Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T21:57:44.777Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

HENRY HALLAM REVISITED

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2012

MICHAEL BENTLEY
MICHAEL BENTLEY*
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews
*
School of History, University of St Andrews, KY16 9AL[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Although Henry Hallam (1777–1859) is best known for his Constitutional History of England (1827) and as a founder of ‘whig’ history, to situate him primarily as a mere critic of David Hume or as an apprentice to Thomas Babington Macaulay does him a disservice. He wrote four substantial books of which the first, his View of the state of Europe during the middle ages (1818), deserves to be seen as the most important; and his correspondence shows him to have been integrated into the contemporary intelligentsia in ways that imply more than the Whig acolyte customarily portrayed by commentators. This article re-situates Hallam by thinking across both time and space and depicts a significant historian whose filiations reached to Europe and North America. It proposes that Hallam did not originate the whig interpretation of history but rather that he created a sense of the past resting on law and science which would be reasserted in the age of Darwin.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 453 - 473
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Hallam, Henry, The constitutional history of England from the accession of Henry VII to the death of George II (2 vols., London, 1827)Google Scholar.

2 T. B. Macaulay, ‘Hallam's constitutional history’, reprinted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and historical essays (3 vols., London, 1854), i, pp. 113–216.

3 Peardon, Thomas P., The transition in English historical writing, 1760–1830 (Columbia, NY, 1933)Google Scholar.

4 For das Butterfieldproblem, see Sewell, Keith, ‘The “Herbert Butterfield problem” and its resolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), pp. 599–618CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bentley, Michael, The life and thought of Herbert Butterfield: history, science and God (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 In making this revaluation an important starting-point was a bicentenary symposium ‘In celebration of Arthur Hallam’ held at the University of Sheffield in Feb. 2011. The author wishes to thank the organizers of that symposium, and especially Dr Matthew Campbell, for their invitation to contribute. He should also record his gratitude to the Leverhulme Foundation for their support of a project in comparative historiography whose perspectives will become apparent in what follows.

6 James Campbell trusts the opinion of Maitland on the matter and there is no reason to think Maitland wrong. See James Campbell, ‘Stubbs, Maitland and constitutional history’, in Benedikt Stuchkey and Peter Wende, eds., British and German historiography, 1750–1950: traditions, perceptions and transfers (Oxford, 2000), pp. 99–122, at p. 100.

7 Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig interpretation of history (London, 1931)Google Scholar.

8 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, History of England from the accession of James II (5 vols., London, 1858–61)Google Scholar.

9 See Burrow, J. W., A Liberal descent: Victorian historians and the English past (Cambridge, 1981), p. 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Sanders, Lloyd, The Holland House circle (London, 1908), p. 225Google Scholar (emphasis added).

11 Hilton, Boyd, A mad, bad and dangerous people? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 346–53Google Scholar. A young medievalist had thought it appropriate during the Second World War to describe Hallam as ‘the patriarch of Whig history, the Founding Father of a great and noble tradition.’ R. A. L. Smith, ‘Hallam's history’, in Smith, Collected papers (London 1947), pp. 117–28, at p. 117.

12 Southey, Robert, ‘Hallam's Constitutional history of England’, Quarterly Review, 37 (1928), pp. 194–260Google Scholar, at p. 240.

13 Peardon, Transition, p. 198. He was referring to Brodie, George, A constitutional history of the British empire from the accession of Charles I to the Restoration (London, 1823)Google Scholar, and Godwin, William, History of the Commonwealth of England (4 vols., London, 1824–8)Google Scholar.

14 Lang, Timothy, The Victorians and the Stuart heritage: interpretations of a discordant past (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 23–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clark, Peter, ‘Henry Hallam reconsidered’, Quarterly Review, 305 (1967), pp. 410–19Google Scholar. Current difficulties at the British Library prevented me from seeing Professor Clark's Henry Hallam (Boston, MA, 1982).

15 Fahey, David M., ‘Henry Hallam: a Conservative as Whig historian’, Historian, 28 (1966), pp. 625–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Burrow, A Liberal descent, pp. 30–2.

17 Ibid., pp. 33, 50.

18 Burrow, John, A history of histories: epics, chronicles, romances and inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the twentieth century (London, 2007), p. 368Google Scholar.

19 Michael Bentley, ‘Approaches to modernity’, in Bentley, ed., Companion to historiography (London, 1997), pp. 395–506, at p. 440; Bentley, , Modernizing England's past: English historiography in the age of modernism, 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2005), p. 23Google Scholar; Bentley, ‘Victorian historians and the larger hope’, in Bentley (ed.), Public and private doctrine: essays in British history presented to Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 127–48, at p. 135.

20 Fisher, H. A. L., ‘The Whig historians’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 14 (1928), pp. 297–339Google Scholar; Butterfield, The Whig interpretation of history. I have separated Whig politics from whig history by using upper case for the former and lower case for the latter.

21 Barnes, Harry Elmer, A history of historical writing (New York, NY, 1937), p. 162Google Scholar.

22 Duncan Forbes became a distinguished commentator on and editor of David Hume and Adam Ferguson. See Forbes, Hume's philosophical politics (Cambridge, 1975), and Adam Ferguson and the idea of community (Paisley, 1979)Google Scholar.

23 G. B. Vico (1688–1744) and B. G. Niebuhr (1776–1831). The former's Scienza Nuova (1725), translated by Jules Michelet, and the latter's Roman history (1827–32), translated by Connop Thirlwall and J. C. Hare, played a significant part in early nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural history.

24 Milman, H. H., History of Latin Christianity (4th edn, 9 vols., London, 1867)Google Scholar.

25 Forbes, Duncan, The Liberal Anglican idea of history (Cambridge, 1952), pp. vii–viiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar, 15, 124.

26 Macaulay, ‘Hallam's constitutional history’, p. 116.

27 Russell, Lord John, An essay on the English government and constitution from the reign of Henry VII to the present time (London, 1823)Google Scholar, saw English history in four stages of development and, though he quoted Hallam (pp. 11, 31), Russell wanted to make the Glorious Revolution ‘the mighty stock from which all other revolutions have sprung’ (p. xv).

28 Forbes, Liberal Anglican idea of history, p. 142. Milman, Forbes's contrast case, had no choice but to make that attempt because he was writing the ecclesiastical history of the middle ages whereas Hallam's conspectus had its centre elsewhere; but the different focus does not equate to incomprehension.

29 Milman saw him as a ‘calm, conscientious Whig of the old school’ who produced work that was ‘sober, solid, veracious’. Memoir, included in H. S. Maine and F. Lushington, eds., Remains in verse and prose of Arthur Henry Hallam (London, 1863), pp. xviii, xx.

30 John Hallam to his wife, 21 June 1790, Hallam MSS, Library of Christ Church, Oxford. This collection, hereafter ‘Hallam MSS’, extends to 16 volumes of letter-books but it comments on Henry Hallam's environment more than his views since most of the correspondence is in-coming.

31 The accounts may be consulted in the Hallam MSS in volume 14.

32 Robert Southey had been born in Bristol but the half-sister of his aunt took him away to live with her in Bath.

33 Milman, memoir, p. xv.

34 ‘You were the oldest and most intimate of his friends; I also held a place in his esteem.’ Dedication to Watkin, Charles Williams Wynn in Southey, Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae: letters to Charles Butler, esq., comprising essays on the Romish religion and vindicating the book of the church (London, 1826), pp. v–viGoogle Scholar.

35 ‘His want of attention to physics’, Seymour wrote of Hallam in 1800, ‘has led him to think more on points of the highest abstraction, than on such intellectual phenomena as fall under daily experience’. Diary, 16 Oct. 1800, in Lady Gwendolyn Ramsden, ed., Correspondence of two brothers: Edward Adolphus, 11th duke of Somerset and Lord Webb Seymour, 1800–1819 (London, 1906), p. 56.

36 Hallam to Seymour, 27 May 1802, ibid., p. 59. He had ‘changed his mind much’ in the past four years.

37 Elton, Charles Abraham, An appeal to scripture and tradition in defence of the Unitarian faith (London, 1818)Google Scholar.

38 The church at Clevedon contains their memorials, artfully arranged around the centre-piece of Arthur Henry Hallam.

39 Elton, Charles A., Deuterai Phrontides: second thoughts on the person of Christ, on human sin and on the atonement (London, 1827)Google Scholar. Joseph Hunter, who had known him ‘in his Unitarian days’, felt the betrayal quite as sharply as Elton's former minister at Lewins Mead, Lant Carpenter. Hunter found the new manifesto written ‘in too spiteful a spirit, full of uncalled for taunting: ill befitting a person who had written in the same style on the other side’. Hunter, ‘Charles Elton’, Hunter MSS, British Library (BL), Add. MSS 36527, fo. 147. On the Anglican side, a jubilant Southey rejoiced in ‘the second case of the kind at Bristol. Dr. Stock's was the first.’ Robert Southey to Dr H. H. Southey, 26 Apr. 1827, in John Wood Warter, ed., Selections from the letters of Robert Southey (4 vols., London, 1856), iv, p. 58.

40 Webb Seymour to Hallam, 5 Apr. 1812, reporting Hallam's views, Hallam MSS 7, fo. 28.

41 He had asked ‘How goes the History’ two years earlier: Seymour to Hallam, 16 Feb. 1810, ibid. 7, fo. 26.

42 Seymour to Hallam, 5 Apr. 1812, ibid. 7, fo. 27.

43 Seymour to Hallam, 9 May 1802, ibid. 7, fo. 17.

44 For the King of Clubs, see Seymour, Lady, ed., The ‘pope’ of Holland House: selections from the correspondence of John Whishaw and his friends, 1813–1840 (London, 1906), pp. 333–9Google Scholar. The club, which had a maximum membership of thirty, held its last dinner on 7 June 1823 with Hallam present.

45 Blocksidge, Martin, ‘A life lived quickly’: Tennyson's friend Arthur Hallam and his legend (Brighton, 2011), p. 13Google Scholar. He wrote again for the Edinburgh Review briefly after 1830.

46 But see footnote 108 below.

47 A small and unrevealing correspondence between Hallam and Murchison is housed at the Geological Society in Burlington House, London.

48 Preface (1834) to Remains in verse and prose of Arthur Henry Hallam, ed. S. Maine and F. Lushington (London, 1863), p. xx.

49 Sydney Smith to Whishaw, 13 Apr. 1818, in Lady Seymour, ed., The ‘pope’ of Holland House, p. 316. This jaundiced remark should be placed alongside the recollections of Jane Brookfield who saw in her uncle one who resisted Macaulay's need to harangue an audience and who often lapsed into periods of benevolent silence. See Charles, and Brookfield, Frances, Mrs. Brookfield and her circle (2 vols., London, 1905), ii, p. 377Google Scholar.

50 View of the state of Europe during the middle ages (hereafter View) (2 vols., London, 1818), i, pp. v, vii.

51 View, i, p. 511.

52 He thought in retrospect that the feudal system had ‘peculiarly drawn the attention of Continental writers’ in the thirty years after he had written. See his Supplemental notes to the view of the state of Europe during the middle ages (4 vols., London, 1848), p. xGoogle Scholar.

53 So feudal tenures ‘determined the political character of every European monarchy where they prevailed’, View, i, p. 123. He celebrates finding feum and fevum ‘in several charters about 960’, ibid., i, p. 117n.

54 Ibid., i, p. 98.

55 Ibid., i, pp. 226–7.

56 Ibid., i, p. 225, ii, p. 137.

57 In this case reprimanding Hume who lacked even ‘a moderate acquaintance’ with it: ibid., ii, p. 365.

58 Ibid., ii, p. 177.

59 Ibid., ii, p. 361.

60 Ibid., ii, p. 364, for Hume. Brady erred in thinking the Normans had deprived the English of all their lands (ibid., ii, p. 162). Millar got frankpledge wrong by following ‘one of those general principles to which he always loves to recur’ (ibid., ii, pp. 146–7).

61 Hallam to Seymour, 23 Dec. 1818: ‘the best judges (among whom I reckon myself) prefer [the chapter] on ecclesiastical power’. Ramsden, ed., Correspondence of two brothers, p. 252.

62 View, ii, pp. 19, 28, 36, 67, 124–5. Hallam wrote, of course, for a readership familiar with the Iliad. Priam was the unfortunate king of Troy who failed to defend his city during the Trojan wars.

63 Alphonse Borghers to Hallam, 6 Aug. 1820, Hallam MSS 1, fos. 1–2. The French publishers wanted some rearrangement of chapters. Hallam did not demur.

64 The notes are bound in the Gladstone MSS, BL Add. MSS 44722, fos. 257–72.

65 Times, 24 Jan. 1859.

66 The constitutional history of England, i, p. 283.

67 Ibid., ii, p. 100.

68 Ibid., i, p. v.

69 John Whishaw to Hallam, ?28 Feb. 1828, Hallam MSS 8, fo. 91.

70 Southey, ‘Hallam's Constitutional history of England’, p. 260.

71 The book of the church (London, 1824); Southey, Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae.

72 Southey, ‘Hallam's Constitutional history of England’, pp. 204, 217, 219.

73 Southey to Herbert Hill, 4 Nov. 1927, in Kenneth Curry, ed., New letters of Robert Southey (2 vols., New York, NY, 1965), ii, p. 320. He likewise confessed to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 16 Nov. 1827, that ‘[n]o book has ever displeased me more by its disagreeable temper, its want of charity, its spirit of detraction, and its bitter injustice’, in Warter, ed., Selections from the letters of Robert Southey, iv, p. 71. His displeasure may also have been artificially fanned, as William Speck has suggested, by his wish for the government to appoint him historiographer; see Speck, W. A., Robert Southey: entire man of letters (New Haven, CT, 2006), p. 205Google Scholar.

74 Southey to Caroline Bowles, n.d. [Oct. 1827], in Edward Dowden (ed.), The correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles (Dublin and London, 1881), pp. 128–9.

75 Hallam to Whishaw, 28 Apr. 1828, in Lady Seymour, ed., The ‘pope’ of Holland House, p. 320; Whishaw to Hallam, ?20 Feb. 1828, Hallam MSS 8, fo. 92.

76 Whishaw to Hallam, ibid.

77 Cf. John Burrow's detection in Macaulay of an irony ‘exercised at the symbols of party’. Burrow, John, Whigs and Liberals: continuity and change in English political thought. The Carlyle lectures, 1985 (Oxford, 1988), p. 68Google Scholar.

78 Maurice Cowling, for example, though he offers acute thoughts on differences between Macaulay and Hallam, makes the review his major source: Religion and public doctrine in modern England (3 vols., Cambridge, 1980–2000), iii, pp. 157–8Google Scholar.

79 Burrow, A Liberal descent, p. 30.

80 The tour is well described in Blocksidge, A life lived quickly, pp. 56–79.

81 Rose, W. S., Letters from the north of Italy addressed to Henry Hallam, Esq. (2 vols., London, 1819)Google Scholar.

82 Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge (16 vols., Paris, 1809–19)Google Scholar; Histoire des français (31 vols., Paris, 1821–44)Google Scholar.

83 On a trip to the Alps in May–Sept. 1822. The Hallams visited Sismondi twice. Blocksidge, A life lived quickly, p. 18.

84 Horner to Hallam, 12 May 1814, Hallam MSS 15, fos. 27–8. It is not clear whether Hallam received Lappenberg and the former does not figure among English historians acknowledged in J. M. Lappenberg, Geschichte von England (10 vols. with continuations by Pauli and Brosch, Hamburg, 1834–98). The best study of his context is Postel, R., Johann Martin Lappenberg: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Lübeck and Hamburg, 1972)Google Scholar.

85 Foscolo to Hallam, n.d. and first page missing, Hallam MSS 15, fos. 52–4.

86 J. D. Meyer to Hallam, 10 Feb. 1819, Hallam MSS 15, fo. 42.

87 ‘nach dem, was Hallam (III) [sic] darüber gesagt hat, nicht mehr wiederholt werden’ (‘after what Hallam said in volume III can no longer be sustained’), Leopold von Ranke, Englische Geschichte vornehmlich im sechzenhten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (7 vols., Berlin, 1859–68)Google Scholar, v, p. 233n. Other references occur in ii, pp. 76 and 491, iii, p. 29.

88 von Luden, Heinrich, Geschichte des teutschen Volkes (12 vols., Gotha, 1825–37)Google Scholar, cited in Hallam, Supplemental notes, i, p. 702, and Grimm, Jacob, Deutsche Rechts-Alterthümer (Göttingen, 1828)Google Scholar), cited at i, p. 71, and elsewhere.

89 Hallam to Whishaw, 28 Apr. 1828, in Lady Seymour, ed., The ‘pope’ of Holland House, p. 320. Guizot did not in the event do so.

90 Guizot to Hallam, 14 Mar. 1838, Hallam, MSS 2 fo. 254: ‘I attach an infinite value to it.’

91 Guizot to Hallam, 1 June 1842 and 28 Oct. 1847, Hallam MSS 2, fos. 256, 260.

92 Guizot to Hallam, 11 Nov. 1852, Hallam MSS 2, fo. 288.

93 Guizot to Hallam, 27 Mar. 1848, Hallam MSS 2, fo. 262.

94 Guizot to Hallam, 11 Nov. 1852, Hallam MSS 2, fo. 289. ‘I have viewed with some sadness the pronouncement of Mr. Macaulay at Edinburgh in favour of the [secret] ballot. Take care that this transformation does not merely introduce revolutionary principles into liberal institutions. It would inoculate a healthy body with plague.’

95 Guizot to Hallam, 22 Feb. 1857, Hallam MSS 2, fo. 294 (‘a rare example of an enlightened and honest politician’). Guizot's Sir Robert Peel: étude d'histoire contemporaine had been published in Paris in the previous year. Three years later Jules Michelet confessed to writing a portion of his Angleterre ‘sur Hallam et Macaulay’. Journal, 12 Mar. 1860, in Paul Viallaneix, ed., Journal de Jules Michelet (4 vols., Paris, 1959–76), ii, p. 513.

96 Gladstone to Hallam (draft), n.d. [1833], Gladstone MSS 44353, fo. 267. He deleted the phrase.

97 I owe this point to a stimulating paper by Dr Seamus Perry in the symposium on Arthur Hallam. See n. 5.

98 Journal, 7 May 1839, in William Thomas, ed., The Journals of Thomas Babington Macaulay (5 vols., London, 2008), i, pp. 182–3.

99 Philip Henry Stanhope (1805–75). He was styled Lord Mahon from 1816 to his father's death in 1865 when he succeeded as 5th Earl Stanhope. See The history of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles, 1713–1783 (7 vols., London, 1836–53)Google Scholar; Life of William Pitt (4 vols., London, 1861–2)Google Scholar.

100 Lord Mahon, The history of England, i, pp. 6–7.

101 Milman to Lord Mahon, 11 Aug. 1835, Stanhope MSS C401/1, Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone. The organization of this archive remains that originated by Stanhope himself and requires a total re-classification and cataloguing to meet the needs of professional researchers. No correspondence from Hallam appears in Stanhope's large file on ‘historical subjects’, but letters may be submerged in other files.

102 ‘An extremely distinguished man.’ Ticknor, George (1791–1871), History of Spanish literature (3 vols., London, 1849)Google Scholar, and Life of William Hickling Prescott (London, 1864)Google Scholar. He spent two periods in England, 1815–19 and 1835–8.

103 George Bancroft (1800–1891), minister in England 1846–9, who found in Hallam ‘a mind richly stored with all kinds of learning’. Bancroft to John Appleton, 3 Feb. 1847, in M. A. DeWolfe Howe, The life and letters of George Bancroft (2 vols., London, 1908), ii, p. 11.

104 Prescott claimed Hallam as ‘my teacher in the science of history, beyond any living writer’: W. H. Prescott to Hallam, 3 Nov. 1839, Hallam MSS 4, fo. 273.

105 Introduction to the literature of Europe, in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (4 vols., London, 1837–9)Google Scholar, i, p. x.

106 Biographie universelle (42 vols., Paris, 1842–65)Google Scholar; Chalmers, Alexander et al. , The general biographical dictionary (32 vols., London, 1812–17)Google Scholar.

107 Coleridge, S. T., Biographia literaria; or, biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (2 vols., London, 1817)Google Scholar. I am grateful to Dr Seamus Perry for this information.

108 Neither the Royal Astronomical Society nor the Royal Asiatic Society holds evidence to suggest that Hallam was a Fellow. The latter Society in any case tended to prefer ‘Member’ to ‘Fellow’ in the nineteenth century and so encouraged MRAS rather than FRAS. The Society of Antiquaries, of which Hallam was vice-president from 1824 to 1851, had a royal charter but rarely used the designation; its Fellows are still styled FSA. But in Hallam's day FRAS may have been an uncommon but thinkable acronym for the Antiquaries and that remains the best bet. I am enormously grateful to Peter Hingley, Adrian James, and Kathy Lazenblatt for their help over this puzzle.

109 Hallam, Supplemental notes, Introduction, p. vi. Cf. Juan Andrés, Origine, Progresso e stato d'ogni literatura (5 vols., Parma, 1782–99).

110 Milman, H. H., History of Latin Christianity (3rd edn, 9 vols., London, 1864)Google Scholar, i, p. vi.

111 Hallam, Supplemental notes, pp. 103, 110–11, 125, 194, 226. He did not see irony in his accusing John Allen of having invented anachronistic legal fictions, pp. 375–6.

112 Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams Jr, 27 Nov. 1863, in J. C. Levenson et al., eds., The letters of Henry Adams (6 vols., Cambridge, MA, 1982–8), i, p. 411.

113 Bancroft received a severe ticking-off. ‘You write as an historian, but you must expect that we shall read as Englishmen.’ Hallam to Bancroft, n.d. [1852], in Howe, Life and letters of George Bancroft, ii, p. 106. For Michelet see Hallam, Supplementary notes, p. xii.

114 In succumbing to the temptation, ‘we turn away from the records that attest the real, though imperfect, freedom of our ancestors’ and miss ‘the plastic influence of civil rights, transmitted as a prescriptive inheritance through a long course of generations’. View, ii, pp. 367–8.

115 Buckle quoted all four of Hallam's books in his History of civilization in England (2 vols., London, 1857–61). He also organized the second volume along national lines – France and Spain, then Scotland – in ways redolent of the View of the state of Europe during the middle ages. I am grateful to Dr Helen Small of Pembroke College, Oxford, for this insight.