Recalling the past
Our ancestors’ sense of the past
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Introduction
Dates are in red.
Hyperlinks to
other pages are in dark
blue.
Headlines are in brown.
References and
citations are in turquoise.
Contextual
history is in purple.
History
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?
“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 di 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).
Glimpsing at the past
Cider with Rosie, by Laurie Lee, 1959: The
village in fact was like a deep-running cave still linked to its antic past,
a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits and by laws still vaguely
ancestral. This cave that we inhabited looked backwards through chambers
that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as yet, been tidied up,
or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or
papered by cinema screens. It was something we just had time to inherit, to
inherit and dimly know – the blood and beliefs of generations who had been
in this valley since the Stone Age. That continuous contact has at last been
broken, the deeper caves sealed off for ever. But arriving, as I did, at the
end of that age, I caught whiffs of something old as the glaciers. There
were ghosts in the stones, in the trees, and the walls, and each field
and hill had several. The elder people knew about these things and would
refer to them in personal terms, and there were certain landmarks about the
valley – tree-clumps, corners in woods – that bore separate, antique,
half-muttered names that were certainly older than Christian. The women in
their talk still used these names which are not used now any more. There was
also a frank and unfearful attitude to death, and an acceptance of violence as
a kind of ritual which no one accused or pardoned. In our grey stone village,
especially in winter, such stories never seemed strange. When I sat at home
among my talking sisters, or with an old woman sucking her jaws, and heard the
long details of hapless suicides, of fighting men loose in the snow, of
witch-doomed widows disembowelled by bulls, of childeating
sows, and so on – I would look through the windows and see the wet walls
streaming, the black trees bend in the wind, and I saw these things happening
as natural convulsions of our landscape, and though dry-mouthed, I was never
astonished.
Lark Rise, Flora
Thomson, Chapter I, Poor People's Houses: Recalling
the Past: “All around, from every quarter, the stiff, clayey soil of the
arable fields crept up; bare, brown and windswept for eight months out of the
twelve. Spring brought a flush of green wheat and there were violets under the
hedges and pussy-willows out beside the brook at the bottom of the 'Hundred
Acres'; but only for a few weeks in later summer had the landscape real beauty.
Then the ripened cornfields rippled up to the doorsteps of the cottages and the
hamlet became an island in a sea of dark gold. To a child it seemed that it
must always have been so; but the ploughing and sowing and reaping were
recent innovations. Old men could remember when the Rise, covered with
juniper bushes, stood in the midst of a furzy heath—common land, which had come
under the plough after the passing of the Inclosure Acts.”
Stories
The end of the story
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1: Our
revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this
vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous
palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit,
shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack
behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded
with a sleep.