A Book Review… A Captivating History Of The English

By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY

Tombs, Robert. The English and Their History. London: Penguin, Random House, UK, 2015. xii + 1012 pp. Available at amazon.com.

Robert Tombs is a distinguished professor of French history at Cambridge University. He describes himself as an Englishman with Irish connections who has spent most of his life studying France. His knowledge of French history gives him a kind of outsider’s perspective. He couples that with a propensity to place his history of England in the context of European history as a whole and often in the context of contemporaneous international events.
He opens his book with a question, “Who do we [English] think we are?” There is no short answer, but any must begin with the acknowledgment that there was a people who sometime in the sixth century took the name English, set up an English kingdom, and subsequently named their country England.
The book is focused on two connected themes. The concept of “nation,” and the manner in which events are recalled and presented in the memory of a people. Tombs asks rhetorically, does a nation, ancient or modern, have some organic existence, a cultural, genetic, or geographic entity, or is it rather a political or ideological fiction, or maybe a mixture of all of these?
“My view,” he says, “is that most nations and their shared identities are modern creations.” He grants as true that some of the world’s oldest nations do exist on the fringes of modern Europe. Of the 11,500 years of settlement on the archipelago that exists off the northwest coast of Europe, only some 1,300 can be described as English. It is a unique island. All of it is inhabitable, suitable for various kinds of agriculture, with few natural barriers and long fully settled.
It may have been Gregory the Great who gave England its name by referring to its inhabitants as Angli. In 576, Gregory sent a mission of forty monks under Augustine, prior of a Roman monastery, with the charge to convert the Angli from German paganism. Under Augustine’s leadership, there came into being a single church with two provinces, Canterbury and York. Their great cathedrals, constructed in the Middle Ages, are testimony to Augustine’s success and remain inspiring to tourists. Two hundred years after Augustine’s arrival, England was no longer pagan but Christian.
No historian can avoid paying tribute to the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede (Beada), a Benedictine Monk (672-735) at the Abbey of Jarrow, near the end of his life summed up his learning and experience in the Ecclesiastical History. From multiple sources, Bede is known as a linguist and as scriptural scholar, as well as the father of English history. He was the first historian to date events from the birth of Christ, anno domini, or A.D. Approximately 600 titles are attributed to him. One of the most famous is The Reckoning of Time, which is concerned mainly with the reckoning of Easter.
Well into his narrative Tombs surprises his reader with a section entitled “Shakespeare and Lesser Historians.” The reference is to Shakespeare’s ten history plays. “No other country has had its past so dramatized or exposed to large audiences, except the United States through Hollywood Westerns.”
The Reformation and its aftermath are treated at some length. Persecution resulted in the deaths of about a thousand, distributed between an equal number Protestants and Catholics. Thomas More and John Fisher have both been canonized and are venerated by Catholics; Ridley, Latimer, and Cramer are comparably venerated by Protestants, exemplified by Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
We are told that Henry VIII attempted to reconquer France and in 1544 would get within fifty miles of Paris, unaware that he was participating in what historians call the “Hundred Years War.” A chapter is devoted to the “Age of Elizabeth” (beginning in 1558 when Elizabeth at age 25 ascended the throne); another to “The Creation of the United Kingdom” (1707).
In the chapter entitled “King George III,” the king is described as a devout Anglican, “the most high-minded, determined, and disastrous of monarchs.”
Other chapters follow in chronological order: “Defeating Napoleon” (1815); “Dickensonian England” (1835-1850); “Victorian England” (1837 and following. Victoria proposed to the handsome Prince Albert in German in 1839 and lived to celebrate her diamond jubilee in 1987); “Imperial England” (1815-1918); “The Twenty Years Truce” (1918-1939); “An Age of Decline” (Post-World War II); “England’s Cultural Revolution” (1960 and following); and “Things Can Only Get Better” (1997-2014).
The nineteenth century Tombs recognizes as “The English Century,” much as the twentieth is sometimes called “The American Century.”
Although Tombs did not predict the outcome of the Brexit vote, he certainly saw it coming: “Though long passive about their rights within a devolving if not dissolving United Kingdom, the English are uniquely sensitive to the encroachments of the European Union.”
Philosophers such as John Locke (a political philosopher by royal appointment), Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, and John Maynard Keynes are given their due. So too, Lord Shaftesbury.
The English and Their History is richly illustrated. One hundred pages of documentation reinforce the text. A mature reader will find this book both informative and stimulating. Most Americans are likely to have some knowledge of the events described, given that English and American history are intertwined.
Yet there is always something new to be found in this narrative. Tombs may be a professional historian, but not a dry one. His style is captivating, inducing the reader to turn the page for the next revelatory insight. Given the size of the volume no one is likely to read the book straight through, but the reader is likely to return time and again to the text until he has mastered the whole.
Robert Tombs is an infrequent guest of French television. His rich persona matches the eloquence of his prose.