The whig history of England was a Bad Thing, most modern historians would agree. It worked, they might say, simply as a form of English literature and supplied uplift and emotional satisfaction rather than a careful and scholarly account of evidence. It sought too wide an audience for its own good and reduced the difficulties of real historical ‘research’ to swirling narratives of progress, improvement and derring-do. It rested on an implicit idea of the superiority of English culture in which the constitution continued to represent the most beautiful combination ever framed, in which the empire seemed no more than a natural outcome of character and enterprise, in which God was tolerant of Nonconformists but remained Himself a moderate Anglican. If it were triumphalist, it announced no triumph of the will, for that would suggest the intentions of the braggart. Rather, the whig historians told the story of a disposition bred into the national stock over a thousand years, one whose crucial adjectives – ‘manly’, ‘frank’, ‘decent’, ‘staunch’ – bonded naturally to the favourite collective nouns of England – ‘people’, ‘nation’, ‘state’, ‘race’. And in accomplishing its stories the whig tendency fostered purposes and directions within the time-line of English development: always looking over its shoulder from a particular present that it sought to defend and evangelize. Constantly digging in the past for roots and seeds that would one day flower in national life, the whigs fertilized their creations with a special form of genius which made mere historical phenomena look like today's cherished institutions and conventions.