Forward into the Past Ian Hislop's Olden Days

When it comes to the past, we Britons are an emotional lot.

We venerate our olden days and have a distinct tendency

to get misty-eyed when thinking about how things used to be.

We even forge ahead by harking back.

In Britain,

if you want to do something new, it's best to claim that it's old.

Modern innovation is much more acceptable

if you present it as part of an ancient tradition,

backing this up by citing our time-honoured laws,

rights and liberties.

Other countries don't do this so much, preferring to appeal

to reason rather than precedent when attempting to move forward.

But we are a "small c" conservative country

in our culture and our politics.

And that's true EVEN when we're being quite radical.

Modern Britain's story has been one of progress -

the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Yet, it's curious that precisely when the country was a powerhouse

of modernity, so many of our artists, writers, architects

and even politicians were obsessed with going back to the Middle Ages.

And this is the paradox, that at times of incredible advancement,

we are inclined more than ever to look backwards.

When you come to think about it - which, being British,

we don't very much - this is pretty strange.

What I want to explore is why, as modern Britain emerged

and then grew to maximum strength and confidence in the 19th century,

so much of our progress was imaginatively fuelled

by the olden days.

Few British traditions appear to be more steeped in history

than the ancient ceremony of the Coronation.

But on April the 11th, 1689, a very strange Coronation

was celebrated here at Westminster Abbey.

Strange, because the previous king, James II, wasn't dead yet.

And a foreigner - a Dutchman - had, arguably, stolen the crown.

Most of us think that the last time Britain was invaded

was 1066 by William the Conqueror.

Few of us realise that we were also invaded in 1688

by William of Orange, who landed with a fleet

twice as big as the Spanish Armada.

This coup d'etat was dubbed "The Glorious Revolution".

And if you weren't aware of this great upheaval,

then THAT was the point.

William of Orange and his wife,

James II's own not very loyal daughter, became William and Mary -

England's only ever joint monarchs.

Their Coronation was filled with the characteristic

pomp and circumstance that had been going on for hundreds of years

and is still part of the spectacle at royal weddings today.

At the altar of the Abbey, they were presented

with the Sword of State and the flat-tipped,

appropriately-named, "pointless" sword.

The Earl of Bedford carried the Queen's Sceptre of the Dove,

and the Duke of Grafton was trusted with the Orb.

The royal couple then swore an oath which began,

"by the Law and Ancient Usage of this Realm",

declaring from the outset that this ceremony was rooted

in the venerable British past.

But all that ceremonial flummery was a disguise,

channelling tradition to present the new monarchs not as imposters,

but as natural successors to the throne.

James II's own parliament had plotted his removal

to end his autocratic Catholic reign,

and give Protestant Britain a Bill of Rights and a free press,

the beginnings of our long road to democracy.

The British throne had borne witness to a revolution almost overnight.

It was all change, but it was dressed up as business as usual.

Even the term "Glorious Revolution" had a specific agenda.

"Revolution" didn't mean violent change,

it meant returning to the same point in a circle.

So the way forward was to go back to the olden days.

For the next 100 years, these links to a solid past

sustained the nation and kept us rooted

as we built an empire and rose to greatness.

But by the late 18th century, a wave of revolution

was sweeping the globe.

Americans had just won a battle for independence.

The French were about to overthrow their monarchy and aristocracy.

These were new, forward-thinking societies

for a new, enlightened era - rational, not emotional.

What did this mean for Britain's future?

There were two very different thinkers who each believed

they had the answer. One was a radical.

A liberal-minded, Unitarian preacher named Richard Price.

And on the eve of the 101st anniversary

of the Glorious Revolution - November 4th, 1789 -

he gave a lecture that caused quite a stir.

Price's lecture was called

"A Discourse on the Love of Our Country",

which was a reassuringly patriotic title.

And he began by praising the events of 1688.

Without them, he argued, "Instead of being thus distinguished,

"we should have been a base people, groaning under the infamy

"and misery of Popery and slavery."

So far, so mainstream.

But he then went on to praise other, more turbulent revolutions,

particularly the one then taking place in France.

Price looked on the French Revolution with awe.

He spoke of kingdoms,

"breaking their fetters and claiming justice from their oppressors."

To him, it was a golden dawn of liberty and equality,

a brand-new nation built on rights and reason.

Surely Britain, too, should follow its lead?

But this was all too much

for politician and essayist Edmund Burke.

Burke was born into a wealthy Irish family,

but his heart was firmly rooted in old England.

He adopted as a national metaphor the great British oak,

an emblem of tradition, fortitude and endurance.

If there's one book that sets out the intellectual case

for the British love of the olden days, then it's this one -

"Reflections on the Revolution in France" by Burke,

written in 1790.

The French Revolution was a huge turning point for Burke,

and for the entire country.

When the Bastille had fallen, he'd originally written,

"England is gazing with amazement at a French struggle for liberty,

"not knowing whether to blame or to applaud."

With this book, he came down firmly on the side of blame

and he was determined to take the British public with him.

And its influence can be felt right down to today -

because what Burke's writing does is to identify, justify

and then champion what he calls "the temper of the people".

And for him, the British people are not radicals,

they are not revolutionaries, they do not believe in an ideal future.

Rather, they believe in an ideal past.

Burke portrays his fellow countrymen as fine,

strong and upstanding, rooted in the soil.

Troublemakers like Price, with their chirping about revolution,

are nothing but noisy and tiresome grasshoppers.

"Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern

"make the field ring with their importunate chink,

"whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow

"of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent,

"pray do not imagine that those who make the noise

"are the only inhabitants of the field; or that, after all,

"they are other than the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping,

"though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour."

And so by respecting and revering tradition, Britain's solid,

cud-chewing majority would defy the chattering classes,

ensuring there would be no bloody, French-style mob rule here.

But hang on, isn't this a bit hypocritical?

Burke was keen to praise OUR revolution in 1688.

How come that was glorious and yet this new one

a hundred years later was catastrophic?

The answer is not just because it's the French doing it,

it's because the French have started from Year Zero,

they've attempted to create a society from scratch.

Whereas OUR revolution was about turning the clock back,

about restoring the ancient values

that had made the country great for so long.

Over 200 years on, the repercussions of Burke's book are still with us,

not least, because as his most recent biographer has argued,

with his veneration of old England

he became the godfather of modern conservatism.

Burke is the first person to gather together into a coherent

body of thought ideas that we would now consider properly Conservative,

long before there was ever a Conservative Party in existence.

And those ideas include respect for tradition,

a feeling that political action must be cautious and reforming

rather than radical and revolutionary,

and therefore the one thing he is resolutely opposed to

is any kind of rationalism that would sweep away institutions

that already exist and which have proved their worth in history.

And do you think that is more than just defending the status quo?

I mean, why was he so popular in Britain?

Would this essentially backward-looking philosophy,

would this have worked anywhere else?

I think he... a lot of Burke is about framing

into a coherent body of thought instincts that people already have.

And I think the British in the end of the 18th century

suspected that there was something rather extraordinary

about this tiny island on the edge of Europe

creating an entire global empire.

And Burke was able to give them a way of thinking

about their own history and their own institutions that then sustained

this narrative for another, frankly, 200 years in many ways.

The flip side of that is that you start regarding the past

in a sort of misty-eyed way, which doesn't bear much scrutiny.

The idea that it happened at all in the past

is pretty much enough for us as a people, isn't it?

If it was there, then it must always have been there.

We're a little incautious about that, but we certainly

like the fact that if it's been there for a while,

then it has a wisdom that we generally respect,

and, I would argue, very rightly so.

Burke might have unearthed a deep-seated caution

in our national character, but you do still have to ask

what in essence was so problematic about liberty, reason and progress?

Burke was attacked even in his own day by pamphleteers

and radicals who saw him as a fogey, a reactionary,

a defender of the status quo.

Caricaturists depicted him as myopic, zealous,

a man with an enormous nose which he shoved into public life.

Here he is brandishing the symbols of the monarchy and the church

as a defence against the revolutionary Richard Price.

But no matter how powerful were the arguments of the home-grown

or foreign champions of the Enlightenment,

in Britain a sort of Burkean view prevailed, which was that

no matter how enthusiastic one might be about the possibilities

of the future, one had to conserve that which was best about the past.

As Burke himself put it, "They will not look forward to posterity

"who never look back to their ancestors."

Idolising a fond, rose-tinted English past was one thing.

But what if your ancestors were generally considered

as outlaws and brutes, as in the olden days in Scotland?

After its union with England in 1707,

Scotland had become a hotbed of bloody revolt,

with a fierce rebel force - the Jacobites - hell-bent

on restoring James II's deposed Stuart dynasty to power.

Of course, the magic of the olden days

is that if the real past is disagreeable,

you can romanticise, even completely re-invent one to suit.

The arch-genius of that was a local laird,

a lawyer and a romantic poet - Walter Scott.

And it's appropriate that Edinburgh's Scott Monument

towers over the country's capital, since with one tall story in 1814,

Scott reinvented Scotland's history and its identity for ever.

Waverley, often cited as the first historical novel,

is based on the actual events

of Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobite rebellion in 1745.

But the genius of Walter Scott is to employ history,

just as Edmund Burke had done, as a counter-revolutionary weapon.

Using the past not to create trouble, but to try and prevent it.

The hero, Edward Waverley, is an Englishman,

sent up north to crush the unruly Highlanders,

until he falls for a beautiful Jacobite named Flora.

He then joins Bonnie Prince Charlie's army,

but goes into hiding once they're defeated.

Eventually, he settles down with a nice lady named Rose

in a newly peaceful, unified Scotland.

So what Scott does

is turn the story of the violent Jacobite uprising on its head.

It becomes a glorious tale of rebellion,

told in defence of the status quo.

At the end of the novel, the hero, Waverley,

sees the error of his ways and comes down in favour

of stability, harmony and common sense.

His head and his heart are no longer divided, they're reconciled.

He becomes neither English nor Scottish, but British.

Scott added a subtitle to Waverley, calling it,

"'Tis Sixty Years Since" and what he's saying

is it was all a long time ago and this violent Jacobite rebellion

can now be put in the safe category of the olden days.

The theme of the novel is really reconciliation.

With so much of Scott's fiction are two strains in his own character,

-and temperamentally he was a Jacobite.

-Right.

He was in love with the idea of the Jacobite rising.

-Right, the romance of the Highlands.

-Yes. Intellectually, he wasn't.

And, you know, one of the things of Waverley,

and of Rob Roy too, is that the Highlanders are very attractive,

romantic, had noble qualities and so on, that it was admirable.

But they belonged to a world that is out of date.

So he was split?

He was split, undoubtedly. Head was saying one thing, heart another.

But what he saw was this was a way in which you asserted

the distinct identity of Scotland within the British culture.

That in order for the union to be happy and comfortable,

Scotland had to remain very Scottish.

He was so successful though, in a sense,

Britain became more Scottish.

I mean the love affair with the Highlands was remarkable, wasn't it?

Yes, yes. And the love affair with the Highlands

of the English aristocracy,

but also the English middle class. That this was a touch of wildness

and glamour and colour which was also completely safe by now.

By turning Scotland's past into a romantic, sanitised fantasy,

Scott brought the olden days to a much wider public than ever before.

A thousand copies of Waverley sold in the first two days alone.

As a result of this enormous popularity,

Scotland rapidly became a major tourist destination,

with Thomas Cook running package tours to capitalise on the fashion

for all things ancient and Highland.

BAGPIPES AND DRUMS PLAY

And thus was sealed the picturesque image of Scottish national identity

so dear to the hearts of tea towel and shortbread manufacturers.

Kilts. Clans. Tartans.

Bagpipes.

More bagpipes.

Even more bagpipes.

And they're all still out in force

at the annual Braemar Highland Gathering.

My father was Scottish, a civil engineer from Ayr.

And my grandfather was a headmaster, also in Ayr.

He fought in the First World War for the Highland Light Infantry,

in a kilt. He was one of those "devils in skirts".

So I do feel I'm a legitimate part of the Scottish diaspora.

And when I look at all this, all this mass celebration

of a sort of nationalism, I... I love it. It works for me.

But there is part of me, obviously a less sentimental part,

that wants to question it and wants to know just how much

of this is actually genuine history?

BAGPIPES PLAY

Colourful, rousing, feel-good,

this is the classic emotional appeal of the olden days.

Even our royal family can't resist getting tartaned up.

But killjoy historians would argue that this

is a triumph of invented tradition.

And, unsurprisingly, that invention is also the work of Walter Scott.

In 1822, he masterminded King George IV's visit to Scotland.

He organised the first ever Highland ball -

effectively a fancy dress party, since Scott insisted that,

"all gentlemen must be attired in their ancient Highland costume".

The fact was that few of the elite, Lowland guests

even had any Highland ancestry. So canny cloth manufacturers

invented hundreds of supposedly ancient clan tartans

almost overnight. And the cream of Scottish society,

not to mention the guest of honour, quite literally bought it.

The stage was set for the King himself,

who appeared in full tartan dressed as a clan chieftain.

He spent the equivalent in today's money of £100,000,

and he bought a hundred yards of tartan.

The vision of the King, however, was a bit ludicrous,

particularly as despite all that tartan,

he'd managed to create a kilt that was rather short.

One society lady there said, "Well, since he is going to spend

"such a short time with us, the more we see of him the better."

One detail which the portrait artist, David Wilkie,

had rather tactfully left out was that the King

was rather worried about the sight of his legs,

so he'd chosen to wear a pair of pink stockings underneath his kilt.

The vision of the King as an explosion of pinks and reds

was, clearly, quite laughable.

But, as is so often the way with British reinvention of tradition,

the effect was a bit ludicrous but it was incredibly successful.

STEAM TRAIN PUFFS

WHISTLE BLOWS

As the 19th century gathered speed,

Britain would modernise and change at an unprecedented rate.

For revolution WAS finally sweeping through the country -

the Industrial Revolution.

But steam engines, railways and factories

wouldn't just alter our way of life, they would radicalise it.

Politics, economics, society.

Previously, the olden days had been a romantic notion,

an idealisation of the past that was about stability.

But now, many increasingly disaffected workers

were seeing a very practical reason for retreating into the past.

And some would stop at nothing in their drive to turn back time.

Industrialisation was a threat to Edmund Burke's vision

of old England - a land not just of solid oak trees,

but of solid respect for traditional freedoms.

And working men could see his point.

What was so great about progress if it meant you had less money

and less security than before?

And what was so valuable about modernity

if machines replaced men, and those men were made redundant?

In the mills of the Midlands and northern England,

a protest group emerged known as the Luddites.

They fashioned themselves after ancient, legendary folk heroes,

especially Robin Hood, the inspiration for the Luddites'

invented figurehead, General Ludd.

Armed not with bows and arrows but with hammers and pistols,

they sought to halt the forward march of progress

by destroying the machinery that was destroying their future.

The Luddites were a curious mix of the very radical

and the very conservative.

We see them as violent, 19th century, flying pickets -

anti-capitalist, proto-trade unionists.

But they saw themselves as a sort of Medieval band of brothers,

a gang of good-hearted outlaws with a secret society

whose oaths of allegiance come straight out of the Middle Ages.

And I'm going to read my Luddite oath

on what I believe is called a tablet computer.

"I, Ian Hislop, of my own free will and accord, do hereby promise

"and swear that I will never reveal any of the names of any one

"of this secret committee under the penalty

"of being sent out of this world by the first brother that may meet me.

"So help me God to keep this, our oath, inviolate."

The authorities, though, didn't accept this olden days justification

of what risked becoming major civil unrest.

They rushed a new law through Parliament,

and 34 Luddites were tried and duly hanged.

But the movement's heroic idealism had caught the imagination

of many of Britain's radicals.

And the Luddite longing for an idealised, fairer Britain

of hundreds of years ago was by no means finished.

Far from it.

What they'd seen in Robin of Sherwood wasn't simply romance,

it was a real model for social change.

Angry at the human cost of industrialised society,

there were many who reasoned that poverty and the workhouse

could do with a bit of liberty, equality and fraternity.

When it came to fear of revolution,

Britain certainly wasn't out of the woods just yet.

When faced with trouble in the present,

the country reacted by looking to the safety of the past,

to a golden age of valiant knights in shining armour,

of chaste damsels in distress, of faithful squires,

of honest yeomen and stout bowmen.

Yes, it was time for a full-blooded romantic retreat to the Middle Ages.

And the man best placed

to capture that backward zeitgeist was, once again, Walter Scott.

What Waverley had done for Scotland, his new novel - Ivanhoe -

would do for England.

It begins...

.."In that pleasant district of merry England

"there extended in ancient times a large forest."

SWORDS CLASH

"Here haunted of yore the fabulous Dragon of Wantley.

"Here we fought many of the most desperate battles

"during the civil Wars of the Roses, and here also flourished

"in ancient times those bands of gallant outlaws,

"whose deeds have been rendered so popular in English song."

HORN TRUMPETS

Ivanhoe, published in 1819, is set in the late-12th century,

when the Norman Conquest had also left a bitterly-divided nation.

Ruthless, anti-democratic Norman aristocrats

are set against a crushed Saxon population.

With the country on the brink of crisis,

enter Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a jousting, heroic champion,

who takes on all foes, rescues the oppressed

and generally embodies the olden days of knights and castles

at their supposed, swashbuckling best.

As Medieval history, Ivanhoe is pretty much nonsense.

But as national mythology, it's terrific.

One critic called it,

"The defining myth of Englishness, written by a Scotsman."

And for Walter Scott, the reality of the Middle Ages,

the brutal, constant warfare, the Black Death,

the suffering of the peasantry,

it was ennobled by the romance of an idea.

And that idea was chivalry.

Ivanhoe himself is an advocate for chivalric ideals

as a force for good.

He describes them as "the stay of the oppressed,

"the redresser of grievances."

Scott saw them as the answer

to the ills of selfish, modern, industrial society.

And it turned out he wasn't the only one.

Even more than Waverley, Ivanhoe hit a nerve,

tapping into a vast public appetite for its fantasy of days gone by.

And Scott packaged it as an all-action adventure story,

even throwing in the tale of Robin Hood for good measure.

It was a romp, but a romp with a purpose.

And that purpose was to promote the traditional values

that Scott believed could unite the nation.

And it's not done very subtly.

At one point in the forest the outlaws shout,

"Fair play and Old England for ever."

A new England, increasingly worried about industrialisation

and inequality, lapped it up.

I think what he's trying to give English people

is a sense of value in a very, very fast transforming and changing world.

Certain values that, if you look into the past,

you want to continue to cherish, like chivalry, like toleration,

like loyalty. And to make that very real to people

through a tremendously good and pacey story.

And do you think this is a genuine look at the past,

the chivalry is real?

Well, chivalry WAS real. But chivalry included a whole lot.

It was a combination always of grand gesture, liberality,

generosity, and cruelty, and discipline, and violence.

That's what we have to remember.

That's why schoolboys and men in general so love the book.

It's not a favourite of mine,

but I know a lot of very smart men who adore the book.

And I think it appeals to that issue

of how do you situate yourself as a man in the world,

and particularly in a world

that makes sometimes very conflicting demands of you.

It strikes me in Ivanhoe that the tale of the knight errant,

the single figure who can change things,

is very important in a mass age.

I think that's really fair. I think people identify with that,

and I think that's exactly the problem within frameworks

of modern life as perceived in the 19th century.

Where is that element of choice?

Where is that element of leadership as well?

What is charisma in the modern age?

So it doesn't mean that we all get dressed up as knights

in sort of chainmail, et cetera.

The question is, for a while, while you're reading this book,

you can think about those issues in a more concentrated fashion.

It's peculiar that it's cited as the favourite book

of both Tony Blair and Ho Chi Minh.

I think that combination is very telling, don't you?!

But there was one reader of the time who took the passion

for Ivanhoe-inspired Medievalism to quite another level.

He was the 13th Earl of Eglinton who in the summer of 1839 staged

the Eglinton Tournament, a sort of Medieval heritage festival,

with around 40 knights in armour

jousting in the grounds of his Ayrshire estate.

The Earl, Archibald Montgomerie,

had expected a few thousand people to turn up,

but in the end over 100,000 spectators appeared.

Which was a pity, because this being Britain,

it poured with rain.

The knights got bogged down in the mud,

and the Marquis of Londonderry, in full armour, with a helmet

and a plume, was observed taking out an umbrella and putting it up,

which rather ruined the effect.

And overall, the spectacle ended up looking like

a sort of 19th-century version of It's A Royal Knockout.

Eglinton, however, was undismayed.

He said, "I am aware that this is a humble imitation of the scenes

"which my imagination has portrayed, but at least I have done something

"towards the revival of chivalry."

By then, Britain had fallen under the spell of the Middle Ages.

For proof of its all-pervasive influence,

we need only look to one of Britain's

most seemingly ancient buildings.

CLOCK STRIKES

FIRE CRACKLES

One night, in 1834,

a raging inferno ripped through the Houses of Parliament.

Thousands lined the streets to watch.

Amongst them, the artist JMW Turner, who painted the blaze

in all its wild intensity.

Virtually the whole building was razed to the ground.

This was the perfect opportunity for a grand piece

of statement architecture, a prestigious new building

for Britain's Parliament.

And you'd have thought we'd have chosen something

from the cutting-edge style of architecture

for our most important national building.

Something to reflect the fact that Britain was, after all,

at the forefront - commercially, industrially, technologically -

of what it meant to be modern.

But, of course, not a bit of it.

The new Palace of Westminster would be built in what had become

the new British national style - actually, a revival of a very old,

very international style, Medieval Gothic.

Its architect was Charles Barry, whose Gothic-revival churches

had been popping up all over Britain.

But Parliament's excess of Gothic ornamentation

was largely the product of Barry's 32-year-old assistant,

a man with a profound passion for all things Middle Ages -

Augustus Welby Pugin.

Pugin had watched the burning of Westminster

with what was almost glee.

"There is nothing much to regret here," he wrote,

"and a great deal to rejoice in."

The old building had been a mishmash of different styles,

which had coagulated over hundreds of years

around the central Medieval hall.

Pugin was determined that a completely Medieval building

would arise from the ashes.

And it did.

Except, there was a catch.

Pugin had recently converted to Roman Catholicism,

a career-destroying move in an Anglican England

that had emerged by deposing its last Catholic king.

So even though almost all of the extraordinary detailing

in the building was his vision, all of it crafted

using actual Medieval techniques - Pugin's contribution

to the new Palace of Westminster had to be kept quiet.

Worst of all, when his piece de resistance -

the great debating chamber of the Lords - was unveiled in 1847,

every craftsman who had worked on it was credited...

..yet Pugin's name was nowhere to be seen.

But recognition was not the main point for Pugin.

He was both architect and visionary, and he saw the Gothic revival

as "a return to the faith

"and the social structures of the Middle Ages".

The dazzling, ornate interiors he designed,

a sort of decorative frenzy writ large, are loaded with meaning.

It's an attempt, deliberately, to recall a more pious,

more charitable and more public-spirited age.

Pugin was shocked by the divisive nature of Britain

as it industrialised and urbanised, with the rich getting even richer,

and the masses left to fend for themselves.

How different that was, in his imagination,

from the olden days, when the church and the community

had looked after the poor, setting up charities and running hospitals.

This building would be his contribution

to resurrecting that golden age.

Other countries could house their governing bodies in buildings

that looked like senates or temples.

Britain would have its government in a cathedral.

Plundering the olden days may have yielded a fantasy Westminster

to house our legislators.

But what had the Middle Ages actually done

for the majority of Britons outside -

so many of them living in desperation,

with poverty and disease rife?

Remarkably, the answer was to give them a moral map which might

actually ameliorate conditions in the cities' growing slums.

One of the leading lights of this social change was a maverick

whose fascination with Medieval values would,

somewhat bizarrely, inspire radical reform

of modern government and society.

He was a rather unlikely British saviour, flash, flamboyant,

Jewish by birth.

Benjamin Disraeli.

Disraeli was THE most colourful politician of the 19th century.

He was a peacock, a dandy, a gambler, a womaniser.

He had coiffured hair and a neatly-trimmed, dapper beard.

There were even whispers at the time that he was a bisexual.

He once appeared in a packed London street,

dressed in bright blue military breeches,

with black and red stockings and buckled shoes.

It was an extraordinary sight, and when the crowd parted

in front of him, he said it felt "like the opening of the Red Sea."

Quite vain. Quite blasphemous.

Quite funny.

Disraeli's passion for all things ancient

was as fevered as his wardrobe.

With the help of a substantial loan, he'd bought this estate -

Hughenden Manor - where he fantasised that

"cavaliers might roam, and frolic with their lady loves."

But this was more than just a romantic playground

to the fiercely ambitious Disraeli.

The house - built on an estate dating back to the 11th century -

rooted him in history and allowed him to feel connected

to old England.

He spent a fortune making it look even more Medieval,

because for him, history since the Middle Ages had been a decline,

a fall from grace, from a perfect society of a strong monarchy,

a responsible aristocracy, and sturdy, patriotic citizens.

And that was his vision for a better British future.

But when he first arrived here at Hughenden,

Disraeli was much more influential as a writer than as a politician.

His dream of restoring a benevolent, Medievalist society

was first promoted in a novel of ideas, written at a time

when a million and a half people were claiming poor relief.

Sybil was published in 1845 and gives a fascinating insight

into the mindset of early Victorian Britain.

Ostensibly, it's a love story between working-class Sybil

and upper-class Egremont, a good-hearted Tory MP,

who has been to the Midlands and the North

and seen the suffering of the poor for himself.

His reaction to this is to long for a return to the values of the past.

Fortunately, Sybil has an equally romantic view

about how much better things were in days of old.

"When I remember what this English people once was,

"the truest, the freest, and the bravest,

"the happiest and the most religious race upon the surface of this globe,

"and think of them now, with all their crimes

"and all their slavish sufferings, their soured spirits

"and their stunted forms; their lives without enjoyment

"and their deaths without hope; I may well feel for them,

"even if I were not the daughter of their blood."

Nothing, I suspect, was more important than the past to Disraeli.

Disraeli at this time, in the 1840s, gets involved with this group

of Tories who have got a kind of new vision

for the direction of Conservatism.

They called themselves Young England, but what they constantly looked to

was Olde England! It was back to the Middle Ages.

And there's this crucial moment in Sybil,

where he talks about the idea that in the Middle Ages

you have community, whereas in the modern world, in the world of cities,

factories, you have what he calls aggregation,

people coming together, but not actually being a community.

A lot of the characters in Sybil keep asking each other,

"You do feel for the people, don't you?"

"Oh, yes, I feel for..."

There's a sort of caring Toryism that Disraeli is trying to push.

-Is that genuine?

-Yeah. Well, that's the great thing.

Obviously, the novel is called "Sybil" or "The Two Nations"

and behind it is an idea, an ideal of one nation.

There's this very famous passage where the hero

is in a ruined monastery - so thinking back to the monasteries

of the Middle Ages - and there's this famous speech

about how we live in two nations. "What are those two nations?"

says the hero, "They are the rich and the poor,

"and they might as well be living on different planets,

"such is the difference between their lives."

It's odd that a Jewish politician, an outsider,

should have ended up so entrenched with the old status quo.

I think it is a great irony.

I mean, perhaps there's a sense that precisely because he was

an outsider, he wanted to become a country gentleman.

And, you know, we're here at Hughenden, and buying this place

was an essential part, an essential career move

to turn himself into a gentleman.

He didn't go to public school, he didn't go to Oxbridge.

He was bisexual.

How does that link to him becoming a gentleman,

become a Tory politician, becoming Prime Minister?

Well, I think that's the great paradox of Disraeli,

and that's why some people say all this talk about one nation,

it's just rhetoric.

When it comes to reality, to his real political career,

he didn't actually do very much for it.

I think that underestimates him.

For Disraeli, the olden days were a potent agent

for reforming Victorian Britain, and, as it turned out,

the impact of what began as a literary Medievalism

was eventually felt by millions in the real world.

Almost 30 years after he wrote Sybil,

its message of Middle Ages paternalism finally became fact,

rather than fiction.

Disraeli's fantasy of old England

was channelled into concrete measures that did directly alleviate

the sufferings of the masses,

not least by giving so many of them the vote for the very first time.

And when he, in his own words, "climbed the greasy pole"

and became Prime Minister, he led the great reforming administration

of 1874 which cleared slums, improved sanitation and housing,

and limited working hours.

The era of laissez faire was over and, bizarrely,

the supposed mores of Medieval England had helped inspire

the new political consensus of modern Britain.

By the late 19th century,

Medievalism had become an integral component of British identity,

and Disraeli was by no means the only Victorian with a vision

for a brighter tomorrow drawn from the values of yesterday.

The artistic visionary who lived in this rather quaint setting -

William Morris -

had his own solution to the ills of industrialisation.

Where Disraeli had reformed traditional Conservative thinking,

Morris called for a whole new political system altogether,

one equally inspired by the olden days,

but that was far more Karl Marx than Edmund Burke.

Morris was an ardent Romantic with an intense passion

for the Middle Ages.

As a small boy, he rode his pony through Epping Forest

dressed in a miniature suit of armour,

looking for ancient churches.

He claimed to have read every single novel by Walter Scott

by the age of seven.

He was extremely gifted and extremely eccentric.

This was his dream house, which was called the "Red House".

It's a 13th-century house built in 1859 to Morris's own designs.

Morris, quite literally, wanted to live in the past.

This was a Medievalist fantasy fun house, where Morris frolicked

in somewhat pretentious fashion with his pre-Raphaelite friends,

Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Depicting themselves inhabiting a halcyon, idyllic Middle Ages.

Morris even commissioned a mural where he and his wife Jane

were crowned Medieval king and queen.

But it wasn't long before a much more serious side

to his harking back took over.

One that was, in a sense, a call for revolution.

Morris wrote, "apart from a desire to create beautiful things,

"the leading passion of my life has been, and is,

"a hatred of modern civilisation."

The contrast with his somewhat idealised Middle Ages

was his belief that at least in that period,

the inequality and the suffering of the ordinary man was alleviated

by the satisfaction of rewarding work.

And this is the same point as that of the Luddites -

that industrialisation made workers unhappy because it made them,

effectively, into machines.

Factories had wiped out the notion of the dignity of labour.

So Morris set up a company that rejected the Machine Age -

employing skilled workmen and women who found pleasure in hand-crafting

the beautiful wallpapers, rugs and textiles that he designed.

Though it made him a millionaire,

he continued to worry about the plight of the working man.

So, in 1883, he declared himself a socialist, becoming a founder

of the proto-revolutionary Socialist League.

Then, in 1890, he outlined his dream of a better society

in the most green and pleasant science fiction book ever written,

set in a 21st century England that's curiously un-modern.

Morris called the book "News From Nowhere" -

and it's essentially a political statement -

it's a manifesto for future change.

But being Morris's manifesto, it's not exactly futuristic.

The illustrated frontispiece doesn't have any skyscrapers

or flying machines, but a Tudor house.

And the text itself is presented as if it were

an illuminated manuscript.

And in this idyllic, historical future

there is no industrial blight,

there are no stinking, overcrowded cities, there is no class division.

There is no divorce.

The country has undergone what he calls the "Great Change".

"When the conflict was once really begun,

"it was seen how little of any value there was in the old world

"of slavery and inequality. There was no hope;

"nothing but the dull jog of the mill-horse

"under compulsion of collar and whip;

"but in that fighting-time that followed all was hope;

"the rebels at last felt themselves strong enough

"to build up the world again from its dry bones -

"and they did it too!"

It's a curious mixture of Marxist ideology and Medieval romance.

And it's also intensely personal.

The small boy who rode through the forest,

dreaming of the past, is still there in the grown man.

Still in thrall to the Middle Ages, but transforming them

into a blueprint for a new age yet to come.

For one of Britain's leading contemporary artists, Jeremy Deller,

it's the contradiction between the Medievalist dreamer

and the political activist that makes Morris fascinating.

Invited to represent Britain

at the prestigious 2013 Venice Biennale for Art,

Deller created a show he titled "English Magic" -

its centrepiece a homage to Morris

that reinvented the Victorian worshipper of the olden days

as a 21st-century English hero.

We have a room in Venice and it's called

"We Sit Starving Amidst Our Gold".

-It is such an amazing quote, and that's by Morris.

-Yeah.

And it's really about, you know, we might be wealthy,

but obviously we don't have spiritual richness,

we don't have emotional richness and so on.

So I used that quote and I knew I wanted to have Morris in my show

-and to bring him back to life, literally.

-Yeah.

As a superhero, effectively, like a Greek god or someone like that.

So I had this huge painting. And it's painted.

-It took a long time to paint, so there's craftsmanship there.

-Yeah.

-And he's holding Abramovich's yacht...

-Roman Abramovich?

..Luna, which Abramovich had parked in 2011 close to the Giardini

and blocked the view for everyone, basically.

So Morris is picking up a yacht and he's tossing it

or throwing it into the lagoon, destroying it.

And basically it's Morris coming back to life as a colossus.

And getting his revenge!

Exactly. And it's the revenge we would all, most of...

Let's face it, there's probably ten people in the world

that wouldn't want to see that happen, I would imagine.

Or five!

But it's very specific wanting Morris to do it.

Exactly. Because Morris would be totally horrified by that.

Do you think a lot of the people who think, "Oh, that's a lovely print!",

or, "I must have one of those chairs!",

do you think they realise how left-wing he was?

No, I don't think they do.

And I think that's what's... it's quite stealth with Morris.

Because he has these views, you know, he's a visionary,

he's not some fuddy-duddy who makes curtains.

I mean, you know, he has made curtains,

but there's so much behind it.

And I suppose it's that contrast of quite tough politics,

but with beauty.

And it made him angry at times that he produced these beautiful things

and yet the working man could never afford them.

Yes.

I mean, there's obviously a great frustration, as I'm sure you know,

that he was known for picking things up and throwing them around.

I mean, he had a violent temper,

but at least he was trying to do something, at least

he was wrestling with the problems, even if he wasn't resolving them.

But, of course, the one thing Morris could never resolve

was his own legacy.

Over a hundred years later, he is now an olden days icon himself.

His house and garden a must-see for lovers of England's heritage.

And what fits of rage might he have felt

if he'd known that the bucolic fields and green pastures

where he built his retreat would become a quintessential example

of the 20th-century suburb?

On the face of it, Morris's vision came to nothing.

He could not turn back time nor hold back the inexorable rise

of the modern world, as Britain urbanised and then suburbanised.

But his instincts for how Britons of all political persuasions

and all classes would find comfort in a quasi-idyllic past

were spot-on.

The prevailing aesthetic of 20th-century suburbia

did not turn out to be Medieval. But nor was it modern.

It was Tudorbethan.

I suppose that's progress of sorts,

moving away from Victorian Medievalism.

But it still harks back a full 350 years because,

for us in the wider sense, the past is never a thing of the past.

We look back admiringly at the Victorians,

who were in turn looking back admiringly at the Middle Ages.

And so it goes on,

as each generation locates its olden days of choice,

and decides which traditional values from there it wishes to recover.

Yes, it seems conservative.

But it can be a surprisingly counter-intuitive way

to effect change and move forward.

Which is why I think that, in the future,

it's unlikely that the olden days will be consigned to the past.

In the final programme, we'll see how the olden days

has found its true home in an often eccentric, usually idealised

and, sometimes, totally bogus version of the British countryside.