Before I start, a disclaimer — my latest book written with Wim Meulenkamp, ‘The English Folly’, of course concerns itself with follies, but essentially it is about Presentism.

In case this -ism is unfamiliar to you,

‘Presentism is the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. For example, when writing history about slavery in an era when the practice was widely accepted, letting that fact influence judgment about a group or individual would be presentist, and thus should be avoided.’

I didn’t write this; I took it straight from Wikipedia.

Wim and I have been writing about architectural follies for coming up to forty years. Naturally we began by describing the buildings; if we’d been writing about mushrooms we’d be concentrating on the fruiting body before the mycelium.

This time around we decided to look at the people who built them, mainly dead white males from the eighteenth century.

It’s no surprise to discover that they didn’t adhere to our standards of behaviour. In fact most of them were appalling: vicious, savage, brutal and cruel. It’s hopeless to even begin to try and understand them, if your concerns are for things like state salaries for all and the better appreciation of the LGBTTIQQ2SA+ communities. There might be a fleeting look of puzzlement before they ran you through with their swords and killed you.

Anyway you’d be dead. With nobody to complain to.

If ‘The English Folly’ were a novel, the tales of astounding wealth, sexual perversion, murder, munificence, rape, insanity, brutality, slavery, religious mania, selfishness, snobbery, charity, suicide, generosity, theft, madness, wickedness, failure and eccentricity which unfold in its pages would be too concentrated to allow for the willing suspension of disbelief. All these sins and virtues, and more, are displayed by the characters in the book, some exhibiting several of them simultaneously.

America, that self-dubbed ‘Land of the Free and Home of the Brave’, the most scaredy-cat country in history, reveres its Founding Fathers. Out of the 56 signatories of the American Declaration of Independence, 41 owned slaves. That’s 73%.

They didn’t do so well with the Second Amendment, either.

But how can we criticise them from our lordly position in 2020, 244 years later? We live in a completely different world with different manners and morals. How can we possibly judge them? Some men tainted by slave ownership performed great deeds — even I, as a proud Welshman and European, can’t repress a tear when I read the words

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The pursuit of happiness had never occurred to any law-giver before.

But those uplifting words didn’t apply to black people because they weren’t considered to be completely human. It is inconceivable to us, but That Is How They Thought Then.

Presentism is hard to overcome. It is difficult to put yourself in other people’s shoes, tough to see the other side of a position you fervently believe in, inconvenient to discover that once admired figures had what we now see to be a darker side.

Some had a gut feeling slavery just wasn’t right. George Washington ordered the manumission of his hundreds of slaves — but not until after he and his wife had died.

These were crimes committed before they became crimes. Today we are accusing our ancestors of not living as we would like them to have lived. It’s Presentism, and it is not fair. Nothing is fair. We were not born into a fair world.

Look on their works, and look at yours. Do not despair. Your descendants will find something to despise about you. What did you do to prevent climate change? Or the population explosion?

The world isn’t black and white, it’s a rainbow of colours. Think before you condemn. Don’t be a Presentist!

‘THE ENGLISH FOLLY’ by Gwyn Headley & Wim Meulenkamp will be published by Historic England / Liverpool University Press on June 30th, 2020.

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