Should we judge the past by today’s fashionable opinion?

“The evil that men do lives after them./The good is oft interred with their bones./So let it be with Caesar..”

Thus Mark Antony in his funeral oration.

He may have been wrong of course. There are cases of men and women reviled in their life and honoured after death. No cause so vile that someone will not be found to defend it. This, if I remember rightly, was Norman Douglas speaking about Nelson’s deplorable behaviour in Naples in 1799, behaviour which has led some to label him a “war criminal”. He still stands on his pedestal in Trafalgar Square. Nevertheless Antony’s words do seem to be applicable today to the Bristol merchant and slave-trader Sir Edward Colston whose own statue has just been dumped in the harbour from which his slave-ships set out on their dreadful voyages. Evidently, and with good reason you may say, the evil that he did lives after him –long after since it is almost three hundred years since he died.

This of course invites the question: why was a statue erected in his honour, or, to put it in Antony’s words, what was the good interred with his bones? Well, the plaque on the statue described him as a merchant and philanthropist. A philanthropic slave-trader? Absurd. Nevertheless, this was a man renowned for using his wealth – ill-gotten as you may say this was – to found and finance almshouses for the indigent and aged, schools for the young, and hospitals for the sick and dying. What is one to make of this?

One answer might be that we should not judge men and women of the Past by the standards of the Present. Fair enough; this argument has some validity. Devout Christians have burned men and women for heresy. One who did so was Sir Thomas More who himself would die a martyr’s death because he would not acknowledge Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church in England. More was himself both persecutor and persecuted. Good or bad? One can at least say that throughout Christendom then it was generally agreed that heresy was wicked because heretics led others into error imperilling their immortal soul, and that heretics therefore should be put to death.

That defence can’t be offered on behalf of Colston. Certainly slavery has been common for most of recorded human history; certainly European slavers bought their slaves from African chiefs and princes or from Arab traders. But, as Jack Dickens pointed out in an excellent article here on Reaction yesterday, there were men and women in Colston’s time who denounced the wickedness of slavery and the trade in human beings, though one might add – he died, aged eighty-four, in 1721 before there was much anti-slavery agitation.

Nevertheless Dr Johnson’s friend, the dissolute poet Richard Savage, was denouncing the slave-trade in the 1730s and Johnson himself was its lifelong opponent. When the American colonists rebelled against George III, Johnson scornfully asked how it was that the “loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of negroes”.

This was fair comment. There are few nobler documents than the American Declaration of Independence with its assertion of the “Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” and few more dishonest, given the number of slave-owners among its Signers. Does this mean that statues of Washington and Jefferson should be demolished?

Isn’t it however more to the point to recognize that Mark Antony’s distinction between Evil and Good, while effective as rhetoric, is too simple, as indeed is our present self-righteous habit of judging the Past by the standards or fashionable opinion of the Present? It is surely wiser to heed Immanuel Kant: “From the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight can ever be made.” Good and evil, virtue and vice, are mixed in all of is. Saints have been cruel and sinners kind. Loving fathers and mothers have been guilty of atrocities and not only in war. Men and women have murdered in the name of their God. The Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, were fond and dutiful sons and there were many in the East End who spoke of them as kind, polite and helpful; nevertheless they were also extortionists and murderers.

Or consider the extraordinary Jimmy Savile – Sir James Savile OBE, knight bachelor, holder of a Papal knighthood, member of The Athenaeum where his proposer was Cardinal Hume. He was a friend of Margaret Thatcher, who had him to stay at Chequers, and was praised by the Prince of Wales for his Charity work. That was real enough; he is reported to have raised some £40 million for various charities.

Now of course it’s all but obligatory to attach the word “monster” to his name, and the revelations since his death almost ten years ago can leave no one in doubt that he was indeed a rapist and a disgusting sexual predator, guilty of scores, even hundreds, of cases of sexual abuse of children.

Many in his lifetime found him weird and revolting; there was always the sense of something creepy about him. Others found him likeable and engaging, and thought that, even if a bit odd, he was genuinely good and caring. You can argue that his apparently indefatigable engagement in charity work was all a blind, a cover-up enabling him to pursue his cruel exploitation of the young and vulnerable. You can call him a loathsome hypocrite and you might be right. On the other hand it seems clear that he did good as well as harm and that even his self-seeking and self-promotion don’t mean that he wasn’t benevolent and sincere in the work he did for good causes.

In the end you may be left, like me, muttering about “the crooked timber of humanity”, and the same, I suppose, might be said about Edward Colston. Or we may find ourselves in agreement with Hamlet: “Use every man after his desert and who shall ’scape whipping?” –  a thought that even the most self-righteous of protesters might sensibly dwell on.