The Great Turning Points of British History (24 page)

The French connection is relevant to the story of these islands. For centuries, regions of France were English owned or leased and the English court spoke French as natives until the fifteenth century. The connection was distinct in the origins and the continuity of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453). There were so many blood, territorial and language ties that it was all but a civil war. In 1453, the English with their Welsh archers were left with only Calais as a stronghold in France. By this point, the English identity was more clearly understood (as was the French).

As John Guy shows in his chapter covering the first half of the sixteenth century, it was Henry VIII’s purpose to take control of Britain. It was Henry who joined his nation with the Holy League against France (1511). This was the time of the Battle of the Spurs, the death of James IV at Flodden, Luther’s attack on indulgences and the spread of the Reformation. Later, Henry talked of the British Empire – meaning that his lands were beyond the rule of the pope – and the British people. Certain events give us the first great sense of the complexities of nationalism, but not Britishness: the Reformation Parliament (1529–36); the Act in Restraint of Appeals; Acts of Succession and Act of Supremacy; suppression of the monasteries and Henry’s assumption as head of State and Church in Ireland.

Britishness also has its historical base in exploration. The British image overseas, especially from the seventeenth century, has much to do with how the world still views the peoples of these islands. Yet the British were hardly the first to step ashore in others’ lands and to plant flags of annexation. It was not until the later 1500s that the British started to catch the Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish in global exploration. (The Cabots’ fifteenth-century voyages certainly left no colonial footprint). It was as an island race and ‘seafaring nation’ that the British identity developed both at home and abroad.

Pauline Croft chose the truly heaven-sent defeat of the Armada (1588) as the key year for the second half of the sixteenth century. This triumph endorsed Britain’s maritime status and control of its immediate sea lanes more effectively than any naval victory since Sluys (1340). Drake and his like impressed the seal of England on parts of the world that would one day be Britain’s imperial adventure playground.

The German traveller Paul Hentzner described late Elizabethan London as being the centre of the British Empire (he meant the capital of all Britain owned) and was much impressed on his journey from Rye with the manner of the English, whom he saw as confident people, slightly aloof, with a liking for drink and too much sugar. In short, even towards the end of the sixteenth century, there was an Englishness – if not a Britishness – that we might find recognizable today. Moreover, national animosities were then crystal clear.

When James I and VI used the term Great Britain to describe the union of his crowns he did not disguise the cool reception his Scottish courtiers received from the sniffy Englishmen. Yet this disdain for others was no more remarkable than the disdain of aristocracy anywhere in the world for those of a different cultural and social breed.

Rab Houston’s description of the Scottish rebellion against Charles I and archbishop Laud demonstrates the frustration of the other islanders against the English and their Britishness. By sheer numbers, organization and wealth, the English would always win, especially against those who were inevitably disorganized, had fewer people and no money. Britishness, then, included the arrogance of overwhelming military opposition and putting the vanquished in their social places.

Like any nation, the British identified with their victors and often-imagined saviours. Yet in the British character there is also that special talent for knocking down heroes. Ralegh was a favourite but when he went to Winchester for his trial in November 1603 his carriage was stoned. Marlborough was accused of misappropriation of funds. Clive was disparaged. Hastings was impeached. Raffles was derided – although Singapore and the London Zoo are not bad memorials. Nelson was an exception: he was adored by the masses so none dared mock him and the toast in the Royal Navy remains to the Immortal Memory.

The British – all four nations – have always liked their naval heroes. It has something to do with the British belief that it is their God-given right to roam the seas. So James Thomson (a Scot, remember) wrote ‘Rule, Britannia’, that England should rule the waves by God’s comman’. There we have it: if there is something called Britishness, then God approves.

In the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution only confirmed that there may have been none so fair as the British grenadier and none so strong as those with hearts of oak, but the true superiority that the British claimed was in its innovations. Engineers governed the quarter of the world that Britannia ruled by 1900. Peter Mandler’s chapter on the Great Exhibition of 1851 transforming Britain into something without compare surely captures the spirit of Britishness.

A hundred years later (and another exhibition, the Festival of Britain, 1951) and they were still singing that British was best and therefore Britishness was all about being superior. It was a superiority of the whole nation that continued to be governed as it had been since Magna Carta – by its aristocracy. Harold Macmillan said of Lord Carrington that he was an asset because if he did not like what was going on he could always ‘bugger off back to his estates’. Robert Menzies (former Australian prime minister) thought that was what Britishness was about: independence of mind with a sense of duty. Equally, Britishness included a fear that individuals would get above themselves. Horace Pendyce in Galsworthy’s
The Country House
, set in the 1890s, was long convinced that ‘individualism had ruined England and he had set himself deliberately to eradicate this vice from the character of his tenants.’

Pendyce’s rural world would struggle until a twenty-first-century squire, pockets full of bonuses or Gazprom share certificates, settled into the big houses of Britain. But they would not represent Britishness because they sought nothing more than the illusion of the sanctuary of Britishness. Maybe it began to fade with Pat Thane’s last charge of imperialism at Suez in 1956, although it really started with the disillusionment of the post-Second World War period, in spite of the social revolution. Crucially, the post-Suez generation produced a society that wasted then abandoned the huge strides in education of R.A. Butler and Ellen Wilkinson. One consequence is that the English now apologize for their history rather than study it. Without history there is no need of identification. This is the real English disease.

All this suggests that if the ‘Turning Points’ series – first and foremost wonderful storytelling – was taught as a school history course it would excite a new generation. Let me quote just one line from Jeremy Black’s piece on the year 1776: ‘American independence permanently transformed the nature of the British Empire.’ That sentence prompts so many questions. It would launch a class into 200 years of the history of our immediate and very traceable ancestors. Would we find who we are today? Of course not. That’s something for the next generation to explore.

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