Discord Consensus

centuries, dwelling on the revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs –​an
unsurprising choice, given the contemporary popularity of the period
among local and foreign commentators on Low Countries history (to
which we return), and the fact that Grattan’s historical novel The Heiress
of Bruges, also published in 1830, was subtitled ‘a tale of the year 1600’. 16
Much of the eighteenth century is covered by a long, single chapter that
shuttles back and forth between the Northern and Southern Netherlands.
The French period takes up the penultimate chapter, before a short section
concludes the book with Napoleon’s defeats and the inauguration
of William I as king of the reunited Netherlands, which now ‘form an
arch of common strength, able to resist the weight of such invasions as
had perpetually perilled, and often crushed, their separate independence’
(351). Grattan’s support for the new Orange dispensation thus
becomes obvious in the closing pages –​his decision to go no further than
1815 may partly owe to a relative lack of usable historical sources about
recent events, as compared with the riches on which he could draw for
earlier times, but it also allowed him to sidestep the difficulties which,
as a Brussels-​based observer, he could not help but notice. Like most foreign
observers, though, Grattan seems to have been unaware that sporadic
Belgian complaints could quickly coalesce into a full-​blown revolt,
and stuck to the British hope that William’s United Kingdom could go on
fulfilling its role within Europe. 17
Grattan’s stance oscillates between that of a semi-​professional,
detached historian, and a more resolute admiration for a (Protestant)
love of freedom and independence. Writing at a time when the historical
profession in Europe was only just emerging as a full-​blown discipline,
and was still far from thoroughly institutionalised in British
universities, 18 Grattan still gave his work the features of a ‘scholarly’
approach. He regularly acknowledges sources in footnotes, although his
references are limited to names and occasionally titles, while page numbers
are often missing. Passages where footnotes appear can turn out
to be loose translations of Grattan’s sources. Compare Grattan on late
eighteenth-​century Belgium: ‘The whole combinations of European policy
were staked on the question of the French possession of this country’
(317), and the Abbé de Pradt’s De la Belgique depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1794:
‘défendre la Belgique contre la France, ou lui abandonner cette superbe
possession, changeait toute la combinaison de la politique européenne’
(7–​8). In this respect, Grattan resembles the ‘eighteenth-​century compilers’
who abridged previous work and ‘added snippets of information
from other sources’. 19 His History still partakes of an eighteenth-​century
historiography where ‘the idea of authorship was not yet definitely
44
DISCORD AND CONSENSUS IN THE LOW COUNTRIES, 1700–​2000