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A Splendid Isolation A Splendid Isolation A SPLENDID ISOLATION A Short History of English Nationalism Stephen Cooper Copyright Stephen Cooper, 2019, 2020 The right of Stephen Cooper to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 1 A Splendid Isolation Messieurs, l'Angleterre est une île, et je devrais m'arrêter là. (Sirs, England is an Island, and I ought to leave it at that). André Siegfried (1875-1959). The story of the English Island-fortress and its progress towards nationhood is a stirring one. But that does not always make it good history. Malcolm Vale (in The Ancient Enemy, 2007). 2 A Splendid Isolation CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 THE ANGLO-SAXONS 2 AT THE HEART OF EUROPE 3 MERRIE ENGLAND 4 WAR & NATIONALISM 5 AGINCOURT 6 NATION STATE 7 REVOLUTION? 8 BRITISH WORTHIES 9 JOHN BULL 10 SPLENDID ISOLATION BIBLIOGRAPHY 3 A Splendid Isolation INTRODUCTION Two themes ran through conventional English historiography when I was young. The first was that England was coterminous with Britain. The second is that ‘we’ (that is the English, or British) were the best at everything (or the things that mattered) and that we had been uniquely fortunate amongst nations. This book is the story of my dawning realisation that each of these was a myth. I was born in 1948 in Manchester, and brought up in Liverpool, where it was still relevant whether you were Protestant or Catholic, and the question of why the monasteries were dissolved by Henry VIII was still a matter of lively debate at school (at least among those of us who thought that there was more to life than football). There were several Catholic schools in the neighbourhood, but I never went inside their gates. I attended an Anglican primary school and an all-boys grammar school. I learned a traditional, Protestant version of English history; and I am sure that it was little different from the version which my parents had learned in the 1920s, or the one which had been taught to their parents in the 1890s. Both at home and at school, I was taught by my parents and grandparents that British was best. The British Empire was the largest in the world, and it had brought civilisation, along with Christianity and the English language, to many countries. True, it was somewhat smaller than it had once been, and it had been re- named, but we still celebrated Empire Day in the 1950s, and it was only in 1960 that Harold Macmillan made his speech about the ‘winds of change’ sweeping through Africa. The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, in 1953, was widely regarded as marking a new ‘Elizabethan Age’. The British armed forces were still the best in the world. Had not England just defeated Germany, for the second time? The English system of government was the best there was, and a model for the ‘Free World’. We were one of the ‘Big Three’, along with the USA and the USSR. We had created the first National Health Service, and introduced a system of free education for all; and we had the best footballers in the world too. It came as a considerable shock when Hungary thrashed England 6-3, in Coronation Year. My references here to England, rather than Britain, are deliberate, because people of my parents’ generation did not distinguish between the two (though they had come to accept that Ireland was different). For us Britain was England with Celtic (or Gaelic) appendages. We might not all have read H.E.Marshall’s Our Island Story (1905) or her Children’s History of Scotland (1907); but our view of the world was hers. The English had created the United Kingdom by ‘taking over’ Wales, Scotland and Ireland, at first by conquest (or attempted conquest), but later by consent; and it 4 A Splendid Isolation was all for their own good anyway, as well as ours. We had become a happy family of nations, and put the bloodshed and the bitterness of our separate histories behind us. We had also (by and large) put religious difference to one side, though the Anglican Church was still at the heart of the Establishment. Although Mis Marshall wrote for children, her histories were essentially simplified summaries of the narratives to be found in the great English historians of the 19th century: Lord Macaulay, William Stubbs, E.A.Freeman, J. A. Froude and J. R. Green. (For example, she explained Boadicea’s revolt against the Romans by saying that Roman soldiers had been ‘rude’ to her daughters.) It was her view of English history which inspired many of the public monuments which were erected just over a century ago, and which are still to be found in our cities today. Marshall’s rosy Anglocentric view of our history (as imparted by schoolteachers to generations of schoolchildren) was lovingly pilloried in 1066 and All That, which was published in 1930; but it survived the radical revision of our history exemplified by A.L.Morton’s People’s History of England of 1938; and it also survived two World Wars; the Irish War of Independence; the Egyptian Revolution; the grant of independence to British India; and the foundation of nationalist parties in Wales and Scotland. As late as 1965, the Socialist historian A.J.P.Taylor could still write a book about British history entitled English History, 1914-1945, though he felt that he now had to apologise for this: When the Oxford History of England was launched a generation ago, 'England' was still an all-embracing word. It meant indiscriminately England and Wales; Great Britain; the United Kingdom; and even the British Empire. Foreigners used it as the name of a Great Power and indeed continue to do so. Bonar Law, a Scotch Canadian, was not ashamed to describe himself as 'Prime Minister of England', as Disraeli, a Jew by birth, had done before him. More recently, I have learned that what was true in England was true in Wales. History continued, for many years, to be written and taught from the British (that is, English) perspective. The consequence was that: The study of the history of Wales was 'marginalized, even within Wales itself. In some historical quarters its practitioners were often looked on with a kind of amused tolerance and a feeling that they ought to have been able to find something more useful to do. The framers of examination syllabuses strove gallantly to ensure a place for Welsh history in the curriculum, but teaching in Welsh schools concentrated on the history of England. (A.D.Carr). Scotland has had a very different history from Wales, but Magnus Magnusson tells us that Scottish history continued to be taught and written 5 A Splendid Isolation from the British point of view when he was at school, thanks in part to the lasting influence of Sir Walter Scott. Things have changed a great deal in the last fifty years. An incalculable number of books have been published, on all aspects of the ground I have covered here; and there have also been startling advances in archaeology and genetic research, of which I am almost entirely ignorant. Nevertheless, I hope I have done justice to all the historians I have cited, and the different traditions which they represent. My conclusions are, of course, my own. Rotherham South Yorkshire September 201& July 2020 6 A Splendid Isolation CHAPTER ONE THE ANGLO-SAXONS Most English people know very little about the the first six centuries of our history, and there are many who can name every king and queen since 1066, but none before that date. Yet the Norman Conquest, though a landmark, does not represent the start of English history, though it could be said to have been a new beginning. Yet the Anglo-Saxons, who came across the North Sea and settled in the East and the South of our country, probably started to arrive in numbers after 410 C.E., when the Roman legions decided to abandon the province of Britannia to its fate; and in many respects, they were as English as you or me. Genetic science has shown that many of us are directly descended from them; they spoke a Germanic language which was clearly the ancestor of modern English; and they probably frequented the pub, that quintessentially English institution, more often than was good for them. Popular ignorance about the Anglo-Saxons, to be fair, is to a large extent due to the obscurity surrounding the first two centuries of their history in this Island, between 400 and 600 - the period which the late Professor James Campbell (1935- 2016) called ‘the lost centuries’; but those who like a historical conundrum, or debate, will find that the paucity of evidence about the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons does not mean that there is any shortage of ideas. The Anglo-Saxon Settlement There are really only two home-grown literary sources for the earliest period of English history. These are the British monk Gildas (thought to have lived in the mid 6th century), and the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede (who wrote in the early 8th century). Accordingly, it is only Gildas who was truly a contemporary writer; but Bede’s account is generally recognised as being of superior quality, and he did bring his account down to his own day. We therefore know that the Anglo-Saxon conquest of what is now England (if it was truly a conquest!) was not accomplished in a year (as the Norman Conquest was) or even in a few decades (like the Roman).
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