England has been so important
to the development of civilized values in the world at large.
Before going into this, though, it is worth emphasizing just how
difficult a task this kind of writing is for its authors. Books like this
are written not as demonstrations of scholarship and originality for the
benefit of other historians but as products aimed at the popular market, or
what the book trade thinks of as the intelligent generalist reader. This
kind of writing requires academically trained authors to pull off several
infrequently attempted feats: to condense the state of research in their
territory to a readable tome, to write for newcomers who need to have the
basics of the field patiently explained to them, to grip these readers with
a good story, and to say something of significance about the human condition
within the chosen parameters of time and space.
These are important functions for historians because it is when they
address themselves to a popular audience that they have the broadest impact
on their culture. On the whole, English history has been served well by
these series, which have often attracted the best practitioners of each age
and have produced some scholarly celebrities, notably David Hume in the
eighteenth century and T. B. Macaulay in the nineteenth. The twentieth
century’s star performer is A. J. P. Taylor, whose English History
1914–1945, the last of the Oxford volumes, remains a masterly narrative
about that most difficult of periods, his own times. The new Penguin series
editor, David Cannadine, gave Peter Clarke of Cambridge University the
unenviable task of following Taylor. Clarke’s book is well-researched and
readable but suffers from two failings: the notion that a rising standard of
living and increased longevity can somehow define British history in this
period (when every other Western nation enjoyed much the same increases) and
his tendency to judge postwar British politicians on the ahistorical grounds
of their support for his own pro-European Union prejudices.
The second of the volumes released so far is the
one that deserves the most attention. This is the Harvard historian Mark
Kishlansky’s contribution, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714.
Kishlansky covers the reign of the Stuart dynasty which largely prevailed,
despite two revolutions which removed their crowns, from the proclamation of
James I in 1603 to the death of Queen Anne in 1714. His book is a great
read, fast-paced, dramatic, full of characters who spring animatedly to life
as they take their place in the historic procession. Above all, it is
Kishlansky’s definition of his project as essentially a political history—or
to be more precise, a constitutional history—that deserves respect. For he
has stood firmly against prevailing academic fashions, has refused to pander
to the current predilections of the book-reviewing industry, and has even
put a slant on his work different from that intended by the series editor.
Kishlansky’s brief was, as the series title indicates, to contribute to a
history of Britain but, as he confesses in his preface, his is much more a
history of England than of developments in Scotland, Wales, or Ireland.[2]
Apart from the opening survey chapter of Britain at the start of the
seventeenth century, Kishlansky has entirely omitted what most authors
aiming at a contemporary popular audience would assume to be the obligatory
topics of social, economic, and women’s history. This is partly, he
explains, because his publishers have let him off the hook by planning an as
yet unannounced series devoted to discussion of that kind. Nonetheless,
there would still have been plenty of scope in the major political
developments of the period for a more politically correct historian to round
up the usual suspects.
For instance, unlike some other recent books on the political culture of
Stuart England, Kishlansky’s does nothing to curry favor with feminist
reviewers or their allies. He does use the term “patriarchy” since it was
current at the time in debates about royal power, but notions of “gender
roles,” victimhood, and other conspicuously anachronistic but now almost
ubiquitous feminist conceptual paraphernalia are thankfully absent. Or,
since we now know that James I was a homosexual pederast and that his son,
Charles I, had also dabbled in homosexual relations, Kishlansky might have
given a sop to the gay market and introduced some Foucault-type speculation
about the “multidimensional sexuality” of the premodern era. Instead, he
reveals how such behavior scandalized royal courtiers and was turned to
their own purposes by competing court factions.
In particular, he eschews the “history from below” approach that has been
so prominent in recent decades in analyses of the most dramatic events of
the era. In 1642 the English Parliament usurped the authority of Charles I
and raised its own army under Oliver Cromwell to defeat both an invasion
from Scotland and the attempts by the king and his supporters to restore his
position. In 1649 the Parliament ordered the execution of the then captive
king. These events have often been explained as a popular uprising of either
a religious kind (the “Puritan Revolution”) or as an expression of the class
conflict predicted by Marxist theory (the “bourgeois revolution”). In the
hands of the most influential of these interpreters, the Marxist historian
Christopher Hill, both religious and political themes are combined and
Puritanism is explained as the ideological expression of the nascent
bourgeoisie.
Moreover, the adherents of the theory that history is moving by stages
toward an egalitarian utopia have also discovered the origins of proletarian
democracy and the “general will” in the debates about government conducted
in Putney Church in 1647 among the coalition of Presbyterian dissidents and
political radicals known as the Levellers. In the sect called the Diggers,
founded by the anti-Christian mystic Gerard Winstanley, who demanded an end
to wage labour and private property, such historians have seen prototype
Communists. From this romantic perspective, the events of 1642–49 amount to
the English precursor of both the French and Russian revolutions and are
seen as proof that political revolution is a necessary part of the
transition to “bourgeois democracy” and modern society.
Kishlansky stands firm against all this. Though he
does use the phrase “English Revolution” to describe the events of the
1640s, his title, A Monarchy Transformed, sums up his assessment of
the real meaning of the century. From an intermittent assembly summoned on
specific occasions (namely when the king wanted to amass additional funds to
conduct foreign wars), the English Parliament finally emerged as the
principal organ of royal government. From a country teetering on the edge of
absolutism (to which many of its continental peers were to succumb), England
endured a series of conflicts that eventually produced a constitutional
monarchy under which subjects were guaranteed liberty of person, property,
and conscience.
Despite the many claims made in the 1990s by the historically uneducated
that it was the French and German philosophers of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment who invented the modern notion of liberty—a view expressed
perhaps most influentially by Francis Fukuyama—Kishlansky does an impressive
job of reasserting the claims of the real source, the English
Parliamentarians of the seventeenth century. In 1688, when it presented
William and Mary with the crown, Parliament drew up a Declaration of Rights.
This was converted in the following year to the Bill of Rights. Kishlansky
says that although this Bill was declarative only —enunciating what already
existed—“it uniformly declared for people and Parliament against the crown.
. . . The people had the right to bear arms, to hold free elections, and to
have frequent parliaments in which members could speak openly. They were not
to be subject to excessive bail, exorbitant fines, or cruel and unusual
punishment.” The king lost his prerogative in judicial matters and was
deprived of the ability to raise money outside Parliament. The Bill of
Rights also had the appearance of a contract and implied that William III
and his successors were constitutional mon- archs.
Kishlansky traces the genesis of these developments in a most
illuminating fashion. He shows that in virtually every case it was political
conflict and political interests that produced them, not the ideas of
intellectuals. Indeed, he shows that the history of ideas in this period
always came second to politics. This was true of the notion that government
was a contract between the king and the people, a view that received its
quintessential expression in the second of John Locke’s Two Treatises of
Government. This was published in 1690, some ten years after the
celebrated debate in the House of Commons in which the Whig majority had
championed the contract relationship against Tory support for the divine
right of kings. .
It was also true of the anti-authoritarian radicalism of the 1640s. For
instance, when the Long Parliament began sitting in 1640, there was not one
of its members who questioned the hierarchical nature of English government
or that monarchy was divinely ordained. After the outbreak of the first
civil war in 1642, however, attitudes changed dramatically with a tax revolt
in London, dissension in the army, and the rise of Presbyterian dissent. But
Kishlansky emphasizes: “the war created radicalism; radicalism did not
create the war.” Puritanism and religious millenarianism reached their peak
of excitement in 1649 but this was after, and largely fueled by, the
execution of the King. “For many, dethroning the King and defrocking the
bishops fulfilled ancient prophecies. The Revolution would usher in a new
Jerusalem; the nation would be governed by saints, God’s own minority
through which he would uproot the corruption of this world.” And rather than
revolution originating in any seething discontent of the populace or their
yearning to overthrow existing institutions, Kishlansky shows that the chief
actors were primarily concerned with the preservation of their inherited
customs and traditions:
In truth, it had never occurred to the leaders of the Army or of the
Rump to turn the world upside down, to institute a thoroughgoing social
and political revolution. Beyond religion, their quarrel with the King had
been to compel him to abide by the settled laws of the nation—those that
protected patriarchy, hierarchy and property.
Kishlansky’s book is a model not only of interpretation but also of
presentation. The way he structures his chapters is bound to set an example
that many historians who want to appeal to a popular audience will follow.
He starts each chapter with a cinematic narrative of the details of one
dramatic event: for instance, the Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes, the
execution of Charles I, the great fire of London in 1666. The rest of each
chapter both explains the significance of the event and moves the whole
story forward. The device works perfectly in terms of both structure and
drama.
The author is also impressive in his ability to
bring his characters and scenery to life. He captures the Byzantine quality
of the court of James I where the monarch displayed, on the one hand, a rare
capacity for intellectual engagement as the author of a celebrated treatise
on the divine right of kings, and, on the other hand, a prurience that
overturned the established decencies of the royal household:
He doted on his Danish wife, Anne, who had already presented him with
three healthy children, and [Sir Henry] Wotton reported that “among his
good qualities none shines more brightly than the chasteness of his life.”
This report of the king of Scots did not square with observations made of
James as king of England. Some Englishmen found his accent impenetrable,
his table manners execrable, and his attraction to handsome boys
loathsome.
One of the young men fancied by James was Robert Carr, who, upon being
appointed Lord Somerset, rose to become the king’s principal advisor and
Lord Chamberlain. When another court faction, which included Francis Bacon,
opposed Somerset’s relations to the pro-Spanish and Catholic Howard family,
its members recruited George Villiers, described by all who saw him as “the
handsomest bodied man in England,” as cupbearer at the royal table.
Villiers caught the king’s eye and was soon appointed a gentleman of the
bedchamber and, within two years, was made Earl of Buckingham, from which
position he not only replaced Somerset but became the most influential
official in the kingdom. Though Buckingham was responsible for a series of
disastrous military adventures, he retained his favor with both James and
James’s son, the future Charles I. In Madrid, during a visit by Charles and
the king’s favorite to propose marriage (unsuccessfully) to the Infanta, the
Spanish were shocked to discover Buckingham in the presence of the Prince
without his breeches on. Another striking portrait drawn by Kishlansky is of
Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart dynasty, and younger sister of Mary, wife
of William III.
Anne Stuart was only thirty-seven when she acceded to the thrones of
England, Scotland and Ireland in 1702, but she was already an old woman,
carried to her coronation in a sedan chair. She had been physically
depleted by seventeen pregnancies and psychically debilitated by their
futility—not a single child had survived. . . .
Anne was dull, taciturn, stubborn and unattractive. Her conversation
was mind-numbing, her taste insipid, her pleasures limited to gambling and
dining, losing pounds at one set of tables and gaining them at the other.
The Queen had the good fortune to marry below her, for George of Denmark
was, if anything, less impressive, and their union was blissful.
In fact, the author’s whole chapter on the reign of Anne is a tour de
force, ranging from domestic details such as the Queen’s psychological
dependence on Sarah Churchill, to the rise and fall of Sarah’s husband, the
military hero Marlborough, and to the culmination of her reign in the
establishment of a balance of power in Europe and a maritime supremacy which
made Britain the dominant trading power in the Mediterranean and the
possessor of a series of colonies and territories in the Americas.
The most famous historical interpretation of the events of the
seventeenth century is that of the first two volumes of Macaulay’s
History of England, published in 1848. Macaulay was a Whig and regarded
his party as the originator and long-term defender of the rights and
freedoms won two centuries before. He also thought freedom itself had been
gradually unfolding in the ensuing period and would continue to do so. Hence
his “Whig interpretation” became synonymous with the concept of progress, an
idea that seemed confirmed by the growing prosperity, power, and the
extension of democracy of late Victorian and Edwardian England.
The carnage of the First World War, however, and the unemployment of the
Great Depression brought into question the idea of ever-increasing progress.
The Whig interpretation of history became a convenient straw man, knowingly
mocked by intellectuals and held up as a warning to the next few generations
of history students of how not to pursue their discipline. Macaulay is still
taught today but primarily as a stylist, as an example of how to write
narrative, which some traditionalists, and their readers, still prefer to
the obliquities of postmodernist discourse. Kishlansky notes that many of
Macaulay’s interpretations of the political events have not worn well. The
most notable consequences of what the Whigs used to call “the Glorious
Revolution of 1688,” for instance, derived not from the liberal principles
of William III and his advisors but were reluctantly conceded by the monarch
out of necessity. Kishlansky argues the establishment of the institution of
parliamentary monarchy arose out of William’s need to call annual
parliaments to raise money for the near constant series of foreign wars he
conducted during his reign.
But once these concessions have been made, the general drift of
Macaulay’s faith in the growth of free institutions remains, at this point
in history, hard to deny. Although, as I noted above, Francis Fukuyama is
mistaken about the origins of political liberty, his observations about its
expansion in recent times are indisputable. The last quarter of the
twentieth century has seen not only the collapse of Communism in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union but also the corresponding demise of
dictatorships of the military-authoritarian Right, with new democratic
regimes established since 1975 in many countries including Greece, Spain,
Portugal, Turkey, South Korea, the Philippines, Brazil, Chile, Argentina,
Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, and South Africa. The kind of political system that
all these countries have embraced has been a liberal democracy of either the
monarchical or republican variety, with guarantees of the rights of subjects
and citizens, the election of representatives, the protection of property,
and the free expression of opinion. In other words, the political principles
that the English Parliament originated in the seventeenth century provide
the basis of the civilized world today.
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
- Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990,
by Peter Clarke; Penguin, 464 pages, $29.95; $14.95 paper.
Go back to the text.
- A Monarchy Transformed: Britain
1603–1714, by Mark Kishlansky; Penguin, 400 pages, $29.95; $14.95
paper. Go back to the text.
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