by Simon Schama
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Epigraph
Preface
CHAPTER 1 AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD?
CHAPTER 2 CONQUEST
CHAPTER 3 SOVEREIGNTY UNBOUND?
CHAPTER 4 ALIENS AND NATIVES
CHAPTER 5 KING DEATH
CHAPTER 6 BURNING CONVICTIONS
CHAPTER 7 THE BODY OF THE QUEEN
Picture Section
Picture Credits
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Index
Copyright
About the Book
‘History clings tight but it also kicks loose,’ writes Simon Schama at the outset of this, the first book in his three-volume journey into Britain’s past. ‘Disruption as much as persistence is its proper subject. So although the great theme of British history seen from the twentieth century is endurance, its counter-point, seen from the twenty-first, must be alteration.’
Change – sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent – is the dynamic of Schama's unapologetically personal and grippingly written history, especially the changes that wash over custom and habit, transforming our loyalties. At the heart of this history lie questions of compelling importance for Britain’s future as well as its past: what makes or breaks a nation? To whom do we give our allegiance and why? And where do the boundaries of our community lie – in our hearth and home, our village or city, tribe or faith? What is Britain – one country or many? Has British history unfolded ‘at the edge of the world’ or right at the heart of it?
Schama delivers these themes in a form that is at once traditional and excitingly fresh. The great and the wicked are here – Becket and Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Anne Boleyn – but so are countless more ordinary lives: an Irish monk waiting for the plague to kill him in his cell at Kilkenny; a small boy running through the streets of London to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth I. They are all caught on the rich and teeming canvas on which Schama paints his brilliant portrait of the life of the British people: ‘for in the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.’
A History of Britain
At the Edge of the World?
3000 BC–AD 1603
Simon Schama
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness . . . Nature expects a full grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life we should not enjoy it too much. I rebel against this state of affairs.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, The History of England
Those conquered kings pass furiously away; gods die in flesh and spirit and live in print each library a misquoted tyrant’s home.
ROBERT LOWELL, ‘End of a Year’ from History
PREFACE
HISTORY CLINGS TIGHT but it also kicks loose. Disruption, as much as persistence, is its proper subject. So although the great theme of British history seen from the twentieth century is endurance, its counter-point, seen from the twenty-first, must be alteration.
Both hanging on and letting go made themselves felt in the two public ceremonies – a drizzly coronation and a frost-nipped funeral – which spoke most powerfully to my post-war generation about what it meant to be British. Admittedly, in June 1953 a bracing sense of change was not the most obviously dominant mood. Two years before, in the Festival of Britain (a self-consciously centennial commemoration of the Victorian Great Exhibition of 1851), there had been a strenuous official attempt to persuade us eight-year-olds, in our grey flannel shorts and saggy knee-socks, that we should now think of ourselves as ‘New Elizabethans’. The heraldic symbol of the coming technological Valhalla was the Skylon – Brancusi out of Isambard Kingdom Brunel – a slender steel cylinder, tapering to points at both ends like an industrial bobbin and suspended by cables so light that it seemed to float a few feet over the South Bank promenade with no visible means of support. But in the spring of 1953 bewitching visions of a sleekly engineered scientific future did, indeed, weigh nothing beside the vast machinery of reverence being cranked up for the coronation of Elizabeth II. To be sure, fitful efforts had been made to advertise the event as a moment of rejuvenating change. But no one was really fooled. For all the communiqués about ‘an association of free nations’, the Commonwealth over which the young queen presided was, transparently, the brave face put on the loss of empire. The parade of pith-helmeted and bush-hatted troops from the ‘loyal dominions’ along with more exotic detachments from what were still, in 1953, known as ‘British possessions’ dutifully trotted along the Mall in their allotted order – a post-imperial durbar in all but name. And when the queen set off on her post-coronation world tour, primary school children like us followed her progress by sticking little flags in all the many regions of the globe still (no matter what their ostensible status in the modern world) reassuringly tinted the dusty rose-red of the old empire. In William McElwee’s The Story of England, published in 1954, it was still possible to look forward to ‘the peaceful evolution of backward races throughout the empire’ made ‘possible under British leadership’. And the faces behind the net curtains in Omdurman Gardens and Mafeking Close were still those of the colonizers, not the colonized.
There was one gawky contemporary cuckoo growing apace in the nest of tradition, and that, of course, was television. But although the broadcast of the ceremony in Westminster Abbey, seen by 27 million viewers within Britain and as many as a quarter of the world’s population in all, was an epochal moment in the history of mass communications, it very nearly didn’t happen. For months the queen herself and all her principal advisers let it be known that while they were prepared to have the processions to and from the abbey televised (as had also been the case with her wedding in 1947), the ceremony of the crowning itself was to be preserved in its sacrosanct mystery from the common electronic gaze. Eventually – swayed, it has been suggested, by the intervention of Richard Dimbleby – she relented. But to re-run that television coverage is to see just how completely the latent cheekiness of the medium was subdued by the enfolding stateliness of the coronation rituals. The cameras were put in their place and made to stand up straight where they were told and to pay attention when they were bidden. Anything as intimate as a close-up of the queen herself, needless to say, was strictly prohibited, so that many of the most memorable shots of the ceremony are the remote views from the galleries high above the nave, peering down at the grandeur. And whatever the credits might have read, the real producers of the event were the Duke of Edinburgh, in his capacity as Chairman of the Coronation Executive Committee; the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, who was intent on maximizing the mystical and sacrificial aspects of the rite; the Grand Chamberlain, the Marquess of Cholmondeley; and, most important of all, the Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, who was required to rule on matters as critical as whether rabbit-fur was an acceptable substitute for ermine on the trim of aristocratic robes. (It w
as.) Over the black-and-white pictures (which themselves have the quality of official state photographs) poured, with honeyed smoothness, the deferentially modulated tones of the commentators-royal: the ripely hushed baritone of Richard Dimbleby for the abbey solemnities and the excitable, lilting tenor of Wynford Vaughan Thomas for the street procession. For that matter, the twenty-seven-year-old at the centre of all this seemed herself to have been crystallized, as if in some ceremonial alembic, into the role of monarch, the open, often broadly smiling face of the young woman settling into the impassive mask of royalty. Millions of the loyal, gathered in front rooms, peering at the 9-inch screens that had been magnified with strap-on image enhancers, watched the heavily crowned, massively mantled figure, the train flowing endlessly behind her, as she swayed down the nave of Westminster Abbey to the roar of the choir and the oceanic swell of the organ, the ancient Saxon-Frankish shout ‘May the queen live forever’ echoing off the columns.
Out in the streets and in the country, novelty was certainly not uppermost in the national mind-set. Analogies between the two Elizabethan reigns were endlessly drummed home. The Earl Marshal was, after all, a Howard Duke of Norfolk, just as there had been a Howard Norfolk Earl Marshal for the coronation of the first Elizabeth. The Souvenir Book for Essex Children emphasized the parallels between the reign of the first Elizabeth: ‘a time when the English people faced a crisis, namely the great struggle with Spain. Now in 1953 Queen Elizabeth the Second has come to the throne at an equally critical time. Two great wars have been fought when the nation has stood and suffered.’ But, it promised, ‘if we are loyal and steadfast, history will tell that the reign of our Queen Elizabeth will be worthy to rank with that other Good Queen Bess’.
With all this fixation on the unbroken continuity of British history, it seemed only natural (or, at the very least, fated) that it should be Winston Churchill who should be in office as prime minister, presiding over the accession and enthronement of the new monarch. For in Churchill’s person the classical distinction between history as deed and history as report had become moot. Looking back over his entire career, had there ever been a time when Churchill had not both written about, and acted on, British history? Two weeks before the coronation, at a lunch for Commonwealth parliamentarians, Churchill told an American schoolboy (who, for better or worse, would go on to be a presidential speech-writer): ‘Study history, history, history. In history, lie all the secrets of statecraft.’ Certainly, in his own mind the writing and doing were so entangled that it was virtually impossible to say which was cause and which effect. Even at the hour of supreme crisis in 1940, it might be argued, the difference that Churchill made to the destiny of the nation was as much a matter of words as deeds: his instinctive (and perfectly justified) belief that to bet on the future it was indispensable to reconnect the country with its passion for its past. Although he was in his late seventies at the time of the coronation, Churchill seemed virtually imperishable, clearly enjoying reminding the queen at a great banquet held beneath the medieval hammerbeam roof of Westminster Hall that he had faithfully served her great-great-grandmother (Victoria), her great-grandfather (Edward VII), her grandfather (George V), her father (George VI) and now her. And the tutelary partnership between this young queen and the indomitable patriarch seemed to both press and public a perfect emblem of the happy marriage between old and new that was supposed to typify the coming epoch of the new Elizabethans.
But three weeks after the coronation, on 23 June, having (one assumes) entertained the Italian prime minister at a dinner with a speech about the Roman conquest of Britain, Churchill collapsed in a chair, the victim of a massive stroke. Its effects carefully disguised from public view, he continued in office and, in fact, made an astonishing recovery. But, as he put it, ‘the zest was diminished’. Like the particular kind of Britain he cherished, he was mortal after all, and when he died twelve years later, in the freezing winter of 1965, the obsequies took place in a culture hot for novelty. Churchill, after all, could hardly be expected to have survived a time-loop so complete that the whiskers and the military epaulettes and frogging he had last seen in the imperial army of Queen Victoria had returned as the whimsical costume of rock bands. The 14th Earl of Home had been replaced in Downing Street by a Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, who hymned the ‘white heat of the scientific revolution’, and the burial place of the first Saxon kings, Winchester Cathedral (for reasons still mysterious to me), had become a pop song sung by Frank Sinatra. But England stopped swinging (‘like a pendulum do’) long enough to grieve. Indeed, on 30 January 1965, the day of the funeral, Big Ben’s pendulum was stopped altogether for the duration of the obsequies. And in the unmeasured time it took to carry Churchill’s coffin, cut from ancient Blenheim oaks and carried on a grey gun-carriage to St Paul’s, where, in a break from protocol, the queen waited before the altar to pay her respects, then out again past the enormous crowds braving the bitter chill on the streets, down to Tower Pier and aboard the launch Havengore, past the docks where the cranes of the Port of London were made to dip in salute, and on to the train at Waterloo, carrying the body westward past a man standing on his flat roof, dressed in his RAF uniform and saluting, towards Bladon churchyard, a mile or so from Blenheim where he was born; in that time the cutting-edge glamour of the new Britain was utterly engulfed by the immense epic of the national past. Out from its lair ambled the old beast history, prowling the streets and monuments and daring any King’s Road smart alec to make jokes at its expense.
Which included me and my mates. For between the coronation and Churchill’s funeral, we had become, we supposed, serious readers of history, meaning, inter alia, Fernand Braudel, A.J.P. Taylor, E.P. Thompson, Marc Bloch, J.H. Plumb, Asa Briggs, Denis Mack Smith and Christopher Hill (who came to our school and spoke, with a brave, charismatic stammer, of Milton and Muggletonians), but which, very definitely, did not mean Churchill or his loyal echo and eulogist Arthur Bryant. Bryant’s rustic rhapsody on late eighteenth-century Merrie England, about to face the crisis of the French revolutionary wars in Years of Endurance 1793–1802 (published, not coincidentally, in 1942), was precisely the kind of thing that drew from us hoots of knowing derision.
Within the candle-lit windows of the wayside cottage and the farmhouse on the hill Old John Bull would sit dozing with his pot beside the kitchen fire, the dog and cat asleep at his feet, the good wife at her wheel, the pretty maid his daughter coming in with her pail, the tinder box on the shelf, the onions and flitches hanging from the ceiling . . . In the tavern down in the village old England still lived on where over their pipes and bowls gathered round the bare rude table, the local worthies with russet, weather-beaten faces cracked their jokes and trolled their song.
But Bryant’s drowsy sentimentality, we also thought in more high-minded moments, was really less of a joke than a menace. It was a kind of literary opium, calculated to lull asleep a public that we wanted jolted awake to the bleaker and more contentious realities of past and present. Our radical rewrite of Bryant’s idyll would have read:
In front of the tavern down in the village, Old England lived on in the gibbet from which swung the decomposing remains of the local rick-burners and poachers who had been so presumptuous as to attack, in their several and unlawful ways, the propertied despotism of the complacent squirearchy.
Something along those lines, anyway. And in place of the great procession of tableaux from which Churchill constructed his chronicle of Britishness – Runnymede, Tilbury, Trafalgar – we wanted to substitute pages from the life of the people – the armed peasants at Blackheath in 1381, the Levellers at Putney, the Chartists at Kennington in 1848.
All the same, back home for the funeral and moved partly by furtive piety and partly by a curiosity as to what it had been in Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which my father had given me many years before, that first kindled my passion for history, I dusted off the red volumes. Passages read at random duly made me squirm with emba
rrassment, but just as many startled me with bursts of irresistibly gorgeous rhetoric and unimpeachable common sense. The only possible, unanticipated, response, was mixed feelings. On the one hand, the unblushing Churchillian epic of progress, much of it inherited from Macaulay – a bullishly insular, romantically princely, axiomatically Protestant, Whiggishly parliamentary, English-speaking Britain, cast as the nursemaid of democracy, the hope of the West, the guardian of the moral genius of the common law and the perennial hold-out against fanatical tyrannies – couldn’t possibly be sustained as the definitive ‘meaning of British history’. But then again, neither could it be airily dismissed as a deluded anthology of patriotic fairy-tales. It had been when my father explained to me that the ghostly letters ‘PJ’, dimly outlined in white paint on the railway-cutting wall in the seaside town of my childhood, meant ‘Perish Judah’ and warmed to his speech, explaining that Churchill had been what stood between the Mosleyite slogan and its realization, that I properly understood that for his generation the belief in the island fortress of freedom had been less a hollow platitude than a necessary article of faith. Buried within the fabulous mythology, could there be, I let myself wonder, if only for an instant, a gritty little nugget of truth?
Thirty-five years on, both authorized versions of the British past – the Churchillian and the socialist – have fallen steeply out of favour. Labour history, initiated at the same time as the Labour Party and largely written by its Fabian founders, has withered on the shrivelled vine of that older Marxist politics, and a centrist political establishment, eager to forget the ‘Red Flag’ along with the rest of the regrettably obscurantist relics of the class war, seems unlikely to put the history of organized labour at the centre of its curriculum for future citizens. Gone, too, is the empire over whose demise Churchill swore he would not preside. The colonized, promised by Westminster that the British legacy would be parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, took the promise at face value and decided to move to the source to enjoy those blessings, which was not exactly what the proconsuls had meant. Omdurman Gardens all over the country are now populated by precisely the people whose subjugation the street names commemorate, and for them, the imperial triumphalism of the saga of what Churchill repeatedly called ‘the island race’ is understandably at best incomprehensible and at worst egregiously offensive.