Genealogy and History
Some thoughts on the relationship
between genealogical methods with historical research, to uncover the full
picture
This page is
still to be written.
“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).
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?