Some definitions. Chamber history – on an analogy with chamber music – is history with a small orchestra. Not symphonic history, not total history, which is a chaos like Schnittke or Penderecki, but something small and orderly, charming. David Starkey = a historian. He has a wonderfully Tudor name – Starkey – but, unlike his name, does not try to unlock the riddle of the heavens, but has come to earth, like the good bodhisattva he is, to explain the riddle of our kingdom. I call his history “Starkey Chamber History” also because it alludes to the Star Chamber: an English court which tried to make sure that laws were enforced even against the powerful. It seems to fit, somehow. (Even in the irony that the Star Chamber, originally a force for good law, ended up being used by the king to punish dissenters, which led, inevitably enough, to its dissolution in 1640. What begins fair, and this, I suppose, is the moral of what I am saying here, may end foul.)
What David Starkey is trying to do is deliver to the British (or English) public a jeremiad informed not by moral posturing or theoretical commitment but by a sense of history. This is so valuable it should almost come without criticism. I think that Starkey’s vision of history is so arresting it deserves to be expressed in short form and so I will attempt a summary of the position. Starkey is an admirably entertaining speaker, and offers a vision that is several dimensions more complicated than we hear from anyone else at the moment. He is full of prepared lines, and has a ready mind: “Niall Ferguson, the good Niall Ferguson, not the bad Neil Ferguson…”; “All bad ideas begin with the French”; “The Union of England and Scotland made the modern world”; “The monarch changes religion as he crosses the border: he begins Anglican, and becomes Presbyterian”; “The Labour party is the equivalent of the Nomenklatura of Soviet Russia: a privileged class”; etc.
I have some criticisms. But first, his vision of our history.
Let me begin by summarising Starkey’s view of history as it conditions the present. He argues the following:
1. On the nature and relevance of history. History is fundamental. We cannot understand ourselves using theory. Avoid abstraction. Use history instead. It is concrete. He suggests that we have always studied history for the sake of the present, though in recent centuries we have also studied it for its own sake. He adds that we should make analogies between past and present.
2. On English history. Starkey says that we were first part of Greater Scandinavia, then, from 1066, were part of an Anglo-French order. The third stage of our history began with the Reformation. Starkey likens the Latin Christendom of the Papacy to the European Union: and so calls Henry VIII the first Brexiteer. The consequence of the Reformation was that Britain and Europe become antagonists. For the first time the sea was reconfigured as a barrier, defended by the navy: and this happened at the same time that energies were thrown outward to the rest of the world. What the English managed to do, along with the Scots, was build something out of the strong language that rises from Chaucer to Shakespeare: the two home countries united to make it impossible to be invaded; they united to make an empire in the world; and they united to make use of remarkable innovations in finance and later industry.
One of Starkey’s great themes is this Union of England and Scotland: first by King in 1603 and second by Parliament in 1707. Starkey says England is not a nation. It lacks a ridiculous national dress (since its national dress, of coat and trousers with tie, was given to the world as universal official dress). And the Union was wholly original, as it subjugated Scotland to England’s Parliament, abolishing the Scottish Parliament, while leaving Scottish law, religion, military tradition and heraldry alone. England and Scotland are politically united, but only politically united. Starkey’s point about all this is that it was never about ‘identity’. There was no such thing as a ‘Briton’. There was no national system of education. So there was no nonsense of any modern-style post-French Revolution nationalism. Instead, we were natural liberals, able to take in immigrants without difficulty. However, throughout all this England is politically dominant in Great Britain and in the Empire.
3. On the present time. Starkey has two points of reference. One is the 1970s, when things went wrong, with a short reversal under Thatcher, and in the 1990s, when things went even more wrong, and perhaps permanently wrong, because constitutionally wrong. The 1970s was the culmination of the Labour politics of welfare, accepted weakly by Macmillan and Heath, but the 1990s was worse because political and constitutional. Labour took things in the wrong direction by making the Bank of England independent and by enabling a new Scottish Parliament to emerge: also by bringing about the Equality Act of 2010 (actually an innovation of Gordon Brown); also by creating a Supreme Court. Then, finally, Charles III removed Parliament from the Coronation, and there was no mention of politics: whereas, since 1688, the Coronation had been a political act. Political power has been fragmented and dispersed from the King-in-Parliament to the quangos, to the Bank of England, to the lawyers. The principle of balance is lost, as every institution has become an interest group, pursuing single issues: an entire raft of Anti-Corn Law Leagues.
Starkey suggests that England will remain an idea, much as the idea of Rome survived the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This is pessimistic judgement. His optimistic judgement, or hope, is that some sort of “restoration”, like the Glorious Revolution, can be enacted. As far as I have heard, he has not yet sketched the form of his restoration, though it has been promised.
Is this clear? Henry VIII broke the monasteries, threw out the Papists, built Oxford and Cambridge in new form, fortified the coast and began the story of Greater England. If we fill the gaps, there were difficulties with the consequences, religious and political, through the reigns of Mary, Elizabeth, James and Charles, but these were resolved in 1688 and then 1707. Then Great Britain became a great power. This remarkable creation was politically and constitutionally destroyed by the theorists and politicians of the late 20th century, since they demoted England within Britain, unleashed petty nationalisms in political form, and, in passing, did not do enough to restrain the welfare state or, we might add, enough to prevent English tolerance being twisted to accommodate net immigration of 700,000 people of fairly antagonistic cultures per year. Britain is now ruled not by Government-in-Parliament but by delegated arbitrary powers and influences which offer sops to partial interests and mean that nothing can be done. No one has an adequate conception of the entire state.
Now for the criticisms.
1. His suggestion that we should study history for the sake of the present is badly formulated. Unfortunately, most historical comparisons are naïve. If we compare our time to the 1930s then we are naïve. Niall Ferguson tells us that Netanyahu is like Bismarck. Alright, suggestive, interesting as far as it goes (and Starkey mentions it approvingly), which is not very far. It is naïve. Now there is nothing wrong with this – I have done it too – but it is naïve and has strict limits. No historical parallels ever apply without almost entire qualification. You know: Thesis: our time is reminiscent of the Civil War, the 1930s, the Barbarian Invasion. Antithesis: well, it really isn’t in almost every other respect than the one of which you are thinking. No synthesis need apply.
In fact, Starkey mostly avoids this naïve sort of comparison, though he extols it. What he does instead is something subtler which is tell a story at several levels about changes across time. He is in fact contributing to what we could call ‘enlightened’ or ‘Whig’ history, in which we use the past to explain the present (not to explain what do in the present, but to explain how to we got to be where we are – these are different).
But there is a problem even with this. For we cannot restore anything by studying history. We certainly cannot reconstruct tradition by reading history. History is conscious, and roots around amongst relics, and engages in textual and contextual criticism of various sorts. It is sceptical. Whereas tradition is unconscious and, if not exactly dogmatic in itself, then not exactly sceptical: it usually depends on settled beliefs. We cannot hope to restore or rebuild anything, including England, simply by becoming more conscious of history. The thing cannot be done. And I say this as at least half a historian: and as someone who agrees with Starkey that we should read more history: as that at least would encourage us to have more respect for our ancestors, and less respect for our contemporary trivialists.
2. I have fewer criticisms of Starkey’s remarkable history of England, and the Union, because it is anything but naïve. It is, in fact, the sort of constitutional history we might find in Stubbs as combined with the sort of history of politics we might find in Seeley. The sort of history we stand in need of is not cultural history, or social history, but good old political and constitutional history: because it is only by looking at politics and law that we can make sense of our own institutions. We could perhaps add a bit of something about feudalism, something about capitalism, something about political parties, something about Victorian reforms, something about the World Wars, something about the rise of the USA, something about meritocracy, modern class divides, managerialism and so on, but the picture is a good frame: a good bit of chamber history. The basic moral of the whole story is that of Edmund Burke in 1790, as updated by Michael Oakeshott and Antony Quinton, and now updated, post-Blair and post-COVID-19, by Starkey himself. Starkey believes in political practice, continuity, balance, tradition and what Quinton called “a politics of imperfection”.
3. About the modern time, I, again, find most of the picture persuasive, about the 1970s and the 1990s. But there are problems. For instance, Starkey is rather too admiring of Thatcher. As I said in an earlier piece, Thatcher only understood one of Enoch Powell’s concerns: the managed economy. She did not understand the problem of Europe until very late on, and never understood the problem of immigration, which remains a taboo subject. Starkey likes Keith Joseph, Friedrich Hayek and the 1979 Conservative Party Manifesto. But Hayek wrote ‘Why I Am Not a Conservative’: he was liberal. And this gives us a clue: that Starkey, as a humorous atheist, is unwilling to extend his political and constitutional analysis to include religion. He sees the Reformation as political – and, in this, he follows his teacher G.R. Elton – and not as religious. He therefore does not make much of the fact that Scotland and England are religious enemies (since the English are moderate and the Scottish, whether Calvinist or Catholic, are not), and that this has a legacy too, even secularly. Scotland has gone back to the Auld Alliance with a continental power.
I suppose I dislike some of the cartoonish, or naïve, analogies, such as the comparison of Christian Europe to the European Union. Anyone could tell us – a historian like Maitland, for instance – that the Papacy was a highly ambiguous entity, neither an empire nor a state nor a pure communion, yet somehow seeming a bit like all of these. It appealed to belief, and depended on faith or truth. No one has ever claimed the EU depends on truth or belief. Indeed, it entirely lacks either. It hasn’t got a single admirable building or work of art. (Contrast Christian York or Aachen or Florence or Krakow.) It stole its music from Beethoven and its flag from the Council of Europe. It is a confection, an arbitrary construction, a sort of Heath Robinson conspiracy whereby secular rational universalists – who are influenced by, alas, those English or Scottish habits of universal trade and profit-arousing and rent-seeking as well as by French and German habits of control and planning – attempt to break down all national significance, and, worse, all independent political significance. The story is a bit more dialectical than I think Starkey could admit without damaging his story.
This brings me back to the basic criticism I had. Good history may be bad politics. This is the triumphant discovery of Herbert Butterfield. And good politics may need bad history. Starkey is right to say that our bad politics has its own bad history. But we are going to be badly misled if we think that good history will grant us the good politics we want.
Yet, even though I say this, I think there is a great deal to be said for Starkey’s particular history, and for his attempt to say something about the past that enables him to make a copious criticism of the present. We have ‘alternative’ learned voices from law in the public sphere – Sumption – and voices from psychology – Haidt and Peterson – and voices from biology – one Weinstein – and voices from science and technology – Musk and the other Weinstein – but almost no sound voices from history. Almost all the established historical writers are on the Left, and therefore incapable of criticism of this established order. Niall Ferguson is a great historian. But Analogies are not enough. Starkey seems to be the only historian who has managed to turn history into prophecy in a powerful way. Everyone has something to learn from his recent lectures.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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