---
title: "Whig history"
chunk: 2/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:34:24.184729+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Subsequent views ===
Butterfield's formulation has subsequently received much attention and the kind of historical writing he argued against in generalized terms is no longer academically respectable. Despite its polemical success, Butterfield's celebrated book was criticized by David Cannadine as "slight, confused, repetitive and superficial". However, of the English tradition more broadly, Cannadine wrote:

It was fiercely partisan and righteously judgemental, dividing the personnel of the past into the good and the bad. And it did so on the basis of the marked preference for liberal and progressive causes, rather than conservative and reactionary ones ... Whig history was, in short, an extremely biased view of the past: eager to hand out moral judgements, and distorted by teleology, anachronism and present-mindedness.
E. H. Carr in What Is History? (1961) gave Butterfield's book the backhanded compliment of being "a remarkable book in many ways" noting that "though it denounced the whig interpretation over some 130 pages, it did not... name a single whig except Fox, who was no historian, or a single historian save Acton, who was no whig".
Michael Bentley analyses Butterfield's whig theory as referring to a canon of 19th-century historians in and of England (such as William Stubbs, James Anthony Froude, E. A. Freeman, J. R. Green, W. E. H. Lecky, Lord Acton, J. R. Seeley, S. R. Gardiner, C. H. Firth and J. B. Bury) that in fact excludes few except Thomas Carlyle. The theory identifies the common factors and Bentley comments:

Carlyle apart, the so-called Whigs were predominantly Christian, predominantly Anglican, thinkers for whom the Reformation supplied the critical theatre of enquiry when considering the origins of modern England. When they wrote about the history of the English constitution, as so many of them did, they approached their story from the standpoint of having Good News to relate ... If they could not have found the grandeur that they developed had they been writing half a century earlier, neither could they have supported their optimism had they lived to endure the barbarisms of the Somme and Passchendaele.
Roger Scruton takes the theory underlying whig history to be centrally concerned with social progress and reaction, with the progressives shown as victors and benefactors. According to Victor Feske, there is too much readiness to accept Butterfield's classic formulation from 1931 as definitive.

== British whig history ==
In Britain, whig history is a view of British history that sees it as a "steady evolution of British parliamentary institutions, benevolently watched over by Whig aristocrats, and steadily spreading social progress and prosperity". It described a "continuity of institutions and practices since Anglo-Saxon times that lent to English history a special pedigree, one that instilled a distinctive temper in the English nation (as whigs liked to call it) and an approach to the world [which] issued in law and lent legal precedent a role in preserving or extending the freedoms of Englishmen".
Paul Rapin de Thoyras's history of England, published in 1723, became "the classic Whig history" for the first half of the eighteenth century. Rapin claimed that the English had preserved their ancient constitution against the absolutist tendencies of the Stuarts. However, Rapin's history lost its place as the standard history of England in the late 18th century and early 19th century to that of David Hume.
According to Arthur Marwick, however, Henry Hallam was the first whig historian, publishing Constitutional History of England in 1827, which "greatly exaggerated the importance of 'parliaments' or of bodies [whig historians] thought were parliaments" while tending "to interpret all political struggles in terms of the parliamentary situation in Britain [during] the nineteenth century, in terms, that is, of Whig reformers fighting the good fight against Tory defenders of the status quo".

=== David Hume ===
In The History of England (1754–1761), Hume challenged whig views of the past and the whig historians in turn attacked Hume; but they could not dent his history. In the early 19th century, some whig historians came to incorporate Hume's views, dominant for the previous fifty years. These historians were members of the New Whigs around Charles James Fox (1749–1806) and Lord Holland (1773–1840) in opposition until 1830 and so "needed a new historical philosophy". Fox himself intended to write a history of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, but only managed the first year of James II's reign. A fragment was published in 1808. James Mackintosh then sought to write a Whig history of the Glorious Revolution, published in 1834 as the History of the Revolution in England in 1688.

=== Thomas Babington Macaulay ===
Hume still dominated English historiography, but this changed when Thomas Babington Macaulay entered the field, utilising Fox and Mackintosh's work and manuscript collections. Macaulay's History of England was published in a series of volumes from 1848 to 1855. It proved an immediate success, replacing Hume's history and becoming the new orthodoxy. As if to introduce a linear progressive view of history, the first chapter of Macaulay's History of England proposes:

The history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.While Macaulay was a popular and celebrated historian of the whig school, his work did not feature in Butterfield's 1931 Whig Interpretation of History. According to Ernst Breisach, "his style captivated the public as did his good sense of the past and firm whiggish convictions".

=== William Stubbs ===
William Stubbs (1825–1901), the constitutional historian and influential teacher of a generation of historians, was the author of the extremely influential Constitutional History of England (published between 1873 and 1878) and became a crucial figure in the later survival and respectability of whig history. According to Reba Soffer,