Recalling the past

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our ancestors’ sense of the past

 

 

 

  

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Introduction

 

Dates are in red.

Hyperlinks to other pages are in dark blue.

Headlines are in brown.

References and citations are in turquoise.

Contextual history is in purple.

 

History

 

There is an In Our Time podcast on how the writing of history has changed over time, from ancient epics to medieval hagiographies and modern deconstructions.

There is an In Our Time podcast on whether we can ever predict the future by understanding the past. What kind of lessons is it possible for leaders, governments or people to take from history?

 

“Whig History”

 

The great divide of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which arose out of the divide between Stuart absolute monarchy and the Puritan challengers continued to influence a calmer nation in its politics and influenced the evolution of England and then Great Britain’s identity.

On one side King Charles the Martyr was celebrated by the Church every 30 January; on the other the Good Old Cause was recalled as the cause for which [John] Hampden bled on the field and [Algernon] Sidney on the scaffold.

The first monumental history was by Charles I’s councillor, Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon who began his History of the Rebellion started in the 1640s and published in 1702.

Separately there developed a Whig history, whose pioneer was a Protestant soldier in William of Orange’s invading army called Paul Rapin de Thoyras who wrote Histoire d’Angleterre (1723 to 1727) aimed at a foreign audience. IOt set out the Whig voiew of English history as a continuous struggle through the ages to defend ancient freedoms; Charles I had tried to enslave England, but the culmination came with the Glorious Revolution.

The Tory history was found in the works of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume’s History of England (1757). He argued against extremes and suggested that societies progressed through improvements in education, government, law and economic management. He di not recognise the Norman Yoke. Liberty did not come from resisting the Crown, rather it required the authority almost absolute of the monarchy. The Tudors had laid the foundations for the best form of government. It was Cromwell who had seized power by violence. True liberty was not in ancient rights but in modern thinking. History should teach the people to be grateful for what they had. Hume was accused by the Whigs of being a Jacobite.

John Wilkes’ History of England (1768) adopted Rapin’s view, liberty is the character of the Englishman. Catherine Macaulay attacked Hume in her History of England (1763 to 1783) and found an eternal struggle for Saxon freedom against the Norman yoke.

Edmund Burke wrote the Whig history Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). He argued that fundamental rights had built up since Manga Carta in the evolution of custom and the Common Law. England’s age of revolutions was over and had changed from a period of political turbulence to a nation of continuity and peace.

Thomas Babington Macaulay continued the Whig historical tradition with his History of England (1848 to 1855). His focus was on resistance to the Stuarts, but he downgraded the idea of an ancient constitution inherited from the Anglo Saxons and focused on progtress through enlightened trade, libraries, factories etc.

Thomas Carlisle published Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845), which allowed Cromwell himself to posthumously speak to heroic struggles.

There was nevertheless a distaste for Roundhead oppression, captured in W F Yeames painting When did you last see your father? (1878) and Frederick Marryar’s children’s novel, The Children of the New Forest (1847).

Whig pieties were reaffirmed by Macaulay’s great nephew, George Macaulay Trevelyan, one of the last Whig Historians, in his History of England (1926), Shortened History (1942) and English Social History (1944).

After that, the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield, dismissed Whig history in his caricature, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and it was parodied by W C Sellar and R J Yeatman’s 1066 and all that, portraying every episode of British history as a ‘good thing’ which progressed Britain’s progress to top nation.

Whig history died as the focus turned in the twenty first century to what had gone wrong with Britain. The American version perhaps outlived the British. The First World War shook British confidence and a period of post war declinism and European integration, and the democratisation of European nations including Germany, led to the waning of the Whig historical perspective.

(Robert Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 262 to 271).

 

 

 

Glimpsing at the past

 

Cider with Rosie, by Laurie Lee, 1959: The village in fact was like a deep-running cave still linked to its antic past, a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits and by laws still vaguely ancestral. This cave that we inhabited looked backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens. It was something we just had time to inherit, to inherit and dimly know – the blood and beliefs of generations who had been in this valley since the Stone Age. That continuous contact has at last been broken, the deeper caves sealed off for ever. But arriving, as I did, at the end of that age, I caught whiffs of something old as the glaciers. There were ghosts in the stones, in the trees, and the walls, and each field and hill had several. The elder people knew about these things and would refer to them in personal terms, and there were certain landmarks about the valley – tree-clumps, corners in woods – that bore separate, antique, half-muttered names that were certainly older than Christian. The women in their talk still used these names which are not used now any more. There was also a frank and unfearful attitude to death, and an acceptance of violence as a kind of ritual which no one accused or pardoned. In our grey stone village, especially in winter, such stories never seemed strange. When I sat at home among my talking sisters, or with an old woman sucking her jaws, and heard the long details of hapless suicides, of fighting men loose in the snow, of witch-doomed widows disembowelled by bulls, of childeating sows, and so on – I would look through the windows and see the wet walls streaming, the black trees bend in the wind, and I saw these things happening as natural convulsions of our landscape, and though dry-mouthed, I was never astonished.

Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter I, Poor People's Houses: Recalling the Past:All around, from every quarter, the stiff, clayey soil of the arable fields crept up; bare, brown and windswept for eight months out of the twelve. Spring brought a flush of green wheat and there were violets under the hedges and pussy-willows out beside the brook at the bottom of the 'Hundred Acres'; but only for a few weeks in later summer had the landscape real beauty. Then the ripened cornfields rippled up to the doorsteps of the cottages and the hamlet became an island in a sea of dark gold. To a child it seemed that it must always have been so; but the ploughing and sowing and reaping were recent innovations. Old men could remember when the Rise, covered with juniper bushes, stood in the midst of a furzy heath—common land, which had come under the plough after the passing of the Inclosure Acts.”

Stories

 

 

The end of the story

 

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.