A conservative case for a black Anne Boleyn

I

Anne Boleyn was not black.

The Boleyns were old East Anglian gentry, servants to the Crown, prosperous merchants, clerics. They had been prominent, in a quiet way, for more than two centuries before their entanglement with Henry VIII’s dynastic troubles led to their downfall. Families like them - embedded in their localities but also plugged into national and even international networks of power and influence - were the administrative backbone of late medieval England. One thing they were not was African. It is noteworthy, then, that the part of Anne in a recent TV drama went to the black British-American actress Jodie Turner-Smith.

This casting decision has been in and out of the news for a year or so now, and the responses have been fairly predictable. Progressives rejoiced at a victory for diversity and inclusion against the sinister forces of bourgeois reaction and latent racism; conservatives protested against what they saw as a historically nonsensical casting that would render the entire programme ridiculous.

I do feel an instinctive sympathy with objections to the progressive attempt to project present-day multiracialism into the past, a clear object of which is to neuter objections to twenty-first century demographic change by falsely implying that ‘twas ever thus (it very much wasn't, as I showed in a 2016 post).

Until the mid-twentieth century, the number of people in Britain from non-European ethnic minority backgrounds was extremely small – far below one per cent of the population. Historians such as Professor David Olusoga (Black And British: A Forgotten History) have done valuable work in highlighting the neglected experience of ethnic minority Britons in earlier eras than our own. Nevertheless, however fascinating the individual stories, the tiny numbers mean that their broader historical significance was generally minimal. 

It matters that we properly understand the history of ethnic minorities in Britain. The alternative, at a time when a principle US export is racial neuroses, is that Britons of all colours come to see the UK race relations experience as more or less akin to that of the USA, i.e. a single numerically significant minority enduring long and systematic oppression and civic exclusion, enforced by brutal and constant state violence.

But their history is not ours.

Without wishing to minimise the racial prejudice and racial violence that has existed and continues to exist in Britain, it is quite unlike the American experience. The USA saw literally thousands of racially motivated lynchings of black people during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; there was nothing remotely comparable in Britain during the same period. By and large ethnic minority Britons are people who have freely chosen to come and live here, or whose parents and grandparents did; in the USA millions upon millions of African-Americans are the descendants of slaves. Britain has sometimes treated minorities poorly but has never had legally enshrined racial segregation and there have never been formal racial bars to voting or other forms of civic participation (the first Indian to sit in the House of Commons, Dadabhai Naoroji, was elected for a London seat in 1892 and was permitted to swear his oath of allegiance on the Zoroastrian holy book). There is a fascinating book about the Second World War in Britain titled When Jim Crow Met John Bull, which explores the culture clash between the racially divided US Army and the frequently – though not invariably – more easygoing British civilian population.

II

All that said, I do think there is a conservative argument for colourblind casting in historical dramas, even if it is initially jarring to see a prominent English person from times past played by someone of non-European ancestry. And yes, I do know that these kind of casting decisions are often taken by media types to own the cons and get a controversy going in a bid to improve their viewing figures.

I’m still working this through in my mind, so take this as the barebones of a possible argument, not a settled impregnable position. But I think it comes down to a dilemma: what will hold Britain together in the years to come? Is there any prospect of maintaining a trusting, orderly, peaceful society despite historically unprecedented demographic change? Most Western countries are staring down the barrel of this problem in some form or another, whether explicitly or implicitly, scrabbling around for some idea of what their country is about, what it is for.

There are a number of things which might form the underlying bedrock of a social order. I am not saying this this is an exhaustive list but the main possibilities, it seems to me, are these:

• Ethnicity; i.e. a country is predominantly made up of people of a particular racial group;
• Religious unity; i.e. the people living in a place practise the same religion;
• Philosophical unity; i.e. the people living in a country share some deep commitment to a particular way of life or particular values or a particular form of government – this is sometimes called a “propositional nation”.
• Commitment to a place; i.e. the inhabitants of a specific area consider themselves to be bound together by a common experience of that area and its history, conditions and customs.
• Deference to some commonly-respected source of authority; i.e. people share an adherence to institutions or individuals which uphold justice and order.

Obviously none of these stands entirely alone, either in practice or in theory. Most countries, historically, were some combination of all of them. The UK, for example, was for two and a half centuries from its inception almost entirely white European, strongly Protestant, and inhabited largely by people whose ancestors had lived in the country for hundreds and hundreds – often thousands – of years. There was also a distinctive, if not unique, emphasis on the freedom of the individual and limited government, which was held to be part of the national character, and a shared fealty to the Crown.

In modern Britain, however, the possible bases of a cohesive society are beginning to look somewhat frayed. Once, of course, we didn't have to think about what it meant to be British because there was a widespread intuitive knowledge, and the great temptation for cultural conservatives, when confronted with enormous change, is to resemble the farmer in the old Irish joke, who is asked the way to Sligo and says “well sir, I wouldn’t start from here.” But what's past is prologue; we cannot revive old factions. Mass immigration has rendered racial unity a dead letter. The collapse of Christianity and the increase in adherents of other faiths has done for religious unity, and our fragmented and fragmenting culture means that there is no possibility of any kind of common understanding of the meaning and purpose of life and political community. Personally I’m not sure purely “propositional" nations can work. The USA is the go-to example of a very high-achieving propositional nation, but I would say the jury is still out on whether their success is genuinely the result of their “shared propositions” about the good life or constitutional arrangements, or whether it ultimately stems from other factors such as commonalities in religious belief, cultural norms and national background that underpin the shared propositions.

In the British context it’s difficult to think of an idea or set of ideas which are coherent enough and inspiring enough to create a shared national identity. Protestant liberty and death to the Pope is as one with Nineveh and Tyre, just like the civilising mission of Empire that came to be central to British self-understanding in the decades before 1914. The post-war social democratic settlement is sometimes conceptualised as a kind of national refounding, with Britain supposedly becoming more of a “proposition nation” (the propositions in question being social solidarity, equality, etc), but this is unpersuasive because the slogans of moderate British socialism are not really enough to unite a nation. Their modern analogues, the anaemic clichés of the diversity and equality racket, certainly don’t fit the bill.

Last man standing, then, is an identity, a patriotism, based on place, the place in question being the island of Great Britain and its archipelago. Places have histories and traditions and customs of their own. Their landscapes, hallowed by those who came before, often have embedded within them the marks of particular ways of life. They contain reminders of the people and events that have shaped how that place came to be, which help people feel at home. And crucially, this is not necessarily dependent on your own forebears having been part of that place. Look, we should say to newcomers and relative newcomers, this place hasn’t been yours for long. It wasn’t your forefathers’ place. But now it is yours, and you are part of its story.

That's where a black Anne Boleyn comes in. Or a British-Indian Robin Hood or a British-Syrian Captain Cook. We want to have a cohesive country in a hundred years' time, we want people to like this place and be proud of it. Perhaps casting people from ethnic minorities in those kind of roles does give people a sense that they can take pride in this country, they can feel loyalty to its institutions and its government, they can feel love for its flag and its fields and its idiosyncrasies. It genuinely is possible to combine a broadly traditional approach to British history with a recognition that many of the people who will be inheriting that history in the twenty-first century might lack an organic or instinctive connection to it, but can be integrated into the stories we tell ourselves.

The real question for practically-minded conservatives in 2021 is not “how do you feel about mass immigration?” but “given the reality of demographic change, how do we make a success of it?" Maybe we can't. Maybe the pessimists are right and it is actually impossible to have a functioning and cohesive multi-ethnic liberal democracy. Maybe we can't get to Sligo. But we have to try, and we have to start from here.