A Radical History Of Britain Read online




  Edward Vallance is a Reader in Early Modern History at Roehampton University. After reading history at Balliol College, Oxford, he was DeVelling Willis Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield. He writes a historical blog at www.edwardvallance.wordpress.com and is a regular contributor to the New Statesman and BBC History Magazine.

  ‘A Radical History of Britain is an opportune volume … powerful … This is a vigorous and wide-ranging account’ Robert McCrum, Observer

  ‘Anyone concerned about the future of parliament, constitutional reform and politics in general will find plenty of inspiration in this accessible, often gripping history’ Frank Trentmann, Sunday Express

  ‘The publication of A Radical History of Britain could not be more timely … An extremely instructive and comprehensive survey’ Robert Colville, Daily Telegraph

  ‘A trenchant salute to the tradition of dissent and demands for social and political reform … This well-written and stimulating book makes a convincing case for the radical and/or rebellious tradition as part of the warp and woof of British history’ A. W. Purdue.

  Also by Edward Vallance

  THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-1-405-52777-4

  Copyright © Edward Vallance 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  No man can have in his mind a conception of the future, for the future is not yet. But of our conceptions of the past, we make a future.

  Thomas Hobbes

  To Linnie, with all my love

  CONTENTS

  About the Author

  Also by Edward Vallance

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction: The First British Radical, Alfred the Great

  PART ONE:

  A TALISMAN OF LIBERTY

  1: The Great Charter

  PART TWO:

  WHEN ADAM DELVED AND EVE SPAN

  2: The Peasants’ Revolt

  3: Jack Cade’S Rebellion

  4: The ‘Commotion Time’

  PART THREE:

  ‘THE POOREST HE … THE GREATEST HE’: RADICALISM IN THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

  5: The Roots of Civil War Radicalism: The Revolution before the Revolution

  6: All Commanded and Yet Were under Command

  7: The Earth a Common Treasury

  PART FOUR:

  THE AGE OF PAINE: BRITISH RADICALS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

  8: Wilkes, Paine, and ‘Liberty Restored’

  9: Rights of Man, The Rights of Woman, and Political Justice

  10: The Reign of Terror

  PART FIVE:

  THE MASK OF ANARCHY: RADICALISM FROM WATERLOO TO THE GREAT REFORM ACT

  11: A Rope of Sand

  12: King Ludd

  13: Peterloo

  14: The Cato Street Conspiracy and the Battle for Reform

  PART SIX:

  A KNIFE-AND-FORK QUESTION? THE RISE AND FALL OF CHARTISM

  15: The Tolpuddle Martyrs and the People’s Charter

  16: The Newport Rising – Chartism Reinvigorated

  17: The Land Plan, O’Connor and the Legacy of Chartism

  PART SEVEN:

  THE BLOODLESS REVOLUTION

  18: The Pankhursts, the Suffrage Movement and Socialism

  19: Deeds Not Words

  20: ‘It Is No Longer a Movement, It Is a Whirlwind’

  21: The Spectacular Pageant Draws to a Close

  22: The Fight against Fascism

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  The Glorious Revolution

  Rubicon

  Persian Fire

  Millennium

  Endgame 1945

  Bloody Foreigners

  INTRODUCTION

  THE FIRST BRITISH RADICAL: ALFRED THE GREAT

  King or no king … he ought to have minded the cakes.

  Denewulf’s wife’s words to Alfred as imagined by H. E. Marshall in Our Island Story (1905)1

  In the early months of 878, Alfred, King of the West Saxons, was in hiding in the dank and impenetrable marshland of the Somerset Levels. He had been forced to flee the royal fort at Chippenham after a surprise attack by the Viking leader Guthrum while he was enjoying the traditional festivities of Twelfth Night. The pagan Vikings obviously knew enough of the Christian calendar to exploit its festivals for military advantage. It was the lowest point in a long military struggle against the Danish invaders, which had begun in 865, six years before Alfred’s accession to the throne, when Ivar the Boneless’s army landed in eastern England. The Saxon kingdoms had fallen one after another: first Northumbria, then East Anglia, then Mercia; their kings either fled or were slaughtered. By the time Alfred was made king, a second Danish force, under Guthrum, had already landed and made its way deep into Alfred’s Wessex lands.

  Alfred now stood in danger of following the fate of the other Saxon leaders. He already appeared a king without a kingdom, and according to popular legend, was forced to live in hiding in the home of a swineherd, Denewulf. The swineherd had not told his wife their guest’s true identity: she assumed that Alfred was simply a friend of her husband’s and therefore a fellow commoner. The King was not, at least as far as she was concerned, a particularly welcome guest. Alfred spent most of his time brooding, gazing into the hearth and contemplating the low ebb to which his fortunes had sunk. Determined that her sullen lodger would make himself useful, the swineherd’s wife set Alfred to minding the cakes that were baking over the fire, instructing him to turn them once they had gone golden on one side. Alfred promised to tend them while she busied herself with her other chores, but his mind quickly drifted back to his predicament and the threat from the Viking invaders. The flames leaping in the hearth became the burning thatch of English homes, set alight by Danish marauders, thick smoke filling the sky.

  Alfred was shaken from this dark vision by the shrieks of Denewulf’s wife. The smoke had not been merely in the King’s mind, but was pouring from the now blackened cakes he had been set to watch. The woman scolded him for his negligence, still not realising that the house-guest was her king. But, once her husband had revealed Alfred’s identity, the King did not rebuke her for her harsh words. She had shaken him from his indolent depression and reminded him that fates were changed by action, not talk. In May of 878, from his camp at Athelney, he rallied the Saxon men and routed the Danish forces at the Battle of Edington. Guthrum surrendered and along with thirty of his followers was baptised. Denewulf, meanwhile, was made a bishop.2

  The legend of Alfred and the cakes, which originated in an eleventh-century life of St Neot, has become one of the most famous stories in English history.3 Though Alfred remains a celebrated national historical figure, the peak of veneration for the Anglo-Saxon king came in the late Victorian era. Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England described him as ‘the noble king who, in his single person, possessed all the Saxon virtues … As it is said that his spirit still inspires some of our best English laws, so, let you and I pray that it may animate our English hearts.’4 The words of ‘Rule Britannia’ were taken from a masque based on Alfred’s life, in which the King was cast not just as the creator of England or even of Britain, but of the British Empire as a whole. The celebration of Alfred reac
hed its zenith in 1901, just as the Victorian age was coming to an end. The misdated ‘Alfred millenary’ of that year – Alfred died in 899 – was marked by fêtes and pageants across the country. The centrepiece of the millenary was the unveiling of a new statue of Alfred in his ‘capital’ of Winchester. The former Liberal Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, led the appeal for funds for the sculpture, which was designed by Hamo Thornycroft – the same team had earlier been responsible for the statue of Oliver Cromwell which was placed outside Parliament. At the unveiling, Rosebery said that the name Alfred was synonymous with ‘our metropolis, our fleet, our literature, our laws, our first foreign relations, our first efforts at education’ and ‘our Parliament’.5 He spoke of his pride that the millenary celebrations had developed an awareness of English history even among the young. This was news to some. Thornycroft later recalled that an electrician working in his studio had asked who the subject of his sculpture was. When he replied ‘King Alfred’, the man, still none the wiser, inquired ‘King Alfred what?’ ‘Alfred the Great,’ said Thornycroft. ‘Well, he’s a big ’un. He’s got a good sized foot,’ the electrician responded.6

  The story of the cakes became so synonymous with the great Saxon king that Sellar and Yeatman in their classic satire on the history textbook 1066 and All That could rechristen him ‘Alfred the Cake’. As that work indicated, though the legend was deeply familiar, it was not all that clear what it meant. In fact, the myth, in its most celebrated retelling in Henrietta Marshall’s Our Island Story, first published in 1905, formed part of a radical reinterpretation of British history.

  Marshall followed the glowing Victorian presentation of Alfred and his reign. To her, there ‘never was a better king of England’. He was ‘England’s Darling’, ‘truthful and fearless in everything’.7 His achievements were legion:

  He collected the laws and wrote them out so that people could understand them. He did away with the laws which he thought were bad, and made others. One law he made was, that a man who had done wrong could not be punished unless twelve men agreed that he really had been wicked, and ought to be punished. This was called trial by jury, and means trial by those who have promised to do justly.8

  Our Island Story’s combination of history and myth – as well as more historically grounded incidents, its narrative included stories relating to King Arthur, Merlin and Robin Hood – proved a great success with adults and children alike. In 2005, a century after it was first published, the right-wing think-tank Civitas, with the assistance of the Daily Telegraph, started a campaign to provide every primary school in Britain with a reprint of the book.9 To many commentators, including popular historians such as Antonia Fraser and Andrew Roberts, the broad chronological sweep and gripping narrative of Marshall’s work appeared to be the perfect antidote to the fragmented, Nazi-obsessed history taught in British schools.10 The campaign was an unqualified success and the book went on to become a bestseller all over again.

  Though the type of grand narrative offered by Marshall was anathema to the national curriculum, the high sales of Our Island Story demonstrated that this was not the case with the general public. The most popular recent television treatments of our past, such as Simon Schama’s History of Britain and David Starkey’s Monarchy, by and large followed the model of focusing almost exclusively on the actions of kings and queens. The same has held true for historical drama, with the greatest ratings success being a ‘sexed-up’ retelling of Henry VIII’s marital affairs, The Tudors.

  However, if Marshall’s approach in Our Island Story proved enduringly popular, it was also, some contended, politically suspect. The reissue had been trumpeted in a right-wing newspaper on behalf of a right-wing think-tank. It also seemed to chime with calls made by Conservative politicians for a revised history curriculum that would emphasise ‘British values’: something which some commentators felt smacked of a return to ‘drum and trumpet stories of Britain’s past’, focusing on glorious leaders like ‘King Alfred, Lord Clive and Horatio Nelson’.11

  Yet, as Antonia Fraser noted, far from offering a jingoistic, imperialist view of history, Our Island Story was, in fact, a subtly subversive text.12 Marshall eulogised Alfred not, as some of her Victorian predecessors did, because he was the supposed founder of Britain’s naval supremacy, but because ‘all his life Alfred was thinking only of his people and what was best for them’.13 He had been a great warrior, but he fought only ‘to save his country and his people’, not ‘for the love of conquering’, as other kings did.14 For Marshall, the significance of the story of the cakes was that it showed Alfred’s humility and magnanimity. Instead of taking umbrage at being upbraided by his social inferiors, he pulls himself together and sets about defeating the common foe. Denewulf is therefore rewarded, not just for providing sanctuary to the King, but also for his wife’s invaluable candour. (Indeed, it is telling that in Marshall’s version of the story, unlike in others, the swineherd’s wife refuses to temper her scolding even once the identity of their guest has been revealed.)

  Marshall’s pacifist sympathies and her view of monarchs as essentially servants of the people affected her evaluation of other English kings. Richard the Lionheart, the popular hero of so many children’s books, was attacked for going away to Palestine to fight rather than staying at home and looking after his kingdom: ‘No doubt he thought it was a great and good thing to fight for Jerusalem, but how much better it would have been if he had tried to rule his own land peacefully, and bring happiness to his people.’15 Robin Hood, who robbed from the rich to give to the poor, came off far better by comparison.

  Marshall was particularly harsh on the Normans and William the Conqueror, whom she portrayed as little more than a usurping tyrant. Edward the Confessor, in any case, had had no right to offer the Crown to William because he ‘could not give away the crown of England to any one without the consent of the people’. The English, she told her young readers, ‘had always been a free people, who had a share in governing themselves’.16 Revealing the persistent belief in the so-called ‘Norman yoke’, Marshall felt Norman law had reduced the Anglo-Saxon Britons from the liberty and freedom they had enjoyed under Alfred to the status of slaves.17 This oppression, she contended, was only reversed by the barons in 1215, when they forced King John to agree to Magna Carta:

  When the barons forced John to grant the Magna Carta, they fought, not for themselves, as barons and Normans, but for the whole English people. For the first time since the Conquest, the people of England acted as one people. The Norman had disappeared. England was England again. She had conquered the Conqueror.18

  As we shall see, belief in the ‘Norman yoke’ was a key feature of many radical narratives of the past.

  Marshall’s history was consistently more sympathetic to rebels than to rulers. She told the tale of Hereward the Wake to reassure her readers that some brave Englishmen still resisted the iron grip of Norman rule. Wat Tyler, the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, was given his habitual bad press, but the revolt itself was generally seen, to use the terminology of 1066 and All That, as a ‘good thing’: ‘Wat Tyler’s rebellion was the beginning of freedom for the lower classes in England. Up to this time many of the labourers and workers who were free men had been treated almost as badly as slaves, but now their condition became better.’19 Similarly, Charles I, the only British king to be executed by his people, was painted as largely deserving his fate (he was ‘wicked’ and ‘foolish’) and the regicide as an action that was necessary, if nasty.20

  Marshall’s view of British history has been characterised as conventionally Whiggish.21 Certainly, she emphasised the familiar Whiggish theme of the ‘rise of Parliament’, but her books suggest a more radical political outlook than this. In her comments on the revolt of Boudicca against the Romans she wrote that ‘although the Romans were clever, they sometimes did stupid things. They thought very little of their own women, and they did not understand that many of the women of Britain were as brave and as wise as the men, an
d quite as difficult to conquer.’22 A further clue to her political sympathies lies in her title for the chapter on the rebellion of the Scottish Covenanters against Charles I: ‘How a Woman Struck a Blow for Freedom’. Here she dwelt on the actions of the legendary (and probably mythical) Jenny Geddes,* who in 1637 hurled a stool at the Dean of St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, in disgust at his reading from a new ‘popish’ service book.

  We know frustratingly little about Henrietta Marshall’s life, but it is known that she remained single and that from 1901 to 1904 she was lady superintendent of the women-only Queen Margaret Hall of Residence at Glasgow University. Boudicca was a heroine who featured in many histories written by leading suffragists, and single, educated women teachers figured prominently among the members of women’s suffrage societies. It is tempting to think that Marshall, like many intelligent middle-class Victorian women, was supportive of the suffrage movement (and perhaps even, given her love of women rebels, of suffragette militancy).23

  Those sympathetic remarks concerning Robin Hood and the Peasants’ Revolt were also suggestive. Her treatment of Cromwell in Our Island Story was largely conventional (indeed, it could be described as Tory rather than Whig), labelling him a ‘tyrant’ who was ‘bitterly hated’.24 Two years after this book was published, however, Marshall produced The Story of Oliver Cromwell, from which quite a different picture of the Lord Protector emerged. While acknowledging that opinion on Cromwell was divided, she believed:

  If Cromwell did not quite succeed, he showed the way, and we now have much that he tried to give to the people of his time. When you grow older you will be able to see how from Cromwell’s days we date our freedom in many things, our union, our command of the seas, and even the beginnings of Greater Britain. And I hope that … you will learn to love the large soul of this true Englishman who, under his grimness and sternness, hid a tender heart.25