Sir Arthur Bryant as a 20th-century Victorian1

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Sir Arthur Bryant as a 20th-century Victorian1 J. Stapleton Department of Politics, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LZ, UK

Abstract This article considers some of the late-Victorian and Edwardian influences on the popular historian, Sir Arthur Bryant (1899–1985) in the 20th century. It emphasises Bryant’s role in strengthening patriotism and English national identity in the unpropitious circumstances of interwar and postwar Britain. The article examines his conservative cast of mind, one he communicated through best-selling histories and prolific journalism. It emphasises his increasing distance from organised Conservatism after the Second World War and the sympathy he attracted in some quarters of the Labour movement at the end of his life, as well as earlier on. However, it concludes that Bryant is a vital link between the late-19th century ‘moment’ of Englishness and its recent revival among Conservative thinkers, publicists and politicians. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction If it is no longer assumed that the Victorian era ended as early as 1910—in Virginia Woolf’s felicitous phrase, when human nature ‘changed’2—we have still not understood its permutations deep into the 20th century. The pioneering volume edited by Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler, After the Victorians, correctly emphasises the sustained resonance of the concerns and beliefs of the Victorian E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Stapleton). I am extremely grateful to Reba Soffer for her comments on an earlier draft of this article. I am also indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Board for funding my initial research on Bryant. I gratefully acknowledge the permission of David Higham Associates on behalf of the Estate of Sir Arthur Bryant to use unpublished Bryant material. My thanks are also due to the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London for permission to quote from the Bryant Papers. 2 On the context of Woolf’s remark in the ‘Manet and Post-Impressionists’ exhibition in London in December 1910 and other events of that year, see Peter Stansky, On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and its Intimate World (Cambridge, MA, 1996). 1

0191-6599/$ - see front matter r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2004.03.003

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liberal intelligentsia. At the heart of those persistent liberal values was the close interface between ‘private conscience’ and ‘public duty’. In the first half of the 20th century, as the authors demonstrate, the work of John Reith, Eleanor Rathbone and J.B. Priestley, among others, reinforced the idea that the personal conduct and belief of those in high places should enrich the body politic and national culture. The book makes clear that the ethic of integrated private and public commitments adapted to rich and varied new circumstances. Yet the confidence of this elite in their ability to head a ‘civilising’ mission to the rest of society was all but sapped by the time of the election and Festival of Britain of 1951. Thereafter withdrawal seemed a price worth paying for integrity as the masses proceeded to go their own, philistine way.3 What of other Victorian intellectual inheritances besides those that were identifiably ‘liberal’, inheritances that may have overlapped with the latter at certain points but which nevertheless developed clear trajectories of their own? Did they survive merely in the form of faint echoes, representing nothing more than a sense of ‘nostalgia’ and ‘self-doubt’ that spelt their future insignificance?4 Alternatively, how were they applied and reshaped, and to whom were they addressed in the radically altered climate of the 20th century? What was the nature of their impact, and when, if at all, were they finally eclipsed? A significant step towards answering some of these questions in relation to 19th-century Conservatism has recently been made by Reba Soffer. Concentrating on the work of three Conservative historians in the 20th century—F.J.C. Hearnshaw, Keith Feiling and Arthur Bryant—she emphasises the continuing purchase of the idea of the organic nation in 19th-century Conservative thought in Conservative party circles until as late as the 1980s.5 This article seeks to amplify her analysis. It does so by exploring the late-Victorian and Edwardian influences in Arthur Bryant’s early life that shaped his public role and distinctive form of cultural and political conservatism. This was centred on a unifying conception of English– British nationhood and the empire it had spawned. He continued to propagate his views with missionary zeal well into the second half of the 20th century and in the face of imperial decline. But it will be argued that he often did so at the expense of postwar (although not interwar) Conservatism, finding readier allies among ‘traditionalists’ on both the right and left of the Labour party. Indeed, it will become clear that it is only in recent times that the legacy of late-Victorian ‘Englishness’ which he carried forward has found a clear and distinctive Conservative voice.

3 S. Pederson & P. Mandler (eds.), After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (London, 1994); see also M. Bevir, ‘The Long Nineteenth Century in Intellectual History’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 6:2 (2001), 313-335. 4 Bevir, ‘The Long Nineteenth Century in Intellectual History’, p. 329. 5 Reba N. Soffer, ‘The Long Nineteenth Century of Conservative Thought’, in G.K. Behlmer & F.M. Leventhal (eds.), Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British Culture (Stanford, 2000), 143–162.

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Bryant and Victorian England Despite being born only 2 years before the death of Queen Victoria, her long reign remained Bryant’s primary reference-point throughout his life. Writing in his weekly column for the Illustrated London News in 1954 he emphasised that his father had inherited ‘the beliefs, ideals, prejudices and tastes of Victorian England, and I, though born nearly 40 years later, inherited them in turn from him’. He went on, ‘It often amuses me, living in a seemingly utterly different world—the world of the atom-bomb, the aeroplane, television parlour-games, boogie-woogie and the strip cartoon—to find how strongly rooted both I and so many of my contemporaries are in those seemingly outworn conceptions’. While he was always conscious of failing to live up to the highest Victorian standards in practice, nevertheless ‘in theory I find that I believe in very much the same things as Queen Victoria and Lord Tennyson and Mr. Gladstone!’6 This statement of intellectual and cultural identity could easily have been different. Bryant could have been part of the movement of deep disaffection with the Victorian era and its ‘flash Edwardian epilogue’7 of which the modernist movements in art and literature and the Bloomsbury influence on morals were key symptoms. He was certainly conscious of the ostentiousness and complacency of the England in which he grew up. Writing at the time of the Festival of Britain in 1951 he condemned England’s traditional rulers of a half century earlier for reducing a rich foundation of national pride and identity to a set of overworked phrases such as ‘wider yet and wider’, ‘the white man’s burden’, ‘the price of admiralty’, and ‘for King and country’. But his disquiet lay squarely within a conservative perspective: the political class had simply failed to connect the ‘high autumnal pomps of Edwardian patriotism’ with a far older heritage. Deriving alike from the robust idealism of our Anglo-Saxon forbears and the noble Christian faith that softened and civilised it, as well as from a thousand years of peaceful and fruitful nurture, it was a tradition that was both valiant and gentle, disciplined and libertarian, resolute and humane.8 The qualified nature of his criticism is also evident in his emphasis on the greater patriotic depth to be found among the ‘simple and unassuming’ than the ‘boiled shirts’ and crooked jingo financiers such as Horatio Bottomley.9 Moreover, he believed that the hereditary elite redeemed itself fully in 1914 (and again in 1939); it excelled in courage and valour and over the course of the next three decades 6 Illustrated London News (hereafter, ILN: n.b.Bryant’s ILN articles had titles after 1967; before then they were simply headed ‘Our Notebook’), 13 November 1954, p. 832. As we shall see, Bryant was not quite at one with all that Gladstone contributed to the Victorian legacy. While hailing the poignancy of Gladstone’s remark that it is ‘freedom that fits men for freedom’, Bryant used this to defend the continuing need for British imperial rule. The dictum was not of universal application, he maintained, and would only pertain to Africa, at least, after a ‘long educative process’: ILN, 19 May 1962, p. 790. 7 G.M. Young, Portrait of an Age: Victorian England (1977; London, 1936), p. 184. 8 ILN, 26 May 1951, p. 838. 9 ILN, 3 Dec 1955, p. 956; see also 17 August 1957, p. 252.

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surrendered with neither complaint nor resistance ‘at the altar of patriotism privileges and possessions greater than those of any ruling class in recorded history’.10 In his view it was the resources of Victorian England on which the First World War generation drew for the strength of character and purpose it displayed in battle, particularly the legacy of leadership provided by the professional classes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.11 Despite their ‘faults and limitations’, he once wrote, these classes gave ‘through their sense of social responsibility and high individual standard of character and attainment, a kind of moral cement to the nation as a whole, without which no country can be or remain great’.12 In later life he reflected that the example of selfless duty and service to noble causes set by this milieu underpinned the ‘common religious and moral belief and code’ throughout the London of his childhood; it was the source of the capital’s ‘vitality and energy’ for all the grime, poverty and tragedy experienced by its less fortunate inhabitants.13 Its writ ended only after the First World War, fatally undermined by the ‘bright young things’ and pseudo-sophisticated intellectuals who poured scorn on conventional standards of taste and morality. Bryant never lost an opportunity to excoriate Bloomsbury and kindred ‘highbrows’ for seeking to destroy the fabric of inherited culture and belief.14 So Bryant eschewed the generational revolt that gathered pace during his formative years, idealising his generation and the Victorians who had shaped it. The self-sacrifice of those who fought in the First World War (and the Second) continually inspired his vocation as an historian. He projected their qualities onto the English–British past as a whole, emphasising the unchanging national character and identity of the people themselves as its driving force. (Like many of his generation, Bryant used England and Britain interchangeably, although he clearly regarded England as the informing spirit behind the larger nation.)15 The strength of his faith in the inherent virtue of the British people saved him from the pessimism about human nature in general and Britain in particular to which his fellow Conservative historians succumbed.16 It fired his burning sense of mission—as he wrote to a correspondent in 1949—to ‘make my brave, kindly, shrewd, enduring though sometimes, perhaps rather confused, countrymen realise the full greatness of 10

ILN, 26 May 1951, p. 838. ‘Not Finished Yet’, ILN, July 1975, p. 22; and 5 August 1967, p. 14. See also ‘Remembering the Somme’, ILN, March 1976, p. 26. 12 ILN, 20 March 1965, p. 8. 13 Bryant, The Lion and the Unicorn: A Historian’s Testament (London, 1969), pp. 20–21. 14 ILN, 9 August 1952, p. 206. 15 ILN, 1 November 1958; see also J.H. Grainger’s Patriotisms: Britain, 1900–1940 (London, 1986), p. 53. 16 See Soffer, ‘The Long Nineteenth Century of Conservative Thought’, pp. 148, 151. Bryant was sympathetic to the postwar pessimism of Toynbee and Butterfield, particularly what he took to be its ‘medievalism’: see ILN, 30 August 1952, p. 320. However, he continued to believe in the capacity of British national life to renew itself, despite the many aspects of the postwar world he deplored. See ILN, 22 August 1953, p. 274; 12 November, 1955, p. 816; and ‘Fashionable Illusions’, ILN, 29 March, 1969, p. 16. On this he differed from his friend, A.L. Rowse. 11

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their heritage and of all that might be built on it’.17 It was the cornerstone of a highly successful brand of national history, one which ensured the survival of Carlyle’s romantic nationalism despite the stronger ‘civilisational’ perspective of mid-19th century Whig historiography.18 Bryant’s history was consciously designed to help his compatriots withstand the vicissitudes of the 20th century and remain steadfast in their commitment to their historical and imperial destiny. This was never more apparent than in the books he wrote during the Second World War when he enjoyed a virtual monopoly on national history, especially history written on the basis of earlier parallels with the war.19 In order to appreciate Bryant’s unswerving confidence in Britain and his conception of its providential role, together with his Victorian loyalties, it is necessary to examine closely the circumstances of his early life.

Early influences The environment in which Bryant grew up was no ordinary one. He was born at Sandringham in 1899, the son of the Chief Clerk to the Prince of Wales. On the death of Queen Victoria, the family moved to the precincts of Buckingham Palace and Francis Morgan Bryant (he was knighted in 1920) became Assistant Secretary to Arthur Bigge, the King’s secretary. He was related on his mother’s side to the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, and visits to the Wiltshire home of his aunt and uncle reinforced the Conservative influences of his own home; indeed, on one such occasion, he was brought directly into contact with the leader of Irish Unionism, Sir Edward Carson.20 His maternal grandfather—H.W. Edmunds—of Edgbaston was a stalwart member of the Birmingham Liberal Party in the heyday of Joseph Chamberlain, whose trade as a hardware merchant he shared.21 Against this background, the British empire became the focus of Bryant’s early imagination. He met veterans of imperial wars such as Lord Roberts on early morning walks with his father through Green Park. The nautical bias of his prep school at Folkestone also sensitised him to what he later recalled as a widespread ‘feeling or spirit’ abroad at the time that the navy constituted ‘the symbol of our peculiar heritage. The sea, we knew, was our life: it had been so for a thousand 17

Bryant to Jack (Lord) Lawson, 16 June 1949, Durham University Library. P. Mandler, ‘‘Race’’ and ‘‘Nation’’ in mid-Victorian thought’, in S. Collini, R. Whatmore, and B. Young (eds.), History, Religion and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 233. 19 English Saga (1840–1940) (London, 1940); The Years of Endurance, 1793–1802 (London, 1942); and Years of Victory, 1802–1812 (London, 1944). Trevelyan and Churchill only published their major works on English history towards the end of the war and after. 20 Bryant, ILN, 31 August 1968, p. 14, in The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 200. 21 In the Bryant Papers (Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London) (B32) there is a table card of toasts for a dinner in honour of Joseph Chamberlain given by the Birmingham Liberal Club in 1881. H.W. Edmunds was to respond to the last toast to ‘our club’. Also included is the property details of the family home, ‘Grey Friars’ in Edgbaston, when it was sold in 1910. It was a substantial residence, with ‘one of the most spacious’ winter gardens in Birmingham. 18

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years’.22 As a result of his close proximity to Buckingham Palace at the height of British imperial consciousness, it was as if—he later wrote—he was ‘for ever hearing the majestic strains of Elgar’s First symphony.’23 But it was not just masculine influences which shaped Bryant’s early imperial enthusiasm; the nurses and matrons who regaled him with stories of heroism drawn from their own experiences in India or male siblings serving in the British army and navy abroad made an equally strong impression.24 Bryant’s high degree of responsiveness to imperial themes and imagery in his youth spawned two further passions: soldiering and history. As a youth with little facility for engaging in the social interplay of school life he passed many an entranced hour re-enacting famous battles. He read widely on military history as a boy, absorbing such leading Victorian sources as Sir William Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula and Archibald Alison’s ten volume History of Europe, a work which denounced the ‘democratic ascendancy’ in France as the enemy of liberty and struck one of the keynotes of Victorian Tory history.25 He also read more general works on history written specifically for the young such as Lady Callcott’s Little Arthur’s History of England, and M.B. Synge’s The Story of the World for the Children of the British Empire. Naturally, he was a devotee of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies.26 But the creation of Bryant’s historical imagination owed most, perhaps, to the bound volumes of the Illustrated London News which he regularly consulted in his father’s library. Commencing weekly publication in 1842, the Illustrated London News was the first illustrated newspaper in the world; its back volumes presented a view of the past which impressed Bryant ‘not as a carefully selected train of events leading up to some fashionable modern hypothesis, but as the spasmodic day-by-day affair it seemed to our forefathers’.27 The social history recorded in its pages proved as fascinating to Bryant as its account of the wars in the Balkans, South Africa, Afghanistan, Egypt, the Sudan and so forth which later—as a military historian himself—he found difficult to fault. On the journal’s centenary in 1942, Bryant recalled the early pleasure it had given him: ‘to a child it was more than a newspaper. It was the Aladdin’s lamp to a wonderful world, all the more wonderful for having been a real one.’28 22

ILN, 7 April 1945, p. 362. ‘The Making of a Historian’, ILN, August 1978, p. 27. 24 ILN, 11 June 1966, p. 14. 25 Sir William Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula, 6 Vols. (London, 1826–1840); Sir Archibald Alison, History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789 to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, 10 Vols. (Edinburgh, 1833–1842). On Alison see M. Michie, An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland: the Career of Sir Archibald Alison (Montreal, 1997). 26 ‘The Making of a Historian’, ILN, August 1978, p. 27. ‘C.M’, or Maria Graham, afterwards Lady Callcott, Little Arthur’s History of England, (London, 1835); Margaret Bertha Synge, The Story of the World for the Children of the British Empire, 5 vols. (London, 1903); R. Kipling Puck of Pook’s Hill (London, 1906); and Rewards and Fairies (London, 1910). 27 ILN, 23 April 1938, p. 694, quoted in Pamela Street, Arthur Bryant: Portrait of a Historian (London, 1979). 28 ILN, 16 May 1942, p. 566. 23

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Bryant was to become a columnist himself in 1936, a position he maintained until his death in 1985. He took over ‘Our Notebook’ from the ailing G.K. Chesterton— another strong influence of his youth.29 With the position came a ready-made conservative public, as well as a regular income. Circulation figures are only available from June 1963 when they stood at 73,310—a figure almost double that of The Spectator a decade earlier, which was itself higher than that of the New Statesman at the same time. They fell sharply to 59,012 at the end of the 1960s with the decline of deference, tradition, and patriotism—the journal’s keynote themes— although some recovery was achieved immediately after Bryant’s death until the late1980s when publication ceased.30 His voluminous postbag for the first 30 years of his association with the journal attests to the wide cross-section of British society to which his contributions appealed.31 Readers comprised not just the well-to-do at whom the luxury goods advertisements in the postwar period were evidently targetted; they also included the inhabitants of University common rooms; and when Stanley Baldwin’s son attempted to get hold of the edition of March 1960 in which Bryant defended Baldwin’s record as Prime Minister against his later critics, he found it in the ‘Workmen’s Club’, Stourport.32 As a result of his immersion in all aspects of Victorian national life provided by the Illustrated London News, Bryant proved highly receptive to the influence of the senior history master at Harrow, George Townsend Warner—a disciple of Arnold Toynbee and pioneer teacher of economic history in Britain.33 Warner had taught G.M. Trevelyan and Winston Churchill before Bryant; and like Churchill—to judge by his time as a ‘New Liberal’—Bryant found Warner’s presentation of the theory of, and more significantly the arguments against, laissez-faire, unimpeachable.34 As late as the 1970s, Bryant was still illustrating the power of these arguments with reference to appalling but preventable factory accidents, such as the collapse of an unstable chimney in a Bradford factory in 1882 that killed sixty people, which had received coverage in the Illustrated London News.35 Just before Warner died in 1916, he encouraged Bryant’s talents as an historian following an essay on Garibaldi his pupil had produced under the inspiration of Trevelyan’s recently published threevolume study of the leader of the Italian Risorgimento.36 29 Bryant wrote of his enduring boyhood admiration of Chesterton as a ‘great English prophet’ in letter to Chesterton, 16 December 1933, BL.Add.Mss 73235, f.170. 30 I am very grateful to the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), Berkhamsted, for generously supplying these figures for the Illustrated London News. The figures for The Spectator and New Statesman in the early 1950s are taken from Bevis Hillier, John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love (London, 2002), p. 425. On the decline of deference in this period, see D. Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (New York, 1999), pp. 159–164. 31 See the Bryant Papers, F17–F22. 32 Copies of the Illustrated London News at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, are from the Senior Common Room; on Stourport see A.W. Baldwin to Bryant, 1 April 1960, Bryant Papers, C62. 33 Warner was the author of the school text-book, Landmarks in English Industrial History (London, 1899). The book went through eleven editions by 1910. 34 ILN, 22 March 1947, p. 282. 35 ‘A Nineteenth-Century Tragedy’, ILN, 4 July 1970, p. 26. 36 ILN, 28 December 1963, p. 1056.

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As will be seen later in this article Trevelyan was to become Bryant’s leading mentor in writing history for large, popular audiences, reproducing a style, if not the Whig message, of historiography that was rooted in Trevelyan’s great-uncle, T.B. Macaulay. Under Warner’s more immediate stimulus, Bryant set his sights upon the study of history at university, although his immediate priority was to get to the war.37 In the closing year of the war he served as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, an experience which sealed his life-long identification with the First World War generation (and the Victorians on whose shoulders it stood) and his approach to both Englishness and English–British history. Following his return from France he began the shortened degree course in history for ex-servicemen at Queen’s College Oxford in January 1919. These various influences from Bryant’s boyhood and early manhood continued to shape his outlook on the past while he was at Oxford. He professed to find the University dull in the extreme as an academic institution.38 Ironically, in view of his authorship of a best-selling work on the subject, he also struggled with early English history.39 Oxford was a place he remembered chiefly for the comradeship of other exservicemen, and also for respite in exquisite surroundings from the unremitting strain and discipline of war.40 But his early interest in military history was re-awakened. In the reaction against all things military after 1918, he was one of only a handful of other students who elected to take their special subject in military history. His tutor was (Henry) Spenser Wilkinson—Chichele Professor of Military History.41 While Bryant disavowed the teutonic sympathies which informed Wilkinson’s teaching, he would have warmed instantly to his tutor’s more popular work for imperial defence. Wilkinson had not only written a book on the subject with Sir Charles Dilke;42 he was also a founder of the Navy League in 1894, a pressure group which sought to strengthen the ties between Britain and the dominions in the interests of maintaining maritime supremacy. The high status which the navy enjoyed in Bryant’s youth owed a great deal to Wilkinson.43 Bryant’s opposition to laissez-faire which the economic and social history of the Victorian era had sparked in him was also reinforced when he went up to Oxford. For all his enjoyment of the good life there, he was made painfully aware of the less fortunate circumstances of those in the ranks with whom he had served during the War, circumstances to which they would inevitably return. He expressed vague 37 Among Bryant’s papers is a cutting of Kipling’s inspirational summons to fight, his poem, ‘For All We Have and Are’ from the Times Recruiting Supplement, 3 November 1915, p. 16: Bryant Papers, R15 (4 of 4). On the poem itself see D. Gilmour, The Long Recessional: the Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (London, 2002), pp. 250–251. 38 Bryant to his mother, 30 January 1919, Bryant Papers, B13. 39 Bryant, The Story of England: Makers of the Realm (London, 1953). 40 Bryant, The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 33; Street, Arthur Bryant, p. 57. 41 ILN, 10 January 1942, p. 37; and 11 April 1964, p. 554. 42 C.W. Dilke and S. Wilkinson, Imperial Defence (London, 1892). 43 On the Navy League’s activities, see Andrew S. Thompson, ‘The Language of Imperialism and the Meanings of Empire: Imperial Discourse in British Politics, 1895–1914’, Journal of British Studies, 36 (April 1997), 148–149, 171–176. See also F. Coetzee, For Party or Country: Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Popular Conservatism in Edwardian England (New York, 1990).

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socialist sympathies at this time to his mother, stressing ‘the duty of all men and women to try to further that change [from the competitive systemyto one in which the common welfare of all will be the rule of life]’.44 A key source of influence here could well have been his modern history tutor, Godfrey Elton (created Lord Elton in 1934 by Ramsay MacDonald). Like Bryant, Elton had recently been demobilised, and Bryant later recalled that Elton belonged ‘to a generation whose progressive e! lite, of which he was a leading and enthusiastic memberywas obsessed, and I think rightly, with the disastrous effects of 19th century laissez-faire on the social welfare and living conditions of the British working classes’.45 However, Bryant’s upbringing at court steeled him against the radicalism which opposed monarchy as much as the profitmotive in the pressure for social change. His first publication—an article for Punch in September 1920—was a proud statement of his adherence to the ‘Kings and Queens’ school of history, one which was deemed ‘dangerously reactionary’ at the university he had just left; so much so that he claimed to have found his tutor (who could only have been Elton) burning one of his essays.46 Clearly, Bryant was already embracing the necessity for social reform, but within the framework of Disraeli’s ancient constitution.

Bryant and interwar Conservatism So strong, indeed, was Bryant’s youthful social conscience that the main source of his income in the 1920s and much of the 1930s derived from teaching the underprivileged—both school children and adults. This career course began with voluntary work at the Harrow mission in the Notting Dale slums.47 He also forged close links with the Conservative party, becoming Educational Advisor to the newly formed Bonar Law Memorial College at Ashridge in 1929. Ashridge’s founding purpose was to educate the much expanded electorate after the War in the principles and ideals of Conservative citizenship, heading off the considerable progress that socialism had made in this direction since the turn of the century.48 It was a project close to the heart of the Conservative leader and Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and his ‘principal lieutenant’, John Davidson. Throughout the 1930s, Bryant vigorously championed Baldwin’s attempt to align Conservatism with democracy and patriotic citizenship as integral to England’s historic national character and identity.49 In turn, Bryant won Baldwin’s admiration; the Prime Minister regarded Bryant not so much as the sycophant emphasised by a recent commentator but—as 44

Bryant to his mother, 9 March 1920, Bryant Papers, B14. ILN, 2 September 1967, p. 12. 46 Bryant, ‘Kings and Queens’, Punch (CLIX), 22 September 1920, p. 224. 47 Street, Arthur Bryant, Chapter 6. 48 Neal R. McCrillis, The British Conservative Party in the Age of Universal Suffrage: Popular Conservatism, 1918–1929 (Columbus, Ohio, 1998), pp. 165–174. 49 On Baldwin’s Conservatism, and the role of Davidson in promoting it, see P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999), p. 71. For Bryant’s close work with Davidson, especially in founding the National Book Association in 1936, see the Davidson Papers, House of Lords Record Office. See Bryant’s biography of Baldwin written for his retirement as Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin (London, 1937). 45

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he said in a letter to Queen Mary, who had sent him one of Bryant’s books in 1937— a ‘friend’ and a ‘real scholar and a real historian’.50 Bryant’s first book, The Spirit of Conservatism, was written under Ashridge’s influence, and was published to coincide with the general election of 1929. It was the first salvo in Bryant’s war with the left which was to heat up considerably in the 1930s and take increasingly vitriolic forms.51 The book’s principal hero was Disraeli; it was Disraeli, he argued, who had revived the Tory party’s sense of responsibility for securing the rights and liberties of the people after a century or more of desuetude. Disraeli alone had recognised that social justice, economic independence, patriotism, and the maintenance of established institutions were indissolubly linked. While the socialists had taken over much of Disraeli’s programme of ‘social reform’, they never really understood its true Burkean objective: to enhance love of country. This provided the foundation of the Conservative party’s raison d’etre. ‘No true Conservative’, he asserted, wishes to oppose any legislation, though initiated by the Labour party, which has as its aim the social amelioration of the people, so long as it conforms to the financial capacity of the country, for the result of any enduring improvement in the condition of the people must be to add to those who love their country and all its institutions.52 Bryant’s championing of Disraeli for the ‘full’ rather than partial socialist vision he uniquely offered and in the context of a Conservative party bent upon winning ‘the conservative heart of Everyman’ is striking.53 Certainly other neo-Disraelian historians were unconvinced that modern British society merited quite the jeremiad that Bryant mounted against it, certainly in his English Saga of 1940, the sequel to the earlier Spirit of Conservatism. For example, while Keith Feiling agreed that the ‘Victorian social balance went badly wrong’, he added but so it had before and yet had been corrected, while the Edwardian rentier was probably in general a better citizen than the Jacobean squire, and most certainly better than the Tudor business man. A wider sweep of history than Mr. Bryant has allowed himself would give a larger hope, or alternatively discover ills more fundamental to democracy than those which he suggests.54 Which developments in the interwar period exactly was Bryant concerned to deflect in moving Disraeli to the forefront of 20th-century Conservatism, and making somewhat free with his legacy of social and cultural criticism? 50 See A. Roberts, Eminent Chuchillians (1995; London, 1994), p. 292; Baldwin to Queen Mary, 15 January 1937, in P. Williamson and E. Baldwin (eds.), Baldwin Papers: A Conservative Statesman, 1908–1947 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 429–430. 51 See Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, Chapter 6; also E.H.H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism (Oxford, 2002), Chapter 5. 52 The Spirit of Conservatism (London, 1929), p. 76 (my emphasis). 53 The Spirit of Conservatism, p. 75. 54 Keith G. Feiling, ‘A Wind on the Heath: Night Thoughts on England’, The Observer, 8 December 1940, p. 3.

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Most pressingly, Bryant’s attachment to Disraeli was fuelled by the sharp reaction against arms (and empire) after 1918; the growing influence—as he saw it—of the international financier; and the haphazard building programme consequent upon the recent granting of subsidies and ‘freedom’ to the private developer. All had taken their toll on Britain’s once ample patriotic reserves by undermining the sense of common nationhood that prevailed before the war, however disputed its contours might have been.55 In The Spirit of Conservatism, he depicted the Conservative as the foe of the theorist who, for the sake of an insubstantial dream, would endanger the peace and security of centuries, of the money grabber who would rob the people of their birthright, of the speculator and jerry-builder who threaten with illconsidered sacrilege to mar the face of Britain.56 The first ‘foe’ typically belonged to the League of Nations Union and misguidedly placed all his faith in visions of collective security and a reduction of arms. By contrast, the only hope of world peace as far as Bryant was concerned was for Britain to resist calls for disarmament in order to deter potential aggressors; continue to uphold a balance of power in Europe; and maintain the empire.57 The second foe was part of a growing cosmopolitan elite of businessmen and financiers, those—as he expressed the matter in his 1934 BBC series, ‘The National Character’—who inhabited the ‘smart hotels of the West End of London, say, or the boardrooms of Limited Liability Companies’.58 This type grew ever more prominent for Bryant in the 1930s as he became entangled with the nationalist right in politics, although it was a type whose anti-semitic connotations he was careful to qualify on some, if not all occasions.59 The third foe threatened to deface rural Britain with ribbon development, bringing ‘evil and sprawling ugliness’ to ‘lovely English places’ which had remained inviolate for centuries.60 The sense in which the first two enemies were perceived to endanger what Bryant presumed was a homogeneous sense of national identity in Britain is more obvious than the third. But Peter Mandler has recently drawn attention to the way in which 55 See the fine epilogue of Grainger, Patriotisms; of the interwar years, he wrote, ‘For it was at this time that a certain diffidence about revealing the moral wealth of the patria became ingrained’, p. 329. 56 The Spirit of Conservatism, p. 75. 57 The Spirit of Conservatism, pp. 168–169, 158. 58 Bryant, The National Character (London, 1934), p. 154. 59 For example, see Bryant, Britain Awake! (London, 1940), p. 32–33. ‘ythere is admittedly a marked Jewish element among the minority who exploit the world’s financial machinery. In some countries this has been the cause of a cruel and undiscriminating persecution. Yet such exploitation where it exists is only an inevitable result of a vital race’s being without a settled home and the effect on its members of constant uncertaintyy A proper national policy [in the allegedly affected countries] would in any case render such exploitation impossible.’ Written before the outbreak of war, Bryant’s Unfinished Victory (London, 1940) was less guarded in its treatment of the Jews in Germany, although it still condemned their persecution by the Nazis. For condemnation of Bryant on account of his anti-semitism, see Roberts, Eminent Chuchillians, Chapter 6. 60 The Spirit of Conservatism, p. 79. For a fascinating study of the role of mass motoring in creating illplanned settlements such as Peacehaven in Sussex in the interwar period, and associated reactions, see Peter Thorold, The Motoring Age: The Automobile and Britain, 1896–1939 (London: Profile Books, 2003).

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the expansion of the town into the countryside, both in the forms of creeping surburbia and increasing recreational use of rural England, represented a new movement of ‘conservative modernity’ in the interwar period. He argues that this development was central to the erosion of the liberal language of a unified (British) national character which was consolidated in the mid-Victorian period under the pressure of democracy and remained largely unchallenged until the First World War. It then gave way to a diverse set of plural identities, none of which was dominant, although the sense of English identity was given a marked filip, building on the momentum it had gathered earlier in the twentieth century as (British) industrial and imperial success, together with a unifying Protestant religion were increasingly undermined.61 Landed, hereditary elites particularly lost out in the interwar move to create lighter, more fluid identities, unencumbered by the dross of tradition.62 Was Bryant here engaged in resisting modernity, even of a ‘conservative’ cast? Was he purely a reactionary, someone who held the line against suburban incursions upon an ancient, pastoral idyll and the corresponding exclusion of old, landed elites from new configurations of nationhood? The evidence suggests otherwise—that he was seeking to reshape the essentially liberal Victorian language of a cohesive national character to broad Conservative advantage by reconciling new forces and outlooks in English national life, especially, with those they otherwise threatened to subvert. The cultural elite may have been dismissive of such endeavours; for example, the BBC rejected Bryant’s proposal for a sequel to his successful debut series on ‘the national character’ in 1934 which would have encouraged listeners to appreciate the English country house, ‘as the French public does its great palaces of the ‘‘ancient regime’’.63 Nevertheless, he touched resonant chords, not least in the suburban, ‘middlebrow’ circles that the elite was anxious to wean off traditionalist values.64 From the 1930s onwards Bryant constantly appealed to this new suburban public, praising their aesthetic taste while attempting to put their values and sensibilities to good Conservative use. This was the core of his audience, both for his journalism and his history; also the numerous pageants and lectures before 1945 which provided other outlets for his creative, patriotic energy.65 They heard him insist that, like the poor who had been stripped of the creativity which had absorbed them into a common nation before industrialism, the inhabitants of suburbia were not to be 61 ‘The Consciousness of Modernity? Liberalism and the English ‘‘National Character’’, 1870–1914’, in M. Daunton & B. Rieger (eds.), Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II (London, 2001), pp. 132–137; see also Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 196–202. 62 P. Mandler, The Rise and Fall of the Stately Home (New Haven, 1997), pp. 226–227, 258. 63 Bryant to Dawney, 27 September 1934, Bryant, File 1, BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading; Dawney to Bryant, 29 September 1934, Bryant Papers, C24; ‘C.A.S.’ to Bryant, 5 October 1934, Bryant File 1, BBC Written Archives. On anti-preservationist attitudes at the BBC at this time, see P. Mandler, ‘Against ‘‘Englishness’’: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850–1940’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, vol. 7 (1997), p. 173. 64 See the enthusiastic response from such listeners to the series ‘The National Character’ in the Bryant Papers, C24. 65 Street, Arthur Bryant, Chapter 6.

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dismissed as mere philistines, as the elite were wont to do.66 He associated the suburbanites with the subaltern class upon whom England’s fate had hung in the balance during the First World War. Writing during the Second World War he maintained that this class had provided the backbone of the interwar suburbs, transforming ‘the cramped and niggling mould’ in which such habitats were first cast into seed-beds of virtuous leadership, true to all that was ‘enduringly best in the English tradition’.67 Earlier subaltern milieux comprised the ‘sensible, well-meaning, economically comfortable but, in the event, politically impotent middle-class families’. This was the public for whom ‘the grass tennis-court, the deck-chair and the garden bird-bath were devised’. Historically, it was interposed between the long splendours of the old semi-feudal world of broad acres, hunting, portswilling squires, footmen and grooms, and the modern world of electrically heated Council houses, State schools, cinemas and television.68 Bryant cast the subaltern-suburban class into a powerful integrative role in national culture transcending party politics, nourished, not least, by his own writing. This was his response to the increasing exclusiveness of literary and intellectual life on the one hand, and its standardisation and commercialisation on the other. It was a response upon which he was to trade briskly for three decades to come, successfully appealing to that part of the intelligentsia and the middle class more widely whose cultural tastes and sensibilities were distinctly anti-modernist, and in some cases, consciously Victorian.69 He also enjoyed a following among working-class autodidacts such as Jack Lawson, briefly Secretary of State for War in the Attlee administration.70 By contrast, the left attacked him relentlessly for the non-partisan pretensions which masked a robust defence of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and evident sympathy with fascism in the late-1930s.71 66

ILN, 11 December 1937, p. 1042. ILN, 25 December 1943, p. 702. He did discriminate between suburbs, favouring those in Middlesex and Surrey over the ‘dense outskirts of London’: ILN, 10 July 1937, p. 56, and 12 March 1938, p. 422. 68 ILN, 11 October 1952, p. 578. 69 Most prominently, G.M. Trevelyan and Ernest Barker. On Trevelyan’s defence of the Victorians against the sneers of Bloomsbury, see D. Cannadine, G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London, 1992), pp. 44–45. On Barker’s friendship with Bryant in the 1930s, despite their Whig-Tory differences, see J. Stapleton, ‘Resisting the Centre at the Extremes: ‘‘English’’ liberalism in the political thought of interwar Britain’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 1:3 (1999), p. 285. Barker was a self-confessed ‘mid-Victorian’ in tastes and sensibilities as late as 1949: see his Ramsay Muir Memorial Lecture, Change and Continuity (London, 1949), p. 9. Bryant continued to receive praise from historical scholars for the values which informed his writing as late as the 1970s: see the correspondence with Geoffrey Dickens in the Bryant Papers, E1. On Bryant’s wide following among the high-Tory middle class in the 1960s, see the perceptive review of his anti-Common Market tract, A Choice for Destiny, by Bob Pitman, ‘A voice the Tories must heed hits out at the Market’, The Sunday Express, 19 August 1962, p. 6. 70 For an account of this friendship, see J. Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain since 1850 (Manchester, 2001), pp. 151–154. On the patriotism which shaped British socialism in its formative years and which explains the friendship between Bryant and Lawson, and prominent Labour figures still later in the century, see Paul Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left, 1881–1924 (London, 1998). 71 R.H.S. Crossman, ‘Sedatives, Mild and Strong’, New Statesman and Nation, 19 February 1938, p. 294. 67

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Bryant’s chief weapon for combating the fragmentation of national identity in the 20th century was history of a popular, narrative, and patriotic kind. By the time of his death he had published 35 books on historical themes; two more were published posthumously. He certainly had his critics, and these increased in number and facetiousness from the 1960s.72 But many of his books were well received by discerning reviewers in national newspapers—such as Raymond Mortimer and Desmond MacCarthy—and by some professional historians too, for example Geoffrey Barraclough.73 All three paid tribute to Bryant’s unrivalled power of vividly evoking the past and the educative value of his work as a result. Sales of Bryant’s books were impressive, most obviously his two volume account of the Second World War based on the Alanbrooke diaries, but his medieval histories— rooted in the concept of ‘parliamentary monarchy’—sold well too.74 He quickly became a national figure on the strength of his historical writing: he was knighted in 1954 and was appointed Companion of Honour in 1967. These achievements are all the more interesting given that Bryant’s approach to history was shaped by three seminal historical writers with deep roots in Victorian England: T.B. Macaulay, G.M. Trevelyan, and Augustine Birrell. Why was Bryant attracted to these writers?

Tory Whiggism Bryant wrote a book on Macaulay in 1932. It was his second book and followed the success of his biography of Charles II in the previous year.75 It was published in a series entitled ‘Short Biographies’ by the publisher and Bryant’s friend, Peter Davies. While in Charles II Bryant had turned his attention to the origins of Whiggism among the disgruntled Cavaliers at the Restoration, he now addressed what he termed ‘English Whiggery’ at its tail end, when Macaulay gave it ‘a last triumphant lease of life’. Bryant certainly found much to admire in Macaulay as a writer of inspiring narrative history. He also praised Macaulay’s ‘feeling for the nation as a whole’, and of his achievement in moving the boundaries of historical study beyond changes in 72 Even The Times and The Daily Telegraph were beginning to grow weary of Bryant in the early 1960s. See for example A.P. Ryan, ‘Sulphur and Lightning Among Plantagenet Splendours’, The Times, 28 November 1963, p. 15d; and A. Duggan, ‘The English March Forward’, The Daily Telegraph, 29 November 1963. 73 See D. MacCarthy, ‘Light from the Past’, The Sunday Times, 8 November 1942, p. 3; R. Mortimer, ‘England, their England’, The Sunday Times, 10 December 1967, p. 54; and G. Barraclough, ‘Popular History’, The Observer, 13 December 1953, p. 9. 74 The first volume based on the Alanbrooke diaries, The Turn of the Tide (London, 1957), sold 75,000 copies in the home market during the first four months of publication. Both medieval books, The Story of England and its sequel, The Age of Chivalry (London, 1963), were published to coincide with the Christmas season and sold over 33,000 copies in the first month. All these figures are in the Bryant Papers (D59). Sales for the medieval works were massively increased when they became a World Books Choice: the expected print run of Makers of the Realm when nominated as such was 225,000. See (Mark?) Collins to Bryant, 23 April 1954, Bryant Papers, D41. 75 Bryant, Macaulay (London, 1932); King Charles II (London, 1931).

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‘dynasty or ministry’ to the people themselves. Small wonder that Macaulay ‘succeeded in making history the favourite reading of the general public of his day’.76 In addition, Bryant praised Macaulay’s talent for setting scenes, which was particularly evident in the third chapter of his History of England. Macaulay, he claimed, ‘drew England in its entirety—London, the streets of Bristol, the little country town, the wild moors and marshes of the north’. Bryant extolled, too, Macaulay’s love of the ‘progress that contributed to man’s material well-being’; and even more so his love of liberty and love of his country.77 As far as Bryant was concerned Macaulay’s appeal also lay in his awareness, ‘politician as he was [that] the purpose of all politics was to safeguard the household gods and the household virtues of the plain man—‘‘the fireside, the nursery, the social table, the quiet bed.’’’78 But here Bryant took his leave of Macaulay; for Macaulay, he claimed, had failed to connect the interests of the ‘ordinary’ individual, thus understood, with ‘the country gentleman’. Macaulay never forgave these country gentlemen their Tory allegiances and libelled them as ‘gross, uneducated [and] untravelled’.79 This indicates Bryant’s concern in the 1930s to launch a major broadside against Whiggism from a Tory direction, while retaining its narrative style and conception of a unified nation as the life-blood of British history. His starting-point was the breakup of the landed estates after the First World War, a development which informed his understanding of conservatism as rooted in an organic society; for to his mind this ideal had been most successfully embodied in England in the values and hierarchical relationships of the countryside. Bryant himself had first-hand experience of the decline of the ‘country gentlemen’ through his first marriage to Sylvia Shakerley, daughter of Sir Walter Shakerley, who abandoned his estates in the county of Cheshire, including Somerford Park, shortly after the First World War in response to crippling death duties.80 Both Bryant’s marriage and his background at Court shaped his Tory view of the English past as massively obscured by Whig prejudices against individuals and classes whose loyalty to country was mediated through monarchy, often combined with a strong connection to the land. This was the impetus behind his three-volume biography of Samuel Pepys, published between 1933 and 1938. As in his Charles II, Bryant opened his study with a ringing denunciation of the Whig historians of the 18th century for ignoring much that was good in Britain before the Glorious Revolution, Pepys included. The Whigs ‘only conferred immortality on such of their defeated opponents as were unmistakably villains. To many generations of English readers the best-known Tory of the later 17th century was Judge Jeffreys.’81

76

Bryant, Macaulay, p. 160. Bryant, Macaulay, pp. 142–143. 78 Bryant, Macaulay, p. 106. 79 Bryant, Macaulay, p. 102. 80 J. M. Lee, Social Leaders and Public Persons: A Study of County Government in Cheshire since 1888 (Oxford, 1963), 95. 81 Bryant, Samuel Pepys: The Years of Peril (Cambridge, 1935), p. xi. 77

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Bryant traced Macaulay’s rural blind-spot to his lack of acquaintance with contemporary letters from country-house manuscript collections.82 He had recognised their value since discovering the Shakerley Papers in a vault at Somerford Park prior to the sale of the house in the late 1920s. It was an event which he later claimed was decisive in his ambition to become a professional historian.83 He argued that Macaulay’s disdainful view of the 17th-century rural squire was drawn exclusively and uncritically from the prejudiced literary sources of the next century; not just the rural squire but the naval officer too, a figure who also assumed pride of place in Bryant’s developing pantheon of England.84 Although one reviewer—Sir Charles Firth—regarded this part of Bryant’s analysis as ‘straining after effect’,85 it was not lost on G.M. Trevelyan. He expressed his agreement with Bryant’s correction of Macaulay and his continuing admiration for the book in a letter written a decade later.86 Trevelyan was Bryant’s most important living mentor as a historian. In 1932, Bryant had written to Trevelyan informing him of his work on Macaulay and had received much encouragement in response. Trevelyan invited Bryant to stay at his Northumberland home, Hallington Hall near Hexham to see Macaulay’s annotated books, both there and at nearby Wallington, the family seat.87 He also allowed Bryant to use Macaulay’s journals at Trinity College, Cambridge—a privilege Trevelyan only extended to scholars he trusted to refrain from satire.88 The book was dedicated to Trevelyan, whom Bryant described as ‘master of my craft’—an indication of cultural and professional consensus existing alongside the continuing Whig-Tory divide. Trevelyan was delighted with the dedication, prompting him to set out their common outlook on the study of the past: ‘We represent’, he wrote, ‘more than any other two people I know of, a particular middle point as regards History—whether it is an art or a science.’89 Bryant in turn praised Trevelyan’s insistence upon the importance of both ‘narrative’ and ‘facts’ to historical writing, and his corresponding concern to retain the interest of the general reader. On the death of Trevelyan in 1962, Bryant paid handsome tribute to his impact, not only on the study and writing of history, but on the historical consciousness and knowledge of the British people as a whole and at a time when such consciousness and knowledge have never been more needed, and when this country, passing through an immense social and economic revolution, has been, and still is, in danger of losing touch with its own roots.90 82

Bryant, Macaulay, pp. 99–102. Bryant, ‘On Discovering the Past was Real’, Historian’s Holiday (London, 1951), pp. 44–58. 84 Bryant, Macaulay, p. 102. 85 ‘Short Notices’, The National Review, no. 598, December 1932, p. 795. Trevelyan guessed that the anonymous reviewer was Firth in a letter to Bryant, 25 December 1932, Bryant Papers, E3. 86 Trevelyan to Bryant, 15 November 1945, Bryant Papers, E3. 87 Bryant gave an interesting account of the visit in the ILN, 28 December 1963, p. 1056. 88 Trevelyan to Bryant, 20 July 1932; and 6 August 1932, Bryant Papers, E3. 89 Trevelyan to Bryant, 8 September 1932, Bryant Papers, E3. 90 ILN, 11 August 1962, p. 200. 83

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It is clear that the methodological agreement between Trevelyan and Bryant easily spilled over into an embrace of what they regarded as the essential national purpose of history. Trevelyan sensed much potential for accord with the ‘Englishry’ that Bryant was producing from a Tory perspective.91 In his turn, Bryant became markedly less polemical in his approach to the national past, his strident Toryism mellowing under the impact of the Second World War and its aftermath.92 The third Victorian source of Bryant’s literary, narrative, and popular approach to history was the liberal politician and man of letters, Augustine Birrell. Bryant rediscovered Birrell later in life after first encountering his work as an undergraduate. He believed that Birrell had anticipated by nearly 20 years Trevelyan’s views on history as both science and art, as expressed in his famous attack on J.B. Bury’s inaugural lecture of 1903.93 In questioning the exclusively ‘scientific’ conception of history of J.R. Seeley, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, Birrell emphasised that the subject was reducible neither to problem solving nor practical politics nor the forecasting of the future; rather, its aim was the Carlylean one of uniting men to the ‘two eternities’ of past and present, in the absence of which they would merely war ‘against oblivion’.94 Against Seeley’s injunction to ‘break the drowsy spell of narrative’ in favour of scientific laws, Birrell defended the importance of narrative to the essential end of history as he had defined it. He conceded that history was rooted in fact, but added ‘the truthful narration thereof’. Bryant also took great pains to emphasise the basis of his histories in fact, never quite comprehending the suspicion with which they were regarded by academic historians and other publicists– particularly from the 1960s—as a result.95 But he stuck rigidly to his craft as a popular, narrative historian, believing in the ‘sanity’ of Birrell and other Victorian writers in resisting the ‘fatal divorce’ between professional historians and the general reader, and for which he believed ‘scientific history’ had much to answer. For Bryant, literary and factual history were by no means incompatible; indeed, they were inseparable components of history as an instrument of national cohesion. Nevertheless, Birrell’s interpretation of the nation was a long way from Bryant’s, rejecting, as it did, the trappings of empire. As President of the National Liberal Federation in 1904, Birrell made a fiery speech in Manchester in which he declared empire to be based on a ‘false conception of England’s duty’.96 On this score, Bryant had more in common with Birrell’s antagonist, Seeley, in defending the ‘expansion of 91

Cannadine, Trevelyan, pp. 119–120, 122, 125. His lack of partisanship was praised by Trevelyan in his review of Bryant’s The Years of Endurance, 1793–1802 (London, 1942), The Daily Dispatch, 13 November 1942. 93 ILN, 17 August 1957, p. 252. Birrell’s essay, ‘The Muse of History’, was published in Obiter Dicta, second series (London, 1887). For Trevelyan’s response to Bury, see ‘The Latest View of History’, The Independent Review, 1 (1903–1904), pp. 395–414, reprinted in Clio: a Muse (London, 1913). 94 The influence of this conception of history is evident in a poignant piece which Bryant wrote for his Illustrated London News readers on what he termed ‘the magic of history’: ILN, 12 September 1959, p. 218. 95 On Bryant’s painstaking method of writing history rooted in fact, see ILN, 31 July 1954, p. 166. On his dismay at the suspicion in which he was held, see his long, somewhat rambling, but illuminating draft letter to A.G. Dickens, 5 March [1984] 1985 [sic], Bryant Papers, E1. 96 Quoted in Robert Spence Watson, The National Liberal Federation: From its Commencement to the General Election of 1906 (London, 1907), p. 289. 92

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England’, although on markedly different historiographical and moral grounds. What relevance did Bryant find in late-Victorian conceptions of empire in an era of imperial decline?

England, religion and empire in the 20th century Bryant continually sounded what he believed was the imperial keynote of modern (and pre-modern) British history throughout his career. Greatly influenced by Seeley, J.A. Froude, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Chamberlain, Cecil Rhodes, and other late-Victorian apostles of empire, Bryant believed that Britain’s acquisition of overseas territories was both a burden and a blessing. He perceived no more timely an occasion for issuing this reminder than in the aftermath of Dunkirk, when the British people faced the enemy ‘alone’. In his best-selling and apocalyptic study of the last hundred years, English Saga published in late-1940, Bryant entitled one chapter ‘Lest we Forget’ after the refrain of Kipling’s poem, ‘Recessional’, written for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. His purpose was to steel his fellow countrymen for further battle. Bryant particularly played up Kipling’s role in conceiving empire as ‘duty and destiny’ not ‘opportunity’, an interpretation on which recent, revisionist Kipling historiography Kipling has concurred.97 Kipling’s aim, Bryant claimed, ‘was as moral in its purpose as Milton’s or Bunyan’s’ (the choice of English literary figures as the underwriters of empire is significant); and the same could be said for Rhodes, whose imperialist ambitions in Africa stunned even Kipling. Like Milton, Bryant wrote, ‘Rhodes held that if God wanted a thing done He sent for his Englishmen’.98 Kipling set out to impress upon a public ‘bored’ with tales of empire the ‘vigour, courage and pathos of those who dedicated undemonstrative lives to a great ruling tradition’.99 Bryant hoped to inspire his wartime readership with the same staunch faith in the English–British nation that had ignited the call to imperial arms a half-century previously; such faith was still merited, he felt, despite the subsequent corruption of noble imperial aims by greed and ambition. It was because prophets of empire such as Kipling had been much read but little heeded that Britain’s rivals—‘as jackals watch[ing] over a dying lion’— could exploit the resultant complacency and distraction, launching untold destruction on European nations.100 If Bryant paid handsome tribute to Kipling in recalling the British to their imperial destiny in the 1890s, he also recognised the similar role of scholars such as Seeley and Froude in the previous decade. He had read Seeley’s The Expansion of England as an undergraduate, a work which—he later recalled—was still in wide circulation in the 97

See Gilmour, The Long Recessional. Kumar has recently emphasised the cosmopolitan nature of the ‘English nationalism’ expressed in this and other passages of Milton’s Areopagitica: Kumar The Making of English National Identity, pp. 107–108, 127–128. But as a disciple of Kipling, Bryant would have rejected any tension between this reading of Milton and British imperialism. 99 Bryant, English Saga, pp. 256–258. 100 English Saga, p. 273. 98

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Oxford of his youth;101 he also read Seeley’s biography of the Prussian nationbuilder, Friedrich von Stein, which he described to his mother as ‘a heavy work, though very shrewd, despite the uncongenial atmosphere of Prussianism’.102 In English Saga he praised Seeley’s insight into the ‘oceanic’ future of the world which would render small nation-states impotent besides ‘composite’ states such as the USA and Russia. He also praised Froude for urging his compatriots in Oceana to reciprocate the patriotism of the colonies and do all in their power to ensure that these overseas territories flourished, not least as an escape-hatch from a densely populated, urban island. For Bryant this remained as pressing a concern in the 20th as in the 19th-century, for the sacrifice of the younger generation in the First World War had gone unrecognised: after the Armistice, the speculators resumed their old hegemony. In 1940, however, as Bryant surveyed the stakes of German power against which Britain was again pitted, he appealed to the countries which the British had settled themselves as solutions to the social problems at home thrown up by the continued rule of the moneyed classes. He declared that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Rhodesias—Kipling’s ‘four nations’—‘are the life-line of the English future. There is the appeal for the British people from the slum, the dole and the regimentation of the factory.’103 While Bryant emphasised the importance of pursuing long-term interests and investment in the empire as preached by Seeley and Froude, he was considerably at odds with the historical methodology and religious views that informed their imperial visions. Too late a Victorian to have experienced the trauma of religious doubt, Bryant embraced neither the rationalistic turn in history epitomised by Seeley, nor Froude’s yearning for a strong but destabilising religious heroism and his consequent ambivalence towards the Elizabethan settlement.104 As we saw earlier, Christianity was for Bryant the cornerstone of English-British nationhood. Unlike Seeley, he never attempted to account for ‘English’ overseas expansion within a framework of ‘scientific history’. Seeley was uninterested in early English history, and conceived the nation-state merely as a vehicle of objective historical laws. But Bryant linked the English–British state firmly to the identity and character of a distinct people, whose ‘genius’ had first emerged in the century following Christian conversion.105 He made this clear in rebuking Froude, as late as 1984, for asserting the existence of an unbridgeable gap between the medieval and the modern mind opened up by the maritime discoveries of the 15th century: ‘what matters most in history’, Bryant maintained, ‘is the continuity in the 101

ILN, 9 October 1965, p. 20. Bryant to his mother, 8 June 1919, Bryant Papers, B13. J.R. Seeley, Life and Times of Stein, or Germany and Prussia in the Napoleonic Age (Cambridge, 1878). 103 English Saga, p. 333. 104 J.W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 276–277. 105 Bryant, The Story of England: Makers of the Realm (London, 1953), p. 88. On Seeley’s lack of interest in nationhood per se, and his ‘scientific’ view of history, see R.N. Soffer, ‘History and Religion: J.R. Seeley and the Burden of the Past’, in R.W. Davis & R.J. Helmstadter (eds.), Religion and Irreligion in Victorian Society: Essays in Honour of R.K. Webb (London, 1992), p. 142. 102

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soul of man’.106 In other words, nationhood and the religious impulse with which it was inextricably linked in Britain, especially, made history one unified story. It is true that Bryant shared with Froude an inability to detach the nation-state from actual individuals, whose actions and the ‘thoughts and feelings behind those actions’ provided the historian’s raw material in both the remote and more recent past.107 However, the Protestant impulse in which Froude correctly identified so much of the spur to colonial effort was for Bryant no narrow, selfish yearning for self-emancipation but was an extension of—in Milton’s words—a long-standing English concern for ‘teaching the nations how to live’.108 It was St. Boniface, Bryant confidently asserted, who ‘wrote the first chapter in the history of the expansion of English ideals beyond the seas’.109 The ‘instincts and aptitudes’ inherent in this pursuit could be re-activated in new ways as the ‘contraction and self-defeat’ of postwar Britain became painfully evident. To this end, he hoped that new leaders would come forward to address the problems attendant upon the discarding of empire in a fit of ‘absence of mind’: ‘We need an Aidan to re-teach us our faith and a Pitt and a Drake to show us what courage and confidence can do’.110 If the objective of Seeley’s imperial politics was the enhancement of national power and that of Froude the renewal of national life after the asphyxiating effects of urban, industrial Britain, Bryant upheld the empire as an integral part of England’s providential mission to spread Christian ideals across the globe. He defended this conception against the doubters and ‘shirkers’, the intellectuals and pacifists whom Kipling had attacked in his First World War poem entitled ‘The Holy War’. They were the latterday equivalents of the types whom John Bunyan—the spiritual mentor of both Kipling and Bryant—had condemned two centuries previously.111 They were nowhere more in evidence than during the Suez crisis, a cataclysm which for Bryant arose from ‘what is probably still the most stable national entity in the world failing to provide mankind with the good order and moral cement it so sorely needs in the revolutionary transformation through which it is passing.’112 At the height of the Suez crisis he wrote of his ‘instinctive [English] distrust of intellectuals—not because they are intelligent, but because they are so often brittle’, an idea appropriated directly from ‘The Holy War’.113

Europe and immigration Late-Victorian ideals of imperial Englishness also informed Bryant’s reaction to two seminal developments in postwar British politics and society: Britain’s 106

Bryant, Set in a Silver Sea (London, 1984), pp. xviii–xix. ILN, 27 September 1969, p. 17. 108 Quoted in ILN, 21 November 1936, reproduced in Humanity in Politics, p. 52. 109 Bryant, The Story of England, p. 91. 110 The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 223. 111 Gilmour, The Long Recessional, pp. 266–267. 112 ILN, 12 January 1957, p. 52. 113 ILN, 29 December 1956, p. 1100. 107

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membership of the European Economic Community and mass immigration. He joined Lord Beaverbrook’s campaign against membership at the time of Britain’s first application in 1962, spearheaded by a Conservative government which—as far as Bryant was concerned—had already abandoned all conservative credentials, not least through an active campaign of decolonisation.114 He stressed that the close cultural and political ties on which the Commonwealth was based would have to be cut as the price of entry. He had already warned against such a rupture 10 years previously when Britain’s closer integration with Europe had been mooted by ‘idealistic but rather uninformed’ sectors of American opinion, and echoed by likeminded people in Britain too.115 The sheer ingratitude this would involve after the Commonwealth had rallied to Britain’s assistance in both world wars was itself sufficient to undermine the case for entry. But an equally important question was that of common ‘blood’ and ‘stock’, and what was for Bryant the different historical and cultural traditions which made ‘blood’ and ‘stock’ significant. It was no invocation of the ‘colour-bar’, he believed, to draw a distinction between those nations of the Commonwealth who were every whit as much as we the heirs of Alfred, Shakespeare, Hampden and Livingstone [again, the virtual Anglicisation of the empire is striking], and those nation-members of different bloods, faith and history who became associated with us through the temporary accident of conquest and are still associated with us as a result of our voluntary and timely bestowal of the gift of freedom. If those ‘non-British’ nations wished to remain associated with Britain, they should no more be ‘cast off’ than their ‘British’ counterparts in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But Bryant made it clear that if a choice had to be made between Europe and the Commonwealth, the real slight would be towards the ‘British’ Commonwealth nations: they would find themselves shunned in favour of nations in Europe of ‘different race, language, and allegiance, who, to put in its mildest form, have noy claim on our gratitude’.116 At the same time, Bryant added his voice of alarm to the implosion of empire and the large concentration of immigrant communities in Britain’s inner cities. In particular, he believed, it represented the reversal of Seeley’s vision of the ‘expansion of England’, intensifying overcrowding at home at the same time as weakening the bonds between the various ‘British peoples’ overseas. The mission of empire—had it not been abandoned prematurely—was to improve political, legal, and economic conditions in dependent countries such that emigration would not be desired. In the 1960s, Bryant felt that it was not only the material resources of Britain that were being placed under intolerable strain; it was national cohesion and unity as well.117 114

ILN, 19 May 1962, p. 790; 4 August 1962, p. 164; and 20 July 1963, p. 78. On his association with Beaverbrook, see Robert Dewey, ‘National Identity and Opposition to Britain’s First Attempt to Join Europe, 1961–63’, unpublished D. Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2003. D. Phil thesis, 2001. 115 ILN, 2 February 1952, p. 158. 116 ILN, 16 June 1962, p. 960. 117 ILN, 9 October 1965, p. 20.

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Hence, he had no hesitation in supporting Enoch Powell’s calls for an end to mass immigration and its reversal through policies of voluntary repatriation.118

Bryant’s role and influence in the late-20th-century and his contemporary significance Although Bryant’s stances on Common Market entry and immigration were unsuccessful, nevertheless he kept alive a particular cast of conservative mind formed in the early part of the 20th century well into the postwar decades. It was one which was significant in opposing perceived attempts to undermine English–British national identity and associated institutions and landscape. This was the main ground on which he sought to connect private conscience and public duty (as well as in less political campaigns such as his Chairmanship of the St. John and Red Cross Hospital Library from 1945 to 1974). Through his various publishing outlets and prominent role in single-issue groups such as the Common Market Safeguards Campaign and the Friends of the Vale of Aylesbury in the late-1960s and 1970s, he helped to galvanise conservative opinion. Very often this was against the ideas and policies of Conservative party elites, anxious to outstep their Labour adversary by projecting a ‘modernist’ face. This was certainly the case after 1951 when the town and country planning laws were dismantled and again in 1959, when Macmillan went to the country on a consumerist ticket.119 Even ‘One Nation’ Tories such as Enoch Powell dismayed him with their zealous advocacy of laissez-faire in the realm of economic, if not social policy.120 Against the postwar Fabianism in which—to Bryant’s mind—the party had colluded and its later preoccupation with affluence and Europe, Bryant attempted to return Conservatism to what seemed in retrospect a close Victorian alliance between its own visionaries such as Disraeli and ‘socialist’ prophets such as Carlyle and Ruskin. Unlike many recent socialists, Bryant maintained in 1948, Carlyle and Ruskin emphasised the importance of roots and loyalties, and the spiritual well-being of the people rather than mere prosperity.121 118 ILN, ‘Powell and the Hidden Opinions’, 7 December 1968, p. 20; ‘Why the door must be shut’, 9 March 1968, p. 14; Bryant, The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 286. (This reference to voluntary repatriation was excluded from the original ILN article, ‘To Reduce the Tensions’, 28 June 1969, p. 12.) See also Bryant’s opposition to the Race Relations Act of 1968 on the grounds of its ‘restrictive and coercive’ nature, ILN, ‘To Reduce the Tensions’, 28 June 1969, p. 8. However, like Powell, Bryant denounced racial discrimination: see ILN, 20 September 1958, p. 460. 119 For Bryant’s criticism of the abandonment of the planning laws by Churchill’s government see ILN, 30 June 1962, p. 1038. For an illuminating account of the context for Bryant’s remarks in this respect, see P. Mandler, ‘New Towns for Old: The Fate of the Town Centre’, in B. Conekin, Frank Mort, & Chris Waters (eds.), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London,1999), 208–227. Bryant criticised Macmillan’s infamous assertion in 1957 that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’ in ILN, 29 August 1964, p. 284. On Macmillan’s drive to ‘modernize’ the British economy, through ‘interdependence’ with Europe and failing that, internally, see Green, Ideologies of Conservatism, pp. 189–190. 120 ILN, 22 May 1965, p. 12; and 5 December 1970, p. 12. 121 On Carlyle, Ruskin, and Disraeli, and the corruption of their legacy by modern socialism, see ILN, 26 June 1948, p. 706; and 3 July 1948, p. 2.

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In this way of thinking, Bryant became a focus for ‘Old’ Labour—both its Right and Left wing—as much, if not more than a Conservative party guru, despite his qualified warmth towards Mrs Thatcher.122 His admirers later in life included Michael Foot, one of the assailants of the ‘Guilty Men’ of the late-1930s—Baldwin and Chamberlain in particular—whom Bryant had ardently defended.123 They also included Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, and Peter Shore (with whom he resisted the 1972 European Communities Bill and worked for a ‘No’ response in the 1975 Referendum).124 All these figures had doubts about sacrificing traditional Labour values, not least their distinctive national context, to Anthony Crosland’s recipe for economic growth and the social and European agenda of Roy Jenkins.125 Indeed, even arch-modernisers in the Labour Party such as Harold Wilson retained a soft spot for Bryant’s histories.126 The paradox of Bryant’s appeal to non-Conservative audiences is easily resolved. As one commentator perceptively noted of Bryant in reviewing one of his penultimate, posthumously published works, Freedom’s Own Island, [Bryant] was never a fugleman for the contemporary Establishment He opposed policies for which that Establishment went overboard, like Common Market Entry. He was so conservative that he could actually sense that there was precious little continuity between the England he lived in and the Old England he loved.127 In the mid-1980s and early 1990s Bryant could still count on support for his view of national history as an ‘adventure’ story of a most inspiring kind, as well as for his narrative style against the hard face of much academic history at the time.128 This 122 For Bryant’s enthusiasm for Mrs Thatcher’s ‘revival’ of patriotism in Britain, see ‘The Road to Salvation’, ILN, November 1975, p. 26; ‘A Question of Humanity’, December 1975, p. 33; ‘One Nation or no Nation’, ILN, March 1979, p. 27. For his criticism of her economic policies, see ‘The Two Equalities’, ILN, June 1981, p. 22; ‘The two-handed engine at the door’, September 1981, p. 36. See also ‘National Wealth and National Poverty’, August 1980, p. 28, and ‘Inflation and the Falklands Factor’, September 1982, p. 19. See Mrs Thatcher’s emollient response to Bryant’s protestations to her on this subject, 16 May 1982, Bryant Papers, E64. 123 Michael Foot attended the celebration to mark Bryant’s 85th Birthday at Vintner’s Hall, London, on 20 February 1984. Also present were the trade unionist Jack Jones, Peter Shore, James Callaghan, and Harold Wilson. Harold Macmillan was also among the guests. For photographs, see Bryant Papers, Add.2, Box 2 of 3. Foot also attended Bryant’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey, 15 March 1985. On the context of the publication of ‘Cato’, Guilty Men (London, 1940), see Philip Williamson, ‘Baldwin’s Reputation: Politics and History, 1937–1967’, The Historical Journal, 47, 1 (2004), pp. 134–138. 124 C. Attlee, review of Bryant’s The Age of Chivalry, ‘Birth Pangs of the National State’, The Sunday Times, 24 November 1963, p. 35; on Bryant’s praise of Gaitskell, see ILN, 2 February 1963, p. 144, and for Gaitskell reciprocal praise, see the letters to Bryant over Common Market entry in the Bryant Papers, H4; and there is a newspaper cutting of a protest against Common Market membership in which both Shore and Bryant participated in Bryant Papers, H4. 125 On the divisions within the Labour movement engendered by ‘affluence’ in the late 1950s and 1960s, see L. Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–1964 (Basingstoke, 2003). 126 Harold Wilson, ‘A Book in my Life’, The Spectator, 249, 2 October 1982, pp. 26–27. 127 ‘Bruce P. Lenman, ‘Forever England?’, History Today (September 1986), pp. 52–53. 128 See the review of Bryant’s Set in a Silver Sea (1984) by Gerald Kaufman in the Manchester Evening News, 1 March 1984, p. 35; and the review of The Search for Justice (1991) by G. Wheatcroft, The Sunday Telegraph, 23 March 1991.

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may be difficult to credit in the light of his much tarnished reputation during the last decade.129 But the strength and persistence of mid-Victorian ideals of the well-being of the people that were formed just before what Krishan Kumar has recently identified as the ‘moment’ of Englishness should not be underestimated. Bryant was instrumental in fusing these developments and enhancing the impact they might otherwise have made separately. He ensured that the combined legacy of concern for social justice and the heightened self-consciousness of the English nation as British industrial and imperial supremacy slipped away would prove a heady and long-lived brew. Aspects of his outlook have resurfaced in Conservatism as well as conservatism more generally in the twenty-first century. For example, recent Conservative writers such as Roger Scruton and Simon Heffer, and Conservative leaders such as William Hague have expressed acute anxieties about the loss of English face associated with devolution, multiculturalism, and European integration in terms that are highly reminiscent of Bryant.130 Bryant is one of the leading links— albeit largely invisible—between the current resurgence of English patriotism and nationalism and its late-Victorian ancestry.131

129

See Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, Chapter 6; also P. Wright, The Village that Died for England: the Strange Story of Tyneham (London, 1995), esp. pp. 234–240. 130 Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, Chapter 7. 131 Although the affinity between Bryant’s English nationalism and that of Heffer and other contemporary conservative thinkers is noted by Andrew Roberts in his preface to a reprint of Bryant’s Spirit of England (1982; London, 2001).