Constitutionalism and churchmanship never faltered in exerting their special pressure on history in twentieth-century England: always under challenge but always there. Painting in the context of historians after the whigs requires other shapes apart from these, of course, though many of them must remain beyond the borders of the present small canvas that allows only a silhouette. The legacies of the whigs should detain us, all the same, until two further elements enter the picture because they dominated the mind and practice of the late nineteenth century and were to play roles of the utmost significance in the twentieth – one of them as a supposed attenuation, like religion, the other as a spreading stain in the consciousness of every man and woman. Whigs were born to empire. Modernists were prone to war. Between them, these evolving conditions comprised a critical conditioning for a specific present within which an English past acquired form. They did not stand outside the developments we have been examining. Rather, they merged with and reflected them in important ways. If they do not occupy the centre of the composition, they permeate all of it through their changing light and shade.

Empire

In the generation of John Robert Seeley and James Anthony Froude the reality of empire was a constitutional fact as much as a category of aspiration and the history of it took some of its colour from the procedures of constitutional historians.