A new publication by Norman Gash is cause for excitement. His stature among living 19th-century English historians is rivalled only by that of Eric Hobsbawm, and since the two men’s writings have little in common except an elegantly plain and direct prose, Clio herself would find it difficult to award the palm to one or the other. Hobsbawm is the most erudite, scrupulous and broad-visioned of the social and economic historians who have done much in the last thirty years to uncover the long-neglected lower depths of popular history; Gash has seldom, and never at length, strayed from the more ancient high road of Parliamentary and constitutional history.
Some would call Gash a Tory historian. Much of his writing has been devoted to the Tory Party and all of it, from his very first book, Politics in the Age of Peel, the introduction to which contained a stout, if somewhat question-begging defence of the Tory case against Parliamentary Reform in 1831-32, has been imbued with a sentiment in favour of the executive. He has chosen to write biographies of two Tory prime ministers, Peel and Liverpool, whose administrative finesse and skill in the practical exercise of power are the qualities which most consistently elicit his admiration. When Gash writes of Peel, in this new collection, that he regarded party as an adjunct of politics because, possessing administrative instincts, he was interested ‘not so much in the pursuit as in the use of power’, we feel that he is writing of a man after his own devices and that he is not simply describing Peel, but congratulating him. Though he remarks that ‘Peel’s habit of qualifying the word ‘party’ by the adjective ‘mere’ was not an endearing trait, Gash himself gives party less prominence, both before and after 1832, than most historians in the field would now accord it. That he prefers to find evidence of party in the mechanics of organisation and distrusts, as evidence, the sharing of ideas and aspirations, is in itself, perhaps, an indication of a Tory cast of mind.
It would, of course, be entirely wrong to regard Gash, Tory or not, as a narrow historian. His notions of history-writing may not accommodate the wilder ambitions of Whigs like John Morley, who said that ‘the history of England ought to end with something that might be called a moral,’ or Professor Seeley, whose Expansion of England, invigorating though it is, gave ample proof that he really believed that ‘history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.’ But nor does he for a moment exhibit (as Namier sometimes did) any hankering after the nonsense that history is just one damn thing after another. At heart Gash is, and has always been, a constitutional historian, and a constitutional historian of the best kind, one who places institutional developments in the hurly-burly of political life, where the most far-reaching intentions are defeated by events and the most unpretending of actions come to issue in lasting consequences. Like all historians, but constitutional historians above all, he wants to unravel the threads of how we got here from there. What he does not indulge in (unlike some contemporary social historians) is telling us how we ought to have got here or using history to tell us what our present moral stance should be. This is not a failure of the imagination. On the contrary, it is Gash’s historical imagination, seeped in the past, fed by his delight in facts, and controlled by a charitable and humane regard for the vagaries of human behaviour, that has enabled him to transmute his prodigious learning by the power of thought and analytical skill into such fertile masterpieces of modern historical literature as his Ford Lectures (published as Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics, 1832-1852), in fluency and subtlety the equal at least of those other celebrated Ford Lectures, Richard Pares’s King George III and the Politicians.
Professor Gash has yet to be honoured by a festschrift. But Edward Arnold have done him proud and served readers better by inviting him to publish this collection of pieces old and new, 15 essays and articles in all, of which seven have not previously been published, one is revised and enlarged (the ground-breaking article on the Conservative election agent, F.R. Bonham, which appeared in 1948, when scarcely anything had been written about post-1832 party organisation), and the remainder are not readily accessible elsewhere. One or two of the pieces are slight, having been originally prepared for audiences who could not be expected to have an interest in the finer points of historians’ debates. The brief account of the three great 19th-century Parliamentary Reform acts and the survey of the Anglican Church in the first half of the century, papers read in Coburg to the Prince Albert Society, fall into this category. Not that Gash talks down to laymen. His address to the Peel Society in Tamworth in 1984 on ‘The Historical Significance of the Tamworth Manifesto’ (the manifesto was Peel’s open letter to his constituents in 1834) is a definitive assessment of the document’s importance, establishing it both as a constitutional landmark in party politics and as a unique event, the latter, in language characteristic of Gash, for the simple reason that ‘the circumstances of 1834 never recurred.’ Most of the articles are more purely scholarly, bringing to light new evidence or arguing freshly about old evidence, and it is a pity, since the selection of previously published material is based on accessibility, that space has not been found for two recent articles on the organisation of the Conservative Party published in Parliamentary History, a journal which has failed, so far as I know, to make its way into many libraries.
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