Discord Consensus

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A twice-​told tale of a (dis)united
kingdom: Thomas Colley Grattan’s
History of the Netherlands
(1830, 1833)
Raphaël Ingelbien and Elisabeth Waelkens
In discussions of Low Countries historiography, Thomas Colley Grattan’s
History of the Netherlands has remained a blind spot, despite its numerous
reprints in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First published
shortly before the Belgian revolution, and revised a couple of years after
the break-​up of King William’s United Kingdom, Grattan’s work can shed
new light on the challenges and pitfalls of ‘great-​Netherlandic history’ in
an international context. After sketches of the biographical, discursive
and political contexts in which Grattan’s History emerged, the different
versions published in the 1830s are compared. Grattan’s revisions show
how his opportunism and his Irish patriot perspective allowed him to
adapt British Whig historiography to the new realities that followed the
creation of Belgium, thus providing discursive legitimacy to shifts in
British foreign policy on the Low Countries. The complex afterlife that
Grattan’s History led through translation and re-​edition is then considered,
giving further insights into the malleability of his version of Low
Countries history to different agendas.
Introduction
In 1826, King William I of the Netherlands invited historians to take up
a challenge: the production of a new history that, drawing on the wealth
of archives available in his dominions, would embrace the destinies of
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