It is tempting to dismiss the idea of writing a history of England as the sort of thing only antiquarians or specialists would bother with today, like writing the history of Aragon, or of Prussia. Most recent histories of this country, even medieval histories, pride themselves on taking a view of the whole of Britain, often including Ireland. They recast the English civil war that began in 1642, for example, as the war of the three kingdoms, reminding us that it started in Scotland and reached its vicious zenith in Ireland. Yet in his massive, engaging and persuasive new book, Robert Tombs speaks up for English history, and sometimes for England itself. The Scots’ recent flirtation with independence may have inspired some English politicians to try their own dalliance with Little Englandism, but Tombs shows there is much more to English history and English identity than answering the West Lothian question. England was subsumed into the union from 1707, but by then it had more than 700 years of continuous institutions and continuous identity to fall back on, and England went on setting the framework for important developments, global as well as British – including acquiring an empire, initiating the industrial revolution, introducing democracy and defeating fascism – for the next 300.
This is a story that has been told many times before. The publishers’ claim that Tombs’s is “the first full-length account to appear in one volume for many decades” stakes out rather narrow ground (technically discounting Simon Jenkins’s recent work – too short – and Peter Ackroyd’s volumes). But the title gives an indication of something different: a discussion of the English people’s relationship with their history. This could take many forms, and Tombs samples most of them. One is to plot a course through English history using some of its most memorable interpreters as way stations. So we follow this part-island story from Bede, via William of Malmesbury and the Earl of Clarendon, to Macaulay, Trevelyan, Churchill (here in his capacity as reinterpreter of England’s history as well as shaper of it) and beyond, to EP Thompson and Niall Ferguson.
Another approach is to consider how our past has been packaged for us in subsequent mythology, from the Norman yoke to the first world war. Here, Tombs offers perfectly pithy insights. He describes, for example, how the Normans “entangled England in endless conflicts on the continent. This was the real ‘Norman yoke’”. On occasion, though, his wide reading and willingness to defer to other authorities make this seem like a history by consensus, rather than Tombs’s own view. Does he need to quote another historian to make the point that England (and Britain) were transformed by the epic struggle against France that lasted on and off from 1688 to 1815? Tombs has written books on French and Anglo-French history from the 17th century to the present. It is understandable that he is careful of others’ specialisations, but it is hard on the wrists when a book of this size sends you so often to the endnotes to see who is being quoted.
He is perfectly capable of his own striking opinions, though I don’t agree with all of them. “Why,” he asks after quoting Disraeli, “is it that the only memorable, let alone amusing, remarks made by prime ministers are all from Tories?” To which you could reply: “‘What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in’ (Lloyd George). Or: ‘A week is a long time in politics’ (Wilson). Or even: ‘Tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’ (Blair).” On the last speaker, Tombs has another judgment, this time borrowed again: Blair was a “non-political Conservative”, not a Labour man at all. But if one thing is clear from Tombs’s patient view of English history, it is that someone has almost always had an opposing view, whether at the time or later. Much of the pleasure of this book is derived from the sense that it is an intervention in a never-ending conversation. The existence of that conversation might itself be part of English exceptionalism, for good and ill. Which other country would reduce the reshaping of its national curriculum to a national debate about teaching history (which, it should be remembered, is not even a compulsory subject at GCSE)?
For all the historiography on display here, the book must still stand or fall by the account it gives of the events it covers. Most people are unlikely to read it straight through, and there are certainly highlights that can be taken in isolation. The section on revolution, covering the era from the civil war to the accession of William III, is one. Tombs boldly attacks various shibboleths, many of which will be familiar to students of the period, but may come as a surprise to others. The descent into civil war and the period of Charles I’s personal rule, for example, is seen as anything but inexorable. “As the continent went up in flames,” Tombs writes, “England was enjoying unparalleled political and social peace, and, ironically, would continue to do so until shortly before the outbreak of civil war.” Though writing a book about Magna Carta was grounds for official suspicion, and parliament was the target of royal pique when Charles dissolved it, far from turning the populace against the King, “the absence of parliament cooled the political temperature, and there is no evidence of widespread or serious discontent”. Religious disputes were the real casus belli, and once the parliamentarians had won, egalitarianism emphatically did not follow: “radical ideas tended not towards democratic freedom, but towards godly authoritarianism resting on armed force.” Tombs also reminds us that “some of our most cherished civil liberties owe much to the paranoia of bigots”. Habeas corpus was later made statutory because MPs were worried that a Catholic king might resort to unlawful imprisonment of his Protestant subjects.
One recurring theme is the development of the English sense of history through the English language. Though English declined as the language of the elite after the Norman conquest, its comeback from at least the early 1200s is noted. Tombs makes a powerful comparison between two Williams, Tyndale and Shakespeare, in their legacy of phrases that became permanent linguistic fixtures. Shakespeare may be more familiar, but from Tyndale’s Bible we get “salt of the earth”, “fat of the land”, “filthy lucre”, “as bald as a coot”, “the straight and narrow’, among others. Naturally, Tombs sees Shakespeare’s influence on the English and their history as going far beyond the epithets he gave us. “Shakespeare made England’s recent history … an artistic subject as great as the history of Rome,” he writes, and makes another telling comparison: “France, in contrast, never had a single play about its own history until 1765 … Shakespeare’s national self-dramatisation perhaps made the English regard themselves as special – perhaps to some extent it still does.”
As we get nearer the present, Tombs offers more of his own views. He is not prone to extremes, but when it comes to the empire, or the world wars, he is unfashionably upbeat. His account of empire might strike some as far too benign, and when he describes the Boers as being “as annoyingly intractable as the Zulus”, he perhaps too comfortably slips into the shoes of the exasperated liberal imperialist. While he resists drawing up a “balance sheet”, however, his overall verdict is fair, including slavery and the Mau Mau repression as well as the “established practices the British tried to stop”, from female infanticide to widow-burning. When it comes to the second world war, Tombs does not play the historian’s trick of downplaying moments of high drama such as Dunkirk, and he makes a cogent case for the importance of Britain’s role in defeating nazism, showing that neither the Soviets nor the Americans could have managed without the British contribution, even if the reverse was also true. As for postwar “decline”, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and “if we abandoned this historical fit of the vapours”, the English might see ourselves as inhabitants of a “lucky country where life is safer, longer and more comfortable than ever”. Tombs’s elegant survey shows how we got there.
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