The History of England: Revolution by Peter Ackroyd, Macmillan, £25
The fourth volume of Peter Ackroyd’s History of England lands with a 400-page thud and a narrative stretching from the crowning of William III to the Battle of Waterloo.
To some extent, this is the tale of the Glorious Revolution and its discontents. Ackroyd is not an outright tarnisher of 1668 and all that, but neither is he averse to scratching away some of the gilt. Loyalty to William was “distinctly muted” in many parts of the country where he was seen as a foreign king imposed by force: “Yet what could be done? The crown was on his head. Indifference, or resignation, was the inevitable response.”
William drew the country into fresh conflict with France and the “prolonged culture of war changed the social, political and fiscal aspects of English life. Larger and larger armies were brought into operation. Taxes increased exponentially.” A new elite, composed of an aristocracy and oligarchy bolstered by the landed gentry, would retain power for 200 years.
Ackroyd mixes narrative momentum with several bracing plunges into the spirit, or rather spirits, of the age: the gambling and speculation exemplified by the South Sea Bubble, the caustic wit, the violence and vice. He singles out the forces that shaped the life of the whole nation: industry, for instance, which “could not exist without misery”, and urbanisation.
Bolton, little more than a village with one street of thatched houses and gardens in the middle of the 18th century, had become a town of 17,000 people 50 years later.
The genius of invention, the ravages of gin, the pity of child labour: they are all here. Ties between the ranks or classes of society were broken, “provoking ambition, restlessness, or confusion”.
The free press exploded into life after Parliament allowed printing regulations to lapse almost by oversight. There were papers that left blank spaces so that readers might fill in more current news before passing on the publication to others. Some items were accompanied by the phrase “this wants confirmation”.
Shopping arrived for the first time as a distinct social activity. London developed a market in fine arts, furnishing and, in the words of one philosopher, a love of order and delicacy of feeling.
Meanwhile, far out at sea, manacled slaves endured the torments of the Atlantic passage. As Pitt the Younger remarked, “perversion of British commerce caused misery instead of happiness to one whole quarter of the globe”.
There are all manner of gems in here. Ackroyd recalls the Speenhamland system of poor relief, set up near Newbury when bread prices rocketed in the 1790s. It instigated “the argument over welfare dependency that continues to this day”.
He reminds us that the English upper lip was not always stiffened. In the 18th century, there was a propensity among men for public sobbing and fainting: at the theatre, in Parliament, in the street.
It was also an age teeming with eccentrics. Ackroyd affords us vivid miniature portraits of the likes of Walpole, Wedgwood, Samuel Johnson, Wesley, the Pitts and George III himself.
However bumpy and chaotic things got, this was a time when England was on a roll, at home and abroad. The American Revolution did not halt progress so much as redirect it. The French Revolution severely tested, but did not end, the English aversion to all-out revolt.
Ackroyd masters the spectacle superbly. I raced through, happily forgiving some dubious assertions, a small dose of London-centricism and a style that is occasionally overly fastidious. Compelling.
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