An England of the mind

Has there ever been so much talk of Englishness in England? The election year has begun with anxious exchanges about the Conservatives’ plans to introduce English votes for English laws. At the same time, the race is on to demonstrate that there are more inclusive—and more English—ways to foster the nation’s political and cultural life than by joining the UK Independence Party. Part of what makes it so complex is the question of how we can think in mutually sustaining English, British and European terms. But being English has always involved richly composite identities. The last time England was an autonomous state with its own laws was in the period between kings Alfred and Canute.

This is very much a time to take the long view. The Cambridge historian Robert Tombs has written a finely judged and heroically sustained history of England which can help us do just that. He builds from the ideas of Englishness in Bede’s history to the debates of the 2014 Scottish referendum. Not only does he guide us through the centuries, commenting on almost every significant political episode, but he also examines the development of English history writing and its role in passing on ideas of nationhood. This historiographical strand is crucial to Tombs’s story. Thirty years on from Benedict Anderson, this is a masterly study of England as a continually re-imagined community.

The very idea of a nation had at some stage to be imagined. Tombs shows how much of the early thinking was done with reference to England. The work of William of Malmesbury and Robert of Gloucester may not sound like essential reading today, but in helping to shape the concept of Englishness, these men were also shaping the concept of nationhood. A shared sense of Englishness must have been established strongly enough by 1066 that over the next century and a half the Normans gradually anglicised, and England did not (amazingly) become “Grande Normandie.” It was strong enough again in the 17th century to mean that royalists and parliamentarians could eventually live together in peace. Tombs shows how thoroughly 19th-century historians took their bearings from the Civil War and its aftermath, when Whig-Tory differences were established and contained in national life. National history, then, is not just what happened or even the sum of divergent scholarly opinion about what happened. It is also what people thought at the time, and what they told each other about the past.

For many of the 1,300 years Tombs covers, England’s population, leadership, laws and foreign relations were different from those of Scotland, Wales or Ireland. During the 12th century, while England was involved in complex negotiations between French, English and European identities, Ireland was controlled by around a hundred kings and Scotland did not exist as one domain but five. There have always been differences to be honoured. In recent times, there is the fact that 90 per cent of immigrants in the 2000s came to England rather than to Britain as a whole. To tell the separate lives of these nations is not to detract from the strength of their union.

Tombs has “tried to explore what is proper to England and what is shared with its various neighbours.” These neighbours include Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, with which England was so warringly united for most of the Middle Ages. Thomas Hobbes thought that “a writer of history ought, in his writings, to be a foreigner, without a country”; Tombs achieves some of this detachment. It may help that his academic life has been devoted to the study of France. He is careful to weigh the views of English commentators against those of foreign onlookers, such as the French cleric Peter de Blois who thought the English were “drinkers, gluttons, profligate wasters,” but cheerful.

Tombs’s nation is made of people rather than places. He emphasises the personal traits that have shaped the course of events: it matters deeply in his account that James I “held the lid down by a characteristic combination of inactivity and shrewdness,” before Charles I “heated the pot by an equally characteristic combination of interference and clumsiness.” There is an old-school feel to these enjoyably shrewd judgements. They remind one of the classic essay question set for generations of students: “Does history consist of the lives of great men?”

Revisionist history since the 1960s has so thoroughly shifted the emphasis from kings to communities that many non-specialists like me have all but forgotten the order of monarchs inscribed on our 12-inch rulers. We are more likely to know about vernacular building techniques or the imaginative lives of nuns. This cultural turn has been transformative and heartening, but Tombs will not let us forget that a few individuals can nonetheless determine the plot. In sharply formulated assessments, he describes Elizabeth I’s “taste for ceremony and quiet mystery, not the emotive verbosity of evangelical preaching”; the different sensibilities of Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone; the character of Winston Churchill both in his capacity as war leader and as historian of the English-speaking peoples.

At times, as the monarchs and ministers keep coming, as Henry III succeeds King John, one wonders whether a book like this is necessary when a few online clicks will lead us to millions of words on whichever Henry we need to know about. Yet it is of incalculable value that large tracts of history should be considered by a single intellect and shaped by a single voice.

The version of events presented here is optimistic. Tombs’s approach is especially striking as he charts the 18th-century recoil from extremism (“England had calmed down amazingly”) and embarks on an expansive discussion of modern times. He sees late Victorian narratives of decline as having skewed our feelings about industrial modernisation. Because England industrialised first, there were no precedents by which to steer and much anxiety about this journey into the unknown. We have inherited, he thinks, unhelpful levels of guilt and suspicion about bleak houses and satanic mills. We remember the desperate poverty of Oliver Twist but not that the Victorian Poor Law was “the biggest system of wealth redistribution in the world.” Similarly, we associate the 1930s with the Great Depression and not with a 30 per cent fall in unemployment. Tombs’s assessments of imperial policy in Australia, India and Africa register the English contribution to quashing the slave trade (while recognising the alternative hardships that could result for unsaleable slaves) and draw on a spectrum of contemporary scholarship to question, among other things, the extent of English responsibility for the demise of aboriginal communities in Australia.

His effort to look for the best runs out when he comes to Tony Blair and the “gratuitous blunder” of the Iraq War. There is a terse account, too, of New Labour’s public spending. Tombs distrusts the mantra that inequality is the source of all evil and—looking back over a long history of institutionalised difference—he proposes that “diverse, open, undisciplined societies” are desirable even though they are more unequal.

Optimists take the risk of appearing (or becoming) complacent. But in Tombs’s view the risk is worth taking. “Extremism feeds on grievance and cultural pessimism,” he says. In giving credit to England, Tombs’s aims are precisely opposed to those of far- right nationalists. To take pride and pleasure in national identity may well be essential in fostering moderate, inclusive politics. Open-minded conversations may flow from the balanced history told here, mindful of iniquities and injustices but cognisant nonetheless that England is, by comparison with many nations, peaceful and prosperous.

Tombs’s designation of himself (via Hobbes) as a foreigner in his writings is both laudable and evasive. It gives him licence both to admire and lament, but his cultivated detachment raises questions. How far must we all try to step outside our country and ourselves? How can we achieve impartiality while also understanding this history as “ours”? In fact, when history is told well, such dilemmas fall away because the past makes strangers of us all. We are likely to feel foreign in a place where people died “not for tolerance but for truth” or in times when braining one’s mother with a candlestick could be absolved with a penance. In a recent interview, Tombs observed that “abandoning national identity to the extreme right is a dangerous game.” Let’s not play it. Read the book.