Neasa MacErlean writes: It is only a hundred years since most leading British historians regarded Ireland as a country with no history. That was to change within a couple of decades, but those years in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s were unstable ones, and the struggle to demonstrate Ireland’s historical character took place against a backdrop of fear and violence. Today’s reshaping of the international order puts other countries in the perilous no man’s land that Ireland used to inhabit.
Robert Dudley Edwards (my grandfather) and Theo Moody were the two young historians who discovered this shocking lack of knowledge in the heart of academe when they enrolled at London’s Institute of Historical Studies. The institute was one of the world’s most sophisticated intellectual centres, founded within London University in 1921 to train the top rung of postgraduate historians. Dudley, as he was widely known, and Moody were the first two Irishmen to attend when they joined in the early 1930s. Another reason to go there was the availability of state records in the British Library which were no longer extant in Dublin, having been lost to the 1922 fire in the Four Courts.
Dudley discovered the truth about the British version of Irish history the day he first met his supervisor, Canon Claude Jenkins. Soon to be elevated to the post of Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford University, the eccentric Anglican clergyman told his new student that he knew nothing about Irish history – but he added, significantly and helpfully, that he could teach him about document analysis. This was the best the Dubliner could hope for, and he gratefully accepted. Dudley’s gratitude was in contrast to the response of another of the canon’s students five years later, Hugh Trevor-Roper, with whom Jenkins had a rancorous relationship. When Dudley finished his thesis, which formed the basis for his 1935 book Church and State in Tudor Ireland, he thanked Jenkins in the preface for having read ‘a great portion’ of it. The doctorate ran to 872 pages, twice the usual length, but it is nevertheless remarkable that even his supervisor did not complete it.
Back in Ireland from 1933, Drs Dudley Edwards and Moody began collaborating on the template they had drawn up in London. Those plans to create the infrastructure of history – academic journal, societies, international affiliations and so on – had taken shape in the kitchen of one of the large London hotels where the two washed dishes to help pay their way. A sense of urgency drove them in this quest to introduce ‘scientific history’, one based on fact, not myth. Just as the Palestinians and the Ukrainians could testify now, the future of a state with an obscure historical pedigree can be compromised when the great powers confront each other and, also, when they later step back. A state with ‘no history’ can be seen by larger neighbours as a barbaric vacuum waiting to be filled with culture and the conqueror’s religion. Even Trinity College Dublin – where Moody would in 1940 become the Erasmus Smith Professor of Modern History – had shunned Irish history, with the first lecture on that subject being delivered as late as 1906.
One of the main aims of the duo in the 1930s was to join the international body the CISH (Comité International des Sciences Historiques) before war broke out. They managed this in August 1938, in a tense CISH meeting in Zurich which had been made more complicated by the Anschluss (Germany’s annexation of Austria) five months before. But becoming a member of the CISH enabled Ireland to be taken seriously by other nations and to make inroads into demonstrating that the country did indeed have a creditable past. Also understanding the critical role of a state’s historical narrative, the wartime taoiseach Éamon de Valera committed government funds to the CISH project and, as a consequence, developed a long-term collaboration with Dudley. Ireland’s admittance to the CISH made it easier for University College Dublin (UCD) to recruit prestigious external examiners – particularly Cambridge’s Herbert Butterfield. Such moves, and the establishment of the journal Irish Historical Studies, raised the standing of these history departments and the intellectual reputation of Ireland as a whole. And shortly before World War II ended, Dudley was given the chair of Modern Irish History at UCD.
At this stage the duumvirate was in a position to create the environment that would nail the truth about the existence of Irish history by training new generations of students who would research and write it. Both remained aware for the rest of their days of the void in understanding which had existed. Dudley would, in 1972, write with irony about ‘the great debate’ which used to exist ‘about whether Ireland had any history before Britain came to civilise her’. There were exceptions to this view – notably Herbert Butterfield and the philosopher-historian Michael Oakeshott – but Dudley fought the ‘no history’ battle throughout his life.
Far from being a history-free zone, Ireland was a kind of historical treasure trove. And Dudley would demonstrate this to his students by using the research of the Canadian historian Dr James F Kenney, a specialist in early Irish history. Dudley used to quote a passage from the Ontarian which began: ‘Nothing similar to the organised secular learning and literature of Ireland existed elsewhere in contemporary Western Europe …’ In fact Ireland contained ‘sources of the highest value to the student of proto-history either of Europe or of mankind’. The reasons for this accumulation of evidence included, said Kenney, Ireland’s ‘freedom from Roman domination’, the ‘absence of anti-national bias in her Church’, the existence of ‘literati’ perpetuating the ‘ancient tradition’, and the ‘relatively early application of writing to the vernacular language’. Not surprisingly, UCD history students were fascinated by discovering such insights into their own national roots. Professor James McGuire, for instance, who would become joint editor of the 2009 edition of the Dictionary of Irish Biography, found his vocation to the subject when studying Kenney with Dudley.
Persuading students at home of this rich heritage was a different matter from asking some of the British historians to accept a revised view of their smaller neighbour. Lewis Namier of Manchester University and Hugh Trevor-Roper appear to have retained their disdain. The conflict between Dudley and the latter was marked from their student days, as shown in their relationship with Canon Claude, and continued to bristle during their careers. Trevor-Roper, later to become Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, was a great hunter-fisher-walker; he liked to visit Connemara and other quiet spots, and extended that habit into his academic work. He had some acceptance that Ireland had a history but he regarded it as base metal. A Reformation specialist like Dudley, he was markedly anti-Catholic and would compare, as he put it, the stagnation of ‘the economic and social and intellectual life of the Roman Catholic countries’ with the arc on which ‘the Protestant countries bounded forward’. To his surprise, when he gave a lecture on this in Galway in 1961 his audience was unenthusiastic in response. Two years later he agreed to address UCD’s Historical Society, and stipulated that Robert Dudley Edwards should not be in the audience. He was disturbed to find the man himself, all six foot of him, not only there but challenging him at the end and describing him as ‘a hangover from an earlier age’. As well as entertaining the students, the fiery exchange showed how live and dangerous the fundamental issues of history still were.
Moody (1984) and Dudley (1988) died in the 1980s, but not before hundreds of academic and local historians were taking Irish history in new directions – including social, female, military and, nowadays, cliodynamic (forecasting into the future on past social trends). Roy Foster, the first Professor of Irish History in Oxford, said in 1986: ‘Ireland has for decades produced an almost embarrassing quantity of the very best historians.’ One particular strand developed out from a third Irish scientific historian, David B Quinn, who had arrived at the Institute soon after Moody and Dudley and collaborated with them until the end. Quinn, later Professor of Modern History at Liverpool and North Carolina Universities, and his student Nicholas Canny, produced a body of work that explained ‘a pattern of conquest’ when appropriating land from indigenous populations, whether in Tudor Ireland or America. We can now add modern Palestine to that list. Regarding the locals as barbarous with no recorded history and no proven legal rights makes it easier to justify bloody actions. President Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu might not have read Professor Canny’s famous essay ‘The Ideology of English Colonisation from Ireland to America’ but they would find much to emulate within it, even if not in the way the Galway professor intended. For instance, when apprising the plantation potential in Ulster, the first Earl of Essex wrote of the Gaelic Irish that ‘in the manner of their departure and breach of their faiths they have given me just cause to govern such as shall inhabit with us in the most severe manner’.
History is, perhaps, not just an academic subject. It is a matter of national security.
20/5/2024
Neasa MacErlean’s Telling the Truth is Dangerous: How Robert Dudley Edwards changed Irish history forever will be published by Tartaruga Books at £11.99 paperback on June 23rd.
