The Success, So Far, of England

The English and Their History
by Robert Tombs
Penguin, 2015, 1014 pages, $35
__________________________

There have been many hundred histories of England, but this is the first work on this scale for more than half a century. Written by the professor of history at Cambridge, it is peppered with criticisms of the English rulers and peoples but—surprisingly in an age where national self-mutilation is common amongst historians—it ends with a verdict that is close to not-guilty. Measured against the story of the whole human race, writes Professor Robert Tombs, “England over the centuries has been among the richest, safest and best governed places on earth, as periodical influxes of people testify.” He particularly has in mind the latest influx.

This massive book travels quickly over England’s first centuries. The invasion by William the Conqueror and his “thuggish, illiterate” Frenchmen appears as early as page 43. The heavy loss of life and the massive and permanent confiscation of English property in 1066 are vividly described. “The Conquest annihilated England’s ruling class, physically and genetically.” While many widows and heiresses were forced into marriage by the French invaders, others escaped into convents. Some of the deposed rulers and landowners fled to places as remote as the Black Sea, and a small English colony arose near Nicea, not far from Byzantium, where Englishmen could be found serving in the imperial guard.

With 800 pages still to go, the book reaches the Elizabethan era and the plays of William Shakespeare. Tombs observes that this greatest English writer emerged during England’s “greatest revolution of words”. That clever lad from Warwickshire would have spent his life writing about theology in Oxford, or writing religious plays, but for the emergence, when he was aged twelve, of the first public theatre in London. A few decades later women loved to be spectators of his new plays, a social sight which scandalised foreigners visiting London. For about 150 years, however, Shakespeare was virtually unknown outside his own island, English being a language unfamiliar to foreigners.

This same section of the book implies that Queen Elizabeth I was one of the mothers of the modern politician, for “she had bought peace for herself by leaving the unpopularity of raising taxes to her successors”. James I, her successor fresh from Scotland, could almost be called politically correct, for he hated the Old Testament idea that a king was often a tyrant. In the creation of his so-called King James Bible, the word tyrant had to be deleted from the recent Geneva Bible in some 400 places.

Robert Tombs handles grand ideas with ease. He arranges or couples them neatly, as if he is loading a container ship bound for many ports: “The Victorians believed in God. They also believed in Progress, and commonly linked the two beliefs.” A vivid example was William Ewart Gladstone, Liberal prime minister. Member of a Liverpool Anglican family that was once heavily involved in the overseas slave trade, Gladstone began his political career as a Tory with a pessimistic view of human nature but decades later he was an optimist who saw God’s will being progressively fulfilled by what he called “the great social forces which move upwards and onwards in their might and majesty”. That was an era in which “the English wallowed in self-congratulation”, as well they might, for their achievements in science, technology and government were stunning. But across Europe by the end of the century, the increasingly pessimistic views about human society were promoting demands for radical change. Noticeable is the author’s knowledge of what was happening in the rest of Europe, especially France and Germany, over many centuries.

In dissecting social ideas of the Victorian era Tombs pauses to look at respectability. The concept seems upper-class or at least conservative but he sees it as the special goal of the political radicals, for it was one wide pathway to social equality. It was the Chartists, socialists and feminists (especially the campaigners against alcohol and sexual immorality) who proclaimed the virtues of respectability and invited the working class to adopt it. Cleanliness is the twin of respectability, and it was at that time that the typical English family took to soap, using twice as much as the French in the 1880s. Indeed a celebrated German historian once sneered at the English, claiming that they “think soap is civilisation”.

Nowadays a woman who stays at home for many years to raise her children is not esteemed in some intellectual circles, but in the late Victorian era her daily work at home was valued. “It took a fairly serious family crisis to get married women back into the workplace,” writes Tombs. His view is that the poorer section of English society greatly improved its health and nutrition partly because the mother stayed at home and cared for the family. As for the later idea that Victorian respectability went hand in hand with a sombre outlook on sex, Tombs disagrees: their attitudes to sex “were little different from those of most human societies”. In some ways the English then were more permissive than the French, especially in the freedom they allowed their daughters.

Some of his statistics on behaviour are arresting. Thus a caption to one of the colour illustrations suggests that in 1851 England was “about as religious as the United States today”. Elsewhere, discussing the birth-rate, he notes that illegitimacy “reached its lowest ever level in 1901”. A casual reader, however, might comment that he can’t really know whether that claim is true. To this Tombs might well respond that a historian writing on a big theme, and again and again revealing the vital details, has to save his words and sometimes skip the fine-tuning.

Every serious Australian historian should read this book. I must say I was intrigued to see a detailed statistical table showing emigration from the British Isles in the century to 1914. Australia and New Zealand gained their highest share of that outflow (an astonishing 22.1 per cent) in the gold-rich 1850s, the USA in the 1860s, and Canada in the earlier period 1815 to 1830. The large map accompanying this table is, alas, rather astray.

On wars Tombs is thoughtful. Asking himself what would have happened if the Germans had won the First World War, he touches on the likely consequences. Thus Germany’s rulers, viewing the war “as a struggle against democracy”, would have extinguished democracy in the territories they occupied or controlled. French democracy would probably have been crushed. England might have continued as “a cowed and impoverished satellite state”. Tombs does not say so but—in keeping with his argument—Berlin would almost certainly have taken over the present Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia, and exacted reparations from Australia.

The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 marks the end of what he simply calls a twenty-year truce. His story of the new war is an impressive blend of narrative and explanatory history, while his comparisons with other wars and wartime leaders are enlightening. Britain’s struggle to survive against Hitler in the two years after the collapse of its ally, France, was a remarkable attempt to fight on so many fronts with so few allies: it was “more than any state in history has ever tried to do”.

The remarkable military success of the Japanese forces in South-East Asia and the western Pacific—and their capture of Singapore and their bombing of Darwin and invasion of Timor and New Guinea in 1942—become less puzzling in the light of Tombs’s analysis. Churchill, compared to Menzies and Curtin, was over-confident about Singapore. But his failure to assign adequate aircraft to the defence of Malaya, Burma and Singapore can be partly explained by one fact I had never seen mentioned until I read this book. Britain supplied to Russia, its new ally, more than 400 modern aircraft that could otherwise have substantially reinforced the naval base at Singapore.

On modern Britain Tombs is illuminating and sometimes pessimistic. The tentacles of Brussels vex him. The massive increase in immigration to England since 2004—its “fastest increase in population ever recorded”—is for him a mixed blessing, for it has led to or been accompanied by a large transfer of employment from mainstream English people to EU immigrants.

A strong lesson of this book is how hard it is to predict the likely movements of people across and into Europe. It was London—and not Paris or Berlin—which permitted in 2004 the heavy influx of migrants from Eastern Europe, now in the EU. At least ten times as many came as were predicted. Even the French and Germans poured into prosperous England, and nearly all—like the Poles—found jobs.

Third World migrants also were easily accepted in the period from 1994 to about 2008, but they were less likely to find jobs and more likely to want public housing and welfare benefits for family members who hurried to join them. Other migrants slipped in, illegally. As early as 2005, public servants “guessed” the illegal ones numbered somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000. And still they came. The effects on London and southern England of massive immigration were a mixture of good, neutral and bad. In London, Christianity was one gainer, and now “57 per cent of all young British church-goers are Londoners”.

Tombs thinks that the racial merging—occurring over the last half-century—has been relatively harmonious, and substantial. The country now holds about the same percentage of “mixed-race children” as does the United States, and large numbers of them now tend to see themselves not as members of a minority but very much as English.

Meanwhile the more extreme Muslims were slowly creating on English soil “an underworld of violent religious conspiracy unseen since the Stuarts”. A tradition of relative social cohesion lasting more than three centuries has been snapped. The sense of alienation and defiance is more notable in France, where 60 per cent of the nation’s prisoners are Muslims. Tombs endeavours to adopt a dispassionate view on these difficult political, ethnic and economic topics.

After I had finished two thirds of the book I began to wonder who he was. A Google or two revealed that he has written more on French than on English history, that he has a French wife, and that together they have written a very large book, called That Sweet Enemy, on French-English relations. Where and when he was born and educated, and where he began his career I do not know, which suggests an inclination to privacy. How he will vote in the coming referendum is not clear, for in the book he indirectly makes strong arguments for an independent England as well as for a stronger, wiser European Union.

His is one of the most lucid and enlightening heavyweight-history books I have read. He can be severe but is not arrogant in his judgment of human beings and their trials and triumphs. He often strays outside England but the detours are brief and often eye-opening. He is sometimes astray factually (at least in my opinion), but how can a book of such length and scope be always correct? As history is a perilous sea, the sight of a master navigator at work is itself rewarding.