Mediating English historical evolution in Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake (1866). (Prepublication)

‘Mediating English historical evolution in Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake (1866)’ Abstract Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake (1866), set around the period of the Norman Conquest eight hundred years earlier, traces a line from a failed East Anglian resistance – seen as ‘the germs of our British liberty’ – to the later growth of ‘a great nation’ and empire under ‘the spirit of Freedom’. Kingsley bases his fictional account of England’s historical evolution on fundamental factors of race, ‘blood’, religion and environment, all mediated through discourses of gender. In turn, Hereward the Wake’s ideological and emotional tendencies are closely related to a long historiographical tradition which made the Middle Ages a cultural battlefield, and, among other things, a testing-ground for the gendering of historiography itself. Within this tradition, Kingsley’s novels represent emotions as laws of Nature that drive history in accordance with a providential pattern. Essay Charles Kingsley’s novel Hereward the Wake (1866), set around the period of the Norman Conquest eight hundred years earlier, is sub-titled ‘the Last of the English’. Yet its outlook is prospective, tracing a line from a failed East Anglian resistance – seen as ‘the germs of our British liberty’ (Kingsley 1902, I. 4) – to the later growth of ‘a great nation’ and empire under ‘the spirit of Freedom’ (Kingsley 1902, II. 258). Kingsley, a polemical Low Church minister, novelist, Professor of History at Cambridge, and supporter of Charles Darwin, bases his fictional account of England’s historical evolution on fundamental factors of race, ‘blood’, religion and environment. All of these factors are also mediated through discourses of gender, specifically of masculinity. In turn, Hereward the Wake’s gender politics are closely related to a long historiographical tradition which made the Middle Ages a cultural and religious battlefield, and a testing-ground for models of English masculinity and for the gendering of history writing itself. Within this tradition, Kingsley represents emotions as laws of Nature that help to drive historical evolution in accordance with a providential pattern. This essay establishes the broader ideological and intellectual context in which Hereward the Wake’s view of English medieval history takes its place, and examines in detail how in a fictional form it participates in contemporary discussions of race, religion, gender and emotion. Kingsley’s novel is of great interest as an example of the output of a famous mid-Victorian public intellectual operating, like his modern equivalents, across multiple media – articles, reviews and literary criticism in newspapers and magazines, university lectures, public addresses, sermons, polemical essays and disputes, novels, short stories, poetry, a play, and a vast private correspondence (Chitty 1974). In subject, content and form, Hereward the Wake resounds most amply within that wider cultural project. Confronting the mid-century break-up of long-standing cultural authorities and collective allegiances, and an increasing diversity of emotional attachments that was signalled to him by revisionist histories and the growing prominence of religious views other than his own, Kingsley strategically promotes his hero’s resistance to authority and his stubborn individualism as actually essential common features of Englishness, around which past national, racial and religious traditions should rally and re-unite. As I note in a brief conclusion, pride in English exceptionalism, hostility to immigrants, and fear of external European control have also made themselves evident in the present day. This presents a challenge to the idea put forward in this collection (Patulny and Olson’s Chapter X) that late modernity represents a significant emotional departure from modernity and earlier periods. The ideological grounds of emotions such as fear, anger and anxiety have necessarily changed, but the emotional mobilisation of ideas of true Englishness remains as politically powerful as it was before. The Middle Ages were a hot topic in the mid-nineteenth-century intellectual world. In the story of the development of England into a modern nation and a world empire, they often featured as a time of superstition and violence, before religious Reformation, scientific discovery and constitutional government had made ‘Great’ Britain. (Lynch 2016, Lynch 2017). Negativity towards the middle ages often centred on the role of religion – Roman Catholicism – in medieval society. This negativity was exacerbated in the nineteenth century by anxiety over Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the progress in the 1830s and 40s of the Tractarian Movement which stressed long-term continuities in English religious life, and the re-establishment of the English Catholic hierarchy in 1850. An 1855 selection from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563) begins: ‘Popery is increasing in Protestant England’, and continues ‘Popery, liberty, and a British constitution, could not co-exist in a state of equality in this or any other country’. Yet readers are reassured that ‘the awakened zeal and aroused fears of Protestant Englishmen betoken the dawning of the old Protestant spirit’, ‘the spirit of our Protestant forefathers’ (Foxe 1855, 3-4). Such rhetoric is typical of many works of the period. It does much more than re-assert the English religious settlement and constitutional arrangements of 1688. It teaches that Protestantism is inherently English, is male, and is ‘old’, in the sense of ‘ancestral’, handed down from the past, but young (‘dawn’-ing) and virile in its zealous intolerance of ‘Popery’ as the enemy of liberty. Catholicism is shown as having always been alien and unnatural to the English ‘spirit’, even when it was the religion of the entire land. Disquiet at the celibacy of Catholic clergy also contributed to this impression of the unnatural. Protestantism laid claim to the true, ‘old’ and manly English past. The medieval era of England’s pre-Reformation history becomes therefore a kind of strange aberration, in which Englishness has not yet properly found itself, except in the victims of Church tyranny, and through perceived glimmerings of Protestantism in the aspirations of chivalry (Norman 1987, 52). In that overall context, a question arose for Protestant historiography whether pre-Conquest England should be regarded retrospectively in a different light from the later medieval period. Around the time of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, first published in 1563, there was some idealisation of England before 1066, in contrast to ‘the last 500 yeares’ in which ‘Sathan broke loose’ (Foxe 1563, I, 17). But there was still considerable hostility towards medieval monastic culture, in the aftermath of the dissolution of the monasteries around 1540. Michael Rodman Jones points out that Reformation intellectuals like Matthew Parker treated pre-Conquest Viking raids on monasteries as divine punishment for ‘monkery’: ‘the religion or rather superstition & hipocrisie of monkes … by the iuste iudgment of God, vtterlye abolished, the Danes spoyling them, and cruelly burning them vp in there houses’ (Parker 1566, 7; Jones 2018). In this Reformation ‘selective reading’ of the late tenth-century scholar Ælfric, ‘monasticism is roundly condemned whilst the intellectual product of it is held to be authoritative and idealised to the point of fetishization’ (Jones 2018). Overall, opinions on the Anglo-Saxons remained divided. The influence of Tacitus’s Germania from the Renaissance onwards ‘provided a rationale for a totalizing vision of the Germanic world, a national character both generous and belligerent, and especially the dream of a free and elected political structure’ (Toswell 2010, 36). There was also a long tradition of respect for the ‘liberty’ and ‘principles of independance’ that David Hume (1778) perceived in Anglo-Saxon secular laws and institutions. (Hume 1983, Vol. 1, Appendix 1). These had been cited in resistance to royal absolutism from the time of Magna Carta onwards (Vincent 2015, 26-27). ‘Scientific’ racial studies would employ the Germania to misrepresent the Teutonic peoples as both autochthonous and racially pure (Krebs 2011), as Kingsley himself would assert about them. But there was another tradition which stressed the decline of the Anglo-Saxons, especially in their later period of rule, and scorned them on interrelated racial, gender, cultural and religious lines. Oliver Goldsmith in 1764 was scathing: ‘The bravest blood of the English had been already exhausted in civil war, under the dissensions of the Saxon heptarchy; and, when those wars were terminated, pilgrimages, penances, cloisters, and superstitions, served to enfeeble the remainder.’ ‘[U]nequal to make opposition against the Danes’, the Saxons ‘therefore bought off their invaders with money, a remarkable instance how much they had degenerated from their warlike ancestors’ (Goldsmith 1764, Vol 1, Letter 7). Specifically, these evils also arose because ‘the Monks acquired such power, as served to retard the vigour of every future operation against the Danes’ (Goldsmith 1764, Vol. 1, Letter 8). To Joseph Ritson, writing in 1802, King Alfred was ‘a wretched bigot’ and Anglo-Saxon poetry ‘a kind of bombaste or insane prose’. Furthermore, ‘while they [the Anglo-Saxons] continued pagans, they were unquestionably a brave and warlike nation; but, upon their conversion to Christianity, their kings became monks, their people cowards and slaves, unable to defend themselves, and a prey to every invader’ (Ritson 1891, 33). Ritson transfers a version of Gibbon’s thesis on the fall of Rome after Constantine to the Romanised, hence feminised, Anglo-Saxons. Out of the friction between these separate traditions came a hybrid view: liberty and independence were natural and inherent qualities in the English from the earliest times, whether or not Englishness was considered to have been later improved by Norman influence, but the ‘Romish’ church, and especially its monastic orders, viewed as an alien power, had always sought to suppress these qualities for its own power and profit. In this view, Catholics of any period were not seen as being in adult control of either their consciences or their emotions because these were managed and manipulated by the clergy, who fed their flocks on superstition and demanded blind obedience. In a common usage, the Catholic laity was considered ‘childish or childlike’ (Ward 1879, 42). In Kingsley’s times, popular histories employed aggressive rhetoric against the Anglo-Saxon church, especially monasticism, as a force that had infantilised and unmanned England. Charles Dickens in the early 1850s scorns ‘EDWARD, afterwards called by the monks THE CONFESSOR’, who neglected ‘his unoffending wife, whom all who saw her (her husband and his monks excepted) loved’, and who ‘had no children’. ‘The King was … as blind and stubborn as kings usually have been whensoever they have been in the hands of monks’. ‘As he had put himself entirely in the hands of the monks when he was alive, they praised him lustily when he was dead.’ (Dickens 1870, 28-32). Dickens seeks to expose celibate monkish ‘sanctity’ as trickery, and intimately connects monastic influence with unnatural masculinity, physical and political incapability and historiographical deceit. Dickens was following, at a popular level, in an anti-monastic tradition of historians featuring David Hume, Edward Gibbon (1776), Thomas Fosbroke (1802) and others. In this tradition, monks tell false history because they are monks, and therefore not real men: ‘the monks, who were the only annalists during those ages ... were strongly infected with credulity, with the love of wonder, and with a propensity to imposture; vices almost inseparable from their profession and manner of life.’ (Hume 1983, Vol. 1, 27). ‘[W]e must supply the silence of antiquity by those legends which avarice or superstition long afterwards dictated to the monks in the lazy gloom of their convents.’ (Gibbon 1820, 202); ‘Whenever the spirit of Fanaticism, at once credulous and crafty, has insinuated itself, even into a noble mind, it inevitably corrodes the vital principles of Virtue and Veracity’ (Fosbroke 1843, 3) For these writers it is not just true history, but the industrious, rational and virtuous manliness of the historian himself that is at stake in attacking the monk. In this respect, the atheist Hume, Gibbon the religious sceptic, and the Anglican priest Fosbroke are of one mind. Much as Kingsley differed in temperament, belief and outlook from Hume and Gibbon, he shared their views of medieval historiography, and blended them with his own combative form of anti-Catholicism. His earlier novels, Hypatia (1853) and Westward Ho! (1855) feature, corrupt and treacherous priests, monks and Inquisitors. He also initiated a famous controversy by a review in Macmillan’s Magazine (1864) of two volumes of J. A. Froude’s History of England (1850-1870) where he asserted that ‘Father [John Henry] Newman informs us that truth for its own sake need not be, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue of the Roman clergy’ (Kingsley 1864, 216-17). Kingsley’s long-term view of English religious history was simple: ‘the whole course of the British mind since the Reformation, and … its whole course before the Reformation … was one of steady struggle against the Papacy and its anti-national pretensions’ (Kingsley 1890, 221). Histories more favourable to the pre-Reformation Church, or less impressed by its replacement, he regards as ‘the outcome of an utterly un-English tone of thought’ that is wilfully blind to medieval ‘priestly abominations’ and ‘the rottenness of the whole system’ (Kingsley, 1890, 222). To ignore wilfully facts like these, which were patent all along to the British nation, facts on which the British laity acted, till they finally conquered at the Reformation, and on which they are acting still, and will, probably, act for ever, is not to have any real reverence for the opinions or virtues of our forefathers. (Kingsley 1890, 222) Kingsley’s focus here is more on the dangerous national effects of slack historiographical mediation of the past to the present than on the history itself, which he wants to take for granted as a self-evident ‘course’ of ‘facts’. He is determined to win the battle to control the popular mediation of emotions through English historiography. The very nature and essence of Englishness are at stake in maintaining the right kind of historical memory and its associated emotions in the lay public. Yet there is a peculiar anxiety in the writing, audible in its one note of qualification – ‘probably’ –amongst so much apparent certainty. Protestantism and contempt for Catholicism are totally natural to the English, yet they always need to be kept reminded of that. In this long and complex context, Kingsley’s choice of Hereward the Wake, a legendary eleventh-century outlaw, as his avatar of English racial qualities solves a problem for him. This ‘rough-mannered Teuton’ of a hero belongs, to some extent, to a wider English movement claiming ‘an indigenous, nonclassicist cultural base’ in ‘a rejection … of. .. elitism of caste and temperament’ and of ‘the privileging of Rome and the classical tradition introduced by the Normans’ (Simmons 1990, 168). Hereward is presented initially as an artless, uncouth, archaic figure, a layman without intellectual pretensions – a perfect contrast to Edward the Confessor. He is an unsophisticated man, of straightforward masculine instincts and strong passions. Above all, he is by birth not an Anglo-Saxon, but a Dane, an East Anglian descendant of Viking invaders, and intensely virile. Kingsley asserts that unlike the ‘priest-ridden’ men of Wessex, ‘the tools of ... prelates’ (Kingsley 1902 1.5), the East Anglians never really bent their necks to the Norman yoke; they kept alive in their hearts that proud spirit of personal independence, and they kept alive, too, though in abeyance for a while, those free institutions which were without a doubt the germs of our British liberty. (Kingsley 1902, I. 4) As an East Anglian (of the area’s more northern regions), and a stronger strain of the ‘Teuton’, Hereward maintains the supposed English traditions of independence and freedom that Hume and many others had noted, but avoids the contempt aimed at the degenerate Anglo-Saxons, who ‘quailed before the free Norsemen, among whom was not a single serf’. (Kingsley 1902, 1.5). These men of Viking descent are the ‘true Englishmen’ (Kingsley 1902, 1.4). In Kingsley’s view, England, by retaining ‘the old Teuton laws’, had ‘escaped, more than any other land, the effete Roman civilization’ and ‘she therefore first of the lands, in the twelfth century, rebelled against, and, and first of them, in the sixteenth century, threw off the Ultramontane yoke’ (Kingsley 1877, 165). He was writing at a time when ‘racial attitudes in Britain, Germany and elsewhere in Northern Europe began to reify previous ethnic and linguistic differences and subsume them under the category of race’, ‘as Teutonic qualities became valorized as closest to Aryan origin’ (Ganim 2005, 30). Race, gender and religion are intimately fused in his ambitious long-range connection of the English Reformation with Henry II’s twelfth-century attempts to assert the crown’s authority against the Pope’s, focussed on his confrontation with Thomas Becket (Simmons 1990, 113-139), and before that with the world of early Scandinavian Christianity, ‘when the old fierceness of the worshippers of Thor and Odin was tempered, without being effeminated, by the Faith of the “White Christ”’ (Kingsley 1875, 66). The accession of Henry II in 1154 is the last historical event in Kingsley’s novel, well after Hereward’s death, c. 1072. Henry is hailed by Hereward’s Norman successor, another descendant of Northern sea-rovers, as ‘“an English king [to] head the English people”’, one who will ‘“understand these Englishmen, and know what stout and trusty prudhommes they are all, down to the meanest serf, when once one can humor their sturdy independent tempers."’ (Kingsley 1902, II. 262). In Kingsley’s master narrative of European history, outlined in many essays, the Teuton honesty and courage of the English mitigate the dangerous effects of their necessary exposure to ‘Roman’ learning and artfulness, as part of a providential plan for the nation and the world. Kingsley’s view of the role of God in world history is stronger than for most commentators of the period, but the racialised discourse through which it is mediated, as set out in his essay ‘The Strategy of Providence’, published as Lecture XII in The Roman and the Teuton, was quite commonplace. (Kingsley 1875; Oergel 1998, 158-171). In his account, God, working through ‘the laws of Nature’, but involved in the slightest accidents of history, ‘enabled our race [the Teutons] to conquer in the most vast and important campaign the world has ever seen’ (Kingsley 1875, 292). Teutons were permitted to conquer the Western Roman Empire, but the effort left them exhausted and disunited for centuries, until the time of Charlemagne. In this dangerous period the rise of Islam and the ‘Saracenic invasion’ prevented the Eastern Roman Empire from asserting its power over them, and so ‘saved Europe and our race’, a vital matter, because ‘the welfare of the Teutonic race is the welfare of the world’ (Kingsley 1875, 305). It is in this overall racial context, which is simultaneously a religious context, that Kingsley’s personal adaptation of Darwinian evolutionary theory in Hereward has greatest cultural and political resonance. In effect, Kingsley's application of the theory reduced the complications Darwin caused to traditional forms and understandings of human emotional development, because in it ‘the laws of nature’ still operate in direct obedience to an omnipotent Creator. As Kingsley wrote to Darwin in 1859: I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development into all forms needful pro tempore & pro loco, as to believe that He required a fresh act of inter-vention to supply the lacunas wh he himself had made. I question whether the former be not the loftier thought. (DCP, LETT 2534.xml. ) Applying this belief to human history, Hereward the Wake treats long-term historical developments as part of an inevitable and natural process in which all behaviour is symptomatic of the confluence of racial and environmental forces. A further ‘struggle’, it is implied, is to balance the benefits of civilisation, which are both civil and moral, with its inherent degenerative dangers for the race: In the savage struggle for life, none but the strongest, healthiest, cunningest, have a chance of living, prospering, and propagating their race. In the civilized state, on the contrary, the weakliest and the silliest, protected by law, religion, and humanity, have chance likewise, and transmit to their offspring their own weakliness or silliness. (Kingsley 1902, I. 1-2) Kingsley’s acceptance of evolutionary theory as an enhancement of traditional creationist beliefs provides a modern discourse for his existing views on race, land and gender, but in articulating that he resists the biological and physiological universalism of emotional origins and expression, in both humans and animals, that had been suggested in Darwin’s earlier work. (The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals would not appear till 1872, six years after Hereward). Kingsley’s initial description of Hereward emphasises instead his specialness – the ‘race’ and strength that give him right to rule – and also introduces a specifically cultural factor, Hereward’s lack of a certain grace, both human and divine: His face was of extraordinary beauty, save that the lower jaw was too long and heavy, and that his eyes wore a strange and almost sinister expression ... He was short, but of immense breadth of chest and strength of limb; while his delicate hands and feet and long locks of golden hair marked him of most noble, and even, as he really was, of ancient royal race. (Kingsley 1902, I. 25-26) Kingsley’s emphasis on ‘royal race’ reflects the former Christian Socialist’s greater class conservatism by the time of the novel’s writing (Norman 1987, 53-57). Yet as a Lowlander, of the more settled Britain, Hereward ‘knows of no natural force greater than himself’, so his greatest danger is the lack of broadening experiences – which the plot will soon offer him – because ‘he has little or nothing around him to refine or lift up his soul, and unless he meet with a religion and with a civilization which can deliver him, he may sink into ... dull brutality’ (Kingsley 1902, I. 3). Hereward moves naively at first, more cannily later on, but always naturally, through a political landscape in which violence is a constant, impossible to tame or to avoid, and where the strong man must make his own rules. Contact with continental civilisation, learned the hard way through mercenary wars and the Norman invasion, benefits the young man as it eventually does the whole nation: ‘Perhaps by no other method could England, and, with England, Scotland, and in due time Ireland, have become partakers of that classic civilization and learning, the fount whereof, for good and for evil, was Rome and the Pope of Rome’ (Kingsley 1902, I. 9). Kingsley despises celibate monastic culture on religious and gender grounds, and Ireland on racial and religious grounds, and so blanks here the existence of the pre-Conquest insular Latinate culture that had seen Celts convert his Teutons to Christianity. So although he considers William’s taking of England, backed by the Pope, an evil in itself, military invasion, whether of England by the Normans, or of Scotland and Ireland by post-Conquest England, is seen as the necessary method to transmit new and beneficial cultural influences. Nevertheless, there is a constant need to assert English exceptionalism – ‘sturdy independent tempers’ – within the sphere of wider continental influence. Unlike the earlier twelfth-century Gesta Herewardi, Kingsley’s main source, his novel allows little sense of ‘Hereward’s final integration into the political, legal and social, multi-ethnic community’ (Bremner 2007, 42) because it defines and privileges a narrower ‘real’ English community on specific racial, and incipiently religious, grounds. Certainly, ‘Englishness’ has obtained a broader political, cultural and emotional repertoire than before, but has kept the essential ‘old’ and innate characteristics that will keep its ‘true’ nature mono-ethnic and mono-confessional. Hereward the Wake can be seen as an attempt to reconcile two contrary demands in Kingsley’s mind – the evolutionary need for raw strength and vitality, and the civilisational and moral need for order and social utility – by mapping a vision of large-scale historical change onto the youth, maturity and old age of the hero, as he progresses from Viking brat into life as a more cultured and sensitive married man, and finally into obsolescence, unfit for the changed requirements of the times and the new environment. Hereward registers evolutionary change on a personal level. His non-reflexive, instinctual emotional life is slowly modified into a set of more self-consciously managed and discriminating behaviours. As a young man he is ‘a true pattern of the half-savage hero of those rough times, capable of all vices except cowardice, and capable, too, of all virtues save humility’ (Kingsley 1902, I. 61). Then, as his life experience keeps on course with the development of the English race, he learns French refinement through love, and finds a purpose more noble in life than ranging land and sea, a ruffian among ruffians, seeking for glory amid blood and flame. The idea of chivalry, of succoring the weak and the opprest ... the dim dawn of purity, gentleness, and the conquest of his own fierce passions. (Kingsley 1902, I. 89) As the active helper of the weak, and as one who can be conquered only by himself, Hereward, in learning love and gentleness, avoids the possible stigma of effeminacy. Kingsley may ‘question … the foundations upon which the military code is built’ (Peck 1998, 127), but he embraces its violence processually – both as the training ground of manly strength, and as the indirect means by which the nation’s avatar can broaden his horizons and receive an emotional education, finally tending towards ‘a conquest of his own fierce passions’ that is a feature of many a Victorian Bildungsroman. The process recreates him as a proto-modern man. By the end of the novel, Hereward is a superannuated figure, his stage in the civilising process played out. A change has come in the requirements of the race: ‘war and disorder, ruin and death, cannot last forever. ... And then the true laws of God's universe, peace and order, usefulness and life, will reassert themselves’ (Kingsley 1902, II. 259). Kingsley may also have in mind here the post-Conquest growth of professionalised central administrative and judicial systems that eventually directed English emotional loyalties to the state rather than the individual lord (Strayer 1970, 36-46). But although Hereward makes his peace with William, he is not fitted to be a courtier or state agent, as if anticipating Norbert Elias’s civilising trajectory (Elias 1978). In the end he ‘serves his people better in death’ (Wawn 2000, 319), but his ‘spirit’ remains in legend to guide following ages: above them, and around them, and in them, destined ... to mould them into a great nation, and the parents of still greater nations in lands as yet unknown, brooded the immortal spirit of Hereward, now purged from all earthly dross, even the spirit of Freedom, which can never die. (Kingsley 1902, 258) Seen in this light, the violence of the Middle Ages, often condemned by Enlightenment and nineteenth-century historians as barbaric, is saluted as part of the vital youth of the nation, made acceptable when it has later been ‘purged’. Hereward’s violent career shows the English ‘going through a stage’, crude in itself, needing development, but manly and necessary if a free country and an empire are going to be the end results. A comforting implication of that evolutionary view of history is that later British ages must have actually solved and superseded, along with the effete monks, the opposite problem of unruly violence that Hereward has exemplified in his own times. A further outcome is a denial of Walter Scott’s influential idea, as promoted in Ivanhoe (1820), and with contemporary Scottish-English relations in mind, that post-Conquest England eventually achieved a successful racial mixture, like the English language itself ‘in which the speech of the victors and the vanquished have been so happily blended together’ (Scott 2000, 17). For Kingsley, instead, the ‘race’ and language of the ‘Teuton’ English have conquered others and left them behind. There is even ‘a positioning of virility in the language itself’, especially through Nordic influences (Stitt 1999, 34). Even though the invasion has brought educational benefits, ‘Latin does not belong’ in English, and ‘Norman French, too, appears to be superimposed, unnatural’ (Stitt 1999, 32). In emotional terms, the prompt to readers is to be proud of their racial achievement but justly to fear foreign influence from regions and spheres of influence classed as ‘Roman’ (Catholic, learned and crafty) rather than ‘Teuton’ (proto-Protestant, instinctual, true-hearted and manly). Kingsley’s triple appeal to race, religion and gender in interpreting history extends to his attitude to historical sources, which he values, more or less, according to how they mediate the ‘facts’ that ‘all along were patent to the British nation’. While he makes some allowance for the inevitable credulity and superstition of earlier ages, and admits a necessary recourse to imagination where the record does not survive, his complete confidence in the existence of continuing racial and religious types makes the process of filling in the gaps easy. Because the passage of time makes so little difference to the basic picture, Kingsley himself, as true English mediator of history, can be a fully competent judge of the medieval world, as of the modern world. There are frequent moves from the middle ages to the nineteenth century to note modern instances of continuing racial characteristics, including the age-old superiority of the Teuton to the Celt. On Hereward’s travels amongst the Cornish, whom Kingsley imagines as descended from ‘ancient Phoenecian colonists’, his ‘hot old Punic’ host, named Hannibal, has ‘thin Punic lips’ and ‘the old Punic treachery in his heart’ (Kingsley 1902, I. 109). Kingsley also argues that the defeat of the Danes by Brian Boru at Clontarf in 1014 – a key event in Irish nationalist consciousness – was simply a matter of one Norse family overcoming another, and that Ireland had greatly benefited from its Viking visitors (Kingsley 1902, I. 91-93). To discredit the favoured Irish (‘Milesian’) version of Clontarf, he invents in Hereward a bard, Teague Macmurrough – ‘teague’ being a term of abuse for an Irish Catholic – with a scornful reference to the work of Thomas Moore (1779-1852), ‘another Irish bard whose song was even more sweet, and his notions of Irish history even more grotesque’ (Kingsley 1902, I. 94). The argument over historiography has a wider political scope: that the Irish can never be trusted to tell their own history accurately supports the continuing necessity for them to be ruled by a superior people. The partisan nature of Kingsley’s application of evolutionary theory in Hereward becomes apparent in this context. Only Teutons, ‘our race’, have the power to evolve, and to possess their ‘old’ qualities in a good sense while suitably adapting to their present circumstances. Everyone else just remains the same. Their failure to change explains their subjection, or even extinction. Writing in the devastating aftermath of the mid-century Irish famine, Kingsley coolly describes the ‘inveterate fashion of lawless feuds which makes the history of Celtic Ireland from the earliest times one dull and aimless catalogue of murder and devastation, followed by famine and disease’ (Kingsley 1902, I. 98). Venturing into English history, with its massive ideological freight, brought out these tendencies in Kingsley much more than when he wrote as a naturalist, where his imagination is much freer from racial and religious anxiety. Gillian Beer, writing of The Water Babies (1863), speaks movingly of Kingsley’s ‘particular delight in the processes of transformation’, and in ‘the value of change, mutation, the new beginning – and this is part both of his Darwinian and of his socialist thinking’ (Beer 2000, 124). ‘Kingsley, like Darwin, enjoys the enlargement of kinship – the great family which must, in human terms, include the chimneyboy and the scientist’ (Beer 2000, 121). Hereward, under the pressure of religious and racialised demands to keep its story ‘on message’, breathes a very different spirit. Its version of evolution as applied to Kingsley’s version of long-range history actively suppresses the role of specific political, social and economic factors in historical causality – his take on the Irish famine is an example – and restricts a sense of kinship and the power of transformation to one chosen people. He actively resists diversity and complication of emotional attachment in these matters: Others simply cannot have a ‘new beginning’. In effect, there is little interest in specific scientific observation in Hereward. Since everything in history is held to be symptomatic of continuing laws of nature, evolution features mainly as an analogy for long-term racial success and failure in terms already drawn from other existing areas of ideology. Non-white races also had their evolutionary place, and some also exhibited a failure to change which doomed them to extinction: ‘The Black People of Australia cannot take in the Gospel. … All attempts to bring them to a knowledge of the true God have as yet failed utterly … Poor brutes in human shape … they must perish off the face of the earth like brute beasts.’ (Kingsley 1880, 414-417) In making Hereward, Kingsley drew on a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as well as the Domesday Book, and other histories, chronicles and romances in English, Latin and French. The early twelfth-century Gesta Herewardi by Leofric the priest, more a romance than a history, was the chief source (Roffe 2004; Gesta 2000, 634-35). But Kingsley changed the emphases of the text to a large extent, especially in relation to monasticism. Most contrary to his gender and religious politics, the Gesta details reports made to King William of free-spirited monks in the Isle of Ely who have ‘“risked endangering themselves rather than be reduced to servitude”’ and ‘“although monks, … had frequently undertaken deeds of valour with Hereward”’ (Swanton 2000, 651-53). Kingsley blanks this material. He does take from the Gesta the story that Hereward seeks knighthood from a monk, Brand, Abbot of Peterborough, because ‘he wished almost all those serving him and under his rule to be knighted by monks’ (Swanton 2000, 643), but quite independently of the source he introduces earlier episodes that colour this episode very differently. In his version, Abbot Brand is Hereward’s uncle, a fiery former Norse warrior, whom he treats as totally different from all other monks. The boy Hereward vows future vengeance on Peterborough Abbey because the monks try to discipline him: ‘they would have flogged us, – me, the Earl's son, – me, the Viking's son, – me, the champion, as I will be yet, and make all lands ring with the fame of my deeds, as they rung with the fame of my forefathers, before they became the slaves of monks. …. Do you think I would not have burned Peterborough minster over your head before now, had it not been for Uncle Brand's sake?’ (Kingsley 1902, I. 28). All this backstory is set up by Kingsley as a transformative context for one of the few widely-agreed historical facts of Hereward’s life: that he forced Peterborough Abbey by burning, and looted it with Danish allies, who took much of the property back to Denmark. The Gesta merely says: ‘And laying waste the whole town with fire, they plundered all the treasures of the church and chased the abbot, although he and his men managed to escape by hiding themselves’ (Swanton 2000, 661). In Kingsley, the episode is heavily mediated through the related discourses of religion and masculinity. Hereward’s long-promised vengeance strikes the monastery, but Hereward himself acts as the protector of the cowardly monks, now ruled by an arrogant and treacherous Norman abbot, whom he still saves from murder by the wild Danes: ‘In the midst of the great court were all the monks, huddled together like a flock of sheep, some kneeling, most weeping bitterly, after the fashion of monks’ (Kingsley 1902, II, 62). As a whole this course of incidents allows Hereward to model proper contempt for the Church of Rome and monkish unmanliness, but distinguishes him from both old Northern violence and Norman tyranny. He thus provides a model of the free and independent English proto-Protestant man that has grown from the wild East Anglian boy, keeping his good natural instincts but learning to moderate his passions. In Kingsley’s ‘selective reading’ of a medieval document, just as in Matthew Parker’s view three hundred years before (Parker 1566), the monks deserve all they get, as a judgement of God. A difference is that for Parker the deep motivation is religious, while for Kingsley ethnic concerns about ‘true’ Englishness are at least as important. As a Protestant English historian, Kingsley stages himself as a better mediator of the medieval past than Leofric the priest was able to be, improving on the Gesta by emphasising the enduring features of birth, race, religion and gender which must have been operative, according to his views, and which in his mind made the subsequent evolution of Protestant England’s history an inevitable affair. In the face of the massive social, technological and ideological changes facing mid-Victorian England, including the impact of evolutionary science on traditional religion, Hereward the Wake is part of Kingsley’s own struggle, both authoritative and anxious, against an invasion of ideas, to assert the continuance of an essential Englishness. One could easily think of Kingsley as a Victorian dinosaur, whose like has been left behind by radical changes in the cultural environment. Of his books only The Water Babies is still read; his assumption that a particular form of religion is the basis of all civil society no longer holds in his own country; the English language is acknowledged and celebrated for its continuing enrichment from other tongues. Yet I would argue that Kingsley is also surprisingly contemporary, as a multi-media publicist who promoted a popular image of English exceptionalism and cultural separatism from continental Europe that survives to the present day, and found full-throated voice in the victorious Brexit campaign of 2017. In the face of changing political reality, fierce Victorian and Edwardian emotional commitment to Empire eventually declined into a mild nostalgia, but English hostility towards immigrants and suspicion of control from external entities have kept their intensity. ‘Brussels’ has replaced Kingsley’s ‘Rome’ as the feared hidden hand on England’s destiny, and 'Eurocrats' have replaced monks, but the emotional processes of fear and anger that surround ideas of Englishness have remained much the same. Some of these feelings find expression in Paul Kingsnorth’s novel The Wake (2013), which can be understood in part as a new version of Kingsley’s story. The Wake voices its protagonist Buckmaster’s hatred of the Norman ‘ingengas’ – incomers / invaders – in a synthetic Old English that also rejects the heritage of contact with French, and asserts a Kingsleyan investment in the essential identity of earth, place and name – ‘erce [earth] was this ground itself was angland’ (Kingsnorth 2015, 53. Buckmaster, like Hereward, spends his life in search of the feeling of English ‘freedom’: ‘no man was ofer me no man will be ofer me’ (Kingsnorth 2015, 11). But his nostalgia for a pre-Christian natural religion and a pre-political version of English identity comes to look increasingly like a desperate underclass fantasy of superior belonging, based on an absolute (and very Kingsleyan) association of ‘erce’ (earth) with ‘folc’ (people) : ‘folcs has their place what was set when the world was macd and when they gan from that place to others then erce is ired [‘angered’] (Kingsnorth 2015, 208). Nevertheless, even in Buckmaster’s extreme xenophobia, there are exceptions made, especially for the Danes: an ingenga a denisc [Danish] man. and his men they set many fyrs and hams and tuns was beorned lic now and yet cnut [Cnut, reigned 1016-1035] when he cum he cum as an anglisc cyng and locd ofer us as one and he done well by us … but frenc [French] men they is not the same mor lic hunds they is than men (Kingsnorth 2015, 126) At least in Buckmaster’s unreliable mind, a hierarchy of races and a pattern of racial likenesses exists which strongly recall Kingsley’s own. One sees too an antagonism towards the ‘fuccan preostes’ that matches Kingsley’s disdain for the Catholic clergy. Ultimately, what distinguishes the two books, created 150 years apart, is that Kingsley’s racial and environmental essentialism is made a prolegomena to the rise of English institutions and empire, whereas Kingsnorth, abandoning traditional politics and alienated from the contemporary English mainstream, looks to the earth itself for meaning, identity and consolation. Kingsley sees the pre-Conquest era as a raw but vital beginning, Kingsnorth as the site of a lost and violated integrity. Yet in terms of the emotions – the particular attachments of love, hate, hope and fear that colour their mediation of the English past – the resemblances between their books are as striking as the differences. At least in these respects, it may be that late modernity has not made a great difference to popular nationalism, and that earlier emotional apprehensions of Englishness can readily re-emerge when circumstances permit.