Discord Consensus

Grattan thus manages to give ideological consistency to the shift in
British opinion that saw the Whigs, who assumed power in the very year
of the Belgian revolution, ratify and guarantee the existence of a new
state created through a revolution against a key British ally on the continent.
It is of course tempting to see Grattan as simply toeing the British
line through its twists and turns, but his appeal to a patriot discourse
of national freedom, religious toleration and civic rights remained fairly
consistent through both versions of the History. Whereas the first version
allied those values closely with the mainly Dutch heroes of the revolt
against Spain, the second version could recognise those same values in
the Belgian revolutionaries of 1830, and even project them back into earlier
forms of Belgian resistance against foreign (mostly Austrian) rulers.
Despite the ‘questionable commencement and turgid progress’ of
the revolution, Grattan praises the Belgian ‘patriots’ who took charge
of the movement ‘to form themselves into a separate and independent
nation’ under a constitutional monarch (1833: 413). 40 Their initially
peaceful efforts to vent Belgian grievances made sure that ‘the people,
urged on by their patriot or priestly leaders’ first ‘showed infinite
moderation in the remedial measures they pursued’ (1833: 397) –​it
was only when they were met with the King’s obstinacy that discontent
boiled over into insurrection. Grattan also details the events that
led to that ‘extraordinary union between the liberals and the catholics’
(1833: 397) against King William, who managed to alienate both
constituencies. That alliance generally puzzled foreign opinion, but it
seemed less strange to Irish patriots who, from Henry Grattan to the
Whig supporters of Daniel O’Connell’s Emancipation campaign, sought
ways of including a Catholic majority into a civic culture that was originally
defined by freedom-​loving Protestants. 41 Far from trying to read
the newly independent Belgians as quasi-​Protestants in a ‘little England
on the continent’, as later British commentators often did, 42 the Irish
Grattan does not play down Belgian Catholicism, but traces its paradoxical
influence on the development of a Belgian national consciousness
that found its expression in the liberal constitution adopted by the newly
independent state.
The revised version of the History does this chiefly by modifying
its account of the Southern Provinces during the eighteenth century.
Whereas chapters dealing with earlier periods were left practically
unchanged, the chapter on the eighteenth century was expanded to
elaborate on the condition of the Southern Netherlands under Austrian
rule. Remarkably, Grattan now sketches national feelings in the Belgian
provinces which his 1830 edition made no mention of. Both editions
A twice-told tale of a (dis)united kingdom 51