Top 15 G. M. Trevelyan Quotes

In the Stuart era, the English developed for themselves, without foreign participation or example, a system of Parliamentary government, local administration and freedom of speech and person, clean contrary to the prevailing tendencies on the continent, which was moving fast toward regal absolution, centralized bureaucracy, and the subjection of the individual to the State.

She regarded it as a first charge of her slender war-budget to see that French and Dutch independence were maintained against Philip. This was secured, partly by English help and by the holding of the seas, and partly by domestic alliance of the Calvinists with Catholic <nowiki>'</nowiki>politiques<nowiki>'</nowiki> averse to Spanish domination; it followed that an element of liberality and toleration very rare in the Europe of that day made itself felt in France and in Holland in a manner agreeable to Elizabeth's eclectic spirit.

The Charter was regarded as important because it assigned definite and practical remedies to temporary evils. There was very little that was abstract in its terms, less even than later generations supposed.... A King had been brought to order, not by a posse of reactionary feudalists, but the community of the land under baronial leadership; a tyrant had been subjected to the laws which hitherto it had been his private privilege to administer and to modify at will. A process had begun which was to end in putting the power of the Crown into the hands of the community at large.

Their demands were limited and practical, and for that reason they successfully initiated a movement that led in the end to yet undreamt-of liberties for all.

One outcome of the Norman Conquest was the making of the English language. ...the speech of Alfred and Bede, was exiled from hall and bower, from court and cloister, and was despised as a peasant's jargon... It ceased almost, though not quite, to be a written language. … Now when a language is seldom written and is not an object of interest to scholars, it quickly adapts itself in the mouths of plain people to the needs and uses of life. ...it can be altered much more easily when there are no grammarians to protest. During the three centuries when our native language was a peasant's dialect, it lost its clumsy inflexions and elaborate genders, and acquired the grace, suppleness, and adaptability which are among its chief merits.

Against Machiavelli's princely interpretation of the new nationalism, Britain alone of the great national States successfully held out, turned back the tide of despotism, and elaborated a system by which a debating club of elected persons could successfully govern an Empire in peace and in war.

The era when London awoke to find herself the maritime centre of the suddenly expanded globe, was also the era of the Renaissance and the Reformation - movements of intellectual growth and individual self-assertion which proved more congenial to the British than to many other races, and seemed to emancipate the island genius.

[Education] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

In those days, before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watch, with its rapid sequence of amusing incidents, each ball a potential crisis!

If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.

If England between the Revolution and the death of George II had not established the rule of the law of freedom, the England of the Nineteenth Century would have proceeded along the path of change by methods of violence, instead of by Parliamentary modification of the law. The establishment of liberty was not the result of the complete triumph of any one party in the State. It was the result of the balance of political parties and religious sects, compelled to tolerate one another, until toleration became a habit of the national mind. Even the long Whig supremacy that was the outcome and sequel of the reign of Anne, was conditional on a vigilant maintenance of institutions in Church and State that were specifically dear to the Tories, and a constant respect for the latent power of political opponents, who were fellow subjects and brother Englishmen.

The specific work of the early Eighteenth Century in England, on the line down which it was launched by the events of Anne's reign, was the establishment of the rule of law, and that law a law of liberty. On that solid foundation the reforms of succeeding epochs have been based.

After long generations of trouble, persecution and hatred, England had at last won through to a period of domestic peace and individual freedom. It was not a period of avowed idealism; it was not a period of legislative reform. But neither idealism nor reform is the whole of life for men or nations. The vigour and initiative of Englishmen, at home and overseas, in all branches of human effort and intellect, were the admiration of Eighteenth Century Europe. The greatness of England in the Hanoverian epoch was made by men acting freely in a free community, with little help indeed from Church or State, but with no hindrance. The great art of letting your neighbour alone, even if he thinks differently from you, was learnt by Englishmen under Walpole, at a time when the lesson was still a strange one elsewhere. Some European countries have not learnt it to this day or are rapidly unlearning it again.

Security and liberty were obtained under the Hanoverian Constitution, because, under Walpole, the Whigs became, what they had not always been, the "moderate men."

When Bolingbroke fled to France, Oxford, with the cool courage that was the finer part of his phlegmatic nature, remained to stand his trial. Fortunately the French archives were not available to the prosecution; and the House of Lords, always at this period a moderator of party heats, acquitted him as it had acquitted Somers sixteen years before. In so doing, it served England well, for the use of impeachments against fallen statesmen is unsuited to a constitutional regime. In civilized society men cannot be expected to serve their country with ropes round their necks.