British Historians and National Identity

From Hume to Churchill

Anthony Leon Brundage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317317104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Two eminent scholars of historiography examine the concept of national identity through the key multi-volume histories of the last two hundred years. Starting with Hume's History of England (1754–62), they explore the work of British historians whose work had a popular readership and an influence on succeeding generations of British children.

1
Demythologizing the Nation’s Past: David Hume’s History of England

When the volumes of David Hume’s The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 appeared in print between 1754 and 1762, they were often read and appraised through the lens of contemporary political and religious divisions. While this was true to some extent about all historical works written in the period, it was especially true for Hume, who chose to write his history backwards, beginning with the most recent era, that of the Stuart dynasty. When the first volume was published in 1754, it bore the title The History of Great Britain. Only with the appearance of later volumes dealing with earlier historical periods was the title of the collected volumes changed to The History of England. Hume decided to start in 1603 rather than 1485 because, as he explained to Adam Smith:

Twas under James that the House of Commons began first to raise their Head, and then the Quarrel betwixt Privilege and Prerogative commenc’d … and the Factions, which then arose, having an influence on our present Affairs, form the most curious, interesting, and instructive Part of our History.¹

His sympathetic treatment of Charles I, criticism of rebel leaders during the Civil War, and disparaging of ‘fanatical’ Puritans, brought down the wrath of radical Whigs upon his head. Conversely, Tories were pleased, though it did not escape their notice that Hume was far from endorsing their most cherished doctrines. In France, most philosophes applauded his philosophical tone and graceful prose, though some were distressed by his presumed endorsement of monarchical authority, while royalistes sang his praises. Such a conservative champion did le bon David seem through the rest of the ancien régime and revolutionary era that one modern scholar has dubbed him ‘prophet of the Counter-Revolution’.² A close examination of Hume’s History reveals a more balanced, sceptical treatment than these views suggest, with an overarching intent by the author to demythologize Britain’s past. In spite of his own somewhat Whiggish views, he took special pains to puncture the myths of the Whig party (like that of a supposedly free constitution in Anglo-Saxon times), considering it unworthy of his fellow Whigs to ground their beliefs in anything other than a well-informed, sceptical approach to history. Unbiased readers at the time were aware of this, but by the closing years of the eighteenth century, the process of drastically bowdlerizing Hume’s History was gaining ground, which only served to lock into place the author’s reputation as a Tory historian.

Hume (1711–76) was born in Edinburgh to a long-established family of border lairds who had taken an active part in Scottish law and administration. Early in his life he set a goal of intellectual eminence through philosophical analysis. His first work, The Treatise of Human Nature (1739) failed to attract a large reader-ship, though today it is considered his major philosophical work. He switched to the essay form, which proved more accessible and popular, with his Essays Moral and Political in 1741–2. In these and subsequent essay collections, he considered the moral and social bases of politics, society and the economy. Many of these shorter works foreshadowed the treatment of major themes in the History. His Three Essays Moral and Political (1748) were written during the Forty-five, that most serious attempt by the ousted Stuart dynasty to regain the throne. Although Hume was a staunch supporter of the Hanoverians, he offered the following description of two of the essays: ‘One is against the original Contract, the system of the Whigs, another against passive Obedience, the System of the Tories’.³ Thus, well before taking up this pen as a historian, Hume showed a determination to distance himself from existing political and religious affiliations. His detachment was further enhanced by his own self-image as a cosmopolitan and leading light of the Scottish Enlightenment, though an underlying anti-English sentiment sometimes emerges, however muted by his ever-present sense of irony.

Starting with the early Stuarts in his History allowed him to tackle the major political, economic and religious issues that had periodically roiled the nation in the modern period, and to do so in a fashion that would demonstrate the appropriate approach to the past by those who considered themselves cultivated and enlightened. Hume made clear the very type of reader he did not welcome: the party advocate, who was willing to believe anything about history that supported his particular group or ideology. He even singled out three historical episodes that served as a litmus test for identifying unworthy readers:

There are indeed three events in our history, which may be regarded as touchstones of partymen. An English Whig, who asserts the reality of the popish plot, an Irish Catholic, who denies the massacre in 1641, and a Scotch Jacobite, who maintains the innocence of Queen Mary must be considered as men beyond the reach of argument or reason, and must be left to their prejudices.⁴

Turning from philosophical analysis of politics and society to writing history allowed Hume an extra dimension to work with in his laying bare of faulty reasoning and prejudice. And since so many misguided views were based on unquestioning belief about past events, he could now expose the shaky underpinnings of all belief systems. These included, importantly, all systems based on the notion of an original social contract, not omitting that of John Locke.⁵ There was, however, another crucial advantage to switching from philosophy to history: it allowed Hume to deploy to great effect his ability to convey a sense of immediacy and identity with the major players of the nation’s past. In short, it brought the powerful tool of sympathy into his arsenal. In Humean terms, this meant the communication of sentiments between an individual and others, and was one of the fundamental bases of our knowledge of the world and the operations of society. Thus we can understand historical actors with this kind of sympathy, just as we understand those around us. Hume also deployed sympathy in the more commonplace meaning of the word, that is, as pity or compassion. This approach allowed his narrative to come to life through the identity readers were able to establish with the characters in his History, though he did not overdo it, sandwiching such close-ups between his more characteristic passages of detachment and irony. Hume correctly guessed that this treatment would secure a far larger readership than any of his philosophical works and thus satisfy his openly acknowledged ambition for public adulation and riches. Of equal importance, it would reach a wide swath of that enlarged reading public inclined, thanks to the earlier work by essayists like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, toward civility, moderation and prudence.

The mid-eighteenth century was a lively time for an aspiring historian to take up his pen. Since the late Stuart period, history had become a political and religious battleground, with the cataclysmic events of the seventeenth century providing the incendiary materials. Beginning with the magisterial History of the Great Rebellion by Edward Hyde (1609–74), the first Earl of Clarendon, a succession of writers attempted, often in inflammatory partisan tones, to craft an account favourable to their faction. An early member of the parliamentary opposition to Charles I, Hyde went over to the royalists as what he perceived as radical and unconstitutional steps were taken by the House of Commons in 1641. A loyal official of Charles I during the Civil War, he went into exile with his son, returning in triumph in 1660 with the restored Charles II. Hyde was elevated to the peerage and made Lord Chancellor, while his daughter Anne was married to the king’s brother, the future James II. Thus Clarendon was grandfather to two English sovereigns, Mary II and Anne, in addition to being the most important of the historians writing about the Civil War from a royalist perspective. Yet Clarendon wrote in a subdued, elevated style that made his history acceptable to many moderate Whigs. In his attempts to craft an accurate and fair narrative, he avoided partisan attacks on leading parliamentary leaders, even while lamenting the destructive and temporarily tyrannical results of the conflict.

Clarendon’s history, much of it written in the final years of his life while in exile after being driven from office, was not published till 1702–4, by which time other histories were appearing. The first half of the eighteenth century was an impressive time for the proliferation of histories focusing on the tumults of the Stuart era, with writers of every persuasion from radical Whig to Jacobite.⁶ Among those who stand out for their influence on Georgian historical writing are Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715) and Paul de Rapin-Thoyras (1661–1725). Both had been participants in some of the events they described, as well as followers of William of Orange in his 1688 takeover of the English Crown. Burnet’s History of My Own Time was published between 1723 and 1734, while l’histoire d’Angleterre by Rapin-Thoyras was published in The Hague in 1723–5, with an English translation appearing between 1725 and 1731. The Scottish theologian Burnet, who ended up as Bishop of Salisbury, invoked the hand of Providence in the freeing of England from tyranny and Popery in the Glorious Revolution, while the French Huguenot Rapin-Thoyras adopted a more secular framework, epitomizing the emerging Enlightenment values of scepticism and free inquiry. They were the major historians to write from a Whig perspective, yet, like Clarendon, were often praised for their balance and fairness. Initially, Hume was drawn to the qualities of Rapin (as he was usually called in England), but on reconsideration he could detect the artful hand of a strongly partisan chronicler.⁷ In 1757 Hume wrote to the French translator of his history asking that a reference to the earlier writer praising him as ‘the most judicious of our historians’ be changed to one impugning Rapin’s impartiality.⁸

While Hume had had a large historical work like this in mind for a number of years, his appointment in 1752 to the Librarianship of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, with its 30,000 volumes, greatly facilitated his labours. Although the post carried a salary of only £40 per annum, it conferred intellectual stature and free access to the resources of one of the finest historical libraries in Great Britain. Thus armed with abundant source material, he threw himself into producing his history of Britain under the early Stuarts. While the trial and execution of Charles I was the most ‘pathetic’ element to be treated, and one that Hume handled with great skill, his sympathetic treatment extended to James I as well. The author afforded a view of the first Stuart king of England as a well-meaning and learned (if pedantic) monarch coming into possession of a realm where royal authority was largely unquestioned – except, of course, by those pesky Puritans, a version of whose ‘fanaticism’ (in Hume’s estimation) James had already confronted in Scotland in the form of Presbyterianism. Here Hume, without ignoring the king’s defects, offered a sympathetic view of him, that then shifted into an ironic profile of those godly men whose assault on a State Church are seen as the essential origin of the horrors of the later Civil War. James had found, according to Hume, that the Puritans

being mostly of low birth and mean education, the same lofty pretensions which attended them in their familiar addresses to their Maker, of whom they believed themselves the peculiar favourites, induced them to use the utmost freedoms with their worldly sovereign.⁹

In this passage Hume was able to combine a sympathetic approach (seeing the Puritans through the king’s eyes) with his own ironic and detached assessment.

With such characterizations, it is hardly surprising that Hume’s History was denounced as ‘Tory’ by those of liberal views. At the same time, the author gave a quite sympathetic treatment to the aspirations of parliamentary leaders to establish a more mixed constitution. However, contrary to the Whig myth of an ancient mixed constitution, Hume insisted, it was the Petition of Right of 1628, and Charles I’s reluctant assent to it, that heralded the arrival of any real notion of parliamentary authority.¹⁰ Like many eighteenth-century philosophes wrestling to create a ‘science of society’, Hume was fascinated by the linkage between economic and political systems as humanity advanced from primitive hunting and gathering through pastoralism and agriculture to modern times. In common with earlier historians like James Ralph and William Guthrie, Hume was especially taken with James Harrington’s Oceana (published during the Inter-regnum in 1656), in which a clear connection was drawn between the rise of the landed gentry and republicanism.¹¹ While finding this economic determinism persuasive, Hume felt that Harrington underrated the influence of the rise of the commercial sector, for commerce was to him the single most important factor in fostering modern, civilized values. Thus in his History Hume created what has been called a ‘commercialized Harringtonianism’.¹² That is, until England had advanced to a certain state of commercial sophistication, which it had by the early seventeenth century, the concept of representative government was unable to come to fruition. Hume clearly approved of the aspirations of parliamentary leaders to have an equal share in governance, but abhorred the slide into civil war, regicide and military dictatorship under Cromwell. The blame for this strangling of the noble goals of parliamentary leaders Hume laid squarely at the door of the ‘fanatics’, those Puritans who hijacked a promising reform movement and forced it into destructive channels. At the same time, neither James I nor Charles I could be blamed for resisting reform, since the underlying changes in the socioeconomic system that made reform possible were so recent, and they had after all inherited a constitution that was firmly monarchical. Hume considered the execution of Charles I murder pure and simple, an act that was bound to unleash all the fanatical furies of political and religious innovation in its after-math. In an anticipation of Edmund Burke, he declared:

The confusions which overspread England after the murder of Charles I proceeded as well from the spirit of refinement and innovation which agitated the ruling party, as from the dissolution of all that authority, both civil and ecclesiastical, by which the nation has ever been accustomed to be governed. Every man had framed the model of a republic; and however new it was, or fantastical, he was eager in recommending it to his fellow-citizens, or even imposing it by force upon them. Every man had adjusted a system of religion, which, being derived from no traditional authority, was peculiar to himself; and being founded on supposed inspiration, not on any principles of human reason, had no means, besides cant and low rhetoric, by which it could recommend itself to others. The levelers insisted on an equal distribution of power and property, and disclaimed all dependence and subordination. The millenarians or fifth monarch men required, that government itself should be abolished, and all human powers be laid in the dust, in order to pave the way for the second coming of Christ, whose second coming they suddenly expected.¹³

It is hard to find a period in English history more repugnant to Hume than the Interregnum, exalting, as he believed it did, forces hostile to the rich fabric of modern civilized society: ‘Gaie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Demythologizing the Nation’s Past: David Hume’s History of England
• 2 Catharine Macaulay’s Vindication of Radicalism and the Republican Tradition
• 3 Reassessing Religion and the National Narrative: John Lingard and the English Reformation
• 4 Placing the Constitution at the Heart of National Identity: Henry Hallam and Constitutional History
• 5 Thomas Babington Macaulay: Writing the History of a Progressive People
• 6 The Glories of the Reformation and the Origins of Empire: J. A. Froude’s Celebration of the Tudor Era
• 7 Edward Augustus Freeman: Liberal Democracy and National Identity
• 8 William Stubbs: The Continuity of English History as National Identity
• 9 Celebrating the People: J. R. Green’s Short History
• 10 Samuel Rawson Gardiner: Incorporating Dissent into the National Story
• 11 In Thrall to English Tradition and Character: G. M. Trevelyan’s Panoramic Histories of the Island Race
• 12 The Anglosphere as Global Model: Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index