J. C. D. Clark Quotes

Strong leaders, even absolute monarchs, owe their strength to a natural social constituency rather than to an authoritarian personality. For Charles, it was the nexus of squire and parson that fuelled the uncompromising counter-revolution of populist Anglicanism. These were the men, like the Vicar of Bray, for whom Good King Charles's days were golden, at least in retrospect. At the time, they found him often reluctant to go as far as they wished in persecuting Catholics and Dissenters. Only later did Charles's reign assume the golden glow of nostalgia, as unhappy Tories under the first two Georges sought a stylish archetype which would highlight, by contrast, the Hanoverian boorishness. Then, Charles's rule came to seem a symbol of the triumph of indulgence, pleasure and tolerance over rigour, earnestness and bigotry. But at the time, it was a much more ambiguous affair.

Like most things under threat today, our experience of it began with the Reformation. Medieval England was part of European Christendom: it never developed a unitary concept of sovereignty while the papacy effectively claimed jurisdiction over things that were God's. The break with Rome made the difference, and Henry VIII's Act in Restraint of Appeals contained the key phrase "the Realm of England is an empire"—that is, a jurisdiction from which there was no appeal... English lawyers responded to these events by devising a new attitude to the integrity of the state. Sovereignty was not a concept that had emerged in the Roman law tradition of the continent which continued for centuries to include a host of local and corporate privileges, immunities and independent jurisdictions. The English common law swept all these away and created a single, level playing field.

It seemed, then, that to ask the question, "why was there a revolution in the 1640s?" was first to reify the notion, then to beg the question: we had been drawn to explain not so much what happened, as the reification itself. The idea of the Civil War as a revolution was breaking down.

Far from seizing the initiative for the Commons, early-eighteenth-century Whigs (who comprised the majority of MPs) were more concerned that the chief agent of all initiatives in government, the Crown, should not be seized by the Stuart dynasty. The reinstatement of Jacobitism as a profoundly important issue was a major achievement of recent scholarship in the early-Hanoverian field.

In any period, as we now see, we have been asked to believe that the rich are always getting richer, the poor always getting poorer, the middle class always rising, the aristocracy always about to disintegrate. The old scenario no longer convinces: it fails to identify and date the real transformations which did occur. Revisionist historians of the ancien regime in England, 1660–1832, being aware that "class" emerged as a terminology only in the last decade or so of their period, and then only as a minority dialect, looked back with incredulity and amazement on the Old Guard in the early-Stuart period, labouring to explain the English Revolution in terms of class conflict, of rising or declining classes, or the aspirations of a bourgeoisie.

History uncovers the inter-relatendess of problems which practical men seek to isolate: recent crises should remind us how mutually dependent monarchy, church and Parliament still are if each is to survive. And their mutual dependence is a clue to their importance. Republicans disagree, for they see the crown as an anachronistic survival, left perched on top of a society already secular and republican to the core. As so often, this half truth is rather less than half true. Whatever the traumas of the 1640s or 1830s, they hardly ranked with 1776, 1789 or 1917: much survives, in the machinery of government (the Queen's peace, the Queen's ministers, unpoliticised armed forces), in manners (deferential more than egalitarian), values (altruistic more than radical-individualist), even speech (the Queen's English rather than cultural pluralism). Tony Benn is right to see England as essentially unrevolutionised; that indeed is his problem. England's differences from societies republican in their essence are still wide.

Indignation is a powerful weapon. With it, the English empiricists saw off the continental system-builders: Comte, Hegel, Marx, Croce, Treitschke, Braudel. The best English historians, by contrast, have been superbly negative and slashingly reductionist, ripping down airy continental nonsense with sharp, scholarly hooks.

The joys and despairs not of romance but of house ownership are the staples of English conversation... Investment potential alone does not explain the cult status that house ownership occupies in the imaginations of the English: it has much older and more emotional roots. Not only do the English wish to own rather than rent, they own with a peculiar relish, and take a special delight in bricks and mortar which no financial asset of equal value could ever give. "An Englishman's home is his castle." This resounding phrase still echoes in our society.

To attempt to write the history of liberalism before the 1820s is thus, in point of method, akin to attempting to write the history of the eighteenth-century motor car. There were, of course, forms of transport which performed many of the functions which the motor car later performed, the sedan chair among them. Yet to explain the sedan chair as if it were an early version of the motor car, and by implication to condemn it for failing so lamentably to evolve into the motor car, is to turn a modern error of scholarly method into a failure of men in a past society.
To stretch explanatory categories so far that they lose their specific reference and become mere holdalls for our ahistorical assumptions about the eternal nature of human motivation is to condemn us merely to explore the inner landscape of the assumptions and to deny us any perception of a need to locate those assumptions in time.

PCism...is about manipulating public doctrine for private ends. The form it takes depends on the nature of national values. In America, PCism derives from three unchallengeable ideals. The ideal of equality is used to promote the interests of women and racial minorities, often ending in very inegalitarian provisions such as quotas. Collective moral improvement is used selectively to deny people what will supposedly harm them, formerly alcohol, soon tobacco. The sanctity of the individual is interpreted to demand parity of esteem for unconventional lifestyles, especially homosexuality, and can be exploited in all sorts of ways through the new sexual harassment industry. In Britain, the pattern is different. None of these things have gained nearly as much ground as in the United States, but the same technique of making a sectional self-interest unchallengeable and using totalitarian methods to inhibit criticism is used in favour of regional cultures against metropolitan culture; used in our endlessly various class war by plebeians against patricians, and, especially, used in that strange crusade of denigration of our national institutions.

County studies have succeeded in proving that there was no self-sufficient impetus to rebellion (let alone revolution) within the English counties. The English Civil War, we can then see, was the result of a "domino effect" produced by successful rebellions in Scotland and Ireland.

Francis Fukuyama, that emblematic American commentator of the 1980s, gave only the last and most optimistic version of this benign intellectual isolationism. His vision of the irresistible triumph of American liberal capitalism around the world was normally read by Americans as an assurance that their victory would be bloodless. Everyone would soon largely agree with them... The most perceptive alternative analysis was that of the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. His new model for international relations predicted a world divided into armed and antagonistic blocs on religious lines. Huntington's was the best argument, but it was Fukuyama who wrote the bestseller.

It has been traditional in British historiography to trace industrial growth and technological innovation to the sturdy virtues of bourgeois individualism, and especially to the individualism of Protestant-democratic England... [T]he example of Japan in our time refutes the necessity of any such connection, for Japan has demonstrated the possible industrial dynamism of a highly deferential society, indeed a society which has only recently masked the values and practices of a divine-right monarchy. It is perhaps possible in the changed climate of the 1980s to re-emphasise the extent to which England's commercial and industrial achievement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rested not only on success in war, averting revolution and eliminating French competition, but also on the virtues of loyalty, diligence, discipline, subordination and obedience in the work-place, whether factory, mine or office (indeed the British economy was eventually overtaken by others which practised these virtues to a higher degree). But such practices had already been elevated to the status of social ideals within the Anglican-aristocratic nexus; and it was the military elite, not the nation of shopkeepers, which won the wars. The values of nineteenth-century industrial society owed far more to the values of the ancien regime than the Victorians were prepared to admit.

The House of Commons under the Georges was far more susceptible to manipulation than it had ever been under Charles I, or even Charles II and James II.

The love affair of the British with their national institutions is no limp romanticism but an appreciation of the way that institutions embody and perpetuate, as well as symbolise, a certain way of doing things. That is why a predilection for hereditary peers and against high inheritance taxes is an affirmation of family integrity. That is why an established Church is widely endorsed, even by other Christian denominations, as an official acknowledgement that law is more than technical convention. That is why the national history curriculum has become a potent symbol of society's right corporately to affirm a vision of itself.