Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The Glorious Revolution is an event that – like so many of these classic historical events – has undergone substantial reinterpretation in recent years. For example, in the UK, where I studied history, it was long the conventional wisdom that the last time England was invaded was in 1066. But in 1688, William of Orange came from Holland to take the English throne with more than 21,000 men, and a fleet twice the size of the Spanish Armada. Is it right to now view 1688 as a foreign invasion?
A major contribution of one of the books on the list, Jonathan Israel’s The Anglo-Dutch Moment, is to document just how big the invasion force was, both in terms of the size of the fleet and the number of men and how sophisticated it was. His claim was that, yes, this should be considered an invasion. The point I tried to make in my own book [1688: The First Modern Revolution] is that yes, it was a huge invasion force, but it involved a large number of people who were, in fact, English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish exiles. There was also a huge amount of financial support from Britain. Something larger than the annual revenue of the Crown was given to William from inside Britain to support his invasion. Also, William himself had both an English wife and an English mother, so deep connections to England. So rather than seeing it as an invasion, it makes more sense to see it as part of a revolutionary movement from below, from within Britain. What we need to do is jettison our conventional notions of what the boundaries of a nation state were, and accept that social and political movements in the 17th and 18th as much as in the 20th century were internationalised. There was critical support from outside Britain, but that support was part of a negotiated process with people in Britain who wanted to overthrow the regime.
In the literature, and some of the books you’ve recommended, the events of 1688 are presented as non-revolutionary. It’s all about the preservation of ancient liberties – it’s even called the Bloodless Revolution, because very few people were killed. There’s almost a denial that it was a revolution, and certainly nothing like the bloody French or Russian revolutions. But I believe the main thrust of your own book is that it was in fact deeply revolutionary?
That’s right. Starting with Thomas Babington Macaulay’s seminal work in 1849, the thrust of the scholarship in British historiography has been that Britain is unlike the Continent in not having had either a violent or radical revolution at any point in its history. The standard line was that British political and social development was always evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and 1688-9 was a restorative event. Then the revisionists came along. They said, “Look, this standard Whig interpretation sees the victors of 1688-9 as being the progressives, that it’s about defending liberty. But James II was, in fact, quite committed to religious toleration. The revolution was actually reactionary against someone who was innovative.”
The point that I try to make in my book is that the revolutionaries were innovative. There was revolutionary change and there was quite a lot of violence and social disruption. It would be a mistake to see James II as a proto-liberal and the revolutionaries as reactionary. Both of them were trying to modernise the British state and British society. So the Revolution of 1688-9 – like the French Revolution, and the Mexican Revolution, and the Russian Revolution – was a competition between two groups who thought that the polity had to be radically transformed. They just had radically different visions of how that transformation should take place.
Let’s start with the Macaulay, then, The History of England from the Accession of James II. He’s writing at the time of the 1848 revolutions in continental Europe, and he writes that “it’s almost an abuse” to give 1688 “the terrible name of revolution” – because it was so different from what he was seeing going on in Europe. Tell me about the significance of this book.
Macaulay’s work was extremely important in a number of ways. It was incredibly well researched: He had an army of research assistants and used archival material that had hitherto been unutilised. The case that he made – writing very much in the shadow of the revolutionary events of the 1840s in Europe – was that what happened in England in 1688-9 was completely the opposite of what had happened in France in the 1790s, and was going on on the Continent in the 1840s. That is to say, it was a peaceful, consensual event, in which everybody agreed to get rid of an abusive monarch. Also, one of the central points he makes, in the third chapter of the book, is to dissociate the relationship between social and economic change and political change. He argues that before 1688 England was, by any measure, a backward place. It was the political change [of 1688-9] and the protection of liberty, which paved the way for British industrial development in the later 18th century. He was reversing the line of mid-19th century European radicals who argued that socio-economic change demanded political change, and arguing that it was in fact political change in Britain that gave rise to social and economic modernisation.
In terms of the way the book is written, he’s not trying to be an objective historian is he? It’s full of stirring passages, with goodies and baddies and a tyrant being overthrown by parliament. It’s quite novelistic isn’t it?
Without question. Historical writing in the mid-19th century was much more narrative driven. It was expected that people would take a side. The discipline of history hadn’t been consolidated yet, so the tone of objectivity that we’re all supposed to have now was not the standard. That’s something that happens after the writings of Leopold von Ranke in the late 19th century. It does make it quite easy to dismiss Macaulay, simply because of the rhetorical flourishes. Nevertheless, it’s a book that needs to be taken very seriously. Macaulay did an amazing amount of research, and while he’s taking a side and while he’s quite passionate, his arguments are well considered, sophisticated and well thought out. I was always amazed, doing research for my own book on 1688 – I’d think I’d found a manuscript nobody had seen before, and frequently Macaulay had seen it.I did, I hope, find some things that he hadn’t seen, but it was remarkable how thorough his research was.
I know Karl Marx called Macaulay a “systematic falsifier of history”. Even Lord Acton, while a great admirer, was very rude about his work. Was he quite controversial?
He was and remains controversial. Now scholars criticise him for not discussing the Empire at all in his history, when this was so manifestly important in the 18th century. There’s no question he was a controversial figure. He was simultaneously a publishing historian and quite an active politician. He took positions and he defended them. The book does, as you say, have novelistic tendencies, but it also reads a bit like a lawyer’s brief for a particular point of view. There’s no attempt to be impartial. I think Marx’s quibble with Macaulay was that he got the social and economic history of Britain completely wrong. Marx saw the Revolution of 1688-9 as a bourgeois revolution, a transformative event, so he disagreed interpretively with Macaulay. A lot of what Macaulay said, especially about the socio-economic history, hasn’t stood the test of time. Also, the overall interpretation of some of the things that he described I disagree with, and others disagree with too. That said, it’s a remarkable testament to a historian that we’re talking about his book in a serious way almost two full centuries after it was written. One can only aspire to such longevity!
So was he trying to make a point about politics in his own time?
Without question. He’s not only writing in the context of the revolutions on the Continent, he’s also writing in critical dialogue with the Chartists in Britain. He would say that the Chartists had it all wrong, and that their attempts to promote radical changes in the British constitution were wrong-headed. There’s no question he was trying to make a point. That said, as with many other historians, there’s a sense in which the way Macaulay understood the past tended to inform his contemporary political commitments, as much as his contemporary political commitments informed the way he understood the past. I don’t think he’s just trying to impose a particular vision on the past. It’s a dialectical relationship.
Let’s go on to GM Trevelyan’s The English Revolution. He is Macaulay’s great-nephew, but also one of the most distinguished English historians of the 20th century.
Yes. Trevelyan made his name writing about Continental history. He was a distinguished historian of Italy as well as having written a history of Anne’s reign. Like Macaulay, he was deeply immersed in the politics of his age, in his case the 1930s. His account of The English Revolution – the foregrounding of the word English in the title is important – was to distinguish the changes that had gone on in Britain in the 17th century from the rise of fascism on the Continent which he very much despised. He was a critic of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. Again, it was a dialogue [between past and present]. However, in terms of length and depth, Macaulay’s study and Trevelyan’s stand in complete contrast. Trevelyan did no new archival research. He was basically interpreting facts that were relatively well known. It doesn’t read like a book where he’s telling the reader things they should be surprised about. He was making the story understandable and pointed, for his own time. He’s pointing out the significance of things the reader already knows. He did this remarkably successfully. It’s a short book, immensely readable, something someone could easily consume in an evening.
So what is his main argument? What does make England different?
His view is that the English were sensible. There were all sorts of political issues, and reasons to be unhappy with the regime, but unlike what was going on in Germany and Italy, and in Spain, the English ruling classes saw that they needed to get rid of a bad ruler, but not go to extremes. His point was that England was different precisely because the ruling classes acted sensibly: Rather than pursuing an extreme right-wing version [ie fascism] or an extreme left-wing version [ie the Russian Revolution] of political change, they sought moderate and gradual change. The significance for him of England’s Revolution was its moderation. The political classes knew that political change was called for, but they also knew that they could do so in a moderate as opposed to an extreme fashion. The lesson of England’s Revolution was that moderate change had extremely beneficial long-term outcomes.
In one of your articles you mention two quotes of Trevelyan’s about 1688, that “the spirit of this strange revolution was the opposite of revolutionary” and that there were “no new ideas”.
Exactly. For Trevelyan, the point was that what one needed to do to fix a polity was to rely on established ideas, not to try to innovate for the sake of innovating. One could draw on one’s tradition, on ideas that had developed over a long period of time – like the common law, for example – to get rid of a bad ruler and a bad polity.
I noticed one review of the Trevelyan book, commenting that this was “Whiggish history at its best”. What does that mean? Is it easy to summarise?
No, it’s not. But it is easy to summarise what Macaulay and Trevelyan both believed in, which was a commitment to slow and progressive change as opposed to revolutionary change. There’s also a notion of Protestant triumphalism, that Protestant polities are superior to Catholic polities. It’s no accident, in the case of Trevelyan, that he’s contrasting England with Catholic polities: Spain, Italy and Nazi Germany (where a lot of the intellectual firepower came from the Catholic south). These are contrasts that for Macaulay are absolutely central. There’s also the notion that social and economic change does not cause political change, but that what matters is top-down changes from the political elite. In some sense, it’s an elitist form of history.
Steven Pincus is professor of history at Yale University, as well as director of undergraduate studies in history. His most recent book 1688: The First Modern Revolution won a number of prizes, including the 2010 Morris D Forkosch Prize given by the American Historical Association
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