Lessons from history
LESSONS FROM HISTORY A C O LU M N B Y M AT T H E W M C C U S K E R
"It is astonishing to what an extent the historian has been Protestant, progressive, and whig." These words, from Herbert Butterfield’s classic 1931 essay The Whig Interpretation of History, will ring true with any Catholic who has spent much time reading works of history, whether academic or popular. Historians writing from otherwise conflicting perspectives often agree on this: the Church is behind the times, against progress, an increasing irrelevance, or is to be ignored and written out of history altogether. The theme of this column is “lessons from history”, and it is written with the conviction that an understanding of the past, of “history”, is an absolutely indispensable precondition for a correct understanding of the present. However, the term “history” refers not only to the events of the past, but also to the discipline by which knowledge of the past is communicated. If we are to learn “lessons from history” we must first learn how to read historical works, and for this a knowledge of historiography – the study of historical writings – is indispensable. This is especially so for those wanting to understand the way that the history of the Church is written in (or written out of) mainstream works of scholarship, and popular presentations of history. In future editions of Calx Mariae we will be exploring this question in some detail. A good place to begin is with consideration of the “Whig Interpretation of History” of which Butterfield, a distinguished Cambridge academic, wrote in 1931. Butterfield described it as: 50
“the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.”1 The term has been used in a very broad sense, to refer to any presentation of history as the inevitable advance of “progress” or “liberty”. A restrictive sense would limit this to interpretations which give the “Glorious Revolution” a central place in English history, which is presented as a process of growth in the liberty of the people, ever defended against the encroachments of royal authority. “Whig history” traces this liberty to remote origins in Anglo-Saxon England, and records its vindication by such signal moments as the signing of Magna Carta in 1215, the English Reformation, the victory of Parliament in the Civil War, and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. The progress of English liberty can be traced through later historical events which, depending on the individual historian’s perspective, may include events such as the Reform Act of 1832, the increasing extension of the franchise, and Britain’s defence of liberty against a variety of totalitarian ideologies. Historians identified as “whig” may, of course, often have little or nothing to do with the historic political party of that name, but the view of history it
MATTHEW MCCUSKER
describes can only be understood with reference to that party. The origin of the Whig party lay in the opposition, including by many of the wealthiest and most influential members of the aristocracy, to the accession of James II as King of Great Britain and Ireland, and their participation in his overthrow and the invasion of England by the Dutch usurper William of Orange in 1688. They were primarily motivated by hostility to James II’s Catholic faith and by the fear that he would use royal authority on behalf that faith and against Protestant interests. They accused King James II of wanting to rule England in the absolutist manner current in many Europeans states in the seventeenth century, such as the France of Louis XIV. The revolution of 1688, which resulted in the replacement of the house of Stuart with the strongly Protestant regime of William III, which led on to the Hanoverian succession in 1714, secured Whig domination of English politics for more than half a century. The “Glorious Revolution”, the Whigs considered, had saved England from CAL X M A R IA E
