A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  Rather than advocating a traditional, imperialist British history, in supporting the reissue of Our Island Story, the Daily Telegraph was recommending a book with not only pacifist, but feminist and republican overtones.

  There are some contextual clues to the surprising radicalism of this deceptively traditional text. It is often forgotten that, at the time of writing Our Island Story, Marshall was living in Melbourne, Australia. The book begins with an imagined conversation between a father and his children, prompted by a letter from ‘home’. The father is asked to explain how both Australia and the little island far away can both be ‘home’. Our Island Story was concerned not only with the development of Great Britain, but with the creation of those values that then took root in ‘Greater Britain’ (the colonies) as well. By the time Marshall was writing, at the turn of the twentieth century, however, the political history of Australia and Britain had diverged considerably, with Australia unquestionably overtaking the mother country in terms of the democratic rights that it accorded its citizens. Men had received the vote in most Australian states by the 1860s, and the secret ballot had been introduced, along with salaries for MPs and fixed-term parliaments. Australia could claim the first working-class representative of any legislature in the British Empire, Charles Jardine Don, elected to the Victoria Parliament in 1860. By 1902, Australian women could vote in Commonwealth elections, a full sixteen years before their British counterparts.*26 Rather than writing a triumphalist history of British imperialism, as is sometimes supposed, Marshall arguably produced a book influenced by the more equal and free Australian society in which she then lived.

  Australia’s democratic society was created by men and women who had formerly been British subjects. Some of those who came to Australia had been deeply involved in radical politics in the mother country. Charles Jardine Don, for example, was a Scottish Chartist.27 The Chartist movement in Britain had campaigned for adult male suffrage, the secret ballot, annual parliaments, salaries for MPs, the equalisation of the size of constituencies, and an end to the property qualification for those standing for election.

  By the early 1850s, the movement in Britain was in steep decline. Along with the hundred or so Chartists transported to Australia for political ‘crimes’, many more of the movement’s supporters freely chose to emigrate during that decade. They were enticed there by the Chartist press, which advertised Australia as a land of freedom and plenty. As the Northern Star put it in 1852: ‘The future Australian republic will be a refuge and a home for those of our workers in the cause of the people, whose souls shall yearn for liberty, should they ever be … compelled to abandon in despair the people of the British Islands, as debased wretches, hopelessly sunk in slavish degeneracy.’28 These Chartist immigrants played a significant role in the development of democracy in Australia. The Ballarat Reform League, formed in 1854 by Victoria gold-diggers, featured former Chartists Henry T. Holyoake and J. B. Humffray among its founder members, and its aims, aside from the reform of goldmining, mirrored the Six Points of the Chartists’ People’s Charter. Within twelve months of the League’s foundation, and the violent clash between the state authorities and the miners at the Eureka Stockade, virtually all of the points of the Charter had been achieved.29

  Chartism brings us full circle, back to Alfred the Great. Far from being regicidal revolutionaries, many Chartists were broadly supportive of the monarchy, at least those monarchs they saw as defending the public good. For this reason, as for Henrietta Marshall, they venerated Alfred, under whom, the Chartist Northern Liberator said, ‘the people of England … became rich, free and happy, and so would have continued had not Universal Suffrage been lost amid the civil dissension of the turbulent reign of the weak Henry the Sixth’. The same idyllic picture of life under Alfred’s benevolent leadership was painted by the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor. Alfred’s reign was, he said, a time when ‘the twenty-four hours of the day were divided into three equal portions’ – like the unions, Alfred only wanted an eight-hour working day – and ‘there was neither lock nor bolt on any man’s door because there was no thief’.30 Other Chartist writers applauded his legal reforms, equating the ‘Code of Alfred’ with the freedoms promised in the People’s Charter.31

  The historic nature of English freedoms was important even to those Chartists, such as Ernest Jones, who subsequently became influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx. As Jones told a meeting in Tower Hamlets in October 1847,

  Liberty is a tree of long growth in England. It was planted at Runnymede; it was sunned by the fires of Smithfield; it was watered by the blood of Marston Moor, and the veins of Charles; it was fanned by the prayers of the Puritan, and dewed by the tears of the Exile – and now it is beginning to bloom beneath the fostering hand of the Charter.32

  The Chartists’ adoration of a tradition of British liberty tells us much about the nature of British radicalism itself. It was not predominantly republican but could praise ‘good’ rulers like Alfred, as well as the righteous rebels of 1381; it emphasised the importance of recapturing lost freedoms, often located in an Anglo-Saxon Arcadia, as much as securing new rights; and most of all, it saw itself as part of a tradition of people fighting for their liberties.

  It is that ‘radical tradition’ which this book celebrates and explores. From the Victorian era to the present day, radical writers, politicians and historians have offered an alternative view of the nation’s past to the dominant narrative of kings and queens. Leading figures on the left, of such diverse talents and backgrounds as William Morris, Belfort Bax, George Orwell, E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill and Billy Bragg, have all attempted to demonstrate a relationship between British history, national character and radicalism. In recent years, discussion of Britain’s radical tradition has been revived by Gordon Brown’s call for a new sense of Britishness, centred on values of tolerance, liberty and fair play: values that Brown suggests are the inheritance of the ‘golden thread’ that runs through British history, the struggle against tyranny and arbitrary power.33 Britain’s radical history has even been the subject of a recent popular competition, sponsored by the Guardian newspaper, to find Britain’s most overlooked ‘radical moment’.

  The idea of a British radical tradition is persistent and powerful, but it carries with it several problems. The first of these relates to its Britishness. As a Scot in possession of a history Ph.D., Brown surely knows that the starting point of his ‘golden thread’, Magna Carta, was an English document, not a British one. Similarly, for those radicals who traced British freedoms back to an Anglo-Saxon ‘ancient constitution’, the question was left hanging as to how such freedoms applied to the Celtic Britons of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Alfred the Great, as most of his Victorian hagiographers agreed, was an English hero, not a British one. Arguably, radicalism in the British Isles did not take on a clearly ‘British’ character until after the Napoleonic Wars, when radicals were keen to ‘re-brand’ themselves as progressive patriots rather than Frenchified Jacobins. Of course, it would scarcely be possible to write a history of radicalism in England without mentioning non-English figures such as Thomas Hardy, the eighteenth-century Scottish founder of the London Corresponding Society, Keir Hardie or Feargus O’Connor. Even Thomas Paine, born in Thetford, Norfolk, but a citizen of the republics of France and the United States of America, might be counted, at best, one-third English. For much of this book, then, what is offered is an ‘enriched’ English, rather than a genuinely British, history of radicalism.

  Like British radicalism, the use of the term ‘radical’ itself, at least in a political context, is mainly of modern vintage. When we describe something as being politically radical, we equate it with ‘thorough or far-reaching political or social reform’.34 However, etymologically, the word originates from the Latin radix, meaning root, and the earlier interpretation of ‘radical’ was, literally, of something pertaining to the root. In the Tudor and Stuart periods, the term was often used in its early modern/medieval scientific cont
ext, as in ‘radical humour’ or ‘moisture’, indicating an inherent quality that gave plants and animals their vitality. When it was used in a political context, which was rarely, it was employed to signify something fundamental or original. It was in this sense that the Parliamentarian writer Nathaniel Bacon in a seventeenth-century treatise on the origins of the English government wrote, ‘I shall first glance upon the natural Constitution of the people of England … and shew the same to be radical, and not by any force or inoculation,’35 meaning that English government was indigenous to these islands and not the product of foreign influence or conquest. Words such as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ carry similar problems of shifting historical meaning. Magna Carta’s conferring of rights upon ‘free men’, who may have amounted to only 7 per cent of the population in 1215, was considerably less generous a grant than it might have been in the seventeenth century. Equally, freedom itself carried a different sense in an era when most people were unfree, either bound to give some sort of labour or actually enslaved. Freedom was a legally conferred status, not a natural right, nor a mental or emotional state. Liberty, too, was often understood in the past less as a synonym for freedom, as in ‘liberty of conscience’ or ‘civil liberties’, and more to mean an exceptional grant or privilege gifted from the sovereign to a particular group or area, as in the liberties or privileges of a defined jurisdiction (the county palatine of Chester, for example).

  Some historians have suggested that by using such terms out of their appropriate historical context (in the case of political ‘radicalism’, the modern era), we are imposing anachronistic modern values upon past groups and individuals – presenting, for example, the seventeenth-century Levellers as ‘the first socialists’ or Gerrard Winstanley’s Diggers as ‘the first communists’.36 Great works by the leading British Marxist historians Christopher Hill and E. P. Thompson undoubtedly did try to trace a lineage, however subtly, from these earlier movements to modern radical parties. Thompson was attacked by his fellow Marxist, Perry Anderson, for the ‘cultural nationalist’ assumptions that Anderson claimed underpinned Thompson’s classic, The Making of the English Working Class. It was a criticism that raised Thompson’s ire but carried a strong ring of truth. As he proclaimed in his last book, the posthumously published intellectual biography of William Blake, Witness against the Beast, he was interested in ‘the long and tenacious revolutionary tradition of the British commoner’, ‘a dogged, good-humoured, responsible tradition: yet a revolutionary tradition all the same’.37 Christopher Hill’s work also tried to delineate an English ‘revolutionary tradition’, stretching from the fourteenth-century English heretics, the Lollards, to the Leveller movement and beyond.38

  In suggesting that Lollards were the predecessors of Levellers, who were in turn the forerunners of the Chartists, Thompson, Hill and others presented English and/or British radicalism as a historical continuum in which the baton of popular struggle was passed from one group to the next.39 This, after all, was one meaning of ‘tradition’, either in a legal sense (the handover of material from one party to another) or in a broader sense, the transmission of methods, customs and even language from one age to another. The notion of a continuum suggested that the content of radicalism remained essentially the same, so that the Lollards’ struggle was in essence the Levellers’ struggle too. When radical activity appeared nonexistent, it had simply ‘gone underground’, only to resurface, its fundamental nature intact, in another epoch. The idea of a continuum also inferred that each group, in turn, influenced the other.

  In fact, the influence of seventeenth-century radicals on their eighteenth-century counterparts was relatively minimal, for reasons which will be discussed later. The idea of a continuum of radicalism arguably confused passing similarity with actual influence. There may have been things that the Lollards and Levellers held in common – a hostility to the spiritual monopoly of the clergy being the most obvious – but there were many more differences: Lollards would have rejected or, at best, found incomprehensible the Levellers’ demands for mass manhood suffrage, broad religious toleration and the effective separation of Church and state. Equally, it conflated means with ends. Levellers and Chartists may both have argued for universal (or near-universal) manhood suffrage, but they did so for different reasons. Levellers saw the vote as the means to ensure political accountability and protect the rights and liberties that were the ‘birthright’ of Englishmen. Chartists, on the other hand, wanted to ensure political accountability and secure social and economic goals, such as better housing, land reform and an end to the invidious Poor Laws.

  However, contrary to the urgings of some conservative historians, the idea of a British ‘radical tradition’ should not be abandoned. Most of those groups usually included within it (the Levellers, Thomas Paine, the Chartists) were undoubtedly ‘radical’ within the context of their own time. Even if, in the case of the Levellers, theirs was a radicalism avant la lettre, it was radical all the same: the realisation of their political vision would have involved the fundamental transformation of the British constitution. The term ‘radical’ is consequently used in this book in the modern understanding of the term as meaning thorough social and political change. My ‘radicals’ then, to borrow a good commonsense definition from the late historian Gerald Aylmer, advocated the transformation of the existing status quo rather than merely reforming it to ameliorate its worst aspects.40 My barometer of ‘radicalism’ is also relative: what the Levellers John Lilburne, William Walwyn and Richard Overton advocated – a broader franchise, governments elected by popular mandate, religious toleration and a fair and equitable legal system – was exceptional in the 1640s but would (I hope) be taken for granted in early twenty-first-century Britain.

  This definition of radicalism does exclude some groups and events that have often been included in discussions of Britain’s radical history. For example, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9 was often invoked by eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century radicals as a key moment in the history of British liberty. However, while modern historians have continued to claim that the consequences of the events of 1688–9 were revolutionary, they now largely see these changes as the unintended by-products of England’s wars with France in the 1690s, rather than as the result of the conscious will of English ‘patriots’. Indeed, the motivations of some of the ‘revolutionaries’ of 1688–9 were deeply reactionary: they wanted to preserve the spiritual monopoly of the Anglican state Church from the threat posed by James II’s tolerationist policies.

  In a more modern context, the founding of the welfare state has also been seen as a transformative moment in British history. Undoubtedly, this had a profound impact on the lives of millions of people. However, though far-reaching, these changes were not genuinely radical. In the first place, it is hard to describe the architects of the welfare state as radicals: they generally accepted the constitutional status quo and wanted to blunt the teeth of a rapacious capitalist system rather than do away with it altogether. Second, ideologically, the notion of a welfare state was well within the political mainstream: by the 1940s, the policies advocated by the Attlee government had become political orthodoxy and could receive broad cross-party support.

  However, even though this book disputes the inclusion of some events within a history of British radicalism, it argues that the idea of a ‘radical tradition’ remains viable and important. As Eric Hobsbawm reminds us, even ‘invented traditions’ can be powerful historical forces: the appeal to the past can be a formidable spur to radical action, rather than a tool of conservative retrenchment.41 In any case, the British ‘radical tradition’ was not a mere fiction: as we shall see, there were a number of important continuities between radical movements. Genuine connections were embellished by radical groups’ habit of creating their own retrospective genealogies: they claimed, through the benefit of hindsight, affinity with past movements and individuals. Consequently, what was perceived to be included within this radical traditi
on varied from century to century and from one group to another. This variegated and ever-changing tradition was celebrated and remembered not only through writing or speech, but also via what the French historian Pierre Nora has called ‘sites of memory’: landscapes, buildings and monuments that evoke and inspire a re-engagement with the past.42

  This persistent memory of radical activity in sources other than written histories was crucial to its survival. We should not forget that much of the history of radical movements had to be unearthed from beneath layers of negative propaganda, official censorship and violent repression. History tends to be written by the victors. In some cases, only very recently have we come to understand the full impact of radical movements, as in the case of Kett’s Rebellion of 1549, now known by its far more appropriate, original label of the ‘commotion time’. What this formerly secret history of radicalism reveals is surprising. Often, historians write the history of radical movements as a string of glorious failures, an account of the struggle of men and women who were ahead of their time, perpetually thwarted by the status quo and ever condemned to have their political dreams reach fruition only after their deaths. The truth is that in many instances radical movements were able to effect real changes on the government of the nation. In some instances, as in 1381 and 1549, they temporarily were the effective government of the nation. At other times, as in 1649, they came within a whisker of utterly transforming the English constitution. More often than not, it was because radicals were successful that they were so gravely feared by the social and political establishment, and their achievements so thoroughly denigrated.