Genealogy and History

Some thoughts on the relationship between genealogical methods with historical research, to uncover the full picture

 

 

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“Whig History”

The great divide of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which arose out of the divide between Stuart absolute monarchy and the Puritan challengers continued to influence a calmer nation in its politics and influenced the evolution of England and then Great Britain’s identity.

On one side King Charles the Martyr was celebrated by the Church every 30 January; on the other the Good Old Cause was recalled as the cause for which [John] Hampden bled on the field and [Algernon] Sidney on the scaffold.

The first monumental history was by Charles I’s councillor, Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon who began his History of the Rebellion started in the 1640s and published in 1702.

Separately there developed a Whig history, whose pioneer was a Protestant soldier in William of Orange’s invading army called Paul Rapin de Thoyras who wrote Histoire d’Angleterre (1723 to 1727) aimed at a foreign audience. It set out the Whig view of English history as a continuous struggle through the ages to defend ancient freedoms; Charles I had tried to enslave England, but the culmination came with the Glorious Revolution.

The Tory history was found in the works of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume’s History of England (1757). He argued against extremes and suggested that societies progressed through improvements in education, government, law and economic management. He did not recognise the Norman Yoke. Liberty did not come from resisting the Crown, rather it required the authority almost absolute of the monarchy. The Tudors had laid the foundations for the best form of government. It was Cromwell who had seized power by violence. True liberty was not in ancient rights but in modern thinking. History should teach the people to be grateful for what they had. Hume was accused by the Whigs of being a Jacobite.

John Wilkes’ History of England (1768) adopted Rapin’s view, liberty is the character of the Englishman. Catherine Macaulay attacked Hume in her History of England (1763 to 1783) and found an eternal struggle for Saxon freedom against the Norman yoke.

Edmund Burke wrote the Whig history Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). He argued that fundamental rights had built up since Manga Carta in the evolution of custom and the Common Law. England’s age of revolutions was over and had changed from a period of political turbulence to a nation of continuity and peace.

Thomas Babington Macaulay continued the Whig historical tradition with his History of England (1848 to 1855). His focus was on resistance to the Stuarts, but he downgraded the idea of an ancient constitution inherited from the Anglo Saxons and focused on progtress through enlightened trade, libraries, factories etc.

Thomas Carlisle published Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845), which allowed Cromwell himself to posthumously speak to heroic struggles.

There was nevertheless a distaste for Roundhead oppression, captured in W F Yeames’ painting When did you last see your father? (1878) and Frederick Marryar’s children’s novel, The Children of the New Forest (1847).

Whig pieties were reaffirmed by Macaulay’s great nephew, George Macaulay Trevelyan, one of the last Whig Historians, in his History of England (1926), Shortened History (1942) and English Social History (1944).

After that, the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield, dismissed Whig history in his caricature, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and it was parodied by W C Sellar and R J Yeatman’s 1066 and all that, portraying every episode of British history as a ‘good thing’ which progressed Britain’s progress to top nation.

Whig history died as the focus turned in the twenty first century to what had gone wrong with Britain. The American version perhaps outlived the British. The First World War shook British confidence and a period of post war declinism and European integration, and the democratisation of European nations including Germany, led to the waning of the Whig historical perspective.

(Robert Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 262 to 271).

 

 

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There is an In Our Time podcast on how the writing of history has changed over time, from ancient epics to medieval hagiographies and modern deconstructions.

There is an In Our Time podcast on whether we can ever predict the future by understanding the past. What kind of lessons is it possible for leaders, governments or people to take from history?