Discord Consensus

will leave it to its readers to draw any contemporary lessons, it will map
the ideological complexities, discursive twists and publishing ironies
that made it possible for Grattan to write two seemingly contradictory
accounts of the Low Countries within years of each other, and for those
accounts to influence the understanding of Low Countries history in the
wider world until the mid-​twentieth century. It will more specifically
shed new light on British (and Irish) perceptions of the ‘Netherlands’
during the transformative period around 1830, complementing recent
studies that, ignoring Grattan’s work, have focused on British views
of Belgium after the revolution. 3 Through its focus on a blind spot in
debates on Low Countries historiography, it will also seek to open those
debates onto other questions than those which traditionally arise from
tensions between Dutch and Belgian/​Flemish schools of thought regarding
‘Great Netherlandic’ history. 4
Background to Grattan’s History
Born around 1791 5 into an Irish Protestant family that boasted connections
to the Irish parliamentary leader Henry Grattan and to the
future duke of Wellington, Thomas Colley Grattan was educated for the
bar. He was, however, drawn first to a military career before becoming
a literary adventurer on the European mainland. Although he was
dismissed as an ‘arrant literary tradesman’ 6 by some of the prominent
authors whose company he sought, and was also criticised for stylistic
or narrative infelicities by some reviewers, Grattan managed to become
one of the bestselling authors of travel tales of the 1820s with his
High-​ways and By-​ways, or Tales of the Road-​Side, Picked Up in the French
Provinces. Financial success was short-​lived: after the spectacular failure
of his debut as a playwright on the London stage in 1827, Grattan
repaired with his wife and children to Brussels. Following a volume
of Traits of Travel (1829) which drew on his experiences in France and
the Low Countries, Grattan set out to reinvent himself as a disciple
of Walter Scott. Immersing himself in ‘local’ sources and archives, he
would eventually produce two historical novels set in the Low Countries
(The Heiress of Bruges in 1830 and Jacqueline of Holland in 1831), a
History of the Netherlands (1830, 1833) and a volume of Legends of the
Rhine and of the Low Countries (1832). The first of his historical romances
was hailed by a reviewer as the work of ‘the Flemish Sir Walter’. 7
Grattan left Brussels after his house was sacked during the 1830
revolution and first settled in The Hague, but he came back to Belgium
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DISCORD AND CONSENSUS IN THE LOW COUNTRIES, 1700–​2000