Historians From England

"Much as it may hurt us, we really have no choice but to move further to a more positive kind of internationalism, which welcomes the new world with open arms, prepares changes in the status quo before the cry for them becomes desperate, and greets the rise of new nations with unreserved joy. If the western world has to be ranged against the world behind the Iron Curtain, surely it is to our interest to see the Middle East, and indeed the whole Afro-Asian block, rise as quickly as possible to real equality and independence, so that they play a genuinely autonomous part in the world's diplomacy. Since the Asiatic countries are so exposed to the threat of Communism, it is difficult to believe that their power—freely exercised—would not operate to our own benefit."

"About the scientific revolution: it “outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes”."

"It is like the Bishop who said that if we totally disarmed he had too high an opinion of human nature to think that anybody would attack us. There might be great virtue in disarming and consenting to be made martyrs for the sake of the good cause; but to promise that we should not have to endure martyrdom in that situation, or to rely on such a supposition, is against both theology and history. It is essential not to have faith in human nature. Such faith is a recent heresy and a very disastrous one."

"The hardest strokes of heaven fall in history upon those who imagine that they can control things in a sovereign manner, as though they were kings of the earth, playing Providence not only for themselves but for the far future—reaching out into the future with the wrong kind of far-sightedness, and gambling on a lot of risky calculations in which there must never be a single mistake. And it is a defect in such enthusiasts that they seem unwilling to leave anything to Providence, unwilling even to leave the future flexible, as one must do; and they forget that in any case, for all we know, our successors may decide to switch ideals and look for a different utopia before any of our long shots have reached their objective, or any of our long-range projects have had fulfillment. It is agreeable to all the processes of history, therefore, that each of us should rather do the good that is straight under our noses. Those people work more wisely who seek to achieve good in their own small corner of the world and then leave the leaven to leaven the whole lump, than those who are for ever thinking that life is vain unless one can act through the central government, carry legislation, achieve political power and do big things."

"Humanism and Humanitarianism, Liberalism and Internationalism...emerge as a result of a tendency to translate into secular terms certain movements and aspirations which had characterised a Christian civilisation... humanitarianism, for example, is an anaemic substitute for the doctrine of New Testament love."

"One of the paradoxes of history has been the way in which the name of England has come to be so closely associated with liberty on the one hand and tradition on the other hand."

"But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness—each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked—each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity."

"In the street the rain was little more than a fine mist which softened the outlines of the houses and even lent a touch of poetry to a neighbourhood unlikely to evoke tender emotions. He raised his eyes to a roofline bristling with television aerials, lowered them again to windows still blank before the evening lights were lit."

"The house - a substantial but essentially modest suburban villa - was furnished with voluptuous grandeur in approximations of various styles, predominantly those of several Louis, with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century additions. Heavy coloured glass ashtrays of monstrous size and weight rested in inlaid marquetry tables of vaguely Pompadour associations. At dinner we drank champagne from ruby Bohemian glasses: the meat was carved at a Boulle-type sideboard. ‘Regency’ wallpaper of dark green and lighter green stripes was partially covered by gilt-framed landscapes of no style whatsoever.’"

"And yet she had never felt so bereft, as if her presence in other lives were entirely illusory, as if she herself were a kind of facsimile, pleasant but inauthentic. Before she got too old she must wrest some part of her life for herself, or she would fade, vanish, before anyone noticed her disappearance."

"Women have come a long way, of course: we can all be left alone at night now. But sometimes it seems a high price to pay. We can also open the door cheerfully to strangers at any hour, deal with obscene telephone calls and mend fuses."

"It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons."

"I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state "I hurt" or "I hate" or "I want." Or, indeed, "Look at me." And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory."

"It was, I saw, a flat to get out of rather than one to stay in. It was a machine for eating and sleeping in, a suitable dwelling place for a working woman, whose main interest is in her work. I disliked this version of myself, which seemed to negate my other activities, reduced them to after-hours amusements, whereas I had always thought them pretty central. These mute, white walls had been silent witnesses to many encounters; nevertheless, they withheld comment, and their very withholding struck me as unfriendly. Unheimlich was the word which came to mind when I stood on the threshold of my bedroom."

"The umbrage given to Cuzzoni by her [ Faustina Bordoni's] coming hither, proves that as Turkish monarchs can bear no brother near the throne, an aspiring sister is equally obnoxious to a theatrical Queen."

"Now, as discord is allowable, and even necessarily opposed to concord, why may not noise, or a seeming jargon, be opposed to fixed sounds and harmonical proportion? Some of the discords in modern music, unknown till this century, are what the ear can but just bear, but have a very good effect as to contrast. The severe laws of preparing and resolving discord, may be too much adhered to for great effect; I am convinced that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it."

"With respect to excellence of Style and Composition, it may perhaps be said that to practised ears the most pleasing Music is such as has the merit of novelty, added to refinement, and ingenious contrivance; and to the ignorant, such as is most familiar and common."

"He certainly over-heated himself at Venice by walking at a season when it is said that only Dogs and Englishmen are seen out of doors at noon, all else lie down in the middle of the day."

"Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry was published in three volumes in 1774, 1778 and 1781. It was both a major landmark of scholarship and a decisive intervention in the cultural politics of its age: for the first time, the achievement of English poetry from Chaucer to the Elizabethans was retrieved and made accessible, and the ground was prepared for a shift in hegemonic style which the Romantics exploited."

"All centuries of literature swam into his learned ken. His Observations on the Faërie Queene still remains the best book ever written about Spenser."

"All human race, from China to Peru, Pleasure, howe’er disguis’d by art, pursue."

"We are apt to form romantic and exaggerated notions about the moral innocence of our ancestors. Ages of ignorance and simplicity are thought to be ages of purity. The direct contrary, I believe, is the case...In the middle ages, not only the most flagrant violations of modesty were frequently practised and permitted, but the most infamous vices. Men are less ashamed as they are less polished."

"Nor rough, nor barren, are the winding ways Of hoar antiquity, but strown with flowers."

"The late Mr Warton, with a poetical enthusiasm which converted toil into pleasure, and gilded, to himself and his readers, the dreary subjects of antiquarian lore, and with a capacity of labour apparently inconsistent with his more brilliant powers, has produced a work of great size, and, partially speaking, of great interest, from the perusal of which we rise, our fancy delighted with beautiful imagery, and with the happy analysis of ancient tale and song, but certainly with very vague ideas of the history of English poetry... Warton's History of English Poetry has remained, and will always remain, an immense commonplace-book of memoirs to serve for such an history. No antiquary can open it, without drawing information from a mine which, though dark, is inexhaustible in its treasures; nor will he who reads merely for amusement ever shut it for lack of attaining his end; while both may probably regret the desultory excursions of an author, who wanted only system, and a more rigid attention to minute accuracy, to have perfected the great task he has left incomplete."

"O! what's a table richly spread Without a woman at its head!"

"A change was preparing and may be traced to Winchester, which, under Dr. Warton, had become a nursery of poets. If any man may be called the father of the present race, it is Thomas Warton, a scholar by profession, an antiquary and a poet by choice; and by nature one of the best tempered and happiest of men."

"Ye fetted pinnacles, ye fanes sublime, Ye towers that wear the mossy vest of time; Ye massy piles of old munificence, At once the pride of learning and defence; Ye cloisters pale, that, lengthening to the sight, To contemplation, step by step, invite; Ye temples dim, where pious duty pays Her holy hymns of everlasting praise - Hail ! Oxford, hail !"

"Eminent as he was in council, it is as the historian of his time that Clarendon will be ever remembered. His book has its faults and limitations, no less than the masterpieces of Thucydides and Tacitus. Those who look upon history as a mere means of strengthening the Whig position will doubtless convict Clarendon of monstrous partiality, and it may be confessed that he thought it no part of his duty to look back upon events with the eyes of a Roundhead. It has been pointed out that he had little sense of natural scenery or of history's dramatic elements. He did not set the persons of his drama against any background, natural or artificial. His world has not houses, nor courts, nor fields. The personages of his drama seem to move hither and thither in vast, vacant spaces. He was interested supremely in men, not things, in the conflict of wills and the passions of the mind. Above all, he was interested in character. History for him was ‘character in action,’ and as he had known all the actors in the drama which unfolded itself before his eyes, and in which he had played a foremost part, he could measure their motives and discern their traits."

"On all counts his memory is entitled to our respect. He was a faithful public servant, a sound Tory, the vivid painter of a vivid age."

"The most unpopular Ministers in England, were the Earl of Clarendon, and Sir Robert Walpole, during their respective Administrations; the former a true, a steady, and equal Friend to a limited Monarchy, and the just civil Rights of the People; and the latter the best commercial Minister this Country ever had, and the greatest Promoter of its real Interests."

"Clarendon displayed a political strength and rectitude rare if not unique amongst British statesmen, and by so doing made the Restoration possible... In exile he wrote the History wherein is displayed the true greatness of Clarendon: his astonishing capacity to take an even and magnanimous view of the men of his age – Cromwell as well as Charles I; his deep and equally remarkable sense of the tides and turns of political feeling not only in Parliament but in the nation at large. Few men have possessed larger or better judgments when confronted with critical political issues. Few, if any, can doubt that Clarendon is one of Britain's greatest men."

"In the same month of May [1702], Rochester issued from the Oxford University Press the first folio volume of his father Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, doing thereby a greater service to High Tory principles than any he was ever likely to do by direct intervention in politics. That epic record of great events, written by one of the chief actors, in the grave and stately speech of an elder world, has a perennial value for all Englishmen, not to be touched by the changing tides of time and faction. But when it first appeared in the early months of the reign of the Tory Queen, it was bound to have a political effect, stimulating the cult of King Charles and Martyr, stirring up anger against the Dissenters as the heirs of the Puritan fanatics, and against the Whigs as the heirs of the Roundhead rebels."

"I first read Clarendon at home in an old Boehm edition and then found the majestic folio edition in the public library. Through the long summer of 1927 I read it day after day. It was like wandering in a cathedral – majesty everywhere, not only in the prose but in the thought, in the almost superhuman capacity for empathy and distance which are perhaps Clarendon's greatest qualities both as man and writer."

"At the restoration the same virtuous statesman protected the constitution against the blind or interested zeal of excessive loyalty: and, if Monk had the glory of restoring the monarchy of England, to Clarendon is ascribed the merit of re-establishing her laws and liberties. A service no less advantageous to the crown than honourable to himself; but which was numbered among the chief of those offences for which he was afterwards abandoned, sacrificed, and persecuted by his unfeeling, corrupt, and profligate master."

"I cannot think that the temperate and constitutional language of the royal declarations and answers to the house of commons in 1642, known to have proceeded from the pen of Hyde, and as superior to those on the opposite side in argument as they are in eloquence, was intended for the willing slaves of tyranny."

"Clarendon was unquestionably a lover of truth, and a sincere friend to the free constitution of his country. He defended that constitution in parliament, with zeal and energy, against the encroachments of prerogative, and concurred in the establishment of new securities necessary for its protection. He did indeed, when these had been obtained, oppose with equal determination those continually increasing demands of parliament, which appeared to him to threaten the existence of the monarchy itself: desirous, if possible, to conciliate the maintenance of public liberty with the preservation of domestic peace, and to turn aside from his country all the evils, to which those demands immediately and manifestly tended."

"His soul could never enter into the secrets of enthusiasts, or, indeed, into any region beyond the range of the Thirty-nine Articles. Just as he fails to understand the nature of the Puritans so he fails to understand Puritanism in general, and his History of the Rebellion has the fundamental defect, that it is a history of a religious revolution in which the religious element is omitted."

"If we turn to historians of the more ordinary type, the most notable name is that of Clarendon. His work suggests a comparison with Thucydides, in that he was himself a prominent actor in the events that he describes; and there are, especially in his character-sketches, passages that will bear comparison with the great Athenian master. As with Thucydides, too, banishment from his native country gave him an opportunity for calm and detached contemplation of the events through which he had lived. But there the comparison ends. The inner spirit of the two men is entirely different. Neither his double exile nor advancing years brought philosophic calm or intellectual fairness to Clarendon. He writes now as a partisan of the monarchy, now of the Church, now of his own administration, and the later books are mainly autobiographical. But none the less Clarendon's work is epoch-making in the development of English historical writing. Here the nation's story is told by a man of practical knowledge, in language well suited to the subject, and in a tone of honest conviction. For a century and a half it fixed the ideas of Englishmen with regard to the prominent actors in the great Puritan revolution. Its prestige was destroyed, as by a sledge-hammer, by the publication of Carlyle's Cromwell; but the book remains one of the foremost of English historical classics."

"Clarendon was a great historian. His profound social insight, tempered by acute penetration in analysing individual character; his lack of illusions, his scepticism, tempered by recognition of the fact of human progress even if he disliked the means which brought it about: all this fitted him to understand the conflicts of his age better than any contemporary, and most later, historians. But above all it is his style that we remember: that style which again reflects the idealised feudal society of his youth. It lacks the conversational urgency and directness, the utilitarian values, of the Parliamentarian pamphlets (especially the Levellers' and Diggers') whose forthright appeal to the man in the street prepared for the prose of Bunyan and Defoe. Clarendon's prose is thoroughly conservative – stately, leisured, opulent, hospitable, with a tang of allusive humour possible because the only readers he envisages are cultured gentlemen certain of their superiority to the common herd. Like the man himself, Clarendon's style is the old world, the world of Sir Thomas Browne and Hooker, looking back to the Middle Ages: the future, in prose as in politics, lay with the ex-Parliamentarian civil servants Samuel Pepys and Andrew Marvell, and with the ex-Cromwellian soldier John Bunyan."

"King and minister held fundamentally different views as to religious policy. Charles II desired to make toleration for Catholics and Nonconformists an integral part of the restoration settlement, partly because it seemed essential to the peace of the nation, and partly because he was a Catholic at heart. In the Church as in the State, Clarendon's one aim was to re-establish the state of things which existed before the war began. The Church was to be restored unconditionally as well as the monarchy. This policy the minister successfully carried out. In a few months, almost before the King realised what was happening, the bishops were in possession of their old power, and the Catholics and Nonconformists were under their feet again... In political as in religious matters Clarendon was more conservative than his master, and this conservatism had been increased by the fourteen years he had passed out of England... He never realised the new conditions the Rebellion had created, or the new forces which had grown up during the Interregnum. And, above all, he failed to appreciate the change which had taken place in the position of the House of Commons."

"He was apt to talk very imperiously and unmercifully, so that his manner of dealing with people was as provoking as the hard things themselves were; but upon the whole matter he was a true Englishman and a sincere protestant, and what has passed at court since his disgrace has sufficiently vindicated him from all ill designs. In one thing it appeared that he had changed his mind much; he penned the declaration at Breda, in which the king promised indulgence and ease to tender consciences, and pursuant to that he penned a long declaration concerning ecclesiastical affairs after the king was restored, which was drawn up with that prudence and temper, that by all appearance, if the king had stuck to it, both church and state had been very quickly happy; but it was observed that immediately after the duke's marriage broke out Clarendon changed his measures, and set on his own creatures to arraign that declaration in the house of commons, of which this account was given me: the bishops had stuck to him in the matter of that marriage, by letting the king know, that it could not be broken neither by the laws of God nor man, that he thereupon delivered himself up to their counsels in the affairs of the church and so did whatever they had mind to do."

"The truth is, his behaviour and humour was growne so insupportable to my self, and to all the world else, that I could not longer endure it, and it was impossible for me to live with it and do those things with the Parliament that must be done, or the Government will be lost."

"[H]e was a man that knew England well, and was lawyer good enough to be an able chancellor, and was certainly a very incorrupt man."

"He many times cast himself upon the ground, with a desperate and obstinate resolution to rest there till the morning, that he might shift with less torment, what hazard soever he run."

"He stood for strong executive government, exclusive Anglicanism and a pacific foreign policy, since he felt this would make it easier for Charles to bring "his own dominions into that temper of obedience, they ought to be in". But events were greater than the man, and Clarendon was the ironic witness of the war against the Dutch, and associated with its failure. The nation demanded a sacrifice and so did the politicians."

"[H]e spake well, his style had no flaw in it, but had a just mixture of wit and sense, only he spoke too copiously; he had a great pleasantness in his spirit, which carried him sometimes too far into raillery, in which he sometimes shewed more wit than discretion."

"It is true he was of a jolly temper, after the old English fashion; but France had now the ascendant, and we were become quite another nation."

"In a word, he had a head to contrive, and a tongue to persuade, and a hand to execute, any mischieve, and his death appeared to be a great deliverance to the nation."

"I am mad in love with my Lord Chancellor, for he do comprehend and speak out well, and with the greatest easiness and authority that ever I saw man in my life. I did never observe how much easier a man do speak, when he knows all the company to be below him, than in him; for, though he spoke, indeed, excellent well, yet his manner and freedom of doing it, as if he played with it, and was informing only all the rest of the company, was mighty pretty."

"Quod cum in maximo uigore floreret imperii, sedile suum in littore maris cum ascenderet statui iussit. Dixit autem mari ascendenti: "Tu mee dicionis es, et terra in qua sedeo mea est, nec fuit qui inpune meo resisteret imperio. Impero igitur tibi ne in terram meam ascendas, nec uestes uel membra dominatoris tui madefacere presumas.""