Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837
Thompson, E.P.
BRITONS: FORGING THE NATION 1707-1837, by Linda Colley. Yale University Press, 1992. 430 pp. $35. King Henry: Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the king's company, his cause...
...We often think of Dr...
...John Thelwall, the leading reformer of the 1790s, was writing an ode on the death of Admiral Nelson in 1805...
...The answer probably varied according to persons and places, times and contexts...
...She insists that patriotism "requires flexible, sensitive and above all, imaginative reconstruction...
...Class" was perhaps overworked in the 1960s and 1970s, and it has become merely boring...
...Not only were the British sometimes highly loyalist and sometimes decidedly not so, but also Colley's argument about the making of one British SUMMER • 1993 • 381 nation need not contradict arguments about the "Two Nations" of class...
...from the Bishop of Rochester and others.]" The Bishop of Durham concurred: The French rulers, while they despaired of making any impression on us by force of arms, attempted a more subtle and alarming warfare, by endeavouring . . . to taint and undermine the morals of our ingenuous youth...
...For the men, service in the armed forces educated them not only in patriotism but also in citizenship—they returned after the Napoleonic Wars to demand political rights...
...King Henry: Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the king's company, his cause being just, and his quarrel honorable...
...Colley says that the revelations about her private life after her death in 1797 "savagely limited [Wollstonecraft's] influence...
...The one respect in which the publisher fails is in putting the notes at the end of the book instead of at the foot of the page...
...Her general thesis about Protestantism will scarcely be challenged, and she can confirm it with reference to the Gordon Riots (1780), sparked off in large part by crowd hostility to the relief of disabilities on Catholics...
...Instead of trying for some mid-way compromise, we might say that both views might be true...
...But what savagely limited and indeed defeated the cause of the Rights of Woman was the unprecedentedly strident and brutal attack upon them, from such quarters as the Anti-Jacobin, and the loyalist equation of Wollstonecraft and feminism with promiscuity and potential treason: Fierce passion's slave, she veer'd with every gust, Love, Rights and Wrongs, Philosophy, and Lust...
...Most of those middle-class reformers, as well as working-class Painites who had been disaffected in the first French war, became ardent anti-Gallicans in the second...
...These years were the very nadir of any British "Jacobin" enthusiasm...
...One, by a Conservative peer and sound historical scholar, Ian Gilmour, is entitled Riot, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in 18th Century England...
...Taking these books with Colley's, each of them might be describing different "Britons...
...In the first there was widespread disaffection, of the Jonathan Panther kind, and even some sympathy with the French...
...My point is not only that the evidence is difficult to read but that it is always evidence of conflict, of competing agencies, with the outcome undecided, and not of determined Whiggish evolution...
...Some of the illustrations are extraordinarily good, such as Romney's "Eton leaving portrait" of the young Charles Grey, and very many will be new to most readers...
...She also has a capacity for historical generalization that puts her into the front rank among her contemporaries...
...Most of the yeomanry were subgentry or their clients and tenants, and one of the things that many of them did was to join or form fox hunts, where they could ride about in a manly way and signal their loyalism by calling the unfortunate creature whom they pursued "Charlie," after the radical and propeace Whig leader, Charles James Fox...
...All this made a difference...
...Colley at one point high-mindedly rebukes unnamed historians for "confusing patriotism with simple conservatism, or smothering it with damning and dismissive references to chauvinism and jingoism...
...For I argued there, and elsewhere, that a significant part of the British experience in these years was the formation of the structures, oppositions, and contradictory cultures of "class...
...The earnest follower of Tom Paine's Rights of Man was utterly turned off France by French betrayal of revolutionary principles—by the elevation of Napoleon as First Consul and then as Emperor, by the re-establishment of hierarchy and of slavery, by French aggression and aggrandizement in Europe...
...It is a concept long past its sell-by date...
...With equal or more force one might say the same of Margaret Thatcher, the first British woman to become prime minister...
...Perhaps we could compromise by saying that the truth lies somewhere between my view and Colley's...
...And on that note I am willing to welcome this book and to call out "Pax...
...But some parts of it are presented too confidently, and I am sure that Colley would prefer to be challenged rather than receive facile assent...
...I am not convinced as to the "apotheosis" of George III...
...If they are 100 percent correct then my old study, The Making of the English Working Class, must be wrong...
...They also, as Colley acknowledges, dressed up in uniform, rode around in macho postures, and were sometimes employed against crowds who were rioting against the high price of bread...
...Another is the striking work by a North American Marxist, Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, which examines "from below" the short life experience of many of those who ended up on the Tyburn gallows...
...At any time between 1803 and about 1810 the Colley thesis is probably right...
...I think that there was a marked change in popular responses between the first and second French Wars...
...No wonder that a committee of the House of Commons solemnly declared the election to be invalid...
...But in doing so she passes by the considerable archive of "Home Office Papers"—that is, the extensive correspondence between anxious magistrates and the Home Office...
...There are mountains of such humbug, which contributed not only to halting but to reversing the feminist impulse...
...I am sure that I have been guilty of this sometimes myself...
...This is to wreck a historical work, but I will not argue that familiar case over again...
...They might serve only in their immediate vicinity and choose preferred (non-military) roles such as wagoners or drovers...
...In the second war—the truly "Napoleonic War" —there was a powerful surge toward a national patriotic and anti-Gallican consensus...
...We have nothing like the remarkable testimonies of liberated slaves now presented by Ira Berlin and his colleagues in Free at Last...
...As to how far the common people participated in this new loyal British consensus, I remain skeptical...
...In this case there is no micrometer that will measure degrees of patriotism or loyalism...
...Colley makes much of their numbers, but does not tell us much about what they did...
...There is no way of telling how many shared the views of Jonathan Panther, a London coachmaker, who was indicted for seditious libel in August 1803, for saying "it is a war of the rich men against the most sober, Honest and Industrious part of the people of this nation, who have always been the principal support of the rich...
...The reformer had secured election with the support of a "lawless mob," and the ensuing triumphal procession "was done in a style unlike any thing ever before exhibited in this Country": The Goddess of Reason attended by four & twenty Virgins dress'd or rather half dress'd in white in the French fashion, followed by the Tree of Liberty and the tri-colour'd Flag...
...One is often impelled to ask: which Britons...
...I consider that Colley much overstates—and thereby weakens—her case by asserting that "training in arms under the auspices of the state . . . was the most common collective working-class experience in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" and more common than the "experience of work...
...Nor need their loyalty be always assumed...
...this disposition continued to be evidenced by the volume of petitions against Catholic emancipation in 1829...
...On the other hand, there were some women and some men who stood up against the avalanche of state-sponsored anti-Jacobinism...
...People can swing swiftly between poles when their leaders shift...
...Her stimulating book will be, and deserves to be, influential...
...The authorities, by comparing handwriting, identified the suspected author of these letters as a sergeant in the Volunteers...
...After all, English, Scottish and Welsh reformers and Chartists managed to work together, and the most prominent British Chartist leader, Feargus O'Connor, was an Irishman...
...The point is valid, but she would be more persuasive if she allowed her readers to learn that some Volunteer patriotism was humbug and that chauvinism and jingoism were among its components...
...Whole cart loads of patriotic ballads came off the presses in those years...
...This also indicates some of the evidence that Linda Colley hurries past with averted eyes...
...And can a sensitive and imaginative reconstruction succeed that holds its hand over this kind of inconvenient evidence...
...The first thesis is undoubtedly true, and she shows it to be so...
...There was a political element in this change also...
...It is a persuasive argument, which hangs together well...
...But that is no reason for historians to follow suit...
...William Cobbett, himself a former regular soldier who had not yet crossed to the side of the reformers, utterly despised the Volunteers...
...There is a Whiggish tone to some of Colley's argument— "the gradual but relentless shift of opinion" —that sometimes suggests that all came about in a determined way, and without sharp conflict or purposive agency...
...And so on...
...Those who volunteered were exempted from service as regulars...
...However, in using "Protestantism" as a blanket term she has little to say about the fact that that extraordinary hybrid creature, the Church of England, balanced itself between two opponents, the Catholics and the Dissenters (who also were subject to limitations on their civic rights...
...Professor Colley has an alias as director of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale, and she has clearly put her time there to good use...
...These are evocative and well selected, even though some require a magnifying glass to understand (but why not...
...There are times when the patriot must also be a revolutionary...
...It was made to happen, by some men and women and against others...
...At the apex of this loyal new nation of Britons was the monarchy, and George III's long reign culminated in his "apotheosis," as the king was celebrated with more and more elaborate ceremony...
...Lord Auckland said that such a bill "was better adapted to the proceedings before the municipality of Paris...
...William Shakespeare Henry the Fifth, Act IV, Scene 1 Since I am going to argue with some parts of this book, let me say at once that it is a significant study and well deserves the praise with which it has been received...
...This in turn was enforced by a century and more of wars and confrontations with the French "Other," a Catholic Other that was also a prime competitor in trade and empire...
...She has also been well served, in most respects, by her publisher, who has allowed her a multitude of illustrations—perhaps one to every five or six pages of text...
...Your head adorned with Ribbons Blue, And in each Arm, A WENCH...
...Perhaps the Volunteers were somewhat encumbered in their military duties by the wenches on their arms, which may be why the "dashing sword" was reserved for wielding against the unarmed handloom weavers and cotton spinners on the field of Peterloo...
...In my view—as I've said before—the only time when that was historical possibility was during the crisis leading up to the Reform Act of 1832, when the rulers were divided and when great sections of the middle and working classes were making common cause...
...Colley makes her argument easier by laying great stress upon the papers of the Volunteers, those part-time civil defense forces that were raised to meet a French invasion, in 1797-1800 and again in 1803-08...
...CHORUS In the Manchester Volunteers, Haste, Britons, Haste to go, Along with Captain Delhoste, To fight the Gallic foe...
...The evidence of Volunteers is not as unequivocal as might be supposed...
...Britons is an interpretive essay and not a chronological study...
...And all the work you have to do, Will be to beat the French...
...My examples are more biased than are Colley's...
...Yes, but if such ballads as I have quoted—and they were numerous—did not represent chauvinistic humbug, then, damn, what does...
...As Americans may remember...
...She may fairly respond that historians have written enough about riots and popular radicalism, and that her purpose is to mark out firmly the boundaries of national consensus within which all that took place...
...She said she had some fringes that wou'ld arouse my fancy...
...Such persons were the potential leaders of an alternative Britain...
...Although the culture of loyalism in the same period was profoundly antifeminist, the widespread participation of women in patriotic activities and in support of the armed forces provided them with education in self-organization and with a new sense of public space...
...CHORUS 0! no, the Devil a bit with jolly Jack of Dover, None of your murd'ring Frenchmen to England shall come over...
...This tells a very different story, of popular disaffection and class alienation, especially between 1797 and 1803, years of severe food shortage and soaring prices, of discontent against taxes (which extended to the middling orders), of mutiny in the Navy, insurrection in Ireland, and war weariness that may have compelled government to accept the brief Peace of Amiens...
...There were also merry ballads that were SUMMER • 1993 • 379 anti-Gallican tout court...
...If we should treat with respect Colley's informed hunch (for it is not much more) as to British loyalism, then I may be allowed to offer my own different hunch...
...They sent amongst us a number of female dancers, who, by the allurement of the most indecent attitudes, succeeded but too effectually in loosening and corrupting the moral feelings of the people...
...The sheer volume and universality of this antiJacobinism (the British precursor of McCarthyism) is scarcely glimpsed in Britons, and yet it was the inseparable obverse of loyalism It can be seen, for 380 • DISSENT example, in a House of Lords debate in 1798 on a divorce bill...
...Thus one, called "Jolly Jack of Dover," is supposed to be spoken by a ferryman who brought emigrants across from Calais: I brought o'er a Milliner, who said her name was Nancy...
...In a few suggestive asides Colley hints that today, in the absence of an enemy Other and with the decline of Protestantism, the British nation may be about to fall apart...
...Colley is able to make convincing soundings here and there...
...She does this superbly well, with controlled judgments and with abundant information...
...In 1801 sensationally seditious anonymous letters were circulating in a corner of Somerset: Then raise yr drooping spirits up Nor starve by Pitt's decree Fix up the sacred Guillotine Proclaim—French liberty...
...If one were to discount all this testimony, one would have to conclude that the British ruling class was made up of paranoiacs and fools, which it was not...
...What all this is about may only be a matter of emphasis...
...No doubt if the French had invaded some of them might have given a better account of themselves...
...Colley appears to share the prevalent view and evades any full discussion of the alienation, in the eighteenth century, between patricians and plebs, and in the early nineteenth century between aristocracy, the middle class, and the emergent working class...
...Michael Williams: That's more than we know...
...Colley makes some portentous concessions to this view, and adds that More was the "first British woman ever to make a fortune with her pen, and this fact alone should warn us against seeing her simply as a conservative figure...
...I find in the sources some examples of conciliated crowds shouting "God Save the King," but this is a ritualized concession to loyalism and it rarely focused upon the royal person...
...quite a few of these had served in the armed forces or at sea in defending and extending the British empire...
...A loud cry of "Hear, hear...
...I cannot find one univocal nation of "Britons...
...Colley has an enviable command of the secondary sources published in the past fifteen years, although her recourse to primary evidence is less fluent...
...This leads into another quarrel with which I must deal more briefly...
...I am certainly not proposing that there was an almost-revolution in Britain in the 1790s...
...Bowdler, who gained fame by "bowdlerizing" Shakespeare's plays, as a "Victorian" figure, but he belongs—as do many features of the repression that we have come to know as "Victorianism" —to the anti-Jacobin repression of the 1800s...
...The directors of a prestigious academic press should be ashamed...
...It is perfectly true that William Godwin's posthumous Memoir of Wollstonecraft was tactless and sadly inopportune...
...Windham, the war minister and close ally of Pitt, was defeated in Norwich...
...Despite her high intelligence and liberal disposition she has written a "top-down" history, flattering to a conservative self-image of Britons...
...I am unimpressed by the argument, heard often today and even supported by some feminists, that Hannah More, the well-supported anti-Jacobin and anti-feminist polemicist, was in fact enlarging feminine space and expectations by becoming such a public figure...
...Hannah More had the good will of the whole state and of much of the ruling class to propel her to fame and fortune, whereas the Nottingham Goddess of Reason was bound to be found, on enquiry, to be invalid...
...That is about all that we hear of the feminist impulse of the 1790s: it was "savagely limited" by an unfortunate contingency...
...This chronicles and analyzes the repeated confrontation between a turbulent crowd and the authorities that punctuated the entire century...
...We know that some reformers joined the Volunteers in order to get 378 • DISSENT hold of arms...
...The difficulty of interpretive selectivity may be illustrated with reference to two other recent books that deal with the British people—or some British people—in the same period...
...All this did not just happen, in a Whiggish way...
...But it still remains necessary to take the full measure of these strains to qualify the theses of Britons...
...one anonymous letter writer remarked that "we dont care a Dam for them fellows that Call Themselves Gentlemen Soldiers But in our opinion they Look moore like Monkeys Riding on Bears...
...In other accounts the Goddess of Reason was naked, although she was probably wearing a flesh-coloured garment...
...But I am not ready to capitulate...
...I wonder if it was even more common than being a supplicant for the Poor Law...
...But the French did not, so the valor and loyalty of the Volunteers must remain a hypothesis...
...But if More and Thatcher were not conservatives what are we to call them...
...Most of my points would be acknowledged by Colley, and indeed find some mention (if only marginally) in her carefully qualified argument...
...By contrast disloyalty could focus sensationally on the person of George IV in the Queen Caroline agitation...
...Wordsworth, who was surveilled as a suspected Jacobin in 1797, was drilling with the Grassmere Volunteers in 1803...
...And I consider that the common people were not always as stupid as she appears to suppose: at one point she remarks approvingly of the cult of monarchy under George III that "it was more securely at one with the politics of unreason and emotionalism...
...Thus in the parliamentary elections of 1802 advanced reformers were elected in some constituencies with a wide franchise...
...And reformers, like royalists, could have their own ceremonies...
...And in Nottingham, where a reformer was elected, an over-excited magistrate sent to the Home Secretary a sensational account...
...How far has she written a thesis on the making of the British ruling class, and how far is she entitled to incorporate the common people into the same thesis...
...One must recall that the most triumphant engagement of their direct successors took place after the wars, and was against Britons, when these solicitor's clerks, dancing masters and wine-merchants in fancy dress rode down the Lancashire working people of both sexes who were demonstrating for political reform, in the "battle" of "Peterloo...
...In SUMMER • 1993 • 377 any interpretive essay the author tends to select evidence that confirms the interpretation and to neglect whatever is inconvenient...
...But the reader or the viewer today at least must choose to buy the rubbish or to turn on the knob, whereas bundles of these masterpieces were, like Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts, bought in bulk by the gentry and their ladies to be sent down to the servants' quarters or distributed to the poor...
...I will take as an example her treatment of feminism in the 1790s...
...I have been trying for much of my life to find out, but I remain an agnostic...
...Her thesis is that it was in the eighteenth century that English, Welsh, and Scots became a British nation, and that a shared Protestantism facilitated this and gave to this junction an identity...
...This evidence has been drawn upon extensively in two books by Roger Wells, Wretched Faces and Insurrection...
...To this day English fox-hunters call the fox "Charlie," although few know why...
...The disposition of the majority of Britons was probably ambivalent...
...The ensuing divisions were more significant than her somewhat complacent account of Protestantism suggests...
...This is not to reject Colley's theses but to seek to qualify them...
...In 1804 he described the Manchester Volunteers as "a parcel of empty coxcombs of manufacturers, whom the imbecility of government had dressed up in swords and red coats...
...As Michael Williams said, when King Hal wandered incognito among his troops on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, "That's more than we know...
...a Band of Music playing the Tune of "Millions be free" and the Multitude singing the words...
...But I said avast there, my dear, I am not so eager, Nor so tir'd of English meat to long for your soup meagre...
...This does not mean that we must take those sentiments at their face value, for in an old popular tradition, which I have called "counter-theater," the discontented chose the vocabulary —Jacobite or Jacobin—most likely to alarm the authorities...
...Inevitably such evidence will tend to confirm a loyalist thesis...
...War was the formative and binding British experience of the eighteenth century (her thesis continues) and this had unplanned and unintended consequences, or what Pasternak once called "the consequences of consequences...
...But even loud patriotism must be inspected carefully for its nuances, its authenticity and also its ego trips...
...I concur strongly with a note of Colley's in which she says that to discuss the strains of the 1790s "primarily in terms of the potential for revolution is unhelpful...
...The rivalry with France and, to a lesser degree, with another Catholic power, Spain, consolidated the British nation and pointed out the Jacobite and then the "Jacobin" oppositions as treasonable...
...As with all texts in popular culture, then as now, it is not easy to decide whether such provided texts reveal the thoughts of their readers...
...Undoubtedly this was stimulated from above, but it met with a strong response as French invasion forces threatened the British coast, and it came to a climax in the famous naval victory of Trafalgar...
...Most of them were songs that one suspects were never sung, such as one in praise of the Royal Manchester Volunteers to the tune of "Our Cannon Balls, and Bumshells": You'll have a Band of Music Boys, Your Loyal Hearts to cheer, A dashing sword, Yourself to guard, Roast Beef, and British Beer...
...Linda Colley writes with clarity and grace—and how much is won by these uncommon virtues...
Vol. 40 • July 1993 • No. 3
