History of the English Baptists From the Reformation to the Beginning of the Reign of King G... Book

In A History of the English People, Paul Johnson recounts the story of the English with both loving admiration and seething disdain; his people are to him "a huge force of good and evil." Most historians have their biases, but they mask them subtly and fairly successfully under the shadow of their academic-style prose; Paul Johnson, however, is so outright with his prejudices in this book that reading it is at times almost comical. Queen Elizabeth, it seems, could do no wrong. If she directed murder, it was "against her will." She "was forced, with great reluctance" to persecute the Catholics and the Puritans, because "both groups, in the end, left her with little alternative." The Queen was a paragon of tolerance, whose greatest achievement was to establish "the religious system of England on a basis of moderation." James, on the other hand, was a "loutish savage." Indeed, Johnson is as expansive in his condemnation of the Stuarts as in his praise for Elizabeth: "Those who decry the influence of personality on history find it hard to argue away the speed, the perverse skill, and the absolute decisiveness with which the Stuarts demolished their English heritage."

Johnson is a clever writer, and he manipulates language effectively. It is not the kind of wordplay one expects to encounter in a history. His descriptions are memorable: the Puritans "oozed hypocrisy,"* America "was the posthumous child of the Long Parliament." Many of the author’s phrases are entertaining because they are tongue-in-cheek. Witch hunters, he tells us, were accused of seeking economic gain, "[b]ut this seems too cruel and cynical even for the English." The reason the English became such a powerful force in history was owing largely to their racism, but "[q]uite when they first took note of the fact that they were the successor-race to the Jews is impossible to determine." "It is a sad comment on human societies," Johnson writes, "that they can usually be persuaded to accept bribery as a system of government, provided the circle of corruption is wide enough."

If the English are not safe from the historian’s barb, we cannot hope that the Americans will be. Indeed, Johnson explodes the romantic view we American’s have of our revolution, but not without a little romanticism of his own. The movement toward independence was, he writes, "an unholy alliance" between landowners and "swarming" lawyers, who united to manipulate the "Boston city mob" so that "America was born in organized violence masquerading as idealism." The "insurgents," he claims, "scalp[ed] and mutilate[d] British redcoats." He compares the American War for Independence to the Communist Revolution in Russia, in which "a small group of single-minded and ruthless men hustled along a multitude." Once the nation was independent, it proved no more capable than England: "Free Americans continued to kill each other in the lapidary shadows of the windy rhetoric from Philadelphia." It is little wonder this volume is so hard to come by in the States. (The book is out of print and the one copy I could secure was literally falling apart in my hands.) Johnson is much more generous in his History of the American People.

A History of the English People is not for the sensitive, or for the unlearned. But it can be thoroughly enjoyed by the well-read and the thick-skinned, and it is, from a purely literary (if not a historical) perspective, the most enjoyable of Johnson’s books.