Historians From England

"His worst fault was imputing motives, which is always a dangerous game played in the dark. For instance, though he gives the facts of Churchill's part in the Revolution correctly he seems to blame him for turning against James, while everyone else is applauded for doing so. Macaulay was, I think, very much affected by Swift's Tory attacks on Marlborough. Indeed it is not true, as is often said, that he always think the Whigs right and the Tories wrong. He detested the Shaftesbury Whigs at the time of the Popish Plot and the adoption of Monmouth as candidate for the crown. He thinks the Tories were right about the Indemnity Bill of 1689, about the attainder of Fenwick and about making peace "without Spain" at the end of the Marlborough wars. He is perfectly fair to Tory leaders like Danby and Nottingham and gets his prejudice against Marlborough from Tory sources. The path Macaulay trod was no doubt narrow, but it was well in the middle. Although he was a Whig of the Nineteenth Century, for the period in the past about which he wrote he was not a Whig but a Williamite."

"Economic and social history are now so large a part of historical study and writing that it is difficult to remember how new a thing it was in 1848 for Macaulay to introduce social history woven in with the political narrative that could not really be understood without it. His famous Third Chapter on the State of England in 1685 has faults... Nevertheless the Third Chapter was a great new thing in English historiography... After the Third Chapter the narrative gets fairly into swing, and the wonderful story is told how James II in three years turned even Tories into rebels, and the series of events and chances which enabled the Revolution to take place without a civil war. I think this is the greatest piece of historical narrative in our literature."

"Macaulay's permanent reputation rests chiefly on his History of England in the reigns of James II and William III, the causes and the course of the English Revolution and the Revolution Settlement as worked out under William. Lord Acton once told me that he considered Macaulay, with all his faults, as the greatest historian."

"He did for our history what Livy did for the history of Rome; and he did it better."

"[T]ake at hazard any three pages of the Essays or History; and, glimmering below the stream of the narrative, as it were, you, an average reader, see one, two, three, a half score of allusions to other historic facts, characters, literature, poetry, with which you are acquainted. Why is this epithet used? Whence is that simile drawn? How does he manage, in two or three words, to paint an individual, or to indicate a landscape? Your neighbour, who has his reading, and his little stock of literature stowed away in his mind, shall detect more points, allusions, happy touches, indicating not only the prodigious memory and vast learning of this master, but the wonderful industry, the honest, humble previous toil of this great scholar. He reads twenty books to write a sentence; he travels a hundred miles to make a line of description."

"Macaulay's views did not make him a great historian. His unrivalled gift was his power of narration. No one ever told a story better."

"I am not sure that Macaulay and the Whig view of history were all that mistaken. He thought that the British constitution was a unique display of political genius. But wasn't it? The revolution of 1688 was truly a Glorious Revolution. George Orwell once pointed out that in this country we do not kill each other for political reasons. Is there any other great community where this has ever been true? Those who criticize Macaulay either do not care about liberty or they think it can take care of itself. Macaulay was a good deal more sensible. Not only did he regard liberty as supremely important; he knew that it needs ceaseless defending."

"It was an immense advantage to have at the head of our literature a man who thought calmly, who spoke moderately, who wrote fastidiously, whose enthusiasm was never intemperate, whose judgment was never excited. This great potentate in letters opposed to the license of speculation and the riot of the imagination, a simple theory of morals, a simple system of politics, and a simple code of criticism."

"I liked him, and, in many respects, admired him. Personally I mean, for his abilities and acquirements commanded more than ordinary admiration. His sentiments and expressions were always generous, his feelings noble; he hated duplicity, meanness, violence; he never thought that brilliant exploits compensated for the want of moral worth; and he would call a man a villain, a rogue, or an oppressor, whether he were arrayed like Solomon, or in tatters like Lazarus. These super-eminent and mighty talents, though never openly and directly employed for God's service, were, at least, never perverted to evil uses. Is there a sentence in any of his writings to offend decency, morality, the Christian faith?—not one. I did not know till now how much I was attached to him. May I never forget his true and noble speech made, at my request, in the House of Commons on behalf of the factory children! Their prayers, I trust, ascended for him to the Throne of Grace."

"The pity is that Macaulay had such power, such unique vividness, that when he was wrong, as he often was, he has impressed his own version upon the English mind more firmly than the truth. His treatment of Warren Hastings and Marlborough are outstanding cases in point. One might almost say that his misrepresentation of Hastings was responsible for the Indian attitude towards the history of our rule in India. What people other than the English would have been so careless of their own case, so unjust to themselves, as to prescribe the reading of Macaulay's essay on Warren Hastings in their schools and universities? The English have a singular faculty for depreciating their great men."

"Browning the philosopher is read by countless thousands to whom otherwise philosophy would be a sealed book, for exactly the same reason that Macaulay the historian is read by countless thousands to whom otherwise history would be a sealed book; because both Browning's works and Macaulay's works are material additions to the great sum of English literature. Philosophy is a science just as history is a science. There is need in one case as in the other for vivid and powerful presentation of scientific matter in literary form."

"No doubt Lord Macaulay was strongly attached to his political friends, and deeply imbued with those immortal principles which have assigned to the Whig party so glorious a share in the annals and government of this country. But he raised those principles to a higher power. He gave them a broader and more universal character. He traced them along the mighty streams of history, and he expanded them till they embraced the noblest destinies of man. Enshrined in the memorable Essays which first appeared in the pages of this journal, and embodied in the great History, which though still incomplete, includes the most remarkable epoch and the most formidable crisis of British constitutional freedom, these truths will be remembered in the language he gave them, when parliamentary orators and the contentions of statesmen are forgotten. Above all things his public career was singularly high-minded and pure; he was actuated by no selfish motives; he disdained every vulgar reward; and bound by principle to the Whig party, he never made the slightest sacrifice of his own judgment and independence to the demands of popular prejudice or to the dictation of authority."

"[I]n the long roll of English historical writing from Clarendon to Trevelyan only Gibbon has surpassed him in security of reputation and certainty of immortality."

"Portions of the speech were as beautiful as anything I have ever heard or read. It reminded one of the old times."

"Macaulay's life as a writer and as a politician was consecrated to the service of freedom. His style is far from perfect. It has often a hard sound and a metallic look. To say with Matthew Arnold that it has the perpetual semblance of hitting the right nail on the head without the reality is in my judgment absurd. Macaulay habitually hit the right nail on the head, and he did not, as Mr. Arnold sometimes did, knock out two tacks in the process. But there is always the semblance as well as the reality, and it is the reality without the semblance which charms us in the greatest writers of all."

"He never wrote an obscure sentence in his life, and this may seem a small merit, until we remember of how few writers we could say the same."

"If you see the Morning Chronicle you must have observed a Speech lately made at the Anti-Slavery Meeting. It was the Maiden Speech of Macaulay's Son, a youth who has just left College. I have it under the hand of Mr. Wilberforce and other grave senators that it was equal to any speech of Pitt or Fox. This seems a bold assertion but it is supported by Brougham, &c. This young Man was my pet at six years old, and we then manfully fought Homer's battles; and he could descant on the heroes of both sides with no little discrimination. He was the firm Trojan."

"Randolph, who is writing a life of the late Lord Derby for Longman's, brought to luncheon a young man of that name. His talk interested the P[rime] M[inister] [Winston Churchill] ... Macaulay, Longman went on, was not read now; there was no demand for his books. The P.M. grunted that he was very sorry to hear this. Macaulay had been a great influence in his young days."

"I wish I were as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything."

"The most influential contribution to siege historiography was made not by a Derryman, but by Macaulay's epic History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1848–55), perhaps the most celebrated work of English history of all time. Often regarded as the chief exemplar of the whig interpretation of history, Macaulay located the central thread of English experience in the gradual triumph of constitutional liberty and representative government. In the evolution of English liberty from Magna Carta to limited monarchy and the rule of law it was the Glorious Revolution which provided the real landmark in sorting out the relationship between crown and parliament, and King William was the hero of Macaulay's work. More than any other single text, Macaulay's brief, vivid description of the Siege of Derry strengthened the emotional and historical links between Great Britain and the Protestants of Ulster, achieving a massive public relations coup for the loyalist cause."

"The discipline of history does not evolve through the abrupt and complete replacement of one type of history by another. Political history, with its emphasis on government and leadership, is alive and well today, and conversely, social history has appeared at various points in the past, most notably in the nineteenth century. In France from the 1820s on, historians inspired by the Revolution, like Adolphe Thiers and Jules Michelet, wrote histories in which groups like “the bourgeoisie” or “the people” were the main movers in an epic struggle against a selfish aristocracy, which led to the nation’s revolutionary birth in 1789. Leading English historians wrote “social history” long before the 1960s: Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1848 History of England from the Accession of James the Second, a landmark chronicle of the nation’s progress through political emancipation, includes a section on England in 1685 that covers everything from social classes to coffeehouses, street lighting, and newspapers. Nearly a century later, in the midst of World War II, Macaulay’s great-nephew, the Cambridge historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, wrote a highly successful volume entitled English Social History. First published in 1942, Trevelyan’s book is a six-hundred-page account of social conditions in England from the Middle Ages to 1901, which like Macaulay’s covers a breadth of topics, from trade routes and population trends to marriage customs and diets. Leafing through Trevelyan you may come across stories of young girls in the age of Chaucer being beaten into accepting unattractive marriage partners, reports on upper-class drinking and smoking habits in the late seventeenth century, or a vividly imagined account of what life felt like (extremely damp, among other things) in a peasant home around 1750. The type of social history written by Macaulay and Trevelyan, which has equivalents in other national traditions, was clearly subordinate and accessory to political history. In Macaulay’s History of England the lengthy opening section on “the state of England in 1685” serves as a scenic backdrop to the significant action taking place center-stage, the political maneuverings of James II, William of Orange, and their associates. Trevelyan wrote his English Social History as a late-career outtake from his previous works of political history; it was intended to boost wartime morale in the country at large as a sort of Shakespearean paean to the land of thatched cottages and “stout yeomen.” The volume aptly illustrates Trevelyan’s much-quoted, controversial, and pithy description of social history as “the history of a people with the politics left out.” The older “customs and living conditions” tradition of social history epitomized by Trevelyan’s book is indeed notable for the assumption that “politics” is purposeful activity that happens only in the highest realm and is therefore absent from society at large. The poor and middling are presumed not to affect historical change; as a result, a book like English Social History reads like a series of picturesque descriptions rather than an argument or a story."

"The man is a humbug—a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull…"

"In the evening I dined quietly at the Athenaeum with Herbert Spencer... We talked much about style in writing, he being strong about the uselessness of knowing the derivation of words, about the bad writing of Addison, about the especial atrocity of Macaulay, whose style “resembles low organisations, being a perpetual repetition of similar parts. There are savages,” &c."

"This book, therefore, has already, in the course of three little months, scattered to the winds, and swept finally from the minds of all thinking Englishmen, those lingerings of Jacobite prejudice, which the eloquence and perversions of Hume, and the popular talents of Scott and other writers of fiction, had restored to our literature, and but too much familiarised to our feelings, in the last fifty years. This is a great work, and a great triumph, and ought, I think, so to be hailed and rejoiced in. All convertible men must now be disabused of their prejudices, and all future generations grow up in a light, round which no cloud can again find means to gather."

"[N]o historian of any age has been so prodigal of original and profound reflective suggestion, aye and weighty and authoritative decision also, on innumerable questions of great difficulty and general interest; though these precious contributions are not ostentatiously ticketed and labelled, as separate gifts to mankind, but woven, with far better grace and effect, into the net tissue of the story."

"Matthew Arnold was unjust to Macaulay's style. Its external characteristic, he said, was “a hard metallic movement, with nothing of the soft play of life.” ... But there are other styles more especially adapted to the historical presentation of facts, and to the conduct of argument, not as among intimates, but in the forum. Such styles, as distinguished from the others, may be called objective; and in these we do not look for “the soft play of life.” Gibbon's is such a style; Macaulay's is another. It suited his subjects; it also suited his temperament, which, though imaginatively dreamy, was not reflective, and still less introspective. It is a style, of course, which has its limitations; but it has also its own sphere, its own virtues, its own beauty and grandeur; yes, and its own play of life too—but not that which Matthew Arnold calls a soft play of life."

"It may be granted that Macaulay would have been a still greater historian than he is, if he had possessed more aptitude for speculative thought,—if his mind had been more philosophic; but the fact that he was not a philosopher is no reason for denying that he was, in his own way, a great historian."

"Macaulay's success in making the achievement of the constitutional struggles of the past once more a living possession of every educated Englishman is now rarely remembered."

"Political history indeed has lost much of the power and fascination it had in the nineteenth century; and it is doubtful whether any historical work of our time has had a circulation or direct influence comparable with, say, Macaulay's History of England."

"History, Macaulay believed, should serve politics by teaching politicians and citizens how to maintain a moderate, constitutional regime in which both liberty and order are preserved, each balanced against the other, and neither promoted to the neglect of the other. This meant that the political centre had to be protected by politicians who opposed extremist parties on both sides of the political spectrum, for at the extremes one found doctrinairism, zeal, and fanaticism on behalf of policies that would lead, in one direction, to anarchy, or, in the other, to despotism. The extremes could be diminished and the centre defended, Macauay held, by making adjustments in institutions in response to demands for change, and by making concessions to those who had grievances."

"The justice of the historian surmounted the habits of the politician; he is much more impartial in his history of the reign of William the Third, than in that of James the Second, or above all, than in the summary of those of Charles the First and Charles the Second. He judges the Whigs of 1692 more severely than the Republicans of 1648; and if I am correctly informed, his new-born impartiality won for him from several interested or ardent Whigs, animated reproaches."

"When I personally knew Lord Macaulay, I still more enjoyed my disposition to admire him. The harmony was perfect between the man and the artist, the talker and the writer. Nothing bore a closer resemblance to Lord Macaulay's works than his conversation. There was the same richness and readiness of memory, the same unaffected ardour in the thought, the same vivacity of imagination, the same clearness of language, the same natural and pointed turn in the reflections. There was as much pleasure and almost as much instruction in listening to as in reading him. And when after so many remarkable and charming Essays, he published his great work, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, the same qualities developed themselves therein with even increased abundance and effect. I know no history in which the past and the historian who relates it live so intimately or familiarly together."

"Macaulay's History is the best ethical study for forming the mind and character of a young man, for it is replete with maxims of the highest practical value. It holds up in every page to hatred and scorn all the vices which can stain, and to admiration and emulation all the virtues which can adorn, a public career. It is impossible for anyone to study that great work without sentiments of profound admiration for the lessons it inculcates, and they who become thoroughly imbued with its spirit, no matter whether they coincide or not with his opinions, will be strengthened in a profound veneration for truth and justice, for public and private integrity and honour, and in a genuine patriotism and desire for the freedom, prosperity, and glory of their country."

"I must embrace the opportunity of expressing, not what I felt, (for language could not express it,) but of making an attempt to convey to the House my sympathy with it in its admiration of the speech of my honourable and learned friend: a speech which, I will venture to assert, has never been exceeded within these walls for the development of statesmanlike policy and practical good sense. It exhibited all that is noble in oratory; all that is sublime, I had almost said, in poetry; all that is truly great, exalted, and virtuous in human nature. If the House at large felt a deep interest in this magnificent display, it may judge of what were my emotions when I perceived in the hands of my honourable friend the great principles which he expounded glowing with fresh colours, and arrayed in all the beauty of truth."

"His style...was one of those gifts of which, when it had been conferred, Nature broke the mould... It is paramount in the union of ease in movement with perspicuity of matter, of both with real splendour, and of all with immense rapidity and striking force. From any other pen, such masses of ornament would be tawdry; with him they are only rich... In none, perhaps, of our prose writers are lessons such as he gives of truth and beauty, of virtue and of freedom, so vividly associated with delight."

"However true it may be that Macaulay was a far more consummate workman in the manner than in the matter of his works, we do not doubt that the works contain, in multitudes, passages of high emotion and ennobling sentiment, just awards of praise and blame, and solid expositions of principle, social, moral, and constitutional. They are pervaded by a generous love of liberty; and their atmosphere is pure and bracing, their general aim and basis morally sound."

"Macaulay once remarked that if the law of gravity were unfavorable to any substantial financial interest, there would soon be no lack of arguments against it."

"I know that to run down Lord Macaulay is the fashion of the day. I have heard some speak against him who have a right to speak; I have heard many more who have none. I at least feel that I have none; I do not see how any man can have the right who has not gone through the same work through which Macaulay went, or at least through some no less thorough work of a kindred sort. I can see Macaulay's great and obvious faults as well as any man; I know as well as any man the cautions with which his brilliant pictures must be studied; but I cannot feel that I have any right to speak lightly of one to whom I owe so much in the matter of actual knowledge, and to whom I owe more than to any man as the master of historical narrative. Read a page of Macaulay; scan well his minute accuracy in every name and phrase and title; contrast his English undefiled with the slipshod jargon which from our newspapers has run over into our books; dwell on the style which finds a fitting phrase in our own tongue to set forth every thought, the style which never uses a single word out of its true and honest meaning; turn the pages of the book in which no man ever read a sentence a second time because he failed to catch its meaning the first time, but in which all of us must have read many sentences a second or a twentieth time for the sheer pleasure of dwelling on the clearness, the combined fulness and terseness, on the just relation of every word to every other, on the happily chosen epithet, or the sharply pointed sarcasm ."

"The speeches made by Mr. Macaulay on the spur of the moment...are generally, when thus the spontaneous product of the moment, most able and vigorous arguments on the subject under discussion, which is, in most cases, placed in an entirely new light. After he has spoken on such occasions as these, the debate usually takes a new turn. Members on both sides of the House, and of all ranks, are to be found shaping their remarks, either in confirmation or refutation of what Mr. Macaulay has said; so influential is his bold, vigorous, uncompromising mode of handling a question; so acute his analysis; so firm his grasp."

"The intellectual expression of Macaulay's countenance was magnificent—never on a nobler forehead, piled up with sagacity & depth. He was a splendid orator; a writer of the first class, both in originality of treatment & power of expression; his learning was very extensive & very various. No man ever had a memory at the same time so prodigious, & so cultivated."

"If, as criticism in the 1970s suggests, condescending treatments of Macaulay are no longer fashionable, he may be seen to rank among the greatest English prose writers, with Addison and Johnson, the subjects of two of his finest essays."

"What Macaulay did was to infuse the liberal creed with the spacious and sanguine spirit of humanism and history."

"But above all, he typified the two things that really make the Victorian Age itself; the cheapness and narrowness of its conscious formulae; the richness and humanity of its unconscious tradition."

"The real villains of Macaulay's piece are the extremists of right and left, those on the right who refused to accept the Revolutionary Settlement, and those on the left who would go so far toward Dissent, latitudinarianism, restricted monarchy, and even republicanism as to jeopardize the Revolutionary Settlement. The villains of the right are the Nonjurors and the Jacobites, open and secret... And as so often happens in politics, left and right frequently worked together in common opposition to the center—in this case the Revolutionary center—and this was a fact Macaulay never forgot. Macaulay's History, then, becomes a classic defense of the middle of the road. Make progress, as much as practicable, within the framework of the Revolutionary Settlement, but never do anything to jeopardize that Settlement."

"[T]here is no denying that Macaulay's historical sympathies were strongly enlisted in support of limited and constitutional government, parliamentary and cabinet government, the extension of civil liberties, the expansion of religious toleration, the broadening of intellectual freedom, the curbing of mercantilistic restrictions, the elimination of trading barriers, the widening of free trade. Since the rising middle class was an exponent of many of these policies, Macaulay in a sense may be said to be an apologist of that class. And since the Whig party was frequently an advocate of many of these policies, Macaulay, in his role of historian, often appears friendly to that party. But this is about as far as Macaulay went in writing from the Whig point of view."

"Macaulay's so-called Whig prejudices, so far as they influence his historical judgments, are greatly exaggerated. The Whigs actually come off worse than one has been led to expect, and conversely the Tories come off better. The Revolution of 1688 and the Revolutionary Settlement, not the Whigs, are the central themes of the History. Macaulay is an apologist for the Revolution, and it is well to remember that both Tories and Whigs made that Revolution possible. To preserve the Revolution required a nice and constant moderation, and with this in view, Macaulay becomes a defender of the middle-roaders, the trimmers, whose cautious policies protected the Revolution and made impossible a counter-revolution. If there is extreme partisanship in Macaulay, it is the partisanship of English nationalism, not of Whiggery."

"He can, in fact, be seen as in many ways the last great neoclassical historian, writing history after a successful public career. His own culture was above all classical, broadened by a love of eighteenth-century novels and drama, as well as by his reading of Burke, whom he revered, and Scott. Where he was exceptional was not in being a social historian, which he certainly was not, but in the emotional range and depth, the almost pictorial vividness and concreteness, and the dramatic intensity of his historical writing. None of this was exactly new — it was foreshadowed in Robertson and Hume — but in no other historian was it so copiously and even extravagantly displayed. His own model historians were Tacitus and Thucydides."

"During these visits to Cambridge, I became acquainted with Macaulay. I remember well walking with him, Praed, Ord and some others of the set, along the College Gardens, listening with wonder to that full and opulent converse, startled by knowledge so various, memory so prodigious. That walk left me in a fever of emulation. I shut myself up for many days in intense study, striving to grasp at an equal knowledge: the trophies of Miltiades would not suffer me to sleep."

"[T]he greatest display of eloquence I ever witnessed at the Club was made by a man some years our senior, and who twice came up during my residence to grace our debates—the now renowned Macaulay. The first of these speeches was on the French Revolution, and it still lingers in my recollection as the most heart-stirring effort of that true oratory which seizes hold of the passions, transports you from yourself, and identifies you with the very life of the orator, that it has ever been my lot to hear, saving, perhaps, one speech by O'Connell, delivered to an immense crowd in the open air. Macaulay, in point of power, passion, and effect, never equalled that speech in his best day in the House of Commons. His second speech, upon the Liberty of the Press, if I remember rightly, was a failure."

"On several subjects I should venture to differ from Mr. Macaulay; but I cannot refrain from expressing my admiration of his unwearied diligence, of the consummate skill with which he has arranged his materials, and of the noble love of liberty which animates his entire work. These are qualities which will long survive the aspersions of his puny detractors,—men who, in point of knowledge and ability, are unworthy to loosen the shoe-latchet of him they foolishly attack."