Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (14 page)

Besides the first premise that
sine qua non
arguments are indispensable and should be made explicit, the key methodological constraint imposed in this collection is therefore that counterfactuals should be those which contemporaries contemplated. In each chapter, it is the alternatives which were seen at the time as realistic which provide the essential starting point for the argument.

A number of points emerge when we consider these. Firstly, what actually happened was often
not
the outcome which the majority of informed contemporaries saw as the most likely: the counterfactual scenario was in that sense more ‘real’ to decision-makers at the critical moment than the actual subsequent events.

Secondly, we begin to see where determinist theories really do play a role in history: when people believe in them and believe themselves to be in their grip. As noted above, the difference between chaos in the natural world and chaos in history is that man, unlike gases, fluids or lesser organisms, is conscious. Not only are his genes determined to survive;
he
generally is too, and he therefore seeks, prior to acting in the present, to make sense of the past and on that basis to anticipate the future. The trouble is that the theories on which he has generally based his predictions have so often been defective. Whether they have posited the existence of a Supreme Being, or Reason, or the Ideal, or the class struggle, or the racial struggle, or any other determining force, they have misled him by exaggerating his ability to make accurate predictions. Tocqueville once observed: ‘One is apt to perish in politics from too much memory’; but he should have said ‘from too much determinist historiography’. In different ways, belief in determinist theories made all the great conflicts studied here - the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish conflict, the First World War, the Second World War and the Cold War - more rather than less likely. Ultimately, as this book seeks to argue, those who died in these conflicts were the victims of genuinely chaotic and unpredictable events which could have turned out differently. Probably as many people have been killed by the unintended consequences of deterministic prophecies as by their self-fulfilling tendencies. It is nevertheless a striking fact that their killers have so often acted in the name of deterministic theories, whether religious, socialist or racist. In this light, perhaps the best answer to the question ‘Why bother asking counterfactual questions?’ is simply: What if we don’t? Virtual history is a necessary antidote to determinism.

There is therefore no need to apologise for the fact that this book is, in essence, a series of separate voyages into ‘imaginary time’. It may smack of science fiction to offer the reader glimpses through a series of worm holes into eight parallel universes. But the assumptions on which each chapter is based are more than merely imaginary or fanciful. The world is not divinely ordered, nor governed by Reason, the class struggle or any other deterministic ‘law’. All we can say for sure is that it is condemned to increasing disorder by entropy. Historians who study its past must be doubly uncertain: because the artefacts they treat as evidence have often survived only by chance, and because in identifying an artefact as a piece of historical evidence the historian immediately distorts its significance. The events they try to infer from these sources were originally ‘stochastic’ - in other words, apparently chaotic - because the behaviour of the material world is governed by non-linear as well as linear equations. The fact of human consciousness (which cannot be expressed in terms of equations) only adds to the impression of chaos. Under these circumstances, the search for universal laws of history is futile. The most historians can do is to make tentative statements about causation with reference to plausible counterfactuals, constructed on the basis of judgements about probability. Finally, the probability of alternative scenarios can be inferred only from such statements by contemporaries about the future as have survived. These points could be held up as the manifesto for a new ’chaostory’ - a chaotic approach to history. But in many ways they simply make explicit what many historians have been doing for years in the privacy of their own imaginations.

One final question: if this book had not been published, would a similar (perhaps better) book have sooner rather than later appeared? It is tempting - and not just out of modesty - to say that it would. Ideas about causation in the sciences have changed so much in recent decades that it seems reasonable to assume that historians would have caught up sooner or later. Indeed, it might be said that, if the present generation of historians had paid as much attention to mathematics, physics and even palaeontology as they have paid to sociology, anthropology and literary theory, the book might have appeared ten years ago. However, history does not proceed as science does. Kuhn may be right about the convulsive quality of scientific revolutions - the tendency for outmoded ‘paradigms’ to persist for some time after their obsolescence has set in.
¹⁹⁵
But at least the paradigm does eventually shift, not least because of the modern concentration of resources on research into what are thought to be important questions. (Even if the question turns out to be unimportant, that becomes apparent sooner or later as diminishing returns set in.) Historical paradigms change in a more haphazard way. In place of periodic ‘shifts’ forward, the modern historical profession has a sluggish ‘revisionism’, in which pupils are mainly concerned to qualify the interpretations of the previous generation, only rarely (and at a risk to their own careers) challenging its assumptions. If at times the history of history appears to have the kind of cyclical quality whose existence at a universal level this book denies, then that simply reflects the profession’s inherent limitations. Indeed, fashions like ‘the narrative revival’ perfectly illustrate the historian’s tendency to go backwards rather than forwards in search of methodological novelty. For that reason, it seems right to conclude on a resoundingly possibilitarian note. There was nothing inevitable about this book. Or rather, a book exactly like this would not have appeared had it not been for a succession of meetings between like-minded historians which might easily never have happened - bringing us neatly back to the authentically chaotic nature of everyday life, where this introduction began. It is for the reader to judge - as in the case of each of the counterfactuals discussed below - whether the actual outcome is to be preferred to the many unrealised, but plausible, alternatives.

John Adamson

The grievances under which the English laboured, when considered in themselves, without regard to the constitution, scarcely deserve the name; nor were they either burthensome on the people’s properties, or anywise shocking to the natural humanity of mankind ... and though it was justly apprehended, that such precedents, if patiently submitted to, would end in the total disuse of Parliaments, and in the establishment of arbitrary authority, Charles [I] dreaded no opposition from the people, who are not commonly much affected with consequences, and require some striking motive to engage them in a resistance of established government.

DAVID HUME,
The History of England
(1778), CH. LIII

 

 

Between 1638 and 1640, when not distracted by fiscal crises and Scottish wars, Charles I turned his attention to a more congenial task: the plans for a new royal palace at Whitehall.
¹
Designed in the Classical style by John Webb, Inigo Jones’s gifted pupil and collaborator, the project was the fulfilment of the King’s long-held ambition to replace the rambling and outmoded palace which he had inherited from the Tudors. The new Whitehall was conceived on a vast scale, a setting for the court which could rival the grandeur of the Louvre or the Escorial. Given adequate funding (an assumption which in 1638 was not yet wholly far-fetched), it would probably have been completed by the mid- to late 1640s. Here, at last, would be a seat of government appropriate to the system of ‘Personal Rule’ Charles I had established since dispensing with Parliament in 1629. At least until 1639, it was from here that Charles could expect to govern his realms, resplendent amid Webb’s Baroque courtyards and colonnades, during the next decade and beyond.
²

Implicit in such ambitious planning was the confident presumption that Charles I’s regime would not only survive, but prosper. Was such confidence justified? Or was it, as many historians have held, the self-deluding folly of a remote and isolated regime - yet another instance of the sense of unreality which characterised the Caroline court? The answers to these questions have rarely been considered on their historical merits. To the two political philosophies most influential in historical writing during the last century, Whiggery and Marxism, the collapse of Charles I’s regime during the 1630s appeared ‘inevitable’. In seeking to enhance monarchical authority (in practice, the powers of the executive), Charles I was standing, Canute-like, against historical tides which were outside mere kingly control: the rise of parliamentary authority; the belief in individual liberty guaranteed by the common law; even, it was once believed, ‘the rise of the gentry’ (the nearest seventeenth-century England could get to Marx’s ‘bourgeoisie’). These forces swept inexorably on, so the theory ran, to produce a parliamentarian victory in the Civil Wars of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, before finally reaching the sunny uplands of parliamentary government in the heyday of Gladstone and Disraeli. To Samuel Rawson Gardiner - the Victorian historian whose work remains, a hundred years on, the most influential narrative of Charles I’s reign - the King’s opponents had the future on their side; the parliamentarians’ proposals for the settlement of the kingdom during the 1640s ‘anticipate[d], in all essential points, the system which prevails in the reign of Victoria’.
³
And in seeking to create a Personal Rule during the 1630s - a strong monarchical government unfettered by parliamentary control - Charles I was not merely up against his critics; he was up against History itself.

Of course, such assumptions about the inevitability of the regime’s demise have recently been subjected to a battery of ‘revisionist’ criticism.
⁴
Yet, in subtler ways, the belief that Charles’s experiment in government without Parliament was inherently unviable continues to enjoy currency, even among historians who reject the teleological approach of Marxists and Whigs. So unpopular were the King’s policies that they were bound, at some point or other, to provoke rebellion; and, as the King could not mount a credible war-effort without parliamentary finance, the luxury of unfettered monarchical rule was one which Charles - quite literally - could not afford.
⁵
From this perspective, the King’s great act of folly was his decision in 1637 to impose a ‘Laudian’ revision of the English Prayer Book on the Scottish Kirk - to which it reeked of ‘Popery and superstition’. The sequence of events set in train by that decision revealed the political and financial impossibility of sustaining a non-parliamentary regime. Confronted with a full-scale rebellion in Scotland, for which the new Prayer Book had provided the catalyst, the King refused to compromise with his critics, and resolved to re-establish royal authority in Scotland at the point of the sword.
⁶
It was the King’s adamant refusal to yield to the Covenanters’ demands, and his determination to fight on - even after the débâcle of the 1639 campaign, the misgivings of his own Privy Councillors, and the failure of the Short Parliament in May 1640 to fund another war - which left his regime politically and financially bankrupt. The Covenanters won the ‘Second Bishops’ War’ of August 1640. And, with a Scottish army of occupation in the north of England, Parliament met in November in conditions which - for the first time in Charles’s reign - prevented the King from dissolving it when he willed. Once the two Houses had convened, it was only a matter of time before royal ministers were brought to book and the ‘innovations’ which had been at the heart of Charles’s regime - from the exaction of ship money to the placement of the communion table ‘altar-wise’ in parish churches - were declared illegal, piece by piece.

The spate of research on the ‘fall of the British monarchies’ has stressed the highly contingent nature of the linkages which connected these events. At least until February 1641, Professor Russell has argued, Charles could have reached a
modus vivendi
with his Scottish and English critics which would have averted the Civil War.
⁷
This essay takes the enquiry one stage further: to ask not just whether Charles might have avoided a civil war, but whether he might have emerged from the Scottish crisis with the structures of the Personal Rule unscathed. Could Charles I have continued to govern his three kingdoms without referring to Parliaments - as he had done effectively at least until 1637 - into the 1640s and beyond? In considering these questions, it is clear that the critical moment was 1639. There is now broad agreement that, had he not failed to suppress the Covenanter rebellion at his first attempt (and so initiated the disastrous sequence of events which flowed from that failure), Charles would never have been forced to call the Long Parliament of November 1640, the body which set about dismantling the whole edifice of Personal Rule. But for the military failure of 1639, the future of Charles’s regime would have taken a very different course. Success against the Scots would have brought the crown prestige, perhaps even popularity, and removed the need for a parliament for the foreseeable future - arguably, for decades to come.

Part of the difficulty in broaching such possibilities is that they touch on areas where the received account of England’s past is so deeply embedded as to make alternative courses of development seem almost unimaginable: England without the evolution of a powerful Parliament; without the emergence of a religious settlement which was both Protestant and (at least in comparison with most of seventeenth-century Europe) relatively tolerant; without a system of common law in which the sanctity of private property was the cardinal principle governing the relationship between monarch and subject.
⁸
If the argument for the ‘inevitability’ of the Caroline regime’s collapse does not stand, then there was nothing foreordained about any of these developments. The trajectory of British (and Irish) history would have looked very different: almost certainly no Civil War, no regicide, no Glorious Revolution; and Oliver Cromwell pursuing a career of blameless obscurity among the rustic gentlefolk of Ely.