1 ^-«. >— f~«. i 1 ! •o o 'i 1 i 1 II "^ I ill i :. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/englishhistorianOOgran Cbc Wftcwtcft libcarv Edited by C. H. HERFORD, Litt.D. /E NGLISH historians] English Historians WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A. J. GRANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY LEEDS UNIVERSITY LONDON • • • MCMVI THE GRESHAM PUBLISHING COMPANY 34 SOUTHAMPTON STREET • • • STRAND PREFACE Any attempt to illustrate the characteristics of English historians by a series of extracts can attain at best to a very limited success. Much more than any other volume in this series it must recall the classical wiseacre who carried round a brick as a sample of the house that he had for sale. At first it seemed to me impossible to devise any- thing within the limits imposed which could be of service to serious students of literature; but, upon deliberation, it seemed that something might be done by a double and to some extent parallel series of extracts, the first illustrating the aims and motives of historians, mostly by their own utterances with regard to their craft; the second exhibiting their style and method of composition by passages of some length drawn from their most important works. I have convinced myself during the progress of the book that the study of the development of historiography offers a promising and little-worked field, from which valuable results might come both for philosophy and history. The volume is concerned only with works in English. This limitation gives a certain unreality to all that part which deals with the centuries before the sixteenth. For six centuries at least all that was most important in English thought found VI ENGLISH HISTORIANS expression in Latin ; and we miss some great names in English historiography when we give exclusive attention to those writers who discarded these classic robes for English home-spun. But it was necessary either to do this or to leave the earlier centuries untouched; and I hope that the extracts from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and from Capgrave, ma}' at least serve to give perspective to my subject. I must make grateful acknowledgment for help received to Professor Herford, the editor of the series; to Mr. H. W. V. Temperley, now of Peter- house, Cambridge, formerly my colleague; and above all to Mr. T. Seccombe, who has given me much valuable assistance, both in the Introduction and the selection of the extracts. The many shortcomings of the book would have been more and more serious if I had not been able to appeal to his remarkable knowledge of historical litera- ture. My thanks also are due to those publishers whose permission to print passages from works of which they hold the copyright has made this book pos- sible. I am indebted to Messrs. Longmans for this permission with regard to the extracts, in Parts I and II, from Gardiner; to Messrs. Macmillan for the passages drawn from the Inaugural lectures of Professor Seeley and Lord Acton; and to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press for the extract from the Inaugural lecture of Professor Bury. A. J. G. Introduction CONTENTS Page ix PART I Passages to illustrate the view taken by His- torians at different periods of the Objects and Methods of History. 1. Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam - - - - 3 2. Edmund Bolton 9 3. Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke - 13 4. David Hume 27 5. Edward Gibbon - 33 6. Macaulay - - - 38 7. Thomas Arnold 49 8. Henry Thomas Buckle 55 9. Thomas Carlyle 65 ID. J. R. Seeley 75 11. Samuel Rawson Gardiner 82 12. Lord Acton 87 13. J. B. Bury 91 PART II Passages illustrating the Method and Style adopted by Historians at different periods. 1. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 99 2. Capgrave's Chronicle of England - - - 109 3. The Earl of Clarendon — The King's Flight from Worcester - - - - 112 The Character of Cromwell I34 vii Vlll ENGLISH HISTORIANS Page 4. David Hume — The Trial of King Charles I 142 5. Edward Gibbon— Julian 157 The Last Campaign and Death of Julian - - - 177 6. Lord Macau lay — The Character of Halifax ..... 1^2 The Trial of the Bishops --.... 195 The National Debt 209 7. Thomas Carlyle — The Meaning of the Reign of Terror - - - 222 The Fall and Death of Robespierre - - . - 227 8. Samuel Rawson Gardiner — The Last Days of Charles I 236 INTRODUCTION THIS book is an attempt to exhibit the different forms that history written in English has assumed at different periods in the history of English literature. It is thus a small contribu- tion to an important subject — the history of his- toriography in England. History is a word of such wide and indefinite meaning that it is necessary to define the way in which it is used here. There is nothing that cannot be regarded in some sort as the material of history : there is no narrative, professedly relating to the actual past, to which the name of history may not fairly be applied. " Quicquid agtint homines " is more and more the theme of the historian; nothing that concerns humanity is outside his province. In the following pages, however, the common usage of the word will be followed: by history will be meant the orderly record of the life of some considerable section of the human race in its main features. Thus, on the one hand, mere lists of events, chronological summaries, and genea- logical tables are excluded;^ and, on the other ^ These are rejected as being rather aids to the writing of history than history itself, though the modern student of history will be far from accepting Bacon's view of Epitomes as being "the mere corrup- tions and moths of history, the use of which deservptli to be banished, -; ( B 454 ) , ix B X THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE hand, memoirs (though often so closely related to history) and all sectional histories, as of litera- ture, music, art, or social customs. The object of the book may indeed be defined as an attempt to exhibit the views which at different times have been taken of the past of man and the different methods that have been adopted in de- scribing it. I. The earliest phase of historical writing in English reveals to us, on the one side, a bald chronicle-narrative of events with little connection or sense of their relative importance, and, on the other, the heroic poem or saga, in which the chief object is to glorify nation or king without much effort at the accurate statement of the facts or incidents of the narrative. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle illustrates well both these forms of his- torical writing. Side by side with the baldest records of comets, floods, pestilences, marriages, harryings, battles, come bursts of saga-like poetry, telling of heroic battles or the saintly lives of kings. Both are illustrated in our extracts, and echoes of both styles may be heard in our later historical literature. It is clear that at this time History was not conscious of herself, and could not have answered any question as to what was her special mission and object. If she amuses, interests, and incidentally instructs, that is enough ; she has not yet asked in what the interest or in- as all men of sound judgment have confessed, as those that have fretted and corroded the sound bodies of many excellent histories and wrought them into base and unprofitable dregs". MEDI^^VAL HISTORIANS xl struction that she provides differs from those pro- vided by other departments of Hterature. The historical Hterature of the Middle Ages is almost exclusively in Latin, and does not there- fore fall within the scope of this 'book. The Latin writers, it is now generally admitted, do not de- serve the contempt that was once generally poured upon them. But history, whether in Latin or English, did not emerge from the atmosphere of chronicle and poetry until the Renaissance, and the mists were slow to disperse even then. It has been remarked by Professor Bury in his Inaugural Lecture, that " it would be a most interesting in- vestigation to trace from the earliest ages the history of public opinion in regard to the meaning of falsehood and the obligation of veracity ". And much of the historical literature in English that precedes the Renaissance is interesting from this point of view, as well as for the information con- tained in it with regard to the events contemporary with or slightly preceding the times of the writer. It would serve no good purpose to give here a list of the historical works published in English prior to 1485, but it will be well to notice the character- istics of a representative example. The Chronicle of John Capgrave is the earliest historical work of any pretensions in English after the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle expired in 11 14. John Capgrave was born at King's Lynn in Norfolk in 1393, and lived most of his life in a friary of that town. He was the author of many works, historical and theological, in Latin, but the Chronicle is written throufrhout in English. The book is not a Xn CAPORAVRS "CHRONICLE good specimen of what the Middle Ages could do in the way of describing events and commenting on them, but deserves note as illustrating some general characteristics of the mediaeval chronicle. In true mediaeval fashion Capgrave begins at the begin- ning, "Anno Mundi i. The first man Adam was mad on a Friday, withoute modir, withoute fader, in the feld of Damask ; and fro that place led into paradise to dwell there: after dryvyn out for synne. Whanne he had lyved nyne hundred }'eres and xxx he deied, byried in Hebron: his hed was lift with the flood and leyd in Golgatha." His narrative then flows on in annalistic form through channels well worn by the classical and ecclesiastical guides of the Middle Ages. Most of the early part of his book is devoted to Greek, Roman, and Jewish rather than to English history. The first mention that is made of Britain comes under the date " Anno 4084 ", and a few short extracts from the neigh- bourhood of this year will serve to show the general character of the first part of this enter- taining book. " Anno 4044. — This yere deied Samson with deceyt of a woman; whech was the Juge of Israel XX yere. His strength passed alle men. He rent a leon. He brak the bondis that he was bound with. The gates of a town, and the postis, he bore them away. And at the last, be stering of the Holy Goost, he pullid down too postis, where a hous fell, and oppressed him and mech othir puple. " In this same time Ascanius, the son of Eneas, in the third yere aftir Tro)-e was distro)ed, biggid CAPGRAVE'S "CHRONICLE XUl a town, Alba, vvhech stod upon the flood which had the same name, but now it hite Tibir, and that same town is now a part of Rome." " Anno 4084. — This yere deied Hely the preest of the tabernacle that was in Silo, undir whom Samuel first was mad a ministir of the same taber- nacle. This Heli, for his necligens, that he cor- rected not his sonnes of her insolens, fel down fro his chaeyer where he sat in the tabernacle, and, thus punishid with temporal deth, scaped, as we suppose, the deth that is evirlasting. In the time of this same Hely was the arke of God take be the Philisteis, to her grete confusion. F'or whan it was sette in her temple her god Dagon fel down and was al to broken. The peeple eke was smet with grevous sores, as the first book of Kynges makith mynde. " In this same Hely tyme. Brute, that was of Eneas, Kyng, cam into this lond, and called it Britayn aftir his name. Whan he deyid he departed his kyngdam to his thre sones. The first hite Loegrius; and to him he gaf the land fro Dooyr onto Humbyr. The second son hite Albanactus; and to him gave he al Scotlond onto Humbir. The third hite Camber; and to him gave he alle Walls." His narrative has considerable historical value as it approaches his own times. His account of Henry V's siege and capture of Havre is given in our extracts as a favourable specimen of what he could do in the way of narrative. II. The reign of Henry VII not only saw the XIV THE RENAISSANCE opening of a new era for politics in England, but also the first stirrings of the Renaissance, which was destined to exercise a profound influence on the writing of history as well as on other branches of English Literature. Many forces were tending to push the spirit of man on to untried paths. The breakdown in the Papal power had been visible since the beginning of the fourteenth century, and soon the Reformation came to turn the neglect of Papal and Catholic authority into decided opposi- tion and contempt. This brought with it a neglect and contempt for all things mediaeval, from which the nineteenth century only with difficulty escaped. Geographical discovery and new conceptions in astronomy played their part in quickening men's imagination and inclining them to the acceptance of new ideas. Yet the present cannot really cut itself adrift from the past, or navigate the unknown seas of the future without assistance derived from experience. And the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though they were ready to consign the mediaeval centuries to oblivion, turned with pas- sionate and often unreasoning admiration to the example of classical antiquit)'. Not only the poets and philosophers, but also the historians of Greece and Rome, became the most cherished possession of the reading world of that century. Now Eng- lish writers might learn from Thuc)-dides that the work of the historian may be of practical use to the statesman; and from Polybius the obligation of veracity and the difficulty of achieving it. But the sixteenth century set little store by any suggestions which the classics contair.cd as to SIR WALTER RALEIGH XV methods of historical research. It would be difficult to show that Thucydides or Polybius had any influence on English thought in the sixteenth century: the men of that age found more to their taste in the efforts of Herodotus " not to let the notable deeds of men of old perish "; they admired the fluent story-telling of Titus Livius, and cared little that he avowed his equal fondness for the plausible and the true; above all, the charming narrative gift of Plutarch, and his high but always human morality, appealed to Shakespeare's century, and influenced the thought of the time more than any other classical historian. The historical product of the sixteenth century does not reach a very high standard. It is seen at its best in historical biography, as in Cavendish's Wolsey and in Roper's More. The more elaborate historical works have not shaken off the charac- teristics of the mediaeval chronicle. They are rambling, uncritical, anecdotal — anything rather than sober and accurate. Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World bears the impress of the Renaissance in the style of certain splendid and renowned passages, but its subject-matter shows no advance on Giraldus Cambrensis or Matthew Paris. Its five books only reach to the first century B.C., and much of the early books is taken up with questions as futile as ever puzzled the brain of a mediaeval scholastic. Chapters III and IV,. for instance, are concerned with the site of the garden of Eden and the nature and size of the tree of life. Raleigh shows considerable knowledge of the scholastic comments on the early XVI holinshed; stow; camden chapters of Genesis', and here, as often in the book, he takes pleasure in bringing to bear the experi- ence of his own travels on the problems in hand. He criticises the view that the tree of life was the Fiats indica by relating his own adventures among them " in the inner part of Trinidado ", where " I havo - travelled a dozen miles together under them ". There is visible throughout the book a desire to exhibit the writer's own know- ledge and the extent of his reading; but in spite of the vast amount of various information that is to be found in its pages, it cannot be held to mark any real advance in the art or science of historio- graphy. Holinshed's Chro7iicles (1586), Stow's Chronicles (i 525-1605) and Survey of London are far less pretentious, less definitely works of the Renaissance, but convey more authentic informa- tion. The sieve of the modern critical historian finds in them much of value, but they do not show any great advance in method or outlook on the works of the earlier centuries. Camden's works (155 1 -1623) are written for the most part in Latin, and must not therefore be dealt with here; but his Britannia and his Amials of the Reign of Elizabeth (the first a topographical work, the second a narrative of contemporary events) were based upon a life-long study and a critical accumulation of material. His biographer, writing in 1691, claimed that they "tasted more of the truth and plenty that may be gained from the records of the kingdom " than any earlier work. He professes to follow in his writings the austere maxims of Tolybius, and reaches a higher standard THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY XVll in his work than had been reached under the Tudors by any EngHsh historiographer. But, if the age of scientific history was not yet, the materials were being accumulated out of which scientific history would one day be written. The Cotton (founded by Sir Robert Cotton, 1 571-163 1) and the Bodleian (1602) Libraries both belong to this age, and the prominent men of the time, such as Cecil (i 520-1 598) and Walsingham (i 530-1 590), w^ere accumulating books and manuscripts with emulous zeal. III. The seventeenth century was for the most part so busy with the making of history that it had little time to devote to calmly considering it or writing of it. But the century had passed through its first quarter before its decidedly revo- lutionary character showed itself, and during this period of comparative quiet the name of Bacon cast glory upon the annals of English thought. Bacon has touched every department of human thought, and in the matter of history, as elsewhere, he may claim to be the prophet of a far-distant future. Considerable passages from the Advance- ment of Learning (published in 1605) are printed in the first series of extracts, and it is therefore not necessary to give here a full account of the views there advanced. But it is a striking testi- mony to the wide sweep of Bacon's genius that no century earlier than the nineteenth would have been able to appreciate the meaning of his advice, or could have attempted to act on it. Here, as in so much of his work, he surveys the promised XVIU BACON land from afar; but it was left to distant genera- tions to enter upon it. No one before had ever taken so comprehensive, so synthetic a view of history as Bacon; no one before had ever conceived of it as being of such direct and general human advantage. There is little in common between the genius of Bacon and that of Carlyle; and yet if the extracts from the Advancement of Learning be compared with those from Carlyle's Essay (also printed in this volume), there is a striking resemblance in certain parts of them. Both lay the greatest stress on biography. " For Lives I do find strange," says Bacon, " that the writing of Lives should be no more frequent." And it was Carlyle's constant theme that history is the essence of innumerable biographies. Again, Carlyle's insistence on the history of religion as the core and explanation of history in general is paralleled, in fact though not in phrase, by Bacon's sense of the importance of ecclesiastical history, and his desire to see the growth of "literary" history, by which he means the history of opinion. The phrase in which he recommends these two departments of thought is a striking one: "It is not St. Augustine's nor St. Ambrose's works that will make so wise a divine, as ecclesiastical history thoroughly read and observed ; and the same reason is of learning ". It may be doubted whether there is any his- torical treatise produced during the rest of the century that does not bear the marks of partisan- ship, or that does not aim at defending or attack- ing some religious or political party. But it must JOHN SELDEN XIX be noted that the very character of the Revolution was itself an incentive to historical study of a certain kind. The contest between King and Parliament was not founded (like the French movement of a century later) on an appeal to first principles or a priori conception of right. The Bible, and such political ideas as could be derived from it, played an important part; but above all, the champions on either side appealed to the traditions and precedents of the actual historical past of England. There was, in conse- quence, keen search made into the historical and legal antiquities of the country. Now for the first time Magna Ca^'ta came to be regarded as the impregnable basis of English liberties, and the men of the Long Parliament found in the Lancastrian period weapons well adapted for their struggle against the Stuarts. Among the legal antiquaries of the period John Selden (i 584-1654) is far the greatest. He appeared as counsel for Hampden, and held that the first and most im- portant thing for the Parliament to do was to " reassert the ancient laws of the country by which the liberty of the subject was secured " ; and many of his numerous works contributed powerfully to this end. The names of Sir Roger Twysden (i597- 1672) and Thomas Madox (1666- 1727) deserve mention, along with Selden, as legal antiquaries who did much to illuminate the constitutional past of England. If we turn to historians of the more ordinary type, the most notable name is that of Clarendon, His work suggests a comparison with Thucydides, XX CLARENDON in that he was himself a prominent actor in the events that he describes; and there are, especially in his character-sketches, passages that will bear comparison with the great Athenian master. As with Thucydides, too, banishment from his native country gave him an opportunity for calm and detached contemplation of the events through which he had lived. But there the comparison ends. The inner spirit of the two men is entirely different. Neither his double exile nor advancing years brought philosophic calm or intellectual fair- ness to Clarendon. He writes now as a partisan of the monarchy, now of the Church, now of his own administration, and the later books are mainly autobiographical. But none the less Clarendon's work is epoch-making in the development of Eng- lish historical writing. Here the nation's story is told by a man of practical knowledge, in language well suited to the subject, and in a tone of honest conviction.^ For a centur\- and a half it fixed the ideas of Englishmen with regard to the prominent actors in the great Puritan revolution, its prestige was destro)'ed, as by a sledge-hammer, b}- the publication of Carl)'le's CroiniveU; but the book remains one of the foremost of English historical classics. But the contemporary and autobiographical ' He h;\i> said himself in one of bis Tracts: " It is not a collection of records or an admission to the view and perusal of the most secret letters and acts of state that can enable a man to write a history, if there be an absence of that genius and spirit and soul of an historian which is contracted by the knowlcdfji- and course and method of busi- ness, and by conversation and familiarity in the inside of courts, and with the most active and eminent persons in the government". Milton's history of England xxi character of Clarendon's History makes it of little value for understanding the way in which the seventeenth century contemplated the past and tried to obtain a knowledge of it. A glance at Milton's History of England (published in 1670) may be of service from this point of view. It extends from the " first traditional beginning " and is continued to the " Norman conquest ", and is described as being " collected out of the an- cientest and best authors thereof". Milton ex- presses his belief that the authorities from which he draws are of differing and doubtful authority; he knows that there are some who " admit that for proved story" which others "explode for fiction"; but he concludes that it is best to put all down, " seeing that ofttimes relations hitherto accounted fabulous have been after found to contain in them many footsteps and reliques of something true, as what we read in poets of the flood and giants little believed, till undoubted witnesses taught us that all was not feigned ; I have therefore determined to bestow the telling over even of these reputed tales, be it for nothing else but in favour of our English poets and rhetoricians, who by their art will know how to use them judiciously". We pass, therefore, in the first book through all the story of Brutus of Troy: "certain or uncertain be that upon the credit of those whom I must follow ; so far as keeps aloof from impossible and absurd, attested by ancient writers from books more ancient, I refuse not as the due and proper subject of his- tory ". We have, therefore, the narrative of how " Brutus with an easy course arriving at Totnes, XXll BRUTUS OF TROY in Dev^onshire, quickly perceives here to be the promised end of his own labours " ; how " Brutus in a chosen place builds Nova Troja, changed in time to Trinovastum, now London, and began to enact laws; Heli being then High Priest in Judaea; and, having governed the whole isle twenty-four years, died and was buried in his new Tro}' ". Without going farther, it is plain that the critical spirit as applied to historical records leaves no traces in Milton's work, and that even his mighty intellect had no sense of the importance of deter- mining the true relation in which the present stands to the past. Milton's work naturally im- proved, as his authorities improved; but a passage at the end of the second book deserves quotation, to show how difficult the polemics of the age made the writing of history. At the end of the Roman occupation he writes : " Henceforth we are to steer by another sort of authors; near enough to the things they write, as in their own country, if that would serve; in time not much belated, some of equal age; in expression barbarous, and to say how judicious I suspend awhile. This we must expect — in civil matters to find them dubious re- laters, and still to the best advantage of what they term Holy Church, meaning indeed themselves; in most other matters of religion blind, astonished, and struck \\'ith superstition as with a planet; in one word, monks." It is, in fact, mainly in dealing with contemporary events, as in Ma}''s History of the Long Parliament^ that the historical writing of the age has value, and such writings are inevitably rather in the nature of memoirs than of iiistory GILBERT BURNET XXlll properly so-called. Sir Richard Baker in 1643 published his Chronicles of the Kings of England. It has been called the "last of the Chronicles", but the true historic spirit is not to be found in it. Sir Richard Baker's Chronicles was long a popular work; Addison makes it the favourite reading of Sir Roger de Coverley. But its entirely uncritical spirit soon removed it from the list of serious histories. Nor can the remainder of the century be said to have produced a work thoroughly historical in spirit — that is to say, painstaking and conscien- tious in its search for the facts; careful and un- biased in its presentation of their relations to one another. There was historical work being done in France of the most valuable kind. Tillemont's work on the Roman Empire dates from the year 1690; Bossuet's Discourse on Universal History was published in 168 1; and Mabillon's Treatise de Re Diplomatica (1681) laid, in the opinion of some, the foundation of historical criticism. But though the influence of France was to have so great an effect later, for the present the fury of ecclesiastical and political contentions left no space for the con- templation of the past. John Strype (1643-1737) was accumulating with somewhat unscrupulous zeal valuable material for the period of the Tudors and the Reformation, but the time had not yet come for those materials to be properly used. The chief name in historical literature that meets us before the reign of Queen Anne is Gilbert Burnet, the famous Whig Bishop of Salisbury. Both his History of the Reformation of the ChnrcJi XXIV GILBERT RURNKT of England and his History of His Own Times have played an important part in moulding the opinion of England concerning the events de- scribed. Both owe their origin to the contests of the time, and are indeed projectiles fired in defence of the Whig and Protestant interests. The History of the Reformation (published in 1679) was a de- fence of the establishment of the Anglican Church, called out by the many dangers, internal and ex- ternal, with which the church was threatened, and especially by the temperate, and therefore all the more dangerous, attacks which were being made upon the Protestant position by the various trea- tises of Bossuet. Burnet's book has been generally commended for its fairness and clearness, and it is noteworthy that the narrative is supported by a considerable array of illustrative and justificatory documents. English literature had perhaps seen no fairer or more sober treatment of the past on anything like the same scale; but it is clear that it belongs to the controversies of the time in spirit and purpose: it is essentially polemical, not his- torical. And the same thing must be said of the more famous and more interesting History of His Own Times. There is no need to enter into the controversy as to the bona fides and accurac}' of the book. It is enough for our present purpose to point out that it, quite as much as the History of Clarendon, falls into the category of memoirs and autobiographies rather than of history. IV. The writing of history, in the sense in which we now use the word, began in England with the THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY XXV eighteenth century. That is a fact which a survey of the earher attempts in that direction brings out with especial clearness. Somewhat suddenly history ceased to be written, as with Froissart, to rescue the acts of brave men from oblivion; or, as with Milton, for the judicious use of English poets and rhetoricians. The truth at length is seriously sought after, and is presented with all the grace indeed of style that the author may chance to possess, but with a serious desire to show events in their true relationship, and to disentangle the action of cause and effect. It is, as a rule, difficult to determine the genesis of a literary movement. " The wind bloweth where it listeth ": and the conditions that stimulate literary production are far from accounting for the appear- ance of genius. But the great attention paid in the eighteenth century to the study and writing of history stands in clear relation to certain influences which it is important to summarize. The era of religious contention had long passed its zenith. The theologians still wrangled, but their struggles no longer occupied the centre of the European arena. The year 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia close the period of the Reforma- tion for Europe. In England the Revolution of 1688 and the Hanoverian Succession in 17 14 had decided the victory of official Protestantism, but had not exterminated Catholicism. In England as in Europe differing faiths would live side by side, and only stupidity or fanaticism would imagine that one could hope to exterminate the others. But while the tempest of religious con- es 454) c XXVI PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY troversy sank into something approaching a calm, philosophy in England, as in France, had begun to make great strides. Hobbes (i 588-1679) and Locke (163 2- 1 704) had devoted their great intellects to the solution of political and social problems. They and their followers asked : What is the origin of civil society? Upon what basis does govern- ment rest? What is the relation of the State to the Church? They turned from the theological disputes of the earlier age to man and the mind of man, and considered all problems, religious, political, and social, in relation to man's welfare, rather than from the point of view of Scriptural texts and rival schemes of theology. This move- ment was not at first inclined to pay much attention to history. Neither Hobbes nor Locke imitated their contemporary, Leibnitz, in the attention which he paid to the actual historical past. But the move- ment, of which they were representative, could not fail to lead to the careful and scientific considera- tion of the facts of man's past. If Hobbes traces the origin of society to one kind of " social con- tract", and Locke to another, it was inevitable that the records of the past should be scrutinized to see what support they gave to one view or the other. The movement of the eighteenth century, especially when its pace quickens as it approaches the revolutionary whirlpool, is often said to be unhistorical, or even to amount to a rejection of the lessons of history. But this is only super- ficially true. It does, indeed, especially on French soil, despise the Middle Ages; it often affects to regard the inheritance of the past as a burden from LORD BOLINGBROKE XXVll which men must extricate themselves. But its preoccupation with human pnjblems made a study of the human past inevitable; and the importance of the issues involved made the study serious and scientific. But the eighteenth century was far advanced before our islands saw the appearance of any great historical work. In England, though to a far smaller degree than on the Continent, work pre- paratory to historical writing was being accom- plished. Documents were being edited, collections formed, a number of private libraries devoted to various branches of erudition were already in exist- ence, and led up to the foundation of the British Museum in 1753. But it was not until the third quarter of the century that any historical narrative was produced which holds a place in the history of English literature. There is a book, however, of a much earlier date that deserves careful note, as indicating how the current of thought was running in the direction of history, and as doing perhaps something to direct it: Lord Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History bears the date 1735, and was written during the time of his exile in France. Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-175 1), had played a great part in the history of English politics. He had struggled and intrigued for the restoration of the Stuart dynasty, and the accession of the Hano- verian dynasty in 17 14 had overthrown his hopes and relegated him to a private station for the rest of his life. No one has ever ventured to call him a great man or a noble character. It must be XXVlll BOLINGBROKE S " LETTERS GN HISTORY " admitted that he was vain and superficial, and that somethint,^ of the charlatan runs through all he writes as well as through his actions. But none the less he was one of the formative influences of his time. His influence on the literature and political thought of his own and the next generation is well known: the later Toryism was largely of his making. And his "Letters on History" mark at least the chief lines on which the history-writing of the century was to proceed. When he comes to consider the purpose for which history should be studied, his ideas differ very widel}^ from those which we have hitherto found expressed. He dismisses in the opening paragraphs of the first letter those who would write or read history for amusement, or for purposes of conversational and rhetorical displa}'. He speaks, too, of the labours of erudition, compilation, and scholarship with a curious and quite unmerited contempt. He re- cognizes, indeed, the value of the work that has been done by those who have devoted them- selves to such tasks : " they grow neither wiser nor better by study themselves, but they enable others to study with greater ease and to purposes more useful ". He admits that it is difficult " to avow a thorough contempt for the whole business of these learned lives, for all the researches into antic]uity, for all the systems of chronology and history that we owe to the immense labours of a Scaliger, a Bochart, a Petavius, or Usher, and even a Marsham ". But he thinks that the material on which such scholars must work is quite limited and nearly exhausted, and, in fact, that the work BOLINGBROKES "LETTERS ON HISTORY XXIX preparatory to the writing of liistory has been done. " The same materials are common to them all ; but those materials are few, and there is a moral im- possibility that they should ever have more. They have combined these into every form that can be given to them; they have supposed, they have guessed, they have joined disjointed passages of different authors and broken traditions of uncertain originals, of various peoples, and of centuries remote from one another as well as from ours. . . . They deserve encouragement, however, whilst they con- tinue to compile, and neither affect wit nor aspire to reason." Such is the contemptuous treatment accorded by Bolingbroke to a class of men who in our days have claimed the exclusive right to the title of historians. His view that the scholars had already exhausted their material sounds strange indeed when we remember that more than a cen- tury and a half later Lord Acton could still speak of " the incessant deluge of new and unsuspected matter ". In the second letter, which is printed in this book, he gives his own ideas as to the purpose and aim of history. There is much of affectation and patronage in the manner, and lack of clear- ness in the presentation. Its conclusions would have to be restated to satisfy the twentieth cen- tury; but it is a notable and a fine utterance. He finds in the study of history no longer a graceful accomplishment or a useful help to the rhetorician and the poet, but something of direct practical human utility. History, he says, quoting from Diogenes Laertius, is " philosophy teaching by examples ", and as such is necessary to the states- XXX THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY man and the citizen. Besides this it has an invalu- able ethical influence: it emancipates the mind from narrowing prejudices, and ennobles it by a wide knowledge of mankind. In later letters he deals sensibly with certain objections to the study of history, and with a good deal of originality urges that it is modern history, dating from the end of the fifteenth century, which will most repay study. He meets the arguments of those w^ho urge that history is not deserving of study because absolute certainty can rarely or never be obtained. A pas- sage deserves quotation. " But it is time I should conclude this head, under which I have touched some of those reasons that show the folly of endea- vouring to establish universal Pyrrhonism in matters of history, because there are few histories without some lies, and none without some mistakes; and that prove the body of history which we possess, since ancient memorials have been so critically examined, and modern memorials so multiplied, to contain in it such a probable series of events, easily distinguishable from the improbable, as force the assent of every man in his senses, and are therefore sufficient to answer all the purposes of the study of history. I might have appealed, per- haps, without entering into the argument at all, to any man of candour, whether his doubts concerning the truth of history have hindered him from apply- ing the examples he has met with in it, and from judging of the present, and sometimes of the future, by the past? WHiether he has not been touched with reverence and admiration at the virtue and wisdom of some men and some ages, and whether A TRIUMVIRATE OF HISTORIANS XXXI he has not felt indignation and contempt for others?" The third quarter of the century saw the pubHca- tion of works by the triumvirate who at last relieved the annals of English literature from the charge of lagging far behind France and Germany in the production of historical works of importance. Hume published the first volume of his English History in 1754; Robertson's History of Scotland saw the light in 1759, and his Charles V in 1769; Gibbon's Roman Empire came in 1776, but he had already published minor and almost - forgotten treatises on historical subjects. These three names are so far above the rest, that the eighteenth-cen- tury school of history can be adequately studied in them alone. It seems at first strange that it should be possible to class them together, for they were widely sepa- rated from one another in social circumstances, in cast of mind, and in their relation to the political and religious controversies of the day. Hume's (1711-1776) historical work was an interlude in his vast philosophical elaboration, and he united opinions in philosophy of a strongly negative type with a strange championship of Tory principles in church and state and an admiration for the Stuart monarchy. William Robertson (1 721-1793) was Principal of Edinburgh University, a thorough Whig at every point. He was Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and his orthodoxy was sincere though circumspect and tolerant. Edward Gibbon (1737- 1794) was a man of means, possessed of no important official XXXU CHARACTERISTICS post; sceptical in matters of religion, but without zeal for any social or religious movement, a bon vivant and a man of the world. But their work, though strikingly individual, is stamped with cer- tain common characteristics. They are all typical men of their century, and, without knowing it, standard-bearers in the intellectual movement that leads up to the Revolution. It is instructive, and important too, to notice how closely all three are connected with the philosophic movement of the time. Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau had some part in moulding the opinions of all ; for even the orthodox Robertson lived on terms of famili- arity with such sceptics as Hume and Adam Smith. The serious study of history w^as in England born from the desire to understand the human problem in its widest aspects. By what characteristics, then, is the wcnk of these men marked off from the historical writers of a preceding age? By their critical and discrimina- ting spirit, in the first place: the record of the past is regarded by all three as the story of something that really happened, where truth must be sought for and distinguished from the plausible and the interesting. And next, underlying the work of all three, there is an attempt at some sort of political and social philosophy: events are not merely arranged in chronological sequence or described so as to make interesting pictures. The relations of events are studied. The philosophy is often tentative, and in Gibbon's case even self- contradictor)', but it is there; and it is a clear mark of the eighteenth- century spirit. It should be added that none of HUME xxxm the Uiree joined in Bolingbroke's contempt for the preparatory work of erudition, compilation, and scholarship; though Hume made less use of these than either of his great contemporaries. Hume's history is now little read, and when read it is rather for the light which it casts on the author's opinions and powers than for its contri- butions to knowledge. It was written from printed materials only. Hume knew of the existence of manuscript and unpublished records; he is said to have contemplated making use of them, but to have desisted, in alarm at the extent and character of the material. But Hume's history, especially that part which deals with the Stuart period, is emi- nently readable and worth reading. It has been said that a historian should write " well but not too well ", and Hume's style exactly answers to that description. It does not, as is the case with the styles of Carlyle and Macaulay, fatigue the reader by the brilliancy of its episodes: Hume is always conscious that he has a long journey before him, and travels smoothly and at a brisk pace. Nor can the comments of such a genius as Hume lack a certain interest. It is specially noteworthy that he, catching the idea perhaps from the French encyclo- pedists, gives to social matters an attention not previously bestowed by any English historian. Robertson, far inferior to Hume in intellectual power, has nevertheless obtained a higher rank among historians. History was his main occupa- tion, and he could devote a larger amount of time to the examination of sources than was possible to Hume. Of his three works {Scotland, Charles V, XXXIV ROBERTSON and America), the second stands highest; but his treatment of Scotch history during the period of the Reformation had a considerable influence on men's thoughts about the great problems of that time. The style is ponderous and somewhat colour- less, but readable in spite of all ; and one may say of Robertson, what can be said to a much greater extent of Hume and Gibbon, that he provokes thought and leaves a permanent impress on the mind of the reader. The introductory chapters to his Charles F form the most remarkable part of his work. They give a general sketch and a critical estimate of the political and social transforma- tions of the Middle Ages; and their wide and lucid survey still renders them valuable, though modern research has done much to modify their conclusions. No survey of so wide a kind, conducted in so serious a spirit, had previously been attempted in English. But Gibbon is without question the great his- torian of the period. His Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a classic of English literature. It is a century and a quarter old ; it deals with a period that has been more ploughed and harrowed by historical research than any other; many positive mistakes in the work have been discovered. Yet it is probably read now as much as it ever was. Alone among English histories it is constantly republished with notes and additions, as though it were an original authority, instead of a secondary work. No book of Macaulay or Carlylc liolds its place with such security against competitors. It is important to grasp the causes of this phe- GIBRON XXXV nomenon. They relate partly to the matter and partly to the style of the book. For in the first place Gibbon's history was the product of profound research, pushed as far as the circumstances of the time allowed. It is written, too, with a wonderful absence of prejudice and bias. The contrary is sometimes held; but the truth is that his own prejudices and prepossessions did not intrude very much on his historical judgments, as his chapter on Julian clearly testifies. But an accuracy even greater than Gibbon reached, and the most passion- less impartiality on men, politics, and religion, would not have procured his work immortality. It lives mainly because of its literary qualities. The style is far from faultless; its dignity is disfigured by artificial antithesis; there are passages that are bombastic. But it is always clear, and, above all, always interesting and singularly well fitted for the long narrative which the author had in hand.^ Fur- ther, he is never buried in detail ; he sees his period steadily and sees it whole; the book conveys the exhilaration of the first view, gained from some commanding mountain-top, of a country hitherto unknown. The experience of many is that from Gibbon for the first time they learn the meaning of the phrases about the continuity and indivisibility of history. His philosophy of causation is often 1 Gibbon has himself told us with what care he polished the style of his history. "The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise. Many experiments were made before I could hit the middle tone be- tween a dull chronicle and a rhetorical declamation. Three times did I compose the first chapter, and twice the second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with the effect." XXXVl THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY strangely thin and unsatisfying, but the book itself implies a philosophy. And yet when this is said, more remains to be said. The secret of Gibbon's permanence lies in his personality. There is no other history that reveals the writer as this does. Most historians try to get out of the way and let the events speak for themselves. The events speak for themselves in Gibbon, but the historian's personality is everywhere too, in the style, in the arrangement, in the allusions, in the occasional irony and innuendo, in the foot-notes, which are them- selves a wonderful piece of art and humour. Gibbon's is assuredly the only great modern history over which the reader is constantly amused. There is a wide gap between the publications of these three men and the appearance of the next considerable historical work in English litera- ture. The reason is not far to seek. Robertson and Gibbon both lived to see the French Revolu- tion break in tempest over Europe; the Napoleonic wars followed hard on it; and Britain was again so busily concerned with the making of history that there was little time for contemplating and writing it. The Revolution, too, made it im- possible that history would ever be written again quite in the mood of Gibbon or Hume. The passions and fanaticisms of the Revolution were a strange ending to the " Age of Reason ". It was plain that there were still elements in human nature which earlier writers had thought non-existent or almost outworn, and the his- torian would for the future have to take ac- count of them. The writing of history (in our INFLUENCE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION XXXVll country especially, and such part of it as comes under the cognizance of literature) has always stood in close relation to the political and philosophic movements of the time; and the Revolution, in the widest sense of the term, left its mark on historical composition. Meanwhile, if little was done in the writing of history, thought on social and political questions was active. Burke's speeches and letters were giving men, among many other precious gifts, a clearer notion of the organic connection of the present with the past, and the efforts of the Revo- lutionists to tear themselves free from the past only made it clearer that such an operation was impossible, and that, in the words of a later philo- sopher, " progress must be the development of order ". Moreover, among the forces that moulded the future of history-writing in England, the general influence of the Romantic school, and especially of Scott, must not be forgotten. The attitude ot cold superiority, when not of contempt, which the eighteenth century had adopted towards the Middle Ages was for ever at an end. The influence which the Waverley Novels had in this direction has been often commented on, but still deserves emphasis. It is not that, in Great Britain at any rate, this period brought much fresh knowledge of the Middle Ages. Gibbon knew far more about the centuries, from the third to the sixteenth, than Scott. What is new is the attitude of mind, the sense of relation- ship between the past and the present. And while thus the movement of events and the movement of literature were forcing on a more comprehensive and organic view of history, the criticism of the XXXVni WOLFF AND NIEBUHR documents on which historiography is founded was producing results of wide-sweeping consequence. In 1797 Wolff published his Prolegomena to the Study of Honie)\ which Professor Bury, in his Inau- gural Lecture at Cambridge, declared to be "one of half a dozen books which in the last three hundred years have exercised most effective influence upon thought ". This famous book subjected the text of the Iliad to a close scrutiny, and declared the poem to be the work of many hands; but it is to the inauguration of a method rather than to the particular conclusions of Wolff that Professor Bury alludes in the above, perhaps exaggerated, phrase. Niebuhr's Roman History appeared in 181 1, and, after a careful criticism of the legendary history of Rome, attempted to construct the beginnings of Roman history on a rational basis. The method employed by both these scholars roused bitter feelings here: they seemed to many to be laying hands on what was almost sacred, and in the vain pursuit after accuracy, to be depriving men of a great source of noble and ennobling enjoyment; further, many saw that the methods used in the study of secular and classical literature must shortly be applied to Biblical literature as well. In the opinion of the present writer some of the early antagonism to these books was justified, and the praise of the methods employed has often exceeded sober limits; but it is certain that they, and the methods which they emplo}'ed, were destined to exercise an abiding influence on all historical compositions for the future. Between the death of Gibbon, in 1794, and the HALLAM AND MITFORD XXXIX end of the Napoleonic wars, in 1815, no historical work of the first rank was produced in English. But hardly had the storms of the Napoleonic wars died down before historical works of great impor- tance began to issue from the press. In the year 1 818 appeared Hallam's Europe during the Middle Ages, the completion of Mitford's History of Greece, and James Mill's History of British India, and in the next year came the first volumes of Lingard's History of England. None of these is a work of quite the highest order, but three of them are typical of the change which had passed over Eng- lish thought since the days of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. Mitford (i 744-1 827) indeed owed the idea of his book to a suggestion of Gibbon's, but it has none of the qualities of permanence possessed by its great example. It succeeds in being eminently readable by virtue of its decisive opinions. Mitford walks with the utmost self- confidence through a subject where now even the strongest writers proceed slowly and with hesita- tion. His marked hostility to the Athenian demo- cracy and his anti- popular opinions generally reflect the feelings of England during the struggle with the Revolution, and furnished him with a ready-made ethical judgment on every phase of Greek politics. His work performed a great service in provoking Grote to answer it, but its pages are now very rarely turned. Hallam's (i 777-1 859) book is evidence of the new interest that was being taken in the Middle Ages, though it may be noted that he deals almost entirely with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which belong rather to the xl LINGARD modern than the mediiiival world. The book still lives. It is based on a long study of such authori- ties as were accessible in print, and is written in a tone of the most absolute fairness. The style is dry and didactic, though Hallam is capable of passages of dignified eloquence when the subject specially appeals to him. Lingard's ( 1 77 i-i 851) work is a notable one, and marks a real epoch in the intellectual emancipation of the Roman Catholics in England. For Lingard was a Roman Catholic, and was trained exclusively by Roman Catholics. Until the publication of his work in 1 8 19 the story of the Middle x'^ges, the Reformation, and the deposition of the Stuarts had been told in England by Protestant writers as a rule, and in no case had the views of a Roman Catholic managed to reach the public ear, W'hen Catholic writers had dealt with contro- versial points it was usually in a tone of bitter invective, and often of misrepresentation as un- scrupulous as they encountered on the other side. Under such circumstances Lingard's achieve- ment was really remarkable. He pleased indeed at first neither Protestants nor Catholics. His treatment of Cranmer and of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew was specially denounced on the one side, while on the other he was declared to be " a dangerous enemy of the rights of the Catholic Church ". It is now universally admitted that his ^^■ork shows conscientious research and great fair- ness in presentment. The revelations of new docu- ments have shaken the credibility of his narrative in certain points, but his bona fides is unquestioned. milman; grote; macaulay xli It may be suggested that if the work were eoited by some competent scholar it would again assume a place on the book-shelves of the student of his- tory. V. During the whole of the nineteenth century the stream of historical composition neither ceased nor slackened. And until the middle of the century was reached and past there is no general change in the character of historical composition. The great works of Milman, Grote, and Macaulay stand in immediate connection with the ecclesias- tical and political movement in England, and they aim not only at .discovering and presenting the truth, but also at presenting it in a manner that shall be generally intelligible and interesting to a wide circle of readers. One and all would have agreed that written history was a part of literature, and that a knowledge of history was so important to the general public that it ought to be told in such a way as to reach the general public. On the Continent, meanwhile, a movement had begun which was destined to have a great influence on the writing of history in England. As early as 1824 Ranke had published his His- tory of the Lathi and Tcuto)iic Nations from i-^Q4. to J^i