Forgetting a great man

BIOGRAPHY: RICHARD ALDOUSreviews Macaulay: The Tragedy of PowerBy Robert E Sullivan Belknap Press, 614pp, £29.95

WHEN PHILIP ZIEGLER was writing his acclaimed biography of Lord Mountbatten, he kept a sign above his desk as a warning to himself. “Remember, in spite of everything,” it read, “he was a great man.”

It’s an observation that gets to the heart of a dilemma for many biographers. If no man is a hero to his valet, then he certainly won’t be to his biographer, who gets to see a life with all its pettiness, contradictions and the glorious benefit of hindsight. Some subjects strike pre-emptively. Philip Larkin had all his diaries destroyed. Harold Macmillan burnt his wife’s letters to her lover, Bob Boothby, after her death. Others put embargoes on papers to ensure that they are long gone before awkward questions are raised. If it goes wrong, the embarrassment and anguish can be acute. When the authorised life of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, was published, the subject commented wryly but sadly that he had assumed he would be dead when it was published and now that it was out, he wished he was.

The Victorian historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay has been lucky so far with his biographers. His life was memorialised in a vast, two-volume biography by his nephew, George Otto Trevelyan. His reputation and legacy were then kept alive by the latter's son, GM Trevelyan, among the most influential historians of the 20th century, who also tightly controlled access to Macaulay's papers. These included personal diaries, publication of which, Trevelyan noted, would be "unfair" to Macaulay's memory. Even when the inevitable reassessment came, Macaulay's luck held. In the early 1970s, the Harvard historian John Clive wrote a perceptive and elegant early life, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, that threw new light on Macaulay's character and thought in ways that made him more, not less, interesting. It was, said the New York Times, "a great book on a great historian".

Suggestive as it was, Clive's work was an open invitation to others to explore further Macaulay's complexities during his remaining years, and to pull the whole thing together in a full-scale life. And what a life Macaulay had. He wrote a hugely popular and influential History of England, which set out the "Whig" view of history as progress that would dominate well into the 20th century. He was a wonderful stylist, whose influence is seen even to this day in a direct and personal line of succession through GM Trevelyan to JH Plumb and contemporary historians such as Simon Schama, Niall Ferguson and David Cannadine. In his public life as an MP and minister, Macaulay was widely admired for his eloquent parliamentary speeches. And as a colonial administrator in India, he was responsible for the introduction of penal reform and the educational measures that help explain why English is the shared language of the sub-continent. Taken together, it not difficult to see why he was so esteemed by his contemporaries and also why a modern biographer might, as Clive did, want to take a scalpel to such an obviously "eminent Victorian".

Robert E Sullivan, a historian at the University of Notre Dame, specialises more in sledgehammers than scalpels. If you want to see Macaulay beaten to a pulp, then Macaulay: The Tragedy of Poweris the book for you. Not only was Macaulay clearly a "bad" thing in his own time, he was pretty much responsible for the sum of human misery and degradation in the 100 years after his death. "His ethic of civilising and imperial slaughter was embraced globally before World War I and practiced into the second half of the twentieth century," Sullivan writes. Really? Macaulay's ethicwas embraced globally? I may not be a historian of the Holocaust or the Soviet purges, but somehow it is difficult to imagine Hitler or Stalin curled up at home with the History of England. And this is even before we get down to the fact that Macaulay was a peaceful and reforming colonial administrator, who never came even close to practising "civilising and imperial slaughter".

That kind of excitable analysis permeates this book, including discussion of Macaulay’s personal life, which is of the Frankie Howerd “Ooh er, missus!” variety. All this is a shame, because underneath, there is a good book trying to get out. Sullivan has discovered new sources and read all the literature. Yet he seems to detest Macaulay with a passion that is out of all proportion to the “sins” of his subject.

Ziegler’s sign above his desk might have helped. After all, in spite of everything, Macaulay was “a great man”.

Richard Aldous teaches history at UCD and is the author of The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli