The famous rebel, Guy Fawkes

THE ENGLISH REBEL: ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF TROUBLEMAKING, FROM THE NORMANS TO THE NINETIES By David Horspool, Viking, £14.99

The statist bias inherent in most history writing is evident from the subtitle of this book. The rebel seamlessly becomes a troublemaker. Troublemaker for whom? Obviously, for the State or for those in power. An attempt to question and change the status quo is thus relegated to troublemaking. Indian historians are familiar with how records kept by the British always described insurgents as badmashes or used similar pejorative terms. This was described by Ranajit Guha, the mastermind of subaltern historiography, as the prose of counter insurgency. He said that to understand insurgency or rebellion through the archives of the State or the victor, it was necessary to invert the terms. For ‘troublemaker’, read ‘rebel’ or ‘revolutionary’.

History is a success story. The attempt to retrieve the activities of the losers, the rebels, is often a difficult task as very few of them leave behind their own authentic traces in the records. This is especially true for a country like India, but holds good for a country like England as one goes further back in time. The rebels of English history were rescued from obscurity and anonymity thanks to the committed scholarship of historians such as Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, George Rudé, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson. Not surprisingly, they were all Marxists. But many of Hill’s non-Marxist pupils have also contributed to our understanding of the 17th century subaltern world and consciousness. The work of Keith Thomas comes immediately to mind.

David Horspool is no radical scholar but he is familiar with radical historiography and its contribution to English historiography. His book is not meant for a scholarly audience. He writes for the intelligent person who is interested in history. He has the gift of distilling the findings and analysis of academic scholars and of presenting them for the non-specialist reader. This is the principal attraction of the book.

The book has a polemical angle. It challenges the prevailing myth that the Englishman is not recalcitrant, that he is tolerant and patient. Horspool shows that there is a continuous and almost unbroken history of dissent and rebellion in England. This history covers the whole of England and cuts across social classes. “English rebellion,” Horspool writes, “has permeated English society, from top to bottom.’’ He believes that the English have proved to be remarkably “tenacious rebels’’, but have been less effective as revolutionaries. He makes a distinction between rebellion and revolution. The former is “likely to end as failure, particularly in the short term.’’ When they succeed, “they aren’t called rebellions any more.’’ In 1618, an English knight put it rather well: “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?? For if prosper, none dare call it treason.’’

Horspool makes the very important point that history should not be equated with insignificance. He has the memorable sentence, “rebellions reveal the alternative histories contemporaries wanted to write.’’ Success or the history written by the victors always undermines the importance of those who wanted to make a different world. Reconstructing their histories, in the words of E.P. Thompson, is like “whistling against a typhoon’’. Horspool attempts to retrieve these histories and reads them “as inspiration, as warning, and as example.’’