John Vincent on a nation of prefects
English history is an English-dominated field: as with Concorde, this supremacy is distinguished by the fact that no one else appears to seek it. Brute facts declare against it: at a recent count, only 3.9 per cent of the 13,000 professional historians in the U.S. were concerned with it. What matters to the development of any subject now is probably its ability to thrive in the American university: and if it cannot do that, it becomes native tradition, existing for local satisfaction but ceasing to command any attention upon the imperial scene. The professionals have settled many little questions, and prevented premature progress with the great: but they have hardly registered the change of context in which they do these things — the arrival of a world, here and abroad, which knows no reason for thinking that the English past particularly matters. Scholarship cannot meet this change in audience: what is needed to establisin a sense that England matters, is better journalism. And in Paul Johnson, hot from his editorship of the New Statesman, with a mood of hostility to the EEC strong upon him as he wrote, we have not only an immensely wide curiosity, and a gallant liveliness of pen, but a stentorian propagandist for the English tradition and English virtue. The motto of the book,* taken from Areopagitica, sets the tone for a magnificent roll of drums by the author himself ten pages later: "When we are taught by the Russians and the Chinese how to improve the human condition, when the Japanese give us science, and the Africans a great literature, when the Arabs show us the road to prosperity and the Latin Americans to freedom, then will be the time to change the axis of our history." Having thus scattered the Wogs to the four winds, the author sets out to show us what a proper nation is like.
Not that one can patronise. Paul Johnson is not the kind of amateur whom one surveys, pen at the ready, for comical blunders and inept faults: this is no Pelican history. Unlike Churchill's efforts, his work does not show how a great man may be greatly served, but rather how a confident man can, despite all the talk about the immense volume of bibliography, maintain a good arguing knowledge of the whole range of English history. Indeed, the
latest heavy and important works of scholarship — Professor Barlow on Edward the Confessor, say — appear to be at the author's fingertips: and those who may feel scarcely encouraged to read the book by their recollections of the author's journalism as editor of the NS in 1965-70, may rest assured that here at last he has a subject-matter and a training, to lend ballast to his bright and buoyant undergraduate manner. He is best on the Saxons, and on the late mediaeval and early modern period, as might perhaps be expected from an Oxford man of the generation taught by the remarkable late K. B. McFarlane: and those who know little mediaeval history, will probably gain most, in fascination and enjoyment, from his storytelling gifts. For, beneath the superficial anachronism of his analysis of late Roman Britain in terms of "the debate about Europe," his account of early mediaeval England never lets go of two great points: the continuous absorptive power of a stable rural culture over the centuries, and the true Englishness of the early English. Most of our mediaevalists do project a mystic Englishness and gentlemanliness back on to their subjects in their private thoughts, but are embarrassed about discussing the process by which men ten centuries apart are essentially alike. Paul Johnson, at least, is not embarrassed, and finds words which express the romantic assumptions on which mediaevalists operate but prudently never state.
As a journalist must, he is taking a line. All objections to his scope are really beside the point: writing .a national history is a matter of wisdom in omission, if the thing is to be done at all, and the dropping of half a dozen kings here or a t ouple of reform bills there is most necessary if the book is to say anything distinctive. What matters is what is selected, and the line taken by the author. Omitting women, children (except public schoolboys, whose chastisements are eloquently recorded) and the working class, the author clears his desk of trivia and concentrates on what is central, picturesque, and his great moral theme: which means in practice a succession of 'incidents and cameos showing how good various past rulers, of ruling classes, have been in measuring up to the role of an idealised Labour Prime Minister.
The problem, it seems, is that while in the ordinary way England will naturally tend to be ruled by admirably earnest prefects who reflect all that is best in our way of life, this benign process is at times thrown into confusion. This is chiefly due to interference by Foreigners, especially Catholics, and more recently by irresponsible left wing elements. Arthur (yes, Arthur), Alfred (drawn from Eric, or Little by Little), William the Conqueror, Henry II, Elizabeth I, are all touchingly depicted as models from whom we may draW wisdom and strength, and as offering an understanding of what England is reallY about. Moreover, lest these living rules seem a little distant from the NS ethos 0f
today, we are firmly reminded that if there was one thing they disliked, it was capital punishment: William the Conqueror in particular was a good paid-up Howard League man. Cromwell, too, counts as on the side of the angels, not because he was efficient in overthrowing a regime, which is unusual, but because he was hardheaded, patriotic, and morally conservative. (There is a curious appendix showing that Cromwell behaved at Drogheda with the best interests of the Irish very much at heart.)
The difficulty about this spirited defence of the prefect system in English history is that it would appear to make the great failure of the American Revolution inexplicable. Not at all: the faults were on the American side. It was, to coin a phrase, the work of agitators. "As in the Russia of 1917 a small group of singleminded and ruthless men hustled along a multitude." Even our prefect system could not be expected to cope with these low designing schemers. Like so many great social thinkers of the past, Paul Johnson has isolated the infection that makes society at times slightly imperfect. It is all due to a Small Minority. Responsible politics consists of identifying this minority and protecting the national consensus from its depredations. The mark Of a strong leader is that he protects the inherent soundness of the Volk from this Small Minority.
Rural values are what matter to the Volk, and to Paul Johnson. Agriculture is the most moral of activities: imperial Rome was bad for us because it tried to make us live in cities, which is un-English. Papal Rome is as bad: turn your back for a Moment, and the country will be in the grip of wily legates undermining the true religion of Englishness by such ill deeds as upholding natural justice and the sanctity Of marriage. Paul Johnson has not lived in the age of Dr Paisley in vain, just as his Labour chauvinism contains an unacknowledged debt to Mr Powell. What else does farmer Paul prize as high civilisation? Why, our strong currency, which we owe to Offa: and our wonderful soil, the envy of the world. One sees this latter-day Cobbett riding round the Surrey heaths, the heavy Cambridge clay, the light soil of Essex, the thin Chiltern chalk, giving thanks for the Lord's plenty, and offering praise that we do not have to contend with the rigours of Provence or Tuscany. Though odd about many things, the author is so oddly lip-smacking about farmland that one might suspect there had been a land boom recently.
One might also suspect that we are dealing with a metropolitan journalist being Chestertonian, showing that a Labour chap is as attuned to le pays reel as anyone else, showing what he wishes to be 'his roots as nakedly as Macaulay exposed his intellect. This is not a worry, since what we want from this book are not the well-wielded sobrieties of a Woodward Or a Feiling. We would hope to find the virtues of the reporter rather than of the thinker, the startling twist to the story, the Gibbonian footnote and after-dinner anecdote, the eager expose. These are there, but the scoops are predictable SCOOPS. What we ge: are essentially Isn't
It-Shocking paragraphs from an NS diary column: over Halsbury's judicial appointments, Milner's plots to stop home rule, the Tory sale of honours during the 191418 war, the proceeds of which were embezzled by the chairman of the party. Tut, tut. As entertainment, this fails to shock pleasurably: as politics, this ritual recantation of insignificant scandal simply shows how tenuous is the alleged opposition of the liberal bourgeoisie to
conservative regimes; lurching incontinently from Peterloo through Amritsar to Bloody Sunday, this demonology makes the necessity for liberalism depend upon chance not argument. But, journalistically, all these stories about the other side not playing cricket have long been part of the standard liberal repertory, and they are not enhanced by other notorious examples of liberal double-think. For instance, our author, as ever the farmer's friend, wants, like many sentimental liberals, protection for the British farmer in the 1870s: yet if taxing the food of the poor was right in the 1870s, why was it wrong in the 1840s? Again, Queen Victoria is depicted as having rather gone off the rails in her latter days in her attempts to keep Gladstone out of office: liberal historians rarely fuss much about her earlier attempt to exclude Disraeli from office. The truth is, the Queen was a sober and conscientious body whose views about personal unfitness were in line with the views of the great majority of sensible men at the time. Thus, Paul Johnson's judgements on modern history are a good deal less challenging than his mediaeval apergus (e.g. on King Offa: "modern England probably owes more to. him than to any other individual . . ."!) where good kings, bad kings, and Pelagius have a field day in a kind of Lamb's Tales from Stubbs. Pelagius espeeially, a fifth-century heresiarch of British birth who had a row with Rome, he keeps popping all over Paul Johnson's narrative as a forerunner of the Reformation, commonsense, and the antiEEC campaign, and in case the argument is not clear, Weidenfeld provide a line engraving of the divine to assist our comprehension.
Paul Johnson's search for the good prefect continues into the present day. He looks for this leadership in a transformed Labour party, "a national movement, embodying the enlightened elements in all classes and occupations. . . It must seek to evolve an elite, classless because drawn from all classes. . . ." This stirring evocation of marching towards the dawn in a Labour Party which, the spirited heir of Alfred and Elizabeth and Cromwell, would presumably consist of Reginald Paget, Sir Geoffrey de Freitas and Robert Mackenzie, is somewhat marred by the more than dotty remark that, at present, " middle-class elements within the Labour Party must accept the status of second class members." As for the trade unions (" the House of Lords of the British working class" whose achievement has been " meagre, possibly negative "), no decent liberal should keep company with them: this, I fancy, is what is known in the trade as 'speaking out courageously.' The cleansing flame proposed by the autrnor, is empirical social reform: and this appears to be a euphemism for keeping the working class quiet and outside politics, in the way that 'moderate student' equals Tory public schoolboy.
When, in the last pages, we reach a climacteric tirade, in true Telegraph style, against student radicalism, and the spirit of the age, the inspiration for the author's Labour chauvinism becomes fairly obvious. His generation gap is showing: he has been upset by the young. Since 1968, he opines, youth has taken to wronging the ancientry; and something of bitterness shows through. It takes singleness of view, to put it mildly, to give the invertebrate Soc. Socs. of our universities a place along with Offa in a history of England, still more to brand them as a major ground for cosmic pessimism. Demos over Suez were good clean fun, and a fundamental assertion of liberal principles: now they are ' Hitlerian,' the author's mot juste for all those funny people who thrust pamphlets at you on Saturdays. In between the two dates, the author has stopped taking in new ideas. Though he attacks the present for, in effect, its lack of intellect as intellect was understood in the Macmillan era, he seems to switch off at some point since then from contemporary discussion by clever people on the left. Even at the level of general knowledge, he thinks the Little Red Book is a catechism: perhaps he does not know what a catechism is, or perhaps he has never read the book. Anyway, after passing swipes at Guevara (" the pathetic would-be caudillo from Argentina "), modern art (" Painting became a matter of mere pigments hurled at, or trampled into the canvas: music dissolved into discordant or random sounds: poetry sought meaning in the meaningless . . .") and modern sexual freedom (" the sexual act, the sexual organs themselves, upstaged the imagination, with every variety of perversion, sadism and brutality employed to evoke fading responses from a dazed and subservient public "), we end on a Note of Hope: there must be a fight against pollution, and "the transfer of industry and populations to the south-east," And so, dotty to the last, the curtain rings down on this entertaining history and still more entertaining piece of self-exposure. Mr Johnson's history, written to mark the end of a period, portrays no more than a change of life.
John Vincent is Professor of History at the University of Bristol.
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