Historians From England

"Other foes made their intentions clear by denunciations of one’s family or religion, and by ravaging the countryside and plundering the towns. The British, generally so restrained in their language and so disciplined in the field, were very different. They could make hostility look like friendship and conquest like a favor. It was difficult to rally support against such tactics."

"What I have tried to show, by looking in depth at one modern theory of human nature, is that our modern intellectual culture, for all its secularism and its rationalism, remains largely theological or crypto-theological in its nature. This is why psychoanalysis, with its subtle reworking of Judaeo- Christian orthodoxies and its almost completely invisible reliance on the creationist theory of human nature, has proved so deeply appealing."

"All in all, we may say that Nonconformity served as a gathering ground of the various influences (religious, political, and economic) which produced the Liberal or Manchester philosophy of the nineteenth century—a philosophy which not only inspired a party, but determined in no small measure the general life and aspect of Victorian England. "Way for individual enterprise"—this was its teaching; and backed by the manufacturing and commercial classes, which had always been the stronghold of Nonconformity, its teaching triumphed. The reluctant Peel, a Conservative and a Churchman, bowed to its logic; the subtle mind of Gladstone, nurtured in the same tenets as Peel, came under its influence and became its chosen apostle. The England which presented itself to the Continent—the England which the Continent still sees (though it is passing or passed)—was the England of this tradition: not the England of Church and King, the "land" and loyalty, but the England of chapel and counting-house, the factory and self-help. The philosophy of England which travelled abroad was the philosophy of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer; and both, whatever their religious views, were deeply imbued with the Nonconformist tradition. Spencer, as he writes in his autobiography, sprang from a family "essentially dissenting"; and his Nonconformist instincts and early training left an abiding mark, which appears in his opposition to any scheme of State education, and in the title and whole argument of The Man versus the State."

"I am bothered today by the abstract intellectualism of those with whom I used to associate, and by the conventional lip service to phrases in my old party—the Liberal Party. I admire more and more the practical wisdom of the good ordinary Englishman, facing the facts and "feeling" the right way through them—as a good Englishman feels his way through a new countryside... This means that I am getting nearer and nearer to you. It is a late change—at the age of 64. But I am glad that it is coming."

"Yet, admirable though his books are, the fact remains that the man was bigger than his books. To think of Ernest Barker is to think, first and foremost, of one who, once met, can never be forgotten, a man of surprising candour, naive curiosity, and effortless vitality. He repelled a few, attracted many, aroused the interest of all. In many ways he was an extraordinarily intelligent child, and he influenced others with the unconscious fearlessness of a child. In all that he did he was always the same, a critical yet sensitive Liberal, not particularly careful of others, yet tender-hearted, easily stirred by the plight of those in adversity, happy in phrase as in disposition, often uncannily acute, and sometimes unexpectedly perverse."

"Among Sir Ernest Barker's many interests and achievements...one was prolonged for some years after his retirement from most other activities, for he continued to work for better international understanding as a member of the United Kingdom National Commission for Unesco and as the first chairman of its National Co-operating Body for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. To both he brought a wealth of wisdom and experience and the stimulus of all those qualities of vitality, candour and stern intolerance of nonsense so well brought out in your memoir, all of which made him so truly worthy and justly eminent a citizen of that Republic of Letters to which his life's work was devoted."

"In Robert Walpole's life he has found the exemplar of that need for political stability without which social stability is impossible; yet, as the concluding remarks upon political stability of his Ford Lectures show, he is intensely aware that this very banishment of the chaos which haunts us all, holds in itself the nemesis of an inertia upon which social instability feeds. To have maintained such profound and pressing human problems as the constant background of works of exceptional detailed scholarship has surely been Professor Plumb's own splendid answer to the urgent demand he posed in his penetrating lecture "The Death of the Past" of 1969, when he called for a renewal o a meaningful study of history in an age when the past no longer gives the old simple linear answers that helped to hold civilisation together from the age of Eusebius to the century of Karl Marx."

"The idea of the State is one which is little grasped in England."

"Creative energy is one of Professor Plumb's most obvious gifts – another is his sense of reality. No other historian can convey so vividly the feeling for how men breathe, eat, breed, enjoy themselves, go about their business, hope, worry and die. He is not too fastidious, he has a brotherly sympathy for the lusts of the flesh and the pride of the eye. All his books are written in what the French used to call the odour of the man... Vigorous, empathetic, sane, Professor Plumb is one of the tonic spirits of our day."

"Collectivism...demands expert government..."the aristocracy of talent" of which Carlyle wrote. The control of a State with powers so vast will obviously need an exceptional and exceptionally large aristocracy."

"It has indeed been a feature common to the Evangelical and Catholic sections of the English Church—and, for that matter, a feature common to both with various Nonconformist societies, which in this respect have followed the same tradition and adopted similar methods—that they have all sought to make religion a general social force."

"Whenever I see a row of poplars", the much-loved tutor Ernest Barker used to say in the rich Cheshire accent he guarded so stubbornly against the corrosive influences of both Oxford and Cambridge: "whenever I see a row of poplars going on in a straight line, over hill over dale, never turning aside for forest or river, I say to myself 'The Romans! The Romans have been here! It may be sentimental, but I like it.'"

"It would be difficult to name another scholar whose books and articles have been and are to-day as widely read by university teachers and students of political science in the United States. American scholars have especially admired his breadth of interests, ranging from an intimate acquaintance with classical Greek, which resulted in the most useful modern translation of Aristotle's Politics, to concern with major problems of the day, reflected in his letters to the Editor of The Times."

"For many years, as a gloomy exercise, I used to look for British cars on the streets of New York and the best that I could hope for was a rare "mini" or a rarer Rolls-Royce. Now its streets are alive with Jaguars – a tribute to the new professionalism in British industry which goes right down to the shop floor, a professionalism, however, which still has to be extended and encouraged. This can only be done by continuing the policies upon which Mrs Thatcher's government has embarked – particularly in education where the need to instill professional qualities and to teach technological skills is paramount. It is only through well trained youth and expanding industry that new, real jobs can be created. Everyone to whom I spoke in America – senators, industrialists, bankers, publishers – from the left of the Democratic party to the right of the Republican spoke with admiration of Mrs Thatcher, not only of the part she is playing in nuclear disarmament but also of the way she has changed the image of Britain from one of collapse and decay to self-reliance and hope. They believe, and I agree, that a victory for Labour would be disastrous. Mr Kinnock and his colleagues possess neither the intellect, the foresight, the sense of human reality nor the creative imagination needed for leadership. They know they cannot convince so they attempt to bamboozle."

"Some years ago, Sir John Plumb, aware of the threat both to the general mind and to the survival of his profession that the undermining of ancient convictions could pose, in effect advised historians to write the sort of history that helps people towards a contented and more cheerful life. But surely that is to back corruption: we are not to tell what for good reason we believe to be much nearer the truth if it upsets people. Besides, it cannot be done. All history upsets some people: what Plumb really called for was the sort of history that supported the social attitudes, ambitions and behaviour that he preferred."

"His [Winston Churchill's] violent disagreement with Neville Chamberlain did not spring solely from thwarted ambition or personal dislike. Such motives may have sharpened the phrases and honed his epigrams, but the long policy of appeasement, the weakening of Britain's world role, the acceptance of oppression and racialism were to Churchill a denial of England's historical destiny and, because a denial, bound to end in disaster."

"Men write history for many reasons; to try to understand the forces which impel mankind along its strange course; to justify a religion, a nation, or a class; to make money; to fulfil ambition; to assuage obsession; and a few, the true creators, to ease the ache within."

"Professor Plumb is outstanding among contemporary historians in fighting this diminished scope of his chosen discipline. It is shown, of course, in the breadth of his historical interests where his editorial work and his essays demonstrate his remarkable historical range. But it emerges more powerfully in the depth of his probing, and the constantly held wide perspective in which he has studied and made his own a portion of English history – the interrelation of political and social order in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries... Again and again J. H. Plumb brings to our conciousness by inference the triumphant victory of humanity in the last centuries, despite all setbacks, over material squalor, disease and brutality of manners; equally insistent is his sense of the tragic shortness of men's lives set beside their aspirations, of their persistent proneness to cruelty, to lethargy or to corruption."

"He has always written to be read. He is always as concerned with the quality of his prose as he is with the quality of his argument or the precision of his evidence. In intention alone, such literary concern marks him out from the mass of practising academic historians, and the results of his endeavours mark him out even more clearly. His writing is, for pace, vigour and flow, unrivalled among contemporary historians and sometimes it is held to be too vivid. His figures of speech are not always appreciated by the profession: when he wrote, for instance, of Walpole's attempt to muzzle the youthful Chatham, "As well might he attempt to stop a hurricane with a hairnet", there were not a few reviewers who tut-tutted at the extravagance of the idea and its expression, but fortunately most have welcomed a writer who can present the product of massive scholarship elegantly and compactly and vividly. For his work can convey an unusual sense of intellectual excitement, and its polish and panache make him one of the most readable historians... He is a man to read for the larger scale and the developing vision. He is an historian to read for the changing relationship between political allies and rivals, for the battle between moral scruple and tactical skill in political factions, for the narrative curve of a politician's career, of the unfolding of a man's character in the face of opportunity, triumph, setback or defeat."

"I once wrote that I knew no one else who could at the same time master the technical problems of conveying the sweep of history – the tour d'horizon of international relations, balance of power, economic development, social structure, cultural achievement and national ambition – and at the same time study these landscapes of the past with perceptive and original interpretations of the major figures bestriding the stage he had set. Plumb switches from the telescope to the microscope with unusual ease."

"If boldly conceived, thoughtfully researched and elegantly written popular history is once again enjoying an extraordinary flowering in Britain, it was Sir John Plumb who planted the seeds, and tended the garden, while himself producing some of its most dazzling blooms. From the beginning of his career to its end he never wavered from the view that history's vocation might begin in the academy, but it should not end there; that as an illumination of the human condition, the "interpreter of its destiny", it was too important to be confined to the intra-mural disputes of the professionals."

"In 1950 Plumb was confident enough to write for "The Pelican History of England" his justly famous masterpiece of compression, England in the Eighteenth Century, with its shrewd thumbnail sketches of the powerful and its unforgettable social scene-painting. On its pages countless readers smelled the London streets as well as the nose on a Houghton Bordeaux. It was, in miniature, writing of the kind Plumb admired in his literary epigones such as Sterne and Rabelais."

"It amuses me to hear some of my Scotch friends, who have leapt nimbly on to the new band-wagon, speaking as if, with independence, Scotland would be the same as before, only independent. Will it even be as large as before? The native historian of the Orkney Islands closes his work with the remark that the only advantage that the Orkney islanders gained from their annexation by Scotland in 1468 was "the ultimate advantage of annexation to Great Britain" in 1707. They may well prefer to be ruled by London rather than from Glasgow, to which political power in an independent Scotland will naturally gravitate, and where it will no doubt be exercised—since they too are good at that kind of politics—by the Irish. This will perhaps compensate them for their inability to rule the Scots of Ulster from captured Belfast."

"England and Scotland were poles apart... In England population, trade, wealth had constantly increased. New industries had grown up and found new markets in a richer, more sophisticated lay society at home. The economic growth of England had been extraordinary and had created, however unequally, a new comfort and a new culture. But in Scotland there had been no such growth. There was little trade, little industry, no increase of population. Always poor and backward, it now seemed, by contrast, poorer and more backward still. That contrast is vividly illustrated by the comments of those who crossed the Tweed, in either direction. We read the accounts of English travellers in Scotland. Their inns, cries Sir William Brereton, are worse than a jakes; and he breaks into a sustained cry of incredulous disgust at that dismal, dirty, waste, and treeless land. Then we turn to the Scottish travellers in England. "Their inns", exclaims Robert Baillie, "are like palaces"; and Sir Alexander Brodie of Brodie, goggling at all the wicked fancies and earthly delights of London, reminds us of a bedouin of the desert blinking in the bazaar of Cairo or Damascus."

"Scotland had already had a religious revolution. By an irony which seems also a law of history, the new religion of Calvinism, like Marxism today, had triumphed not in the mature society which had bred it but in undeveloped countries where the organs of resistance to it were also undeveloped."

"Like seventeenth century visitors to Scotland, they [English historians] tend to dismiss it as a barbarous country populated only by doltish peasants manipulated, for their own factious ends, by ambitious noblemen and fanatical ministers. And equally, they see the English occupation of Scotland merely as imposed, for the sake of order, on an exhausted land. Even Scottish historians have hardly sought to fill this gap. As far as published work is concerned, the sociology of seventeenth Scotland remains a blank."

"The Government spokesmen...insist that, once the assembly is established, the SNP will wither away... Thanks to the assembly, Scotch nationalism will have been scotched. The leaders of the SNP do not agree with this reasoning. If they did, they would oppose the assembly as an unacceptable substitute for their own essential demands, a stone offered instead of bread. In fact they have decided to vote for the assembly, confident that they can use it as a stepping-stone towards their own objective. For after all, they can say, the opportunities of making trouble in the assembly will be many. There can be disputes over the spending of the money, disputes over the restraints on the assembly, both political and financial. Even practical incompetence can be useful; for in every case the blame can be concentrated on a very convenient scapegoat, the reserved powers of Westminster. In this way the assembly, which has been devised to halt the advance of the SNP, will be an excellent means of accelerating that advance: an advance far beyond the limited aims of the government: an advance to sovereignty."

"After that date [1707], intelligent Scotchmen rejoiced in the removal of their national politics to London. That enabled them to get on with the long delayed improvement of their country which, till then, had remained, as they admitted, "the rudest of all the European nations". In the eighteenth century, the energy which had hitherto been wasted or frustrated in futile politics was devoted to "improvement" and the rudest of its nations became the admired model of Europe."

"Now this doctrine of Carlyle, which the history of Nazism so aptly illustrates, depends upon two premisses of doubtful validity: firstly, that "greatness", or any other merely abstract conception, is desirable; secondly, that the human character is constant,—for a great man can clearly be trusted with absolute power only if his qualities remain "great". The opposite doctrine to this is the doctrine summarised by Lord Acton in his famous aphorism, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely": the doctrine that power is not merely the effective expression of a fixed character, but can affect and alter the character which exercises it. The history of Nazism suggests that this doctrine is true."

"To this the government reply is, in effect, "wait and see". We are assured that once the sensible Scots people have elected sensible, practical men to represent them in the assembly, all these grim forebodings will prove mistaken. The assembly-men will settle down and make good laws within the limits set, and the claims of the SNP will dissolve in mere noise."

"I used to think that historical events always had deep economic causes. I now believe that pure farce covers a far greater field of history, and that Gibbon is a more reliable guide to that subject than Marx."

"The Regius Professor's methods of quotation might also do harm to his reputation as a serious historian, if he had one."

"Perhaps the most recurring and paradoxical trigger of change in human society has been war."

"The second amendment, passed in 1791, allowing US citizens access to arms, was manageable when most firearms were muskets that took minutes to load."

"Given the current bitter polarisation of political allegiances, it is important to remember that national groupings have never been homogeneous and are rarely static. Of course, there are some persistent habits and patterns of thought and behaviour in all long-standing states. But countries and their populations are not just mixed in terms of ethnicity, politics, religion and much more, they also change over time, sometimes rapidly and radically."

"The men who dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 were deploying technology that had taken decades to develop. Nonetheless, in carrying out that act, these US airmen did effect an almost immediate transformation in the nature of warfare and in attitudes towards it."

"Consider the terrible outbreak of plague in the 14th century known as the Black Death. Europe suffered disproportionately, losing perhaps 50 per cent of its total population. One result of this, however, was that the living standards and wages of many of those who survived seem to have improved. This, it has been suggested, led in time to a marked increase in Europeans’ food consumption and demand for consumer goods. And this rise in demand may well in turn have contributed to the increasing number of European trading voyages across the world’s oceans in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries."

"One of the ways in which all universities could contribute substantially to their home societies is by helping students obtain a better understanding of the development and interdependencies over time of our seemingly fragmented globe."

"Dramatic in their scope though the maritime empires once were, it is overland empires that have proved more resilient, and variations of them are still with us. The United States, Russia, China and India call themselves nation-states, but all of them are in reality products of, and marked by, different imperial enterprises; and their respective rulers on occasion still behave accordingly. Think of Donald Trump’s casual suggestion last August that the US purchase Greenland. At the time, many put this down to Trump being Trump. In fact, he was acting in conformity with many of his predecessors. US presidents proposed purchasing Greenland in the 1860s and 1940s, and American politicians did succeed in buying other vast tracts of land, Alaska, for instance, and the huge Louisiana Purchase in 1803."

": "I think Helen Graham is probably the most profound historian writing about the Spanish Civil War in the English language.""

"...War in Spain remains ‘unfinished business’, and not only inside Spain itself, but across Europe, and in Britain too."

"The Spanish Civil War was, in a sense, the war before the lights went out—the war that could have changed the course of European and world history if power actors had behaved in different ways."

"By definition a historian must be curious; that is what makes us look into the heart of societies. I think that I was surprised by the relative ease with which Spain moved from dictatorship to democracy after the death of Franco. But thinking about the impact of civil wars on societies I have reached the conclusion that the generation that grows up after a civil war has such terrible memories of what happened that it does everything possible to prevent a repetition in the future."

"We have to learn to navigate this globalized world. Instant communication has changed our lives; those crises of the 18th and 19th centuries were not known around the world, but now we know what is going on everywhere at any time. But we are also seeing a world in which the banks and the large multinationals are playing a bigger role than ever in making decisions about how we live. These supranational organizations are pressuring governments, and that is distancing government from the people. People want more control over their lives, which is why we are seeing a resurgence of regionalism, of ethnicity, of nationalism - everybody wants a place in the sun."

"In the second half of the 17th century, the Catalans saw that the relationship with Spain had failed, and so they rebelled against Philip V; then they realized that the French were no different. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Catalans began to see the opportunities that being in Spain presented. I think that, like the Scots, they took advantage of those opportunities. But historians are not prophets, and it now looks as though our two countries could break up."

"As you write, it doesn’t matter what age you are. I think I’m a better historian now, at 75, than I was at 25."

"The Bourbons imposed an authoritarian rule in the 18th century, shutting down the regional parliaments and ruling from the center, making a balance between the innate diversity of Spain and the concept of a united Spain."

"For many years Madrid's policies were mistaken. If you compare the union of Scotland and England in 1707, for instance, with the Bourbons and Catalonia, you'll see that England immediately involved Scotland in its empire project. A great many Scots held important positions in government, as well as leading the economy over the following centuries. This did not happen with Catalonia."

"In this globalized world, there is no such thing as independence."

"...In this globalized world, independence no longer exists. It is gladdening to see that we are part of a world in which we are all linked. There is also a thing called generosity: any people that thinks only of itself and is not generous with others is doing itself harm in the long run."