Island Stories: Britain and Its History in the Age of Brexit

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And the human cost has been considerable, especially at two points during the twentieth century. First, in the 1920s and 1930s, a whole generation of workers in staple industries such as coal, steel, textiles and shipbuilding experienced long-term structural unemployment. Their iconic protest was the Jarrow March from Tyneside to London in October 1936. And then the even more precipitous slump from the 1970s in what was left of those sectors and across heavy industry as a whole. Between 1971 and 1999 the proportion of workers in manufacturing halved, from 34 per cent to under 16 per cent, while employment in the service sector rose from 54 per cent to 72 per cent – with most of that growth coming in financial and business services: up from 6 per cent to over 18 per cent of the workforce.[76] (#litres_trial_promo) In both phases, deindustrialisation was mainly the result of sharp foreign competition from lower-wage developing economies, but it has been accentuated by the policy decisions of various British governments – privileging the gold standard in the 1920s, sticking to monetary targets and breaking union power in the Thatcher era. The consequence in each case was high levels of unemployment and enduring social deprivation in regions that had been heavily dependent on a single economic activity or enterprise – a coal mine, steel mill or car factory, with the old industrial heartlands of northern England, South Wales and Clydeside hardest hit. This process has tended to exacerbate the sense of a North–South divide – with prosperity most evident in London, the Home Counties and parts of the Midlands. This fed into the pro-Brexit vote in June 2016.

Indeed it has been argued that ‘de-industrialisation’ not ‘decline’ should be considered the most appropriate ‘meta-narrative’ for post-war British history – perhaps even comparable with the epic historical transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, given its wide-ranging effects on ‘income distribution, unemployment, the gendered distribution of work and the shape of the social security system’.[77] (#litres_trial_promo) The new service economy is highly polarised between what have been called ‘lovely’ jobs and ‘lousy’ jobs, with the latter routine and poorly paid, so that ‘in-work’ poverty has to be quietly mitigated by state benefits. Precipitate de-industrialisation has brought with it sharp increases in social inequality and economic insecurity. And in understanding the human costs, concepts such as ‘growth’ and ‘decline’ are not merely irrelevant but obfuscatory. The root questions are political more than economic. What have governments done to promote new economic activities, retrain unemployed workers and educate younger generations into flexible work skills? This agenda takes us into the realm of national policies rather than structural processes – and ‘policies’ in a much more sophisticated sense than political rhetoric about reversing national decline by acts of Napoleonic willpower.[78] (#litres_trial_promo)

Yet the ideology of decline still has visceral power. There seems to be a ‘gut feeling that Britain, having once been top dog, ought always to be top dog’. In which case, the fact that other dogs are bigger is taken as evidence of the nation’s ‘decline’, even though the British dog is now a lot fatter than a century ago.[79] (#litres_trial_promo) Some seem to find it particularly galling that former enemies, notably Germany, now occupy an elevated place. The insistence on ‘greatness’ – that Thatcherite aspiration to put the ‘Great’ back into ‘Britain’ – suggests a rooted Tory unwillingness to bid farewell to the position and status that had been lost. Yet it is striking that when the Europhile Liberal Democrat politician Nick Clegg published his 2017 manifesto about how to reverse the verdict of the EU referendum, he felt it necessary to entitle the book How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again). The appeal of the ‘G’ word, it seems, is not confined to the political right.

Magnifying this sense of lost greatness is the visibility of the past in contemporary Britain. The era of ‘decline’ is not only an age of affluence but also the heyday of Heritage. Yet what the ‘H’ word actually means is elusive. ‘We could no more define the national heritage than we could define, say, beauty or art,’ stated the first annual report of the National Heritage Memorial Fund in 1980–1. In its view the term obviously included ‘the natural riches of Britain’, threatened by ‘thoughtless development’, but ‘heritage’ was also ‘a representation of the development of aesthetic expression and a testimony to the role played by the nation in world history’.[80] (#litres_trial_promo)

The prodigious growth of the ‘heritage industry’ has spawned many forward-looking projects of urban and rural regeneration. But it can also foster nostalgia funded by affluence. At one end of the spectrum is the National Trust – despite its name a private charity whose membership has mushroomed from 1 million in 1981 to over 5 million in 2017. Now one of the largest landowners in Britain, the Trust describes its mission as preserving ‘special places’ not only ‘for everyone’ but also ‘for ever’. It has been credited with largely ensuring the survival of the English country house, and with that an alluring evocation of past gentility. At the other end of the spectrum, local councils and museums have given new life to a multitude of derelict industrial sites.[81] (#litres_trial_promo) Some of these – Ironbridge, for instance – can be infused with a gritty grandeur to match, in a different way, country houses like Stourhead or Cliveden.

The vogue since the 1980s for ‘heritage films’ has also enhanced the ‘historical imaginary’ of Britain. Many influential blockbusters feature famous monarchs, such as Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and George III, and country-house dramas have always been popular, from Brideshead Revisited to Downton Abbey. Often memorably acted and beautifully filmed, these films and TV programmes can insidiously suggest that the nation’s past is more impressive and exciting than its present. That can also be the effect of the most dynamic area of recent history television, so-called ‘Reality History’. Moving away from an academic, informational approach, TV channels adopted a more emotive, participatory format – encouraging the viewer to identify with historical figures and their experience by adopting their lifestyle (the House genre), wearing their clothes, or enduring their experiences (Trench, Ship, and so on).[82] (#litres_trial_promo)

Particularly potent have been movies about Britain’s Second World War produced by post-war British studios. The total number was remarkable: about one hundred in the two decades from 1946 to 1965. Some 30 million people went to the cinema every week in the late 1940s, when Britain’s population totalled 51 million. Although attendance fell below 15 million in 1959, this figure still virtually matched the circulation of all national daily newspapers. War films – though despised by many critics – proved consistent box-office successes. The Dam Busters was the top-grossing British film in 1955; likewise Reach for the Sky in 1956 (about the wartime aviator Douglas Bader). Sink the Bismarck was another big success in 1960. Unlike movies of the 1920s and 1930s about the Great War, there was very little questioning of the conflict’s rightness; nor were soldiers on both sides depicted as essentially ordinary men led as victims to the slaughter. The post-1945 films celebrated men and masculinity; their heroes – stars such as Jack Hawkins and Richard Todd – were generally tough but reserved, stereotypically English, and their German and Japanese foes usually classic ‘baddies’. Apart from a few Australians, the contributions of the empire to victory rarely figured, nor those of allies such as the Americans – let alone the Russians. Complementing the message of the popular boys’ weekly, The Eagle, these movies projected the war as ‘a great game’ and ‘a good cause’. Of course, most audiences probably enjoyed them simply as action-packed entertainment – escapes from Nazi prisoner-of-war camps being particularly popular. But, at a subliminal level, the films served to reinforce the heroic narrative of Britain Alone.[83] (#litres_trial_promo)

These movies were seen by much larger audiences from the 1970s through endless repeats on television. And, more recently, the heroic narrative has been sharpened down to the person of Churchill himself, through what is called a process of ‘re-mediation’ – as one medium refashions the product of another: book, journalism, film, with multiple feedback loops – and in the process amplifies the Churchillian impact. Churchill started the process with six volumes of war memoirs published between 1948 and 1954. He intended to shape the verdict of history at an early stage by, as he liked to put it, being one of the historians. The most vivid parts of those books were purveyed to a much larger audience through serialisation across the world in major newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph in Britain and the New York Times and Life magazine in the USA. Film-makers also picked up the memoirs, for instance, the Winston Churchill: The Valiant Year series shown in America and Britain in 1960–1, and Churchill’s immortality was then assured by a state funeral in 1965, broadcast on TV across the world. Meanwhile, historian Martin Gilbert was gradually constructing Churchill’s literary mausoleum in what became an eight-volume ‘official biography’, on which he worked for twenty years before its completion in 1986. These volumes and the accompanying tomes of supporting documents in turn provided vast amounts of additional information for new movies and TV films. In The Wilderness Years – an eight-part television series of 1982 – Churchill in the 1930s was brought to life for a new generation by the actor Robert Hardy. In the twenty-first century, British-American co-productions hiked up the budgets and also the special effects. In quick succession came Albert Finney in The Gathering Storm (2002), Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm, 2009) and Gary Oldman’s Oscar-winning performance in Darkest Hour in 2017 – the same year as the movie Dunkirk, another box-office triumph about Britain in 1940. And so the process of Churchillian re-mediation has continued for some seventy years, with books, films and journalism feeding on each other.[84] (#litres_trial_promo)

In the process, however, there has been a gradual narrowing of the Second World War in popular British imagination to the story of one country and one leader in one year, and this has distorted the magnitude and complexity of that global conflict. In June 1940, Churchill urged his beleaguered countrymen to ‘so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’ In his memoirs, Churchill turned exhortation into description, entitling the second volume, about 1940, Their Finest Hour. Over time, ‘theirs’ and ‘his’ have become intertwined. And ‘finest’ implies that Britain’s Churchillian moment cannot be bettered, in other words that it has been all downhill ever since.[85] (#litres_trial_promo)

In various ways, therefore, heritage is in danger of becoming a substitute for history in public awareness of Britain’s past. ‘The nation’, observed historian Patrick Wright, ‘is not seen as a heterogeneous society that makes its own history as it moves forward, however chaotically, into the future. Instead it is portrayed as an already achieved and timeless historical entity which demands only appropriate reverence and protection in the present.’[86] (#litres_trial_promo) In other words, history is understood as content not process: a proud inheritance to be cherished and preserved, rather than an ongoing project of making and remaking.

If you are sure what Britain is, or should be, this may not be the book for you. But if you can cope with the challenges of living in the future tense, rather than luxuriating in the past pluperfect,[87] (#litres_trial_promo) then read on. What follows is an attempt to conceive of Britain and its history as work in progress.

2 (#ub67bdc2e-5da7-50d2-a36a-8433c22a0f19)

Europe (#ub67bdc2e-5da7-50d2-a36a-8433c22a0f19)

Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history.

Margaret Thatcher, Bruges, 20 September 1988

The idea of Britain existing separately from Europe is a familiar feature of modern British culture. In daily speech, from football matches to weather forecasts, the two terms are often used to denote distinct entities. This has also been a trope of political rhetoric, from the long debate in the 1960s about whether Britain should ‘join’ Europe, via the 1975 referendum about whether to ‘stay in’, and on to the Brexit vote in 2016 to ‘leave’. Of course, ‘Europe’ here signifies a specific political organisation – the EEC or the EU – but much of the political debate has drawn on a narrative about Britain’s historic and special character compared with the Continent.

One of the most celebrated speeches about Britain’s non-European identity was delivered by Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour leader, to the party’s annual conference in Brighton in October 1962. He spoke at length about the conditions that would have to be fulfilled before Labour could agree to join the ‘Common Market’ – especially changes to the Common Agricultural Policy, which he denounced as ‘one of the most devastating pieces of protectionism ever invented’ – and he stressed Britain’s obligations to the Commonwealth. Gaitskell’s conclusion was that the arguments for British entry were ‘evenly balanced’ and that ‘whether or not it is worth going in depends on the conditions of our entry’. He did not conceal his anger at the way Harold Macmillan’s Tory Government seemed hell-bent on joining, despite the costs to the Commonwealth. Yet what caught the headlines was not Gaitskell’s judicious weighing up of pros and cons but his emotional soundbites.[1] (#litres_trial_promo)

For instance, he warned about a two-faced Europe, of which Britain had good historic reasons to be wary. ‘For although, of course, Europe has had a great and glorious civilisation, although Europe can claim Goethe and Leonardo, Voltaire and Picasso, there have been evil features in European history, too – Hitler and Mussolini … You cannot say what this Europe will be: it has its two faces and we do not know as yet which is the one which will be dominant.’ The ‘ideal of Federal Europe’ also stuck in the Labour leader’s gullet. This meant that ‘if we go into this we are no more than a state (as it were) in the United States of Europe, such as Texas and California … it would be the same as in Australia, where you have Western Australia, for example, and New South Wales. We should be like them. This is what it means; it does mean the end of Britain as an independent nation state.’ And with that transformation would come, Gaitskell believed, a repudiation of Britain’s historic identity: ‘It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say “Let it end” but, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought … For we are not just a part of Europe – at least not yet. We have a different history. We have ties and links which run across the whole world.’[2] (#litres_trial_promo)

A couple of months later this kind of British rhetoric about a thousand years of history and a global destiny was picked up by Dean Acheson – who had served as US Secretary of State of State in 1949–53 at height of the Cold War. Acheson’s line about Britain losing an empire but not finding a role – quoted at the start of this book – has now become notorious, but the background story is important. In 1962, Acheson – now a crusty elder statesman – was asked to deliver the keynote address to a student conference at the US Military Academy at West Point on 5 December. He made his usual pitch about the importance of the Atlantic Alliance, and the speech attracted little attention in the United States. But embedded in a section about some of the problems facing Western Europe, was the single paragraph on Britain that proved incendiary:

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role – that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength, and enjoys a precarious economic relationship by means of the Sterling Area and preferences in the British market – this role is about played out. Great Britain, attempting to be a broker between the United States and Russia, has seemed to conduct policy as weak as its military power. H.M.G. [Her Majesty’s Government] is now attempting – wisely, in my opinion – to reenter Europe, from which it was banished at the time of the Plantagenets, and the battle seems to be about as hard-fought as were those of an earlier day.[3] (#litres_trial_promo)

That whole paragraph is worth quoting both because of its contemptuous dismissal of the Commonwealth, the Sterling Area and Britain’s Cold War diplomacy and also because of its (now rather uncanny) prediction that Britain’s attempt to enter the EEC might presage another Hundred Years’ War. Above all, however, it was the epigram about Britain losing an empire without finding a role that caught the eye in London and provoked an outcry in Tory circles. The Express denounced this American ‘stab in the back’ of its devoted ally; the Telegraph observed snidely that Acheson had always been ‘more immaculate in dress than in judgement’.[4] (#litres_trial_promo) And because the former Secretary of State was deemed to be close to President Kennedy, the Prime Minister himself felt it necessary to offer his own capsule narrative of British history, to placate his party and what he called ‘the “patriotic” elements in the country’. Macmillan declared that ‘Mr Acheson has fallen into an error which has been made by quite a lot of people in the course of the last four hundred years, including Philip of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler.’[5] (#litres_trial_promo)

An Evening Standard cartoon showing Prime Minister Harold Macmillan begging President John F. Kennedy to let him be the back legs of the American pantomime horse, while Dean Acheson looks on from the wings.

Acheson never retracted his argument but he did later express regret about how he had expressed it – albeit in a typically sardonic manner. ‘The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull,’ he told an interviewer in 1970, adding that this was ‘not always easy to achieve’. He admitted that the controversial sentence in his West Point speech suffered from being too epigrammatic and quotable. ‘If I’d taken twice the number of words to express it, it would have been inoffensive and recognised as true at once. Since then it has been adopted by almost every British politician, though they have never given me credit for it at all.’[6] (#litres_trial_promo)

Acheson was right: his one-liner about losing empire and not yet finding a role became almost a cliché of British commentary, especially for those who wanted Britain to join ‘Europe’.[7] (#litres_trial_promo) Yet the emotional invocations of national history by Gaitskell and Macmillan reflect an abiding counter-strain, which re-emerged, for instance, at the time of German unification in 1989–90. ‘We beat the Germans twice, and now they’re back,’ Margaret Thatcher exclaimed during a European summit in December 1989, a month after the Berlin Wall was breached.[8] (#litres_trial_promo) Her close friend Nicholas Ridley vented similar feelings splenetically to a Spectator journalist, calling the European monetary union ‘a German racket, designed to take over the whole of Europe’ and exclaiming that, as for handing over sovereignty to the EC, ‘you might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’ The Spectator gleefully ran the interview as a cover story, graced by a poster of the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl daubed with a Hitler moustache, and Ridley was obliged to resign from the Cabinet. So Boris Johnson’s battle cry in 2016 that the British must again be ‘heroes of Europe’ and stand up to German domination was more of the same. The Telegraph headlined that story: ‘Boris Johnson: The EU wants a superstate, just as Hitler did’.[9] (#litres_trial_promo)

To make some sense of these potted narratives we need to take in more than the Second World War and its aftermath, and look across the broad sweep of Gaitskell’s ‘thousand years’. An appropriate way to do so is by reflecting on the ‘English Channel’. Although this figures much less in the narratives of Welsh or Scottish history (defined by the Marches or the Borders) and hardly at all for Ireland (across the Irish Sea), the Channel has come to symbolise the Britain–Europe divide: a maritime frontier etched out in the White Cliffs of Dover. But we need a more fluid understanding of the Channel within ‘our island story’ – a more nuanced perspective on Britain’s changing interactions with a changing Continent.

The Channel – barrier and bridge

A millennium ago, what we British now call the English Channel was described as not so much a divide but a passageway between two land masses. Geoffrey of Monmouth, the twelfth-century chronicler, referred to it as ‘the straits to the south’ which ‘allow one to sail to Gaul’.[10] (#litres_trial_promo) His perspective was hardly surprising because, for several centuries after 1066, England was ruled by a political elite who spoke a version of French and who moved naturally between their domains on either side of the water. And in the age of sail, not rail, France could be reached from London far more quickly than Scotland. The result was ‘a shared culture’, ruled by an intermarried aristocracy and by the Roman Catholic Church, whose clerics constituted the administrative class (and also the historians).[11] (#litres_trial_promo)

The sharing was, however, far from harmonious because of rival claims to territory and title. Armies from the French side of the Channel invaded England on several occasions, notably during the civil war of 1139–53 over the succession to Henry I and again in 1215–17 during the ‘Barons’ War’ against King John about how to interpret and implement the Magna Carta. More common, however, were armies crossing in the opposite direction, from north to south. After Henry I, the Anglo–Norman dynasty founded by William the Conqueror were succeeded by the descendants of Geoffrey of Anjou – Henry II and his sons Richard and John – whose ‘Angevin empire’ at its peak in the 1170s stretched in a great arc from Normandy west to encompass Brittany and then south down the coast to Bordeaux, Aquitaine and the Pyrenees, as well as east through the Massif Central to the Auvergne. Although covering about half of modern France, this ‘empire’ was a hodgepodge of separate possessions, plagued by disputes within Henry’s fractious family. It fell apart during the Anglo–French wars in John’s reign, with the loss of Normandy and all the other lands apart from Gascony, the southwest rump of the once vast duchy of Aquitaine.

Edward I and the Plantagenets struggled to hang on to what was left of their French lands. Their crucial claim was to the duchy of Aquitaine. The Capetian kings of France – engaged, like Edward I in Britain, in an aggressive programme of state building – claimed that, under the 1259 Treaty of Paris, the duchy could only be held in homage and fealty to the French crown. In 1286, Edward I did perform an act of homage to Philippe IV of France, using the words, ‘I become your man for the lands which I hold from you on this side of the sea according to the form of peace made between our ancestors.’[12] (#litres_trial_promo)

The implications of this vow became increasingly intolerable to his successors: a monarch who claimed to be sovereign on the English side of the sea was in a position of feudal inferiority to the Valois dynasty in respect of his continental inheritance. As the confrontation escalated, Edward III (the grandson of Edward I) took advantage of a French succession crisis in 1328 to assert his claim, via his mother, to rule France as well as England. The result was open warfare between the two monarchies on and off from 1337 – what became known as the Hundred Years’ War. After Henry V’s surprise victory at Agincourt in 1415, the English and their Burgundian allies did finally seem close to enforcing their claim. In the 1420s they controlled much of France from Brittany and the Channel to the Loire. But then the war turned against them, in part due to the inspirational leadership of Jeanne d’Arc, and by 1453 the English possessions were reduced to a small area around Calais. Despite new French wars under Henry VIII, Calais was eventually lost in 1558, though subsequent English monarchs did not stop reiterating their nominal claim to be rulers of France until the Napoleonic era.

Defeat in the Hundred Years’ War therefore ended a period of almost four centuries when the Channel was a bridge as much as a barrier, linking two sides of an Anglo–French culture in which the English elite had roots and often lands in France. Over the next four centuries there slowly emerged a sense of contrasting and competing national identities, sharpened by the Reformation and the protracted struggle to establish a distinctively English form of Protestantism, which lasted till 1690, and then by another on-off Hundred Years’ War with the French, this time against Louis XIV and later Napoleon. In this process, the Channel did assume the character of an iconic barrier, especially in official rhetoric.Yet it never ceased to function as a bridge because, as a Protestantnation, England could not be indifferent to the fate of the Reformation on the continent, now wracked by conflicts between Protestants and Catholics.[13] (#litres_trial_promo)

Henry VIII’s break with Rome began for very personal reasons: his desire for the Papacy to annul his barren marriage in the hope of producing a legitimate male heir with his latest infatuation, Anne Boleyn. When the Pope refused to grant him a divorce from his wife Catherine of Aragon, Henry set himself up as ‘supreme head’ of the English church and then, seizing on the convenient ideas of anti-clerical reformers, his regime attacked the institution of monasticism and dissolved all the religious houses, owners of about a third of the land in England. Instead of prudently managing those assets, however, Henry flogged them for ready cash to pay for an ego-trip bid to regain England’s lost French empire. The war of 1544–6 was a costly disaster and England’s incremental Protestant Reformation left the country increasingly exposed in Counter-Reformation Europe.

The 1550s proved a critical turning point, defined by the accidents of gender and mortality. Henry died in 1547. His young son Edward VI was an ardent Protestant, eager to promote his faith, but he died – probably of tuberculosis – in 1553, aged 15. Anticipating his death, Edward tried to ensure a Protestant succession by willing the Crown to his cousin, Lady Jane Grey. But her reign lasted only nine days before Mary, Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, was installed on the throne. A staunch Catholic, committed to extirpating Protestantism, Mary married the heir to the Spanish throne, who became King Philip II in 1556. This placed England on the other side of Europe’s wars of religion. But then in 1558, Mary died aged 42, possibly from cancer of the uterus. She was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth – the daughter of Anne Boleyn, who was then 25. Given the fate of her siblings, few would have predicted at her accession that Elizabeth would reign for nearly 45 years. In 1562, for instance, she contracted smallpox and seemed close to death. Her fortuitous longevity proved to be of huge historical significance.

Elizabeth was a firm but cautious Protestant. Both those adjectives mattered: she secured the Reformation but did not allow religion to divide the country as happened in France. Equally important, in 1559–60 Scotland’s anti-Catholic nobles expelled the French and established a Protestant regime. What ensued has been described as ‘the greatest transformation in England’s foreign relations since the start of the Hundred Years’ War’ – making ‘an ally of England’s medieval enemies the Scots, and an enemy of its medieval allies the Burgundians’ whose possessions in the Netherlands had now passed to Philip of Spain.[14] (#litres_trial_promo) What’s more, France and Spain finally made peace in 1559 after nearly seven decades of periodic conflict, freeing Philip to concentrate on his mission of rolling back the Reformation.

In 1567 the Duke of Parma began a ruthless Spanish campaign to suppress the Protestant-led rebellion in the Low Countries; in 1572 thousands of French Protestants were killed in what became known as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. At home Elizabeth, pressed by her advisers, turned on recalcitrant Catholics as potential traitors; abroad she began to aid the Dutch revolt in the interests of national security. This escalating confrontation with Spain climaxed in Philip’s abortive invasion in July 1588 – which was defeated not so much by English naval prowess as by the fabled ‘Protestant wind’ that prevented the Spanish Armada from linking up with Parma’s army in Flanders and instead drove the sailing ships into the North Sea. A third of the original 130 vessels did not make it around Scotland and home to Spain.

From these years of fevered insecurity, when regime and religion both seemed to hang in the balance, there emerged a new national ideology. Rooted in providentialist interpretations of recent history, it depicted the English as a staunchly Protestant nation, blessed by God’s protection. An intellectual landmark was John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church – popularly known Foxe’s Book of Martyrs because it was a collection of stories – some true, others little more than rumour – about Christian martyrs, mostly anti-Catholic. Foxe had started compiling his work in Latin, while exiled on the Continent during Mary’s reign. Returning to England in 1559, soon after Elizabeth acceded to the throne, he was quickly taken under the wing of her principal adviser, William Cecil, who put Foxe in touch with the printer John Day, persuaded him to publish in English and also helped finance what was a truly massive project – the biggest book printed in England to date. The first edition, which appeared in 1563, ran to 1,800 pages, lavishly illustrated with 60 woodcuts; the second, in 1570, filled 2,300 pages – more than two million words – in two volumes, with 150 illustrations. Over the course of Elizabeth’s reign five editions were published; four more followed during the seventeenth century; and abridged versions, in cheap instalments, were printed throughout the eighteenth century – carrying Foxe’s message to a new and much wider audience.[15] (#litres_trial_promo)

‘The Double Deliverance’: Samuel Ward’s print, published in Amsterdam in 1621 and widely distributed. In the centre the Pope and a Spanish grandee (King Philip II?), with advisers including the Devil, plot England’s destruction. Left: the Armada of 1588 is blown away by the wind from Heaven. Right: Guy Fawkes prepares his deadly plot but the all-seeing Jehovah smiles on his chosen people in England.[16] (#litres_trial_promo)

This providentialist sense of the English as a Chosen People – like the Israelites of old – became enshrined in the national calendar. Particularly significant in English national memory was what preacher Samuel Ward called in 1621 the nation’s ‘double deliverance’ from ‘the invincible navie’ and ‘the unmatcheable powder treason’ – in other words, from the Armada of 1588 and the Catholic plot to blow up king and parliament in 1605. The failure of both were depicted as acts of divine intervention.

The Gunpowder Treason Plot became even more sacred to Protestant memory during the reign of the crypto-Catholic Charles I and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Charles’ attempt to impose an Anglican prayer book on the Scottish Presbyterian church provoked the so-called Bishops’ Wars of 1639–40. In an effort to put down the Scottish revolt, the King tried to raise an army of Irish Catholics, which deepened suspicions that he was a Papist. Finally obliged to call Parliament in London into session, after more than a decade, in order to obtain money for the Scottish war, Charles was confronted by a long list of civil and religious grievances from a legislature that voted itself into permanent session (the ‘Long Parliament’) until its demands were met. Deadlock turned into confrontation and then three English civil wars between 1642 and 1651, which were intertwined with the politico-religious struggles in Scotland and Ireland.

Charles was executed in 1649 and although his son regained the throne in the Restoration of 1660 as Charles II, he returned to a country permanently changed by the civil wars. England was now firmly established as a constitutional monarchy committed to a Protestant church. So much so that when Charles’ brother and successor, James II, turned to Catholicism, he was displaced in 1688 in favour of his Protestant daughter, Mary, and her Dutch Calvinist husband William of Orange. After Mary died in 1694, ‘King Billy’ reigned alone until his death in 1702. The year before, a parliament dominated by Tory squires passed the Act of Settlement, prohibiting a Catholic (or anyone married to a Catholic) from acceding to the throne. This was no ritual act of piety. In 1707, ensuring the Protestant succession throughout Britain was a major reason for the Anglo–Scottish Treaty of Union, which established a new constitutional entity, Great Britain. And in 1714, when Queen Anne (Mary’s younger sister) died without a living heir, Parliament passed over more than fifty individuals closer to her in blood yet Papist in faith. Instead they invited Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover – barely able to speak English but a staunch Lutheran – to be crowned King George I.[17] (#litres_trial_promo) In other words, to preserve England as a constitutionally affirmed Protestant nation it was considered an acceptable price, both in 1688 and also 1714, to call in a continental monarch.

The Protestant succession also brought with it renewed engagement with the Continent. By the 1680s France, under Louis XIV, had replaced Spain as Europe’s predominant Catholic power. Autocratic and aggressive, Louis and his successors sought to expand through enforced dynastic marriages and overt military conquest – a project seen by many in Britain as portending a ‘universal monarchy’. The French directly supported the son and grandson of James II in their bids to put the Stuarts back on the throne through invasions in 1715 and 1745. This threat forced Britain into continental alliances in the wars of 1689–97, 1702–13 and 1743–8 – waged to restrain French power.

In any case, the Protestant succession meant that Britain was itself a continental monarchy. Except for the twelve years of Queen Anne (1702–14), ‘from 1688 to 1837 the holder of the British thrones was simultaneously ruler of significant continental European territories’ – the United Provinces under William III and the Electorate of Braunschweig-Lüneburg under the Hanoverian dynasty. Although generally known as Hanover after its capital city, the Electorate actually covered much of north-central Germany – from Brunswick to Bremen on the North Sea, and from Göttingen to the edge of Hamburg. George I and George II were rulers of two separated territories and – retaining deep German roots – they took their continental obligations seriously, spending at least one summer in three in Hanover, together with key ministers usually headed by the senior Secretary of State. This pattern was broken only in 1760 with the accession of George III – the first Hanoverian to be born in Britain and to speak English as his mother tongue. Indeed he never visited Hanover during his sixty-year reign.[18] (#litres_trial_promo)

The Hanover connection and the experience of fighting continental wars gave the eighteenth-century British political elite a keen awareness of Europe as a whole, both geographically and politically. This also discouraged insular isolationism. In 1716 the Earl of Sunderland asserted that ‘the old Tory notion that England can subsist by itself whatever becomes of the rest of Europe’ had been ‘justly exploded since the revolution’ of 1688. In 1742 the MP John Perceval ridiculed the idea ‘that this country is an island entrenched within its own natural boundaries, that it may stand secure and unconcerned in all the storms of the rest of the world’. The politician Lord Carteret insisted in 1744 that ‘our own independence’ was closely linked to ‘the liberties of the continent’.[19] (#litres_trial_promo) And setbacks against the French were often blamed on eighteenth-century equivalents of lack of willpower: luxury, selfishness, even an addiction to tea. ‘Were they the sons of tea-sippers’, asked the pamphleteer Jonas Hanway, ‘who won the fields of Cressy and Agincourt, or dyed the Danube’s streams with Gallic blood’ at Blenheim?[20] (#litres_trial_promo)

It became an explicit theme of Whig political rhetoric during the first half of the eighteenth century that the ‘national interest’ required Britain to maintain a ‘balance of power’ on the Continent, through judicious alliances and selective intervention. Yet there were many who disagreed. One critic claimed in 1742 that the idea of it ‘being the Honour of England to hold the balance of Europe has been so ignorantly interpreted, so absurdly applied, and so perniciously put into practice, that it has cost this Nation more lives, and more money, than all the national Honour of that kind in the World is worth’.[21] (#litres_trial_promo) The Tory politician and political philosopher Lord Bolingbroke offered an alternative strategy. ‘Great Britain is an island,’ he insisted. ‘The sea is our barrier, ships are our fortresses, and the mariners that trade and commerce alone can furnish are the garrisons to defend them.’ Bolingbroke did not totally rule out sending soldiers to the Continent. ‘Like other amphibious animals, we must come occasionally on shore,’ he admitted, ‘but the water is more properly our element, and in it, like them, as we find our greatest strength, so we exert our greatest force.’[22] (#litres_trial_promo)

Emerging here was what would prove to be a lasting tension in debates about British foreign policy between a ‘continental’ and a ‘maritime’ strategy. The latter became more plausible after 1760 under a monarch who did not share his predecessors’ orientation towards Hanover, both personally and politically. What’s more, Britain’s trade had now shifted away from northwest Europe to the Mediterranean, East Indies, Caribbean and the American colonies, in an increasingly profitable nexus of goods, commodities and people-trafficking. The major wars against France in the second part of the ‘long eighteenth century’ – 1756–63, 1778–83, 1793–1802 and climacterically 1803–15 – were struggles for global empire, especially in North America and the Indian sub-continent. Indeed Britain was now, to quote historian Peter Marshall, ‘a nation defined by Empire’.[23] (#litres_trial_promo)

Yet also still defined by its relations with the rest of Europe: every one of these wars entailed threats to the security of the British homeland, above all the menace of invasion by Napoleon in 1803–5. But except for the crisis years of 1812–15, Britain did not deploy large armies on the continent – using instead its commercial wealth and stable national debt to employ foreign mercenaries as its contribution to continental alliances. In 1760, for instance, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, there were 187,000 soldiers in Britain’s pay yet the contingent of British and Irish troops sent to Germany numbered only 20,000.[24] (#litres_trial_promo) In the seven wars against France from 1688 to 1815, the British were diplomatically isolated just once, when Spain and the Dutch joined France in 1779–80. As a result, Britain lost control of the seas and, with this, its American colonies.

These conflicts had a profound effect on national identity. ‘Great Britain’ – the union of England and Wales with Scotland in 1707 – was an invented nation, forged and hardened through these conflicts. ‘A powerful and persistent threatening France became the haunting embodiment of that Catholic Other which Britons had been taught to fear since the Reformation,’ historian Linda Colley has observed. ‘Confronting it encouraged them to bury their internal differences in the struggle for survival, victory and booty.’[25] (#litres_trial_promo)

The global struggle against France between 1793 and 1815 (over twice as long as both of Britain’s twentieth-century world wars combined) revived a real threat of invasion. A small French force landed in Wales in 1797, followed by more substantial invasions of Ireland in 1796 and 1798 – one of the main reasons for incorporating Ireland into the United Kingdom in 1801. Indeed from 1798 to 1805 the invasion of England was Napoleon’s main strategic aim. ‘Eight hours of night in our favour would decide the fate of the universe,’ he blustered. ‘We have six centuries of insult to avenge.’ Britain was mobilised as never before. In 1804–5, nearly a tenth of the country’s 10.5 million people were directly involved in national defence. In these years, France became Britain’s bogeyman, with fears fanned by propagandists. ‘That perfidious, blood-thirsty nation, the French,’ one pamphlet claimed in 1793, was ‘the source of every evil you have experienced for a century past.’[26] (#litres_trial_promo)

Only when he lost control of the seas after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 did Napoleon turn east against Prussia and then Russia. But he posed a new challenge in the form of economic warfare. His ‘Continental Blockade’ of Britain from 1806 and British retaliation against any state that cooperated with him proved the climax of this battle to control the narrow seas. It also had wider implications. The refusal of Portugal to join the blockade allowed the British to open a vital second front from 1808 in the Peninsular War, fighting Napoleon in Spain. And the Tsar’s refusal to maintain the blockade was a major factor in Napoleon’s hubristic invasion of Russia in 1812, which marked the beginning of his end. In 1814 and again in 1815 Britain was able to subsidise a coalition of three major powers (Prussia, Russia and Austria) as well as its own now-substantial army and thereby twice defeat the Little Emperor – culminating in the British-Prussian victory at Waterloo in June 1815.

The French wars from 1793 to 1815 led to a sharper definition of national borders. For the British, the sea between the two countries became generally known as ‘The English Channel’ – reflecting their claim that ‘the maritime frontier was defined by the French coast’. For the French, the waterway was known as ‘La Manche’ – the sleeve – indicating a looser conception of territorial waters. ‘The sea became an external limit of the French territory, without belonging to it,’ but the English claimed the sea as well.[27] (#litres_trial_promo) Affirming Britain’s security interest in the other side of the Channel coast, in 1839 the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, orchestrated an international agreement to guarantee the independence and neutrality of Belgium, which had broken away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. France and Prussia were among the signatories. This had fateful consequences seventy-five years later.

After Waterloo there was periodic friction with France and occasional invasion scares, but, to quote historian François Crouzet, the French ‘never again picked up the gauntlet’. They ‘understood that they would not have a chance, and so backed down when the risk of war was serious, for example in 1840 and again in 1898’.[28] (#litres_trial_promo) Gradually relations between Britain and France moved haltingly towards co-existence, then entente and eventually alliance – redefining Britain’s continental connection until 1940.

The Channel – transcended yet triumphant

During the century between 1815 and 1914, Britain tried to maintain its hybrid grand strategy – maritime and continental – by new means. Global expansion, often conducted by limited wars such as the conquest of Egypt in 1882, was combined with periodic bouts of calculating diplomacy to maintain a European balance. Throughout, large-scale wars such as the Crimea (1854–6) and South Africa (1899–1902) were the exception. But in the last decades of the nineteenth century – after the geopolitical turning points of American and German unification between 1861 and 1871 – the implications of Britain’s relative decline began to kick in. During the long eighteenth century the British had battled against a single foe, France, for European stability and global hegemony. The struggle was immense, but the chess game was essentially simple. By 1900, however, the country faced simultaneous challenges on the continent and globally from a variety of powers, even though Germany was the most threatening because closest to home. The first German war (1914–18) was won by Britain and France, but only with massive American help; in the second France quickly became irrelevant geopolitically and America all-important. In the process the Channel lost much of its strategic significance – transcended by the bomber and then the nuclear missile. Yet its psychological importance for British identity was triumphantly re-asserted by the events of 1940. The era of the two world wars requires closer attention because it has become central to national debate.

In the late-nineteenth century, Britain’s default response in the face of multiple challengers was a policy of selective ‘appeasement’ – in those days a perfectly respectable diplomatic term. It meant, according to historian Paul Kennedy, ‘satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise, thereby avoiding the resort to an armed conflict which would be expensive, bloody, and possibly very dangerous’.[29] (#litres_trial_promo) But the rationality and acceptability of appeasement was more obvious to the British than to others. ‘We are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance,’ Churchill privately admitted in 1914. ‘We have got all we want in territory and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.’[30] (#litres_trial_promo) He chose to omit the italicised phrases when quoting this memorandum in his war memoirs – a sign, presumably, of his awareness that they did not accord with what the British liked to present as their principled love of peace.

The United States, at least, could be managed around the turn of the century by calculated appeasement – backing down on points of friction, while playing up the economic and cultural ties between the two ‘Anglo-Saxon’ powers. The US was a force only in the Americas and the Pacific, with – at this stage – minimal political engagement in Europe. In Europe itself, Germany was not geographically a direct threat – unlike Napoleonic France had been. However, its aspirations under Kaiser Wilhelm II to become a ‘world power’ equal to the others did pose a serious challenge, especially in the 1900s when Germany built a large modern fleet to rival the Royal Navy. This prompted Britain to draw closer to France and Russia – colonial rivals in North Africa and the Indian subcontinent respectively but also European states that feared the growth of German military power. The Anglo–French entente of 1904 and the Anglo–Russian agreement of 1907 were intended to resolve, or at least reduce, imperial tensions in the interests of deterring Germany.