Tea at Trianon: The Tory Interpretation of History

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, November 4, 2021

The Tory Interpretation of History

From The Imaginative Conservative:

In 1931, the young English historian Herbert Butterfield published a small book entitled The Whig Interpretation of History. While modest in size, it left an outsized impact on historical scholarship, considerations on the nature and practice of history, and the way historians think about presentations of the past. Too many English historians, particularly those of the nineteenth century like Thomas Babington Macaulay and Lord Acton, portrayed history as the “struggle for liberty” over authority and the inevitable triumph of progress, usually defined as the mores of contemporary liberalism and the prerogatives of the British Whig and later Liberal Party. The story of history becomes one of ascent, a sort of neo-Marxist progressive liberation from constraint and oppression, thereby glorifying the present as the culmination of past battles against evil. None of this settles well with our knowledge of the world since 1789, or 1776, or 1688, or 1649, or 1537, however, nor did it settle with Butterfield.
If history is the record of progress, then the progressive road to a brighter future is marked by potholes that call into the question the legitimacy of the interpretation itself. Butterfield proposed to substitute a radical empiricism for Whiggery, so radical in fact that his replacement looked bloodless, a “just-the-facts, ma’am’” Dragnet-style history without meaning or morality. A more effective counter to Whig history, one that fights upon the same ground as the Whigs, is a Tory interpretation that emerged from the same point of contention – the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (Tories would prefer to call it the Inglorious Revolution) and its fallout. (Read more.)

On James II and religious toleration:

The Revolution of 1688 was "enabled" by James's reforms, not by his oppressions, as the Church of England adopted a posture of implacable opposition. The Toleration Act, passed in 1689 after the installation of William and Mary, now emerges as a forced tactical response to James's campaign, not a reward for Dissenters' previous hostility to James, and not inspired by Locke's Epistola de Tolerantia; indeed, it left a sacramental test still standing, the opposite of what the repealers had sought. Religious toleration was still some two centuries off. Sowerby is clear in his verdict: the Revolution "was not primarily a crisis provoked by political repression. It was, in fact, a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained. (Read more.)