Arthur Bryant

Sir Arthur Wynne Morgan Bryant CH CBE (18 February 1899 – 22 January 1985) was an English historian, columnist for The Illustrated London News and man of affairs. His books included studies of Samuel Pepys, accounts of English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, and a life of George V. Whilst his scholarly reputation has declined somewhat since his death, he continues to be read and to be the subject of detailed historical studies. He moved in high government circles, where his works were influential, being the favourite historian of three prime ministers: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Wilson.

• During the last four centuries, the most important things that had happened were the extension of the Anglo-Saxon race into every corner of the world and the growth of the American Republic and the view of life it stood for... That ideal was born four centuries ago when a few bold persons believed it would be possible to find on the other side of the Atlantic a land in which they could make for themselves a new home, with a freer and better life than they had hitherto enjoyed. Hence gradually developed the founding of small English colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America.
  • "The American Ideal", lecture delivered at University College, Gower Street (8 November 1935), quoted in 'President Jefferson's Influence', The Times (9 November 1935), p. 14

• [L]ike most of my countrymen I loathe injustice and cruelty, and unlike them I happen to have had some recent experience in Spain. And after reading the pages that follow, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the people of this country have been misled by those who form its public opinion into condoning, in the name of an abstract theory, cruelty and injustice of a particularly horrible kind. There doubtless have been many harsh acts committed by the Spanish Nationalists: men do not wage civil war with gloved hands. But they do not include the wholesale rape, murder, and mutilation of non-combatant women and children, such as the Communist leaders in Spain will have to answer for... Over here the intellectuals—our foolish wise—have mislead us into thinking of such men as democrats, and of the Spanish Civil War as a fight between a properly constituted Liberal-cum-Socialist government and a gang of Fascist saboteurs. But no university lecturer or anonymous BBC commentator has told the just and compassionate people of England about the women of San Martin de Valdeiglesias.
  • Introduction to The Second & Third Official Reports on the Communist Atrocities Committed in Southern Spain from July to October, 1936, By the Communist Forces of the Madrid Government (1937), pp. v-vi

• I believe that the British unilateral guarantee of Poland's independence—though not necessarily, as you wisely point out, the integrity of her present Versailles frontiers in perpetuity—constitutes the first real chance for the Prime Minister's policy of appeasement to obtain the unanimous support of his countrymen. The latter are so constituted that they will never accede permanently to what is demanded of them by force. Something stubborn and undefeatable has always risen in the English consciousness at the sound of a threat. And the Germans, like ourselves a strong race, are so constituted that they can never respect arguments that seem based on fear or weakness. The Prime Minister has now placed our relationships on a new and realist footing. A realization in both countries of what will inevitability produce war, coupled with a readiness to seek an adjustment of existing differences by every other means, is now attainable. It offers a fresh possibility of an Anglo-German understanding—not now, perhaps, but in the future. It is worth trying, for the alternative is the almost certain destruction of our common civilization.
  • Letter to The Times (3 April 1939), p. 10

• Mr. Strauss's subsequent statement in a supplementary question that my Fascist sympathies were "well known." They may be well known to Mr. Strauss, but they are certainly not known to me. It has, however, for some time been a practice of the Communist Party to attribute "Fascist" views to those of its opponents whom it regards as in any way dangerous to itself and whose reputation it is therefore desired to blacken. These would now appear to include any writer who has the temerity to express his support of Mr. Chamberlain's foreign policy.
  • Letter to The Times (23 June 1939), p. 23

• Peace—real and enduring peace—must always be our supreme and ultimate aim, for with our swollen industrial population we are dependent on trade with a peaceful world and a world, moreover, that can honour its debts and trade obligations. Our true war aim is an assured system of international law and cooperation that will alone make a real peace possible.
  • Letter to The Times (7 October 1939), p. 4

• It is hard to see how any assured peace can exist in Europe so long as Herr Hitler—that incalculable man of temperament—continues to direct the external policy of a nation as powerful as Germany, though it must not be forgotten that the advance of the Russian frontiers has already put a check to German capacity for future aggression. But we ought to make it plain that by "Hitlerism" we mean Hitler's fatal method of conducting foreign affairs, and not the right of the German people to choose their own governors.
  • Letter to The Times (7 October 1939), p. 4

• The key to a nation's future is in her past. A nation that loses it has no future. For men's deepest desires—the instrument by which a continuing society moulds its destiny—spring from their own inherited experience. We cannot recreate the past, but we cannot escape it. It is in our blood and bone. To understand the temperament of a people, a statesman has first to know its history.
  • English Saga, 1840–1940 (1940), p. xi

• The English were what they were because they had long wished to be. Their tradition derived from the Catholic past of Europe. Its purpose was to make Christian men—gentle, generous, humble, valiant and chivalrous. Its ideals were justice, mercy and charity.
  • English Saga, 1840–1940 (1940), p. xii

• Without justice and charity there can be no England. That is the historic and eternal English vision.
  • English Saga, 1840–1940 (1940), p. xii

• Before the British regiment of the line is sacrificed to logistics—if sacrificed it is to be—I should like to put on record a historian's conviction that the greatness of our infantry soldier in the past, as in the present, has been due primarily to the fact that in the regiment, with its personal pride, loyalties, and traditions, the individualistic and liberty-loving qualities of the Briton have found their natural medium in war.
  • Letter to The Times (24 December 1945), p. 5

• The ability to deny to the enemy the use of the sea for the movement of armies and supplies, while enjoying it for your own, would continue to be the most vital factor until the distant day when troops and supplies could be carried over its surface without interference. Like Napoleon, Hitler was thwarted by a few miles of salt water.
  • 'A Historians View of the War', lecture delivered at the Royal United Service Institution (22 January 1947), quoted in 'Sea Power in the War', The Times (23 January 1947), p. 2

• Weapons change; it is the ability to command the sea that matters. The Battle of Britain, like the defeat of the Armada, was fought for command of the sea. The work of Bomber Command, like the invasion of Europe, was an exercise of offensive power from our inviolable sea-base.
  • Letter to The Times (24 January 1947), p. 5

• The chairman of the Cromwell Association [Maurice Ashley] asks why Charles II's escape from the Battle of Worcester 300 years ago deserves commemoration. It is because in the days that followed Cromwell's victory poor and humble men, in the face of overwhelming power and in extreme peril, out of their faith in God and their loyalty to the Crown dared everything to save their King. Whatever may be our opinions of the characters of Cromwell and Charles, most of us are agreed that the hereditary Crown was infinitely worth saving. The symbolic faith and courage of that little woodland community around Boscobel belong to the proud annals of our history as much as Cromwell's genius, and after the lapse of three centuries there is room in our pride and gratitude for both.
  • Letter to The Times (13 August 1951), p. 5

• Even more striking than England's unity has been the freedom of individual choice on which it has been based. Because the Channel lay between her and the continent, her people were able to develop a form of government in which power, instead of being centralised in a few hands, was distributed in many. Not being threatened across a land frontier, they had no need to entrust their rulers with standing military forces or despotic rights over private liberties. Authority normally was exercised only after those subject to it had had an opportunity to make their views known. From the Saxon Witenagemot to the twentieth century Parliament, from the village hustings and manor court to the trade union lodge and parish council, there was nearly always some working machinery in England by which those in authority could test the opinion of those over whom authority had to be exercised. Government was conducted subject to the right of the governed to criticise and, within lawful limits, to oppose. "His Majesty's Opposition" is the most characteristic and certainly the most original of English contributions to politics.
  • The Story of England: Makers of the Realm (1953), p. 20

• Loving private liberty, yet finding that it could not exist without public order, the English devoted themselves to making the two compatible. Freedom within a framework of discipline became their ideal. They achieved it through the sovereignty of the law. "All our struggles for liberty," wrote Disraeli, "smack of law." And by law the English meant an enforceable compact between themselves and their rulers, deriving not from unilaterally imposed force, but from assent freely given. Both they and their American descendants constituted such law, rather than the Executive, their ultimate sovereign.
  • The Story of England: Makers of the Realm (1953), p. 21

• Compromise, give-and-take, live-and-let-live, became a national habit. The freedom of the Press—a forebearance unnatural in any Government—was an English invention; so was the secret ballot which enabled a man to record an unpopular vote without danger to himself. The English, as self-opinionated as any people, mastered the lesson that they could only possess liberty by allowing it to others, enjoy the propagation of their own views by listening patiently to their neighbours'.
  • The Story of England: Makers of the Realm (1953), p. 22

• Entry to the Common Market involves, for certain, an end to the untrammelled sovereignty of the Parliament of the day which for centuries has been the governing principle of our constitution and a main source of our political greatness and stability.
  • Letter to The Times (13 July 1962), p. 13

• In weaning pagan man from his primitive and bloodstained creeds of terror and human sacrifice the Church's supreme achievement was to domesticate and humanise the conception of Eternity. Everywhere he was confronted, in church and wayside shrine, with homely and familiar reminders of the Heaven he was enjoined to earn through the virtues of love, faith, compassion, humility, truthfulness, chastity, courtesy—virtues that came so hard and were so much needed by a passionate, hot-tempered, primitive people.
  • The Age of Chivalry (1963), p. 340

• [T]here is one fundamental issue at stake in Thursday's Referendum. It is whether the British people of the future are to retain the age-long right through Parliament and parliamentary elections to decide their destiny without being bound by the authoritarian and dead hand of the past imposed by some rigid bureaucratic formula devised by continental constitutionists. What is at stake is the preservation of the great libertarian principle of popular "consultation and consent" which has run like a golden thread through our history. The essence of our unwritten constitution has always been that, while the elected Parliament of the day, interpreting the will of the existing electoral majority, can enact whatever it chooses, it cannot prevent future Parliaments and electorates from exercising the same elastic right.
  • Letter to The Times (4 June 1975), p. 15

• What any elector who feels that this is fundamental has, therefore, to decide is whether he or she has sufficient confidence in our present rulers of all parties to resist the declared intention of those who, out of however sincere and high-minded motives, hope to make our continued membership of the European Economic Community a first and irreversible step in the creation of a supra-national political union in which our nationhood—the most important of all the political assets we inherit from the past—would be submerged for ever.
  If that were the sole issue of the Referendum—the sacrifice of a national society evolved over 1,500 years of Christian history—the answer would be undoubtedly No.
  • Letter to The Times (4 June 1975), p. 15

• It is admirably done, with warmth, vitality and colour. The familiar criticisms of "popular history," that it lags a generation behind scholarship, would misfire if levelled against this work. It stands fair and square on the results of modern research.
  • Geoffrey Barraclough, review of The Story of England by Arthur Bryant, quoted in The Times (16 December 1953), p. 8

• The Luddites, he thought, were right, and the Industrial Revolution "has so far harmed man even more than it has benefited him".
  • Lord Caldecote, 'Is profit next to ungodliness?', The Times (13 March 1990), p. 20

• A fascinating volume. No brother historian but will envy the beauty and simplicity of the writing. You have achieved your avowed purpose more completely than any other book of its kind that I remember.
  • V. H. Galbraith, review of The Story of England by Arthur Bryant, quoted in The Times (24 November 1954), p. 10

• By using intelligently the diaries of Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Sir Arthur Bryant had made a contribution to the inside story of Hitler's war which was of the greatest importance. He had given on a broad canvass a faithful picture of the two greatest figures on the British side.
  • Lord Montgomery, speech at the 40th anniversary luncheon of the Institute of Transport (3 November 1959), quoted in 'Ld. Alanbrooke “Best Soldier of War”', The Times (4 November 1959), p. 9

• He has the gift of making the record of past events continuously moving and exciting.
  • Peter Quennell, review of The Story of England by Arthur Bryant, quoted in The Times (2 December 1953), p. 10

• Mr. Bryant has a wonderful tale to tell, he sees the whole picture and has the gift to make us see it.
  • A. L. Rowse, review of The Years of Victory by Arthur Bryant in The Sunday Times, quoted in The Times (10 January 1945), p. 26

• He was the most popular historian of his time — and above all an emotional, even a sentimental, one... He was always alive and had a good sense of humour, a wonderful feeling for landscape and country life... His best qualities were his passion for the English past, and his gift for giving expression to it, calling back above all its life.
  • A. L. Rowse, 'A sentimental history', The Times (19 August 1994), p. 16

• For all his aristocratic taste, he had popular sympathies. He liked prize-fighters, old-fashioned trade unionists, and of course Army and Navy men, among whom he had a devoted following. He was miles away from Bloomsbury intellectuals, at the opposite pole to Lytton Strachey in several respects.
  • A. L. Rowse, 'A sentimental history', The Times (19 August 1994), p. 16

• So how much of all his work remains? There was a good deal of honest research. His large work on Samuel Pepys certainly stands. His Regency trilogy offers an authentic picture of the age, both vigorous and sympathetic. But I best liked his essays, collected in such books as Historian's Holiday. He was a born writer, as few are, and he dedicted perhaps obsessively. His thinking was emotional, and that was of a piece with his gifts.
  • A. L. Rowse, 'A sentimental history', The Times (19 August 1994), p. 16

• The most exciting story in the world, and splendidly told. If Volumes II and III are equal to Volume I, I predict that it will be holding the same place as Gibbon.
  • Viscount Simon, review of The Story of England by Arthur Bryant, quoted in The Times (24 November 1954), p. 10

• The transformation of the English from a predominately rural into a predominantly urban people makes the substance of his narrative, in which his gift of vivid description and his intense feeling for national idiosyncrasy have effective expression. He finds the cause of the social change—which he wholeheartedly deplores—in the dogma of laissez-faire, with its consecration of the profit motive and the rights of property, and its reduction of the state to a system of machinery for the protection of individual rights.
  His diagnosis of the evils proceeding from the change combines that of the Marxists with that of the Nazis—that is, he sees competitive capitalism driving the world to war, and individualism and urbanization resulting in the deterioration of the race. But his remedy is neither Communism nor Fascism, but a Toryism based on the teaching of Disraeli. He believes in a method of government that is so far paternal that it has always in mind the welfare of the community, future as well as past, overriding the immediate interest of any individual.
  • 'Social Change in England', The Times (28 December 1940), p. 9
  • A review of English Saga, 1840–1940 by Arthur Bryant

• Bryant's conservatism was of the broadest sort. He admired and reverenced what he saw as the best legacy of the Middle Ages to the centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution – the independent spirit of the peasant and yeoman classes of England. At the same time he heartily loathed the degrading aspects of laisser-faire capitalism and saw it as having corroded the English spirit.
  • 'Sir Arthur Bryant', The Times (24 January 1985), p. 14

• It is my hope and belief that your Toryism, without ceasing to be Toryism, is broadening into Englishry, as I hope my Whiggery has to some extent so broadened in the course of years. You will hold an important place—you do already—as interpreter of the country's history to the new generation, probably more important than anyone else now—so it matters a lot.
  • G. M. Trevelyan to Arthur Bryant (1 August 1935), quoted in Julia Stapleton, 'Cultural Conservatism and the Public Intellectual in Britain, 1930–70', The European Legacy, Vol. 5, No. 6 (2000), p. 797

• I have read it with delight. Every page of it is alive with the sense of the reality of those times. To read it will hearten us all for the struggle in which we are now engaged. It will warm your heart and teach a lesson too.
  • G. M. Trevelyan, review of The Years of Endurance by Arthur Bryant, quoted in The Times (16 January 1943), p. 2

• The story is well known, but Sir Arthur's account makes us tingle again at the dangers, anxieties, and triumphs. He is excellent also on the Armada, making us share the heightening tension as the Spanish galleons sailed up the Channel and feel for their ultimate appalling fate... Sir Arthur has read widely, and generously acknowledged, the work of our finest Elizabethan historians. But it is his own intense imaginative commitment which makes The Elizabethan Deliverance so vividly and splendidly readable.
  • C. V. Wedgwood, 'Our finest hour', The Times (22 January 1981), p. 12
  • A review of The Elizabethan Deliverance by Arthur Bryant

• Sir Arthur is a patriotic historian. He shows the British in all their bloody-mindedness but argues that they are better than anyone else. He deals not merely with kings and high officials but with the common people, how they lived and thought, and how they began to force their freedom from their rulers... [I]t is a pleasurable way of absorbing history painlessly: a triumph for a historian aged 85 who takes in the broad sweep, without losing the road, in the manner of Gibbon or Macaulay.
  • Woodrow Wyatt, 'The broad sweep of history', The Times (1 March 1984), p. 15
  • A review of A History of Britain and the British People. Vol 1, Set in a Silver Sea by Arthur Bryant