Historians From England

"For the first time in history at Question Time, all three parties are represented by a stand-in for the real leader."

"I thank the Prime Minister for his remarks about me. Debating with him at the Dispatch Box has been exciting, fascinating, fun, an enormous challenge and, from my point of view, wholly unproductive in every sense. I am told that in my time at the Dispatch Box I have asked the Prime Minister 1,118 direct questions, but no one has counted the direct answers—it may not take long."

"We have a Government that has contempt for the views of the people it governs. There is nothing that the British people can talk about, that this Labour Government doesn't deride. Talk about Europe and they call you extreme. Talk about tax and they call you greedy. Talk about crime and they call you reactionary. Talk about asylum and they call you racist. Talk about your nation and they call you Little Englanders. This Government thinks Britain would be alright if only we had a different people. I think Britain would be alright, if only we had a different Government."

"In the Prime Minister, we have a man who has forfeited the right to be believed or to be trusted. In more than 20 years in politics, he has betrayed every cause he believed in, contradicted every statement he has made, broken every promise he has given and breached every agreement that he has entered into. In 1982, the Prime Minister said that we would negotiate a withdrawal from the EEC. In 1994, he said: "Under my leadership, I will never allow this country to be isolated." In 1996, he said that he had made it clear that if it is in Britain's interest to be isolated then we will be isolated. There is a lifetime of U-turns, errors and sell-outs. All those hon. Members who sit behind the Prime Minister and wonder whether they stand for anything any longer, or whether they defend any point of principle, know who has led them to that sorry state. In one of his frequent meetings with the former leader of the Liberal party, whom he so much preferred to meeting his own Cabinet, the Prime Minister told us as it is. He said that he had taken from his party everything they thought they believed in and had stripped them of their core beliefs and that what kept them together was power."

"Nothing is more absurd than a Prime Minister who has committed us in principle to joining the Euro saying last week that he was against it. He talks about his five tests; we know what they are: "Does Peter want it? Will Gordon let me? Will the French like it? Will Robin notice? Can I get away with it?"

"I was the driver's mate, delivering the bottles and beer around South Yorkshire. We used to have a pint at every stop – well the driver's mate did, not the driver, thankfully – and we used to have about 10 stops in a day. You worked so hard you didn't feel you'd drunk 10 pints by four o'clock, you used to sweat so much. But then you had to lift all the empties off the lorry. It's probably horrifying but we used to do that then go home for tea and then go out in the evening to the pub."

"What has happened to our courts system when career burglars and muggers get a few dozen hours' community service, or a couple of months in prison if they are unlucky, while people defending their homes against the very same criminals risk long prison sentences?"

"The Tony Martin case lit a touch-paper that has led to an explosion of anger and resentment among millions of law-abiding British people who no longer feel the State is on their side. The specifics of the particular case are best left to the criminal courts. But politicians aren't doing their job if they don't listen and respond to the unprecedented outcry which has greeted the murder conviction for this Norfolk farmer who was defending his home against burglars."

"The lesson of Yugoslavia and the Russian federation is that it is dangerous to force disparate peoples into a common political unit unless they already feel a sense of national affinity."

"It was our national identity, so powerfully expressed in Winston Churchill's speeches, which had helped see us through the darkest days of the war. For us, patriotism was the focus of our resistance against Nazi tyranny. We have never been as nervous of nationalist feelings as our continental neighbours, and I believe we have never really understood, let alone showed, the fears and ambitions of European federalists."

"One could find oneself trapped in the economic equivalent of a burning building with no exits. In Asia, those countries that have had the most violent reactions to the financial crisis have been those countries that do not have the safety valve of democratic elections. How will the peoples of Europe react to a recession without the electoral means of changing the people responsible?"

"Many of them [European politicians] believe our ultimate objective should be the creation of a single European state, and that this is an inevitable destiny. I believe they are wrong. There is a limit to European political integration. We are near that limit now."

"The truth is that the supporters of British membership of a single currency tend to fall back on one central argument that overshadows all others. They say: "It's going to happen and that we can't possibly be left out." It is the argument used by every lemming throughout the centuries and it does not bear close scrutiny."

"When Bolingbroke fled to France, Oxford, with the cool courage that was the finer part of his phlegmatic nature, remained to stand his trial. Fortunately the French archives were not available to the prosecution; and the House of Lords, always at this period a moderator of party heats, acquitted him as it had acquitted Somers sixteen years before. In so doing, it served England well, for the use of impeachments against fallen statesmen is unsuited to a constitutional regime. In civilized society men cannot be expected to serve their country with ropes round their necks."

"[I]t was he Bernard Pares] who first interested his friend G. M. Trevelyan in Garibaldi by giving him a copy of the Autobiography as a wedding present: surely one of the most momentous wedding presents in literary history."

"It is a wonderful evening, and the Master and Mrs Trevelyan take me for a walk down the limes and on to the Fellows' Garden beyond. George Trevelyan tells me that Gladstone told his father that they should always be grateful for living in the great age of Liberalism. "Other generations, my dear Trevelyan, will be less fortunate." But who could have conceived that any generation would suffer as we have done?"

"A prize I got for good work at school was one of G. M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi books. This fascinated me, and soon I obtained the other two volumes of the series and studied the whole Garibaldi story in them carefully. Visions of similar deeds in India came before me, of a gallant fight for freedom, and in my mind India and Italy got strangely mixed together."

"His whole life was a celebration of English civilization. When he wrote about Europe – in just five of his twenty books – it was to write about Italy and how much more difficult and delayed was the coming of liberty to a country riddled with priestcraft and superstition. He was profoundly paternalistic in his social values; liberal in his racial values; progressive in his political values and intolerant in his religious attitudes (though less in later life)."

"As concerns the problems of foreign policy, I am paying Mr. Trevelyan the highest compliment which it is in my power to pay him, when I say that, looking at things from abroad, I find after all very little to criticize in his liberal and scrupulously judicial, though patriotic, treatment of this most difficult problem: the way in which he deals with the subject of the diplomatic and moral relations between England and the United States deserves special commendation. In so far as foreign politics bring England into contact and occasional conflict with the outer world, British History becomes merged in World History; and here again we find Mr. Trevelyan, thanks to the liberal and philosophic turn of his mind, equal to the task. His survey of Napoleon the Third's policy, and his characterisation of the Prussian Bismarckian régime are masterpieces of quiet and high-minded impartiality."

"Narrative technique was the natural vehicle for such influential historians of the two eras as G. M. Trevelyan and Basil Williams, yet whatever their other professional gifts it is now impossible to examine their narratives without a mounting sense of frustration at the shallowness, the superficiality and glibness of much of their writing, their willingness to skate over ignorance with a commonly received form of words, and to evade important problems with a well-turned generalisation."

"The Garibaldi trilogy established him as the best-selling historian of his generation, and by the outbreak of the Second World War, England Under the Stuarts was in its seventeenth edition. By 1949 British History in the Nineteenth Century had sold 68,000 copies and the History of England 200,000. But even these astonishing figures were eclipsed by the English Social History. Within a year, it had sold 100,000 copies, and by the early 1950s sales had exceeded half a million. There had been nothing like it since Macaulay – a precedent of which Trevelyan was well and happily aware. Nor do these statistics give any accurate impression of the total audience that Trevelyan reached: for many of his books were bought by libraries and used in schools and must have been read many times over. The tributes paid him in later years – that he had done more to promote interest in history than any other man alive – were wholly deserved."

"In the Stuart era, the English developed for themselves, without foreign participation or example, a system of Parliamentary government, local administration and freedom of speech and person, clean contrary to the prevailing tendencies on the continent, which was moving fast toward regal absolution, centralized bureaucracy, and the subjection of the individual to the State."

"She regarded it as a first charge of her slender war-budget to see that French and Dutch independence were maintained against Philip. This was secured, partly by English help and by the holding of the seas, and partly by domestic alliance of the Calvinists with Catholic politiques averse to Spanish domination; it followed that an element of liberality and toleration very rare in the Europe of that day made itself felt in France and in Holland in a manner agreeable to Elizabeth's eclectic spirit."

"The Charter was regarded as important because it assigned definite and practical remedies to temporary evils. There was very little that was abstract in its terms, less even than later generations supposed.... A King had been brought to order, not by a posse of reactionary feudalists, but the community of the land under baronial leadership; a tyrant had been subjected to the laws which hitherto it had been his private privilege to administer and to modify at will. A process had begun which was to end in putting the power of the Crown into the hands of the community at large."

"Their demands were limited and practical, and for that reason they successfully initiated a movement that led in the end to yet undreamt-of liberties for all."

"One outcome of the Norman Conquest was the making of the English language. ...the speech of Alfred and Bede, was exiled from hall and bower, from court and cloister, and was despised as a peasant's jargon... It ceased almost, though not quite, to be a written language. … Now when a language is seldom written and is not an object of interest to scholars, it quickly adapts itself in the mouths of plain people to the needs and uses of life. ...it can be altered much more easily when there are no grammarians to protest. During the three centuries when our native language was a peasant's dialect, it lost its clumsy inflexions and elaborate genders, and acquired the grace, suppleness, and adaptability which are among its chief merits."

"Against Machiavelli's princely interpretation of the new nationalism, Britain alone of the great national States successfully held out, turned back the tide of despotism, and elaborated a system by which a debating club of elected persons could successfully govern an Empire in peace and in war."

"The era when London awoke to find herself the maritime centre of the suddenly expanded globe, was also the era of the Renaissance and the Reformation - movements of intellectual growth and individual self-assertion which proved more congenial to the British than to many other races, and seemed to emancipate the island genius."

"[Education] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."

"In those days, before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watch, with its rapid sequence of amusing incidents, each ball a potential crisis!"

"If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt."

"If England between the Revolution and the death of George II had not established the rule of the law of freedom, the England of the Nineteenth Century would have proceeded along the path of change by methods of violence, instead of by Parliamentary modification of the law. The establishment of liberty was not the result of the complete triumph of any one party in the State. It was the result of the balance of political parties and religious sects, compelled to tolerate one another, until toleration became a habit of the national mind. Even the long Whig supremacy that was the outcome and sequel of the reign of Anne, was conditional on a vigilant maintenance of institutions in Church and State that were specifically dear to the Tories, and a constant respect for the latent power of political opponents, who were fellow subjects and brother Englishmen."

"The specific work of the early Eighteenth Century in England, on the line down which it was launched by the events of Anne's reign, was the establishment of the rule of law, and that law a law of liberty. On that solid foundation the reforms of succeeding epochs have been based."

"After long generations of trouble, persecution and hatred, England had at last won through to a period of domestic peace and individual freedom. It was not a period of avowed idealism; it was not a period of legislative reform. But neither idealism nor reform is the whole of life for men or nations. The vigour and initiative of Englishmen, at home and overseas, in all branches of human effort and intellect, were the admiration of Eighteenth Century Europe. The greatness of England in the Hanoverian epoch was made by men acting freely in a free community, with little help indeed from Church or State, but with no hindrance. The great art of letting your neighbour alone, even if he thinks differently from you, was learnt by Englishmen under Walpole, at a time when the lesson was still a strange one elsewhere. Some European countries have not learnt it to this day or are rapidly unlearning it again."

"Security and liberty were obtained under the Hanoverian Constitution, because, under Walpole, the Whigs became, what they had not always been, the "moderate men.""

"Our formidable factions, for all their nonsense and violence, served to protect the liberty of the subject. It is only in States based on the less civilized principle that no party may exist save the party of government, that liberty of press and person can be totally destroyed, whether in the Eighteenth or the Twentieth Century. That is not the English tradition."

"Apart from a few Crown appointments, like the Christ Church and Trinity Headships, Oxford and Cambridge had ever since the Revolution enjoyed a very complete immunity from Royal and Ministerial interference—an academic liberty that held in it the seeds of intellectual freedom for the whole country, as compared to the practice in many other lands down to our own time. The quarrel of James II with the Universities was constantly in the recollection of the dons, who, whether Whig or Tory, would never, in his daughter's reign, permit the least interference with their internal government by royal mandate or request. Any such attempt was promptly met by expressions of the hope that Queen Anne would "reflect upon what was done in Magdalen College in her father's time." Meanwhile politics swayed College elections, as in the case of poor "Mr. Entwissle's pretensions" to a Fellowship at Brazennose, for the young man was found to be a Whig, "which was against the present humour of the College." Such an incident in 1711 is not surprising, but it is a remarkable proof of academic freedom from government control that Oxford was permitted to continue such practices and to remain Tory, and largely Jacobite, under the Hanoverian kings and their Whig governments. Academic and scholastic freedom, which is a necessary condition of intellectual and political freedom, was established as against the State in Eighteenth Century England. In a great part of Europe it does not exist to-day. It is one of the island blessings we have inherited from our Whig and Tory ancestors."

"Kindly old England has always in the long run revolted against "fascist" experiments at the permanent suppression of "the other side"."

"If we consider the relative positions of France and of England from 1680 to 1688, and compare them with the situation when Anne died, the contrast is great indeed. England, lately despised abroad and distraught at home, had become the chief instrument in winning the world war, and had then dictated the Peace. With sea-power no longer rivalled either by France or Holland, with financial and commercial pre-eminence hardly less remarkable, and endowed for the moment with the martial greatness lent her by Marlborough, Great Britain was relatively more important in the world in 1713 than in 1815 or 1919. No country save France was then a rival to her greatness."

"At Utrecht the bigwigged Plenipotentiaries ended an epoch, and liquidated the fifty years' struggle of the smaller States of Europe to save themselves from the hegemony of France, and of the Protestants of Europe to save themselves from the fate of the French Huguenots. These two movements of self-defence, combined by the political genius of William, had triumphed through the military genius of Marlborough. England, entering late into the struggle, had decided the issue. Her success had demonstrated that a country of free institutions could defeat a State based upon autocratic rule. This was a new idea in the world, and caused men to think afresh on the maxims of State."

"[I]f the lesson of Marlborough's genius at Blenheim had been taught in vain to those in Holland and Germany who refused to learn, it had its full effect in our island. Bishop Burnet was not the only man whose "heart was so charged with joy he could not sleep" on the night when the news came through. In manor house, farm and workshop a race of country-folk, who commonly heard and thought about little save their own quiet occupations, were stirred by the strange tidings from the Danube, which opened wider vistas to the imagination, recalled fireside talk of King Harry at Agincourt and Queen Bess at Tilbury, and pointed forward to a future of illimitable magnitude for their country and their children, dimly descried like the sun rising behind the midst."

"The action of these courageous but wary statesmen was based, not on theory, but on sound information and calculation of all the forces on the board. Such was the method of the Whigs and Tories who made the Revolution Settlement of 1689, the Act of Settlement of 1701 that fixed the Succession on the House of Hanover, and half-a-dozen years later this Union with Scotland. These three settlements, on which the British Constitution has rested ever since, are parts of a single scheme; they were all of them made in the same spirit of compromise between parties, churches, and nations, and therefore they were never over-set. The not very idealistic statesmen of that Augustan age laid the foundation of modern Britain more wisely and well than the passionate Cavaliers and Roundheads of an earlier time had been able to do. It was the heroic idealists—Laud, Hampden, Cromwell, Montrose—who had rough-hewn the issues of controversy, but the terms of settlement were drawn up by their prudently compromising successors in the reigns of William and Anne. The Scottish Union was a piece of their most characteristic and successful work."

"As contrasted with our treatment of Ireland and our dealings with America, the Scottish Union stands out in the Eighteenth Century as a thing apart, an unwonted and surprising act of wise Imperial initiative. The men who made the Union of 1707 (Marlborough, Godolphin, Somers and Harley for England, Queensberry and Argyle for Scotland) were not selfless patriots—it was not an age productive of such. They were shrewd, worldly men, capable of looking the real facts of a situation in the face. And they studied the interest of their respective countries all the better because, unlike Fletcher of Saltoun, they could do so without too much zeal. They were, moreover, free from the religious and political fanaticisms of the previous century, which had so often stood in the way of agreement by mutual concession."

"But for all their nonsense and faction, the English were acquiring a new conception of the place of their country in the world, as the mistress of the Mediterranean, "the scourge of France, the arbitress of Europe," to whom foreign Princes and peoples looked for help and justice not in vain. England was more than all she had been under Elizabeth, more than all she had been under Cromwell, for she was now a united nation with a fixed and free Constitution. Whig and Tory might bark and bicker, but they carried on the nation's work between them, because the blood-feud of sects and parties had been staunched by the compromise of the Revolution Settlement, which, by giving to England domestic peace, based more securely than on force, had opened to her the paths of greatness abroad."

"The success of England and her allies in the War of the Spanish Succession, which curbed "the exorbitant power of France" for eighty years to come, influenced the whole tone of Eighteenth Century civilization in a thousand ways. The defeat of Louis is one of the most prominent facts in history. We are, therefore, apt to forget how very near he came to attaining world-power, by the retention of the whole Spanish Empire as a field of French influence, and by the virtual annexation of the Netherlands and of Italy as jewels in the French Crown. He was never nearer to success than in the spring of 1704. Nothing but the accident of Marlborough's genius, and some lucky turns of fortune in the field that year, diverted the paths of destiny."

"This great but noiseless revolution in sea-power was accomplished by the victories of Marlborough's arms and diplomacy on land; by the maintenance of England's fighting navy at full strength during the time when French and Dutch were perforce disarming at sea; and by the wise application of an amphibious strategy in the Mediterranean, dreamed of by Cromwell, conceived by William, and executed by Marlborough, through the agency of such capable seamen as Rooke, Leake, Shovell and Byng. It was because Marlborough regarded the naval war as an integral part of the whole allied effort against Louis, that English sea power was fixed between 1702 and 1712 on a basis whence no enemy has since been able to dislodge it."

"The erection of British naval and commercial supremacy on a footing that proved permanent for more than two hundred years, might not unreasonably be regarded as the most important outcome of the reign of Anne."

"The movement towards philanthropy instead of persecution, as an outlet for religious enthusiasm, was one of the characteristic fruits of the Revolution, as also was the improvement in public justice, both political and criminal. Because the Revolution Settlement was not a party victory, but an agreed compromise between Whig and Tory, Church and Dissent, it made humanity, moderation and co-operation the main current of affairs in the Eighteenth Century."

"If...the story of the great events and the great men of our Augustan age could be told in its truth and simplicity, as only the man of Athens could have told it, it would move like a five-act tragedy from start to finish, presenting in turn the overweening pride and the fall of Louis, then of Marlborough and of the Whigs, then of the Tories in their turn, while, through the crash of each successive crisis of war and politics, the fortune of England moves forward on the tide of destiny. And what men that little rustic England could breed! A nation of five and a half millions that had Wren for its architect, Newton for its scientist, Locke for its philosopher, Bentley for its scholar, Pope for its poet, Addison for its essayist, Bolingbroke for its orator, Swift for its pamphleteer and Marlborough to win its battles, had the recipe for genius."

"It was difficult to understand what was going on across the Channel, but there was satisfaction in the thought that we were not as other nations. Our social and political troubles, it was held, lay behind us, wisely solved in advance—by Queen Elizabeth, William of Orange, Pitt, Lord Grey, Mr. Cobden or Sir Robert Peel, according to choice—and above all by the calm good sense of the British people. In the middle of the European revolutions the first part of Macaulay's history was published, and attained at once a popularity and influence analogous to that of Scott, Byron or Dickens. There were many grounds for its success, but one was that it presented a reasoned eulogy of Britain and things British, as that age understood them. Nor could the historian resist the temptation of inserting a passage proudly contrasting 1688 at home with 1848 abroad."