The Transition in English Historical Writing, 1760–1830

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STUDIES IN HISTORY, ECONOMICS AND PUBLIC LAW Edited by the FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

NUMBER 390

THE TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING 1760-1830 BY

THOMAS PRESTON PEARDON

THE TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING i760—1830

BY

THOMAS PRESTON PEARDON, Ph.D. Instructor in Barnard College Columbia University

NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS London :

P.

S. King & Son, Ltd.

1933

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted chiefly to Professor Carlton J. H. Hayes who read my manuscript carefully and made many sugges¬ tions for improvement; to my wife, Celeste Comegys Peardon, for much assistance, especially in typing part of the manuscript and in reading proof; and to Mr. Hermann F. Robinton whose careful reading of the proof saved me from a number of errors both typographical and of a more serious kind.

To Professors Austin P. Evans, Hoxie N. Fairchild,

Dixon Ryan Fox, William Haller, David S. Muzzey, Geroid T. Robinson and Robert Livingston Schuyler, I am also grateful for their criticism.

It is only fair to add, however,

that since I have not always adopted the suggestions I have received from those mentioned above, the responsibility for the facts and opinions in this monograph rests on me alone. 5

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TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE

CHAPTER I Introduction .

9

CHAPTER II Rationalist History, 1780-1800.

34

CHAPTER III Party History from Hume to 1800 : The Tory Emphasis.

69

CHAPTER IV Signs of Change, 1760-1800: I, Primitivism.

103

CHAPTER V Signs of Change, 1760-1800: II, Medievalism and Pietism. 127 CHAPTER VI The Rise of Nationalist History. 161 CHAPTER VII Party History from 1800 to 1827: The Whig and Liberal Emphasis.

183

CHAPTER VIII Romanticist History, 1800-1830. 214 CHAPTER IX From Roscoe to Lingard. 253 CHAPTER X The Change in Attitude Towards the Sources of National History. 284 Bibliography .

. 3H

Index .

7

333

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CHAPTER I Introduction English

historical writing in the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries merits attention on two grounds.

In

the first place, if this period, especially the years between Gibbon’s last volumes (1788) and Hallam’s Middle Ages (1818), was not fertile in great historians, it saw a successsion of works of respectable merit, and a distinct revival after 1800.

Secondly, it marks the transition from the

“rationalist-’ ideals of historical writing exemplified by Hume, Robertson and Gibbon to the very different ideals of the nineteenth century.

In tracing this change, which it is

the main purpose of the present essay to do, it is easier to set a terminal date than to find an exact beginning.

By

1830 the basic elements in the nineteenth-century conception of history—romantic enthusiasm for the study of the past, nationalist zeal in portraying it, and the use of “ scientific ” methods in ascertaining the facts about it—had already found considerable

expression

among

historians.

Moreover,

shortly after this date at least, the public records, funda¬ mental sources of historical study in the last hundred years, were first adequately cared for and their importance properly realized.

Meantime, also, the Tory view of political his¬

tory, which had received classic exposition from the pen of Hume, was being definitely superseded by a Whig interpreta¬ tion which became almost equally classic in the Victorian era. But when we turn to seek the beginning of the change which had gone so far by 1830, one great difficulty presents itself.

Students of literary history have long recognized that 9

IO

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

“ the more we investigate below the surface [of the eigh¬ teenth century], the clearer traces do we find of the Romantic movement, which is implicit in a constant series of writers from Dyer and Thomson to Chatterton and Blake.” 1

In

precisely the same way, if we look below the surface of the great period from

1754

to 1788 when Hume, Robertson and

Gibbon reigned so gloriously, we find vigorous dissent from their type of historical outlook.

For this reason, therefore,

the first five chapters of this essay, while mainly concerned with writers who flourished between 1780 and 1800, will give some attention to those of an earlier date.2

In the

remaining chapters we shall deal chiefly with trends visible among historians of the first thirty years of the last century. The conception of history fashionable among the eigh¬ teenth-century rationalists is too familiar to need detailed description.

But its main features should be summarized

briefly for purposes of reference.

History was believed to

be the teacher of private virtue and correct public policy, and the justification for its study lay in this pragmatic value. For this purpose modern history, as being most nearly ana¬ logous to present conditions and most easily studied, was apt to be regarded as far more important than the history of earlier periods.

Indeed, while classical history always

enjoyed some of the respect it had won from the human¬ ists, primitive ages, as ages of barbarism, and medieval civilization, as the product of ignorance and superstition, were held unworthy of the investigation of enlightened men or at best worth examining solely as the introduc¬ tion to modern civilization.

The historian was to write

1 T. Seccombe, The Age of Johnson (1748-1798) (3rd edition reprinted, London, 1928), p. xvi. 2 For the significance of the year 1780 in the periodization of literary history, see O. Elton, Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830 (London, 1920), vol. i, p. 9 et seq.

« > v* • •«.»>» i l j Ml * li.ii.su hi I.Viis* - . • ClitXU 1: i.Sii'J » *. iitAUlununUiuu

■

INTRODUCTION

11

in a “ philosophical ” spirit, by which was generally meant that he should attempt to penetrate beneath the surface of events to underlying causes and motives—to explain rather than merely to narrate.

All history, moreover, was to be

viewed critically and without any vulgar sentiment like national or religious partiality.

More emphasis was placed

on the presentation of results in a good literary style, and less on the arduous examination of first-hand sources, than in the nineteenth century, with the result that public records and manuscripts, now the delight of the historian and the object of governmental care, were then less assiduously cared for and consulted, although by no means utterly neglected. Generally speaking, too, because the eighteenth century was so satisfied with its own enlightenment it was not very suc¬ cessful in avoiding the mistake of judging past ages by modern standards foreign to them.3 All these characteristics, however, are only one side of the rationalistic conception of history, and in most cases were shared by or inherited from previous schools.

The

ancients had insisted on the pragmatic value of history and on history as an art, while the medieval writers were quite as arbitrary in the application of their own ideals as any age could be.

More novel, though not wholly original, was the

attempt made in the eighteenth century to realize a type of history resembling in certain respects the “ New History ” about which there was so much controversy in American 3 On rationalistic historiography see especially E. Fueter, Geschichte der neueren Historiographie

(Miinchen,

1911), bk.

H. E. Barnes, “ History, its rise and development

”

iv,

pp.

334-414;

in Encyclopaedia

Americana (New York, ed., 1922) ; and J. B. Black, The Art of History (New York, 1926).

In this introductory chapter I have drawn freely

from Professor Black’s excellent discussions of Hume, Robertson and Gibbon. expressed.

But he would doubtless disagree with some of the opinions

I2

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

academic circles some years ago.

The attempt failed, but

its effects were never lost completely; it would doubtless be possible to trace a direct line of succession throughout the last century.

It was in part a phase of the effort to build up

a science of man, which has been called the “ chief glory of the eighteenth century ”,4 while on other sides it developed out of the interests of preceding historians.

Back of the move¬

ment then as now lay a belief that too much attention was being paid to wars and intrigues, to the doings of princes and diplomats, and too little to arts, sciences, economic and social life; and in some there appeared the same desire as now to explain how things actually came about rather than merely to gather a great many facts about the past. We may distinguish several varieties of this new type of history.

The first, “ social history ” it would be called today,

sought merely to give information on customs and usages, dress, amusements, and the like, frequently in subordination to a narrative of political events in the old manner and usually without any principle of arrangement except chronological sequence.

There was also, in the second place, a certain

amount of study of the history of institutions and associa¬ tions, whether within the boundaries of one country or over a larger area. Closely associated with these tendencies was the widespread interest in the natural history of society, in the general stages of social development rather than the history of events or particular institutions in any specific country or area.

Seek¬

ing to treat of the general rather than the particular, it pro¬ ceeded as far as possible by the comparative study of the history of different peoples.

Where direct evidence failed it

took the form of “ conjectural ” or “ theoretical ” history 4J. H. Randall, 7he Making of the Modern Mind (New York, 1926), p. 308. HiivL,,

f

INTRODUCTION

13

which cannot be better described than in the words of Dugald Stewart:8 When, in such a period of society as that in which we live, we compare our intellectual acquirements, our opinions, man¬ ners, and institutions, with those which prevail among rude tribes, it cannot fail to occur to us as an interesting question, by what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated. Whence has arisen that systematical beauty which we admire in the structure of a cultivated language; that analogy which runs through the mixture of languages spoken by the most remote and uncon¬ nected nations; and those peculiarities by which they are all distinguished from each other? Whence the origin of the different sciences and of the different arts; and by what chain has the mind been led from their first rudiments to their last and most refined improvements? Whence the astonish¬ ing fabric of the political union; the fundamental principles which are common to all governments; and the different forms which civilized society has assumed in different ages of the world? On most of these subjects very little infor¬ mation is to be expected from history; for long before that stage of society when men begin to think of recording their transactions, many of the most important steps of their prog¬ ress have been made. A few insulated facts may perhaps be collected from the casual observations of travellers, who have viewed the arrangements of rude nations; but nothing, it is evident, can be obtained in this way, which approaches to a regular and connected detail of human improvement. 5 D. Stewart, “The Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.”, Works

of Adam Smith (London, 1811), vol. v, pp. 448-450.

A somewhat

similar idea was expressed by Thomas Pownall in his Treatise on the

Study of Antiquities (London, 1782), p. x: “ By a careful analysis of human nature, and by a combination from analogy of such broken accounts as the ship-wreck of History affords, a description, almost historic, of the progress and first stages of human life may be composed; such as shall give a just representation of the general course of events.’’

•id .

iiii

;§ ' -»» .... —.v.,J.. • r«rt;?/.•»:

14

■

r;i.nv;m"i : jmj jri -- -yt i» marked a distinct advance in its field. Robertson took full advantage of great stores of new material which had been printed but not incorporated into an historical narrative, and went beyond these to secure data in the Library of the Faculty of Advocates at Edinburgh, in the British Museum (to which he secured access before it was opened to the pub¬ lic), in private collections, and through correspondence with other students.32

“ Nothing like so massive a ‘ domesday ’ of

material had ever been compassed by any previous histor¬ ian ”

33

as was contained in the History of Scotland on its

first appearance; nor did Robertson cease to improve his text in later editions as he was given access to additional sources.34 It is indeed not possible to speak with equal respect of the scholarship in his Charles V (1769).

The subject was

more strange to Robertson, the rich archives at Simancas were not yet fully investigated and he did not take the trouble to learn German, although he knew French, Spanish and Italian.

Nor does he indulge to the same extent, except

in the introductory volume summarizing the development of Europe during the Middle Ages, in those supplementary notes into which he had put so much learning in his earlier book.

The Charles V remains, in spite of its enormous repu¬

tation in the eighteenth century and in spite of the fact that some critics have rated it the best of Robertson’s works, a polished but not very penetrating account of a great subject. The introductory volume on the Middle Ages is indeed in many ways Robertson’s greatest effort, but not from the

32 History

of Scotland, Preface, Works, vol. i, pp. cxxvii-cxxx.

83 Black, op. ext., pp. 119-120. 34 “ Wherever the opportunity of consulting original papers either in print or in manuscript, to which I had not formerly access, has enabled me to throw new light upon any part of the history, I have made alter¬ ations and additions which, I flatter myself, will be found to be of some importance.”

Preface to nth edition, Works, vol. i, p. cxxxi.

INTRODUCTION

25

standpoint of research, wherein S. R. Maitland has convicted him of error and carelessness.35 The History of America

(1777),

work of high scholarly merit.

however, was another

The author was more happy

with this subject than when dealing with the Spanish Empire in Europe.

His style is uplifted by the enthralling nature

of the adventures he has to recount, the careers of men like Columbus and Cortes; the list of authorities he consulted is

impressive, and the texture of the narrative solid.36

Robertson’s last work, the Historical Disquisition Concern¬ ing Ancient India (1791) is not one upon which his reputa¬ tion rests, and it was completed in the course of twelve months,37 but it too showed wide and careful use of authori¬ ties consulted, though the subject was too broad and the study too brief for a treatment of long-standing merit. Robertson, we may conclude, had far greater scholarly in¬ stincts than Hume or than the majority of historians in his day.

He was a zealous student of printed materials and went

beyond to unprinted sources. In certain other respects Robertson fell short of the high35 S. R. Maitland, The Dark Ages; A series of Essays

(2nd ed.,

London, 1845), Essays 2-7 (pp. 9-122) and Essay 9 (pp. 141-151). 36 Yet in working over some of the same ground himself, Robert Southey came to have a low opinion of the History of America upon which he passed judgment in no uncertain terms: “...Dr. Robertson... in what he calls his History of America, is guilty of such omissions, and consequent misrepresentations, as to make it certain, either that he had not read some of the most important documents to which he refers, or that he did not choose to notice the facts which are to be found there, because they were not in conformity to his own preconceived opinions.... The reputation of this author must rest upon his History of Scotland,... if that can support it.

His other works are grievously deficient.”

of Brasil (London, 1810-1819), vol. i, p. 639.

William Robertson als Historiker und Geschichtsphilosoph n. d.), pp. 38-39. 37 D. Stewart in Works, vol. i, p. lvii.

History

Quot. Bernhard Pier, (Radbold,

26

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

est standards of rationalistic historiography.

The History

of Scotland is mainly a narrative of political events without much attempt to get at underlying factors, while in spite of the promise of its introductory survey the Charles V contains practically no account of institutions or of social and eco¬ nomic life.38

Instead there are endless wars and negotia¬

tions, those ghastly Italian wars over which so many students have groaned, relieved occasionally by passages such as the interesting discussion of the rise of the principle of toleration and the account of the Jesuit order.

Thucydides could write

of the Peloponnesian War and make it the theme for obser¬ vations of eternal value to philosophers and politicians; while Tacitus could make a drama out of the court history of the early Roman Empire.

But Robertson was neither a deep

thinker nor a great artist, and the Empire of Charles V proved too much for him.

He had no key with which to

unlock the secret of its events.

He was deeply interested in

the story of discoveries, and conscious of the importance of commerce, as we can see from his View and from the His¬ torical Disquisition, but he came too early to grasp the full importance for Europe itself of what we call the Commercial Revolution.

At the same time, in spite of his cloth, he

was too much under the influence of Rationalism to appreci¬ ate fully the greatest religious revolution.

“ He will tell us

nothing of the ethos of Protestantism, or of its significance in the development of the individual, society, or the state. His picture, in short, is mechanical, external, and without substance.” 39 Yet it is well to remember that all such criticism is relative. 38

“ Wer als

Deutscher Robertsons

Geschichte Karl

V liest,

wird

ii'ber das diirftige Bild der Reichsverfassung und der inneren Verhaltnisse in Deutschland einigermassen erstaunt sein.”

40-41.

39 Black, op. cit., p. 140.

B. Pier, op. cit., pp.

INTRODUCTION

27

For example, Professor Black censures Robertson for devot¬ ing too much attention to political and military detail and then wondering why the changes of the era of Charles V seemed so disproportionate to the causes.

Such a conclusion,

he says, “ is certainly quite fallacious if applied to that other aspect of the subject, the religious revolution.

If this had

been given the prominence due to it, and the other transac¬ tions of the period carefully subordinated to it, there need have been no anti-climax to the book, and in all likelihood Robertson would have written a more attractive and convinc¬ ing history.” 40

Now in some schools of history in recent

years, Robertson or Professor Black would be criticized almost as much for subordinating the history of the early sixteenth century to the religious revolution as to political and military events, while prominence would be given rather to economic changes and geographic expansion.

Another

generation may well swing back to emphasis on politics, though surely not to that satisfaction with the mere detail of political episodes which is the real weakness for which Robertson is open to criticism. Notwithstanding such criticism of some of Robertson’s work due credit must be given to him for the way in which he sought to transform historical writing.

He laid great

weight on the necessity of paying more attention to econ¬ omic and intellectual affairs, for it is a cruel mortification, searching for what is instructive in the history of the past times, to find that the exploits of con¬ querors who have desolated the earth, and the freaks of tyrants who have rendered nations unhappy, are recorded with minute and often disgusting accuracy, while the discovery of useful arts, and the progress of the most beneficial branches of commerce, are passed over in silence, and suffered to sink into oblivion.41

40 Ibid., p. 139. 41 Works, vol. viii,

p. 177-

28

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

Like so many of his contemporaries also, he was deeply impressed by the real or supposed resemblance between the circumstances of the ancient Germans and the American Indians,42 and adhered to the idea that peoples in similar situations are apt to be pretty much alike whatever their racial connections may be.

Hence, too, he accepted the

notion of the profit to be derived from the study of com¬ parative history, suggesting that many obscure points of the English constitution might thus be cleared up.43 Robertson’s interest in the larger movements of history re¬ sulted in his View of the State of Society in the Middle Ages, prefixed to the Charles V.

This slim volume was

an interpretative essay rather than a chronicle of events and in it the author sought to analyze the factors in the prog¬ ressive development of European civilization from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the opening of the sixteenth century. As already mentioned, S. R. Maitland made a rather severe criticism of certain ideas about the Middle Ages propounded in this essay, while more recently Robertson has been held largely responsible for the continuance of the notorious myth of the year 1000 (the notion that the end of the world was looked for generally throughout Europe then) and for the overemphasis on the influence of the Crusades, two of the most persistent sources of error in the understanding of medieval history.44

But with all its faults the View remains

a remarkable attempt to elucidate the main forces at work during a thousand years of European history, reaching its high point in the enumeration of the causes of the revival of European civilization from the “ Dark Ages ” succeeding the Roman Empire.

Robertson throws the emphasis upon such

42 Works, vol. iii, pp. 189-194. 43 Works, vol. iii, p. 333. 44 H. E. Barnes, History, its Rise and Development, p. 230 (Reprinted from the Encyclopaedia Americana, New York, ed., 1922).

INTRODUCTION

29

great events as the Crusades, the rise of towns, the influence of the canon law, the revival of commerce, etc., never once allowing himself to forget his main purpose or slip down into mere episode.

It has been said with some degree of reason

that in this dissertation and in the first Book of the History of Scotland where a similar task is undertaken, Robertson showed a wider and “ more synthetic ” conception of history than Gibbon or Hume.45

He was not merely narrating a

series of events, but without lapsing into conjecture he was seeking that inner connection of events and the great move¬ ments that are the theme of history in its more serious aspects.

In so doing he was setting his contemporaries a

new standard of historical study. Gibbon also sought to rear a British monument of philo¬ sophical history, hoping to be associated in the public mind with Hume and Robertson.

He was distinctly rationalistic

in the cosmopolitanism of his outlook.

He weighed the

civilizations of the past by the standards of his own day as the rationalists were prone to do, and he shared their general lack of appreciation for revealed religion.

He was perhaps

a little unconventional in devoting so much attention to the history of the Middle Ages, but his primary interest was, of course, in Rome.

He did not realize that his subject would

carry him as far down the centuries as the event proved, and his treatment became less satisfactory both in extent and quality as he moved into the Christian era.

J. B. Bury has

pointed out 46 that the Decline and Fall may be divided into two parts, a very full account of the period A. D. 180-641, and a summary account, omitting many important details, of 45 Encyclopaedia Britannica, nth edition, art. “William Robertson.” 46 In his article on Gibbon in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, nth edition, and in his Introduction to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire pp. liii-liv.

(ed. J. B. Bury, London, 1900-1902, 7 vols.), vol. i,

3o

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

the long stretch of time from 641 to 1453 A. D.

Here he

laid the stress, as one would expect from the title, on the notion of civilization in decline, with relative neglect of the fact that this period may well be viewed as one of advance, of the rise of Germanic Kingdoms, the Papacy and other insti¬ tutions that constituted the foundations of modern Europe.47 It is probably not true that “ Gibbon’s verdict on the history of the Middle Ages is contained in the famous sentence, ‘ I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion,’ ” 48 and he certainly did not indulge in the blanket condemnations of Hume; but Gibbon none the less shared the rationalistic lack of sympathy with the medieval period. Yet in so far as he is a rationalistic historian, Gibbon is, like Hume, in a distinctively British tradition.

He does not

have the grasp of great social forces possessed by Montes¬ quieu and Voltaire; and while he inserts illuminating pass¬ ages on economic and social matters, these form a subordi¬ nate part of his history.

To him “ wars and the adminis¬

tration of public affairs are the principal subjects of his¬ tory.” 49

But where Hume departed from the rationalistic

norm mainly because he was not yet emancipated from older conventions of historical writing, especially the English con¬ cern with party history, Gibbon reached out to a new type of historiography which was to succeed that of the rational¬ ists.

Nothing could be more “ romantic ” than the scene

on the Capitoline Hill where he decided to write the Decline and Fail; and the emotion of that moment was never com47 Black, op. cit., pp. 164-165. 48 J. B. Bury in E. B. art., “Gibbon.”

Cf. Decline and Fall, Introd.,

pp. xxxviii-xxxix, and J. B. Black, op. cit., pp. 166-173, where a number of passages are cited to make a convincing argument against Bury’s view that Gibbon held Christianity purely destructive in influence and mainly responsible for Rome’s overthrow. 49Decline and Fall (Bury ed.), vol. i, p. 236.

INTRODUCTION

pletely lost in the

long pilgrimage that

3!

followed.50

If

Gibbon’s style is artificial, appealing “ to the brain, rather than the heart,” 51 and unable to portray passion or human nature, critics have seen also his sense of color and his love of Oriental splendour.52

His description of meeting for the

first time as a boy a history of the Byzantine Empire, shows how early he felt the charm of the Orient:58 To me the reigns of the successors of Constantine were abso¬ lutely new; and I was immersed in the passage of the Goths over the Danube when the summons of the dinner bell reluc¬ tantly dragged me from my intellectual feast. This transient glance served rather to irritate than to appease my curiosity; ... I procured the second and third volumes of Howel’s His¬ tory of the World, which exhibits the Byzantine period on a larger scale. Mahomet and his Saracens soon fixed my atten¬ tion; and some instinct of criticism directed me to the genuine sources. Simon Ockley, an original in every sense, first opened my eyes; and I was led from one book to another till I had ranged round the circle of Oriental history. Before I was six¬ teen I had exhausted all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and the Turks; and the same ardour urged me to guess at the French of d’Herbelot, and to construe the barbarous Latin of Pocock’s Abulfaragins. Gibbon touches the imagination of his readers by the names and association he calls to their attention.

There is

absent from his style both the crystal-clear intellectuality of Hume and the chasteness of expression of Robertson. 50 “ Das Gefiihl, welches Gibbon, als er unter den Ruinen des Capitols sitzend, Barfussermonche im Tempel des Jupiter die Vesper singen horte, zu dem Entschluss, seine grosse Composition zu unternehmen, begeisterte, tont durch das ganze Werk hindurch.”

J. W. Loebell, “ Ueber die

Epochen der Geschichtschreibung und ihr Verhaltnis zur Poesie, Eine Skizze,” Historische Taschenbuch (Leipzig, 1841), p. 361. 51 Black, op. cit., p. 176 and footnote.

52 O.

Elton, Survey of English Literature, 1730-1780, vol. ii, p. 295.

53 Autobiography (Everyman ed., London, 1911), pp. 35-36.

32

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

Gibbon was thus touched by the interest in Oriental things characteristic of Romanticism.

He also placed research

higher in the scale of historical values than was customary among Rationalists.

They did not despise the laborious

amassing of information provided it was then used towards pragmatic or philosophical ends.

But with Gibbon the his¬

torian’s task consisted mainly in adequate research followed by the artistic presentation of material.

He was first a

student, a born historian, then an artist, then a philosopher. His own description of his method indicates how vigilant he was to follow the lines suggested by his reading:54 We must be careful not to make the order of our thoughts subservient to that of our subjects; this would be to sacrifice the principal to the accessory. The use of our reading is to aid us in thinking. The perusal of a particular work gives birth, perhaps, to ideas unconnected with the subject of which it treats. I wish to pursue these ideas; they withdraw me from my pro¬ posed plan of reading, and throw me into a new track, and from thence, perhaps, into a second and a third; at length I begin to perceive whither my researches tend. . . . Another indication of greater interest in the acquisition and ordering of information than in philosophical reason¬ ing therefrom is the fact that there are comparatively few generalizations in Gibbon—even few occasions when he stops in his course and surveys the road over which he has travelled. This, indeed, helps to explain his hold on immortality.55

The

social sciences change too rapidly for the philosophical survey of history in one age to be of much validity in the next. Gibbon’s work has lived as a great mine of material arranged with artistic genius, illuminated with penetrating observa54Miscellaneous Works (3 vols., ed. Lord Sheffield, 1815), vol. ii, p. 2. Quot, Black, op. cit., p. 149.

:: V -

55 J. Cotter Morison, Gibbon (2nd ed., London, 1878), p. 115.

33

INTRODUCTION

tions, yet not forced under the yoke of a philosophical system. However, this point, while true in the main, must not be given too much weight.

The very title of Gibbon’s book,

covering as it did European history to the middle fifteenth century, implied a generalization of the most far-reaching character. Finally, it should be noted that while Gibbon has the biasses of rationalism, and his book could never have been written except in the eighteenth century, he is, when com¬ pared with most of his contemporaries, remarkably impartial. Even in considering Christianity few distortions are found outside the first volume.56

Sometimes he was betrayed by

unsound authorities like Procopius into serious lapses in judgment—the estimate of the Byzantine Empire being the most notorious—but on the whole, blunders arise only where the sources at his disposal were themselves incorrect.

He

followed the evidence with scrupulous and critical care unex¬ celled or even equaled at that time.

Such qualities in his

work foreshadowed a new type of historian and have kept his memory green among subsequent scholars.

56 Ibid.,

pp. 121-128.

CHAPTER II Rationalist History, Among

1780-1800

those who carried on the tradition of rationalist

history in the latter part of the century a high place belongs to Robert Henry, author of History of Great Britain on a New Plan (1771-1793).1

Where Hume had been mainly

concerned with political and constitutional history and only secondarily with society and manners, Henry’s idea was to make his work equally complete on the economic, social, political, and intellectual sides.

He began with an interest¬

ing criticism of his predecessors for their narrowness of outlook:2 The far greater number of our historians have given us only a detail of our civil, military, and ecclesiastical affairs: a few of them have inserted occasional dissertations on our constitution, government, and laws: but not one of them hath given, or so much as pretended or designed to give, any thing like a history of learning, arts, commerce, and manners. All that we find in the very best of our historians, on these interesting subjects, are a few cursory remarks, which serve rather to excite than gratify our curiosity. Are these subjects then unworthy of a place in history; especially in the history of a country where learning, arts, commerce, and politeness flourish; doth not the ingenious scholar, who hath enlarged and enlightened the faculties of the human mind; the inventive artist, who hath encreased the com¬ forts and conveniences of human life; the adventurous merchant or mariner, who hath discovered unknown countries, and opened 1 Volume VI, of the first quarto edition, was completed by Malcolm Laing and published posthumously. (London, 1805-1806). 2 Op. cit., vol. i, p. xiii. 34

References here are to 4th edition

RATIONALIST HISTORY

35

new sources of trade and wealth; deserve a place in the annals of his country, and in the grateful remembrance of posterity; as well as even the good prince, the wise politician, or the vic¬ torious general? Lest he himself make the same omissions, Henry proposed to divide British history into ten periods, each beginning and ending with some “ remarkable revolution.”

Each period

was to be the subject of a book, and each book was divided into seven chapters under the following heads : civil and mili¬ tary history; ecclesiastical history; constitutional history; government, laws, and courts of justice; learning, learned men, and seminaries of learning; the arts; commerce, ship¬ ping, money and prices; manners, customs, vices, dress, diet, and amusements.

Maps were given in appendices and the

sources of information in footnotes. This plan had already been used, in France;3 nor was Henry the first to suggest, though he was the first to realize, a history of Britain along such lines.4

It is hardly necessary

to point out that the scheme was too mechanical, making for the compilation of facts, but not the composition of history, for comprehensiveness rather than comprehension.

But it

is just the sort of arrangement that might be expected to appeal to one like Henry who had no sense of the continuity of history or of the organic unity of the different parts of society in any given era.

He failed to realize the interaction

of economic, social, political, and intellectual movements—or rather events since Henry did not rise to the conception of movements.

Thus each book, each chapter almost, is a sepa¬

rate entity, and chronology the only link between them.

Nor,

3 In 1761, there was published at Edinburgh The Origin of Laws, Arts, and Sciences, and their Progress among the most ancient Nations. Translated from the French of the President de Goguet, 3 volumes octavo. The organization is almost exactly that of Henry. 4 It was suggested by Priestley, on whom see below .pp. 57-62.

36

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

in spite of his professions, did Henry avoid giving more attention to political and military episodes than to other matters.

Moreover his style, in spite of the quotation

given above, was frequently dull and mechanical like his organization. To this catalogue of defects must be added Henry’s lack of a critical sense.

He asserts blandly that the pagan

religions were descended from the sons of Noah, from whom had come the Druids, “ gymnosophists ” and Brahmins of India, the Magi of Persia, the Chaldeans of Assyria, and the priests of Egypt.

The Celtic nations, languages and

religion, whose origin was a sore subject of controversy in his day, he traced to “ Gomer, the eldest son of Japhet.” 5 Along with credulity went a naivete revealing itself in such sentences as that on the nakedness of early man: “ However surprising and incredible it may appear to us, there is hardly any one fact in ancient history better attested than this:— That the first inhabitants of every country in Europe, and particularly of this island, were either naked or almost naked.” 6

With this went a sense of humor so tawdry that

he could refer to the Pope as “ the old gentleman at Rome ” and make infantile jokes about Dunstan.7 Although abounding in depreciation of the religion and civilization

of

the

Middle

Ages,

Henry

thought

their

history important enough to warrant several large volumes, a striking contrast to the cavalier fashion in which Hume treated the same period.8

Like so many of his day, too,

5 Op. cit., vol. i, pp. 136, 149-150. 6 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 341. 7 Ibid., vol. vii, p. 320. 8 Henry’s use of second-hand sources and inaccuracy in dealing with the Middle Ages were pointed out by Lingard (Antiquities of the AngloSaxon Church, 3d American edition, Baltimore, 1854, pp. 100-101, 125 et passim) and by S. R. Maitland, op. cit., pp. 122-141.

RATIONALISE HISTORY

37

he was touched hy the revival of medieval poetry, was an admirer of chivalry, and an enthusiastic believer in Ossian.0 To these signs of contact with the romanticist movement, we may add his interest in Anglo-Saxon history, and the absence of any marked didactic purpose.

Henry doubtless believed

history useful, but he wrote history chiefly because he was interested in it, and he was willing to sacrifice a good deal for the successful completion of what seems to have become the chief ambition of his life.

He had something of the

devotion to his subject characteristic of the true historian, the spirit that in a great contemporary produced the Decline and Tall, so that there is in his work a solidity of knowledge and an atmosphere of industry in striking contrast to the brilliant superficiality of Hume. Success did not come until he had conquered indifference and active opposition.

No publisher would touch the earlier

volumes, which therefore appeared at the author’s expense. Then when llume, with his usual good-natured encourage¬ ment of his own rivals, wrote a laudatory review of the second volume for Hilbert Stuart’s Edinburgh Magazine and Deview, Stuart refused to print it, substituting instead a vitriolic attack from his own pen.

Stuart also wrote to Lon¬

don suggesting that similar onslaughts be inserted in English journals.10

The

reason

for

this

behavior is

not clear,

■> He spoke not unfavorably of medieval poetry and used Warton’s History of Poetry and Percy’s Reliques extensively.

Ossian was re¬

ferred to frequently by Henry who said that in “Dr. Blair’s Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian . . . the reader will find the genuineness of Ossian’s Poems fully established.”

(Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 174, note 204).

He regretted that we are able to see our Anglo-Saxon ancestors only through the medium of “bigotted and gloomy monks” (ibid., vol. iv, p. 298). 10 Stuart’s review appeared in the issues of February and March, 1774, that is, vol. i, pp. 199-207, 264-270.

He assailed Henry’s style, learning,

and accuracy, saying, among much of the same sort, “Avoiding with care, whatever was worthy to excite curiosity, he has amassed all the refuse

38

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

although we know that Stuart looked upon all Edinburgh intellectual circles with a jaundiced eye, but the immediate effect upon the reception of poor Henry’s work was very bad. Happily it wore off and he became a respected, even popular author and was finally given £3300 for the copyright of his work.11

It was perhaps more prominent on the student’s

desk than the lady’s dressing table, but as a work of refer¬ ence maintained its place for a good many years, besides stimulating the production of other histories on the same or a similar plan.12

A fairly accurate and learned writer for his

time, Henry’s influence would have been very great indeed had he possessed more style and some philosophic insight. Given imagination and literary gifts he might have been the John Richard Green of the period. Henry died before getting beyond 1547, but his work was continued to 1603 by James Pettit Andrews 13 who followed Henry's plan while introducing more literary material and a great many anecdotes, of which he had already published a collection.

The same author’s History of Great Britain con¬

nected. with the Chronology of Europe (1794-1795) gave in annalistic form the events of British history on one page and and lumber of the times he would record.”

The persecution of Henry

by Stuart is described, with quotations from Stuart’s letters, in Isaac Disraeli, Calamities and Quarrels of Authors, a new edition edited by his son the Earl of Beaconsfeld (London, 1867), pp. 130-139. 11 A. S. Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson (London, 1927), P- 3413 T. F. Dibdin says (Reminiscences of a Literary Life, London, 1836, vol. i, p. 90) : “ But Henry’s History was the sort of ‘ Hortus Adonidis ’ from which I strove to gather ripe and unperishing fruit.

He was al¬

ways on my table; and when I could, his authorities were by the side of him. Hume was my sofa companion ...”

13 History

of Great Britain, from the death of Henry VIII to the ac¬

cession of James VI of Scotland to the Crown of England.

Being a con¬

tinuation of Dr. Henry’s History of Great Britain, and written on the same plan

(volume i, London, 1796.

No more published).

RATIONALIST HISTORY

39

on the opposite page contemporary happenings on the Con¬ tinent.

There were notes to contain events of minor impor¬

tance, while to each Book, except the first “ which comprising only a barbarous and dark epoch, affords materials only for one supplement,” 14 were added two appendices containing a chronicle of literature with the lives of writers and specimens of their works, and an analysis of manners, religion, gov¬ ernment and similar topics.

Although he disclaimed origin¬

ality and research, Andrews was in fact rather proud of the “ novelty ” of his plan.

It was a good idea to link British

and continental history, but the practice of compiling annal¬ istic histories had already been made familiar by men like Henault15 in France and Dalrymple 16 in Great Britain.

In

his choice of material Andrews leaned heavily on Henry. The first general history of English law was written by John Reeves (History of English Law, 1783-1829) who was chief justice of Newfoundland from 1791 to 1792, later king’s printer, and one of the strongest opponents of the spread of French Revolutionary sentiments in England. “If the first blow against French ideas had been struck by Burke, the second was struck by Reeves,” 17 who founded a well-known association against the English supporters of the French Revolution.

He was also author of Thoughts on

the English Government (1795), an eighty-page pamphlet glorifying the national character of the English and their constitution, pronouncing the French a people unfit for lib-

14 The History of Great Britain connected with the Chronology of Europe (one volume in two parts, London, 1794-1795), p. vi, note. 15 Henault, Charles Jean Francois, Abrege chronologique de I’histoire de France (from Clovis to Louis XIV), Paris, 1744. English, 1762.

Translated into

E. Fueter, op. cit., pp. 145-146.

16 Sir David Dalrymple, Annals of Scotland from the Accession of Malcolm III, surnamed Canmore, to the Accession of the House of Stewart (Edinburgh, 1776, 1779). 17 G. P. Gooch, in Cambridge Modern History, vol. viii, p. 760.

40

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

erty, a perpetual menace to the peace of Europe, and their Revolution a judgment of God for their violence and fraud. This was not unpopular doctrine in 1795, but Reeves’ Tory opinions carried him too far and he was finally put on trial for having magnified too greatly the royal prerogative. Although a disciple of Montesquieu, Reeves was more directly stimulated to write a history of English law by the closing chapter in Blackstone’s Commentaries where an out¬ line for such a work is given.18

His aims were purely

historical: I found [he says] that modern writers, in discoursing of the ancient law, were too apt to speak in modern terms, and gen¬ erally with a reference to some modern usage. Hence it fol¬ lowed, that what they adduced was too often distorted and mis¬ represented, with a view to displaying, and accounting for, cer¬ tain coincidences in the law at different periods. As this had a tendency to produce very great mistakes, it appeared to me, that, in order to have a right conception of our old jurisprudence, it would be necessary to forget for a while every alteration which had been made since, to enter upon it with a mind wholly un¬ prejudiced, and to peruse it with the same attention that is bestowed on a system of modern law. The law of the time would then be learned in the language of the time, untinctured with new opinions; and when that was clearly understood, the alterations made therein in subsequent periods, might be de¬ duced, and exhibited to the mind of a modern jurist in the true colours in which they appeared to persons who lived in those respective periods..19 The first edition of the History (1783-1784) stopped at 1509, but to the second, revised, edition (1787) was added a section to the death of Mary.

More than a generation

18 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the laws of England (Oxford, 1765-69), vol. iv, pp. 400-436.

19 History

v-vi.

of English Laiv (London, 1783-1829), vol. i, Preface, pp.

RATIONALIST HISTORY

41

passed before the fifth and last volume, covering the reign of Elizabeth, appeared in 1829.

Although the book had the

misfortune to be badly edited by Finlason, in 1869, it remained standard until superseded by Pollock and Mait¬ land 20 (for the period before Edward I) and Holdsworth.21 Both Maitland and Holdsworth have assessed with the assurance of masters the merits and shortcomings of the man whose work they have themselves supplanted.22 him the respect due to a pioneer in a difficult field.

They pay His was

the first complete history of English law to the end of Eliza¬ beth.

Along with good abstracts of old authorities, it con¬

tained a careful account of the history of writs, and of pro¬ cedure and pleading; while there was a commendably sceptical approach to such topics as the authorship of the Mirror of Justices and the possibility of an Anglo-Saxon origin of the jury.

Against such merits, his critics placed the striking

absence of large views, combined with so little sense of pro¬ portion that minute technicalities were described at “ in¬ ordinate length.”

The division by reigns does not begin

until 1216—not even those of Henry I and Henry II are dis¬ tinguished—while, as Finlason remarked,23 by incorporating the whole of Glanville and large parts of Bracton, Reeves had confused the materials of history with history itself. Worse than his dullness, is the fact that he confined himself to printed books and there only to purely legal ones.

He

ignores the connection between law and other sides of national development.

“ The only ideas which he discusses

20 F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward

1.

(Cambridge, 1895).

21W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law (9 vols., London, 1903 et seq.) 22 Maitland, Collected Papers (Cambridge, 1911)> vol. >>> P- 6; Holds¬ worth, Historians of Anglo-American Law (New York, 1928), pp. 61-64. 23 In a note to vol. i, p. xi of the 1869 edition.

42

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

are the technical ideas of the common law.

These, coupled

with bald narratives of events, summaries of statutes, and a slight account of the literature of the law at different periods, make up the book.” 24

Thus to quote Maitland, “ no at¬

tempt is made to show the real, practical meaning of ancient rules, which are left to look like so many arbitrary canons of a game of chance.” 25

It is no wonder, after this, that

even apart from the increase in materials available for such work the history of English law had to be done over in the next century. Reeves was also the author of a History of the Law of Shipping and Navigation (1792), in which he argued in favor of the Navigation Acts as the sources and guarantee of British trade and maritime power; and of a History of the Government

of

the

Island

of

Newfoundland

(1793).

Neither of these works was of great importance, but the second derived some interest from the fact that its author had examined the documents relating to Newfoundland be¬ longing to the Board of Trade, and had gone through the register of the committee of the Council for Trade and Plan¬ tations. island.26

It was still useful to a recent historian of the

The fame of Robertson’s Charles V made it almost inevit¬ able that someone should soon undertake a history of the reign of Philip II.

Robert Watson, a Scottish clergyman

and principal of St. Salvator’s College in Aberdeen, was long remembered for having done this; but between his Philip II (1777) and Robertson’s Charles V there was a world of difference.

Watson had a vivid narrative style, no small

factor in the astonishing renown he gained, but he was no Holdsworth, Historians of the Anglo-American Law, pp. 62-63. 25 Maitland, Collected Papers, vol. ii, p. 6. 26 Daniel W. Prowse, History of Newfoundland from the English, Colonial and Foreign Records (London, 1895).

RATIONALIST HISTORYT historian.

43

To a large extent he used secondary authorities

in a work purporting to be a serious contribution to history. He had no sense of proportion or of the relative importance of events in Philip’s reign.

He devoted nearly three-quart¬

ers of his space to the Netherlands Revolt and omitted over¬ seas affairs entirely.

For this omission he could plead the

precedent of Robertson, but this does not make the fact more excusable in a work intended to be a history of one of the most important eras of the Spanish Empire.

The fact that

Watson treated the Netherlands in detail was perhaps one cause of his success at a time when a similar revolt was taking place in the British Empire, but he was detailed rather than illuminating, for he narrates only the surface events of war and politics and allows his picture to be deeply colored by bias against Roman Catholicism, the Spaniards, and Philip himself.27

He never forgot, or at least we are never able to

forget, that he was a Protestant clergyman and a patriotic Briton.

The personality of one of the most important, if one

of the least amiable, of the Spanish monarchs is made no clearer from reading Watson.

On the contrary, he has been

called one of the two writers most responsible for obscuring the truth about Philip.28

Prescott, who could certainly speak

with authority, criticised Watson severely in private letters although he speaks with more reserve in the preface to his own Philip IIP 27 He commended Philip, however, for his “ magnanimous behaviour on the defeat of the Armada,” History of the Reign of Philip the Second (6th edition, London, 1803), vol. iii, pp. 140-141. 28 H. Forneron, Histoire de Philippe II

(1881), vol. i, pp. 392, as

cited by W. Hunt in Cambridge History of English Literature (Calmbridge, 1921), vol. x, p. 291, note 2. 29 W. Prescott, History of Philip II (London, 1873), Preface, pp. iiiiv; Roger Wolcott, ed., Correspondence of William H. Prescott, 18331847 (Boston and N. Y., 1925), vol. ii, pp. 51-52, 119; G. Ticknor, Life of William Hickling Prescott (Boston, 1884), p. 89, note 13-

44

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

When he died Watson left behind an unfinished account of the reign of Philip III, which was rapidly completed by William Thomson and published in 1783.

The whole of the

second volume seems to have been by Thomson.

Although

a hack writer forced to write with great rapidity,. Thomson possessed at least two advantages over Watson.

First, he

was not particularly biassed against the Spanish character or religion.

On the contrary, he goes so far as to compare the

spirit of the Spanish missionaries in the New World with that of the early Christians in its zeal and purity of motive.30 In addition to this, he finally came to see that no account of the reign of a Spanish king in the seventeenth century could be complete if it ignored maritime and colonial affairs and he accordingly added a section on them to the third edition. On the other hand, he suffered from a rather tortuous style, an inclination to digression and to that type of “ philosophi¬ cal reflections,” common enough at this time, which, not arising naturally from the main current of his theme, de¬ tracted from the straightforwardness of his narrative without aiding the reader’s understanding of events.

Only a man

who was being paid by the sheet could introduce Spanish intervention in the Thirty Years’ war with nearly a hundred pages on the remote origins and early progress of that struggle.

Yet because the reign of Philip III had been little

cultivated this joint work by Watson and Thomson won a more lasting place than the former’s Philip II31 The two outstanding historians of ancient Greece (Mitford and Gillies) may best be grouped with the spokesmen aoThe History of the Reign of Philip the Third, King of Spain, The first four books by Robert Watson ... The last two by William Thomson (3rd edition, 2 vols., London, 1808), vol. ii, pp. 320-322. 31 For example, the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica refers to Watson and Thomson as “the most available account” of Philip Ill’s reign, while Watson’s Philip II is not referred to at all.

if;

RATIONALIST HISTORY of party philosophies.

45

But a third student of ancient

times deserves brief mention in this place.

John Gast

was an Anglican clergyman in Ireland who studied history for its moral lessons

(virtue brings happiness, and vice

ruin), its evidence of a superintending Providence, and its illustration of the excellence of the British Constitu¬ tion.

As early as 1753 he composed a history of Greece

in dialogue form, which is said to have been very suc¬ cessful, but became rare at an early date.

He then planned

a larger work on Greece from the earliest times to the Turkish Conquest, in three quarto volumes, two on Greece proper and one on Alexander’s successors in Egypt and Asia. Although the first two were published between 1782 and 1793, the most novel part of the enterprise, the section on Hellenistic Egypt and Asia, was unfortunately never real¬ ized.s:

But the fact that his plan recognized the importance

of a field not yet fully cultivated is almost his only claim to remembrance. shallow.

His style was arid and his scholarship was

Working amid the innumerable cares of parish

life, he could hardly have become truly learned even if this had been his primary aim; and so far was he from possess¬ ing a sense for historical evidence and criticism that he used Old Testament prophecies to explain events in the reign of Alexander the Great.

He was one of the first to write a

connected history of Greece, on a large scale at least, for English readers; but he was quickly overwhelmed by the com¬ petition of Gillies and Mitford, to whom we shall turn later, both of whom were better writers, more learned, and more intelligent in their use of historical sources. Adam Ferguson, of whose earlier work something has 32 A volume containing the History of Greece front the Accession of Alexander of Macedon till its final subjection to the Roman power, with a brief epitome to 1453, came out in 1782.

This was republished at

Dublin in 1793 (posthumously), along with a volume to the accession of Alexander.

46

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

already been said, was also well-known as the author of a History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Re¬ public (1782). The title and date of publication suggest emulation of Gibbon, but the author appears to have been at work some years before 1776.33 The History was the by-product of those philosophical and didactic interests which were Ferguson’s main concern. He believed that in the Roman Republic could be found the richest mine of examples and precepts for the student and statesman, and he sought to give a plain narrative of political and military events, without much comment, so that the reader could draw his own conclusions.34 In view of the fact that Ferguson was not aiming at schol¬ arship in the pure sense of the term, it is perhaps not surpris¬ ing that Niebuhr’s judgment on the Roman history, con¬ tained in his own lectures on that subject delivered as the era of scientific history was dawning, was a contempt¬ uous one.35 He condemned Ferguson for lack of research, for a proneness to moralizing, and for having slighted the early history of Rome. “ To those who want to acquire a knowledge of Roman history,” he concluded, “ the book is worth nothing.” 36 Now it is true that Ferguson did not 33 He wrote to Gibbon, April 18, 1776: “I have, as you suppose, been employed, at any intervals of leisure or rest I have had for some years, in taking notes, or collecting materials, for a History of the distractions that broke down the Roman Republic, and ended in the establishment of Augustus and his immediate successors.” E. Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works (London, 1814), vol. ii, p. 163. On Ferguson see also supra, pp. 15-17. 34 See John Small, Biographical Sketch of Adam Ferguson (Edin¬ burgh, 1864), p. 44. Also the preface to volume i of the 1813 edition of the History. 35 B. G. Niebuhr, Lectures on the History of Rome from the earliest times to the fall of the Western Empire (edited by L. Schmitz, London, 1870), p. 54.

36 Ibid.,

p. 54.

RATIONALIST HISTORY

47

uncover new material, but it is a permissible aim to present a digest of what is already known and this Ferguson did with sufficient skill to rival if not to displace Hooke’s earlier com¬ pilation.37

It is true, also, that the period before the Gracchi

was scantily treated, but after all Ferguson was not writing a complete history of Rome, but of a definite period or phase of that history, and he limits his field much as Ferrero has done in modern times. Moreover, Ferguson saw, though he was not the first to do so, that the generally accepted account of early Rome rested on insecure foundations.38

Writers like Fabius and

Cato, he pointed out, were largely dependent on tradition and mainly useful only when they had drawn upon Greek accounts contemporary with events in Roman history.

Livy

was in much the same position, himself drawing on Fabius and Cato, while Plutarch used Livy, Dionysius, or the authors upon whom they themselves rested.

Therefore, Ferguson

reasoned, a connected history of the early period could not be written, but only a narrative of such facts as tradition was competent to supply—events striking enough to remain in public memory.

He is to be commended for having recog¬

nized these difficulties and for having refused to enter upon difficult ground with which he was unfamiliar.

Indeed, not-

37 New editions of the History in 5 volumes, appeared in 1799, .1813, 1825 and also a one-volume edition in 1825. 1786.

German translation, 1784-

French translation, 1784-1791, with a second French edition 1803-

1810. 38 Ferguson discussed the authorities for the early history of Rome in the Preface to the 1813 edition of his History. There had previously been carried on in the French Academy of Inscriptions, through a series of years beginning in 1720, a debate on the reliability of ancient history. This resulted in Louis de Beaufort’s well known Dissertation sur I’incertitude des cinq premiers siecles de VHistoire Romaine (Utrecht, 1738), a work in which the author maintained a sceptical view.

See R. Flint,

Historical Philosophy in France and French Belgium and Switzerland (New York, 1894), pp. 254-261.

48

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

withstanding the critical genius of Niebuhr and the amazing progress of a century, it is perhaps still true to say that the assured history of Rome does not begin until the fourth or third century.

In so far as Ferguson worked in a less credu¬

lous spirit than Hooke, he marked a genuine advance in Roman studies.

In England, in France, and in Germany, he

held his circle of readers until well into the nineteenth cen¬ tury, even after modern research had begun the process of transforming Roman history into what it has since become. A modern writer has said that our interest in Hume as an historian arises not from his learning or research, but from the fact that his was “ perhaps the acutest intellect ever applied to English history ” 39—we are drawn by the thinker, not the scholar.

In somewhat the same way we are interested

in ascertaining the views of Roman history taken by Fer¬ guson who, it will be remembered, occupied a subordinate place in the Scottish philosophical Pantheon whose major god was Hume.

It was so even in the eighteenth century,

for although Ferguson professed to be ambitious solely of giving a simple digest of the facts, in most cases without expressing his own opinion or seeking to work towards any interpretation of the facts, he received credit chiefly for hav¬ ing “ turned the searchlight of philosophy on one of the greatest events in history.” 40

It is never difficult to trace

Ferguson’s own views amid his detail of events or analysis of characters; and by these as well as his by own scholarship we are able to estimate his place in historiography. At times, he seems to be on the verge of giving an inter¬ pretation of the fall of the Republic in terms of historical circumstance, in a manner quite respectable even to the present day.

He maintains that the era of conquest had

39 Hume Brown, History of Scotland (Cambridge, 1911), vol. iii, p. 298. 40 Robert Bisset, History of the Reign of George III (London, 1803), vol. iv, p. 58.

RATIONALIST HISTORY

49

brought the Romans face to face with the complex problems of Empire at a time when the social discipline of the people had declined through the luxury and corruption introduced from abroad.

To govern the Empire, the Republican form

of government, adequate enough for the quite different con¬ ditions under which it had arisen, needed drastic reform. From this point of view, it was those who attempted to pre¬ serve the Republic rather than those who sought its over¬ throw, whose conduct needed vindication.

There is much in

this argument that shows an accurate diagnosis; modern historians seem to agree that foreign conquest would neces¬ sarily change the institutions at Rome and that the Empire could only be preserved thereby. confine himself to diagnosis.

But Ferguson could not

He was full of prepossessions

for the Senate and of sentiments about “ liberty,” “ tyranny,” and “ virtue ”—the stock in trade of an eighteenth-century libertarian.

Hence we find him indulging in an eulogy of

the Senate in which he declared:41 If ever there was a body of men fit to govern the world, it was the Roman Senate, composed of citizens who had passed through the higher offices of state, who had studied the affairs of their country, in the execution of its councils, and in the command of its armies; and it will be for ever remembered, in behalf of those who wished to preserve its authority, that if their removal from the scene on which they acted was expedient or seasonable, it was so because that scene was become unworthy of their presence. Here, Ferguson is no longer the historian, content to analyse, but the moralist passing judgment.

This is his more

customary role, and hence we are not surprised to find Marius, Pompey and Caesar roundly condemned.

Caesar,

41 A. Ferguson, History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic fnew edition, Edinburgh, 1813), vol. v, pp. 72-73-

c0

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

he said, had supreme genius, but employed his abilities to subdue fellow citizens with whom he ought to have lived on terms of equality.

Therefore they slew him, a sacrifice to

their “ just indignation,” and,42 a striking example of what the arrogant have to fear in trifling with the feelings of men whom they ought to respect, and at the same time a lesson of jealousy and of cruelty to tyrants, or a warning which they are but too willing to take in the exercise of their powers, not to spare those whom they may have in¬ sulted by their vile usurpations.

I

Because of his proneness to indulge in such sentiments, with respect both to the figures of late Republican days and in his short survey of the early Empire, Ferguson the his¬ torian was submerged by Ferguson the moralist.

This was

not an obstacle to his contemporary fame, but it has been fatal to his subsequent reputation. Compared with their predecessors, the historians of the Enlightenment were broad in their interests, but their enthu¬ siasm was bounded by those topics which concerned the rising bourgeoisie for whom they worked.

For as the revolutions

of the eighteenth century produced middle-class states, so the writers of that day produced middle-class histories.

Some

among them had risen from the uneducated and exploited masses to the distinction of a literary career,43 but of all these there was not found one to undertake the history of the poor or of poverty.

It is true, of course, that their description

of manners and customs of the past included some of those of the lower classes, and an occasional note of awareness of

42 Ibid., vol.

I

iv, p. 151.

43 For example, Robert Heron (infra, pp. 148-150), John Bigland, and William Russell

(infra, pp. 65-68; 123-124).

Bigland was author of

many popular historical works of the early nineteenth century.

He gives

an interesting account of his early life in Memoir of the life of John Bigland . . . Written by Himself (Doncaster, 1830).

RATIONALIST HISTORY

51

the part they played in history made itself heard.

Logan,

as we shall see in a moment, asks why more is not said about “ the people,” though he does not explain clearly what he means; and later John Bigland, a fertile author of popular works, shows some interest in the unchronicled majority.44 But the first person who set himself the task of giving the historical background of poverty in a large way seems to have been the benevolent aristocrat, Sir Frederic Morton Eden,

(1797), was the direct result of the hard times of 1794 and 1795. His main

whose great work, The State of the Poor

concern was to give a statistical account of selected English parishes at the end of the eighteenth century, but the better to understand the conditions he found he devoted some four hundred pages (quarto) of the first volume to the historical background.

Useful for the documents and digests it con¬

tained, this was nevertheless not an adequate history either of poverty or of the poor.

It is closely confined to official docu¬

ments, never rises above a mere detail of facts, and possesses no literary merit.

We can well believe Eden’s statement that

he never spent time looking for another word when he could spend it looking for another fact.

Nor, it need hardly be

said, can Eden’s work be regarded as a precursor of recent attempts to look at history from the viewpoint of the “ proletariat.” But that Eden was not isolated in his concern with the his¬ torical background of poverty may be seen from Thomas Ruggles.

Ruggles was a justice of the peace in Ireland who

worked at his History of the Poor (1793-1794) to while away the solitary hours of a rural winter.

He was chiefly

44 Bigland, in his History of England to 1815 (London, 1815), protests against the neglect of the populace in “ our ancient annalists ” and their anti-popular tone.

He complains that they are most unfair to the people

and virulent in denunciation of the struggles for popular liberty which were really more important than the languid wars of many monarchs (vol. i, pp. 618-619, 620 et seq.).

52

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

interested in discovering why agriculturalists were poor and what the remedy, if any, was. explain this phenomenon?

Do physical or social causes

To answer this question, he pro¬

posed a summary account of the “ duties of the poor to, and their claims from, society ” from the earliest times, followed by a “ transient view ” of the ideas of those who had written on the subject in various ages.

Actually the historical part

of Ruggles was quite slight, and if he possessed any impor¬ tance now it would be for his reflections on his own time. The interest in comparative and “ conjectural ” history dis¬ played by men like Hume, Ferguson and Millar in the writ¬ ings earlier mentioned was not followed up in any large way in later years.

But a minor example of a similar approach is

James Dunbar’s Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (2nd edition, 1781).

Dunbar aban¬

doned a purely chronological arrangement because he saw that “ degeneracy, as well as improvement, is incidental to man,” 45 so that some ages are more backward than others that preceded them.

At the same time he believed that prog¬

ress is in the long run the distinctive feature of history and he sought to explain the factors operating in the process. He has been praised for not ignoring the factor of heredity and for his anticipation of the League of Nations,46 but in general he repeats the ideas about climate, environment, and so on that were commonplace in his own day. Of more direct interest was John Logan’s Elements of the Philosophy of History, Part First (1781), comprising a syllabus of some lectures delivered before Scottish audiences under the auspices of Robertson, Blair, and other dignitaries. Logan was a clergyman, evidently of considerable ability, whose career was ruined by drink and melancholia.

The

detailed syllabus shows that he began his course by a brief 45 Essays on the History of Mankind (2d edition, London, 1781), p. 3. 46 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (London, 1920), p. 364.

RATIONALIST HISTORY

53

consideration of some of the principles that must guide the worker who attempts to reconstruct the history of society after the fashion of the “ conjectural ” school.

One of these

is that “ the arrangements and improvements which take place in human affairs result not from the efforts of individ¬ uals, but from a movement of the whole society ” 47 so that the historian should investigate the story of peoples rather than remain a mere panegyrist or recorder of “ great men.” From want of attention to this principle History hath often degenerated into the panegyric of single men, and the worship of names. Law-givers are recorded, but who makes mention of the people? . . . [Yet] Poetry, Philosophy, the Fine Arts, national manners and customs, result from the situation and spirit of a people. . . . All that Legislators, Patriots, Philosoph¬ ers, Statesmen, and Kings can do, is to give a direction to that stream which is forever flowing.48 Arising from this wTas the second principle that all parts of society are one—literature, philosophy, fine arts, manners and customs, each influencing the development of the others. A third principle was that national character is formed by a combination of physical and moral causes; a fourth that prog¬ ress is inherently characteristic of the human race, giving the real key to history. From these principles, Logan proceeded to lecture on vari¬ ous stages of history.

From barbarous society he passed to

a consideration of Asiatic civilization with its claim to a high antiquity, from Asia to Egypt, and thence to Greece.

Here

he evidently felt on firmer ground, for he begins to include more narrative, more history in the stricter sense of dealing with specific facts and particular situations capable of com¬ prehension with the materials at hand.

47 Elements of 48 Ibid., p. 16.

But his main interest

the Philosophy of History, pp. 14-15.

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

54

was to ascertain the general factors basic in all social change, as exemplified in specific happenings like the decline of Greece or the rise and decline of Rome.

Nor do his explanations

bear out the claims for the use of the inductive method and the recognition of social forces he had made in the beginning. The decline of the Roman Empire is a topic in dealing with which the eighteenth century revealed its limitations of out¬ look more than in any other way; Logan gives us the same story of decaying virtue as so many other writers of that time.

It may seem unfair to judge him without the full

text of his lectures at our disposal, but his syllabus is elabor¬ ate enough to temper our regret that the lectures themselves were never published.

Yet since they were delivered before

public audiences, with sufficient success to warrant the print¬ ing of a full outline of the first part, they serve as an illustration of the way in which the ideas of the “ New History ” were popularized. William Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783) belied its name since it was really a description of contemporary Sumatra intended as raw material for philosophers investi¬ gating the natural history of society.49

It was apparently

the first English work on Sumatra and has been serviceable to later students for this reason.

It was one of the numerous

class of travel accounts so important to the eighteenth-century social sciences. The influence of rationalistic ideas of history appeared clearly in several manuals, one or two of which remained in use for a long time, both reflecting and helping shape prevailing attitudes. was

the

Reverend

A most effective writer of such books John

Adams,

a

Scottish

clergyman

long resident in and about London, the plan of whose text¬ book of English history was admittedly based on Henry.50 49 History of Sumatra (London, 1783), pp. vii-viii, 373-375. 50 A New History of Great Britain, from the invasion of Julius Caesar

55

RATIONALIST HISTORY

The resemblance is close.

There is the same division into

books and chapters, each dealing with a specific aspect of one period, and the same breadth of subjects included.

The

happy pupil who learned from Adams, and the number must have been legion judging from the editions that appeared, was told when potatoes arrived in Europe, when silk stock¬ ings were first worn, universities founded, coaches intro¬ duced, half pence and farthings first coined, inoculation for smallpox discovered, and the Royal Institution founded.

He

studied the reign of fashion as well as the reigns of kings, and followed the record of discovery as well as the story of war.

It is true that the relative importance and the

causes of the events of which he read were not always pointed out to him—the book has some of those defects noted in Henry—but as long as school history was to be mainly a chronicle of facts it was well that the facts should be selected from different fields.

In the case of Adams’ manual they

possessed some human interest and related to matters with which the pupil might be in daily contact.

Moreover, Adams

kept bringing his History up to date in successive editions. Indeed one is inclined to marvel at its progressive character in this respect when one thinks of many widely used text¬ books in later days and reflects that it was for long scarcely respectable to evince any interest in the century just previous to the pupil’s birth. Henry was not the only writer whom Adams brought before

a

wider

audience.

In

1789

he

issued

Curious

Thoughts on the History of Man, Chiefly abridged or selected from the celebrated works of Lord Kaimes, Lord Monboddo. Dr. Dunbar, and the immortal Montesquieu, which was “ designed to promote a spirit of enquiry in the British youth to the present time ... on a plan nearly similar to that of Dr. Henry (London, 1802).

I have used the 5th edition (London, 1818).

see supra, pp. 34-38.

On Henry

56

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

of both sexes, and to make the philosophy, as well as history of the human species, familiar to ordinary capacities.” 51 This modest aim was to be realized by a short and simple digest of the best thought of the day on such topics as the social nature of man, the chief causes which gave rise to civil society, population, property, language, the influence of war on human character, the effect of persecution and opulence on manners, and of climate on the human constitu¬ tion. It is true that the author retailed information, or better, theories, rather than stimulated thought, but no one has yet discovered an infallible secret for imparting the “ incurable disease of thought.”

One is rather surprised at the attrac¬

tive and modern character of Adams’ books than inclined to carping criticism. Similar in aim was a work with the inclusive title, Elements of Useful Knowledge (1793), a kind of “survey” course designed to lay the

foundations of a liberal education.

Beginning with a sketch of astronomy and its application in proving the existence of God, Adams then gave rapid sum¬ maries of mythology, chronology, the memorable events from Creation to the end of the eighteenth century, rhetoric, metallurgy, climatology, and the British Constitution, end¬ ing with a chapter of miscellaneous information.

To this

was appended a brief account of the trial and execution of Louis XVI and the recent (1793) transactions in France. Since the book was meant mainly to be committed to memory, the pupil who survived might be expected to hold his own in almost any company. Adams was the author of other works of an historical or near historical character.

His View of Universal History,

from the Creation to the Present Time (1795) did not belie its name, for it included, besides the more important coun¬ tries, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Greenland, Iceland, Lap51 From the full title of the Curious Thoughts on the History of Man.

RATIONALIST HISTORY

57

land, Russia, Poland, Arabia, China, Tartary, India, Japan, Mexico, and the South American countries, and, in Adams’ customary style, concluded with a survey of world conditions at the time of writing.

The book was more uninteresting in

its selection of material and its mode of treatment—the coun¬ tries were taken up seriatim—than the English history. Adams did not, in fact, any more than Henry, possess a sense of the unity of History: there was no guiding line in it for him. The Flowers of Ancient History (1788) sought to aban¬ don a narrative of events in chronological order for a dis¬ cussion at greater length of selected transactions.

It was of

course compiled from larger histories, but reflects consider¬ able breadth of interests, including in its scope Confucius and Sadi as well as the heroes of Greece and Rome.

The

Flowers of Modern History (1788) dealt with the period since the barbarian invasions.

Adams was also the author

of an abridgment of Gibbon, in two volumes, a collection of extracts from the works of celebrated travelers, and sev¬ eral other books less closely related to history.52 Ideas similar to those of Adams were expounded for more advanced students by Joseph Priestley.

From 1761 to 1767

Priestley was a tutor at the Dissenting Academy of Warring¬ ton.

His duty wras to teach languages, but he felt so strongly

the need of instruction in History and Political Science that he himself undertook the work in those fields.53 52

In 1765 his

Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in

six volumes, quarto, abridged in two volumes, octavo (London, 1789). In the British Museum Catalogue Adams is credited with the authorship of Elements of Reading (London, 1781), Elegant Anecdotes and BonMots (new edition, London, 1790), The Flowers of Modern Travels (2 vols., Boston, 1797), Modern Voyages (2 vols., London, 1790). 53 Miss Irene Parker (Dissenting Academies in England, Cambridge, 1914, esp. pp. 133-135) has pointed out how the Dissenting Academies of the eighteenth century modernized the educational curriculum by includ-

58

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

Essay on Education gave the syllabi for three courses of lectures, one a general introduction to the study of history, a second on English history, and a third on the laws and gov¬ ernment of England.

His course on English history was

intended to supplement the usual account by linking together English and foreign history at appropriate points, and by stressing the non-political side.

His plan was almost exactly

that later adopted by Henry, viz., to divide the fields into periods and to digest the material for each under various heads.

But Priestley’s history of England, if he had ever

written one, would probably have shown less research than Henry’s; though it would on the other hand have contained more acute reflections. According to Priestley, the appearance of Henry’s work made the publication of his own lectures on English history unnecessary; while Blackstone’s Commentaries forestalled his treatise on law and government.

Fortunately, however,

he did publish, in 1788, the lectures in his first course. Originally in quarto, they became more familiar to the nine¬ teenth century in the 1826 edition, a fat octavo of over five hundred and fifty pages.

They remained in use, at least in

America, almost to the end of the century.54 Priestley began with a conventional discussion in three lec¬ tures

of

the

use

of

history—it anticipates

experience,

strengthens virtue, stimulates to great deeds, enables us to understand human nature, and teaches the truths of religion. All these were of course commonplace to the historians of the century and were probably expounded by every teacher ing such subjects as history.

There is much material on this topic also

in H. McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts. History I93i).

54

of

the

Non-Conformist

Academies,

1662-1820

Being the

(Manchester,

C. K. Adams in his A Manual of Historical Literature (New York,

1882, p. 193) found the value of Priestley’s Lectures on History “still very considerable.”

RATIONALIST HISTORY

of the subject.

59

More important was his treatment of the

sources of history, a topic to which he devoted nine lectures. Quite in the modern manner, he explained the difference between direct and indirect sources, while stressing at the same time the immeasurable superiority of records over material more liable to corruption through dishonesty and error—oral tradition and written accounts.

He discussed

sensibly the use of coins and medals, heraldry and placenames, illustrating each with definite examples.

In his lec¬

ture on indirect methods of ascertaining historical fact, he showed the possibility of learning from the style in which a document or book is written; while the necessity for a close study of chronology and the value of a study of law were also emphasized. From sources, Priestley passed to a consideration in four lectures of the preparation in “ auxiliary sciences ” (to use our term) necessary to produce the good historian.

This

included in ideal, he said, a training in all the sciences.

But

even in practice the historian ought to be skilled in the knowl¬ edge of human nature (psychology, we would call it), in philosophy,

geography,

economics

and

statistics

(“the

Methods of estimating the Riches and Power of ancient and remote Nations ”) and numismatics. All this must have seemed like a counsel of perfection to the students at Warrington Academy, who were probably a good deal more enthusiastic over the series of “ Directions for facilitating the study of history,” comprising a discussion of compendia and epitomes, chronological and genealogical tables, commonplace books, an outline of historians since Herodotus and a solitary lecture on terms of fortification. But the greater part of the course was given over to a brief treatment of the most important topics to which the historical student should direct his attention.

Among these were

biography, politics, manufacturing and commerce, forms and

6o

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

problems of government and law, agriculture, the arts, colo¬ nies and colonization, money, luxury and manners, religion, population, war, and national finance.

Well might Priestley

conclude; “It would be endless to point out every useful object of attention to a reader of history, as there is no branch of useful knowledge which history will not furnish materials for illustrating and extending.” 55 Priestley is to be praised for his breadth of approach to history, as he has been praised by Sir Leslie Stephen for see¬ ing the importance of the historical approach to the study of religion.56

Yet as an historian he had serious defects

which are clearly revealed in the book under consideration. He was keen rather than profound in his observations. Moreover, he was an advocate, constantly in the arena writ¬ ing, speaking, disputing for his cherished beliefs in politics and religion, rather than a scholar solely concerned with the advancement of knowledge.

So far as the Lectures on His¬

tory are concerned, we must, however, remember their peda¬ gogical purpose, which might justify a greater degree of positiveness in statement than in a more advanced and philo¬ sophical presentation of the study of history.

Yet Priestley

was more than pedagogically opinionated; he was strongly biassed and his biasses crop out constantly. misled

by

his

liberal

views

into

Thus he was

recommending

Mrs.

Macaulay’s History of England as a “ masterly perform¬ ance,” whereas, as we shall have occasion to show later, it is really only a masterly example of how not to write history. On the other hand, in Priestley as in other writers, it is pos55 Lectures on History and General Policy (new edition, by J. T. Rutt, London, 1826), p. 541. 56 Sir Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (3rd edition reprinted, London, 1927), vol. i, p. 435, with refer¬ ence to Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity (Birming¬ ham, 1782, 2 vols.).

RATIONALIST HISTORY

6l

sible to find prepossessions and prejudices leading to an appreciation of some aspects of history the significance of which might otherwise have been completely misunderstood. He was a staunch Unitarian with truly rationalistic contempt for the Catholicism of the Middle Ages.

But his acceptance

of tire thesis of a providential guidance in history leading the race through error and pain to better things, made him look for the historical function of institutions with which he had otherwise little sympathy.

Even evil, he says, is

transmuted by the hand of God into good.

“ Popery ” saved

learning in the barbarian ages, and the monks by going into the desert places helped to establish towns.

Again, there was

hardly any event in history more calamitous than the Crus¬ ades, yet they were the great means of establishing the liberty of the lowrer orders, breaking the power of the barons and introducing much useful knowledge.

Wars have scattered

learning and spread civilization.57 Of course opinions like those just given are to be found also in Voltaire,58 but Priestley’s views of history had a stronger religious tinge; he was apt to give a religious inter¬ pretation even where he had derived the fact which he was explaining from Voltaire.

As in the case of Voltaire, too,

Asia rather than Europe seemed important to Priestley in the history of the Middle Ages.

He was enormously im¬

pressed by events like the rise of the Saracens and the part they played in stimulating an intellectual revival “ long before the Greek fugitives from Constantinople promoted a taste for eloquence and the belles-lettres.” 59

Priestley was inclined

to stress the importance of the Saracens because of their service to science, and to depreciate the Italian Renaissance because of its concern with literature.

So pedestrian were

57 J. Priestley, Lectures on History, pp. 560-565, 569. 58 See J. B. Black, op. cit., pp. 73-74. 69 Priestley, op. cit., p. 289.

62

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

his views of letters that he believed the production of poetry ought to cease because the supply already at hand was greater than the average person could master, and the quality not likely to be improved upon.

After this it is perhaps not

necessary to say that Priestley had no special sense for the continuity of history or appreciation of how institutions shape its course.

He was like Hume in that while he shows traces

of an historical approach in some of his works, his efforts at formal history are dominated by a mechanical, atomistic conception of society. Some years before the publication of Priestley’s book, Alexander Fraser Tytler was appointed professor of history in the University of Edinburgh.

In 1782, he produced a

syllabus of lectures in universal history 60 and an expansion of this was published, in 1801, as Elements of General His¬ tory.

Like Priestley’s Lectures this manual long retained its

popularity.61

Defining history as the school of politics and

virtue, Tytler nevertheless included more than political his¬ tory in his statement of aims :62 It is proposed to exhibit a progressive view of the state of man¬ kind, from the earliest ages of which we have any authentic accounts to the beginning of the age in which we live; to deline¬ ate the origin of states and empires, the great outlines of their history, the revolutions which they have undergone, the causes which have contributed to their rise and grandeur, and operated to their decline and extinction. For these purposes, it is neces¬ sary to bestow attention particularly on the manners of nations, their laws, the nature of their government, their religion, their intellectual improvements, and progress in the arts and sciences. 60 A. F. Tytler, Plan and Outline of a course of Lectures on Universal History, ancient and modern, delivered in the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1782). 61 Seventeen editions of the Elements are cited in the British Museum Catalogue, the last in 1875, also an abridgment and several editions of parts of the work.

62 Plan

and Outline, pp. 3-4.

RATIONALIST HISTORY

63

In other words, while Tytler’s goal is the explanation or description of political phenomena, he seeks the explanation in non-political causes.

Yet he gave about four-fifths of his

space to political history; nor did he grasp generally the con¬ nection of economic, social, and political phenomena—the most characteristic failure of this group.

Tytler organized

his lectures around the great states and empires that had appeared.

In every period, he pointed out,63 some one state

or people has been dominant, and to this dominant element may be referred the history of contemporary peoples and states.

For example, after considering under the general

head of Charlemagne’s empire such topics as the rise of the Franks, the origin of the feudal system, the state of Euro¬ pean manners, government, literature, arts and sciences, he next passed to a group of “ collateral objects of attention ” at this time.

Among these were the Roman Empire in the

East, the conquests and settlements of the Normans, the rise of the temporal dominion of the Church, and the Saracen conquest of

Spain.

The

organization was

thus topical

within clearly recognizable chronological limits.

He devoted

some time to the history of the Far East, but on the other hand displayed a certain provincialism of outlook by dispro¬ portionate attention to British history. It is easy to explain why this manual should have remained in use so long.

It was, in the first place, very comprehensive,

at least in the sense of touching upon a wide variety of topics. It was also clearly and simply written; and it followed a middle course between the bare recital of facts and the philo¬ sophizing tendencies of many of its contemporaries. There was more “ philosophy ” in the Reverend George Thompson’s Spirit of General History (1791), which also consisted of lectures, delivered before public audiences rather than before university classes. 63 Ibid.,

p. 9.

A work of compilation, it

6_|

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

drew heavily on writers like Pufendorf, Bossuet, Montes¬ quieu, Ferguson, Millot, Gibbon, and Strutt, thus mingling the old and new.

Thompson was more interested in causes

than events, and he devoted too much space to England, but he actually manages to minimise politics and war more com¬ pletely than was customary.

Mostly his views go back to

Hume, Voltaire, or some other giant, and are expressed with little originality; but in two respects he presents something different.

He was more conscious of the unity of history,

from its beginning to its end, than most of those who wrote narrative history, though not perhaps than those who con¬ cerned themselves with the natural history of society. In¬ deed he is prophetic of Freeman in his formulation of this idea: The history of mankind from the beginning of the world to the present time, is a chain consisting of many links; and to strike off one, would be to discompose the whole. There is an intimate connection between ancient and modern history. These two parts may make up the whole. And though any part of history may be the object of our study, yet unless we view it in con¬ nection with the other parts, it cannot be studied with that ad¬ vantage, it otherwise would.64 In the second place, Thompson derived some distinction among these English writers in his emphasis upon the neces¬ sity of using history as a means to social reform.

He saw

the reality of ignorance and oppression beneath the veneer of enlightenment in the eighteenth century.

“ But alas! ”

he said,66 “ at present a few only, comparatively speaking, are enlightened, wise, and liberal; the greatest number are still ignorant, intolerant, and foolish.”

In this condition he

found the true mission of history, which “ should teach men 64 G. Thompson, Spirit of General History (Carlisle, 1791), p. n. 65 Ibid., p. 432.

RATIONALIST HISTORY

65

to endeavor to remove the evils which are pernicious to society; to correct the faults of government, and establish public good upon a right foundation.” 68

It was a common¬

place that history should be useful, but ordinarily it was to be useful in teaching a vague “ virtue,” patriotism and obedi¬ ence to constituted authority—at least among the English his¬ torians.

Not often at this time do we find this thoroughly

modern note of history in the service of social betterment. One of the most widely read books was William Russell’s History of Modern Europe from the Fall of the Roman Empire to 1763 (1779-1784), cast in the form of “letters from a nobleman to his son,” and intended as a manual for young students.

For this purpose it continued to be used on

both sides of the Atlantic during the better part of a century. Russell saw that Europe and the Europeanized parts of the world formed one community with a common history char¬ acterized by a progress from “ rudeness to refinement ” and he set himself to giving a simple account for young students. If simple, it was certainly not brief, since the book ran to five stout volumes, octavo.

After a few preliminary remarks

on the Roman Empire, strongly tinged with liberal ideas, the main account begins with Clovis.

Although Russell de¬

clared that “ the history of the human mind is of infinitely more importance than the detail of events,” 67 and inserted chapters on commerce, navigation, colonization and letters, political events occupy eleven or twelve times as much space as social, economic, and intellectual affairs, another illustra¬ tion of the extent to which achievement lagged behind aspira¬ tion among these innovating historians of the Enlightenment. In the same way, though not to the same degree, English affairs received a disproportionate emphasis as compared with 66 Ibid., p. 43367 The History of Modern Europe (new ed., London, 1788), vol. i, p. 212. On Russel! see also infra, pp. 123-124.

66

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

those of the continent.

In this he was quite in keeping with

the practice of his contemporaries (in England) who were accustomed to profess a cosmopolitan outlook, but who were in practice more national in their sympathies than Continental historians.68 Russell’s treatment of the Middle Ages is a good example in brief compass of the change that was coming over his¬ torical writing in this respect and of which more examples will be given in a later chapter.

On the one hand he reflects

the disparagement of medieval civilization of which Hume was perhaps the leading representative.

This is best illus¬

trated in Russell’s apology for not giving an extended account of medieval society, an enterprise which he compared to

“ travelling

over

barren

mountains

and

uninhabited

deserts, in search of the remote fountains of the Nile ” when one could contemplate the “ accumulated majesty of that river ” as it flows through the rich and fertile plain.69

On

the other hand, that a changing attitude towards some phases at least of the Middle Ages was in the air at this time is suggested by favorable notice of the “ beautiful extravagan¬ cies of romantic feeling,” an appreciation of which the source is indicated as Warton’s History of Poetry.70

Such refer¬

ences show how the nascent literary Romanticism was begining to influence the outlook of historians, but in general his¬ tory lagged far behind literature in doing justice to the Middle Ages; nor must it be supposed that Russell’s general tone towards that period was sympathetic. Yet his objection to a close study of the Middle Ages was 68 T. H. Dyer, History of Modern Europe from the Fall of Con¬ stantinople in 1453 to the war in the Crimea in 1857 (4 vols., 1861-1864), has some criticism of Russell.

He estimated that Russell gave fully half

of his space on the modern period to England alone, and gives (vol. i, pp. vi-vii) a list of some of his mistakes. 69 Russell, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 205-206. 70 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 211.

67

RATIONALIST HISTORY

based on more than a mere aversion from the spirit of medi¬ eval civilization.

Russell believed that history should con¬

fine itself to periods concerning which the truth was clearly ascertainable, which in the existing state of knowledge, and for a writer of a manual, meant chiefly modern times.

He

felt also that the emphasis should be placed on events that had had some civil and political consequence, particularly those the effects of which continued to be felt at the time of the writer.

Obviously this led naturally to an extended

discussion of Europe after Westphalia at the expense of everything that had gone before, no matter how interesting or how well authenticated.

Nor is such a principle for a

writer of textbooks one that can easily be overthrown, even at the present day.

Probably the chief difference between

such a twentieth-century writer and Russell is that the latter aimed at giving, in addition to a concise account of material selected in accordance with the above principles, the lessons that might be drawn from this history.

Such aims are not

so plainly avowed in the present time, though it is still true that history is often meant to teach patriotism at least.

In

Russell’s case, the lessons related in great part to the debas¬ ing influence of despotism and the evil deeds of the Tories. Indeed, he ends his discussion of political history with an attack on the treaty of 1763 as a betrayal of essential British interests by Tory counsels.71 In spite of this aim to teach philosophy, by the examples of history, Russell’s book is mainly a straightforward narra¬ tive written in a clear, simple and interesting style.

It did

not expand the frontiers of learning, it was too long perhaps for its purpose, and diffuse in its treatment, but its merits attracted generations of students, until the work of Dyer gradually superseded it.72 71 Ibid., vol. v, pp. 456-460. 72 See note 68, above.

68

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

Russell was also the author of a History of America (1778) and of an unfinished History of Ancient Europe C1793) •

The first of these, published during the American

Revolution, may be mentioned for having advocated that American trade should be freed from the restrictions placed upon it by the Mother Country.73

But as a history of

America it was overshadowed by Robertson and seems never to have reached a second edition.

The History of Ancient

Europe was carried to the Peloponnesian War when its author died.

It was purely pragmatic in aim and deservedly

the least successful of the three books mentioned.

The

breadth of Russell’s interests is shown by the fact that he left manuscripts for a History and Philosophical View of the Progress of Mankind in the Knowledge of the Terraqueous Globe and for a History of England from the Beginning of the Reign of George the Third in 1760.

This was to be in

three volumes octavo and Cadell, the publisher, had agreed to pay £750 for the copyright.74 73 History of America (London, 1778), vol. ii, pp. 418-419. 74 David Irving, Lives of Scotish [sic] Authors; Falconer, and Russell (Edinburgh, 1801), pp. 122-123.

viz.

Fergusson,

CHAKTEE HI PARTY

H/.STORY FROM

IfCMR TO

J 8 :

'J he Tory Emphasis

fV./nv history, like- political parties, originated in sevent< vol. i, pp. xxvii-xxviii.

MEDIEVALISM AND PIETISM

of his day. Industrious reading is not enough, sary also:72

149 It is neces-

to study diligently the sense of each successive passage in those records which afford the foundation of our narrative; to com¬ pare the different contemporary writings, sentence by sentence, and thought by thought, with one another; to estimate the credi¬ bility of the various original authors, by a careful consideration of consistency of narrative;—and opportunities of information, —freedom from the causes of prejudice, or subjection to them— discernment, or the want of it,—sobriety of judgment and faith¬ ful integrity of character, or a flightiness of imagination prone to embellish with fiction, and a looseness of morality, not rev¬ erencing the distinction between truth and falsehood. . . . [It is necessary] in the composition of an historical work, from the evidence of ancient chronicles, epistles, laws, and charters,—to judge of the value of your evidence—by looking into first prin¬ ciples of human character,—-by considering whether the acknowl¬ edged talents, accomplishments, passions, and habits, of this or that man, give probability to what is related of him by examin¬ ing whether the state of the general spirit, intelligence, and manners of a nation, were consistent with the account which we receive of this or that public transaction—by applying the philo¬ sophy of the Law of Nature and Nations to the illustration of historical truth. . . . Finally, Heron is another instance of protest against the neglect of the history of “ barbarous ” ages by Bolingbroke, Hume and Robertson, pointing out that these men were mainly interested in illuminating the political system of modern times and (nice thrust!) that they were too lazy for “ the rugged toil of antiquarian research.” 73

Then by a

curious concatenation of witnesses, he refers to Herodotus, Gibbon, and Epic Poetry as proof that “ barbarous ” ages

72 Ibid., vol. iii, pp. vi-vii. 72 Ibid., vol. i, p. 31.

x 50

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

are really susceptible of literary treatment and that it is pos¬ sible to separate fact from fable in their study. Poor Heron’s achievements were not equal to the merits of his ideas of study.

He divided his history into books,

each book into two sections, one on public affairs and one on social life.

But though he had given a vigorous criticism of

those who confined their attention to political history 74 the sections on social life are never elaborate, not as concrete or as interesting as those of Henry, and grow shorter from volume to volume.

The book is badly padded, the facts in¬

sulated with a thick coat of speculation, ail couched in an ambitious verbose style.

I cannot resist one quotation in

illustration of this point.

Having introduced the invention

of gunpowder with a brief mention of Roger Bacon and the German Schwartz, Heron embarks on a long disquisition on the effects of firearms on civilization, beginning: “the up¬ lifted arm, the clenched fist, a stone taken from the earth, a branch torn from a tree were the first weapons of offense, used among mankind.” 75

It is not surprising that a book

with so many weaknesses should not be successful, but one hopes Heron paid his debts from it.

If he did, the relief

was only temporary, for the hour of death found him in the debtors’ prison at Newgate. Another minor example of protest against “ philosophical ” history is Charles Home’s New Chronological Abridgment of the History of England (1791).

This was the veriest

of compilations intended for popular consumption.

Its or¬

ganization was purely annalistic, the book being divided into reigns and then subdivided into years.

Great admiration for

Henault was expressed by its author.

Home divided history

into two types: chronological and systematic, the latter char¬ acterized by the tracing of events back to their causes and

MEDIEVALISM AND PIETISM

forward to their furthest consequences.

151

This type, Home

admitted, required more labor and intellect, and was more interesting and instructive, than chronological history. But then is not the [reader] exposed at every step to become the dupe of the writer’s prejudices, in addition to his own, and of being misled by his too subtile refinement, which as often misleads mankind as does stupid ignorance? To what other cause, but to the prejudices of historians, is it owing that, instead of a faithful, unclouded mirror of the past events of this coun¬ try, we have Whig histories of England, and Tory histories, Church of England histories, Calvinistical histories, and Roman Catholic histories? It is evident, likewise, that ingenious men, by too deep and refined speculations on causes and events, often overshoot the mark, and mislead others as well as deceive them¬ selves. Hence they frequently make facts bend to theories, instead of deducing theories from facts; in their eyes every movement in the political world forms part of that intricate system, which, perhaps, was first called into existence in their own closets; and they hardly know how to make any allowance for the caprice, the inconsistency, and the folly, to which we know the great are fully as subject, as persons in inferior sta¬ tions. The philosophical dissertations on history that are now frequently published may claim a superiority over the plain chronological narrations of our ancestors; but certainly they are much less entitled to the name of histories, and are by no means so well calculated for general use; which requires a simple and contracted form at once for the advantage of common under¬ standings and of narrow finances.75 One of those who replied to Lyttelton’s Protestant view of the investiture struggle as Lyttelton had criticized Hume’s casual treatment of Henry II’s reign, was Joseph Berington. This Catholic priest devoted his long life chiefly to vigorous agitation for civil and religious freedom, but he found time 76 C. Home, New Chronological Abridgment of the History of Eng¬ land (London, 1791), pp. v-vii.

152

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

also to publish several compilations of an historical character. Of these, two in particular deserve our attention here—the History of the Lives of Abeillard and Heloisa (1784) in the second edition (1793), containing an introduction on the eleventh century, and the History of the Reign of Henry the Second, and of Richard and John, his Sons . . . (179°) • In the latter work Berington professed a desire to write di¬ rectly from contemporary chronicles,7' but he had so little conception of real scholarship as to apologize in his Abeillard and Heloisa for the paucity of his reading by saying that to have read more would have been confusing rather than enlightening.78

From the research standpoint his greatest

service is contained in his publication of materials on the history of Roman Catholicism in England.'9

His more pre¬

tentious books do, however, exhibit the ideas of an advanced Catholic on the Middle Ages. Berington was certainly no panegyrist of the medieval church.

He held it an undoubted evil for criminous clerks to

be outside the jurisdiction of the secular courts and censured, though not without qualification, Innocent III for worldli¬ ness and undue ambition.80

For the Albigensian Crusade,

he had little but bitter denunciation—worldly motives and religious intolerance combined to produce it, and its only heroes were the martyred Albigensians.81

But he sought to

prove that the Catholic centuries of English history, what¬ ever their faults, had been unfairly represented. 77 History of the Reign of Henry the Second...

“ Their

(Birmingham, 1790),

p. xviii.

78 History of Abeillard and Heloisa (2nd ed., London, 1793), vol. i, p. vi. 79 J. Berington, The Memoirs of G. Pansani... Translated from the Italian original... to which are added an introduction and supplement. (London, 1793.)

80 History of the Reign of Henry the Second, 81 Ibid.,

pp. 5I5-S27-

pp. 107, 594-595.

MEDIEVALISM AND PIETISM

153

ancestors,” he said of the proscribed Catholics of his own day, “ were the men who once brought glory and freedom to the land; their principles grew with its growing greatness, cementing the political fabric as it rose; and their church was, for ages, its essential and indissoluble partner.” 82 In presenting his defence of Becket, Berington applied a standard of judgment in relation to the age that was fre¬ quently recommended in the eighteenth century, but less often realized in practice.

In their judgment of Becket, he says,

the medieval chroniclers were blinded by their enthusiasm for a saint of the church, but modern historians on the other hand have been far too Erastian in their views.

They recognize

that the Crown had just prerogatives which might be de¬ fended honorably.

But they fail to see that the church also

had rights the defence of which need not be due to “ a spirit of pride and priestly domination.” 83

Becket may have im¬

bibed somewhat too strong ideas of church prerogative but if so he merely carried a little further than others notions that were as commonplace in his time as the rights of the state in ours.84 Unfortunately

Berington

did

not

stop

at

explaining

Becket’s acts in terms of the spirit of his age but went on to make resistance to the royal prerogative in the name of the church synonymous with resistance in the name of ab¬ stract freedom.

It is difficult to see that Becket had any

such position; an unchallenged church would have been just as dangerous to popular freedom as an absolute king.

Ber-

rington tried to make a popular hero out of Becket, declaring that he would have led the barons against John in 1215 and fought against

the

papal

aggressions of

Innocent

III.

Indeed, so much did he overrate Becket that he called him

82 Ibid., 83 Ibid., 84 Ibid.,

p. iv. p. 70. pp. 235-240.

154

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

the greatest man of the age in Church and State—“ firm, dauntless, composed and manly; like a deep and majestic river, he proceeds even in his course, hardly ruffled by rocks of opposition, and true to the level he had taken.” 8,1

His

faults were the faults of his age, his virtues those that have distinguished great men in all ages.

So extreme was this

prepossession for Becket and so strong the emphasis on the investiture struggle that Berington missed the real significance of Henry’s reign, the reform of administration, a mistake the less excusable since Lyttelton had noticed the importance of Henry’s reforms. On several occasions Berington expounded the desirability of a sympathetic consideration of the middle ages.

He ad¬

mitted those ages to be dark, but yet they saw progress and held lessons even for today, for “ the mind that divests it¬ self of modern habits and modern prejudices, and goes back with some good temper into the time I have described, will discover virtue that it may imitate, learning that it may ad¬ mire, maxims that it may copy.

The man is inequitable who,

possessing but one standard, measures by it all the characters and events of other days, and on their correspondence with it pronounces.” 86 The same point is made more clearly in the Introduction to the second edition of Abeillard and Heloisa.

This is in

effect an attempt to explain how the middle ages came into bad repute.

The men of the Renaissance, said Berington,

despised anyone who did not write classical Latin, while the sixteenth century reformers deepened the picture of medieval depravity in order to justify their extreme measures against the Church.

Yet in the worst moments of the middle ages

the sciences and arts were not extinguished, and from the eleventh century, at least, progress was manifest.

85 Ibid.,

p. 237.

86 Ibid.,

pp. 645-646.

Our diffi-

MEDIEVALISM AND PIETISM

155

culty is to catch the angle from which the men of past ages saw life.

In the eleventh century there was a group of rulers,

wise, able and good, such as no era has surpassed.

But the

same men were superstitious, and credulous even to the extent of miracle-mongering.

We can comprehend these two sides

only by seeing history in long perspective. Could we transport ourselves back to their times, and seize the association of ideas which had occupied their minds, we might discover how they saw and reasoned. It was the natural effects of circumstances, which then no superior sense or better organi¬ zation could have surmounted. Man is a part of the general system which time rolls on, and is subject to its laws. They were as wise as they could be; and if we are wiser, it is because a new order of things has risen to our view. The time will arrive when this age may be denominated dark; and who knows, but they may say, we were credulous? Our Ancestors, I doubt not, thought themselves as little under the influence of prejudice and idle fancy, as we deem ourselves; and to speak equitably, agreeably to the ideal suggested, can it be said, that they were deceived ? 87 In this passage may be found much of the historical approach.

It must not be supposed of course that Bering-

ton showed any real enthusiasm for the middle ages.

His

rather jejune appendix on manners, arts and learning in the time of Henry II praises architecture, but finds sculpture, painting, poetry and music contemptible.88

He dissents from

the degree of approval given medieval literature by “ the His¬ torian of our poetry,” that is, Warton, though he does praise Ossian and Icelandic poetry.89 his scorn.

Scholasticism arouses only

Yet there is always a saving sense of the relativ¬

ity of historical judgments, a consciousness that posterity 87 History of Abeillard and Heloisa, vol. i, pp. li-liii. 88 History of the Reign of Henry II, pp. 603-646. 89 Ibid., pp. 620-621.

156

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

might some day look back upon his own age from a superior height and smile at its shortcomings. A more important contribution to medieval studies was made by Samuel Pegge whose Life of Robert Grosseteste (1793) was the first serious attempt at a biography of this important figure. Pegge lacked the imagination and insight necessary for marked success at this task.

He compiled

available materials, but could not bring the past to life.

His

high approval of the career of Grosseteste would be more striking if the latter had been less outspoken in his opposition to certain papal actions, nor does Pegge ever speak as freely about the character and significance of the middle ages as some of those we have just mentioned.

But that such a book

should be written at this time is in itself a mark of change, while its scholarship was such as to constitute a step towards better knowledge of the middle ages.

It is perhaps not yet

fully superseded.90 A word will suffice for William Warrington’s History of Wales (1786) which sought to turn the discoveries of Evans, Mallet, Jones and others to the uses of history.

Warrington

was a great enthusiast for the Welsh people with “ their in¬ dependency of spirit, defining for ages the rights of nature and of liberty in the bosom of their native mountains.” 91 This connection with the Celtic revival is his chief claim to notice today. The emphasis on the “ New History ” movement was mainly upon the sociological study of history, details not being considered important in themselves but only as they contributed towards a larger synthesis out of which the laws of society might emerge.

Of those mentioned in Chapters

80 C. Gross, op. cit., gives five references to Pegge. Stevenson, Robert Grosseteste (London, 1899), p. viii.

See also F. S.

91 The History of Wales, in nine books: with an appendix

1786), p. v.

(London,

MEDIEVALISM AND PIETISM

i5 7

I and II this was least true of Robert Henry, but this dry, singular clergyman was nevertheless essentially a spirit of the Enlightenment, a worthy member of the Edinburgh Society whose brightest lights were Hume and Robertson. But in Joseph Strutt we see fully illustrated the new “ roman¬ ticist ” approach to what may be called social history, though a better name would perhaps be social antiquities.

His inter¬

est was never in the arrangement of detail toward philosoph¬ ical

conclusions.

He loved the past for

its own sake,

especially the picturesque details of everyday life, of kings and peasants—dress, manners, arms, games, sports, pastimes, regal costumes—all that gave history its glamour for Ro¬ manticists like Scott.

Strutt was convinced that the British,

Anglo-Saxon, and medieval periods, but especially the first two, had been slighted and that too much stress had been laid on politics and war, while “ too little care has been taken in the delineation of the manners and genius of the people.” 92 Originally an engraver, he became interested in the content as well as the illustrations of the manuscripts among which he worked and made his books valuable for the information thus obtained as well as for their remarkable illustrations.93 But he was not an historian in the full sense, for he lacked the desire, or at least the ability, to fuse his information into a connected narrative.

Nor did he possess a sense of de¬

velopment, although many have been called historians who were lacking in this respect. The Regal and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of England from Edward the Confessor to Henry the Eighth (1773) was the first of a series of similar works; to it a supplement of twelve plates with accompanying descriptions was added in 1792.

92 The Chronicle of England

(London, 1777-1778), vol. i, p. iii.

93 See Miller Christy, Joseph Strutt, Author, Artist, Engraver, and Antiquary, 1749-1802: A Biography (1912), in typescript in the British Museum.

! 5g

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

A Complete View of the Manners, Customs, Arms, Habits, etc. of the Inhabitants of England was carried from the Saxon invasion to the reign of Henry the Eighth in two volumes in 1774 and 1775 and was continued to date in a third in 1776.

The Chronicle of England (1777~I778)

treated only of the neglected pre-Norman era and included sketches of civil, military, and ecclesiastical events, as well as material on laws, architecture, agriculture, commerce, and

navigation,

metal-working,

coinage,

clothing,

learning, the polite arts, and manners in general.

arts,

A Com¬

plete View of the Dress and _ Habits of the People of England, from the Establishment of the Saxons in Britain to the Present Time (1796-1799) has been called the most valuable of Strutt’s works,94 but the Sports and Pastimes of the People of England

(1801)

was easily the most

popular and was reprinted as lately as 1903.

The former

began with an introduction of nearly a hundred pages on the dress of antiquity.

It was illustrated with more than

140 very fine colored plates, and contained, in addition to matter more directly suggested by the title, the status of clothiers, sumptuary laws regarding dress, a discussion of the attitude of the clergy, and similar topics.95

To the study of

sports and pastimes, Strutt then turned, he says, because the character of a people is better displayed in their amusements than in war or policy.

He was also author of an unfinished

Dictionary of Engravers (1785) and of an unfinished his¬ torical novel, Queenhoo Hall, which was completed by Scott. Strutt, as has been well said by one of his editors, “ was a pioneer in almost every branch of English medieval archae¬ ology, and as such is entitled to the respect of every anti94 Miller Christy in D. N. B., art. “Joseph Strutt.” 95 Complete Viczv of the Dress and Habits of the English People (London, 1796-99), vol. ii, pt. v, ch. i-iii.

MEDIEVALISM AND PIETISM

quary.” 96

159

He was in some ways a successor to the social

historians of the Enlightenment, but he centered his attention on the picturesque sides of history and on the middle ages. He was a lover of the past rather than a student of historical development. The new piety, apparent to some extent in John Whitaker, found its chief historical expression at this time in the re¬ writing of Church history from an Evangelical standpoint by the Reverend Joseph Milner and his brother Isaac (History of the Church of Christ, 1794-1809).

The first three vol¬

umes of the original edition carried the narrative to about the year 1200 and were published between 1794 and 1797. The enterprise was then continued to the Diet of Augsburg in two further volumes by Isaac Milner, who later reedited the whole work.

It received some attention during the

high-church controversies of the nineteenth century and a new edition appeared in 1847.

The idea of the project

belonged to Joseph rather than to the younger brother.

The

former felt that historians, by the attention they devoted to wickedness and the purely secular,

institutional side of

Christianity, had given a false picture of Church history. He sought to stimulate piety and to fight scepticism by showing that in every age there have been real followers of Christ.

He would write a history of good Christians

whatever the external allegiance they professed.

He criti¬

cised 97 “ the intemperate censures of writers, who seem to think an indiscriminate aversion to the Church of Rome to be one of the principal excellencies of a protestant his¬ torian ” and declared,98 “ I mean to extol the Church of 96 Sports and Pastimes (new edition by Charles Cox, London, 1903), p. vi. 97 History of the Church of Christ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1835), vol. i, p. S26. 98 Ibid., vol. i, p. 526, note; cf. vol. i, pp. 4, 9 et seq.

:5o

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

Christ, wherever I can find her; nor should a Roman dress, when she appears in it, convey any prejudice to my mind.” The History of the Church of Christ was thus a work of piety and polemic rather than of scholarship.

The Milners

digested the main contemporary printed sources and modern accounts, but made no pretence at research, at style, or at his¬ torical criticism.

“ I fairly warn the Reader not to expect

from me,” said Joseph in beginning the enterprise," “ any indulgence in the modern taste of Scepticism.

I shall not

affect to doubt the credibility of ancient respectable histor¬ ians.”

The scrappy chapters into which each “ century ” was

divided were vehicles for preaching religion rather than con¬ veying information, nor do they show any signs of special aptitude for historical writing.

But the success of such a

book was certainly a sign of changing taste.100 No one who examines a large number of the historians between 1760 and 1800, instead of confining himself to the customary three, can fail to be impressed by the multiplying evidences of a new outlook.

There were important differ¬

ences between Hume, Robertson and Gibbon and below their level an even more clearcut tradition of dissent.

Nor can

there be any doubt that the chief stimulus which produced change in historical writing at this time was the “ Romantic Revival ” in literature.

This change had gone far by 1800

and the works published after that date deserve treatment in a separate place.

The influence of the Rationalists was still

felt after 1800 and even beyond the limits of this essay.

But

it was no longer dominant as had formerly been the case. 99 Ibid., vol. i, p. 5. 100 S. R. Maitland pounced upon the brothers Milner as upon Robert¬ son and Henry.

See his Dark Ages, p. 343 et seq., and his two pamphlets,

published at London in 1835, A Letter to the Rev. Hugh James Rose with Strictures on Milner’s Church History and A Second Letter to the Rev. Hugh James Rose ... containing Notes on Milner’s History of the Church in the Fourth Century.

CHAPTER VI The Rise of Nationalist History In

the nineteenth century party history tended to merge

with nationalist history.

As the former expresses in terms

of a picture of the past the doctrines and passions of political parties, so the latter expresses the doctrines and passions of nationalism.

It has also been reflected in the choice of sub¬

jects, periods of national origin and national glory, and was partly responsible for the extent to which the middle ages, the era in which the national state took shape, were written about in the last hundred years. Even in the eighteenth century, if not earlier, Englishmen showed distinct national consciousness in their attitude to¬ ward history.

They tended to be less cosmopolitan in their

choice of subject than were their contemporaries on the Con¬ tinent where the national tradition was less old and where there was no such satisfaction with existing arrangements in Church and State as in Hanoverian Britain.1

Moreover,

Hume had a Scottish antipathy for the English, while even Gibbon, if he did not really glory in the name of Briton, was “ in his own way ... a proud Englishman, a patriot, with a proper conceit of his country.” 2

It is interesting to note

also that Bolingbroke, high priest of the cosmopolitan En¬ lightenment, was a “ Philosopher turned Patriot.” 3

He be-

1 The contrast between Voltaire and Hume in this respect is pointed out by Fueter, op. cit., p. 367.

Robertson and Gibbon were less insular

than Hume, but taking eighteenth-century histories as a whole, English writers were not very cosmopolitan in outlook. 2 O. Elton, Survey of English Literature, 1730-1780, vol. ii, p. 287.

3

C. J. H. Hayes, “ The Philosopher turned Patriot ” in Essays in In161

j62

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

lieved that God has planted in human beings the impulses to constitute distinct nationalities.

The forms of government

should vary according to the spirit of the nationality con¬ cerned, while governments once constituted should devote themselves to national rather than class or dynastic interests. Especially should they have a regard for peace and a respect for the rights of other nationalities.

From this theory Bol-

ingbroke went on to characterize the national genius of the British and to extol their history. Yet it is obvious that there is a profound difference between the ideas and emotions of an eighteenth-century na¬ tionalist like Bolingbroke and those of a nineteenth-century figure such as Froude.

From the former we have a few

scattered ideas and a thin line of patriotic sentiments, ex¬ pressed with vigor but seeming incidental to Bolingbroke’s main mode of thinking, perhaps more a weapon of political controversy than anything else. is very different.

But the case of a Froude

Nationalism suffused the whole cast of his

mind, it was part of the essence of his thinking, almost the fons et origo from which his interpretations of history, his religious adherence, his whole intellectual life took their rise. In the century between these two, consciousness of nationality as a political factor and the expression of patriotic sentiment in historical writing became much more important. Of this development there were many signs in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The interest in race and na¬

tional origins already touched upon was one of these. Another was the adulation of the British Constitution by influential foreigners like Rapin Thoyras,4 Montesquieu,5 tellectual History Dedicated to James Harvey Robinson (New York, 1929), PP- 189-206; The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York, 1931), pp. 17-22. 4 Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, L’Histoire d:Angleterre (1724). 5 Montesquieu, L’Esprit des Lois (1748), bk. xi.

NATIONALIST HISTORY

and De Lolme.6

163

Still a third was the effect upon English

opinion of the cession of Corsica to France without refer¬ ence to Corsican wishes and of the partitions of Poland.7 The Corsican incident, says a recent investigator,8 “ seems to have shocked the public opinion of Europe, a fact in itself significant of a changing attitude,” while the importance of the partitions of Poland in the growth of nationalist theory was long since stressed, perhaps even unduly stressed, by Lord Acton.9 A new phase of English nationalism opened with the French Revolution.

Burke resented the appeal of its auth¬

ors and sympathisers to English history.

He contrasted the

slow, orderly growth of English liberty with the disorderly excesses across the Channel.

Neither in the practice nor in

the prevalent opinions of Englishmen could such deeds orig¬ inate.

The Revolution of 1688 had been conducted in the

most peaceful manner.

English progress to freedom had

been carried out “ under the auspices and is confirmed by the sanctions of religion and piety.

The whole has emanated

from the simplicity of our national character and from a sort of native plainness and directness of understanding ” in the English people and their leaders.10 Burke eulogized the British constitution and social system wherein all classes had place and interests guaranteed by respect for law and custom.

English liberty was more

certain than elsewhere in Europe because its roots went far 6 J. de Lolme, The Constitution of England (1775). 7 Burke was the best expression of this public opinion.

See Cobban,

op. cit., pp. 97-132, and Hayes, Historical Evolution of Modern National¬ ism, pp. 88-95. 8 Alfred Cobban, op. cit., p. 108. 9 Lord Acton, The History of Freedom and other Essays (London, 1907), p. 275 et seq. 10 Reflections on the French Revolution (Everyman edition, London, 1910), p. 87.

! 64

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

back into the past.

The English people lived in a security

dignified by consciousness of high descent.

“ Always acting

as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. ... By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. jestic aspect.

It carries an imposing and ma¬

It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors.” 11

This teaching of Burke marked a new emphasis on national differences in government and history.

It helped

change the rather smug attitude of Englishmen towards their established institutions into something approximating the modern spirit of jingoism.

When the war with France

broke out it gradually took on a character different from that of the dynastic struggles preceding the Revolution.

Even

before 1800 it bore some resemblance to the nationalist crus¬ ades of our own times.

Such teaching also would naturally

lead to doctrines similar to those with which intellectuals have so often rallied the people behind imperialistic adventurers, if they have not actually inspired those adventurers to under¬ take their mission of carrying civilization to the various “ lesser breeds without the law.” The new nationalism found an early expression in the fourth volume of a History of the Reign of George III, published between 1783 and 1796.

This volume, though not

the whole work, was written by Robert Macfarlane and cov¬ ered the years 1790-1796.

Macfarlane finds France the

aggressor in her war with Great Britain.12

He holds the

project of universal peace visionary and believes that “ a modern Amphictyonic council would prove as ineffectual as the ancient.” 13

His argument that the British Empire in

11 Ibid,., p. 32. 12History of the Reign of George III (London, 1783-1796), vol. iv, P- 376. 13 Ibid., vol. iv, p. 7.

NATIONALIST HISTORY

165

India ought to be extended is an interesting anticipation of modern imperialistic notions.

India, he says, abounds in

military adventurers ready for such an enterprise.

The

concjuest of Bengal has already brought wealth to Britain and prosperity to Bengal. \\ hy then should Britons reject the boon with which Providence tempts them ? Like Alexander and the Romans, ought they not to proceed in their progress of communicating civilization and felicity, toleration and a mild government to their brothers of the human race, who now groan under the pressure of despotism and superstition? Nations can never remain long stationary; and their motion, if not progressive, must be retrograde. Ac¬ tivity prevails through all nature; the principles of attraction and repulsion keep the minutest as well as the largest portions of the universal system in perpetual circulation. Why then should empires be at a stand? Will they not in such a state, like stagnant water, corrupt and putrify? All large communi¬ ties abound with restless and enterprising spirits, who, if not employed abroad, will be apt to engender mischief at home. Hence arise civil wars, the worst of evils.14 The army, he goes on to say, is indispensable yet needs action to preserve its discipline and spirit.

For this reason

China acted wisely in recently extending her border to the mouths of the Oxus.

Augustus, on the other hand, by his

withdrawal of the legions to the Rhine, contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire.

The British Empire

must expand to avoid decay.15 Here, then, in 1796 is the doctrine of the White Man’s Burden and the “ scientific ” argument for imperialism. Macfarlane is also interesting as the author of An Address

14 Ibid.,

vol. iv, p. 113.

15 Macfarlane sometimes presented other interesting viewpoints such as his argument against the theory that Christianity was responsible for the superior civilization of Europe.

Ibid., vol. iv, pp. 4-6.

156

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

to the People, a pamphlet published in 1797.

It is an appeal

to the English nation against defeatism at a time when the French were victorious and an invasion of England seemed likely.

He called upon every individual to come forward in

support of the national cause either on the field of battle or, if age did not permit this, in the realm of opinion.

The

French were “ a nation of hairdressers, cooks and taylors [sic] and devourers of meagre soup ” 16—also, however, “ a horde of ferocious banditti ” 17—who would prove “ impo¬ tent against the brawny arms of well-fed Britons.” 18

Eng¬

land must take vigorous action on the Continent and ought to stir up the Spanish colonies to rebellion.

This would

not only secure their independence, but incidentally “ a pref¬ erence if not a monopoly ” for British trade.19 One further example may be given in Herbert Marsh's polemic tract over the origins of the war between England and France.

Marsh was an English divine who had studied

at Leipzig and who by his translation of J. D. Michaelis’ Introduction to the New Testament (1793-1801) helped to introduce German scientific method into English biblical criticism.

In 1799 he published at Leipzig, in German, a

book to show by an analysis of the history of the eighteen months between Pillnitz (August, 1791) and the outbreak of hostilities in February, 1793, that the French were the ag¬ gressors in the war with Britain.

This was translated into

English and published in 1800.20

Citing the Moniteur and

16 “An Address to the People” in Appendix, Or the Criticks Criticised (London, 1797), p. 11.

17 Ibid., 18 Ibid,, 19 Ibid., 20

p. 16. p. 9. p. 16.

The History of the Politicks of Great Britain and France, from the

time of the Conference at Pillnitz, to the declaration of war against Great Britain (London, 1800).

NATIONALIST HISTORY

167

the speeches and correspondence of leading French statesmen, Marsh sought to convict the national enemy out of their own mouths.

He pointed to the fact that the British had not

joined in the grouping of Powers against France in 1791, had indeed acted with the greatest friendliness towards the French, for example in giving aid against the negro upris¬ ing in Santo Domingo.

The French, on the other hand, had

always been hostile to Great Britain, though afraid to reveal their true spirit until the victories of late 1792.

They had

been fully armed at sea at least three months before Britain made a move, while their preparation for an invasion of Holland was equivalent to hostile action against England because of the close connections between the two countries. Altogether apart from such episodes, he argued, it was clear that war must come since the French leaders were determined to make their revolution international and to overthrow all kings. Possibly Marsh did not make sufficient allowance for cir¬ cumstances in deciding what weight should be given to a particular piece of evidence, by distinguishing between private letters and public speeches for instance.

He quotes heated

utterances of French leaders calling for war, without con¬ sidering the domestic political situation that may have played a part in eliciting them.

But on the whole, his book is well-

documented, clear-cut, and written with pleasing vigor.

It

wrould be entitled to a place in the historiography of the time on these grounds of merit alone.

But it is mentioned rather

to bring out the fact that there was in the War-Guilt Ques¬ tion of that day as of this an appeal to the aroused public opinion of the nations in arms. After 1800 nationalist feeling and its expression in his¬ toriography

increased

rapidly.

The

publication

of

Sir

Robert Wilson’s History of the British Expedition to Egypt in 1802 spread anti-French sentiment by spreading the story

! 58

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

that Napoleon had poisoned the sick at Jaffa.21

When it was

seen that Amiens had marked only a truce with the enemy the war took on a more serious aspect.

England was felt

to be engaged in a life and death struggle. for the first time became really general.

War sentiment

A few years later,

the Peninsular War was distinctly popular, the Convention of Cintra being greeted by an outburst of nationalist wrath. Wordsworth wrote a pamphlet in which he declared that nationalist uprisings were necessary to defeat Napoleon, and should be stimulated by the Allies, and attempted “ to define the moral basis of nationalism, to show that nationality has a mystical justification that makes it the true outward mark of the general will of society.” 22

Indeed it has been declared

that in this pamphlet “ patriotism was brought back—to the sentient, the animal, the vital, where it has remained ever since.” 23 Thus as England saw with dismay the ascending star of Napoleon, nationalism was both deepened and diffused more widely.24

For the first time it began to rival party feeling

as a force in the writing of history.

One of the earliest

examples of a rather fully developed nationalist historian, the more suggestive because linked with Burke’s propaganda, is Robert Bisset.

Bisset was a Scottish teacher who moved

21 Hewson Clarke, An Impartial History of the Naval, Military and Political Events in Europe from the Commencement of the French Revo¬ lution (Bungay, Suffolk, 1815), vol. i, p. 554. 22 Crane Brinton, Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (Oxford, 1926), p. 56.

23 Ibid.,

p. 229.

24 A very interesting example of transformation from an eighteenthcentury cosmopolitan pacificism to a nineteenth-century nationalism may be found in letters written by Henry (later Lord)

Langdale between

1801 and 1805, printed in T. D. Hardy, Memoirs of the Right Honour¬ able Henry Lord Langdale (London, 1852), vol. i, pp. 64, 69-70, 74, 173, 184, 192-194, 195-196, 221, 226-227.

169

NATIONALIST HISTORY

to London and there long conducted a school in Sloane Square.

He added to his income and expounded his views

by means of several works of history and biography.25

None

of these was important from the standpoint of research, but they are admirable reflectors of changing historical attitudes. The Sketch of Democracy (1796) professed to refute the argument for democracy by an appeal to the facts of experi¬ ence and history.

It is a polemic against the critics of the

British Constitution, apparently inspired largely by the agi¬ tation of Burke’s later days, and nothing could be less his¬ torical.

Bisset begins by praising the inductive method as

the one sure road to truth, but in a moment of forgetfulness states that he had adopted his anti-democratic philosophy on the authority of “ a gentleman of great eminence ” and that “ principles first adopted on so respectable authority, subse¬ quent experience and reasoning confirmed.” 26

He would

give “ a just view of the badness of democracy and the good¬ ness of the British constitution.” 27

He outlined the horrible

effects of democracy in antiquity, gave a few pages in sum¬ mary of its effect in England in the few cases (such as Jack Cade’s rebellion) in which he supposed it had appeared there, and concluded with a eulogy of the British Constitution. There is a natural connection, he maintained, between democ¬ racy and irreligion, since “ those who will submit to no human authority, however salutary, come by no very difficult transi¬ tion to disavow divine,” 28 while as a form of government democracy is characterized by nearly all the political vices,— turbulence, incompetence, aggression, cruelty to the con25 James Mill said that Bisset made six or seven hundred pounds a year by his writing although he had no genius and little knowledge. Bain, James Mill (London, 1882), p. 37, note. 26Sketch of Democracy (London, 1796), p. iii.

27 Ibid., 28 Ibid.,

loc. cit. p. 96.

A.

iy0

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

quered, ingratitude.

It cherishes the vicious and attacks the

virtuous, perverts the able and corrupts the patriotic.

The

sum of history’s teaching, then, is that mixed government is best and “ that the happiest of all lands is

The Land We

Live In.” 29

The same lesson is given by Bisset in his Life of Edmund Burke (1798) and in his very poor novel, Douglas, or the Highlander (1800), which was ostensibly a picture of the society of the day especially in the Scottish Highlands.

It

was a crude satire, full of bitter, uncharitable propaganda against reformers and supposed revolutionaries. In 1796 the Revolution constituted a threat to the estab¬ lished order and aroused Bisset’s fear of “ democracy,” but soon France was under Napoleon and constituted a menace to the greatness, if not the national independence, of Britain. Bisset in his History of George III, published in 1803, took up the nationalist cause with ardor equal to, if not greater than, his zeal against democracy.30 aims.

He frankly avowed his

In preparing his life of Burke, he said, he had care¬

fully studied recent events, “ and with proud pleasure I con¬ templated the efforts of my country, displaying in arduous struggles the exhaustless abundance of British resources, and the invincible force of the British character; still more strik¬ ingly manifested in the times in which I live, than even those which had immediately or shortly preceded.” 31

Inspired by

this and encouraged by the success of his previous works, he had undertaken to narrate the events of the reign of George III, prefacing them with an introductory survey of British history to 1760. 29 Ibid., pp. xxiv-xxv; cf. p. 352. 30 The History of the Reign of George III to the termination of the late war.

To which is prefixed, A viezv of the progressive improvement of

England, in prosperity and strength, to the accession of his Majesty (London, 1803). 31 Ibid., vol. i, pp. iv-v.

NATIONALIST HISTORY

171

Both in the Introduction and History, it has been my endeavor to place in a just and striking light the force of the British char¬ acter, formed and invigorated by the British Constitution; and to demonstrate that Britain either in peace or in war, prospers and conquers, because she excels in wisdom and virtue. This is the moral lesson which my narrative attempts to inculcate; and if I do not succeed the deficiency is in myself, and not in my subject. It is possible that my narrative may be charged with national partiality; I confess I love my country, and hate her enemies; and if this be a crime, I must plead guilty. I trust, however, that notwithstanding my warm affection for Britain, and my admiration of her stupendous efforts, I shall be found, even in reciting the contests with her foes, to have rigidly ad¬ hered to historical truth, and done justice to the exertions of her enemies; who, in disciplined valour, genius, and power, far sur¬ passed any foes that were ever opposed to the heroes of ancient Greece or Rome.32 Bisset’s History was composed at a moment when France was yet unbeaten and when defeatist sentiment was strong in England. It is therefore largely a tract for the times seeking to justify Britain’s cause and to arouse British exer¬ tions to the point necessary to combat Napoleon. Bisset sought to show, in the first place, that England had never been an aggressor in the wars she fought,33 that she could not fail to win since she was unbeatable at sea,34 and that in any case it was economic folly for any nation to fight Great Britain since her commerce benefited everybody. History showed that she had never lost even a battle except against over¬ whelming odds, and seldom then.35 Even the war of the American Revolution, superficially a defeat, had not impaired 32 Ibid., vol. i, pp. vi-vii. 33 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 151, 174; vol. iii, pp. 33-34, 115, 250; vol. iv, pp. 130131; vol. v, pp. 321, 340; vol. vi, p. 179. 34 Ibid., vol. vi, pp. 179, 392-39335 Ibid., vol. vi, p. 63, note.

172

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

her power, while it had so weakened her European enemies that revolution came and destroyed them.36 poleon failed to invade England in 1798?

Why had Na¬ “ Bonaparte was

aware that Britain contained more formidable opponents than he had ever encountered; the defiles and precipices of the Alps and Apennines, guarded by myriads of Austrians fight¬ ing for their masters, could be surmounted; but the plains of Sussex and of Kent, containing hands and hearts of free¬ born Englishmen fighting for themselves, would, he well knew, be impassable.” 37

England herself afforded no ex¬

ample of a greater naval exploit than the battle of the Nile. “ Were Homer to rise from the dead, he would find a subject worthy of his muse in the British sailors and the British offi¬ cers, headed by the British Nelson.” 38

Even without allies,

Britain could defeat Napoleon, indeed frequently she had been more successful when fighting alone than when ham¬ pered by half-hearted or incompetent aid.39 Thus did Bisset whistle to keep up the courage of his people.

The last part of his History is especially permeated

with this doctrine of the invincibility of British arms, and lest anyone should misunderstand its application to the con¬ temporary situation, the lesson is made doubly clear in the final sentences of the book, culminating in a sputter of capitals.40 . . . if she could have been subdued by any human effort, in the late arduous contest she must have fallen: the stupendous exer¬ tions that were employed in vain demonstrate her invincible. HERE

RESTS

36 Ibid., 37 Ibid., 38 Ibid., 38 Ibid., 40 Ibid.,

OUR

SECURITY,

IN

THE

vol. ii, pp. 142-144; vol. iii, p. 403. vol. vi, p. 217. vol. vi, pp. 225-226. vol. iii, pp. 13, 61; vol. vi, p. 126. vol. vi, p. 442.

MANIFESTATION

OF

RE-

NATIONALIST HISTORY

173

SOURCES NOT TO BE EXHAUSTED, A SPIRIT NOT TO BE BROKEN, AND A FORCE NOT TO BE SUBDUED: OUR SECURITY IS INVULNER¬ ABLE WHILE WE CONTINUE WHAT WE HAVE BEEN, AND ARE TRUE TO OURSELVES.

So generalized a nationalist zeal, combined with the appli¬ cation of history to a specific national crisis, gives Bisset a place in reflecting trends of historical attitude far beyond his merits as a scholar or writer.

He was perhaps the first

thorough-going nationalist historian.

Not only did he show

a superheated patriotism, but he frequently employed the characteristic notion of national character to explain history. Of course this idea he derived from the eighteenth century, but he uses it with a frequency and purpose more common in the next century.

By it he showed that the British are

adapted for liberty, the negro for slavery, and the Irish for ferocious outbursts, like their seventeenth-century rebellion.41 But more particularly he was interested in the national char¬ acter of the French. The French character, Bisset said, was distinguished by courage, activity, ingenuity, levity, love of pleasure and in¬ stability.

For a long time the French people supported ab¬

solutism and the Roman Catholic religion with extreme loy¬ alty.

But when these showed signs of decay and were

subject to biting criticism, the unstable French went to the other extreme.

It became fashionable to attack the church

and Christianity.

“ Gallic ingenuity could easily find argu¬

ments to expose the frivolity and folly of many of their priestly doctrines, rites, observances; but as ardent as versa¬ tile, leaving their superstitions, they took the opposite and much more dangerous extreme.” 42

The government did not

take proper steps to check the spirit of free inquiry which 41 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 451, 485; vol. v, pp. 6-8. 42 Ibid., vol. v, p. 10.

X^4

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

turned from religion to politics and, the French being more competent to frame abstract hypotheses than to reason from ascertained facts to sound conclusions, political speculation led to the worst excesses of the Revolution.

The French

character had not changed in centuries, but had merely varied the objects of its unstable attachment.

In the sixteenth cen¬

tury, the French devoted themselves to raising the priests of a superstitious religion, in the seventeenth they turned their ardent devotion to the growing absolutism and thence to “ en¬ larging the sway of atheists and levellers ” in the eighteenth century.43 It must not be supposed that Bisset was indifferent to other phases of history than national character.

He saw behind

the French Revolution not only the unstable French people lending a willing ear to irreligious and anti-monarchical doc¬ trine, but also the fundamental fact of abuses of government needing correction they did not receive and of mistakes in foreign policy.44

But his emphasis falls generally on points

such as no writer in the calm years before 1789 would have been likely to stress, but such as were commonly stressed in the next century.

He was indeed a kind of distorted and

dwarfed image of Burke, sharing Burke’s prejudices without his genius, waging the same warfare against social revolu¬ tion, indulging in the same idealization of the British Con¬ stitution, assailing the French Revolution in as vigorous terms.

The parallel between these so different men is closer

yet, for Bisset’s views on the American Revolution were al¬ most a paraphrase of Burke.

It may be noted, however, that

while Bisset always regarded the American war as unneces¬ sary and unfortunate, he changed his tone somewhat when the French and Spaniards were added to the enemies of Great Britain.

Then, he argued, all parties ought to have rallied

43 Ibid., vol. v, p. 271. 44 Ibid., vol. v, pp. 9-15.

NATIONALIST HISTORY

175

around the national colors in defence of their country, calling those who did so “ impartial patriots.” 45

Like Burke, also,

Bisset came to have a panic fear of the reformers of his own day.

He excoriated Paine and Priestley, attributing the re¬

form movement chiefly to the vanity of those who sought distinction by leadership in revolutionary societies. political reforms he lumped religious innovation.

With

Contempt¬

uous of the excesses of the Puritans, the Quakers and Metho¬ dists were to him only “ mischievous agitators of religious change,” Whitefield and Wesley “ mere adventurers.” 46 As the Napoleonic Wars went on there appeared a number of ephemeral books of the “ family history ” type in which the new nationalist spirit was spread abroad.

Of these we may

mention Hewson Clarke’s Impartial History (1815) of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period.

Clarke was an intelli¬

gent writer, rather inclined towards liberal views.

Yet his

nationalism was distinctly more evident than his liberalism. His main concern was with great exploits on sea and land, the biographies of national heroes and of national foes.

It

will be remembered that the frontispiece of Mrs. Macaulay’s History had shown the author of that work as the Muse of History and the patron of liberty.

But times had

changed and in Clarke’s frontispiece there appeared “ Brit¬ annia protecting Europe from the horrors of War and Slavery and triumphing over Discord.”

The British lion

is shown roaring defiance by Britannia’s side, while in the background are seen a burning building, a broken gun, ships of war, and the Union Jack flying amid the glare of flames and the haze of smoke. expressed

abhorrence

of

the

Like Burke, Clarke

partition

of

Poland

(the

second in this case) as a sacrifice of a nation’s happiness to dynastic ambitions; and like Marsh, Bisset, and others 45 Ibid., vol. iii, pp. 87-88, 138, 143. 46 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 261-262; vol. v, p. 11, note.

176

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

he was anxious to show the expedience and justice of British participation in the First Coalition against France. But he came too early in the career of nationalistic historio¬ graphy to suppress his admiration for the heroism of the French armies against the invaders, nor would he accept the “ atrocity ” story according to which Napoleon was said to have poisoned the sick at Jaffa, reasoning judiciously that the story was improbable and certainly not proven.

He showed

a due nationalistic zeal about the Spanish uprisings against the French and the Peninsular War, a “ sacred cause ... so congenial to the feelings of a Briton,” 47 while he was equally incensed at the Convention of Cintra, “ one of the most injurious and dishonorable conventions that had disgraced the annals of English history.” 48 Clarke was also author of a continuation of Hume.49

The

work itself needs no comment, but one wonders whether Hume would have welcomed his association with a work in which the frontispiece shows: “ Britannia, holding the Tri¬ dent of Neptune, surmounted by the Cap of Liberty, and crowned by Victory, tramples on the chains of despotism. She holds Magna Charta in her left hand, Fame points to her principal battles inscribed on her shield, supported by the Genius of Commerce.

The emblems of War and of the

Arts, occupy the Foreground.”

There is something here

that Hume would have recognized and approved, but he would certainly have found the colors of the picture a little gaudy and the spirit somewhat repelling. Britannia was also enshrined in the Grand National His47 Op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 10-19. 48 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 26. 49 The History of England from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the revolution in 1688. In tzvo volumes by David Hume, esq. and a further continuation to the reign of William IV, in two volumes, by Hewson Clarke, esq. (London, 1832).

NATIONALIST HISTORY

177

tory of England by the Reverend John Malham, a work per¬ meated with patriotic ardor, glorifying national worthies and scenes of national triumph like Trafalgar;50 while national¬ ism was also apparent in Samuel Dales’ Essay on the Study of the History of England (1809), in George Moore’s His¬ tory of the British Revolution of 1688-p (1817) and other works of a very “ popular ” character. On a somewhat higher plane the new spirit of nationalism, combined with the older political partisanship, was clearly shown in Robert Southey, especially in two works of which mention will be made in this chapter.51

The Life of Nelson

(1813) was rather biography than history.

It grew out of

an article in the Quarterly Review and was intended as a mid¬ shipman’s manual.

Though the subject was not of his

choice, Southey was well pleased with his execution of the task, and countless schoolboys down to the present day would be willing to confirm him in his satisfaction.

The clarity and

vigor of his book made it an ideal biography for its purpose. Southey was not afraid to show the blots on his hero’s career, declaring that the best eulogy of Nelson was a faith¬ ful account of his deeds.

His condemnation of the breach

of treaty with the Neapolitan revolutionists is as downright as anyone could wish :52 A deplorable transaction!

A stain upon the memory of

50 It is symptomatic of the new era to find Malham referring to the writing of English history as “ a great national work... a task of extra¬ ordinary importance, in which every Briton is interested from the sover¬ eign to the meanest peasant.”

The Grand National History of England

(2nd ed., London, 1816), p. iii. 51 On Southey’s nationalism see also Haller, The Early Life of Robert Southey (New York, 1917), p. 176 (on Southey in Portugal) and es¬ pecially the analysis of the poem Joan of Arc, in which Professor Haller shows that Southey makes Joan a saint of nationalism. Ibid., pp. 96-112. On Southey’s other works, see infra, pp. 234-244.

52 Life

of Nelson (1813), vol. ii, p. 46.

178

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

Nelson, and the honour of England! To palliate it would be in vain; to justify it would be wicked; there is no alternative, for one who will not make himself a participator in guilt, but to record the disgraceful story with sorrow and with shame. Upon Nelson’s conduct in executing Caraccioli after what seemed in the light of the evidence at Southey’s disposal a hasty and unfair trial, he also pronounces “ a severe and un¬ qualified condemnation,” 53 nor can he refrain from censuring Nelson’s passion for Lady Hamilton.

One comment shows

him quite as averse to the mystical interpretation of patriot¬ ism as he was to its counterpart, “ enthusiasm ” in religion. Nelson had told a story of how when dejected on realizing that lack of patronage would probably hinder his rise, “ a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me, and pre¬ sented my king and my country as my patron,” an experience which urged him on to great achievements. pared this to mystical conversion in religion.

Southey com¬ The true cause,

he said, was a depressed mind and an enfeebled body.54 In spite of such deplorable scepticism, the Life of Nelson exhibited both nationalist passion, in its hatred of the French and glorification of British deeds, and nationalist doctrine. We find Southey censuring the sale of Corsica on the ground that no purchase can justify one country in taking possession of another against the will of the inhabitants.

He declared

the statesmen and monarch responsible for this act infinitely more guilty than the “ foulest murderer.” 55

He sided with

the Corsicans as he favored the Spaniards and Portugese because they represented the outraged rights of nationality.56

53 Ibid., 64 Ibid., 55 Ibid.,

vol. ii, p. 51. vol. i, pp. 24-25. vol. i, p. 103.

50 Following the Nelson, Southey was asked to contribute to Lardner’s Cabinet Encyclopaedia a series of popular lives of British admirals since the reign of Elizabeth with a preface on naval history prior to that date.

179

NATIONALIST HISTORY

In the preface to his History of the Peninsular War (18231832), Southey declared that “since the publication of Strada’s Decades, no history composed by one who was not an actor in it, has appeared with higher claims to author¬ ity ” ; 57 and in one of his letters he pronounced the work sure of winning a place in Britain, Portugal and Spain.58 characteristic

self-confidence

was

sadly

misplaced.

This The

History of the Peninsular War was a pot-boiler, parts of which were taken over bodily from contributions to Ballantyne’s Edinburgh Annual Register.™ The History shows clearly three of the major characteris¬ tics in Southey, political partisanship, moral and religious interests, and nationalist zeal.

The first chapter, an “ Intro¬

ductory View of the States of Spain, Portugal, France and England,” and subsequent summaries of the English parlia¬ mentary debates, gave opportunity for frequent sorties in the Tory cause.

“ My History of the War smites the Whigs,

and will draw as much hatred from the Buonapartists in France, as I have the satisfaction of enjoying from their friends in England.” 60

The war proved the wickedness of

the Whigs, the danger of attempting to put “ crude ” theories of government into practice, and the particular undesirabilHe carried the enterprise through Sir Walter Raleigh in four volumes which, with a fifth added after his death by Robert Bell, were widely read. 57 History of the Peninsular War (London, 1823-1832), vol. i, p. vi. 58 C. C. Southey, Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey (Lon¬ don, 1849-50), vol. v, p. 182. 59 Southey said of the second volume: “ A large portion of the volume will be transferred from the ‘ Edinburgh Annual Register ’ without much alteration ”

(Warter, Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey,

London, 1856, vol. iii, pp. 326-7), and L.

Pfandl

(“Robert Southey

und Spanien” in Revue Hispanique, Tome xxviii, Paris, 1913, pp. 86-87) gives examples of direct borrowing. 60 Life and Correspondence, vol. v, p. 112.

jgo

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

ity of foisting representative institutions upon peoples un¬ prepared for them. From the struggle of the Peninsula Southey drew certain moral and religious lessons.

Indeed he made a special point

of calling attention to the moral spirit pervading his work. In his case, as in that of his friend Turner, religion and mor¬ ality played a larger part in his later than in his earlier works. He solemnly asserted that the Napoleonic usurpation in the Peninsula was divine retribution for Portugese and Span¬ ish atrocities in the Netherlands, India and the New World, and for the Inquisition.

These crimes brought inevitable

degradation upon the two peoples who perpetrated them. Only a great moral and political earthquake could bring pur¬ gation.

He was illustrating the ways of Providence in writ¬

ing the history of this war.61 But stronger than party or religious spirit was the nation¬ alist zeal in Southey’s book.

He saw the war as a crusade.62

It showed “ that national independence depends upon national spirit, but that even that spirit in its highest and heroic degree may fail if wisdom to direct it be wanting.” 63

By this

Southey meant that the Spaniards needed British leadership. He extolled the motives of British intervention and retailed war myths without question.

The French appear as mon¬

sters of iniquity, while on the allied side “ not an outrage, not an excess, not an insult was committed.” 64

British lead¬

ership allowed expression to the best features of the Spanish, and Portugese character—bravery and national spirit—but restrained the natural cruelty of these peoples. Before Southey’s last volume was on the market and at the 61 History of the Peninsular War, vol. ii, pp. 24-25. 62 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 1-2.

63 Ibid.,

vol. iii, p. 927.

64 Ibid., vol. iii, p. 925. But elsewhere (vol. ii, p. 699) he does give one lone instance of mistreatment of prisoners by the Spaniards.

181

NATIONALIST HISTORY

very end of our period there began to appear a history of the Peninsular War besides which his own shrinks into insig¬ nificance.

Napier 65 was superior in intellect, in style, and

in knowledge of the subject.

He wrote from a fullness of

experience in the war, with ample leisure at his command, and with access to the best sources of information.

He was able

to consult the papers on both sides and to interview the lead¬ ers themselves.

When poor Southey sought permission to

see Wellington’s files the request was refused. Napier belongs to a later period than ours, but requires some words of comment.

Unlike Southey he stressed the

military rather than the political side of the war.

But he

was an equally strong nationalist, although distinguished from Southey in having pro-French and anti-Spanish feel¬ ings.

Southey, who would not be betrayed into admiring the

national enemy, was more conventionally pro-Spanish and anti-French. sympathy.

Napier also was intensely liberal in political Thus apart from the

fact of its greatness,

Napier’s book is significant in two respects.

Its appearance

was one of the signs of the overthrow of Tory historiography and it is the first example of nationalism in an English his¬ tory of the highest order of excellence.

Napier’s work is

still classic while Southey’s pot-boiler is long since forgotten. But as late as 1837 Southey was confident it would win a place in literature.66 Nationalism is often regarded as an unmitigated curse to historiography. in its growth.

But in the end there was gain as well as loss It is a more inclusive, a more generous moti¬

vating principle in certain respects than partisan, class, or sectarian zeal which divides men of the same origin into dif¬ ferent groups.

The sympathies of the nationalist may in-

65 W. F. P. Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France, from the year 1807 to the year 1814 (London, 1828-40). 66 Warter, op. cit., vol. iv, p. 503.

jg2

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

elude all who belong to his own nation, from the masses at the bottom to the sovereign at the top.

Against this, how¬

ever, must be set an increased antipathy for foreign nations. Nationalist historians have also tended to emphasize histor¬ ical continuity more strongly than their predecessors.

Their

desire to study the experience of this national community from age to age through long centuries of evolution, to trace it back to its remote origins, stimulated further a genetic, truly historical approach.

Nationalism also had in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a broadening influence since it was one of the factors responsible for renewed interest in the middle ages.

CHAPTER VII Party History from 1800 to 1827: the Whig and Liberal Emphasis After this excursion into the field of nationalism we shall return to the succession of party histories after 1800.

Most

of those included in Chapter III had made appreciable addi¬ tions to historical knowledge and have a place in the story of research.

Generally speaking too, they treated only of

times prior to George III.

But as the century wore on there

came a crop of “ Annals ” or “ Histories ” of George Ill’s reign, some of them widely known at the time.

Such ac¬

counts were usually very partisan and have not lasted until today because they have little value as contemporary sources, since they were not written by statesmen, and came too early to possess the value of solid secondary accounts based on wide use of original sources.

They belonged to a familiar

type of contemporary or near-contemporary history which seldom has a long life.

It will be useful, however, to men¬

tion two of the most popular in this group; for such books show how the eighteenth century was gradually taking its place beside the seventeenth as a battle ground for party historians. William Belsham devoted a long life to writings in defence of Whig principles as applied to past and present issues. For nearly twenty years after 1789 he is said to have pro¬ duced at least one volume or pamphlet almost every year, the product of literary interests and close association with 183

^4

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

leaders of the Whig party.1

His most extensive series of

volumes covered the history of Great Britain from the Revo¬ lution to the death of George III in 1820.2 Two strong prejudices warped the judgment of Belsham. He was, in the first place, a staunch Whig of the Fox group. He believed firmly in the necessity for parliamentary reform and professed dismay at the political and social tendencies of the times—increasing poverty for the many, wealth for the few; a national debt corrupting the body politic, a constitu¬ tion sapped by the revival of the royal prerogative, and pri¬ vate life degenerating through the growth of luxury.

All

this, the theme song of a certain type of Whiggism, de¬ termined the picture given of England since 1688. In the second place, Belsham was a convinced anti-clerical. “ The spirit of High-Churchism, which is a compound es¬ sence exhaled

from the ingredients of pride, ignorance,

malice, prejudice and folly, has, during this reign, been in a regular and progressive state of increase; and as the same causes which have operated still continue to operate, it is probable that until some violent convulsion is produced by a new Laudian or Sheldonian persecution, the tide will continue 1 Dictionary of National Biography; Gentleman’s Magazine (London, 1828), vol. xcviii, pp. 274-275; Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres, no. 566 (London, Nov. 24, 1827), p. 762.

2 These

appeared as follows: Memoirs of the Kings of Great Britain

of the House of Brunswic-Lunenburg (London, 1793) ; Memoirs of the Reign of George III to the session of Parliament ending A. D. 1793 (London, 1795) ; History of Great Britain from the Revolution to the accession of the House of Hanover (London, 1798) ; Memoirs of the Reign of George III to the Commencement of the Year 1799 (London, 1801) ; History of Great Britain, from the Revolution, 1688, to the con¬ clusion of the Treaty of Amiens, 1802 (London, 1805—comprises earlier volumes plus two on the period, 1799 to Amiens) ; Memoirs of the Reign of George III from the treaty of Amiens, A. D. 1802, to the termination of the Regency, A. D. 1820 (London, 1824).

Mention should also be made

of his Essays, philosophical, historical and literary (London, 1789, with a second volume in 1791).

to flow in the same channel and direction.” 3

He not only

sawr, what indeed history seems to confirm, that there is no necessary connection between religious piety and ethical behaviour, but ascribed a peculiar passion for power and a peculiar unscrupulousness in its attainment to priests of all religions.4 When we add to Belsham’s shortcomings as a scholar, his prejudices, and his loose and rather bombastic style, it may seem as if he were quite without merit—a violent, unin¬ formed, pugnacious pamphleteer.

It would manifestly be

very difficult to make out a strong case for him as an his¬ torian.

Yet since he was successful in his own day, it is

worth while to see what pleas may be entered in mitigation of sentence.

He aimed at seeing how far the “ grand fabric of

liberty ”,5 completed at the Revolution, had been preserved or allowed to decay in succeeding years.

In this enterprise

he frankly disavowed that “ frigid philosophy ” which aims at narrating events and portraying characters irrespective of their moral implications.

Rather he held it to be the his¬

torian’s function to distribute praise and blame for the in¬ struction of posterity.6

Yet he does not always praise

Whigs nor always blame Tories.

He wrote from Whig

principles rather than merely for the Whig party.

He was a

severe, not unintelligent, publicist, influenced by dissenting religious and ethical standards, strongly liberal in political outlook, and with a due sense of the importance of his voca¬ tion.

He was criticized by Coxe for his animadversions on

3 Memoirs of the Reign of George III, to the session of Parliament ending A. D. 1793 (1795), vol. ii, p. ISS-

4 History

of Great Britain, from the Revolution to the accession of

the House of Hanover (1798), vol. i, pp. 299, 456-457.

5 Memoirs

of the Kings of Great Britain of the House of Brunswic-

Lunenburg (1793), vol. i, p. 61.

6 History

of Great Britain from the Revolution, 1688, to the conclusion

of the Treaty of Amiens, 1802 (1805), vol. xi, “Advertisement.”

jg6

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

the regime of Sir Robert Walpole, but in fact he recognized the national services of this great statesman while deploring the corruption characteristic of his administration.7

For

Hume’s History, apart from its Tory coloring and philosoph¬ ical indifference, he had the highest praise.8

He approxi¬

mated the historical attitude in his estimate of Elizabeth.9 No admirer of Burke’s principles as a rule, he nevertheless agreed with the Reflections that the British Constitution had not been struck off in a heat nor was it the product of the speculative sagacity of a few individuals.10 Belsham was wholeheartedly on the side of the rebellious Americans whom he compared to the Greeks fighting for European liberty against Persian aggression,11 but his atti¬ tude towards the French Revolution was almost necessarily more complex.

The earlier stages he, like an orthodox Fox-

ite, viewed with approval. of

But he deplored the Constitution

1793, Jacobinism, and the Terror.

Deprecating the

growth of the “ profligate ambition and presumption ” of the France of the Directory and Napoleon, he yet set this off against the “ pride, folly, and mischievous activity of the British administration.”

Openly critical of Nelson’s acts in

Naples, he could also write favorably of the French internal government in 1805—a fact which must always appear strik¬ ing after the nationalist hysteria attending the corresponding twentieth-century battle of giant nations.

Since he did not

view the war as one for freedom or peace he looked forward with pessimism to the future.

“ Who, in fine,” he says in

concluding the twelfth volume of his collected history, in

7 Memoirs of.... the House of Brunswic-Lunenburg, vol. ii, pp. 8 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 380. 9 Essays, philosophical historical, and literary (1789-1791), vol.

53-54. i, pp.

49-50.

10 Memoirs

of ...the House of Brunswic-Lunenburg, vol. ii, p. 132.

11Memoirs of the Reign of George III, vol. ii, pp. 72-73, 349-351.

PARTY HISTORY, 1800-1827

187

1805, “ever did, or even can, declare Europe to be in such a state of security, as to preclude subsequent innovations by the hand of violence?

Treaties cannot bind the ambition of

nations; the powerful will oppress the weak; riches will incite the attempts of avarice; the interests of the many will be sacrificed to the selfishness or vanity of the few; and the relative situation of the nations of the globe, will, like the lunar disc, be in a state of perpetual variation.” 12 The two volumes published in 1824 when Belsham was an old man constitute a kind of epilogue to the main work and show how tenaciously the author clung to his opinions. Their theme is the unfortunate consequences of the “ Gallic War ” : strengthened despotism and bigotry abroad, especi¬ ally the enormous aggrandisement of Russia (“ to which no adequate barrier can be opposed ”), the enslavement of Italy and the political annihilation of Denmark; at home, increased debts and taxes, pauperism, a stronger military establishment, the decline of liberty, and the advance of royal prerogative. With this gloomy analysis, Belsham contrasted the state of England on the accession of George III.

Somewhat milder

in tone than formerly, he nevertheless remained a thorough Whig, equally opposed to the politics of the Court and to the new lower-class radical movements.

For almost a gen¬

eration in spite of his shortcomings in research, recognized from the very beginning by students like Coxe,13 he held a prominent place among party historians, that contemporary renown which so often leads to complete oblivion as time displaces the materials with which a popular writer has worked, or popular tastes turn to other types of composition. The noted barrister John Adolphus 14 carried on the Tory

12 History

of Great Britain (1805), vol. xii, pp. 482-483.

13Memoirs of the Life and. Administration of Sir Robert Walpole (London, 1798), vol. i, p. xviii. 14 See Recollections of the Public Career and Private Life of the Late

j88

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

tradition especially in his History of England, from the ac¬ cession of George III to the conclusion of peace in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty three

(1802).

Adolphus was superior to the general run of Annalists. Like Gibbon he claimed to regard the accumulation and nar¬ ration of facts as the chief duty of the historian; while he was like Robertson in accepting a doctrine of the dignity of history which excluded from his narrative some interesting anecdotes that might otherwise have found a place.15

Yet he

also shows signs of a new age, for example in his recognition that historical characters must not be viewed as wholly good or wholly evil, but as human beings to be portrayed in all their moods.

Moreover he aspired to explain the conduct

of politicians whom he disliked by party connections or the legitimate ambitions of honorable men rather than by ascrib¬ ing to them base designs against liberty or moral depravity “ which is characteristic neither of the nations nor the times on which I have treated.” 16

He did not seek to conceal,

in fact he definitely outlines, in the beginning of the History, his own political prepossessions, but he discusses them in such a way as to arouse confidence on the part of his readers. He admitted to a warm admiration for the established order in Church and State, a reverence for George III, a dislike of “crude reforms,” and withal a belief that liberty and hon¬ esty were more general in his day than ever before.17 Thus Adolphus was an intelligent, restrained conservative, settled in his views, but unwilling to condemn all who opposed him.

Such men are sometimes the truest liberals; in any

John Adolphus... with extracts from his diaries, by his daughter Emily Henderson (London, 1871).

15 History of England, from the accession of George III 1802), vol. i, pp. iv-v, 128 and note, 544, note. 16 Ibid., 17 Ibid.,

vol. i, Preface. vol. i, pp. vii-ix; vol. iii, pp. 599-600.

(London,

PARTY HISTORY, 1800-1827

^9

event Adolphus achieved the difficult feat of having his History praised both by George III and the Edinburgh Re¬ view, 18 while he was the friend of Coxe and was commended by Somerville.19

Part of his History was translated into

German; in England it had gone through four editions when at the age of seventy the author undertook to prepare a con¬ tinuation to the death of George III. Adolphus had the advantage of access to Coxe’s materials and to other private papers which enabled him to throw new light on some transactions of George Ill’s reign.

He was

mainly interested in parliamentary history and he presented excellent summaries of the debates.

His style was less

diffuse than Belsham as his mind was more judicial, and he was far more careful to give footnotes and references to his authorities.

Though a Tory, he sought to give both sides

by digesting opposing arguments.

But his anxiety to defend

Lord Bute and his justifications of George III were clearly shown. The most important topic with which Adolphus had to deal was the American Revolution. He treated it far better than Belsham, recognizing how the situation was complicated by the presence of such factors as debts, and naturally not in¬ dulging in talk about the “ invincible spirit ” of the Ameri¬ cans which was apt to clog the pages of Whig accounts.

His

preliminary discussion of American affairs pointed out the difference in situation between Great Britain and the colonies and between the various colonies themselves.

He admitted

that the vast majority of the colonists did not seek independ¬ ence at first, and confessed also to the unwisdom of some of the earlier acts of the British Government.20 18 Henderson, op. cit., p. 97. 19 My Own Life, p. 314.

But he argued

igo

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

the necessity of punishment for disloyalty by the time of Burke’s speech on conciliation.

And as affairs grew still

more serious so did Adolphus’s philosophic calm grow less. He begins to charge the Americans with hypocrisy, and where they appealed to heaven, of “ puritanical cant.” 21 The Petition to the King from the Continental Congress of 1774 he calls “merely an insidious mockery.”

He finds

their address to the people of America imbued with a “ spirit of hostility and resistance alone ” while “ that to the Canad¬ ians discovers the deepest and most inveterate malignity against Great Britain, and is replete with mean artifices to cajole the people into disaffection.” 22

Thus he more and

more indulges in censure instead of maintaining the judicial impartiality upon which he appears to have prided himself. He was contemptuous of the Declaration of Independence, incensed at the Franco-American alliance, and accused the Americans of occasional cruelty to prisoners of war.

On

the other hand he detailed the good treatment of Burgoyne’s army on its surrender to Gates and pays a tribute to the qualities of George Washington.23

He tried his best to give

credit where credit was due. Adolphus was also the author of several works on the French Revolution which may be dispatched with merciful brevity.

The Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolu¬

tion (1799) dealt with some of the important figures in con¬ temporary France. Dedicated to Windham, it defended the memory of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and was ab¬ surdly biassed.

His History of France from the year 1/80

to the Peace concluded at Amiens in 1802 (1803) was a mere compilation picturing a diabolical revolution caused by a diabolical conspiracy, and showing a total absence of any 21 Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 144, 161. 22 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 167. 23 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 535; vol. iii, pp. 590-591.

PARTY HISTORY, 1800-1827

historical sense.

I9I

Adolphus was also the author of a large

pamphlet, Reflections on the Causes of the Present Rupture with France (1803), justifying the war after Amiens.

His

attitude towards France was that of a strong Tory of today towards Russia.

He was willing to swallow any atrocity

story, but showed absolutely no ability to see the constructive measures taken, for example, by the National Convention. He wras no longer, as in the case of his History of England, seeking to be impartial, for France was the national enemy and historical impartiality no virtue.

Yet to be insane on

the subject of France was no condemnation, and certainly must not be allowed to conceal the fact that among the writ¬ ers of “ Annals ” Adolphus ranks high.

He produced sub¬

stantial books that were long read and helped to shape the prevailing attitude of at least a generation.24 Both scholarship and the Whig cause were aided by Wil¬ liam Coxe, Archdeacon of Wiltshire.

Educated at Cam¬

bridge, Coxe is said to have been directed towards the pro¬ duction of learned works by a teacher at King’s College.

As

tutor to sons of the nobility, and later as archdeacon, he traveled through a great part of the Continent and was given access to many valuable papers both at home and abroad. On the basis of these materials he produced a whole series of volumes on the eighteenth century as well as a History of the House of Austria, perhaps his best known work, and a volume of Spanish history. Coxe’s works were, and to some extent still are, valuable for the documents contained.

Of the three volumes of the

Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole (1798) two are composed 24 Adolphus compiled also the Political State of the British Empire; containing a general view of the domestic and foreign possessions of the crown; the laws, commerce, revenues, offices, and other establishments, civil and military (London, 1818), and The British Cabinet; containing portraits of illustrious personages, engraved from original pictures: with biographical memoirs (London 1799-1800).

192

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

wholly of correspondence.

The Memoirs of Horatio, Lord

Walpole (1802) is really a collection of letters and papers, with a connecting text, rather than biography or history. The Memoirs of Marlborough

(1818-1819)

contains a

larger percentage of Coxe’s own composition, but contains much source material too.25

This is even more true of the

Correspondence of Charles Talbot (1821) which is still a very important book.26

The posthumous Memoirs of Henry

Pelham (1829) are of the same general character, containing a good deal of correspondence and documentary material scattered through the text, while the last two hundred pages of volume two consist wholly of original sources.

Coxe

was also author of several works of travel and description. The History of the House of Austria (1807) was a largescale epitome, distinguished among such productions by wide use of manuscripts, oral sources, and dissertations on special topics.

It belongs definitely to the nineteenth century in

style and tone.

The sentences are short and clear; it is a

work of exposition, the narration of concrete facts rather than the expounding of historical philosophy.

The arrange¬

ment is annalistic though there are summaries at intervals. A commendable list of authorities ends each chapter.

Com¬

petent but undistinguished, Coxe develops no views that are worthy of attention, no special interpretation of Austrian history.

The Memoirs of the House of Bourbon (1813)

was a pioneer attempt to relate the history of Spain from the accession of Philip the Fifth to that of Charles the Fourth. To the body of the narrative was prefixed an Introduction 25 “ The best life of Marlborough is by Coxe, and is now a century old.”

W. T. Morgan, Political Parties in the Reign of Queen Anne

(New Haven, 1920), p. 8. Morgan also says: “Coxe’s comments add value to many of the letters he copied.” Ibid., p. 409. 26 They are “extremely valuable for the reign of William III, es¬ pecially for 1694-8.” Davies, op. cit., p. 12.

PARTY HISTORY, 1S00-1827

193

covering the period from the union of Castile and Aragon to the extinction of the Austrian line.

In this work too,

Coxe used original and unprinted sources.

He appears not

to have read Spanish and Portuguese, but he had assistants who did, and was either able to handle German himself or hired others who could. As an historian, Coxe leaves much to be desired. was often dull.

His style

He showed no grasp of historical forces, no

ability to organize his materials.

Moreover, history was to

him merely a record of wars, diplomacy and politics, with a succession of great men holding the strings of events.27 was intensely biassed in favor of the Whigs.

He

Not only does

this color his narrative, but he sometimes stops to argue with the opponents of his Whig heroes.

And once when his hero

is clearly in the wrong there are traces of conscious or uncon¬ scious use of another device.

That is, he begins by a frank

admission that his character is guilty of the offence charged against him.

Then, apparently with the sincere belief that

he is pointing out the “ truth ” from the “ facts,” he proceeds to give an account of the circumstances of the action so favorable to his chosen character as to nullify or at least modify the bad impression previously given.28 said, was perhaps due to unconscious bias.

This, as we

It is more diffi¬

cult to explain away a passage in Somerville’s Memoirs which 27 “ Unfortunately for man, it is the sword which decides the fate of nations, secures their tranquility, and promotes their aggrandizement;— it is the sword alone which is the guardian of national honour, and the protector of public and private happiness.

Commerce may enrich, the

arts may civilize, science may illuminate a people; but these blessings can only owe their safety and stability to military force.

War, there¬

fore, to the regret of every milder virtue, must form the principal subject of History.”

History of the House of Austria (London, 1807), vol. i,

Preface.

28 Memoirs pp. x, 41-42.

of John, Duke of Marlborough (London, 1818-1819), vol. i,

I94

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

throws too important a light on Coxe’s historical standards not to be quoted:29 The Rev. Mr. Coxe, in transmitting to me such of the Orford and Townshend papers as he thought likely to convey valuable information relative to public events during the reign of Queen Anne and King William, at the same time accompanied them with restrictive recommendations, which narrowed their useful¬ ness. He insinuated that it would be gratifying to the pro¬ prietors if I found myself warranted, by the evidence contained in them, to justify the Whig ministry for rejecting the terms of the peace proposed by Louis XIV in 1707-9. But Coxe was more than a mere partisan.

He had all the

nineteenth-century scholar’s pride in the variety, extent and rarity of his sources.

He was acutely conscious of the ne¬

cessity of going beyond printed papers to the manuscripts, and eagerly grasped at oral tradition and anecdote also.

In

this zeal for original research we see again signs that the emphasis upon “ philosophy ” and the interpretation of his¬ tory was giving place to a new school that would consist of scholars rather than writers.

It is perhaps significant, also,

to note that Coxe’s later works suggest an increasing con¬ sciousness of nationality.

His earlier works were the result

of research and partisan zeal.

The Spain, however, ap¬

peared in the exciting days of 1813.

Coxe tells us that his

attention was drawn to the modern history of Spain by “ the burst of patriotic enthusiasm which the usurpation and per¬ fidy of the French ruler excited among the Spaniards, and the deep interest which the British public took in the exertions of a brave and magnanimous nation combating in the sacred

29 My

Own Life, pp. 289-290.

T. H. Buckle, Miscellaneous and Pos¬

thumous Works, (London, 1872), vol. i, p. 214 makes a similar charge of what is practically dishonesty.

PARTY HISTORY, 1800-1827

cause of freedom and independence.” 30

195

This work he dedi¬

cates to Wellington with a note of patriotic exultation over the recent victories of British arms in the Peninsular War. In the Memoirs of Marlborough again Coxe laments “ as an Englishman” the absence of such a study; it is a “history which may be considered as truly national ”—and he refers to “ our national historians.” 31

This nationalist note was

now appearing more and more frequently. The Tory view of the seventeenth century evoked an answer from no less a person than Charles James Fox whose History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second (1808) was the only fragment ever published of a projected account of the Revolution.

It comprised an introductory

chapter on the period 1640 to 1685, a more detailed account of James IPs reign to the execution of Monmouth, and an appendix of documents.32

Fox sought to weave his facts

into a continuous narrative without notes, disgressions or supplementary dissertations and limited the scope of his sub¬ ject matter to public affairs that this might be done more successfully.

Actually, however, he wrote history in the

manner of a Parliamentary debate rather than a narrative. “ There is about the whole book,” as Macaulay so justly said,33 “ a vehement, contentious, replying manner.

Almost

every argument is put in the form of an interrogation, an ejaculation, or a sarcasm.

The writer seems to be address¬

ing himself to some imaginary audience, to be tearing in pieces a defence of the Stuarts which has just been pro-

30 Memoirs

of the Kings of Spain of the House of Bourbon (London,

1813), vol. i, Preface, p. x.

31 Memoirs

of John, Duke of Marlborough (London, 1818-1819), vol.

i, pp. ix-x. 32 The documents are still of some convenience.

Davies, op. cit., p. 21.

83 In comparing Fox and Sir James Mackintosh, Essays, Critical, His¬ torical, and Miscellaneous (New York, i860), vol. iii, p. 255.

I96

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

nounced by an imaginary Tory.” Fox’s partiality was too strong, too undisguised for him ever to have attained com¬ plete success as a historian.34 His was no philosophical ad¬ herence to a position arising out of the historical situation, nor would he have secured a prominent place because of research, to which he was indifferent, or because of the pub¬ lication of documents, in which he was not vitally inter¬ ested.35 He carried back to the seventeenth century the passions of the politics of his own day, and at his best wrote history in the manner of the ancient rhetoricians. It is scarcely to be expected that his work if it had ever been com¬ pleted would have won him a high place among historians. Another Whig historian, Malcolm Laing, was a friend of Fox and a successful lawyer by profession. He has already been mentioned for his completion of the sixth volume of Henry’s History of Great Britain; besides this he edited the “ Historie and Life of King James the Sext ” and the poems attributed to Ossian.36 His dissertation to prove the com¬ plicity of Mary, Queen of Scots, in the murder of Darnley, and his scathing exposure of the Ossianic fraud were issued as appendices to his chief work, the History of Scotland (1800).

Fox was pleased to think that his friend’s History would “ serve to counteract the mischief which Hume, Dalrymple, Macpherson, Somerville, and others of your countrymen have done,”37 but such was not Laing’s primary aim. 34 Rt. Hon. George Rose, Observations on Fox’s Historical Work (London, 1809), esp. pp. vii-ix. 35 Ibid., p. xi. 86 The Historie and Life of King James the Sext (Edinburgh, 1804), which I have not seen. The Poems of Ossian, containing the Poetical Works of James Macpherson in prose and verse, with notes and illustra¬ tions (London, 1805). 37 C. J. Fox, A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second (London, 1808), p. xxi.

19 7

PARTY HISTORY, 1800-1S27

Rather he sought to fill a gap in the history of his country by continuing the work of Robertson from 1603 to 1707. Laing had much in common with Robertson.

Equally in¬

dustrious in research, he used the manuscripts in the Advo¬ cates Library at Edinburgh, the Calderwood manuscripts for church history, the privy council records, and documents in private hands.88

Like Robertson, too, he embodies much

material in the form of dissertations, notes and “ illustra¬ tions.”

Rather paradoxically, however, he was inclined to

be impatient or even contemptuous in his attitude towards a period requiring as much attention to religious disputes as seventeenth-century Scotland. He thought that history should treat mainly of diplomacy and politics and when he discussed social and religious topics in his section on the Protectorate, he excuses the lapse from historical dignity by saying that no “ public or important ” events, except the roy¬ alist insurrection of 1654, occurred in Scotland during this period.

“ Yet the civil and military institutions of the con¬

queror, the innovations produced by a new government, and the internal progressive state of the country and its inhabi¬ tants, may furnish a subject of curious inquiry, when the history of public transactions is silent.” 39 Laing made an honest attempt to be impartial, and speci¬ fically disclaimed any pragmatic aim, at least in the narrower sense of making the story of the past a direct commentary on present times.

“ It would be difficult to speak of the present

times without degenerating either into adulation or censure, and absurd indeed to render the history of the last century a comment on the philosophy or folly of the present.” 40 38 His use of sources and treatment of Scottish history were, however, criticized rather severely by G. Brodie, History of the British Empire (Edinburgh, 1822), vol. iii, pp. 294, 336 note, 516 note, passim. 39 The History of Scotland... (London, 1800), vol. i, pp. 438-439. 40 Ibid., vol. i, p. vii.

198

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

Yet none the less his account is vigorously Whiggish.

He

viewed both Stuarts and Republicans with equal disfavor, and completely failed, as had everyone before him, in the interpretation of Cromwell.41

In one respect, perhaps, this

statement might be qualified, for there are some friendly pages on the Independents, whose advocacy of toleration Laing approved while he disliked their “ enthusiasm.”42 His account of the administration of Scotland after the Res¬ toration became almost a series of atrocity stories, while the end of the Stuart regime he characterized as a “ sanguinary and cruel despotism.” 43

His enthusiasm for William III

was almost unbounded, but a touch of Scottish patriotism made him point out that William left Scotland in the hands of subordinates who did not do their master credit.

Yet any

partiality in Laing was too obvious to be dangerous and too superficial to cancel his undoubted merits.

In many ways a

late heir of the tradition of the Enlightenment, he was an illustration of the fact that such a tradition was quite com¬ patible with industrious and accurate research.

If he never

attained a high level of style, and sometimes sank into dull¬ ness, he won deserved contemporary approval and enjoys a reward for honest and intelligent labor in the fact that his narrative is still cited occasionally.44

After the lapse of more

than a hundred years this is no mean distinction. The three most considerable party histories marking the renewed attack on the Tories were those of Brodie, Godwin and Hallam.

But several small books by Lord John, the

first Earl Russell, attained popularity and were of course written from a Whig standpoint.

The Life of William Lord

Russell; with some Account of the Times in which he lived 41 Ibid., vol. i, p. 472. 42 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 269-278. 43 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 2. 44 G. Davies, op. cit., p. 304.

PARTY HISTORY, 1800-1827

199

(1819) went through three editions in two years, and reached a fourth in 1853.

The spirit in which Lord John worked is

beyond reproach.

He readily granted that the Tories were

attached to the constitution as much as the Whigs.43 Hume he spoke with respect.46

Of

But he was annoyed at the

invidious conclusions drawn by writers like Dalrymple47 from the conduct of the Whigs in Charles II’s reign: The concert between the popular party and France was a concert only in name. The opposition continued, as before, pursuing their own purpose, which so far from being French, was the preservation of the English religion and laws. They promised, it is true, to prevent, if possible, the war with France, but it was their bounden duty to do so. They had every reason to suppose that it was intended as a death-blow to liberty.48 As for the additional charge that the “ popular party ” had also accepted money from France, Lord John had several reservations to make.

Barillon, the French ambassador,

upon whose statement the accusation rested, might well have been dishonest and have put into his own pocket the sums he pretended to have paid to English leaders.

Even if we

assume that Barillon was honest, he may have been deceived by “ corrupt and worthless

emissaries.”49

Coleman,

at

least, who confessed to having received French money for distribution among members of Parliament, denied that he had actually distributed it.

The most probable conclusion to

be drawn from the evidence, Lord John thought, was that some obscure politicians were bribed but that Barillon was deceived in believing he had reached the leaders.

Lord Wil-

45 The Life of William Lord Russell (3rd edition, London, 1820), vol. i, pp. 188-189. 46 Ibid., vol. i, p. xi. 47 Ibid., vol. i, pp. xi-xii, 198; vol. ii, pp. 140, 160. 48 Ibid., vol. i, p. 120. 49 Ibid., vol. i, p. 196.

200

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

liam was certainly free from this taint in spite of his im¬ prudent communications with France.50 This was a Whig interpretation of certain famous events. But it was not a very virulent form of partisanship.

Nor

could much exception be taken to the spirit in which the career of Lord William himself is treated in his descendant’s pages. ents.

He is represented as a man of not very brilliant tal¬ His animosity against the Roman Catholics, while

placed almost wholly on political grounds, is condemned. The charge that he opposed the remission by Charles of that part of the sentence of death against Lord Stafford which ordered him to be drawn and quartered is shown to rest solely upon the unfriendly authority of Echard; but such an action if true, is declared to be properly subject to unqualified censure.51 Even in dealing with the death of Lord William for treason a proper balance is maintained by his biographer. Lord William was convicted upon insufficient evidence, his condemnation was unjust, his execution tyrannical.

Still,

said Lord John, some of the legal objections advanced in his behalf were without force, the usage he received was not under the circumstances extremely unfair,

and Charles,

“ though inexorable, seems by no means to have been wan¬ tonly unfeeling.” 52 An Essay on the History of the English Government and Constitution from the reign of Henry VII to the present time (1821) was widely read in England and translated into both French and German.

It was both a history and a com¬

mentary on the English government, some of its thirty-five chapters being devoted to topics like the place of party, the kinds of liberty, criminal law, public schools and the national 50 Ibid.., vol. i, pp. 190-193, 199-200. 51 Ibid., vol. i, p. 236. 52 Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 73, 137.

PARTY HISTORY, 1800-1827 debt.

The whole essay in its original form was little more

than 60,000 words in length. erate

201

Whiggism

gave

it

Its brevity, clarity and mod¬

great

popularity.

Lord

John

Russell also published during this period Memoirs of the Affairs of Europe from the Peace of Utrecht (1824-1829). Isaac D’ Israeli wrote from a Tory standpoint in his Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James I (1816) and his five volumes of Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I (1828-1831); but he was distin¬ guished less for partisanship than for zeal in searching out original materials.58

G. W. Meadley 54 was a biographer of

Algernon Sidney and others, while Lucy Aikin 55 produced a series of “ Memoirs ” after 1818.

Both Meadley and Aikin

were liberal in outlook. The title of George Brodie’s History of the British Em¬ pire, from the accession of Charles I to the Restoration (1822) was misleading.

There was no effort to trace the

history of overseas possessions, but merely the constitutional history of England, Scotland and Ireland, with a good deal in addition about politics and military affairs.56

The book

was a counterblast to Hume’s views on the Tudors and Stuarts.

Brodie made an independent survey of the mater¬

ials for these periods from an advanced Whig standpoint. He used manuscripts in the Advocates Library at Edin¬ burgh, the British Museum, the Bodleian, and the Arch¬ bishop of Canterbury’s Library at Lambeth.

His first

531. D’lsraeli, An Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First (London, 1816) ; Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, King of England (London, 1828-31). 5i G. W. Meadley, Memoirs of Algernon Sydney (London, 1813). 55 Lucy Aikin, Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1818) ; Memoirs of the Court of King James the First (London, 1822) ; Memoirs of the Court of King Charles the First (London, 1833). 50 The edition of 1866 was more correctly entitled A Constitutional History of the British Empire (London, 1866).

202

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

hundred and fifty pages made a rapid survey of English constitutional history to the close of Elizabeth’s reign. Brodie then embarked upon a discussion, approximately equal in length, of the institutions and usages of Tudor times upon which Hume had based his analogy of the English government with that of Turkey.57

The third chapter

treated of James I, and volume one then closed with two chapters on Scotland and Ireland.

The next two volumes

and almost one-half of the fourth traced the reign of Charles I in detail, while brief surveys of the Common¬ wealth and Protectorate brought the work to a close with the Restoration. Hume had portrayed the instances of arbitrary govern¬ ment he found in English history, especially under the Tudors, as “ the abstract of tyranny; ” 58 Brodie sought to show that they were exceptional acts to meet certain emer¬ gencies.

The essence of English Government was limited

monarchy and through all vicissitudes “ the grand principles of the constitution were preserved, however, its spirit might occasionally slumber.” 59

He not only challenged Hume’s

interpretation of the English constitution; but by listing many mistakes of fact, misuse of sources, and instances of prejudice attacked Hume’s competence as a reporter of events.

Had Brodie not lacked certain qualities desirable in

the historian, it is difficult to see how Hume could have sur¬ vived the detailed exposure of his blunders. For the Stuarts, whom he regarded as having sought to subvert the established constitution of England, Brodie had little short of detestation.

James I he viewed as “ destitute

not only of the qualities that win, and the talents that dazzle,

57 A History of the British Empire, from the accession of Charles I to the Restoration (Edinburgh, 1822), vol. i, pp. 158-326. 56 Ibid,,

vol. i, p. 223; cf. vol. i, pp. 343 note; vol. ii, p. 281.

59 Ibid.,

vol. i, p. 154; cf. vol. i, pp. 325, 327.

PARTY HISTORY, 1800-1827

20 3

and impose upon mankind, but of even the essential virtue of ordinary sincerity ... in his whole conduct, he evinced a total want, not only of common discretion, but of common decency. . . .” 60

He was also uniformly unfavorable in his

interpretation of Charles I's acts, upon whom and his advis¬ ers is thrown the blame for the civil war.61

Brodie, unlike

Hallam, has no words of criticism for the execution of Charles I, and he ends his book by denying that Charles II acted mercifully on his Restoration.62 It will be seen that Brodie was not a very generous his¬ torian nor always a judicious interpreter of the seventeenth century. doubt.

He hated to give the Stuarts the benefit of any He was not, however, a republican, but believed that

those who in 1648 favored placing one of the younger sons of Charles on the throne were wiser than those who advo¬ cated the abolition of monarchy—not of course because of any claim the Stuarts had to the throne, but on grounds of practicability and utility.63

Cromwell’s seizure of power is

pictured as a conscious and deliberate usurpation resulting from ambition, but is condemned less vigorously than the rule of the Stuarts.

There seem to have been circumstances to

palliate Cromwell’s usurpation but no excuses for the Stuart despotism.64

60 Ibid., 61 Ibid., 62 Ibid., 63 Ibid.,

vol. i, pp. 355-356. vol. iv, pp. 235-236. vol. iv, pp. 485-486. vol. iv, pp. 237-240, 432.

64 There is a favorable picture of Cromwell’s early character. vol. iii, pp. 490-499 and the long note beginning foot of page 499. defended against the charge of excessive cruelty at Drogheda. iv, p. 256.

Cf. ibid., vol. iv, pp. 421, 431-432.

Ibid., He is

Ibid., vol.

Brodie, it may be noted

here, pays very little attention to the Levellers, but speaks not unkindly of Lilburne {ibid., vol. iv, pp. 253, 377). It would be too much, however, to expect a nineteenth-century Whig to have the same degree of historical sympathy for Everard and his “thirty fanatics.”

253-

Ibid., vol. iv, pp. 252-

204

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

Brodie had studied his evidence carefully, but his pre¬ sentation of it left much to be desired.

His style was color¬

less and he wrote without enough attention to arrangement and compression.

His conception of history was purely

political and partisan.

He prosecuted a case, but did not seek

to understand his characters or how, with some exceptions, the historical situations in which they found themselves had come about.

While not an impassioned writer he lacked im¬

partiality almost completely.65

He made a frontal attack

upon Hume, and thereby captured some important outposts in his impetuous assault.

But it was not thus, if we may

change the figure, that the spell of Tory views as expressed by Hume could be lifted.

Brodie’s work appeared in a new

edition in 1866 but not thereafter, and is no longer cited. William Godwin sought, in his History of the Common¬ wealth of England from its Commencement, to the Restora¬ tion of Charles the Second (1824-28), to trace the story of the republicans from their rise during the civil war to their extinction, as an influential group, with the Restoration.

He

was drawn to this subject partly because England under the Commonwealth, as the chief instance in history of a great nation experimenting with the republican form of govern¬ ment, seemed to him a valuable example in the study of the interesting question of what is the best form of government. But more particularly he sought “ to attend to the neglected, to remember the forgotten,” 68 by placing the republicans in a different light from that in which they appeared in the pages of Whig and Tory historians.

Two whole volumes

65 In the following short sentence the four important words or phrases in italics carry an invidious implication: “ Placed at the head of the eccles¬ iastical and civil government, Laud betrayed all the presumptuous in¬ solence of a little mind, intoxicated with undeserved prosperity.” vol. ii, p. 247.

Ibid.,

66 History of the Commonwealth of England (London, 1824-1828), vol. i, p. vi. On Godwin see also infra, pp. 246-247.

PARTY HISTORY, 1800-1S27

205

were devoted to tracing the politics of the Civil War period to the death of Charles.

A third treated of the Common¬

wealth proper, and the last described the Protectorate to the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658. sciously

expressing

While freely and con¬

sentiments and

sympathies,

worked in a cooler spirit than Brodie.

Godwin

He inclined to the

belief that the execution of Stratford was just and necessary but expressed “ an almost invincible abhorrence to the taking away the life of man, after a set form, and in cool blood, in any case whatever.” 67

He disapproved of the execution of

Laud and passed a balanced judgment on the death of Charles.

That monarch was one of the greatest criminals

in all history.

But the event proved that his execution did

not answer the purpose intended by its authors.

Not only

did it not conciliate England to republican ideas, but it con¬ stituted so great a shock to ancient prejudices as to ensure defeat to the republican cause.

“ I am afraid, that the day

that saw Charles perish on the scaffold, rendered the restora¬ tion of his family certain.” 68

On the other hand Godwin

has considerable praise for the intentions of the regicides. Deeming themselves called to perform an awful act of justice, they had, in his judgment, faced their responsibility with courage, resolution, and public spirit. Although Godwin denounced Cromwell as an hypocritical apostate who rose to power “ by basely deceiving and desert¬ ing the illustrious band of patriots, with whom he had till that time been associated in the cause of liberty,” 69 the His¬ tory of the Commonwealth marked some progress towards an understanding of England’s Iron Statesman. Censure is less conspicuous in Godwin than praise of Cromwell’s good qualities and his services to the country. 67 Ibid., vol. i, p. 93. 68 Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 691-692. 69 Ibid., vol. iv, p. 597.

In foreign affairs

206

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

he had raised English prestige to an unusually high point and in domestic policy sought to achieve a reformation of gov¬ ernment.

He aimed at being the father of his people, said

Godwin, and every day he appeared to them more like a king, less like a simple usurper.

Had he lived ten years

longer, he might well have established his rule firmly enough to guarantee the succession in his own family.70 In spite of the interest such views hold for a reader the History

of the

Commonwealth

is

an unexciting book.

Sometimes it descended to an almost bare listing of events or Parliamentary decisions.

At other points it lapsed into

abstract speculation which distracts attention whatever its intrinsic merits may be.

Godwin moreover showed no

appreciation whatever of the importance of economic and social affairs, nor was he an adequate historian of ideas. For these reasons, perhaps still more for the unpopular nature of his political opinions, Godwin does not seem to have been very effective in changing prevailing views of the Commonwealth period.

He was, however, of importance in

the history of research.

He is still remembered for the new

material he incorporated into his book, being the first person to make wide use of the great collection of Thomason Tracts in the British Museum and of the unprinted Order Books of the Council of State in the State Paper Office.

Along with

these he made copious use of the Journals of the Commons and Lords, although of course he was not the first to turn to these sources.

Godwin’s use of his manuscript materials

was criticized by Andrew Bisset, a later historian of the Com70 Among the numerous passages relating to Cromwell, reference may¬ be made particularly to vol. ii, pp. 407-408; vol. iii, pp. 216-217, 434-438; vol. iv, pp. 579-608.

Godwin has even been spoken of as “perhaps the

most vigorous champion of the Cromwellian policy that has written.” C. K. Adams, op. cit., p. 461. republicans, not Cromwell.

This is extreme.

Godwin championed the

PARTY HISTORY, 1800-1827

207

monwealth Period,71 but seventeenth-century specialists of the present day, like Firth and Godfrey Davies, speak of his work with greater respect.72 Macaulay declared Hallam’s Constitutional History of England (1827) to be the most impartial book he had ever read.73

But Hallam was certainly not impartial in the mod¬

ern sense—in the sense of Acton’s dictum when he advised con¬ tributors to the Cambridge Modern History to write without revealing the country, the religion or the party to which they belonged.

To Hallam “ the Whigs appear to have taken a

far more comprehensive view of the nature and ends of civil society; their principle is more virtuous, more flexible to the variations of time and circumstance, more congenial to large and masculine intellects.” 74

His general picture of English

constitutional development was in sharp contrast to the classic Tory view.

The English government, he maintained, had

always been a limited monarchy, although the constitution was not sharply defined, “reduced into a system,”75 until the seventeenth century.

At times, as in the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries, there had been a retrograde tendency towards absolute monarchy; and under the Tudors certain special circumstances 76 made possible the exercise of a very high prerogative.

But the violent, arbitrary acts of the

Tudors were clearly irregular and illegal.

Moreover the

commons were never altogether unmindful of the real con71 Essays on Historical Truth (London, 1871), pp. 304-305, 315. 72 C. H. Firth, in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd ser., vol. vii (London, 1913), p. 40; G. Davies, op. cit., p. 21.

73

Critical, Historical and Miscellaneous Essays (New York, i860),

vol. i, p. 436. 7i The Constitutional History of England from the accession of Henry VII to the Death of George II (5th ed., London, 1846), vol. ii, p. 364. On Hallam see also infra, pp. 271-276.

75 Ibid., 76 Ibid.,

vol. i, p. 269 note. vol. i, pp. 42, 46-56.

208

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

stitution of England.

They asserted their rights with in¬

creasing vigour in the reign of Elizabeth, opposed the Stuart effort to establish despotism, until the Long Parliament in 1641 “ restored and consolidated the shattered fabric ” 77 of the constitution.

In this connection Hallam was careful to

point out, however, that the acts of this parliament, “ made scarce any material change in our constitution such as it had been established and recognized under the house of Plantagenet; ” 78 while on the other hand, they gave to the constitu¬ tion its modern form.

The later Habeas Corpus “ intro¬

duced no new principle, nor conferred any right upon the subject.” 79

The Revolution of 1688 may have been neces¬

sary to make the constitution secure, but not so much by changing the laws as by altering “ the spirit and sentiments of the people ... it broke the spell that had charmed the nation.

It cut out by the roots all that theory of indefeasible

right, of paramount prerogative, which had put the crown in continual opposition to the people.” 80 Hallam’s Whiggism was not only revealed in this rather anachronistic conception of the English constitution, but also in his treatment of particular men and events.

He made no

secret of his detestation for the Tudor despotism though able to approve of some of its achievements. High-Churchism was outspoken.

His antipathy for

He ridiculed the notion

that the Stuarts had any lawful claims to the throne apart from the will of the people. His censure fell equally upon the Stuarts, with their propensities towards arbitrary rule, and upon the independents who leaned towards republicanism. His favor fell upon those whether of the royalist or the par77 Ibid., vol. i, p. 513. 78 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 519-520. 79 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 177. 80 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 255.

PARTY HISTORY, 1S00-1S27

2og

liamentary camp, who were loyal to the ideal of “ the mixed government of England by king, lords, and commons.” 81 Yet while Hallam’s Whiggism was clearly indicated in everything he wrote it was a very balanced form of party history that came from his pen.

If he criticized Hume for

seeking evidence only on one side of the question, for preju¬ dice and unfairness,

for

fallacious reasoning, historical

blunders and “ preposterous insinuations,” 82 he was equally ready to censure Brodie’s exaggerations 83 and the “ absurd partiality ” of Coxe.84

Mingled with his disapproval of

Charles I was a recognition of the difficulties of that mon¬ arch’s situation, at least in the latter part of his reign, and an occasional word on the favorable side of his character.85 So, also, great as was his admiration for the earlier achieve¬ ments of the Long Parliament it was balanced by his detesta¬ tion for the “ violent and barbarous proceedings ” 86 that marked its course after 1641.

He loved liberty, but he did

not find either its friends or its enemies concentrated in one camp during the Civil War.

He refused to believe “ that

Falkland and Colepepper differed greatly in their constitu¬ tional principles from Whitelock and Pierpoint, or that Hert¬ ford, and Southampton were less friends to a limited mon¬ archy than Essex and Northumberland; ” 87 and he was in¬ clined to find Parliament the aggressor in the war. Such opinions were partly due to the fact that Hallam was a staunch Conservative, admittedly no great lover of Parlia81 Ibid., vol. i, p. 557. 82 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 4, 18, 21, 24S, 253, 262 note, 276-284, 443, 507 note, 613, passim. 83 Ibid., vol. i, p. 284 note, 560 note. 84 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 428 note. 85 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 452-453, 543, 605 and note, 631. 86 Ibid., vol. i, p. 597 note. 87 Ibid., vol. i, p. 564.

2io

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

mentary reform and specifically opposed to the Reform Bill of 1832, sceptical of the virtues of shorter Parliaments, con¬ fessing to a “jealous distrust of that indefinable, uncontrol¬ lable privilege of parliament, which has sometimes been asserted.” 88

He was no lover of revolutions and like so

many Whigs of his age was fearful of the democratic trend of modern society.

Thus he recoiled from the radical acts

into which their zeal sometimes led Parliamentary leaders, just as he resented the more extreme claims made by the Stuarts. But quite apart from this, Hallam was not of the stuff out of which violent partisans are made.

He was too sceptical,

melancholy, even pessimistic, in his attitude towards human affairs to locate all wisdom and righteousness in one man or group of men.

He is an example of the truth of Stubbs’

remark that the devoted student of history may be a wiser man, but will be a sadder one. Equally unfavorable to the nurture of party passion was Hallam’s manner of life.

He retired early from the Bar and

was never an active participant in politics.

Having sufficient

means to be free from the necessity of earning an income, he devoted his full time for many years to study and writing, a mode of life which is not indeed incompatible with intense partisanship but certainly less likely to induce it than the rivalry of courtroom or Commons.

He tells us that he term¬

inated his history at the accession of George III so as to avoid “ the prejudices of modern politics” to be found in the sub¬ sequent period.89 Hallam’s conception of history, finally, was elevated far beyond that of the service of party.

For him history was

teacher and judge, rendering the judgment of the present, with its superior knowledge and calmer emotions, upon the 88 Ibid., vol. i, p. 361; cf. vol. ii, pp. 201, 399-400. 89 Ibid,., vol. i, p. vii.

PARTY HISTORY, 1800-1827

r

turbulent struggles of the past.

211

He even regarded the judg¬

ment of history as more conclusive than that of a court of law because based in part upon evidence not available to a court or not admissible in legal procedure on technical grounds.90

He sought to consider the great events of history

according to the “ maxims of civil prudence ” or the canons of political ethics with judicial impartiality.

He is never

better than when weighing the evidence for and against this or that conclusion in some disputed event of great impor¬ tance.

The tone of such passages approximates quite closely

to that of a judicial opinion.

An early example is the argu¬

ment in the case of Mary, Queen of Scots.91

Other striking

instances are the discussion of the attainder of Strafford leading to a modified condemnation of that measure,92 the very fine passage considering the “ political justice ” of the Civil War,93 the observations on the execution of Charles I,94 and the rather apologetic remarks on the connection between the Whigs and France in the reign of Charles II.95 Perhaps this point may be made clearer by a brief summary of his conclusions regarding the execution of Mary.

He

begins by laying down the opinion that her execution has been unduly censured by posterity.

The evidence in favor

of the charge that Mary had assented to a conspiracy against the life of Elizabeth was “not indeed irresistibly convincing, but far stronger that we find in many instances where con¬ demnation has ensued.” 96

The contention that Mary as an

independent sovereign was not amenable to any English juris-

90 Ibid.,

vol. i, p. 525.

91 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 158-162.

92 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 522-530. 93 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 557-569. 94 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 644-646. 95 Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 99-105. 86 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 158-159.

>

212

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

diction, Hallam holds somewhat questionable.

Such a prin¬

ciple certainly did not include the right to plot against the sovereign of a territory in which she resided, even if detained there by force.

Moreover, was Mary in any case anything

more than “ a titular queen, divested of every substantial right to which a sovereign tribunal could have regard? ” 97 For these reasons her execution cannot be regarded as wholly iniquitous or unwarrantable.

Nevertheless, Hallam went on

to say, a good deal might be said against it.

“ The queen

of Scots’ detention in England was in violation of all natural, public, and municipal law; and if reasons of state policy or precedents from the customs of princes are allowed to extenu¬ ate this injustice, it is to be asked whether such reasons and such precedents might not palliate the crime of assassination imputed to her.” 98

In any event Hallam was inclined to

think reasons of state, such as the maintenance of the relig¬ ious establishment, might have been satisfied without the death of Mary, and a more generous sovereign than Eliza¬ beth would not have proceeded to exact the full penalty of the law. Elallam’s Constitutional History marked an epoch both in party history and in historical writing in general.

Its su¬

perior learning, its depth of observation, its measured and dignified style, and its honest, balanced tone raised the level of English history to a new height.

In party history it was

the first great exposition of Whig views. it did not displace Hume completely.

At the same time Hallam suffered in

comparison with that far inferior historian because of his less glittering style, his legalistic tone, and his concentration on institutional history.

He assumed a knowledge of gen¬

eral English history which many of his readers did not have. Elallam, too, was more scrupulous in his effort to get at the 97 Ibid., vol. i, p. 161. 98 Ibid., loc. cit.

PARTY HISTORY, 1800-1827 exact truth, which is seldom sensational.

213

He was not the

sort of historian over whom convinced partisans in either camp could wax enthusiastic.

He gave his readers strong

medicine while Hume’s pill was sugar-coated to the popular taste.

But the very qualities that detracted from Hallam’s

charm for the average reader increased his claim upon the attention of students.

Among the latter, accordingly, his

influence was very strong.

In the meantime, by

1827,

Macaulay had already appeared upon the scene, destined to rival even Hume in the extent of his popularity and to end the reign of the Tory historians among the generality of readers.

CHAPTER VIII Romanticist History, 1800-1830

In Chapters IV and V we have already discussed certain “ signs of change ”—particularly a heightened appreciation of the “ primitive ” and of medieval civilization — that marked the growth of a Romanticist outlook in the later eighteenth century.

We shall now follow these tendencies

into the early years of the next century. Sir Walter Scott has generally been regarded as the chief link between nineteenth-century Romanticism and his¬ toriography.

The late Professor C. H. Herford went so

far as to say in his Age of Wordsworth1 that “the true Romantic historian of our period was Walter Scott.”

More

recently Professor R. S. Rait, than whom there could be no higher authority, has borne witness to Scott’s historical merits.

“ Sir Walter Scott,” he has testified 2 “ knew Scot¬

tish history better than any other man has ever known it, better than any other man ever will know it, until some mind of genius equal to his own chooses to devote the same time and attention to it;” and Professor Rait has further de¬ clared that Sir Walter had got this knowledge into his poems and novels, covering almost the whole sweep of Scotland's history, and including the high-born and the low-born, drum and trumpet, and the ordinary scenes of every-day life.3 Thus the connection between Scott and historical writing C. H. Herford, The Age of Wordsworth London, 1928), p. 39.

(3rd edition, reprinted,

2 “ Sir Walter’s Pageant of Scottish History,” The Sir Walter Scott Quarterly (no. 1, Edinburgh, April, 1927), p. 14. 3 Ibid., p. 17. 214

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

215

is too close to allow us to pass him by without mention.

He

himself bore testimony to the effect upon him of writers like Robert Henry, Strutt and Sharon Turner.4

The Minstrelsy

of the Scottish Border was intended to be a contribution to the history of Scottish manners 5 and Scott always retained his interest both in the reading of history and in the publi¬ cation of materials for its study.6

It has even been said that

his primary purpose in the poems and novels was to depict the society of the past, and that he “did not want to write a romance with an historical background, but ... to give an instructive picture of the past, for which the writer did not think it beneath him to make use of a story.

It may be

true that this purpose was not always equally clear to the author, but it is found in his work.” 7 Confirmation of this point of view is found in several of Scott’s own statements.

In the Preface to the Lay of the

Last Minstrel he said:8 “The Poem, now offered to the Public, is intended to illustrate the customs and manners which anciently prevailed on the Border of England and Scotland . . .” while for Waverley he claimed that “ some parts of this book are not only historical romance, they are history itself, and deserve to be considered as genuine docu¬ ments, although presented in informal fashion, or as evidence out of court.” 9

Ivanhoe he called “ a work designed to

4 Ivanhoe, “ Introductory Epistle ”; Margaret Ball, Sir Walter Scott as a critic of literature (New York, 1907), p. 126.

5 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), Introduction, vol. i, pp. cix-cx. 6 Though none of Scott’s contributions to the publication of seventeenth century sources was of prime importance, he is cited ten times by Davies in his Bibliography of British History, Stuart Period (Oxford, 1928). 7 H. Vissink, Scott and his Influence on Dutch Literature (Zwolle, 1922), pp. 22-23. 8 Quot.

Ibid., p. 22.

9 Waverley (Everyman edition), “Introduction,” p. viii; quot. Vissink, op. cit., p. 29 note 3.

2i6

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

illustrate the domestic antiquities of England and particularly of our Saxon forefathers.” 10 Yet while all this may be true, and while Scott is one of the major forces in the history of history,—the number of those who felt his influence including Thierry, Macaulay, Ranke, Barante, and Andrew Dickson White,11—this influ¬ ence was greater on Continental than on English writers and then in a period later than the one with which we are dealing. Moreover, Scott had little urge for the composition of sober, formal history, for which he once declared that he had “ neither time, talent, nor inclination,” 12 and he turned to this species of writing only when the vein of fiction threat¬ ened to run out as that of poetry had done earlier.

He then

produced his Life of Napoleon (1827), Tales of a Grand¬ father

(1828-1830), and History

of Scotland

(1830).

None of these give him high rank as an historian.

Of the

first Scott remarked:13 “ Superficial it must be, but I do not care fcr the charge.

Better a superficial book which

brings well and strikingly together the known and acknowl¬ edged facts, than a dull boring narrative, pausing to see farther into a mill-stone at every moment than the nature of the mill-stone admits.”

It was planned as a concise work

like Southey’s classic Nelson, but grew to the length of nine 10 Ibid., p. 22. 11 M. Ball, op. cit., p. 127, note 3; G. P. Gooch, op. cit., pp. 170, 174, 307; O. Elton, Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830, vol. ii, pp. 381382; L. Maigron, Le Roman Historique a I’epoque Romantique Essai sur l’influence de Walter Scott (Paris, 1898), esp. pp. 388 et seq.

Philip H.

Churchman and E. Allison Peers, A Survey of the Influence of Sir Walter Scott in Spain (Revue Hispanique, vol. liv, Paris, 1922, pp. 227310), show that Scott influenced the study of national history in Spain. 12 Letter to Archibald Constable in T. Constable, Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents (Edinburgh, 1873), vol. iii, p. 93. 13 J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1837-1838), vol. vii, pp. 154-155.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY volumes. its size.

217

Its importance was by no means correspondent to Scott showed no appreciation of the French Revo¬

lution nor was he inspired by Napoleon as a subject.

Still

he recognized the exaggeration of Burke’s Reflections 14 and is far more balanced in his treatment of Napoleon than was Southey in his Peninsular War.

Scott acknowledged the

benefits of Napoleon’s rule in France and Italy, his services in establishing a regular government, schools, laws and courts of justice.15

He recognized the shades of gentleness and

mercy in Napoleon's character.

If he portrays him as a

supreme egotist he also saw that his was a sublime and noble egotism identifying the welfare of France with his own. Peace having been signed, Scott was content to let the fight¬ ing cease.

The Tales of a Grandfather were in four series,

three dealing with Scottish history, and one with that of France.

They were frankly intended to stress the pictur¬

esque 16 and while absorbingly written are only to be con¬ sidered as books for children.

The History of Scotland was

a summary in two volumes that came out in the same series and the same year as Mackintosh’s History of England. The true Romanticist historians of this time, however, were Sharon Turner and Robert Southey. Turner was born in London and principally educated at an academy conducted by the Reverend Doctor James Davies, Rector of St. James, Clerkenwell.17

He seems to have been

something of an agnostic as a young man, but had passed this stage before he was thirty, his conversion being partly 14 Sir W. Scott, The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (Edinburgh, 1827), vol. i, p. 278.

15 Ibid.,

vol. ix, pp. 337-338.

16 Sir W. Scott, Tales of a Grandfather, 1st Series

(Philadelphia,

1834), Preface.

17 Gentleman’s 434-436.

Magazine (vol. xxvii, new series, London, 1847), pp.

2i8

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

the result of the impression made upon him by the titanic upheavals of the Napoleonic era.18

As an attorney, Turner

was frequently employed by the publisher, Murray, a fact which with his own inclinations and accomplishments made him at home in the literary circles of London. said to have belonged to the Godwinian set.19

His wife is

He was a long¬

standing friend of Robert Southey, with whom he corres¬ ponded, and a reviewer of historical works for the Quarterly in its earlier years.

With Southey, he represents the con¬

servative Romanticist group in historiography. Turner’s chief work was his History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805).

He had early become convinced that the

Anglo-Saxon period was treated too hastily and with little attention to original sources by the generality of writers and, in the prefaces to the first and second volumes of his own History, he pleaded the cause of early English history in significant words.

“ We roam the most distant oceans to

explore the manners of uncultivated savages, and even the philosopher reads, with interest, every description of their customs and transactions.

Why should he then despise the

first state and the improving progress of his Saxon ances¬ tors?

This nation exhibits the conversion of

ferocious

pirates, into a highly civilized, informed, and generous people —in a word, into ourselves.

Can it be frivolous to depict

the successive steps of this admirable change?

Amid this

nation, in the ninth century, a man arose who may be com¬ pared with the proudest names of antiquity without disgrac¬ ing them by his society.” 20

Britain had during her career

18 Sacred History of the World (New York, 1846), vol. i, pp. 14-15, 72; vol. iii, pp. 367-8. This late work, written for Turner’s son, contains several biographical items. 19 T. Constable, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 125-127. 20 History of the Anglo-Saxons (London, 1799-1805), vol. ii, pp. xi-xii. Turner enlarged and changed his History in later editions, and except for

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

219

gained glory in every quarter of the globe, in arms, in art, letters, commerce, and science.

“ Surely then the childhood

growth of this people cannot disgrace the curiosity of their descendants.” 21 In addition to this general appeal, Turner directed atten¬ tion to certain phases of early English history that seemed to call for more emphasis than was generally given.

Greater

consideration should be paid to the Anglo-Saxons before they crossed from the Continent: “because to contemplate the infancy of celebrated nations is among the most pleasing occupations of human curiosity; it is peculiarly important to us, the posterity of the Anglo-Saxons, to know as much as possible of our continental ancestors.” 22

The evidence of

the ancient Britons themselves, in their relations with the invading Saxons, should be consulted through the literature now being uncovered “ after a long oblivion disgraceful to our curiosity,” and public opinion should urge further ex¬ ploration of these treasures.

“ The Danish literati have

given, in this respect, an example to the world.

A collection

like Langebek's Scriptores Rerum Daniccirum medii aevi, partim hactenus inediti, should appear from every country; and until such efforts are made to rescue the relics of history from the destruction which has already consumed some, and is about to annihilate the rest, the literati of every country deserve to be

stigmatized

for their

fatal

indolence.”23

Moreover, said Turner, in seeking information on Ragnar Lodbrog, to which he had been led by reading Hugh Blair’s this and the four quotations immediately following', which are from the prefaces to the first and second volumes of the first edition, reference is made to the fifth edition (London, 1828) the last to appear in Turner's lifetime. 21 Ibid., vol. ii, p. xiii. 22 Ibid., vol. i, p. iv. 2" Ibid., vol. i, p. vi.

220

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), he discovered how valuable was the Northern literature for Anglo-Saxon

history and how

completely neglected

by

English students; “ it appeared impossible to study the English annals from Egbert to William the Conqueror with any precision or intelligence, unless the Northern literature was consulted and applied.” 24 The History of the Anglo-Saxons included a summary treatment of the British and Roman periods, of the Saxons before their arrival in Britain, and of the Northern peoples who later invaded England, followed by a large-scale survey of civilization to the Norman Conquest.

In addition to a

discussion of political, economic, social, intellectual, and religious history, Turner included analyses of poems and many texts and translations.

He avoided alike the super¬

ficial depreciation of Hume and the absurd reconstructions of Whitaker and the Celto-maniacs.

Rejecting Ossian he

nevertheless exploited the remains of Celtic poetry uncovered by Pughe, Evans, Williams, Jones, and others, the rich stores of the Cottonian manuscripts in the British Museum, which he was the first to use extensively, the Bayeux tapestry and other sources.

It is no wonder the work was received with

widespread favor and so long retained its popularity. Turner’s scholarship, however, suffered from serious de¬ fects, not all of which were excusable.

He was not the first

to bring Beowulf to public attention as he claimed to be, though he was the first to point out its significance for his¬ torical studies.

His account of the story of Beowulf con¬

tained many mistakes; and worse yet he failed to correct his mistakes in later editions or even to direct his readers to the more accurate accounts that had appeared.

Many of his

translations were faulty and his whole treatment was un-

24 Ibid.,

vol. ii, p. vii.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

221

critical.25 He found the origin of the jury among the AngloSaxons, and said he was convinced the Witenagemot was quite like a modern Parliament in its composition although he admitted the evidence was against such a belief.28 He had the common failing of ignorance of Continental research. This shortcoming, and his lack of criticism, were pointed out clearly by William Taylor of Norwich in a letter to Southey:27 He has the fault of all our antiquaries, to equivalue the noble and the rabble of authorities: he should cultivate a more aristo¬ cratic taste, and not count the dunce and the genius by the head; he will else incur the reputation of pedantry and not of erudition. He has another fault,—that of being what Porson calls behind¬ hand with his subject; Schlotzer’s Northern History had settled forty years ago many points about which he is at a loss. Although he stressed rather than concealed the ferocity of the barbarians, and ridiculed those who gave an imaginary illustrious descent to the Saxons,28 Turner was one of the early “ Germanists ” among students of English History. “ Our language, our government, and our laws,” he declared, “ display our Gothic ancestors in every part. They live, not merely in our annals and traditions, but in our civil institu¬ tions and perpetual discourse.” 29 Where Hume had con¬ cluded that the French element predominated in the English language Turner was anxious to show that it was “ prin23 C. B. Tinker, The Translations of Beowulf, A Critical Bibliography (New York, 1903), pp. 9-15. 26 On Turner’s treatment of the origins of English Government see H. J. Ford, Representative Government (New York, 1924), pp. 39-46. 2,7 J. W. Robberds, A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the late William Taylor of Norwich (London, 1843), vol. i, p. 470. Letter to R. Southey, August 27, 1803.

28 History of the Anglo-Saxons, 5th edition, vol. i, pp. 107-110. 29 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 188-189.

222

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

cipally Saxon.” 30

He believed also that the Germanic ele¬

ment in English life, indeed in European society as a whole, was responsible for many of its finest features.

He did not

go the length of trying to show that Roman and British ele¬ ments had been completely wiped out at the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, nor did he argue that Roman and British influences were necessarily bad; but in his emphasis on the German strain and in his partiality for the Saxons, while admitting their early barbarities, he prefigures the school that was to be so strong a generation or two later. This is clearly shown in his estimates of the late Roman Empire, the barbarian invasions, and Anglo-Saxon civiliza¬ tion.

He regarded the German migrations as a necessary

purgative of the decadent Roman society and was insistent that the Germans had not barbarized Europe;31 the Dark Age “ was their misfortune, not their fault.” 32

Too much

enthusiasm had been bestowed on classical civilization, wdiich at its best nurtured many superstitions and barbarous prac¬ tices, and in which the benefits of culture had been enjoyed only by the few while the many were as ignorant and uncared for as at any stage of history.

Moreover the Roman world

had passed its peak before the era of invasions.

There must

be stagnation, further decline, or “ some extensive revolu¬ tion ” to infuse new vigor into the social frame.

This the

Germans brought, and hence there should be an end to “ our dark and querulous descriptions ” of the period of their in30 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 440 and Appendix I.

Hume (History of Englaitd,

vol. i, pp. 259-260), speaks of “ that mixture of French which is at present to be found in the English tongue, and which composes the greatest and best part of our language.” 31History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. i, pp. 130, 251-252; vol. iii, pp. 2-5, 430. 32 History of England from the Norman Conquest to 1509 (London, 1814-1823), vol. i, p. 3791 after the first edition this work was entitled, History of England during the Middle Ages.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY vasions.33

Especially so because comparatively speaking the

Germans were not bloodthirsty in their attack, a fact proved, in his estimation, by Salvian’s statement that many Romans preferred life among the barbarians to the oppressions of the Roman Empire.

Many single wars of antiquity had been

attended by greater misery than was brought by the over¬ throw of the Western Empire. It will be seen, therefore, that even though Turner appears to have regarded the Saxons as about the fiercest, most un¬ civilized, of Germans, his angle of vision predisposed him to give a sympathetic picture of the centuries of their rule in England.

To be sure, he warned his readers against the

poetic dream of the Anglo-Saxon period as a kind of para¬ dise, fit home for the Anglo-Saxon freemen, •“ lord of the lion heart and eagle eye,” 34 but he had an obvious enthusiasm for their healthy, rough society.

If learning was at low

point the Anglo-Saxons were nevertheless equal to the rest of contemporary Europe and superior in certain respects to antiquity.

Many of their superstitions were really derived

from antiquity, while they also preserved much of value in the classical heritage, and in some respects made contributions of their own.

Bede, for example, “ collected and taught

more natural truths with fewer errors than any Roman book on the same subjects had accomplished.

Thus his work dis¬

plays an advance not a retrogradation of human knowledge.35 This estimate of Bede, which illustrates so well Turner’s predilection for the Saxons, has been pronounced an exag¬ geration by a modern authority on the history of science,36 and it would perhaps be difficult to sustain Turner in his 33 Ibid., vol. iii, p. 4. 34 History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. iii, p. 86. 35 Ibid., vol. iii, p. 43°86 Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1923), vol. i, p. 634.

224

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

belief that the Anglo-Saxon intellectuals progressed in many respects beyond the ancients, but the modern authority already referred to would probably agree with the general contention that much of the darkness of the “ Dark ” ages, in

England

and

elsewhere,

was

really

derived

from

antiquity.37 The present trend of anthropology would also bear out Turner in his view that the cultural backwardness of AngloSaxon England in comparison, let us say, with Mohammedan Spain, arose from lack of opportunity, not lack of talent. “ They had to fight for several generations to win their ter¬ ritorial possessions, and afterwards from their mutual inde¬ pendence, to defend themselves against each other.

The

whole frame of their society, and the main direction of their spirit and education, was essentially, because necessarily, warlike.” 38

In such a society intellectual pursuits could only

be obstacles to success in life, except for the clergy to whom some knowledge of Latin at least, was essential.

If not pre¬

eminent in literary and scientific pursuits, Turner maintained, the Anglo-Saxons achieved greatness along lines suitable to their

circumstances, especially

in

war

and

government.

They laid the foundations of England and deserved the last¬ ing regard of their descendants.

To arouse a “ patriotic

curiosity ” about their deeds was the main aim of Turner’s History and it was with pride that he declared in 1820, look¬ ing back upon his early labours, “ his favorite desire has been fulfilled—a taste for the history and remains of our Great Ancestors has revived, and is visibly increasing.” 89 37 Professor Thorndike says (ibid., vol. ii, p. 979) of the Middle Ages in general: “ They had to struggle against a huge burden of error and superstition which Greece and Rome and the Arabs handed down to them; yet they must try to assimilate what was of value in Aristotle, Galen, Pliny, Ptolemy, and the rest.” 88 History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. ii, p. 5. 39 Preface to the third edition, dated March, 1820, and reprinted in the fifth edition, pp. v-viii.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

225

This work on the Anglo-Saxons was followed in due course by a History of England from the Norman Conquest to I5°9 (1814-1823), a far less significant book.

Turner

did not have the same long-standing enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, his command of the materials was less, and there were more competitors.

Moreover, he was ill during

part of the time he was composing the volumes.40

Yet they

were well received and deserved to be, for they exhibited genuine scholarship and correct ideas of historical study. “ Modern criticism,” the author declared, “ averse alike to fable and to rhetoric, wishes history neither to defame nor to blazon; but to explore and narrate the simple truth, whereever it is penetrable, or attainable, unvarnished and untwisted, with no disingenuous suppression and without any political subserviency.

On this principle, the present history has

been attempted.” 41 He disclaimed any competition with Rapin-Thoyras, Hume, or Henry, but expressed a desire to incorporate materials they had ignored, and believed that “ standing on the vantage ground of the nineteenth century, some views might be taken of the great stream of time which has preceded, in parts more comprehensive, in parts more picturesque; and, on the whole, more just and faithful, than had hitherto been sketched.” 42

Most significantly he viewed

the Middle Ages not as a period of barbarism, but as “ that period which has been the least studied and the most negli¬ gently written; but within which our political relation, our religion, literature, language, manners, laws, and constitu¬ tion, have been chiefly formed.” 43 Some points in Turner’s organization and selection of 40 History of England from the Norman Conquest to 1509 (1814-1823), vol. iii, Preface. 41 Ibid., vol. iii, p. 398. 42 Ibid., vol. i, p. v. 43 Ibid., vol. ii, p. iii.

226

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

material were admirable, among them his chapters linking English with continental history, his elaborate discussion of literature, including vernacular poetry, of the development of the language, and of religion.

He continued to show

great interest in manners and customs, but he did not com¬ plete his design of giving a whole volume to economic and social history.

His appreciation of the Crusades included

respect for their motives as well as a recognition of their results, and he paid warm tribute to the work of the papacy, although a strong Protestant feeling is clearly evident. Some profoundly important points are missed.

For ex¬

ample, although his sketch of William the Conqueror’s reign touches upon the social revolution produced by the Norman Conquest it is mainly given up to William’s wars, while such matters as the Domesday Book and the Salisbury Oath are barely mentioned.44

It was a work based on good sources

and reflecting the new interest in medieval civilization for its own sake and not merely as an introduction to modern times; but it was in no sense a revelation of new materials such as the History of the Anglo-Saxons had been. Although the Modern History of England45 (1826-29) was regarded as a Protestant antidote to Lingard, and was certainly influenced by the religious controversies of the early nineteenth century, it was also in part the fruition of a long entertained desire to carry English history to 1603.46

In the

sixteenth century Turner was more than ever out of his proper field, but he still sought to write as far as possible from documents and contemporary sources, using later writ44 Ibid., vol. i, chap. iv. 45 This appeared in 2 parts quarto: (1) The History of the Reign of Henry the Eighth: comp-rising the political history of the commencement of the English Reformation; (2) The history of the reigns of Edward the Sixth, Mary and Elizabeth (London, 1826-29). 46 Ibid., vol. i, Preface.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

227

ers only when they were based on original materials no longer in existence.

He did not attempt, however, to write a com¬

plete history of the sixteenth century, but merely to throw light on dark places, and in accordance with this principle he did not give a full narrative of so important an event as the dissolution of the monasteries on the ground that it was already well known.

There was less said than formerly

about non-political matters, and political history itself was treated in an episodical, even perfunctory, manner. A brief summary of Turner’s most characteristic ideas of the sixteenth century may best give the measure of his book. He saw that Greek literature had been introduced into Italy “ above fifty years before the capture of Constantinople by the Turks,” 47 and that in any case the mere revival of class¬ ical literature could not account for the great change of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

He recognized that the

Reformation was far more than a political movement and that it could not be adequately explained by the “ passions ” of Luther.

Back of it lay political, economic, social, intellectual

and religious forces, complex in their nature and their con¬ sequences, coming to a head in the religious revolution, so that under the title “ Reformation,” in his view, one might include all the events of the century.

It was “ the greatest

concussion that human society has received, between the abruption of the Roman Empire and the late French Revo¬ lution.” 48

Luther was its creature as well as its leader and

without him it would as certainly have occurred.

Turner

gives, as we might expect, only the conventional Anglican view of Luther, recognizing his greatness but stressing his weaknesses.

He is, of course, very sure of the benefits of

the Reformation to England, but he recognized that the Prot¬ estants were intolerant like the Catholics. 47 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 3. 48 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 71.

Of the Reformers

228

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

under Edward VI he said: “ Their persecutions proved that they differed from their adversaries more in the verbal faith and in the external ceremony than in the spirit, the feeling, and the action.

But that dissimilarity cannot be great which

appears only in the arithmetical number of its victims.” 19 He was surprisingly kindly in his treatment of Mary, credit¬ ing her with a desire to avoid the persecution to which she was driven by her “ ecclesiastical instigators.” 50 Turner’s view of Henry VIII is of some interest because of its possible influence on Froude, who tells us he had read Turner carefully.51

The latter attempted to paint a more

favorable portrait than was common in the eighteenth cen¬ tury.

The real Henry, he said, was frank, honorable, bold,

a thoroughly good king if a little too much inclined to display. He was flattered and used by Wolsey, the villain of Turner’s piece, and the shock of discovering the duplicity of this min¬ ister in whom he fully trusted destroyed good King Henry’s confidence in everyone.

Meanwhile, the religious struggle

had coarsened English public life in the same way, though to a lesser degree, as the Marian and Sullan struggles coarsened the politics of Rome.

Both papal and anti-papal sides

resorted to doubtful devices, more arbitrary measures, Henry among the rest.

He lost his fine qualities and ended a tyrant.

There is something to be said for aspects of this reconstruc¬ tion.

Historians have often pointed out the contrast between

the young and the old King.

But Turner was much too

anxious to defend his hero.

As Hallam said,52 he went

“ upon the strange principle of exalting that tyrant’s reputa¬ tion at the expense of every one of his victims, to whatever 49 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 195. 50 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 247. 51J. A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects (New York, 1868-83), vol. iv, p. 166. 52 Constitutional History of England, vol. i, p. 32, note.

229

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

party they may have belonged,” even to the extent of defend¬ ing the attainder of Sir Thomas More. Turner’s treatment of history was affected not merely by his contact with literary Romanticism and his interest in re¬ search but also by his doctrine of the inevitability of human progress under Divine guidance.

He saw a steady tendency

towards progress in past history, though not every age was superior to its immediate predecessor, and was as convinced as any perfectibilist that the same progress would continue into the indefinite future through the agency of God.

To

some extent it is even true, as the writers of his obituary notice in the Gentleman s Magazine said, that “ the grand leading principle of all his historical works

[was]

that

minute providential agency, and actual superintending direc¬ tion of all affairs by the Almighty, which it was his delight to trace.” 53

From this religious idea he doubtless gained a

greater sense of the unity and the continuity of history, and it was perhaps also partly responsible for his willingness to consider each age in terms of its own possibilities and attain¬ ments, marking a certain stage in the revelation of God’s purpose, rather than constantly to be judging the past by the yardstick of eighteenth-century rationalism.

For him

history was a single process, an unfolding of human destiny from the Fall of Man to his own day, and he was often satis¬ fied to observe and describe this process without frequent judgments on the baseness of one culture or the excellence of another.

But if he was less of a judge than was fashion¬

able among rationalistic writers, he was no less a pedagogue, constantly drawing the appropriate moral lesson for his read¬ ers, an unfortunate tendency that grew stronger in his later years. The chief danger of theocratic conceptions of history is probably the proneness to refer particular events to direct 63 Gentleman’s Magazine (vol. xxviii, new series, London, 1847), p.435.

230

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

supernatural agency.

Although Turner criticizes medieval

thinkers for this fault (he also criticizes modern thinkers for the opposite fault of ascribing events solely to natural causes), he himself is not free from it.

He says, it is true,

that God intervenes directly only when secondary causes are insufficient to secure his ends, but examination reveals a sur¬ prising number as well as a curious assortment of instances where Divine intervention is postulated.

The list includes

the triumphs of the Arabs, Saxons, and Normans, the early success and ultimate failure of the Crusades, the training of Titus in Britain, the career of Lanfranc, the service in Latin, the Turkish conquests in the Balkans, and the escape of France from her sixteenth-century troubles.54 Among secondary

causes

Turner

national character and environment.

instanced

racial

or

It was characteristic

of eighteenth-century thought that he should regard environ¬ ment as more important generally than inborn traits, although in his observation on the part played by Government in pol¬ itical progress, this is not the case.

The passage, in this

respect, and because it reflects the tendency to a laissez-faire attitude, is worth quoting:55 The progress of political society is indeed always tending to ad¬ vance ; it only asks in general from its government the absence of all imposed impediments : let its own energies act unrestricted and unspoiled, and the general laws of human nature will impel it perpetually forward in its meliorating career. In spite of his religious zeal Turner had a good many affin¬ ities with the era of Enlightenment, sharing its confidence in

54 History

of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. i, pp. 83, 120-121; vol. ii, pp. 417-

418. History of England from the Norman Conquest to 1509, vol. i, pp. 61-62, 297-299, 401-402, 412, 472; vol. ii, pp. 19-20. Modern History of England, vol. i, pp. 240-241; vol. ii, p. 71.

55

History of England from the Norman Conquest to 1509, vol. i, p. 362.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

231

the intellect, its conviction of the intellectual supremacy of modern times, its humanitarian condemnation of war, intol¬ erance, and cruelty.56

In one of his attempts at poetry he

censured Wordsworth for having given “ feeling-thought¬ meaning and voice ” to inanimate nature, and for having taken his themes from lowly life: 57 But why the quaint in humble life select And mystic meanings in rude minds detect and counselled him to Waste not thy genius on a vulgar tale.68 When he praised Sir Walter Scott it was not, as we might expect, for have given a sense of the glamor of medieval times, but for kindling in his readers “ favourable impres¬ sions and recollections of the best sympathies, good prin¬ ciples, a spirit of rectitude and honor, and an increased desire for the reputation and advantage wdiich our most laudable sensibilities will most amply bestow.” 59

Assuming that this

passage makes sense, it hardly seems the sort of approval we should expect from one Romanticist to another. Yet Turner undoubtedly marks the beginning of a new era in

historiography.

His

abiding zeal

for

Icelandic and

Anglo-Saxon studies, his attitude towards primitive peoples, and his religious interpretation of history are the clearest examples of this.

His appreciation of Irish “ sensibility,” of

56 History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. i, pp. 32, 178, 456-7; vol. ii, pp. 8, 256.

History of England from the Norman Conquest to 1509, vol. i, pp.

325, 336, 37i; vol. ii, p. 36; vol. iii, pp. 234, 300, 374.

The Modern His¬ tory of England (London, 1826-29), vol. ii, pp. 138, 154, note 3, 180. 57 Prolusions on the present greatness of Britain; on modern poetry;

and on the present aspect of the World (London, 1819), p. 115. 59 Ibid., p. 117.

59 The History of England during the Middle Ages (3rd ed., London, 1830), vol. v, p. 254.

232

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

Russian “ originality of character, institutions, and political position,” his generous enthusiasm for the pleasing qualities of different peoples are characteristically Romanticist; while his vigorous advocacy of the collection and publication of the sources of national history, his generalized pride in all things English, and incidental expressions of opinion like his criti¬ cism of the evils of the factory system and his approval of unemployment agencies, all show what a watershed of opinion the years around 1800 were.60

Perhaps we can best describe

Turner’s place by saying that in the motivation of his studies, in his choice of subject, and to a large extent in his manner of treatment, he belongs to the nineteenth rather than to the eighteenth century. It is nevertheless easy to account for Turner’s disappear¬ ance from favor.

He never showed that command of his

material characteristic of Gibbon or Hallam.

Nor did he

realize the importance of the history of institutions with which scholars have become increasingly concerned.

The

constitutional parts of his book were negligible, and he so completely misunderstood the sixteenth century as to make the sovereign responsible to his “ cabinet.” 61

His sense of

proportion was so faulty that he gave as much attention to Richard III as to Henry VII.62

Moreover success made him

self-conscious and his style, never good, grew too ambitious 60 Turner’s views on the factory system are to be found in his late work The Sacred History of the World (New York, 1846), vol. iii, pp. 423-425.

With reference to Turner’s connection with Romanticism,

we may add that he acknowledged his debt to Horne Tooke (History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. ii, p. 420) and quoted Herder shortly after the appearance (1800)

of the English translation of the Outlines of the

Philosophy of the History of Man. History of the Anglo-Saxons (first edition, London, 1799-1805), vol. ii, p. 193, note 14. 61 Modern History of England, vol. i, p. 168.

62 Turner

seems to have been rather fond of Richard III and devoted

one of his poems (Richard III, A Poem, London, 1845) to giving at more correct popular idea of that monarch.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

as time went on.

233

He is capable of referring to salt placed

in a captive’s wounds as “ the saline stimulant,” while spring is for him “ the vernal season.” 63

Sometimes his gaucher-

ies are beyond description, for what shall we say of a man who contrasts the ostentation of Wolsey with the modesty of God as revealed in creation,64 and solemnly compares the English Parliament to a “ superintending Providence.” 65 Turner’s works were on the whole very well received, but adverse comment grew with the later volumes.

Critics were

especially annoyed by the elaborate over-style and pious mor¬ alizing so much more noticeable than earlier.

One reviewer

went so far as to doubt if ten persons in the whole kingdom had read through the seven hundred quarto pages on Henry VIII.66

But none the less Turner was long esteemed and in¬

fluential.

Southey thought he had written the best history

of the day, while Scott, Hallam, and Prescott spoke of him with respect.67

He was read carefully by Froude, is thought

to have influenced Tennyson, and was certainly one element in producing a new treatment of the sources of national history.68

Though not a great historian, nor even a first-

class one, he was by no means a negligible figure.

63 History

of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. i, p. 515.

Modern History of

England, vol. i, p. 507.

64 Modern 65 History

History of England, vol. i, pp. 142-143. of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. iii, p. 179.

68 See the criticisms quoted in Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature (London, 1859-71). 67 For Southey and Scott and Turner see the Dictionary of National Biography article.

Hallam speaks respectfully of Turner in his own

Middle Ages, vol. iii, p. 471, note, and p. 482, note, among other places. Prescott refers to “the circumspect and conscientious Sharon Turner” in his Biographical and Critical Miscellanies (London, 1845), p. 89. 68 On Froude’s reading of Turner, see supra, note 51.

For an instance

of the use of Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons, by Tennyson see Notes and Queries, No. 189 (Ninth Series, London, August 10, 1901), pp. 117-118.

Tennyson apparently derived the epithet “the truth-teller”

234

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

With Turner it is natural to associate his close friend Robert Southey.

One thinks of Southey as a poet whom

few read today, but he was also a voluminous writer of his¬ tories and expected to be remembered mainly as a historian, especially as the historian of Portugal.09

It is one of the

ironies of a tragic career, that this History of Portugal, the dream of Southey’s youth, his labor of love through the years of maturity and the last resource of his age, was never com¬ pleted; and equally ironical that of the histories he did write, those

from

which

he

confidently

expected

immortality

gather dust on the shelves of the larger libraries, while the others, such as his Nelson and Wesley, are perhaps more frequently read for their style than their matter. The idea of a History of Portugal dated back to Southey’s first visit to that country; thereafter it is mentioned fre¬ quently in his letters and appears in the very last one given in the Warter collection.70

It was to be a massive work,

comparable to the pyramids in solidity and endurance, and like a great palace in extent and beauty.

Equal to Gibbon in

scholarship, it was to be superior in the spirit and correctness for Alfred from Turner.

Stephens says in his Life of Freeman (1895),

p. 114, that “To Sharon Turner belongs the credit of having awakened some interest in these neglected materials [the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts] which led to an inquiry being made about the matter in Parliament in 1800, and the appointment of a Commission ‘ to methodize, regulate, and digest the records ’ ”; but I do not know upon what evidence so strong a statement may be rested. 69 C. C. Southey (ed.), Life and Correspondence of the late Robert Southey (London, 1849-50), vol. iv, p. iii; vol. vi, p. 182. On Southey see also supra, pp. 177-181. 70 For references to the History of Portugal, upon which the material of the next thiee paragraphs is based, see J. W. Robberds, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 342, 429; vol. ii, pp. 76-77. J. W. Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey (London, 1856), vol. i, pp. 99-100, 115-116, 132I35, 140, 145 et seq., 159-160, 208-209, 224, 233, 239, 246-247, 337, 364, 406; vol. ii, p. 96; vol. iii, pp. 174, 325-326; vol. iv, pp. 220, 574-575.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

235

of its philosophical and religious outlook.

Southey hoped

to secure from it an income large enough to free him from the necessity of hackwork, but he never forgot that he was building for the ages, and was ready without hesitation to sacrifice immediate rewards for the sake of eternal fame. The History was to be divided into three parts, consisting of separate accounts of Portugal and her African possessions, her Asiatic conquests, and Brazil.

At first Southey thought

he could complete the work in three, possibly four, quartos, but his scale grew larger and the one part he did produce, the History of Brazil, was itself published in three giant quartos.

One further volume, on the domestic history of

Portugal, seems to have been finished and rejected by Long¬ mans ; it has now been lost. Southey’s letters tell us a good deal about this projected work.

He planned to pass over the “ Gothic ” ages in sum¬

mary fashion, dealing with their manners rather than politi¬ cal history, and to place his emphasis on the glorious days of discovery and empire.

For the later period of Portugese

history he expresses small respect and to it would probably have paid slight attention.

The narrative was to be based, he

said, on first hand sources and each volume was to have a critical discussion of authorities.

On one occasion, indeed,

at an early stage in his work, Southey announced an inten¬ tion of reading all the chroniclers of Spain and Portugal; but the citations in his letters show how frequently he was working at secondary accounts.

Finally, his History of

Portugal was to include a good deal about Spain also since Southey regarded the two peoples as morally and intellectually one. After Southey had been working at his Portugal for some twenty years his friends began to urge him to publish a part of what he had done, suggesting around 1806 the section on Brazil, a country in which public interest had been aroused

236

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

by the removal of the royal family thereto.

Accordingly,

the History of Brazil was pushed to completion and appeared in three volumes, 1810-19.

Southey regarded it as his finest

achievement and there is much to be said for this opinion. It was a work of great labor and solid learning, based in large part on an independent study of manuscripts.

It included

accounts of the discoveries, of the manners and customs of savage tribes, of the European colonists, the work of the missionaries, especially the Jesuits in Paraguay, the progress of Brazil and a description of its state at the opening of the nineteenth century.

This last enormous chapter on the state

of Brazil in 1809 is a most impressive and interesting sum¬ mary.71

Southey had never visited South America, but his

enthusiasm for the continent was unbounded,72 his industry colossal, and no work comparable to this in scope and scholar¬ ship had yet appeared in English at least.73 Unfortunately not all the work dealt with social history and in spite of the clear, vigorous style of which Southey was master one grows wearied by the tremendous mass of material often relating to unimportant topics not fully sub¬ ordinate to any great design.

Southey himself admitted that

the connection in his history was frequently only chronologi¬ cal and anticipated but a moderate appreciation from his readers.

A less excusable defect was his “ rigid and blind

anti-Romanism ” 74 which crops out with disconcerting regu¬ larity and is naturally a great drawback in a history of a i1 History of Brasil (London, 1810-1819), vol. iii, pp. 696-879.

72 Ibid,.,

vol. i, p. 330.

73 There had been several works describing voyages, but practically no attention to Brazilian history in English.

I do not know of any work

between Charles Brockwell’s Natural and Political History of Portugal ....to which is added, The History of Brasil... (London, 1726) Andrew Grant’s slight History of Brasil (London, 1809). 74 O. Elton, Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830, vol. ii, p. 11.

and

Catboi'^

tbeCaP i.Parafti

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

Catholic country.

237

At the same time he pays high tribute to

the Catholic missionaries and his picture of the Jesuit society in Paraguay marks a high point.75

He is a frank admirer of

that order, declaring that they were actuated solely by the highest motives of service to God and their fellow men in South America.76

They were the only protectors of the

natives against rapacious and dishonest lay officials. Their expulsion was a most unwise and iniquitous though wellintentioned measure in Southey’s eyes, and he says so in no uncertain terms.

He could properly pride himself on the

spirit in which he had handled this important part of his task. The attention given to savage life is a link between Southey’s poetic interests and his History of Brazil.

But

when dealing with primitive peoples as they actually exist he shows none of that tendency to idealization which is found in a poem like the Tale of Paraguay.

It has been well said

that Southey knew too much about savages to make “ noble savages ” out of them.77

All we can learn from such people,

he explains, is a knowledge of herbs and the habits of life by which they survive in climates strange to us.

Nor does he

idealize the European settlers any more than the native in¬ habitants.

In fact he apologizes for his subject as one which

will arouse disgust and anger more often than exalted senti¬ ments.

“ I have to speak of savages so barbarous that little

sympathy can be felt for any sufferings which they endured, and of colonists in whose triumphs no joy will be taken, because they added avarice to barbarity; . . . ignoble men, carrying on an obscure warfare, the consequences of which have been greater than were produced by the conquests of Alexander or Charlemagne, and will be far more lasting.” 78 75 History of Brasil, vol. ii, pp. 330-380. 76 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 361. 77 H. N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage (New York, 1928), p. 209. 78 History of Brasil, vol. i, pp. 1-2.

238

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

It is, therefore, the importance of Brazilian history, rather than anything splendid about it, upon which Southey throws emphasis.

But that his interest was keen is obvious when

one thinks of the unflagging zeal with which he worked on through 2300 quarto pages. From Brazil, Southey turned to religious history, a field in which he produced two works of which some mention will be made.

For the student of literature, the Life of Wesley

(1820) is interesting as a vivid biography; for the historian it is significant because one of the first attempts to place Wesley and the rise of Methodism in historical perspective as phenomena to be explained by the course of English his¬ tory and worthy of investigation quite apart from one’s per¬ sonal attitude.

It is no small part of Southey’s claim to

remembrance as an historian that he grasped this essential fact.

He placed Wesley in the line of the leaders of “ great

moral and intellectual revolutions,” like St. Francis of Assisi, Luther, Loyola, and Voltaire.

“ The Emperor Charles V,

and his rival of France, appear at this day infinitely insig¬ nificant, if we compare them with Luther and Loyola; and there may come a time when the name of Wesley will be more generally known, and in remoter regions of the globe, than that of Frederick or of Catherine.” 79 Such a sentence, when compared with Robertson’s estimate of the sixteenth century, is a measure of the transformation of historical outlook.

So is Southey’s deeper sense of the

manner in which the “ great moral and political revolutions ” find their explanation in the long continuing drift of history rather than in the appearance of great leaders.

Like Turner,

he believed that leaders were men who knew how to respond to conditions which they did not themselves create.

79 The Life of Wesley; and the rise and progress of Methodism (London, 1820), vol. i, p. 3.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

239

But in all stirring seasons, when any great changes are to be operated, either in the sphere of human knowedge or of human actions, agents enough are ready to appear; and those men who become for posterity the great land marks of their age, receive their bias from the times in which they live, and the circum¬ stances in which they are placed, before they themselves give the directing impulse. It is apparent that though the Wesleys should never have existed, Whitefield would have given birth to Methodism.80 In a significant phrase, Southey called the Methodists “ a distinct people, an imperium in imperio.” 81

He traced their

rise directly to the depressed and abandoned state of the English masses—that other nation so often commented on by observers—who had been Catholic in the Middle Ages, Protestant since the Reformation, but never more than nominally Christian because no one had given adequate atten¬ tion to their lot.

Abandoned by the Established Church they

remained sunk in vice and misery until Wesley came to them. He had done much to work a moral revolution among them, and had certainly awakened them into life with consequences that no one could foresee, but sure to be profound in the long run. It must not be supposed, of course, that Southey was a Methodist sympathiser.

Part of the stress he laid on the

probable significance in history of Wesley’s work arose from his fear of the political consequences, the stimulus to revo¬ lution, of encouraging the habit of association among the common people.

Although he admitted that Wesley had in¬

sisted on civil loyalty, he regarded the Established Church as essential to the state and was apt to confuse adherence to the one with loyalty to the other.

In his eyes, religious dis¬

sent was near allied to political dissent, and in any case likely 80 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 153-15481 Ibid., vol. i, p. 1.

240

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

to lead to unbelief.

Nothing could be more alien to his tem¬

perament than “ enthusiasm ” in religion.

He could see that

complex forces must have led to a moral revolution like the Reformation or the rise of Methodism, but he could not understand the complexities of the inner spiritual life or the experience of conversion in a man like Wesley.

He ex¬

plained such phenomena by physical causes—“ the state of the pulse or the stomach ”—and at first gave “ ambition ” as the key to Wesley’s career, although he withdrew this charge when pressed by critics.82 The Brazil and the Life of Wesley are Southey’s chief claims to the title of historian.

The Book of the Church

(1824) was really a part of his campaign against political and social unrest.

A rapid survey of Anglican Church his¬

tory, it showed a strong bias against Roman Catholics and 'Puritans.

Southey sought to recall his countrymen to their

allegiance to the Establishment by showing the temporal and spiritual blessings they had derived from it.

He loved the

Anglican Church as a truly English product and as the guard¬ ian of the Constitution. We owe to it our moral and intellectual character as a nation; much of our private happiness, much of our private strength. Whatever should weaken it, would in the same degree injure the common weal; whatever should overthrow it, would in sure and immediate consequence bring down the goodly fabric of that Constitution, whereof it is a constituent and necessary part. If the friends of the Constitution understand this as clearly as 82 See the Introduction to M. H. Fitzgerald’s edition of the Life of Wesley (Oxford, 1925), vol. i, pp. ix-xi.

R. Watson’s Observations on

Southey’s “Life of Wesley ” (1820) seems to me a better criticism than Mr. Fitzgerald will allow {op. cit., vol. i, p. viii).

Watson, a Methodist

clergyman, tried to impale Southey, a devout Anglican, on the horns of a dilemma by demonstrating that the natural causes used to explain away the spiritual phenomena of Wesley’s life and of Methodism might with equal validity be used against all branches of Christianity.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

241

its enemies, and act upon it as consistently and as actively, then will the Church and State be safe, and with them the liberty and the prosperity of our country.83 This passage reflects the attitude with which Southey approached not only tire history of England, but history in general.

His bias against Roman Catholicism was funda¬

mental and it is no small tribute to the strength of his his¬ torical sense that in spite of this bias he could appreciate as fully as he did the services of Roman Catholicism in history, of the monasteries in the Middle Ages and the Jesuits in Paraguay especially.

But it was a poor feeling with which

to undertake Church History and we are not surprised at the violent controversy into which the Book of the Church plunged its author.

Nor does this attitude make us regret the failure

to carry through his project for a history of the Monastic Orders.

Even if he had paid tribute to their services in

civilizing Europe, there would probably have been a dispro¬ portionate emphasis on abuses, vice and corruption. Enough has now been said to enable us to arrive at a gen¬ eral estimate of Southey as an historian.

The History of

Portugal, “ my great History ”, as Southey fondly designated it, would undoubtedly have been of considerable importance; but it seems clear that in history as in poetry Southey would never have risen to the stature of greatness.

Full of im¬

pressive schemes and noble ideals, as he was, there were nevertheless basic weaknesses in his scholarship and methods. One of these was the rapidity with which he worked, a facility that made it possible for him to support a large family by the pen, but that went beyond the speed at which his mind was able to function adequately in criticism of his own pro¬ duction.

It was not only economic necessity that made him

produce so much; he was by nature a writer rather than a 83 The Book of the Church (London, 1824), vol. ii, p. 528.

242

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

thinker or scholar, and his inclination was to turn every scrap of information, every idea, into an article or book. He himself saw how different Coleridge was in this respect, and was inclined to be impatient of his friend’s lack of pro¬ duction, little realizing how differently posterity would rate their genius.

Give Coleridge an idea and he would walk

about ruminating on it and dreaming of it until the alchemy of his mind had transformed it into something far richer than the crude ore with which he began.

In the meantime,

Southey would have made a book, full of force and crystalclear, but as likely as not with little indication of the deeper problems involved in the subject.

Moreover, perhaps be¬

cause of the habit of writing for the reviews at so much a sheet, he was too discursive, too disinclined to omit.

He

confused great history with large histories and, though he could do a neat little life of Nelson, whenever he thought he was writing one of his monuments for posterity he worked in quartos. Southey was a man of wide reading rather than a scholar. He had neither the time nor the temperament for the close study which Gibbon bestowed on his subject, nor is it surpris¬ ing that he did not welcome the critical methods of Germany when they began to influence England at the end of his life.84 His work suffered also from a love of seclusion and country life which conflicted with his ambition to write a great treatise on Portugal.

In spite of the excellence of the col-

84 He wrote to Warter, 25 May 1831: “ I have been reading the trans¬ lation of

Muller’s ‘ Dorians

Niebuhr’s ‘ Roman History.’

and find in it the same faults as

in

The writers of that school consider history

as fable, or fable as history, just as it may suit their present purpose, and thus they make dangerous use of their great learning.

They have also

the grievous fault of introducing into their text what ought to be thrown into notes, or appended in dissertations,—writing history with as little method or regard to proportion as if they were writing reviews.” Warter, op. cit., vol. iv, pp. 219-220.

J. W.

:

-

.

■

'

.

MB

.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

243

lection at Southey’s disposal, his enterprise would involve constant reference to the large libraries—the British Mu¬ seum, Lord Holland’s Spanish collection, the libraries at Lisbon.

Now Southey worked manfully at the manuscripts

while living in Portugal and he always hoped to return.

He

also wished to take advantage of the British Museum and of Lord Holland’s invitation to make use of his collection, and on several occasions he planned to move near London, but something always intervened and he remained at Keswick, isolated in the Cumberland Hills.

When he made sorties to

London, the time was taken up with visits to friends; he talks of consulting manuscripts on these occasions as if it were the play of an afternoon.

The result was that although

Southey thought himself the greatest authority on Portugal outside that country itself, he was really surpassed by several Germans who were applying scientific methods in their studies.85

His histories are for the most part superseded

without having served even as building material, because the bricks with which modern scholarship has been erected were themselves

made

by different

processes

from

those

he

employed. It is evident also that Southey saw history in too sharp outline.

He must have been one of the most opinionated

men of his day, a fact of prime importance in his manner of narrating past events.

His antipathy for the French, Roman

Catholicism, reformers and the industrial system, verged on phobia.

Some of these fears came from his experience in

Portugal and from the French Revolution, but their basic explanation, Professor Haller has suggested, is psychologi85 Felix Walter, La Litterature Portugaise en Angleterre a I’epoque romantique (Paris, 1927), pp. 65-66. Professor William Haller points out also that Southey’s oriental learning, though considerable, was not nearly as extensive as it purported to be.

The Early Life of Robert

Southey (New York, 1917), PP- 253-264, esp. 258-259.

244

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

cal.86

The sorrows of his life—sickness, loss of friends and

relatives—made him desire above all else a security he could find only in the continuing institutions of his country and in a religious faith.

At the same time developing industrialism

and democratic ideas menaced his life in the country, sur¬ rounded by his family.

He fought with all his power every¬

thing that threatened the security he found in established in¬ stitutions and in the old ways of living.

Nor could he avoid

using his histories as weapons in this struggle.

He was also

drawn to history because he found in the past, in the study of huge folios and long dead chroniclers, much of the peace he could not get in contemplating the shifting scene of the present.

In this latter respect, his love of history was typic-*

ally romantic in character.

If we take Southey’s histories

as a group we find a clear example of how such romanticist love of the past became merged with religious zeal, political partisanship, and nationalist feelings.

To the student of the

art and manner of writing history he is, like his friend Turner, a very significant figure. In 1807 was published the inaugural lecture delivered by the Reverend James Ingram as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, an interesting reflection of the new zeal for AngloSaxon history.

“ The most valuable part of the laws, the

constitution, and the religion of England,” Ingram main¬ tained,87 “ is undoubtedly built on a Saxon foundation . . . my purpose will be sufficiently answered, and my labours

86 Ibid.,

p. 305.

Lingard found Southey “ timid in the extreme ” on an

occasion when both were giving testimony in a law case.

M. Haile and

E. Bonney, Life and Letters of John Lingard, 1771-1851 (London, 1911), p. 254.

Does this explain Southey’s tendency towards bluster in print?

On Southey’s opposition to industrialism see W. Haller, “ Southey’s Later Radicalism,” Publications of the Modern Language America (vol. xxxvii, 1922, no. 2), pp. 281-292.

Association

of

87 James Ingram, Inaugural Lecture on the Utility of Anglo-Saxon Literature (Oxford, 1807), pp. iv-vi.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

245

abundantly rewarded, if I contribute in the smallest degree to excite attention to these valuable monuments of our na¬ tional history [contained in Saxon literature], hitherto too much neglected or misunderstood, which may not only be subjects of curiosity to an antiquary, but may also afford interest and amusement to the statesman, the patriot, and the scholar.”

In this appeal based on patriotic grounds, com¬

bined with his high approval of the project for better care of the public records, Ingram pointed the direction English historical studies were henceforth to take.

He himself was

one of the outstanding Anglo-Saxon students between Turner and Kemble, his chief claim to remembrance being an edition of the Saxon Chronicle issued in 1823.88

With his name we

may associate that of another Oxford professor, John Josias Conybeare, whose contributions to Archaeologia, beginning in 1811, were a stimulus to Anglo-Saxon research, though mainly on the side of letters rather than history.89 In this field belongs also Samuel Heywood’s A Disserta¬ tion upon the Distinctions in Society and Ranks of the People, under the Anglo-Saxon Governments (1818), con¬ taining much detail on English society about the time of the Norman Conquest.

Hey wood knew no Anglo-Saxon, but

used as his chief authorities Domesday Book, the Saxon Chronicle, and Wilkins’ Anglo-Saxon Laws, as well as some manuscripts in Latin.90

Notwithstanding this reliance on

Latin sources, Gross still regarded Heywood’s book as use¬ ful.91

But it was never reprinted nor did Heywood execute

his plan for a large treatise on Anglo-Saxon tenures. 88 James Ingram (ed.), The Saxon Chronicle with an English trans¬ lation and notes ... (London, 1823). 89 H. R. Steeves, Learned Societies and English Literary Scholarship (New York 1913), p. 120.

90 A

Dissertation upon the Distinction in Society ... under the Anglo-

Saxon Governments (London, 1818), pp. lv-lvii. 91 C. Gross, op. cit. (2nd ed., 1915), p. 306.

246

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

Thomas Dudley Fosbroke, while clergyman by profession, devoted most of his time to antiquarian pursuits. His studies, which are said to have extended to eight or nine hours a day, included the Anglo-Saxon language.92 His British Monachism (1802) comprised a survey of the prin¬ ciples and history of monasticism in England, and a descrip¬ tion of the life of the monks, including an account of their buildings and organization. While declining “ to convert the work into a Homily, by superannuated confutations of Popery,” 93 Fosbroke was unfavorable to monasticism, Cath¬ olicism, and medieval civilization in general. The book, how¬ ever, played some part in popularizing knowledge of the Middle Ages. Fosbroke’s later writings included his Ency¬ clopaedia of Antiquities (1824), A Treatise on the Arts, Manufactures, Manners and Institutions of the Greeks and Romans (1830), and a History of the City of Gloucester (1819). Although William Godwin did some work among the records94 in preparing his Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803), he did not claim to be more than a novice in the field and critics have judged him severely.95 The book was indeed marred by defects of several kinds. It was a huge, rambling sort of structure. The survey of civilization in Chaucer’s day and the estimates of the Middle Ages in general were 92 See the Memoir prefixed to the third edition (London, 1843) of British Monachism.

93 Ibid., p. vii. 94 Life of Chaucer

(2nd ed., London, 1804), vol. i, pp. viii, xii; vol. ii, p. 97, note and the extracts from records and other sources given in the Appendix. Also C. K. Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Con¬ temporaries (London, 1876), vol. ii, p. 97. On Godwin see also supra, pp. 204-207. 95 For material on the reputation of Godwin’s Chaucer, see E. P. Hammond, Chaucer, a Bibliographical Manual (New York, 1908), pp. 38-39, 207.

247

ROMANTICIST HISTORY

extended beyond reason.

There are long stretches where

Chaucer seems forgotten.

Godwin also spent too much

energy in controverting Tyrwhitt, the merits of whose edition of the Canterbury Tales (1775-1778) were not as fully rec¬ ognized then as now. sophical

reformer

and

Sometimes, too, Godwin the philo¬ censor

of

society

supplants

the

biographer. Nevertheless, this book had a large measure of success and still has interesting features as a mirror of historical opinion. Godwin protested against the study of antiquities by men of “ cold tempers and sterile imaginations.” 90

He hoped “ to

carry the workings of fancy and the spirit of philosophy into the investigation of ages past.” 97

Rebelling against the

taste, less prevalent in his own than in an earlier day, that preferred Dryden and Pope to Chaucer and Shakespeare, he wished to restore Chaucer to popular esteem, to send his readers back “ to study the language of our ancestors ... a study at least as improving as that of the languages of Greece and Rome.” 98

He liked to dwell on the early days of Eng¬

lish history, to speak of “ the good old people of England, the peasant in the midst of his family, the hospitable, wellhumoured and

open-hearted country-gentleman, and the

baron surrounded by his vassals. . . .” 99

He saw the age

of Chaucer through the spectacles of Romanticism,100 and could even speak of “ the peculiar beauty of the Romish religion.” 101

Such expressions from a man like Godwin are

very significant.102

96 Life

of Chaucer, vol. i, p. ix.

97 Ibid., vol. i, p. xi. 98 Ibid., vol. i, pp. v-vi. 99 Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 254-255.

Cf. vol. ii, p. 121; vol. iii, p. 208.

100 Ibid., vol. iv, p. 167. 101 Ibid, vol. i, p. 69. 102 Of course there are many remarks depreciatory of the Middle Ages as well.

Ibid., vol. i, pp. 28, 50, 272, 284.

248

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

Scottish medieval studies were aided by George Chalmers’ Caledonia: or an account historical and topographic, of North Britain; from the most ancient to the present times . . . which appeared in unfinished form in three volumes between 1807 and 1824.

How Chalmers’ interests were distributed

may be judged from the fact that in the first volume he alloted more than 800 pages to Scottish history from 80 A. D. to 1306 A. D. and concluded with only 70 pages on subsequent times.

The second and third volumes were given

up to topographical history, each shire being considered in eight sections: its name; situation and extent; natural ob¬ jects ; antiquities; establishment as a shire; civil history; agri¬ culture, manufactures and trade; and ecclesiastical history. The work belongs to the field of antiquities rather than his¬ tory, but it emphasized the desirability of departing from old tastes in historical study and especially urged the importance and fascination of the Middle Ages, a period “ so crowded with changes and so varied with novelties.” 103

It is symp¬

tomatic that Chalmers was not only conscious of the services to civilization of the monks but seems not to have felt called upon to express contempt for the institution of monasticism.104

He was resentful of Robertson’s sneer at the “ in¬

dustry and credulity of antiquaries,” and sharply criticized him for pronouncing the period of Scottish origins a realm of pure fable and for having declared that nothing before the end of the thirteenth century merited particular inquiry. Although Chalmers amassed much information of service to later students, he was cocksure 105 and uncritical, and ac¬ cordingly fell into many mistakes.

He accepted both Ossian

and the De Situ Britanniae as genuine, besides being exces103 G. Chalmers, Caledonia... (London, 1807-24), vol. i, p. ix. 104 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 310, 318 et scq., 782-3, 785, 804.

105 Ibid.,

p. 418.

vol. i, pp. v, ix and his letter in T. Constable, op. cit., vol. i,

ROMANTICIST HISTORY sively Celticist in outlook.

249

Thus “ where John Pinkerton

could find nothing but Gothic and the Goths, George Chal¬ mers was equally unable to see anything but Welsh and the Cymry.” 106

His attitude towards Robertson passed the

bounds of a decent difference of opinion and became a per¬ sonal antipathy.

Chalmers was one of the hard-hitting tribe

of antiquaries to which Pinkerton and Ritson belonged.

But

like them, too, he was a man of erudition and ability. Among Chalmers’ lesser works the earlier Political Annals of the present United Colonies from their Settlement to the Peace of 1763 (1780) takes first place.

Though excessively

British and Tory in outlook it was based on state documents not generally available.107

It stimulated Americans both to

retell the story from their own point of view and, for this purpose, to collect and use the materials available in their own country.108

The Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, drawn from

the State Papers, with six subsidiary memoirs (1818) was of value chiefly for the subordinate figures treated therein. At the opening of the last century the fame of John Knox stood at a low level.

In the words of the Edinburgh Re¬

view 109 he was generally regarded as a “ fierce and gloomy bigot ” a view not unnatural after the Laodicean praise of Robertson110 Hume.111

and

the

acrimonious

characterization

of

That this did not continue to be the estimate of

the reading public was largely the work of the Reverend Thomas McCrie, an historian who may be placed beside Turner, Southey and Roscoe in the little group holding the 108 W. F. Skene, op. cit., p. 19.

107 G.

Davies, op. cit., p. 362.

J. S. Bassett, The Middle Group of

American Historians (New York, 1917), PP- 44-45108 Bassett, loc. cit. 109 Edinburgh Review (vol. xx, July, 1812), pp. 3-4. 119 Works (London, 1840), vol. ii, pp. 36-37. 111 History of England, vol. v, p. 26.

250

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

stage before Hallam.112

The Life of John Knox, contain¬

ing Illustrations of the History of the Reformation in Scot¬ land was issued first in 1811 and then, revised and enlarged, in 1813.

Its success was rapid and it may still be regarded

as a standard biography.113 without merit.

This high place was not won

McCrie was the first to make a thorough

study of the letters of Knox which he quoted frequently in text and appendix,114 and to explore other essential sources like church registers.

He did not lose sight of the movement

in portraying the man with the result that his book was really a history of the Reformation in Scotland until the death of Knox in 1572, rather than merely the biography of one of its leaders, albeit the most important.

Nor was he without

discrimination in estimate of the national hero.

He admitted

Knox’s lack of amiability and, while asserting his claim to a place among the great Reformers, placed him definitely below Luther, Calvin and Zwingli.115 While this sense of discrimination is one of McCrie’s best qualities, he was at the same time intensely prejudiced in certain of his views.

He gibed at the Catholics and ar¬

raigned the English religious settlement.116

His contempt

for the antiquarians with their love of Gothic remains scarcely 112 On the growth of respect for Knox’s memory, especially in Scotland, see Thomas McCrie, Life of Thomas McCrie, D. D. author of John Knox... (Philadelphia, 1842), pp. 171-172. 113 Sixth English edition, 1842; German translation, 1835.

1817;

Spanish,

“ As the expression of a special view of Knox that biography, alike

by its learning and ability, must remain one of the standard books in the language.”

P. Hume Brown, John Knox, A Biography (London, 1895),

vol. i, p. x.

The recent Guide to Historical Literature

(ed. G. M.

Dutcher and others, New York, 1931), p. 555, lists McCrie’s Knox among biographies “ of greater value for the general reader.”

114 Life

of Knox (4th edition, 1818), vol. ii, pp. 367-469.

115 Ibid.,

vol. ii, pp. 260-261.

116 Ibid.,

vol. i, pp. 44, 45, 69.

ROMANTICIST HISTORY knew any bounds.

-251

His defence of the destruction of Roman

Catholic art by the super-heated zeal of the Reformers must certainly

be

called

benighted.117

He

was,

as

Hallam

remarked with customary aptness of characterization, a presbyterian Hildebrand.118

Everything he wrote was marred

by this intense prejudice, made more obnoxious by a liberal use of his considerable gifts of sarcasm.119

This was a very

different sort of clergyman-historian from the temperate Robertson; and the difference reflects the growth of piety and national feeling that intervened between the two men.

One

of its results was to make Robertson unpopular in the circles where McCrie was rated most highly.120 McCrie never realized his desire to write a history of the Reformation after Knox; but The Life of Andrew Melville (1819) treated a significant phase of that subject inasmuch as Melville (1545-1622) was one of Knox’s chief successors. This work also is still in use.121

McCrie prepared several

shorter biographical studies, later collected in his Miscellane¬ ous Writings (1841), and completed but did not print part of a life of Calvin.122

He broke new ground with two small

books in which he treated of the Evangelical movement in Italy and Spain at the time of the Reformation.123

In addi-

117 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 271-278, 436-442, and note HH.

118 Constitutional 119 For

the

History of England, vol. ii, p. 478 note.

offence

thus

given

see

T.

McCrie,

Life

of

Thomas

McCrie, pp. 166-167. 120 For an excellent example of how the zealous came to regard Robert¬ son in the last century, see ibid., pp. 162-163. 121'Godfrey Davies, op. cit., p. 315, calls it “of first importance for the period.” 122 Four chapters were published in 1880 as The Early Years of John Calvin.

A

Fragment, 1509-1536

(ed.

William

Ferguson,

Edinburgh,

1880).

123 History

of the Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in

Italy in the Sixteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1827).

History of the Prog-

252

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

tion to all this he wrote much for periodicals, one of his con¬ tributions being a review impugning the accuracy of Scott’s portrait of the Covenanters given in Tales of my Landlord.124 ress and Suppression of the Reformation in Spain in the Sixteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1829). 124 This first appeared in the Christian Instructor for 1817, was re¬ printed in 1824, and may now be found, with an introduction by McCrie’s son, in Miscellaneous Writings (Edinburgh, 1841), pp. 247-450.

Godfrey

Davies, op. cit., p. 304, calls it an “ able review,” but I have not read it.

CHAPTER IX From Roscoe to Lingard

growth of a nationalist outlook, the spread of Whig views, and the appearance of Romanticist histories such as those by Turner and Southey constitute the three most important trends of the early nineteenth century. But not all the writers with whom the new century opened are to be classified under these headings. Some indeed represented little departure from rationalist ideas even when their adven¬ tures into new fields helped change historical perspective in¬ directly and in the long run. In this chapter we shall men¬ tion briefly a selection of such writers leading to a discussion of James Mill’s History of British India, Hallam’s survey of the Middle Ages, and Lingard’s volumes on England. These three works, together with Hallam’s Constitutional History which we have considered in Chapter VII, inaug¬ urated the line of distinguished nineteenth-century histories. With them accordingly this part of our essay may properly end. William Roscoe 1 began writing as early as 1795, but his fame was contemporary with that of Turner and Southey. Roscoe sought to connect the “ golden histories ” of Gibbon and Robertson (Charles V) by means of biographies of Lorenzo de Medici and Leo the Tenth. In fact his Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1795) and his Life and Pontificate of Leo the Tenth (1805) constitute a history of the Italian Renaissance during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth cen¬ turies. They gave Roscoe a prominent place in the revival The

1 Henry Roscoe’s The Life of William Roscoe (London, 1833), will be found valuable. 253

254

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

of enthusiasm for Italian studies characteristic of the Ro¬ manticist period during which he lived; but the ideas which Roscoe brought to his work are so directly derived from the period of the Enlightenment that he has not unhappily been called a disciple of Voltaire.2

He believed that history is

largely a gloomy record of crimes and follies, relieved at intervals by eras of culture and civilization.

From a con¬

templation of these interludes mankind may learn how to avoid decadence in the future and it is the historian’s duty to survey such oases while explaining their appearance and dis¬ appearance.

It was natural for Roscoe to organize his

treatment of the Italian Renaissance around Lorenzo and Leo because he believed that it was such great individuals who are mainly responsible for the heights to which mankind has intermittently risen.3 This is of course strikingly similar to Voltaire, but the resemblance between the two men might be traced further. Both adopted a pragmatic view of history; both stressed the importance of letters and arts rather than of political history; both talked of “ moral ” causes as determining the course of events; both were, as we have seen in the case of Roscoe, apt to organize their works around great men in a given era; in both there was a strong tinge of pessimism; and both viewed the Middle Ages with jaundiced eye. The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici on which Roscoe had worked for many years won an immediate and ultimately almost a

world-wide

success-

Lord

Lansdowne,

whose

memory ran back to Hume’s first volumes, said he could not recall any book having met with an equal reception.4

Long

2 E. Fueter, op. cit., p. 622. 3 Much of Roscoe’s philosophy of history will be found outlined in his On the Origin and Vicissitudes of Literature, Science and Art, and their influence on the present state of society. 1817), as well as in his histories. 4 H. Roscoe, op. cit., vol. i, p. 167.

A Discourse . . . (Liverpool,

ROSCOE TO L1NGARD

255

before the tenth English edition was reached, in 1851, there were translations into French, German, and Italian.

The

subject was new in almost every language and as a pioneer Roscoe deserved all the praise he was given for his zeal in procuring copies of manuscripts from Italy and in making the work at once readable and an addition to learning.

On

the other hand, he did not visit Italy himself and his repre¬ sentative, Mr. William Clarke, was not trained in the selec¬ tion and use of historical materials.

Nor, for that matter,

was Roscoe, so that subsequent investigation, of which he was himself in large part the cause, soon surpassed his own efforts.

Particularly was

this the

case because

Roscoe

allowed himself to indulge in an uncritical enthusiasm for Lorenzo both as ruler and man.

He said that he was sur¬

passed by no character of ancient or modern history for “ depth of penetration, versatility of talent, or comprehension of mind,” 5 and declared that if Lorenzo had devoted him¬ self to literature alone he could have been one of the greatest if not the greatest of Italian poets.

Sismondi criticised

Roscoe severely, not for his praise of Lorenzo’s literary abil¬ ities, but for failing to distinguish in his admiration between Lorenzo the poet and Lorenzo the statesman, as Sismondi himself did.

Indeed Sismondi went so far as to accuse

Roscoe of having misinterpreted the facts through a desire to glorify the Italian tyrant.6 Roscoe thought his Leo the Tenth a better book than its predecessor, but its success though great was less resounding. For one thing, in spite of the subject and its author’s his¬ torical predilections, wars and internal commotions loom larger than artistic and intellectual history.

Moreover, on

5 Life of Lorenzo de’Medici (Liverpool, 1795), vol. ii, p. 240. 6 Roscoe’s Illustrations... of the Life of Lorenzo de’Medici (London, 1822) is largely an argument against his critics on forty specific points with supporting documents.

For Sismondi’s points see pp. 24-36.

256

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

the whole, Roscoe showed himself less appreciative of Pope Leo than of the secular statesman Lorenzo.

But chiefly the

rationalistic interpretation given to the Reformation and the religious leaders infuriated Protestant reviewers in an age of Evangelical revival.7

Roscoe undertook to point out some

failings in Luther and to criticize some supposed benefits of the Reformation, an undertaking more likely to be welcomed in an earlier or at a later day.

Much of what he said was

true in itself, but the sympathy necessary for full and accurate historical portraiture was undoubtedly lacking.

Roscoe rec¬

ognized that Luther was able, sincere and honorable, and perhaps gave him too much credit for learning.

But he saw

also failings of passion and prejudice, and that fundamental inconsistency between Luther’s early advocacy of complete liberty of private judgment in religious affairs and his later denial of that right in practice.

The Reformation as a

whole, it was pointed out, had not been marked by unmixed progress in the field of literature, in morals and manners, in politics, fine arts, or toleration.

The author was particu¬

larly assailed for asserting that the Protestants had not eschewed persecution and for pointing to the not unfamiliar fact that Servetus was burned in a Protestant city with Calvin’s approval. Now many similar comments were being made at this time by historians like Sharon Turner and Robert Southey.

But

these criticised the shortcomings of the Reformers while remaining pious, even ardent, Protestants.

They empha¬

sized the profound spiritual revolution of which the Refor¬ mation, for good or ill, was the greatest expression; while Roscoe looked upon it from an external, an outmoded, stand-

7 The

Christian Observer said that Roscoe was “ uniformly hostile to

Christianity,” that he “ had received a retaining fee from the Pope ” and concluded with the charitable observation that “ he gave rise to a strong temptation to burn him.” For these and other references see H. Roscoe, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 334-335-

ROSCOE TO LINGARD

257

point lacking almost wholly in sympathy with mystical religion.

The limitations of his insight emerge most sharply

in the condemnation of Savonarola as a misguided fanatic who foolishly opposed Lorenzo de’ Medici and initiated the disturbance that ended in the ruin of the Florentine republic. It requires not, however, any great discernment to perceive, that Savonarola united in himself those exact proportions of knavery, talents, folly and learning, which, combined with the insanity of superstition, compose the character of a fanatic; the motives and consequences of whose conduct, are perhaps no less obscure and inexplicable to himself than they are to the rest of mankind.” 8 Whatever one’s attitude toward Savonarola, it is obvious that this will not do. Although Roscoe was less enthusiastic about Leo than about Lorenzo, he does attribute to the former the “ astonish¬ ing proficiency in the improvement of the human intellect ” in the early sixteenth century and he declared the pontiff devoted to “ beneficent and generous ends.” 9

It is a strik¬

ing instance of Roscoe’s merits that he was able to give a balanced picture of Alexander VI.

The character of Luc-

rezia Borgia he defended in an appendix. Indeed when we judge Roscoe by his whole career we can¬ not but admire the spirit of calm reasonableness and zeal for scholarship he manifested.

In spite of his expression of

didactic purpose he grinds no axe and serves no party.

Even

if he could not rise above certain prepossessions inherited from a previous age he is a good deal more impartial than some historians who have laid claim to the title scientific. If Sismondi surpassed his genius and scholarship, it is per¬ haps true that he did not succeed in giving a more fair picture of the Italian republics, though his bias lay on another side 8 Life of Leo X (Liverpool, 1805), vol. i, p. 279. 9 Ibid., vol. iv, pp. 345-346.

258

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

and was more congenial to the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century.

It was Roscoe’s great work to help stir

up that enthusiasm for Italian studies which soon reached such proportions and was marked by such advances that he himself became only a memory.

In doing this he intro¬

duced his readers to new and original sources some of which he gave in his own books.

If his style was inclined to dif¬

fuseness and without embellishment of imagination or lang¬ uage, it was always clear and hardly ever dull.

He was on

the one hand a proof that the rationalistic spirit was still capable of producing creditable works in the midst of the triumph of Romanticism.

He was also an earnest that a

new era of good histories, whatever the source whence they drew their inspiration, was dawning. The Reverend William Shepherd, a Unitarian minister and a friend of Roscoe, was author of a very creditable life of Poggio Bracciolini (1802).10

Like Roscoe he did not visit

Italy to consult manuscripts there, but he was aided in secur¬ ing materials by Roscoe and William Clarke, both of whom lent him scarce books, and in preparing a second edition he incorporated suggestions from Italian scholars based on manuscript materials.

Shepherd is open to criticism for un¬

due liberality in his praise of Poggio’s erudition and in esti¬ mate of his depth of thought.

But the book was another

stimulus towards English interest in the Italian field and has worn well as an account of the external facts of Poggio’s life. In a previous chapter we discussed the treatment of the Middle Ages in the earlier works of Joseph Berington, and suggested that in them might be seen traces of the new approach to history.11

We should expect such a writer to be

10 The Life of Poggio Bracciolini (Liverpool, 1802). the 1837 edition (Liverpool, 1837). 11 See supra, pp. 151-156.

I have seen only

ROSCOE TO LINGARD

influenced deeply by the stronger medievalism after 1800. But he seems to have reversed the normal course, and his Literary History of the Middle Ages, published in 1814, might have pleased Hume if Hume had been alive and could have been persuaded to read it.

This book covered the first

fifteen centuries of the Christian era and treated of Greek and Arabian as well as Western European letters.

It

deserved credit as a pioneer work in this field in the English language, but Berington made no effort to enter into the spirit of his subject, denouncing in round terms all vari¬ eties of medieval literature.

The book is therefore dull be¬

cause its crude style and annalistic arrangement are not relieved by any glow of sympathy with the subject.

“ We

must quit the life and learning of Gerbert, on which we have been agreeably detained, like travelers on a spot of verdure, of shade and flowers, in the midst of desert, again to wander in

the

dreary

waste

of

ignorance

and

superstition.”

Berington justified the disproportionate length of his treat¬ ment of Italian literary history by saying that with an equally long sketch of all countries, only “ a wider reign of sterility would have been expanded before the reader’s eyes ... a dreary continuity of barrenness.” 12 Similarly in this work he judged the Crusades rather more severely than in his first book.13 Such contradictions of opinion as those we have found in Berington might be duplicated in many of his contemporaries. In Berington’s case the contrast between his early apologies for the Middle Ages and his later condemnation admits of several explanations.

12 A

In the first place, his latest book con-

Literary History of the Middle Ages (London, 1814), pp. 217, 5x2.

13History of Henry II (Birmingham, 1790), pp. 630-631; History of Abeillard and Heloisa (London, 1793), vol. i, pp. 69-70; Literary History of the Middle Ages, p. 266 et seq.

260

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

cerned itself with medieval literature of which even in his Henry II he had been rather contemptuous.

Indeed, it is

perhaps surprising that he undertook such a subject, except that there was still an open field in English and it might easily be compiled from the continental literary histories that had recently appeared.

Moreover, Berington appears to have

grown more radical in his religious position as he grew older, and this may have made him less appreciative of medieval civilization.14 John Colin Dunlop thought of literary history, partly at least, as a reflection of the social life of various times.

But

his two works in the field were noteworthy chiefly because of the critical ability displayed therein and because of the skill with which the classics of past ages were summarized for modern readers.

His History of Fiction (1814) has

been found weakest in the sections on oriental and modern literature, strongest in those on the romances of chivalry and the Italian novelists.

His History of Roman Literature

(1823-1828) went to the end of the Augustan era.

Dunlop

later (1834) published Memoirs of Spain during the reigns of Philip IV and Charles II from 1621 to 1700, a production that bridged the gap between Watson and Thomson, on the one hand, and Coxe, on the other.

This was a useful service,

14 A passage in the Preface to Berington’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Catholic Religion in England (London, 1813), p. xxx note, suggests increasing radicalism.

In Milner’s Ecclesiastical

Democracy Detected, Berington was accused of erroneous opinions and advised to write a book of Retractions.

Berington remarks on this:

“ As to a book of Retractions, perhaps, some years hence, I may write one, to shew' the progress I have made since, about twenty years ago, I commenced author.” For illustrations of some of Berington’s advanced opinions, regarding miracles, etc., see: Charles Plowden: Remarks on the Writings of the Rev. Joseph Berington, addressed to the Catholic clergy of England (London, 1792).

Plowden denounced to the ‘‘Bishop

of Aeon, and Apostolic Vicar in the Midland district,” several works in¬ cluding the History of the Lives of Abeillard and Hcloisa.

ROSCOE TO LINGARD

26l

but Dunlop was not specially qualified to write Spanish his¬ tory and achieved no marked success therein. In the eighteenth century Adam Anderson had compiled his valuable Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce (1764) which became a standard auth¬ ority.

But as the Middle Ages came to loom larger in the

minds of historians his work was seen to need revision on this side, as well as continuation to a later date.

The task

was undertaken by David Macpherson who as deputy-keeper of the public records in London made some contribution to medieval subjects.15

At a prior stage in his career Mac¬

pherson had been a land surveyor and perhaps then had come to share Anderson’s sense of the significance of commercial history.

Macpherson rewrote the section on the Middle

Ages, introducing materials both from literary sources and from the records, revised the annals from 1492 to 1760, and continued them to 1801.

To this he added appendices

containing lists of sovereigns, tables of money, prices, and wages, a commercial and manufacturer’s gazeteer of Great Britain, and a full chronological index.

The plan was that

of Anderson, but the book was given a new lease on life. Historians like Hallam found it invaluable.

Macpherson

also wrote a History of European Commerce with India mentioned below. Another marked feature of the early years of the century was the increased number of significant books dealing with oriental history, of which we shall give a few examples. John Bruce’s Annals of the Honourable East-India Com¬ pany (1810) 16 was based on documents relating to India in 15 D. Macpherson (ed.), De orygynale cronykil of Scotland, be Androw of Wintown.

Now first published, with notes, a glossary, etc...By D.

Macpherson (London, 1795). 16 Annals of the Honourable East-India Company, from their Establish¬ ment by the Charter of Queen Elisabeth, 1600, to the Union of the London and English East-India Companies, 1707-1708 (London, 1810).

262

TRANSITION IN ENGLISH HISTORICAL WRITING

the State Paper Office and on records of the East-India Com¬ pany.

Of the former Bruce made full use, but confined him¬

self among the latter mainly to letters received from the East and to the Company’s replies.17

The tone of the book was

strongly favorable to the Company, to whose Directors it was dedicated, but it contained much valuable information.18 With this work we may couple David Macpherson’s History of European Commerce with India (1812).

After an in¬

troduction on contrasts between the West and India before the age of discoveries, the book dealt with the Indian trade of

modern European peoples

including the

Portuguese,

Dutch, English, French, Danish, Swedes and Spaniards.

To

this was added a review of the arguments for and against trade with India, a part of the question much discussed in the eighteenth century as to whether the expansion of Europe had been a benefit or an evil to the human race. Macpherson, like Bruce, showed a bias in favor of the EastIndia Company, and like him, too, was a competent student of his subject. Colonel Mark Wilks was one of the long line of soldierhistorians of India whose fitness is based not only on indus¬ trious research, but also on active participation in many of 17 W. Foster, “John Bruce, Historiographer, 1745-1826” in Scottish Historical Renew, vol. ix (Glasgow, 1912), p. 372. 18 Lack of space prevents discussion of John Bruce’s other works. He was, however, an example of interest in the history of the arts and sciences and of the application of the historical approach to problems of his own day.

Thus he wrote an Historical View of Plans for the Gov¬

ernment of British India, and regulation of Trade to the East Indies (London, 1793).

At the time

(1797-1798)

when Napoleon threatened

to invade England he prepared reports for the Government on defence measures taken on similar occasions in the past.

When the Union of

England and Ireland was mooted he prepared a Report on the events and circumstances, which produced the union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland (London, 1799).

These works were compiled when he was

keeper of the State Paper Office. may be consulted with profit.

W. Foster’s article, referred to above,

. v. : :t. .

S-.f

>

'•

:i'.1

■ '

.

.

■

■ '

■

, ■.

r

.

.

.

■

••


55 Dunlop, John Colin (d. 1842), 260261 Dunning, W. A., 15 Dyer, T. H., on William Russell, 66 n. East-India Company, 268, 270, 271 Echard, 200 Eden, Sir F. M. (1766-1809), 51 Edinburgh Magazine and Review,

37

Edinburgh Review, 249, 281 Edwards, Bryan (1743-1800), 102 Elton, Oliver, 125 England, histories of, 19-23, 34-42, 5i-52, 54-55, 68, 69-84, 96-102, in-112, 114, 127-131, 135-140, 150-151, 152-154, 156, 157-159, 164-165, 166-167, 170-181, 183190, 191-196, 198-213, 217-233, 238-241, 244-249, 277-283, 289, 290, 291, 294-295, 302-303 Evangelical Revival and historical writing, 107, 140 Evans, Evan (1731-1789), 220, 289 Ferguson, Adam (1723-1816), 1517, 45-50, 52, 64, 123 Ferrero, G., 47 Finlason, W., 41 Firth, C. H„ 207, 288 Fosbroke, T. D. (1770-1842), 246 Fox, C. J. (1749-1806), 98, 195-196 Freeman, E. A., 64 French Revolution and historical writing, 39, 78, 84, 90, 94, 98, 163 et seq., 166-167, 186-187, 190191 Froude, J. A., 162, 228, 233 Gast, John, 45 General Record Office, 308,309, 310 Gentleman’s Magazine, 229 Gibbon, E. (1737-1794), 9, 10, 19, 23, 29-33, 37, 57, 64, 84, 104, hi, 130, 136, 144, 149, 160, 161, 188, 232, 234, 242, 253, 270, 271, 273, 275, 293, 294, 295, 301, 303; his rationalistic outlook, 29; second¬ ary interest in Middle Ages, 29; touches of romanticism in, 3032; devotion to research, 32; ab¬ sence of generalization, 32-33; accuracy and impartiality, 33

INDEX Gillies, John (1747-1836), 44, 45, 92- 95; compared with Mitford, 93- 95 Glanville, 41 Godwin, William (1756-1836), 198, 204-207, 246-247; on Charles I, 205; on Cromwell, 205-206; his research, 206.; on the middle ages, 246-247 Goldsmith, O. (1728-1774), 77-78 Gooch, G. P., 279 Gough, R. (1735-1809), 103 Granger, James (1723-1776), 78 Greece, 44-45, 84-96 Green, J. R., 38 Grose, F. (d. 1791), 103, 289 Gross, Charles, 245, 289 Hailes, Lord, see Dalrymple, Sir David. Hall, Hubert, 310 Hallam, Henry (1777-1859), 9, 69, 128, 198, 207-213, 228, 232, 233, 250, 253, 261, 271-276, 280; his Whig conceptions, 207-208; on seventeenth century, 208-209; his conservatism, 209-210; his lofty character, 210-211; on Mary, Queen of Scots, 211-212; su¬ periority to Hume, 212-213; his View of the State of Europe not a true synthesis, 272; stand¬ ards of research, 272-273; con¬ ception of history, 273; on the middle ages, 274-276; national and religious elements in, 276 Hamilton, Charles (d. 1792), 126 Hardy, T. D. (1804-1878), 301, 302, 305 Harleian manuscripts, 301 Harris, William (1720-1770), 78 Hazlitt, W., 271 Hearne, T. (1678-1735), 290 Henault, C. J. F. (1685-1770), 39 Henry VIII, 228 Henry, Robert (1718-1790), 34-38, 39, 54, 55, 57,_ 110, 157, 196, 215, 225, 277; criticism of his prede¬ cessors, 34-35; contacts with romanticism, 36-37; reception of his History, 37-38 Herford, C. H., 214 Herodotus, 59, 95 Heron, Robert (1764-1807), 50 n.,

335 148-150; on criticism of sources,

149 “ Heron, Robert ”, pseudonym for Pinkerton, John Heywood, Samuel (1753-1828), 245 Historical Writing, causes of change in character of after 1760, 103 et seq. History, nineteenth century concep¬ tion of, 9; rationalistic concep¬ tion of, 9-14, 54 et seq., 273; “ conjectural ”, “ itheoretical ”, comparative, 12 et seq., 28; con¬ jectural history not true history, 18- 19; middle class character of, in eighteenth century, 50-51; uses of, 58; sources of, 59; and social reform, 64-65; protest against “ philosophical ” form of, 151; reaction against rational¬ istic form of, 103 et seq., 282 et seq.; Pinkerton’s statement of rules of, 145-147 Hobbes, 71 Holdsworth, W. S., 41; quoted, 42 Home, Charles, 150-151 Hooke, N. (d. 1763), 47, 48 Hume, D. (1711-1776), 9, 10, 1415, 17, 19-23, 25, 29, 30, 31, 37, 48, 52, 62, 64, 69, 70, 81, 96, 105, 127, 129, 130, 135, 136, 137, 143, 147, 149, 157, 160, 161, 176, 186, 196, 199, 201, 202, 204, 209, 212, 213, 220, 221, 225, 249, 254, 259, 271, 274, 275, 277, 280, 282, 290; his Essays, 14-15; his History of England, 19-23; popularity, 19- 20; merits, 19-21; views of the middle ages, 21-22; lack of synthesizing principle, 22; super¬ ficial research, 22-23; his view of the seventeenth century, 6972; interest in origins, 107-108; his views of the middle ages challenged by contemporary writ¬ ers, 127 et seq. Hutchins, John (1698-1773), 289 Hutchinson, William (1732-1814), 289 Icelandic poetry, 155 India, 125-126, 165, 261-263, 265271 Ingram, James (1774-1850), 244245

336

INDEX

Innes, T. (1662-1744), 105 n., 114 Irish historians, 117-120 Italian Renaissance, 61 James II, Macpherson on, 76-77 Java, 264-265 Jesuits, 26 Johnstone, James (d. 1798), 144, 289 Jones, Sir William (1746-1794), 126, 144, 220, 266 Karnes, Henry Home, Lord (16961782), 55, no _ „ Keating, Geoffrey (i570?-i644?), 104 n. Kemble, J. M. (1807-1857), 245 Kenney, James, 120 King, Edward (d. 1807), 289 Knight, Samuel, 144 Knox, John, McCrie on, 249-250 Laing, Malcolm (1762-1818), 98, 196-198 Lane-Poole, Stanley, 263 Langebek, Jacob, 219 Language, as a key to race, 106 and note 11, 115 and note 38 Laski, H. J., 15 League of Nations, anticipated, 52 Ledwich, Edward (1738-1823), 120 Leibnitz, 288 Leland, Thomas (1722-1785), 119 m Leo the Tenth, 255-256 Lingard, John (1771-1851), 36 n., 226, 253, 277-283; Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church, 277278; on middle ages, 278-279; on the sixteenth century, 279-280; style, 280; his moderation, 280281; wide research, 281-282; conception of history, 282-283 Lansdowne, Lord, 254 Lansdowne Manuscripts, 301 Lodge, E. (1756-1839), 290 Logan, John (1748-1788), 51, 52-54 Lolme, J. L. de (1740-1806), 163 Lorenzo de’Medici, 253-255 Lucian, 73 Luther, Sharon Turner on, 227, 256 Lyttelton, George, Lord (17091/73), 127-130, I5L 154 Macaulay, Mrs. Catharine (17311791), 60, 70, 79-82, 175; char¬

acteristics as an historian, 79; radical tone, 79-81; fame and influence, 81-82 Macaulay, T. B. (1800-1859), 19 n., 69, 87, 88, 91, 195-196, 207, 213, 216, 270 Macfarlane, Robert (1734-1804), 164-166 Mackenzie, Sir George (16361691), 104 n. Mackintosh, Sir James (17651832), 217, 263 Macpherson, David (1746-1816), 261, 262, 291 Macpherson, James (1736-1796), 73-77, 105, 108-113, 115, 116, 117, 145, 196; as a party historian, 73-77; and primitivism, 108-113; threefold character of his influ¬ ence on historical writing, 112113. See also Ossian and Primi¬ tivism. Macpherson, Dr. John (1710-1765), hi

Maitland, F. W., 41, 42, 305 Maitland, S. R., 24-25, 28, 36 n. Malcolm, Sir John (1769-1833), 263-264 Malham, Rev. John (1747-1821), 176-177 Mallet, Paul-Henri (1730-1807), 106 Marsden, William (1754-1836), 54 Marsh, Herbert (1757-1839), 166167, 175 Mary, Queen of Scots, Hallam on, 211-212 Maseres, Francis (1731-1824), 20 n. Maurice, Thomas (1754-1824), 126 McCrie, Thomas (1772-1835), 249252

Meadley, G. W. (1774-1818), 201 Miohaelis, J. D. (1717-1791), 166 Middle Ages, 21-22, 24-25, 28, 29, 30, 36-37, 39, 61, 66-67, 127, 128, 129, 133, 135, 141, 142, 145, 152, 154-155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 214, 225-226, 241, 246 et seq., 254, 258-260, 261, 271-276, 278, 279, 293 et seq., 301-303 Mill, James (1773-1836), 253, His¬ tory of British India, 266-271; on proper qualifications of the historian, 266-267; on Hindu civilization, 267-268; pragmatic

INDEX character, 268; defects, 268-269; merits, 269-270; reputation and influence, 270-271 Millar. John (1735-1801), 17-18, 52, 82-84, hi, 266; treatment of economic factor in history, 83-84 Millot, 64 Milner, Isaac (1750-1820), 159-160 Milner, Bishop John (1752-1826), 278, 280, 289 Milner, Joseph (1744-1797), 159160 Mitford, William (1744-1827), 44, 45, 96; History of Greece, 8492; aims, 84-85; influence on Grote, 85 n.; anti-democratic tone, 85-87; on Athens, 87-89; on English constitution, 89-90; on French revolution, 90; de¬ fects, 90-91; merits, 91-92; com¬ pared with Gillies, 93-95 Monboddo, Lord (1714-1799), 55 Montesquieu (1689-1755), 15, 30, 40, 55, 64, 124, 134, 162 Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 303 Monumenta Historica Britannica,

301-303

Moore, George, 177 Muratori, 272 Murray, John (1778-1843), 218 Namier, L. B„ 101-102 Napier, W. F. P. (1785-1860), compared with Southey, 180-181; significance as an historian, 181 Napoleon, and historical writing, 167-168 Nash, T. R. (1725-1811), 289 Nationalism, in early eighteenth century, 161-162; in later eight¬ eenth century, 162-163; after the French Revolution, 163-167; after 1800, 167-182; and histor¬ ical writing, 78-79, 104-106, 107, 113, 118-119, 120, 181-182, 276, 298, 309-310 Neero and historical writing, 124 “New History”, 11 et seq., 107, 156

Nichols, John (1745-1826), 289 Nicolas, N. H. (1799-1848), 301, 303-305, 309 Nieubuhr, B. G., 20 n., 46, 273 Noble, Mark (1754-1827), 78

337

Noble Savage, 104 et seq.; historical writing, 120-124 Nordicism, 115

and

O’Conor, Charles (1710-1791), 117118, 119, 127 O’Flaherty, Roderic (1629-1718), 104 n., 119 O’Halloran, Sylvester (1728-1807), 118-119 Oldfield, T. H. B. (1755-1822), 101-102 Orient, 31-32, 107, 124-126 Orme, Robert (1728-1801), 125 Ossian, 37, 107, 136, 155, 196, 220, 248; and historical writing, 108m. See also Macpherson, James and Primitivism. Owen, Aneurin (1792-1851), 302, 303 Paine, Thomas, 175 Palgrave, Sir Francis (1788-1861),

301, 305

Papacy. See Roman Catholicism. Parliamentary History of England, 289-290 Parry, J. H. (1786-1825), 302 Party history after accession of George III, changed character of, 78-79 Pegge, Samuel (1704-1796), 156 Pelloutier, Simon, 115 Percy, T. (1729-1811), 103, 106, 132, 144, 289 Petrie, Henry (1768-1842), 302, 308 Phelps, William Lyon, 113 Philip II, 42 et seq. Philip III, 44 Phillips, Sir T., 307 Pier, B., 26 n. Pietism, 159-160 Pinkerton, John (1758-1826), 114117, 140-147, 249, 293, 294. 295, 301, 303; Dissertation, 114-117; life, 140-141; place in literary revival, 141-142; on early Scot¬ land, 142-143; on Stuarts, 143; contemporary comments, 143-145; kinship with the Enlightenment, 145; signs of a new outlook, 145T47 Poggio Bracciolini, 258 Polybius, 73, 95 Pope, 128

338

INDEX

Porritt, E., 101 Portugal, 234-235 Poverty and poor, history of, 51-52 Pownall, Thomas (1722-1805), cited, 13 note Prescott, W., 43, 233 Price, David (1762-1835), 263 Price, Richard, 303 Priestley, Joseph (i733-I8°4), 5762, 175, 291; plan for a history of England, 58; on the use of history, 58; on the sources of history, 59; on the study of his¬ tory, 59-60; characteristics as an historian, 60-62 Primitivism, 17, 115, 131-133, 135, 141, 142, 145, 149, 214, 237; causes of revival of, after 1760, 103 et seq. See Chapter IV. Procopius, 33 Protestantism. See Reformation. Pufendorf, 64 Pughe, W. O. (1759-1835), 220 Public Records, early interest in care of, 284-285; eighteenth cen¬ tury parliamentary interest in, 285-288; growing recognition of value of, 290-295; committee on, in 1800, 295-299; Record Com¬ mission and, 299-306; Commit¬ tee of 1836 on, 306-310; new era after 1836, 310 Quarterly Reviezv, 218 Racialism. See Primitivism. Raffles, Sir T. S. (1781-1826), 264265, 266 Ragnar Lodbrog, 219 Rait, R. S., 214 Ranke, L. von, 216 Rapin-Thoyras, Paul (1661-1725), 162, 225 Rationalism, 26, 32, 103, 160. See Chapters I and II. Record Commission, 299-306; com¬ position, 299; achievements and plans, 300-303; controversy con¬ cerning, 303-305; reforms in, after 1831, 305-306; expiry, 307, 308, 309, 310 Rccueil des Historiens dcs Gaules et dc la France, 303 Reeves, John (i752?-i829), 39-42; opposition to French Revolution,

39; Thoughts on English Gov¬ ernment, 39-40; History of Eng¬ lish Law, 40-42: other works, 42 Reform movement and historical writing, 101-102, 107 Reformation, 26, 134, 227-228, 2492 = 1. 256-257, 276 Religious view of history, 180, 229230. See Pietism. Rennell, James (1742-1830), 144 Revett, Nicholas (1720-1804), 289 Richard of Cirencester, 136 Ritson, Joseph (1752-1803), 141, 249 Robertson, William (1721-1793), 9, 10, 19, 23-29, 31, 42, 52, 98, 122, 123, 126, 133, 134, 135. 136, 149, 157, 160, 188, 197, 238, 248, 249, 251, 253, 274, 275; his scheme of composition, 23; scholarship, 2325; short-comings, 25-27; ser¬ vices to history, 27 et seq. Roland, Mme., and Mrs. Macaulay, 81 Rolls Series, 302 Roman Catholicism, 26, 36, 43, 44, 61, 139, 151-154 159, 236-237, 241, 246, 250-251, 274-275, 277281, 283. See Reformation. Roman Empire, 28, 54, 65, 165, 222 Roman Republic, 46 et seq. Romanticism, 113, 120, 143, 144, 157, 160 Romilly, Sir John (1802-1874), 302 Roscoe, William (1753-1831), 249, 253- 258; compared with Vol¬ taire, 254; on Lorenzo de’Medici, 254- 255; on Leo the Tenth, 255, 256, 257; on the Reformation, 256-257; on Savonarola, 257; services to historiography, 257258 Rose, George, 292 Rousseau (1712-1778), 116 Ruggles, Thomas (1737? - 1813), 51-52 Russell, Lord John (1792-1878L 198-201 Russell, William (1741-1793), 50 n., 65-68; and Noble Savage, 123-124 Rvmer, Thomas (1641-1713), 288, 303

Salvian, 223

INDEX Savonarola, 257 Scotland, 23-24, 30, 104, 105, 106, 134-135, 142-143, 148-150, 196 et scq., 216, 249-251 Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 143, 157, 158, 214-217, 231, 233, 252 Scriptores rerum Anglicarum, 293295 Servetus, 256 Seven Years’ War, 124 Sharpe, John, 302 Shepherd, Rev. William (17681847), 258 Sidney, Algernon, 72, 201 Simancas, 24 Sismondi, 255, 257 Smith, Adam (1723-1790), 17 Smith John (1747-1807), 113-114 Smollett, Tobias (1721-1771), 77 Somerville, Thomas (1741-1830), 96-100; his industry, 99-100; his standards of criticism, 100, 189, 193-194, 196 Southey, Robert (1774-1843), 25 n., 177-181, 216, 217, 218, 221, 233, 234-244, 249, 253, 256, 276, 280; nationalist ideas of, 178; com¬ pared with Napier, 180-181; scheme for a history of Por¬ tugal, 234-235; estimate of, as an historian, 241-244 Statutes of the Realm, 304 Steohen, Sir Leslie, 15, 60 Stewart, Major Charles (17641837), 263 Stewart, Dugald (1753-1828), 1314, 98 Strada’s Decades, 179 Strutt, Joseph (1749-1802), 64, 157*59. 215 Stuart, Gilbert (1742-1786), 37, 130135, 291; his treatment of historical evidence, 131-132; esti¬ mate of, i34'I35 Stuart, James (1713-1788), 289 Stubbs, William, 210, 272 Sumatra, 54 Tacitus, 26, 73 Talman, John (d. 1726), 290 Taylor, William (1765-1836), 221 Tennyson, 233 Thierry, 216 Thirlwall, Connop (1797-1875). 93

339

Thompson, Rev. George, 63-65; consciousness of the unity of his¬ tory, 64; emphasis on social re¬ form, 64 Thomson, William (1746-1817), 44, 260 Thorpe, Benjamin (1782-1870), 303 Thucydides, 26, 73 Trevelyan, G. O., 69 Turner, Sharon (1768-1847), 144, 215, 217-233, 238, 245, 249, 253, 256, 275, 276, 278, 280; life, 217218; interest in Anglo-Saxon history, 218-220; faults as an his¬ torian, 220-221, 232-233; partial¬ ity for the Germans, 221-224; on the Middle Ages, 225-226; on the Reformation, 227-228; on Henry VIII, 228-229; religious view of history, 229-230; rationistic elements in, 230-231; ro¬ manticist elements in, 231-232; reputation and influence, 233 Tyrwhitt, Thomas (1730-1786), 247 Tytler, A. F. (1747-1813), 62-63 Tytler, James (1747?-i8os), 113 n. Tytler, P. F. (1791-1849), 309 Unity of history, 64 Vallancey, Charles (1721-1812), 118, 119-120 Van Tieghem, Paul, 109 Voltaire (1694-1778), 30, 61, 64, 254 Walker, Joseph C. (1761-1810), 120 Walpole, Horace (1717-1797), 79. 98, 144 Wanley, Humphrey (1672-1726), 290 Warburton, W. (1698-1779), 128 Ward, Sir A. W., 282 War-guilt question, 166-167 Warrington, William, 156 Warton, Thomas (1728-1790), 66, 155, 289 Washington, George, and Mrs. Ma¬

caulay, 81 Watson, Robert (i730?-i78i),

44, 260 West, James (i704?-i772), 290 Westminster Revievu, 271

42-

340

INDEX

Whitaker, John (1735-1808), in, 114, I3S-I40, 220; general char¬ acteristics, 135-137; emphasis on the primitive, 137-138; romanti¬ cist elements in, 138-140; relig¬ ious interpretation of history, 140 White, A. D., 216 Wilkins, Sir Charles (i749?-i836), 126 Wilkins, David (1685-1745), 245

Wilks, Col. Mark (1760? - 1831), 262-263 Williams, E. (1746-1826), 220 Wilson, H. H. (1786-1860), 269 Wilson, Sir Robert (1777-1849), 167-168 Wood, Robert (i7i7?-i77i), 289 Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 168, 231 Wynne, J. H. (1743-1788), 121