11. ‘A dreary record of wickedness’: moral judgement in history

Brian Young

Historians, for whatever reason, rarely feature prominently in any list of that curious category the ‘public intellectual’. We can all think of exceptions, no doubt, but they are few and far between, and are, I think, diminishing in number. Historians tend to be broadcasters rather than moralists, penny-a-liner journalists rather than secular Jeremiahs. But this was not always so, and in accounting for why many more historians belonged in the long nineteenth century to that capacious category christened by Stefan Collini as ‘public moralists’ the historian has to do what he or she does best, and that is to think historically.¹ In undertaking such an examination we can also begin to ask why it has taken so long for such a very necessary conference as this to consider the outbreak of moralizing Maoism that lies behind the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign and allied activities at Yale University. Fundamentally, we have ceased to think historically as a culture and this has profound consequences of which the attack on our undoubtedly morally dubious (and sometimes more than merely dubious) ancestors is likely to be but the prelude.

It might well be that the era of historicism and its successors, that is roughly from the very late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century, will eventually look like an intellectual interlude and that the hegemony of history as a cicerone to the public memory of humanity will prove fleeting. Moralizing is easy, but it is one of Job’s comforters; thinking critically and above all historically is much harder, but it is ethically much more rigorous and hence the reluctance of many to undertake it. We need to be careful to see that the false securities of the ‘Whig Interpretation of History’ do not collapse into the no less delusory ‘Prig Interpretation of History’, and priggishness and censoriousness lie behind a lot of what we are confronting today. What E. P. Thompson, a genuine public intellectual, memorably identified in The Making of the English Working Class as the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ can be as attributable to his fellow radicals as it certainly was to the political conservatives he lamented as prominently determining historical interpretation in the early 1960s; a properly self-critical historian, Thompson would, I suspect, have been as suspicious of many aspects of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign as any deluded advocate of absurdly late imperial nostalgia, but much more interestingly and creatively.

Thompson’s career as historian and public intellectual marks a moment when the hitherto marginalized and culpably forgotten elements of historical enquiry began to enter the mainstream; from the late 1960s onwards, the academy steadily became more politicized, and hence the ‘culture wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s; but in his assaults on the Althusserian theorizing of Perry Anderson and other prophets of the New Left, Thompson contrastingly argued for the merits of empiricism and the self-critical mediating of experience as the proper preserve of the historian. Not for him the rhetorical revolutions of Parisian Mandarins.² In many ways, Thompson, the enthusiast for William Blake and William Morris, was a legatee of the nineteenth-century public moralists as least as much as he was a public intellectual of the second half of the twentieth century. As the best of the British Marxist historians, and in common with the Labour party, Thompson owed, paradoxically perhaps, more to Methodism than to Marx. However residual religion might have been in Thompson’s sensibility, remnants of it allowed him to be more charitable to our ancestors (excluding Methodists) than the more theoretically charged high priests of the New Left tended to be. Christianity, after all and however imperfectly, is a religion predicated on charity and the rehabilitation of the sinner; public chastisement in the early Church initiated the journey on the road to repentance by the individual sinner rather than their ready condemnation to perdition: that was in the hands of an altogether higher authority.

While Thompson thundered from the new University of Warwick and after his resignation from ‘Warwick University Limited’ from the wilds of Worcestershire, John Burrow pondered in the self-consciously radical schools of study at the University of Sussex on nineteenth-century historians and the various moral universes they inhabited. His conclusions bear reflection, rooted as they are in sceptical reflexivity, to use a word of which he would not have approved, practitioner of it though he splendidly was. And what Burrow concluded was that the whig interpretation of history is actually rather more variegated than its condemners had initially suggested, and that it flourished among tories and radicals as well as among liberals. At its worst, it produced Macaulay, whose philistine prejudices were accurately speared by Burrow as being ‘suburban’, and whose experience of India has been critically and judiciously examined recently by Catherine Hall, and with a remarkable lack of charity let alone sympathy by a Jesuit historian, Robert Sullivan: Macaulay would probably not have been surprised by Sullivan’s savaging of his life and writings from the perspective offered by a soupy and excessively moralizing form of contemporary Christianity, if he would rightly have been appalled by it.³ What Hall remembered and Sullivan wilfully forgot were the lessons of historicism. And historicism, as Burrow remarked in his History of Histories, was rooted in a religious view of history: Ranke’s idiosyncratic variety of Lutheranism informed every aspect of his activity as an historian.⁴

Historicism has had many historians, of whom the most interesting is Friedrich Meinecke, himself an historian compromized by complicity with the Nazi regime that it took him a suspiciously long time to condemn, and this only in the expiring agony of defeat. But even so appalling a trajectory as that more or less willingly followed by this eventual successor to Ranke’s chair at the University of Berlin ought not to mean that Meinecke is simply condemned without a hearing or the benefit of a jury. What is more, as has been noted by his more charitable interpreters, in celebrating the moral and religious capaciousness and attentiveness of historicism in the 1930s, Meinecke was championing a mode of thought that implicitly challenged Nazi ideology. Nazis believed in myth, not in history, in centralizing unity and not in pluralistic variety. Burckhardt, in whom in many ways the historicist tradition culminated, was despised by Nazis. They hated Burckhardt’s scepticism and his suspicion of linear narratives; multiplicity and variety were the very stuff of history for Burckhardt, and it was from him that Isaiah Berlin took the repeatedly necessary warning against ‘the terrible simplifiers’ of human experience.⁵ Terrible simplifiers have a taste for purging, and it is not only statues that they tend to throw from pedestals. History and its necessary and highly complex variety is loathed by the terrible simplifiers, whose destructive energy is applied to dismiss rather than to comprehend complicated legacies. And to comprehend is not necessarily to forgive; it is simply and entirely to comprehend.

Not that all historicists were so hesitant to condemn as had been Burckhardt. His contemporary Lord Acton was a hanging judge in the court of historical enquiry; a cosmopolitan Catholic where Burckhardt was a religious sceptic, a Gladstonian Liberal where Burckhardt was a sceptical Bernese conservative, Acton was never less than certain in making historical judgements, whereas Burckhardt was judiciously circumspect. The greatest twentieth-century critic of the whig interpretation of history, Herbert Butterfield, once signally devoted considerable interpretative energy to overturning Acton’s ‘black legend’ exegesis of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacres. There was something of a paradox in a Methodist historian defending the likes of Catherine de Medici from the moralizing scrutiny of a liberal Catholic, but such is the invigorating nature of our subject and the reflectively distancing discipline it demands of us. Butterfield undertook this work as a proponent of what he called ‘technical history’ against the moralizing certainties of whiggish mythography; it is a bracing enterprise and has much to commend it. In tackling this subject, Butterfield was reversing a critique Acton had offered of another charitable student of Medici history, Mandell Creighton.⁶ (And where, incidentally, would Florence be without the Medici? Statues of the Medici have not been toppled in that city since the late fifteenth century, and let us hope that that continues to be the case. As Burckhardt demonstrated in his Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, the state was itself a work of art and a work of art that commissioned many other works of art to the benefit of humanity, well beyond that city).

Mandell Creighton is a figure that has been forgotten by all too many historians, but his work was at least as important as that of Acton, and unlike Acton, Creighton achieved his relatively short life’s work in the five volumes of his History of the Papacy. Creighton began this work in a Northumberland rectory, before completing it as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge, where Acton was to become Regius Professor of History. Acton admired Creighton’s industry, but he was highly critical of what he thought to be his altogether too forgiving, if not merely indulgent, treatment of the supposedly culpable moral degeneracy of the Renaissance papacy, most especially of its Medici representatives. No-one could accuse Acton of indirection in his lengthy review of Creighton’s History, where Acton observes of his adversary that, ‘He is not striving to prove a case, or burrowing towards a conclusion, but chooses to pass through scenes of raging controversy and passion with a serene curiosity, a suspended judgment, a divided jury, and a pair of white gloves’. And thence, by contrast, to Acton’s peroration in this 1887 review-essay:

Mr. Creighton perceives the sunken rock of moral scepticism, and promises that he will not lower the standard of moral judgment. In this transition stage of struggling and straggling ethical science, the familiar tendency to employ mesology in history, to judge a man by his cause and his cause by its result, to obviate criticism by assuming the unity and wholeness of character, to conjure with great names and restore damaged reputations, not only serves to debase the moral standard, but aims at excluding it. And it is the office of historical science to maintain morality as the sole impartial criterion of men and things, and the only one on which honest minds can be made to agree.⁷

Here is the crux of the Acton-Creighton correspondence that inevitably followed such a declaration of war. Two citations from Acton’s letter to Creighton of 5 April 1887 are worthy of repetition, even if both are pretty familiar:

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means.

From which he concluded that, ‘You would spare the criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science’.⁸ Creighton patiently replied to his apparently liberal persecutor in conciliatory tones, but strictly without giving interpretative way. One paragraph in particular stands out, and it ought to be engraved in letters of gold in every teaching manual for historians that might conceivably be imagined:

You judge the whole question of persecution more rigorously than I do. Society is an organism and its laws are an expression of the conditions necessary for its own preservation. When men were hanged in England for sheep stealing it was because people thought that sheep stealing was a crime and ought to be severely put down. We still think it a crime, but we think it can be checked more effectively by less stringent punishments. Nowadays people are not agreed about what heresy is; they do not think it a menace to society; hence they do not ask for its punishment. But the men who conscientiously thought heresy a crime may be accused of an intellectual mistake, not necessarily of a moral crime. The immediate results of the Reformation were not to favour free thought, and the error of Calvin, who knew that ecclesiastical unity was abolished, was a far greater one than that of Innocent III who struggled to maintain it. I am hopelessly tempted to admit degrees of criminality, otherwise history becomes a dreary record of wickedness.⁹

The applicability of the Acton-Creighton encounter to the subject of this volume is obvious, and it is accordingly worth quoting that final sentence of Creighton’s again: ‘I am hopelessly tempted to admit degrees of criminality, otherwise history becomes a dreary record of wickedness’. Surely this is the sensible response of any historian, other than an Actonian moralist, to the issues with which we are concerned today. No-one is going seriously to defend the records of Cecil Rhodes or John C. Calhoun, but their degree of criminality has to be understood in context. Of course, they are more akin to Calvin than to Innocent III in Creighton’s reckoning in that both Rhodes and Calhoun lived in a world in which criticism of their attitudes and behaviour towards people over whom they claimed racial superiority was readily voiced by their contemporaries. But even here, curiously, double standards apply. So far as I am aware, the debates over ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ have not been extended to include the man after whom the Trades’ Union-sponsored college at Oxford is named. The posthumous reputation of John Ruskin, aside from justified feminist criticism of his failures regarding his estranged wife Effie Gray, is seemingly sacrosanct; and yet he put his name – as did not only Thomas Carlyle but also Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley and Alfred, Lord Tennyson – to the Governor Eyre Defence Committee. Governor Eyre had put down a revolt in Jamaica with great savagery, as a result of which John Stuart Mill set up the Jamaica Committee to seek his judicial prosecution, an endeavour in which Mill was joined by Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley and Thomas Hughes.¹⁰ Why, one wonders, has the eponymous hero of Ruskin College not been subjected to the same travails as Rhodes? Where is the moral consistency in such evasiveness? To use Acton’s language, white gloves are worn when Ruskin is discussed, but hanging is held as being too good for Rhodes. Any defence of Ruskin, and they ought to be made, is dependent on Creighton’s ‘degree of criminality’ approach to the exercise of moral judgement in history. But so, uncomfortably, is Rhodes. And what applies to Calhoun ought, surely, also to apply to Thomas Jefferson, but who has consistently advocated any complete rejection of its founder by the University of Virginia?

Moral absolutes are not the natural ethical register of historians, and they have not been since Gibbon resorted to irony in withholding judgement on the role played by religion in the decline and fall of the Roman empire. One can deduce aspects of his thinking on the matter, but anyone who insists that Gibbon believed that Christianity was the principal causal agent in that history simply cannot have read his work anything like attentively. Moral absolutes are the coinage of such doubtful historians as Carlyle and James Anthony Froude; and not only ought historians to understand and describe the moral lives of their dead subjects historically and sensitively, but they ought also to be able to imagine how their own judgements will one day be duly historicized in their turn. Creighton knew not only how to live in charity with the Renaissance papacy but also with his contemporary believers and unbelievers, both publicly and privately, when he was preferred from Cambridge first to the bishopric of Peterborough and thence to that of London. Historians, as Gibbon reminded us in the opening of chapter fifteen of his great work, are not theologians and have to understand accordingly how religion (and morality) evolved in time, and not sub specie aeternitatis. It is a division of labour we historians should never forget, so permit me to remind you of it (and what Gibbon says of religion can and ought to be extended to politics, morality and ethics):

The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.¹¹

Gibbon, who knew his theology and his casuistry, was always wary of the self-righteous and the persecutory elements in history; they were still extant in the eighteenth century, and they are with us now. The secular ideals of political correctness display much of the intolerance and lack of understanding that made so much of the religious history of the West peculiarly unattractive to liberal sensibilities, and they presume a moral superiority that will not withstand scrutiny. To advocate historical scepticism is, to them, to promote a liberal heresy. Humility as well as scepticism characterizes the best historical practice, and just as Gibbon implicitly cites Augustine in that passage just quoted, allow me to close my remarks with a very slight emendation of a great moral admonition as uttered by a well-known moral teacher, the inspiration alike of Acton and of Creighton: ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone’.

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¹ S. Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1993).

² E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory: an Orrery of Errors (1978).

³ J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981); C. Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (2012); R. E. Sullivan, Macaulay: the Tragedy of Power (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).

⁴ J. W. Burrow, A History of Histories (2007), pp. 457–62.

⁵ See B. Young, ‘Intellectual history and historismus in post-war England’, in A Companion to Intellectual History, ed. R. Whatmore and B. Young (Chichester, 2016), pp. 18–35, and ‘History’, in Historicism and the Human Sciences in Victorian Britain, ed. M. Bevir (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 154–85.

⁶ H. Buttterfield, ‘Lord Acton and the massacre of St Bartholomew’, in Man on his Past: the Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 171–201.

⁷ Lord Acton, review of Creighton’s History of the Papacy, in Essays in the Study and Writing of History: Selected writings of Lord Acton, ed. J. Rufus Sears (Indianapolis, Ind., 1986), at pp. 367, 373–4.

⁸ Acton, Essays in the Study and Writing of History, pp. 383–4.

⁹ Creighton to Acton in Essays in the Study and Writing of History, pp. 389–90.

¹⁰ B. Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (1962).

¹¹ E. Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. D. Womersley (3 vols., Harmondsworth, 1994), i. 446.