BOOKS 
The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking, from the Normans to the Nineties
By David Horspool
Viking £25, 432 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20
History belongs to the victors – or as Sir John Harington put it in 1618: “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? / For if it prosper none dare call it treason”. Rebels who fail tend not to build the monuments – castles, palaces, civic squares – that are our visible heritage. Yet, says David Horspool in this vivid, lucid chronicle, rebels have shaped England’s character as incontrovertibly and effectively as the monarchs and law-givers they challenged.
Beginning with the Norman conquest and closing with Arthur Scargill, Horspool argues in The English Rebel that England’s role as coloniser – of its own island, then its archipelago, eventually of a third of the world – shrouds the significance of the rebel tradition at home. Anglo-Saxon uprisings led by “woodsmen” who attacked Norman strongholds, then melted into forests and marshes, belong to a lineage running from the Robin Hood myth to today’s eco-warriors. Five centuries before America’s Bill of Rights, English barons forced King John to accept the Magna Carta, sowing the seeds of constitutional reform. Generations ahead of the French Revolution, the English executed Charles I in favour of a radical government.
Most revolts were short-lived, though their inspiration could last much longer. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher outmanoeuvred the miners but was brought down by protests against a “community charge” – an issue acquiring political resonance when recast as a “Poll Tax”, a byword for injustice during the Peasants’ Revolt 600 years earlier. That earlier revolt arose from successful reactions by the knights of Edward III against demands to supplement the royal coffers; Horspool shows how, repeatedly, when groups higher up the social ladder reaped rewards from limited rebellions, they exposed those beneath them to greater depredations, as well as passing on examples of violent resistance. So revolt became a crucial undercurrent in the slow progress towards parliamentary democracy.
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Sometimes, in late medieval aristocratic gangsterland, usurpers triumphed for the longer term, most lastingly when an obscure Welsh nobleman founded the Tudor dynasty. Shakespeare, writing under Tudor rule, brilliantly and persuasively dramatised this epoch as one determined by the tragic workings of fate that historians are only now recovering the Wars of the Roses as the period when “rebels made the political running”.
Dependent entirely on secondary sources and delivered in bite-size chunks (“Edward’s Killing Fields”, “A Family Affair”), this is history repackaged for a 21st century where nationhood is fracturing into regional identity, political idealism dissolving into pragmatism, and everyday lives – past and present – demand their 15 minutes of fame, from 14th-century peasant leaders Jack Straw and John Ball to the London match-girls who went on strike in 1888. Horspool choreographs his vast cast with skill, sympathy and user-friendly context: for example, he writes about William Walworth, the London mayor who stabbed rebel Wat Tyler to death and was rewarded with a knighthood – but he opens the chapter with Boris Johnson’s recent promise to tackle knife crime.
England’s rebels are illuminating, Horspool says, in the context of today’s “search for English identity, for what makes the English different ... addressed with increasing urgency as Scottish, Welsh and Irish identity becomes ever more defined... A book about the Irish, Scottish or Indian rebel would tap into a well-recognised tradition”.
What defines Englishness just as pertinently, though, are surely the contrasts with Europe that Horspool never makes. “Peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must,” was the Chartist motto in the 19th century: like English thought, English rebellion has been empirical not absolutist, tending to target violence by those who want to change the system rather than full-blooded revolution by those who would overthrow it.
A rebel history of any other major European country could never have been written in this cheerful, anecdotal style, because memories of insurgency and resistance in 20th century Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Russia remain painful and still critical in forming national psyches. But that of course is the point – Horspool’s easy-going, ideology-free approach above all makes this a quintessential and enjoyable, English story.
Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s chief art critic
