Discord Consensus

658–65; George Clement Boase, ‘Grattan, Thomas Colley (1792– 1864)’, Dictionary
of National Biography, 1885–1900, vol. 22; Francis Clarke, ‘Grattan, Thomas Colley’.
Dictionary of Irish Biography http://dib.cambridge.org; Thomas Colley Grattan, Beaten
Paths; And Those who Trod Them, 2 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1862); Raphaël
Ingelbien and Vincent Eelen, ‘Literaire bemiddelaars in bewogen tijden. Thomas Colley
Grattan, zijn bronnen en vertalers in de (ex- )Nederlanden (1828– 1840)’, Tijdschrift voor
Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 128 (2012); Rolf Loeber and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, A
Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650–1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006). Grattan’s date of birth
is sometimes given as 1792.
6 Quoted in Boase, ‘Grattan, Thomas Colley’.
7 Anon., ‘Living Literary Characters, no. VII: Thomas Colley Grattan’, The New Monthly
Magazine 32 (1831), 77–​80 (77).
8 For a recent discussion of his historical novels, see Ingelbien and Eelen, ‘Literaire bemiddelaars
in bewogen tijden’.
9 Bagot’s skills as British ambassador to Brussels and The Hague are praised in the second
edition of the History (401) and in Grattan’s autobiography Beaten Paths (vol. 2, 234–​5).
10 See Van Sas for a detailed account of Britain’s role in the affairs of the United Kingdom of
the Netherlands, N.C.F. Van Sas, Onze Natuurlijkste Bondgenoot: Nederland, Engeland en
Europa, 1813–1831 (Groningen, 1985).
11 For a sense of how flexible such travelogues were in their references to the Low Countries,
see Anon., Rambles abroad, or, Observations on the continent: made during the summers of the
years 1816, 1817, 1818, in excursions through part of the north of France, the Low Countries,
along the Rhine and the Prussian rontier (London: J. Carpenter & Son, 1823); James
Mitchell, A Tour through Belgium, Holland, along the Rhine, and through the North of France,
in the Summer of 1816; in which is Given an Account of the Civil and Ecclesiastical Polity, and
of the System of Education of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with Remarks on the Fine Arts,
Commerce, and Manufactures (London: T. and J. Allman, 1819).
12 Anon. ‘The Netherlands’. Monthly Magazine, or, British Register 10.58 (Oct 1830): 434.
13 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell, 1931); John
Burrow, A Liberal Descent. Victorian Historians and the British Past (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981).
14 In the rest of this chapter, references to the original edition will be indicated parenthetically
as page numbers. References to the revised second edition will be indicated parenthetically
as ‘1833: page number’. The original edition is, Thomas Colley Grattan, The History of the
Netherlands (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1830). The revised edition
is Thomas Colley Grattan, The History of the Netherlands. 2nd edition, revised (London:
Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1833).
15 For a contrast between those definitions of national character, see Joep Leerssen, National
Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 125–6.
16 The considerable attention devoted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Grattan’s
History qualifies François’s claim that the ‘exclusive focus on Belgium’s sixteenth century’
among British writers was ‘a typical post-​1830 phenomenon’ and that ‘before 1830 [. . .] all
centuries got their fair share of attention’ (A Little Britain on the Continent, 103).
17 Van Sas, Onze Natuurlijkste Bondgenoot.
18 Ilaria Porciani and Lutz Raphael, eds. Atlas of European Historiography. The Making of a
Profession, 1800–2005 (London: Palgrave, 2010); John Kenyon, The History Men. The
Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance. 2nd edition (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1993).
19 See G.J. Schutte, ‘The History of the Dutch Republic interpreted by non-Dutch authors’, in
A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (eds.), Clio’s Mirror: Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands
(Zutphen: Walburg, 1985), 120. Grattan’s possible source in the example given is De Pradt’s
De la Belgique, depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1794 (Bruxelles: Lecharlier, 1820).
20 Tom Verschaffel, ‘The Modernization of Historiography in 18th-​Century Belgium’, History
of European Ideas 31 (2005), 135–​46 (138).
21 Anon., ‘The Netherlands’, Monthly Magazine, or, British Register 10.58 (Oct 1830), 434.
22 Unsurprisingly, Vandervynckt’s Histoire des Troubles des Pays Bas is the source Grattan
alludes to most, given his own focus on the Dutch Revolt. Grattan’s various sources have
been mapped by Jolien Raskin, whose MA thesis must be acknowledged as providing the
groundwork for our paragraphs on Grattan’s use of previous ‘Dutch’ histories.
NOTES
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