Quote of the Day (Thomas Babington Macaulay, on King Charles I)

“Charles [I] bore no resemblance to his father [King James I of England]. He was not a driveller, or a pedant, or a buffoon, or a coward. It would be absurd to deny that he was a scholar and a gentleman, a man of exquisite taste in the fine arts, a man of strict morals in private life.

“His talents for business were respectable; his demeanour was kingly. But he was false, imperious, obstinate, narrow-minded, ignorant of the temper of his people, unobservant of the signs of his times. The whole principle of his government was resistance to public opinion; nor did he make any real concession to that opinion till it mattered not whether he resisted or conceded, till the nation which had long ceased to love him or to trust him, had at last ceased to fear him.”—English historian and essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), The History of England from 1485 to 1685 (1987)

Over the years, I have had my issues with the smugness of Thomas Babington Macaulay, but when it comes to King Charles I –born on this day in 1600 in Dunfermline Palace, Fife, Scotland—his conclusions seem indisputable.

Charles did not commit any offenses not done by either his father or, for that matter, any of the Tudors. But he was fatally insensitive to how his kingdom was changing and how much he was alienating a significant proportion of his subjects. That blindness led to the English Civil War, defeat at the hands of Oliver Cromwell, and execution for treason in 1649.

In a post for the “Yesterday Channel” for UK TV, a blogger posed the question, “Did King Charles I Deserve to Die?” After offering the case for the prosecution, the blogger, I would say, makes a more compelling case for the defense, noting that Cromwell and the military arrested any MPs in favor of negotiating with Charles at the end of the civil war. In other words, they engineered a military coup, echoing Macaulay’s charge.

(The image accompanying this post is by the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst in 1628.)

Flashback, November 1688: William of Orange Invades England

Though invited by Protestant commanders and politicians to assume the British crown, Dutch-born William of Orange was taking no chances. He landed in November 1688 at Torbay, England, with 53 warships,1,700 cannon, 20,000 men, and 7,000 horses—enough to precipitate the most successful invasion of England since William the Conqueror did so in 1066.

Victors not only get to write the histories but even to coin the terms by which these are understood, and the successful conquest (who became William III once he assumed the English throne) only confirms the point. The series of military and political developments that followed, involving the end of the monarch William came to overthrow—his own father-in-law, King James II—came to be called “The Glorious Revolution.”

That “revolution” was meant as a marker in the evolution from “the divine right of kings” proclaimed by James toward a more constrained, constitutional monarchy, setting the seeds for democracy in North America. 

But the ouster of James was far less “glorious” to two groups that had benefited from his policy of toleration: Protestant Dissenters who had taken issue with the Church of England, now experiencing a severe setback, and Roman Catholics, who, especially in Ireland, found themselves at bay in every corner of society for supporting their co-religionist James, who ended up with the dubious distinction of being the last Catholic monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland.

It would also be a mistake to regard William simply as the guarantor of a new tolerance, a royal who ruled through restraint. As a 19^th-century American political boss would put it, he saw his opportunity and took it. The elected ruler of the Dutch Republic, William would much rather govern without someone looking over his shoulder. 

Fortunately for him, the tumultuous political situation in the home country of his wife, Princess Mary of England, presented that opportunity—and James could claim the proper lineage for those concerned about such things. Mary, James’ eldest daughter, was heir to the throne if the king didn’t sire a child, while William’s mother was James's older sister. This made the king his uncle and Mary his cousin as well as his wife.

For all his interest in military affairs, William, at least at this point, did not enjoy a reputation as a commander superior to his father-in-law. James, through his secretary of the navy, the famous diarist Samuel Pepys, had served creditably as Lord High Admiral. He had also won a victory over the Dutch in 1665.

But William had it all over James in craft and guile, holding his own counsel until he could reasonably assess those with whom he came in contact. Other men—very much including James’ older brother, King Charles II—would have been inclined to move slowly in a country where Catholics constituted only 6% of the population. Not James. 

The worldliness, wit, and winking attitude toward matters of the flesh so characteristic of Restoration comedy took their cue from the libertine nicknamed “the Merry Monarch.” As if that weren’t enough, Charles also proved powerfully adept at warding off potentially lethal political blows. 

But James’ obstinacy and arrogance reminded older government officials all too much of his father, and why he ended up executed. What could have been a political masterstroke--a Declaration of Indulgence that exempted Catholics and Dissenters from penal laws, moving the nation toward genuine tolerance--turned into a blunder when he dissolved Parliament, forced clergy and bishops to read the Declaration from their pulpits, and prosecuted the seven bishops who refused to comply.

Nevertheless, even a ruler without James’ undeniable faults might not have avoided sharing his fate, for as a Catholic convert—one who took his faith very seriously—he represented a direct threat to the power and influence wielded by Protestants in both government and the military. His more reluctant supporters were willing to bide their time in the hope that upon the death of 55-year-old James, the throne would pass to his Protestant daughter Mary.

But the announcement of an heir to the aging monarch and his wife, the Catholic Maria of Modena, who successfully gave birth in her late 40s after several miscarriages, still births and deaths in infancy energized the opposition and catalyzed the Resistance of the time. The news came on the heels of more pronouncements indicating that James, unlike Charles, was serious about his faith.

In contrast, out of necessity growing up, William learned how to maintain a veil of discretion, according to Thomas Babington Macaulay in his influential but problematic The History of England, from the Accession of James II: “Long before he reached manhood, he knew how to keep secrets, how to baffle curiosity by dry and guarded answers; how to conceal all passions under the same show of grave tranquility.”

All through 1688, William set the stage for his armada, working swiftly but surreptitiously, without letting key factions supporting him know what was happening on other fronts:

*He hired the most combat-ready soldiers from armies across Europe;

*He worked non-stop on the logistics of the expected campaign, with the help of the breadmakers of Rotterdam and the gunsmiths of Utrecht;

*He secured financial backing from banks, from Huguenots who had carried precious metals with them when they fled religious persecution, and gold equaling a hundred thousand guineas, from secret British supporters—all to go along with what the parsimonious William had put aside for an emergency;

*He exploited the religious resentments of Protestants even as he assured Catholics they had nothing to fear from him—winning the support of key members of the military and Church of England, while telling prominent English Catholics that James’ favoritism would only excite mobs who would perpetrate untold mayhem upon them; and,

*He allowed King Louis XIV to play into his hands, as Protestants all over Northern Europe came to fear that the Catholic “Sun King” would ally himself with an increasingly assertive co-religionist on the English throne.

The conspiracy against James might have unraveled but for perhaps England’s ablest soldier of the time secretly joining their ranks. Two and a half centuries, his illustrious descendant, Sir Winston Churchill, strenuously attempted to explain the conduct of John Churchill during this crisis, but it just won’t wash. It’s hard to do so given Churchill’s desire for preferment and riches; his profession of loyalty to the point of death to James, even as he was plotting to desert the king; and his advice to his monarch to visit Warminster, where he could be kidnapped.

As I explained in a prior post, this lieutenant general can easily be charged with ingratitude, since Charles and James had raised him from humble circumstances to preeminence in the English military. But, for all his justifications to the contrary, opportunism played the decisive role in his switch to William of Orange, who ended up naming him Duke of Marlborough. That opportunism can be seen in John Churchill’s secret letter several years later to James, in an attempt to get back into his good graces.

That letter illustrated nothing so much as Churchill’s lack of insight into political reality. In the interim, James had dismayed his followers by fleeing to France instead of confronting William; by leaving Ireland after losing the Battle of the Boyne; and by being unable to get over the destruction of another fleet, staffed by Louis XIV, before his very eyes.

England avoided a civil war, but because James lost his bid to remain in power, Catholics would continue to be second-class citizens until passage of Daniel O’ Connell’s Emancipation bill of 1829.

Quote of the Day (Thomas Babington Macaulay, on Virtue and Power)

“The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.”—English historian and Whig politician Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), 1843 review of Lucy Aikin’s Life and Writings of Addison, in Critical and Historical Essays (1852)

Good luck trying to find such a person—especially these days.

Flashback, February 1835: Macaulay Note Guides Racist British Policy in India

Before he set out to write history, Thomas Babington Macaulay created it, as legal member of the Supreme Council of India. But the same emotional trait that endeared him to the British public and its ruling class—a cocksure belief in his conclusions—marred his ethnocentric Feb. 2, 1835 “Minute” on education on the subcontinent.

The son of a former governor of Sierra Leone, the 35-year-old Macaulay hadn’t planned on extensive foreign service. But as he considered the career alternatives available to someone with his background—a law practice that he had dropped in favor of the far more interesting pastimes of politics and writing, along with a family business whose reverses had forced the sale of a Gold Medal he had won at Cambridge—he suddenly found that the chance to effect international change dovetailed nicely with a salary that would allow him to devote more of his energy to writing.

For Macaulay personally, the most significant result of his four years in India (1834-1839) was the income he put aside that eventually enabled him to embark on his epic History of England from the Accession of James the Second. For Indian colonists and their descendants, the most important consequence was his advocacy of a Western education (including study of the English language). Both results were highly problematic.

In a prior post, I noted that Macaulay, for all his prejudices, was an extraordinarily vivid historian. He was also a highly influential one: The famous third chapter of his History, a survey of English society in the year 1685 that analyzed such matters as population, cities, classes and tastes, pioneered a form of social history that provided a model for Henry Adams’ History of the United States in the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and, at greater length, Frederick Lewis Allen’s account of the Roaring Twenties, Only Yesterday.

But Macaulay’s interest in social history and mores really did not extend much beyond the Mediterranean SEa. He did not have the boundless curiosity of a Montaigne or Sir Richard Burton in learning about unfamiliar races or nations.

Although Macaulay quietly rejected the fierce Evangelical piety of his father, he did not dispense with one of the principal consequences of that faith: the urge to spread the benefits of Western (and, to be precise, British) civilization abroad. By his lights, he wanted to help colonials—and, to be fair, he genuinely foresaw a day when India would be independent.

But it never seems to have bothered him that, from a position of power, he would be forcing millions of people to learn a language not their own. He was not responding to an Indian plea that English be taught, but superimposing it from without.

Indeed, in the unlikely phenomenon of British Orientalists—a group of British East India Co. bureaucrats trained in the local languages and culture of the subcontinent—an alternative existed that took full cognizance of the ancient religious and cultural traditions of classical India.

Somehow, Macaulay didn’t get their message. He responded in his “Minute” with the kind of sweeping, cast-all-doubt-aside statement that has made his History suspect in our time as an unbiased source: “I have never found one among them [Orientalists] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”

That kind of statement makes Macaulay practically a bull’s eye for those academics who deride Dead White European Males.

As in his histories, the politician-bureaucrat sought, in Indian law and education, “uniformity where you can have it; diversity where you must have it; but in all cases certainty.” To replace what a number of observers at the time felt to be an inefficient welter of legal rules on the subcontinent, he drafted the Indian Penal Code, which was finally enacted in 1862, three years after his death.

I would be the last to argue against a system simple and logical to use. The problem comes when the proponent of a system can’t imagine another lying outside his own experience.

That was precisely the case with Macaulay. Peter Gay’s Style in History (1974) summarizes pretty neatly the problems that so many historians of our day have had with the man nicknamed “The Beast” (for his ugliness) by fellow Cambridge students: “He professes to detest—and, worse, he really detests—what he is too limited to grasp: the subtler points of philosophy, the mysteries of poetry, the sheer historical interest of personages or causes he does not find sympathetic.”

At the same time, several huge problems exist when Macaulay’s “Minute” and the circumstances surrounding it are examined:

*He did not know Sanskrit. Indeed, his opportunity to learn the language was lost when his Sanskrit-English dictionary fell overboard in his voyage to his new assignment, forcing him to learn Portuguese.

*His perspective was that of the ruler, not of someone seriously interested in a different culture. His arrival in India was quite agreeable: Not only did he receive a 15-gun salute when he set foot on the beach, but, he also noted, “I traveled the whole four hundred miles between this (Ootacamund) and Madras on men's shoulders.” He read European classics avidly during this time. Indian arts, science and theology? Not on his radar.

*His policy pronouncements had practical consequences. Governor General William Bentinck accepted Macaulay's contentions, writing a year later that "the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India." As a result, two Orientalists retired from the Committee of Public Instruction, shifting the balance toward the Anglicists who favored English instruction.

A people that sees its language extirpated is halfway toward having not just their heritage but also their existence discounted and even annihilated. Macaulay may have found such receptiveness to his blithe dismissal of Indian languages and customs because the British government had already been doing so closer to home, in Ireland. For six centuries, one of the aims of British policy was to destroy the Irish language, which the occupiers of the island widely regarded as a bulwark of attachment to all things Irish.

In our own lifetime, other intellectuals have elicited opprobrium for remarks as ill-considered as Macaulay’s about ethnic or racial groups’ cultural achievements. Novelist Saul Bellow got into some trouble for a 1988 interview with The New York Times Magazine in which he asked flippantly, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read them." Samuel Eliot Morison arrogantly wrote, in The Oxford History of the American People, that the Famine Irish contributed “surprisingly little to American economic life, and almost nothing to American intellectual life.”

But the difference with Macaulay was that his views would not only inform internal policies in a single colony, but also foreign policy across the Atlantic, by two statesman enthralled as much by his worldview as his writing style. Winston Churchill used Macaulay’s rhetorical devices in the speeches and other writings that won him a Nobel Prize for Literature. Theodore Roosevelt was even more enthusiastic, hailing Macaulay’s “eminently sane and healthy mind” as well as his “wholesome spirit and knowledge of practical affairs.” In a private letter, he noted: “Of all the authors I know[,] I believe I should first choose him [Macaulay] as the man whose writings will most help a man of action who desires to be both efficient and decent, to keep straight and yet to be of some account in the world.” Hyperkinetic TR read Macaulay’s immense History all the way through a number of times, including during the 1904 election.

Another aspect of Macaulay appealed to these two leaders, however: his justification of a worldwide imperium centered on an Anglo heritage and democratic values. Even before his projection of American power beyond North America, T.R. had written The Winning of the West. Churchill, highly reluctant to see India become independent, called his own epic narrative A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

Those who argue that British imperialism was a net plus to colonial peoples can point to the economic advantage they hold in a world where the de facto language of international commerce is business. (English has also became the language of choice in communicating scientific discoveries, as discussed in Michael D. Gordin’s article “Absolute English” for Aeon.)

But such a view is morally myopic, failing to recognize that the element of self-interest that has obtained in imperial enterprises even more than in normal international affairs. Across the maddeningly diverse Indian subcontinent, Macaulay believed, the only hope was in “an enlightened and paternal despotism.” Time has proven how easily paternalism can shade into dominance when it comes to a “backward” colony and its allegedly “civilized” conqueror.

In an 1833 speech in Parliament, Macaulay hailed Britain’s “pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism,” in an “imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.” Our…our…our…our. Might made right, especially to deal with subjugated people on “our” terms.

Edward Said’s controversial 1978 study, Orientalism, surely overstated the case when it claimed that “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was… a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” But Macaulay, through his “Minute” on Indian education, provided the late Columbia University scholar with one of the most devastating bits of evidence in his indictment against the West.

Flashback, September 1649: Cromwell Enters Irish Infamy at Drogheda

Oliver Cromwell only spent nine months in Ireland, but during that brief time he became a byword for British cruelty and oppression. Much of this owed to the end of the siege of Drogheda, when his army killed wholesale. 

Much about the mass killing on September 12, 1649, remains, surprisingly, in dispute. The massacre, justified by the future self-proclaimed “Lord Protector” as in accordance with the justice of God, certainly exacerbated sectarian unrest in Ireland and spawned a national grievance against the British government as undying as the mid-19^th century Potato Famine.

Proximity to England made Ireland a natural launching pad for rebels against the established order. In years past, this would have been the crown. But after 1642, when a faction against King Charles I seized control (thus becoming the “Parliamentarians”), the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny had aided the Royalists. Seven years later, with Charles seized and executed at Cromwell’s behest but with many still loyal to his son, the head of the “New Model Army” had turned his attention to Ireland as part of the campaign to subdue the last pockets of resistance to the new regime.

For an idea of the fate that Cromwell hoped desperately to avoid, I suggest you rent the Helen Mirren 2005 mini-series, Elizabeth I. In one scene, her counselors, asked about putting down a rebellion in Ireland, look like they’ve been asked to swallow castor oil, and the queen can’t help displaying her scorn. Anybody hoping to tame the island would be facing an emerald briar patch, as the queen’s bratty favorite, the Earl of Essex, was about to find out.

Having arrived in Ireland relatively late in the year, Cromwell felt the necessity to move rapidly and effectively—and unlike precursors such as Essex, he actually did so. His “New Model Army” was more open to men of ability than the Royalists and its members were more motivated by zeal (the religious kind--many of the men shared Cromwell's Puritanism, and  ministers of that faith were assigned to each unit). 

Because Cromwell insisted on being well-provisioned and financed even before leaving England, he would not be as likely to bog down in logistics. When it came time for the attack on Drogheda, the commander also possessed heavy artillery that would make short work of the town’s medieval walls.

Even with all these advantages—not to mention his more than three-to-one manpower edge, as well as divisions among the loose coalition of Protestant Royalists and Irish Catholics—the defenders at Drogheda fought vigorously. Annoyed that they refused his demand to surrender, Cromwell was downright enraged when the fighting went into its second day with members of his army even dying.

The result: at the end of the battle, following Cromwell’s orders of “no quarter,” not only had the beleaguered Drogheda garrison been butchered wholesale, but the killing had even extended to civilians.

At this point, apologists for Cromwell swing into action. Under formal rules of warfare at the time, they say, once a demand for surrender had been refused, combatants could not expect mercy if they lost. Moreover, because there was not much in the way of protest at the time, they insist that many, if not all, of the subsequent charges against Cromwell represent propaganda.

This last point is rather rich. A number of apologists are quick to point out that atrocities had been perpetrated against Protestants when Catholics had rebelled in Ireland eight years before. Surely there were a number of the latter. But the victors in Cromwell’s war had as much motive—and far more opportunity—to whip up propaganda than Catholics had. As Jane Ohlmeyer pointed out in an essay for A Military History of Ireland,  as few as 4,000 Protestants may have been murdered in the initial months of the 1641 rebellion—a far cry from the 154,000 claimed by the lords justice 10 years later.

In terms of the “propaganda”: The position of Irish Catholics in the two centuries after Cromwell can be likened to “the view from the bottom rail,” the phrase used by James West Davidson and Mark Lytle in After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection to describe former slaves still in the lower classes of society in post-Reconstruction America. These aged slaves were mistrustful of white interviewers dispatched by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s to ask them about life under the “peculiar institution.”

Irish Catholics had equal reason to fear Cromwell and the new colonial regime he helped institute in their land. They had seen neighbors slaughtered. They knew the same thing could happen to them if they agitated openly against the new regime. In addition, many were illiterate, so they could not have provided a written record, even had they wanted to do so. Whatever they remembered, then, survived in the form of folklore, songs, even coded language--the kind of forms generally regarded less trustworthy by historians.

The horrified countrymen who lived on after the depredations of the New Model Army could not, then, be transparent participants in one of the key questions following the end of the siege: How many died at Drogheda? Cromwell put the number at 2,000; later, Catholics claimed 4,000. Historians have tended to split the difference.

There are far worse ways of illustrating the chasm of miscomprehension on both sides of the Irish Sea than with an analysis of how the siege of Drogheda ended. If you are on the Irish side, words such as “butcher,” “massacre” and “genocide” spring to mind. If you’re on the other side of that body of water (or an Irish revisionist), you might say that we don’t know “exactly” what went on.

But in explaining away everything they possibly can, even to the point of offending common sense, the revisionists fail to take into account the words of Cromwell himself. In a letter written a week after Drogheda, he denies any order to kill civilians, but gives the game away when he expresses his true intentions: “This is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood.... it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise work remorse and regret.”

In other words: 1) The people of Drugheda had it coming because God was on our side; and 2) the massacre would cause so much fear that nobody would dare to rebel afterward, lest they meet the same fate.

A year and a half ago, while touring London, I spotted Hamo Thornycroft’s statue of Cromwell outside Westminster Hall. At first, I shook my head over the absurdity of Parliament honoring this theocrat who had dismissed it as easily as he had Charles I done away with. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw it in keeping with the imperialism the nation was practicing when the statue was first unveiled in 1895.

I didn’t think anything else could make my blood boil as much about Cromwell until I read the assessment of the strongman-turned-dictator by Thomas Babington Macaulay.  For all his almost novelistic vigor as a prose stylist, it is difficult, if not impossible, to take this Victorian politician-historian seriously nowadays because of his blatant biases and his smug self-satisfaction. 

Even given all of that, it came as a shock for me to read Macaulay’s belief that Cromwell’s policy of slaughter, expropriation of land, and forced resettlement in Ireland—what we would term “ethnic cleansing”—didn’t go far enough:  “For it is in truth more merciful to extirpate a hundred thousand human beings at once, and to fill the void with a well-governed population, than to misgovern millions through a long succession of generations.” 

In fact, Macaulay, an unabashed admirer of Cromwell (possessor of a “high, stout, honest, English heart”) was less concerned by the mass murder that occurred at Drogheda than by the “great depravation of the national taste [that] was the effect of the prevalence of Puritanism under the Commonwealth.”

If there is anything more shocking than mass murder, it may be a public intellectual justifying it. And then, Macaulay tops even this, as he considers likens the resettlement of English settlers to Ireland--a colonization project pushed by Cromwell--to a phenomenon occurring across the Atlantic Ocean in his time: "This tide of population ran almost as strongly as that which now runs from Massachusetts and Connecticut to the states behind the Ohio. The native race was driven back before the advancing van of the Anglo-Saxon population, as the American Indians or the tribes of Southern Africa are now driven back before the white settlers."

It's much easier to become "the first responsible European to espouse 'civilizing slaughter'" (as biographer Robert E. Sullivan of Notre Dame has called Macaulay) when you regard a subject people as innately inferior to a master race, as Cromwell did.