Leslie Mitchell
I FOUGHT THE LAW...
The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking, from the Normans to the Nineties
By David Horspool (Viking 453p £25)
A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries, The Men and Women Who Fought for our Freedoms
By Edward Vallance (Little, Brown 639pp £25)

Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!

These are books that cover much the same ground, the history of the rebellious, if from very different angles. Edward Vallance is only interested in the radicalism that can broadly be said to be of the Left. His pantheon of heroes begins with Wat Tyler and Jack Cade and finishes with Mrs Pankhurst and the Labour Party. David Horspool casts a wider net. For him, all rebellions are of equal interest. He writes about Tyler and Cade as well, but sets them alongside Odo of Bayeux and the marchers for CND. As a result, an awful lot of those who read his book will recognise some aspect of their youthful selves.

Taken together, these books make one point abundantly clear. If Britain has a reputation for political stability, it is a reputation of very recent origin. European travellers visiting this country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were appalled by the disorder they witnessed. They frequently dubbed us 'an anarchic people'. Mobs assaulted people and destroyed property with apparent immunity. Much of this activity was actually predictable and formulaic, but to the outsider it looked menacing. Not surprisingly, both authors are forced to catalogue the beheading of archbishops and aristocrats, and the gruesome despatching of carpenters and cobblers. Ostensibly, violence and protest were as British as could be.

For Vallance, protest against the political and social status quo is essentially driven by a radical impulse that flows 'like a golden thread' from one century to another. There is 'a radical tradition' in British history, of which radicals themselves were keenly aware. The rebels of one generation intoned the claims and revisited the martyrdoms of their predecessors; the suffragettes quoted the Chartists, the Chartists quoted the Levellers, and everyone quoted Magna Carta. Of course, in many cases, this was only an imagined past rather than real history, but it was none the less potent for that. Talking historical nonsense, the Chartist Ernest Jones genuinely believed that 'Liberty is a tree of long growth in England. It was planted at Runnymede; it was sunned in the fires of Smithfield, it was watered by the blood of Marston Moor.' Millicent Fawcett naturally thought Boudicca an early champion of freedom.

Horspool has no quarrel with the idea that there was a sort of apostolic succession within the development of British radicalism, but he has to give it a more cursory treatment, because he wishes to talk of other things as well. For him, the social and political Establishment was just as likely to be challenged by aristocrats with a grudge as by peasants with a grievance. After all, only Roger Mortimer and Henry Bolingbroke managed to murder kings. Even Charles I was executed at the behest of gentlemen like Cromwell. So a sensible government would not only look for trouble from below, but would also keep an eye on those within the Establishment who looked shifty.

Covering nearly a thousand years of British history, both authors have to rely heavily on the best secondary sources that are available, and both give colourful accounts of the plots and rebellions they identify. This makes for comprehensive and readable books. The student starting out on a new period and the general reader in search of an overview of dissent will not be disappointed. But time and space do not permit much discussion of consistent themes in British protest that give it its particular character, though Vallance does his best to flag these up.

For the rebellious in Britain have been a strange crew. More often than not, they were anxious to deny that they had anything new in mind at all. Strange readings of history allowed them to claim instead that they were merely seeking to reclaim practices that had worked well in some foggy past. A Chartist in 1838 meant it when he and his friends exclaimed: 'We seek no change - we say give us the good old laws of England unchanged.' What he meant by this patriotic remark was that somewhere a proper way of doing things had been overlaid by some form of tyrannous self-interest. The job in hand therefore was to recover what had been lost, and this might mean reaffirming the law code of King Alfred, the works of Algernon Sidney, or the provisions of the Bill of Rights, or choosing from a menu of comparable historical experiences.

History was always more comfortable and reassuring than dealing with abstract theory. Theorising could be left to the French and Germans. Artisans seeking the vote and barons complaining about bad kingship all preferred to justify their actions with reference to the past. Vallance properly reminds us that arguments based on natural rights entered the debate during the Civil War, but these new ideas found it hard to oust a long-established preference for the historical. After 1789, many British radicals took the view that the French Revolution's descent into violence could be explained by an over-indulgence in theoretical rights. The English in contrast would be free because they enjoyed a lucky history that predisposed them to freedom.

Further, English rebels not only denied that they were demanding anything new, but also asserted that they were not rebels at all. In Europe, revolutionaries had little compunction in trumpeting the necessity of overturning regimes; in Britain, it was more a question of appealing to established authority and asking it to behave better. Kings should burden their people less, and parliaments should legislate for beneficial change. Ritualistically, marches and meetings ended in petitions to those in authority, who just as ritualistically rejected them. Many rebels were so legalistically minded that they set up their own courts and systems of administration in areas they controlled. Within the bloodshed and upheaval there was often a search for a greater orderliness. As Horspool puts it, 'The English have proved remarkably tenacious rebels, but less effective revolutionaries.'

All this produces a sense of déjà vu. In Kent, Essex and Suffolk, medieval rebels set up camp on the same heaths that had offered a temporary home to their fathers and grandfathers. For prey, they hunted down lawyers, men who had become too rich too quickly, and of course foreigners. In turn, Lombards, Flemings, Jews, and the Irish have been identified as the cause of the trouble. Alternatively, anger is directed towards certain individuals, 'evil counsellors' or discredited politicians, whose disappearance would once again allow light to flood the earth. Such patterns suggest that rebellion starts in an economic and social distress that then looks for a target. Rarely does it start with an ideology that offers a vision of a whole new order of things.

A reading of these two books proves that the English can make a great deal of noise, and that the Scots and the Irish can be positively clamorous. In addition, Edward Vallance is keen to establish a radical tradition with honourable roots. But both authors are too honest not to notice that there were strange aspects to the rebellions they describe. At the great Chartist meeting at Kennington in 1848, Feargus O'Connor welcomed the arrival of the chief of the Metropolitan Police, not least because he had just had his pocket picked by someone attending the protest.

Leslie Mitchell is Emeritus Fellow of University College, Oxford. His most recent publications include a life of Bulwer-Lytton and a study of the Whig Party entitled 'The Whig World'.