The Ironist
J.G.A. Pocock: Gibbon under Fire, 14 November 2002
Gibbon and the ‘Watchmen of the Holy City’: The Historian and His Reputation 1776-1815
by David Womersley.
Oxford, 452 pp., £65, January 2002,0 19 818733 5 Show More
by David Womersley.
Oxford, 452 pp., £65, January 2002,
“... been done in 1688 and 1714 was compatible with hereditary succession, and distance himself from Charles Fox (whose company he found delightful) by arguing that it had not been the act of a sovereign people; but he would not have found this difficult. Womersley might have gone deeper. That Gibbon should have envisaged the English succession as the third ... ”