Customer Reviews

English Rebel

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A smashing read. This is almost `Our Island History' for the seriously vexed and inordinately peeved. With all due respect to our Irish, Scots and Welsh cousins, the English have been fighting against our own government longer than anybody else. This fast paced book is a potted history of the growth of English government and the attempts to keep it under control from Norman times to the nineties. It shows the development of opposition to government from the self-interest of the barons to the appealing to the higher power that monarchy claimed through to right of the ordinary man in the street to have his voice heard. The common thread of the rebel is the `commonwealth' or ` community, the rebellions of the Reformation, the Peasants revolt or Magna Carta to name but a few of the revolts that would make you believe that this country is a seething mass of discontent ready to erupt at any time (which in a way it has). Equally good at pointing out examples of how chance and opportunity play there part in events, Horspool also points to a geographic continuity that certain areas have, such as Clerkenwell in London, in drawing in rebels. The other area of continuity that he points to is that of example. Rebels always appeal to past examples, whether it was the poll tax rioters of the nineties casting back to the Peasants Revolt or the appeals to Magna Carta that even the Americans appealed to in their revolt (after all, they regarded themselves as Britons living in America with a direct link to the English political past. That's why there's a mural of Simon de Montfort in the House of Representatives). Perhaps that's why the English have a reputation for being so well-mannered. We have to keep that seething mass of emotion in check to stop ourselves from running amok!

This book makes the heart beat faster, makes you want to turn the page to see the next installment. It reads not so much as a dry historical account, but as a thriller: making history leap off the pages. I would recommend this book if you are even only half interested in history. Brilliant - that is the one of the words I would use to describe it!

Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot to blow up King James and parliament in 1605 has for centuries been portrayed as unsavory exhibit number one to damn all English rebels as a dangerous, barking mad minority, utterly marginal to the wise and steady progress delivered from on high by the `natural rulers' of England. The reality is quite the opposite, writes Horspool in his alternative history of the thousand year long, vibrant tradition of English rebellion.

Most early rebellions were aristocratic uprisings which rarely rose above intra-elite mediaeval battles for power and riches as privileged landholders, barons, nobles and clergy could find themselves opposed to a particular monarch who stood in the way of already powerful men thwarted in their wider and greedier ambitions.

Elite rebels often wrapped their venal revolt up in abstract principle - the liberties for `free men' referred to in Magna Carta which King John was forced to sign at Runnymede in 1215 was a concession to the need to widen the support of elite rebellions amongst the lower orders but the rebellion was controlled by men whose "naked self-interest" in reducing their tax burden was paramount, and Magna Carta as a result has "all the glamour of an appeal against an assessment by the Inland Revenue".

Nevertheless, a rebel-driven expansion of the democratic share of government inched forward over the centuries. The more canny aristocrats supported rebellion as a means of winning reform to prevent revolution, fearing the spectre of peasant risings, an apparition which materialised in 1381 with the Peasants' Revolt.

There were other genuinely popular uprisings which, however, suffered from aiming at those around the King rather than the King, a flaw of most rebellions until the English Revolution in the mid-17th century, which, despite Horspool's reluctance to call it a bona fide revolution was a world-turned-upside-down revolt of the middle and labouring classes against the monarchy.

The rebel tradition gradually took on a more consistently popular character aimed at an unrepresentative parliament (in 1832, only six in a hundred people had the vote), finding its metier increasingly through `combinations' (illegal trade unions), direct action (the Luddite machine-breakers), a People's Charter backed by mass working class protests and petitions, and suffragettes determined not to leave women out of democratic reform. The twentieth century also saw a series of system-shaking national strikes and protests.

Horspool's book is not helped by his definition of a rebel as someone who takes personal risks to make the "English state bow to pressure". This is both too broad and too narrow. It sweeps up terrorists (the Angry Brigade anarchists who bombed government buildings, banks and the Miss World Contest in the early seventies) but excludes the non-violent Vietnam Solidarity Committee. It includes the 1930s fascist, Oswald Mosley, but excludes English socialists and Marxists.

The dynastic jockeying of aristocratic power-seekers is in but missing are the campaigns of anti-slavery abolitionists, military Conscientious Objectors, feminists, and most modern protest movements. Horspool's definitional vagaries results in an unbalanced book which compresses the modern era but applies a microscope to the mediaeval era when individuals rather than mass movements had largely cornered the rebel market.

Despite this, Horspool's book is a highly readable corrective to elite history, showing that, despite the failure of many rebels in their own time, their "democratic or socially-leveling ideas" have had a much better long term prognosis. Rebels "have had to show what they wanted when asking politely for it was too ineffective", a prescription that is still called for.