Republic or Death! (24 page)

That night, the company performed Ben Jonson's
The Alchemist
to a full house. As it finished, the audience ‘were agreeably surprised' when three soloists and a male choir strode out to the front of the stage and launched into the song Arne had arranged that day. I'm not sure how much that song would have sounded like the ‘God Save the Queen' we know now. The tune is in the style of a galliard, a dance that includes a leap into the air once a phrase, and the singers, accompanied by harpsichord, might have felt obliged to perform it as one. Back then soloists also liked showing off. A lot. What was the point in having one note for each word when you can have ten? Why sing straight when you can trill? The ‘God Save the King' heard that night, then, was probably drawn out and ornamented as richly as possible, first sung by the soloists, then by the choir booming in to repeat it all.

But however it sounded, it worked. There was ‘universal Applause' and ‘repeated Huzzas', the
General Advertiser
wrote, making use of a system of capitalisation that was old-fashioned even then. The song ‘denoted in how just an Abhorrence [people] hold the arbitrary schemes of our invidious Enemies and detest the despotick Attempts of Papal Power,' it added. It went down so well, in fact, that they started to sing it at the end of every show, and rival theatres felt obliged to copy the idea. Shortly afterwards, the song was printed in the popular
Gentleman's Magazine
, alongside articles like ‘Can England be otherwise than miserable under a Popish King?'

The magazine printed all three verses, including the occasionally controversial second:

O Lord our God arise,

Scatter his enemies

And make them fall.

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On him our hopes we fix,

O save us all.

That verse brilliantly summed up people's feelings towards Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. It seems less appropriate today, probably explaining why the royal family pretends it doesn't exist when it hands out versions of the lyrics. (It's not the most infamous verse. That goes to one penned in tribute to Marshal Wade, who led the king's initial forces in 1745. ‘May he sedition hush, / And like a torrent rush, / Rebellious Scots to crush, / God save the King,' it goes, although it was only occasionally sung and not documented until 1822.) Not everyone was happy with the original song, though. Just two months after it was printed, the
Gentleman's Magazine
published an anonymous ‘attempt to improve the song “God Save the King”, the former words having no merit but their loyalty'. ‘Tell Rome and France and Spain, / Britannia scorns their chain,' it started. It didn't catch on.

‘God Save the King' didn't, of course, become what we'd call ‘the national anthem' immediately, even though it kept being sung long after Bonnie Prince Charlie had fled the country in 1746, with parodies of it even being used to sell fish (‘Nature's best treat / … May turbot eat'). People didn't really think of themselves as Britons back then, for a start, and the government was only in the early stages of trying to create a unified identity (even if some Scots called themselves North Britons in a desperate attempt to prove it existed). But by the late 1780s, there was apparently no other patriotic song to rival it.

That seems to have happened partly due to the madness of King George III. Throughout his reign, he suffered bouts of mental illness that, at worst, caused him to become deranged, talk gibberish for hours and foam at the mouth. Many feared he would have to be replaced by his extravagant and debt-ridden son, George, Prince of Wales. ‘God Save the King' seems to become a rallying cry against that change, a prayer almost, begging for the king's recovery. In 1789, George III recovered from his first major bout of ‘madness' (most likely the kidney disease porphyria) and went on a trip to the south coast to convalesce. His party stopped at the village of Lyndhurst on the way and decided to go for a walk. ‘The moment they stepped out of the house, the people, with one voice, struck up “God Save the King!”' writes Fanny Burney, one of the queen's assistants, in her diary. ‘I assure you I cried like a child twenty times in the day at the honest and rapturous effusions of such artless and disinterested loyalty … These good villagers continued singing … during the whole walk … 'Twas well the King [decided] he could walk no longer … they would have died singing around him.'

There were other factors at work, of course, pushing people to want patriotic songs, like the loss of America and the Seven Years War with France. But perhaps the real reason for the song's rise was the fact it mentions nothing apart from the monarch and God – the only two things people could agree on, and see themselves as belonging to, back then. There are no references to any country – even a landscape – for people to get angry over or feel left out from. There's not even a reference to ‘Great Britain', a phrase the monarchs started pushing in the 1700s. People in England and Wales, Scotland or Ireland could all sing it without having to feel part of an imagined community or even dropping their hatred of each other. Its lack of specificity is probably its greatest asset in that respect. The irony that the first real national anthem wasn't a national anything is one that hasn't been missed by many historians.

If you want more proof that the tune was becoming more an anthem than a song, you only have to look at its reception abroad. In 1790, the tune appeared in Denmark as ‘Heil dir im Siegerkranz' (‘Hail to Thee in Victor's Crown') and was used to praise that country's king. By 1793, a similar song had appeared in Germany and ‘almost at once was officially adopted by Prussia, Saxony, Hanover, Brunswick and Weimar' to praise their rulers (it was still the Kaiser's anthem during the First World War). In 1816, the music was being used for ‘The Prayer of the Russians'. It soon spread further afield too, by 1861 even turning up representing the Kingdom of Hawaii.

The world's greatest musicians were also swept up by its charms. During the 1790s, Joseph Haydn stayed in London twice and heard ‘God Save the King' practically every time he went to the theatre. Somehow, he didn't leave the country fed up with it, instead envious that Britain had ‘a song through which it can show in full measure its respect, love and devotion to its ruler'. Back in Vienna, he wrote his own tune for Francis II, the Holy Roman Emperor. He composed a melody far more graceful and stirring than the one that inspired it. It's now known as the ‘Deutschlandlied' and is Germany's national anthem.

Beethoven was likewise smitten with the anthem, writing seven majestic and fun piano variations on it in 1803, then, a few years later, featuring it in his Battle Symphony – easily the worst piece of music he ever composed, a fourteen-minute musical fight between Britain and France that's meant to involve real cannon fire and drummers pretending to march to their deaths. ‘I must show the English a little what a blessing they have in their “God Save the King”,' he wrote in his diary while preparing that piece. One critic dared rubbish it and Beethoven scrawled alongside a copy of their review, ‘What I shit is better than anything you have ever thought.'

*

However, the most interesting aspect of the story of ‘God Save the Queen' is not its travels but its origins, or, to be precise, the fact that no one has the faintest idea what those origins were before it suddenly appeared in the
Thesaurus Musicus
, with no composer or lyricist named.

We do have some ideas about the lyrics. They may, ironically, have been written during the reign of James II, England's last Catholic king, when he was about to be overthrown. The clue to that is in the song's final verse, where it pleads for the king to ‘defend our laws' like a list of terms and conditions for his ‘saving'. James was seen as a notorious autocrat, repeatedly ignoring the wishes of Parliament in order to get his way and make life easier for Catholics and Protestant Dissenters. The belief is that whoever wrote the words wanted him to survive, just not to keep acting a fool if he did. A similar song has also been found in Latin, which some have argued is further evidence it could originally have been written to support a Catholic monarch. But having said all that, the words equally could have been written far earlier, since its main phrases were common even in the 1500s. In Henry VIII's time, for instance, the newly formed Royal Navy used ‘God save the King' as a password, ‘Long to reign over us' being the required answer.

As for the music, there's just as little certainty about who wrote it. Thomas Arne, the man who brought the song to London's stage, was once asked if he knew and said he ‘didn't have the least knowledge, nor could guess', and with that admission he opened the floodgates to a tide of chancers desperate to write their name into history. It's hard to decide which of the claims to authorship is the most ludicrous.

In the 1790s, a man called George Carey insisted his father, Henry, had written it. It wasn't beyond the realms of possibility: Henry had been a famous satirist and songwriter in the 1700s, a go-to man for London theatres. The only problem was that George claimed his father wrote it in 1745 specifically for Arne's performance, which couldn't have happened as he'd killed himself two years earlier, hanging himself with a cord. George probably didn't do his claim any favours by asking the king for a £200 yearly pension (‘Some
little
relief', as he called it) in recognition of his father's service to the country. He was shouted out of the palace.

There are also those who claim Jean-Baptiste Lully wrote it. Lully was a French composer most famous for dying of gangrene after accidentally stabbing himself with his own conducting baton. That story first appeared in the memoirs of a French noblewoman, the Marquise de Créquy. Renowned for her artistic friends, she insisted that Lully composed the tune for some nuns in 1688 so they could welcome Louis XIV, who was planning a visit to their convent. She even knew the words they sang:

Grand Dieu sauvez le Roy,

Grand Dieu vengez le Roy,

Vive le Roy!

A few decades later, she wrote, the dastardly composer Handel sweet-talked the same nuns into letting him see that music, then copied it down and sailed back to London with, I assume, the copy hidden in his bouffant wig, so the English could proclaim it their own. It's such a good story it's almost a shame to learn the marquise's memoirs are fake.

There have been dozens of other claims, each one pushing the bounds of credulity further than the last. There is one, however, that does not seem quite so far-fetched. It is made on behalf of John Bull, who was one of the most famous musicians in the 1600s, a man whose baroque organ pieces caused rapture in churches all over Europe. If you find a portrait of him from the time, Bull couldn't look more enigmatic (or less like his namesake, the portly, top-hat-and-waistcoat-wearing personification of Britain). He has a sharply chiselled face and greased moustache, and he always seems to be looking over your shoulder, as if eyeing up a young woman who's walked into the room behind you. The portraitists may well have captured his character perfectly, as he seems to have been something of a womaniser, and was forced to flee Britain having been found guilty of ‘fornication, adultery and other grievous crimes' (he died in Antwerp).

Bull was linked to the anthem largely through the efforts of an amateur historian, Richard Clark, who in the 1800s went on a one-man crusade to prove his authorship. Clark first made the claim on Bull's behalf after seeing a collection of the composer's work that included a piece called ‘God Save the King'. He even claimed to know the exact date for the tune's unveiling: 16 July 1607. That night Bull had entertained royalty on a ‘very rich pair of organs' and, Clark argued, must surely have played it. The one problem with this story was that Clark hadn't actually checked the music, and when someone did, they found it ‘no more like the anthem than a frog is like an ox'.

Clark tried to ignore the criticism and carried on insisting Bull was the author, but he became a laughing stock, to the point that forgers one day targeted him with fake Bull sheet music they claimed to have found being used to wrap food in a cheesemonger's. Undeterred, Clark kept searching for evidence and one day bought Bull's music collection to have a look at the supposed ‘God Save the King' for himself. His critics were right – the song was nothing like the anthem – but sitting thirty pages further on there was another tune that was. It's not exactly the same, certainly not enough to name Bull the composer, but it is close enough to seem like a premonition, the melody ‘God Save the King' might have been based on. Clark should have published his discovery at once, but for some reason he didn't. Instead he got a quill and altered the music, adding the title ‘God Save the King', writing ‘2 more verses' at the end, changing the song's key and even adding a few sharps here and there to improve the resemblance. He then varnished it and tried to sell a book telling all about this miraculous discovery. It didn't take long for his deception to be uncovered – Clark went back to being a laughing stock.

*

Sitting in Vaduz, Josef Frommelt rubs his hands together, happily relieved to learn he doesn't have to tell me about ‘God Save the Queen' and he can just go straight into explaining how this song became Liechtenstein's anthem and why, unlike seemingly everywhere else, it wasn't dropped soon afterwards. ‘It's because of a man called Jakob Jauch,' he says. ‘His life was a tragedy. Really a catastrophe.' He suggests getting some wine to make his tale more cheerful. ‘Have you tried ours? It's made by the prince.'

Jakob was a priest, or at least he wanted to be one. In 1852, aged fifty, he was living in Switzerland, studying at a priest college and effectively unemployed. The problem was that no bishop in the country wanted anything to do with him, all remembering his father, Xaver, a priest too and a man even God would have struggled to love. ‘Jakob's father offended all the Catholics [in Switzerland], then he changed his religion and became a Protestant and offended all of the Protestants too,' Josef says. ‘I think he didn't have a brain.'