Our most important ruler?

Yesterday, in his Guardian column, the environmentalist George Monbiot, considering England’s current democratic deficit in the light of its colonial past, explained how he was ‘indifferent’ to the country of his birth. I find it hard to believe that anyone is indifferent to the country to which they belong. They may hate it (as I suspect George does and, as Orwell pointed out, many English left-wing intellectuals do), they may love it to pieces, or like it just a little bit. But indifferent? Was he unaffected by the monument to British worthies that stands in the grounds of his stately public school, Stowe? Did he not engage with the politics of his father, a former deputy chairman of the Conservative party, or his mother, an Oxford councillor? Aren’t his present politics in some way a reaction to his impeccably English upper middle class background? No, it seems George bestrides the world of which he is a ‘global citizen’ in some strangely numb and wholly objective manner, averse to the prejudices of we lesser folk. Oh to think such pure thoughts.

It is impossible to feel indifferent towards Henry VIII. Yesterday, Dr David Starkey, member of History Today’s advisory board, was at the British Library to unveil a love letter from Henry to Anne Boleyn. Probably written in January 1528, it has been hidden away in the Vatican collections for the best part of 500 years, and will be on display in a British Library exhibition on the king which opens on April 23rd. Dr Starkey is rarely short of an opinion, one of the many reasons why he is one of our most compelling historians, and declared at the unveiling that ‘Henry is not only England's best-known king - with his wives, his girth and his bloodthirstiness - he is also our most important single ruler. When he came to the throne, Henry was the pious prince who ruled an England at the heart of Catholic Europe. When he died, he was the great schismatic, who had created a national church and an insular, xenophobic politics that shaped the development of England for the next 500 years.’ Two questions arise from that statement. Was the politics that shaped England from the Tudor age to the present day really marked by insularity? Can empires be born of insularity? Is not curiosity about the world beyond a motivating factor, as it was in the rise of science in England? And is Henry really ‘our most important single ruler’? Cases can certainly be made for William I, Henry II, Elizabeth I, Cromwell, among others.

A Grounding in History

We live in an age where the fulfilment of adults has come to be regarded as more important than the wellbeing of children.

Charles Arnold-Baker, subject of yesterday’s post, has an interesting thesis about the prevalence of violence in the Middle Ages. He puts it down to everyone being very, very drunk most of the time. It’s certainly an attractive topic for further research. The Victorians, he claims, diverted the people of these islands away from drink and towards industry in the widest sense. Their influence lasted until very recently. Public drunkenness was scorned in Britain (just as it is in Italy today), and it is interesting that Orwell thought the defining characteristic of English life between the wars was ‘gentleness’. Among the chief beneficiaries of this moral reformation were children. That is no longer the case. We live in an age where the fulfilment of adults has come to be regarded as more important than the wellbeing of children. Thomas Paine wrote 'If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child shall have peace.'That will not be the case for the next generation of British children. But if we can’t give them peace, we can at least give them an education and a grounding in history, from where to navigate a difficult future. This explains, perhaps, the enormous rise in the number of applicants for the remaining grammar schools and, even more remarkably, the apparent rise reported yesterday in applicants for fee-paying schools. In difficult times, our priorities change.

The Companion to British History

we cast off our traditional narratives and left ourselves with little else but shopping as a distraction

Yesterday I was privileged to meet Charles Arnold- Baker, author of The Companion to British History, at his Johnsonian flat in the Temple, London’s legal heart. Though 90 years old, he remains as sharp as a tack, recounting his remarkable life, combative in his views on the practice and nature of history. Arnold-Baker was born into the Prussian aristocracy, during the last months of the Kaiser’s reign, and christened Wolfgang von Blumenthal. When his German father and English mother divorced, he came to England. Educated at Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, he was repelled by National Socialism (and the Marxists who taught him at Oxford), and joined the Buffs, becoming Churchill’s bodyguard, before rounding up Nazis in Belgium for MI6 towards the end of the war. Trained as a barrister, he began work on The Companion to British History in 1960. Each of its 15,000 or so entries, all two million words, were composed in longhand in an exercise book. His method was to write of events and personalities in chronological order and then rearrange them alphabetically, adding complementary entries that, in his judgement, shed light on British history. Now in its third, beautifully presented, edition, the CBH is a rich, brilliant and sometimes eccentric work – its entry on Limericks adopts that genre’s form. Arnold-Baker and his work will be profiled in a future edition of History Today.

Later on, I watched TV reports of the Select Committee grilling of four prominent bankers, including Fred ‘the shed’ Goodwin, the longstanding ally of our Prime Minister.I had discussed our society’s neglect of narrative history with Arnold-Baker, and earlier with David Starkey, a master of the form, and reflected on the grievous consequences while watching the confrontation between bankers and parliamentarians, which itself shed little light. Both sides were at fault, I thought. From the 1960s onwards, we cast off our traditional narratives, whether historical, religious, social or cultural, failed to reinvent them, and left ourselves with little else but shopping as a distraction. Politicians, who had been the driving force behind these changes (remember the nonsense spouted by Tony Blair about Britain being a ‘New Country’ – only if you discard all the history of course), allied themselves with bankers in an extraordinary act of smoke and mirrors that has brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy. The politicians were unable to create – perhaps didn’t want to create - a convincing national narrative, so called on the bankers to create ever more elaborate – and unsustainable - means to keep us consuming instead, like spoilt children. We spent too much and earned too little. Our children and grandchildren will live with consequences. As one last act of consumption, buy them Charles Arnold-Baker’s The Companion to British History. It will offer them a lifetime of instruction.

It is available here: www.loncrosspress.com