Revolutionary in spirit

A few years ago, a French reader congratulated me on my marvellous biography of Napoleon. Yes, I agreed, it’s a terrific read — an absolute blinder. But I had to be frank and reveal that, alas, I wasn’t Frank.

I confess to being a little envious of my approximate namesake, Frank McLynn. A hugely successful popular historian who has the freedom to write on just about any subject he damn well pleases: Marcus Aurelius, the Burma campaign, the battle of Hastings, Jung, the Wild West. He even has a sideline on Hollywood greats. With some two dozen books to his name, he has clearly grasped the baton from Christopher Hibbert. Such eclecticism should come at a price — and occasionally it does, if only a nominal one — but he keeps his many readers happy, and will do so again with his new book.

The Road Not Taken purports to ask how it is that Britain has avoided, as McLynn sees it, the type of full-blooded, ‘true’ revolution experienced in so many other countries (France, Russia, China, Mexico and Cuba, for example). However, his focus instead rests on the established methodology of cause, course and consequence of seven ‘clear revolutionary situations’.

It is debatable whether all McLynn’s choices were indeed such near misses; of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Jack Cade rebellion of 1450, the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, the Jacobite Rising of 1745-6, the Chartist Movement of 1838 and the General Strike of 1926, how many really nearly threatened permanent change of the whole regime? And surely the Magna Carta rebellion of 1215 should be included, with its profound implications for the restriction of kingship under conciliar probation? Even more curiously for an historian who specialises in the 18th century, McLynn consciously chooses to exclude the Glorious Revolution of 1688 on the grounds that it is merely a ‘rank zero’ or ‘alleged’ revolution, being simply a transfer of power ‘within a given elite’.