England Expects
From time to time, a would-be edgy Tweeter or columnist will
shock us all by stating or suggesting that the heritage British, those awful
boring white people who until the last third of the twentieth century made up
almost the entire population of the United Kingdom, have no real culture to
speak of. There is a twofold implication to this rhetorical ploy: that indigenous
Britons should fall on their knees in eternal gratitude for the hitherto
unknown liveliness and dynamism of the various diaspora communities who have
made their homes here, and also that the demand that newcomers integrate into
our way of life is meaningless because there is nothing into which the new
Britons can integrate.
Well.
Many white Britons are happy to participate in this self-abnegation. Pathologically anti-patriotic Tweeters like Otto English love to point out that much-loved aspects of British culture, from fish 'n' chips to St George, have been influenced by foreigners. They also love to emphasise how dull Britain was in the bad old days before Windrush or Tony Blair. A classic recent example was provided by George Monbiot, who Tweeted a year or so back, “I was brought up in a village that was almost exclusively white and Christian. It was the most boring and stifling place I've ever known.”
I, however, am not interested in doing so. As a matter of objective reality Britain,
and its constituent parts, have one of the richest, most consequential and
deepest cultures on the planet.
England has existed as an organised unitary state within more
or less its current borders since long before the Norman Conquest; Athelstan,
who reigned from 927 to 939, was the first English monarch to exercise
meaningful political authority over almost all the country. The English nation
as a coherent polity is therefore 1100 years old. The cultural unity of
the English can be plausibly traced to two centuries before Athelstan, to the
time of Bede (d. 735). Our religious continuity goes even further back, with
organised Christian communities appearing in the late Roman period. Parts of St
Martin’s Church in Canterbury date to Roman times, i.e. before c410. It does
not seem to have been a place of Christian worship in Roman Britain, but it was
being used for that purpose by 597, as the private chapel of Queen Bertha of
Kent. She was the wife of Ethelbert, who had married her while he was still a
pagan but later converted to Christianity under the influence of the
Augustinian mission. St Peter’s-on-the-Wall in Essex was probably built in the
650s, and its original stonework is substantially intact.
The first known English poet, Caedmon, lived and wrote in the
second half of the seventh century, 1350 years ago. Most English counties and
many towns have origins in the Anglo-Saxon period.
I am not going to rehearse the long span of British
history. This is a blogpost not a twenty-part book series. But the point needs
to be made that there is a very solid answer to the question “What is British
culture?”, even if it is not the pat, easy answer that the (usually bad faith) posers
of the question expect.
The Alfred Jewel
It is not the twee, trite nonsense about tea and biscuits and
queuing and grumbling about the rain and liking the Queen. Fundamentally
British culture is the various products and components of the highly-developed
civilisation that a largely homogenous and settled population achieved over a
thousand years. There are different spheres to this, of course. In literature,
we have Beowulf, Chaucer, Malory, Milton, Donne, Austen, Wordsworth,
Dickens, Trollope, Scott, Wodehouse and Eliot, to say nothing of a certain
gentleman from Stratford. There is the Robin Hood legendarium with its
uproarious celebration of tradition and liberty against the greed and stupidity
of bad rulers. In religion, take your pick from medieval Books of Hours, The
Imitation Of Christ, The Book of Common Prayer, the Authorised Version of
the Bible, the heroic courage of the Reformation martyrs on both sides, the
Methodist revival, the Oxford Movement, the Catholic literary flowering, and
the flourishing Jewish life of London. The whole fabric of Britain speaks of
its long, fascinating history, and the genius and innovation of its people. The
Welsh castles, the cathedrals, the parish churches, the country houses, the Box
Hill Tunnel, The Iron Bridge, Edinburgh New Town, the Forth Bridge, the mills
and factories of the Industrial Revolution.
Go to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard and see HMS Victory.
During the Napoleonic Wars Britain was building, maintaining, manning and
supplying a vast global fleet of such ships, dominating the seas by force of
will, national organisation, determination, and economic sophistication unmatched
anywhere in the world. She continued to do so for another century after the
defeat of Napoleon, winning and maintaining a global empire.
A few hundred yards away from Victory is HMS Warrior,
the first ironclad warship, which on her completion in 1860 rendered almost all
existing warships obsolete.
Britain was not unique in developing constitutional and
accountable forms of government. But we were early adopters and shapers of the
tradition of liberal, limited government. Freedom of speech, thought, assembly
and religion have been observed and respected here – albeit imperfectly – for a
very long time. The same is true of due process in the criminal justice system,
while the flexibility of our partially unwritten constitution has meant that
throughout the modern period we largely avoided the revolutions, political
instability and civil strife that blighted almost every other comparable
country.
The most successful and prosperous nation in the world, the
United States of America, was founded on political principles that had been
given their clearest and most compelling exposition by British philosophers. The
USA’s founders were mostly of British extraction, as many of its great men have
been. The same is true of many of the most peaceful, orderly and free places –
Australia, New Zealand and Canada being the most obvious examples. The British
political tradition has been a huge boon to the world. Adam Smith, for example,
was not the first advocate for the free economy, but he was one of the most brilliant
and most sophisticated.
I could spend thousands of words listing the scientific and
technological breakthroughs made in Britain, or describing
at length the learned societies and debating clubs and scientific institutes
that grew up from the seventeenth century onwards, taking advantage of our
free, orderly, well-organised society to push science forward. I could fill a dozen
books with details of the tens of thousands of gentleman amateurs and underemployed
clergy who produced monographs on every subject from astronomy to entomology. I
could name painters – the Van de Veldes, Gainsborough, Turner, Lucian Freud,
David Hockney – who will be enjoyed as long as there are people who wish to
look at paintings, or composers like Purcell, Holst, Vaughan Williams and James
Macmillan.
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| The cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral |
Britain has long provided a home and a refuge for those
persecuted elsewhere, starting with the Huguenots more than four hundred years
ago. Between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the start of the
Second World War we accepted something like 400,000 Eastern European Jews with
very little violence or unrest. Indeed, we had a Jewish Prime Minister 155
years ago.
Twice in the span of three decades, we devoted vast resources
– human, financial and material – to defeating huge threats to the peace and
freedom of Europe. By so doing we practically bankrupted ourselves, but we were
in the fight on the side of decency, humanity, freedom and democracy.
There are so many aspects of British culture that I haven’t
mentioned – I’ve not even approached sport or folk culture or cinema or TV – but before
I finish, I would like to return briefly to the George Monbiot comment I
mentioned earlier.
The place where he grew up was Rotherfield Peppard in
Oxfordshire. One can see how it might have seemed rather claustrophobic
and limiting to an independent-minded, incipiently socialist teenager growing
up in a well-off and well-connected Tory family.
And yet the very stability, order and quiet of Rotherfield
Peppard represented – still represents – an extraordinary civilisational
achievement. Safe streets and trustworthy neighbours are not the norm for human
societies; they are the exception, even today. They did not arise by accident
in Britain. They are the product of many centuries of hard national graft, of
tough decisions, of sacrifice. They arise from a particular Christian context,
a specific national character: the brilliance of a particular people in a
particular place.
