Читать книгу Island Stories: Britain and Its History in the Age of Brexit - David Reynolds - Страница 15

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] 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]

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]

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 Protestant nation, England could not be indifferent to the fate of the Reformation on the continent, now wracked by conflicts between Protestants and Catholics.[13]

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] 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]

‘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]

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] 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]

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] 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]

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] 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]

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]

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] 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]

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]

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] 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] Gradually relations between Britain and France moved haltingly towards co-existence, then entente and eventually alliance – redefining Britain’s continental connection until 1940.