Page 38 - History 2020

sudden shaken and overthrown. Meanwhile in our island the regular course of

government has never been for a day interrupted. The few bad men who longed for
license and plunder have not had the courage to confront for one moment the
strength of a loyal nation, rallied in firm array round a parental throne. And, if it be
asked what has made us to differ from others, the answer is that we never lost what
others are wildly and blindly seeking to regain. It is because we had a preserving
revolution in the seventeenth century [Glorious Revolution of 1688] that we have not
had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth.”

Macaulay attributed Britain’s success - both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of
the British Empire - to the British genius for stability. Macaulay begins his history, “I
shall relate how the new settlement of 1688 was, during many troubled years,
successfully defended against foreign and domestic enemies; how, under that
settlement, the authority of law and the security of property were found to be
compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never before known;
how, from the auspicious union of order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which

the annals of human affairs had furnished no example; how our country, from a state
of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European
powers; how her opulence and her martial glory grew together; how a gigantic
commerce gave birth to a maritime power, compared with which every other
maritime power, ancient or modern, sinks into insignificance. The history of our
country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of
moral, and of intellectual improvement.”

Other British historians picked up Macaulay’s “Whig history” with enthusiasm:
Thomas Carlyle, S.R. Gardiner, E.A. Freeman, John Seeley, William Stubbs, William
Lecky and George Macaulay Trevelyan - Macaulay’s great-nephew! They effectively
wrote the version of the British history that we grew up with. The essence of this
interpretation is that the whole of British history is a continual struggle for freedom.
These freedoms extend right back to Anglo-Saxon times. Sadly, they were

overthrown by William the Conqueror as we fell under “The Norman Yoke”.
Fortunately, our freedom-loving barons rebelled against “Bad King John” and forced
him to grant Magna Carta in 1215. The struggle for freedom continued, with the rise
th
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of parliament from the 14 century, the Civil War against Charles I in the 17 century
and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 against James II. The Victorians erected statues
to the heroes of this struggle; Alfred the Great in Winchester, Cromwell outside
parliament (a controversial decision) and even Boudicca near Big Ben.