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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. IOt set out the Whig voiew
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.