A General History
ENGLAND IN THE REIGNS OF JAMES II AND WILLIAM III. By 5-,° Ogg. (O.U.P., 50s.) MR. OGG is a very brave man. In three massive volumes, of willch t England in the Reigns of James II and William III is the last he has written the history of England from 1660-1700 at a level detail which is no longer fashionable with professional historians) In the nineteenth century such studies were more common, '11 modern historians prefer the narrow beam of a learned article
or p or the wide sweeps of descriptive history; they eschew narrall
„f like the plague. It calls, of course, for great literary skill, which Mr. Ogg is handsomely endowed. This is a beautifully planned volume; the necessary chapters on the nature and Wm"
ture of government and society, without which the narrative would lose half its meaning, are cunningly interspersed in the story. Nor does Mr. Ogg's literary skill stop at construction; a cool and supple style is made memorable by a tart wit. And, of course, Mr. Ogg's scholarship, as far as printed materials go, is excellent. The result is a general history of England of the late seventeenth century which, for reliability of its facts and the ease and pleasure of its style, will take a lot of beating.
This is not the only aspect of Mr. Ogg's courage. He is a truculent old-fashioned Whig and does not mind the world know- ing it. He detests the Stuart's Tory apologists and regards them as crypto-fascists. For him James II remains the dangerous despot of Macaulay; the Revolution, the vindication of that innate sense of liberty which marks an Englishman. All this is well and cogently said and it is refreshing to have James's follies and mistakes under- lined once more and the great virtues of William III extolled.
But brave men are often a little insensitive, otherwise they would not run the risks they do, and Mr. Ogg is no exception. His courageous whiggery leads him, at times, to judgements as deeply prejudiced as those which he abhors. In two brilliant chapters he describes how 'freehold' and 'liberty' meant very different things to men of the seventeenth century from what they mean today, yet he fails to apply the same detachment to Stuart politics, which he insists in fitting into nineteenth-century standards. He is harsh and opaque towards those of whom he does not approve. He can see no good in Sunderland and, therefore, refuses to give more than a grudging recognition to the profound influence whfch he exercised over William III after the Revolution. In Mr. Ogg's somewhat uncharitable universe sympathy has a knack of siding with success; yet so long as men made the right historical decisions altruism is permitted to gloss self-seeking. The effect of this rigidity of attitude is to make the issues which confronted the men of the Revolution too clear-cut and their choice too much a matter of free will.
This rigidity of interpretation makes the weakest parts of this book those which deal with politics and human motive, whereas Mr. Ogg is at his best in dealing with more formal matters—the legal aspects of the constitution, the development of administra' tion and the organisation of the Army and Navy. No man can be an expert in the many aspects of history which Mr. Ogg has attempted to cover, but it is a pity that he could not have found more time and space for economic history, particularly agrarian history which influenced so deeply the plight of the gentry. Indeed he scarcely explores those inter-relations between political attitudes and the social structure which hold the key to so many of the events of this time. But these are small flaws in a fine achievement. Because of the solidity of its scholarship, the range of its learning and the skill of its construction, this will remain the standard authority for many long years.
.1. H. PLUMB
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