‘No English monarch until Victoria — that is, long after monarchy had become the “dignified”, rather than the “efficient” part of the constitution — remained free from challenge, and three lost their thrones to rebellions.’
David Horspool’s new book is a detailed survey of the English men, women and mobs who have been prepared to risk life and property to rise up against power. It starts in the time of the Norman yoke and ends with the Poll Tax riots in the time of the Norman Tebbit. It is, to adapt Carlyle, a ‘history of irate men’.
There’s an awful lot of ground to cover and Horspool goes over it at a hell of a scamper. The disadvantage is that he sometimes sacrifices detail for dispatch: the catalogues of risings and quashings and exiles and defections, particularly where there’s less colour in the sources, can be a bit chewy.
But the advantage is that the shape of Horspool’s overall argument emerges fluently and persuasively. It is that the history of English rebellion forms a continuous and conscious tradition (or, perhaps, sheaf of traditions). It has seldom been revolutionary in character and never, in the long run, in effect — Horspool suggests that the French Revolution had the effect of putting paid to any prospect of an English one.
But rebellion has been a central rather than a marginal part of the mechanism of English politics — and one whose importance has been wrongly elided, first by Whig history and later by the recent concentration on rebellion against England from Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The Metropolitan Police, Horspool writes, may have been ostensibly founded to fight crime, ‘but it was used almost from the beginning in the politically sensitive role of supervising demonstrations’.
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