How to Be English

by David Boyle

  The English commander had prepared for this battle by setting out clear rules of engagement, discussed with his captains evening after evening around his table on the Vanguard. The broad plan was to lay themselves alongside part of the French line and overwhelm it; the details would have to take care of themselves as circumstances arose, and he trusted his captains to interpret the plan effectively.

  Nelson was no disciplinarian, and he had already gained a reputation for disobeying orders during the Battle of St Vincent. He steered out of line because he saw the chance to cut off a group of Spanish ships from the rest, and managed to capture them. His captains knew this was his style and knew that what he expected of them was not slavish obedience to detail, but enthusiastic commitment to the objective.

  These regular dinners were the beginning of the trusting collegiate atmosphere Nelson managed to instill among his commanders, which gave rise to the idea of a ‘band of brothers’, a phrase stolen at the time from Shakespeare’s Henry V. They were the basis of the adulation with which the English revered Nelson for the next century or so.

  His victory at Trafalgar was organised on the same basis. When he unveiled his plan to the captains, some wept at the bold simplicity of it. Nelson was of course killed at the height of the battle, with the words ‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ addressed to his flag captain, among his final phrases. When the English personality gave way to the stiff upper lip, there was embarrassment about this. Could the great hero have been so unmanly? Could he not have said ‘kismet’, a Hindi and Arabic word meaning fate? The answer is: almost certainly not. Never underestimate English sentimentality.

  ‘But there is one little admiral,’ wrote the Edwardian Henry Newbolt, the patriotic author of various poems linking cricket with Gatling guns, ‘We’re all of us his brothers and his sons, and he’s worth – oh he’s worth at the very least, double all your tons and all your guns.’

  Newbolt’s song was written at the end of a century of total sea power, secured for England by Nelson’s overwhelming victory at Trafalgar. It is a song that has embarrassing moments for audiences today, with its heroic bombast and naïve lyrics (‘there are queer things that only come to sailormen’). But it ends with this verse:

  I’ve been with him when hope sank under us –

  He hardly seemed a mortal like the rest,

  I could swear that he had stars upon his uniform,

  And one sleeve pinned across his breast.

  There was the Nelsonian symbol, and it was a symbol of English heroism even in his own lifetime, though he was lachrymose, overindulgent, adulterous – not at all the British stiff upper lip – and not very tall. He was certainly a ‘little admiral’.

  What was it about Nelson? He certainly had a sense of destiny. He was also physically courageous, losing arms and eyes with abandon. But did he really have something else? This was the question the Board of Admiralty asked themselves as they tried to decide who should prevent Napoleon’s invasion fleet arriving on English shores. Was Nelson all bravado and good luck? They asked to see his private diaries of the period in the Mediterranean, when he had been searching for the French fleet, and were convinced that he was the man for them. What made Nelson almost unique was his combination of compelling, humanitarian leadership and strategic brilliance.

  There was an element of anarchy about Nelson – disobeying orders by putting his telescope to his blind eye at the Battle of Copenhagen to avoid the signal ordering him to withdraw, and founding a tradition of disobedience that was unique in the armed forces – because he expected to be trusted by his superiors just as he trusted his own men.

  Which brings us back to the Battle of the Nile. One of Nelson’s captains, Thomas Foley in the Goliath, happened to be leading the line of ships when the French came into sight. Foley ordered his men to get the battle sails ready, so that he could stay in front when the order came to get into line of battle.

  So it was Foley, standing next to his helmsman, the battle ensigns flying behind him, who saw the emerging opportunity as the disposition of the French ships became clear. There they were anchored along the shore, and Foley realised that there might just be enough space to squeeze along their undefended side, between the French line and the shore itself.

  It was a risky decision. Thinking fast as the battle got ever nearer, Foley grasped that the French commander Bruey’s ships must have anchored with enough space to swing round at anchor as the tide changed, so there would almost certainly be enough sea to avoid running aground. But there was no time to consult anyone else. Foley steered between the French ships and the shore, leading the British line after him. Foley was rightly hailed as the hero of the victory at Aboukir Bay, of which Nelson had been the architect.

  Foley knew he was allowed to take bold steps if he saw an opportunity. He was able to break with conventional thinking, and the apparent drift of his orders, and use his intuition. This was not rigid control – this was the English way.

  Let me alone. I have yet my legs and one arm. Tell the surgeon to make haste and his instruments. I know I must lose my right arm, so the sooner it’s off the better.

  Nelson facing the inevitable after his wound on Tenerife, 1797

  UTOPIAN SCENARIOS TEND to be frustrating to read about. The heroes and heroines find themselves in the past, future or present, encountering a ‘perfect’ society, with the reason why everything turned out so perfectly gently explained to them in patient tones.

  One Utopia stands out, not because it breaks the pattern but because it evokes a dreamlike journey into Ruskinian medievalism that has had a deep influence on the English psyche. It manages to be radical, futuristic and nostalgic all at the same time, as much medieval as it is Marxist, looking back to the Peasant’s Revolt as much as it looks forward to the inevitable revolution.

  William Morris never liked the idea of violence, and it was the gentleness, beauty and sheer craftsmanship of the Middle Ages that really inspired him. This is how he described a return to the fourteenth century in A Dream of John Ball:

  Moreover, as we passed up the street again, I was once again smitten with the great beauty of the scene; the houses, the church with its new chancel and tower, new-white in the moonbeams now; the dresses and arms of the people, men and women (for the latter were now mixed up with the men); their grave sonorous language. And the quaint and measured forms of speech, were again become a wonder to me and affected me almost to tears.

  His most famous and influential dream was to become News From Nowhere, which unfolds as he sails from Kelmscott House, his home in Hammersmith, down the Thames to the original Oxfordshire Kelmscott in a remote medieval future. It follows the same themes as John Ball and was written in response to the frightening American utopian novel, Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, which predicted an unpleasant authoritarian and militaristic future, which he neither believed in nor desired.

  Morris’ own predictions have not quite come to pass. We do not live in a rural London, and the Houses of Parliament are not yet a dung store. Yet in other ways, he did peer accurately into our present-day London: where salmon have returned to the Thames, where the inner cities have been cleared, where homes are simpler, and where state socialism has been tried and failed.

  Morris thrived in the all-male medieval craft community. He dreamed of medieval guilds. He had already built one of his own, in the thriving Morris & Co., providing wallpaper and furniture to an increasingly affluent middle class. But News From Nowhere provides a glimpse of his own romantic yearnings, as he encounters a picture of empowered womanhood. ‘She led me up close to the house, and laid her shapely sun-browned hand and arm on the lichened wall as if to embrace it,’ he wrote, ‘and cried out, “O me! O me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows of it – as this has done!”’

  The shapely, sun-browned hand is also a bit of a clue. There is something of the erotic dream about News From Nowhere. The heroine is one of those powerful fe
male characters that seem to dominate the lives of the back-to-the-land writers of the Victorian age. There was some element of erotic yearning about them. There certainly was about Morris, who married one of the great beauties of the age who embodied the pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty, Jane Burden, but lost her to his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  As he formed the words, the train stopped at his station, five minutes’ walk from his own house, which stood on the banks of the Thames, a little way above an ugly suspension bridge. He went out of the station, still discontented and unhappy, muttering ‘If I could but see it! If I could but see it!’ but had not gone many steps towards the river before (says our friend who tells the story) all that discontent and trouble seemed to slip off him.

  William Morris, News From Nowhere (1890)

  WHEN THE YOUNG Charles II famously took refuge in the Boscobel Oak on the border between Shropshire and Staffordshire in 1651, as he escaped from the Battle of Worcester, he added a royal dimension to the idea of sturdy, enduring Englishness. There are Royal Oak pubs all over England now, and even a Tube station of the same name. There was a battleship called Royal Oak, unfortunately now at the bottom of the sea at Scapa Flow, where it was despatched in 1939 by U-47.

  The royal-oak idea dovetailed neatly with the wooden walls of England, the oak-built ships which defended the English, not to mention ‘Heart of Oak’, the patriotic song penned by the actor David Garrick, which included the immortal and slightly excessive lines ‘heart of oak are our ships / Heart of oak are our men’. The song was written to celebrate this ‘wonderful year’ (1759), where the British forces managed the military equivalent of the 2012 Olympics, with a whole series of victories, including that of Quiberon Bay.

  But England is not the only country to have embraced the oak as its official national tree. The others include: Cyprus, Estonia, France, Germany, Moldova, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia and the USA.

  And you can see why. The oak is an amazing tree, supporting about 500 other species, and spread by birds – one single jay can gather and store up to 5,000 acorns in ten weeks. Its potential longevity is also downright staggering. A 1,000-year-old oak tree stands in a field at Manthorpe, near Bourne in Lincolnshire, where its hollow trunk is still used for parties. At one point, it is claimed, three dozen people managed to stand up inside it.

  Nor is it alone. The Major Oak in Sherwood Forest is old enough to have sheltered Robin Hood, as old as the English language itself, as one history noted back in 1790. Or the Knightwood Oak, the tallest in the New Forest, planted around the time of the Battle of Agincourt. Or the Allerton Oak in Liverpool which used to be the venue for the local hundred court another couple of centuries before that.

  There are hanging trees, from where highwaymen breathed their last. There are gospel trees and writers’ trees. There are even some which were used as pubs inside their hollow trunks. There are also far fewer oaks than maybe there ought to be, mainly because of the navy – a ship like HMS Victory took about 2,000 of them to build.

  The celebration of oak trees and the Royalist cause was linked with the development of Oak Apple Day, celebrated on Charles II’s birthday on 29 May by wearing oak leaves. It was known in the West Country as Shick-Shack Day, for reasons that are now a little obscure, and turned out to be a wonderful opportunity for ragging anyone suspected of republican opinions.

  This is not to be confused with Apple Day (the nearest weekend to 30 October), introduced in 1990 by the charity Common Ground, dedicated to celebrating ordinary beauty and designed to celebrate the role of apples in English culture. It manages to catch some of the spirit of Oak Apple Day without the Royalist connotations.

  Sing for the oak-tree

  This monarch of the wood,

  Sing for the oak-tree

  That growth green and good;

  That growth broad and branching

  Within the forest shade

  That growth now; and yet shall grow

  When we are lowly laid!

  Mary Howitt (1799–1888)

  THE ENGLISH ARE certainly not the only nation to have a penchant for loveable rogues and thieves. The Australians have Ned Kelly; the Americans have Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde and a whole coachload of other baddies to love. But the legendary English outlaws have another quality to them, a streak of romance and generosity.

  Robin Hood gave away his money to the poor. He faced down sheriffs and bishops and even Bad King John. Dick Turpin gave away his ill-gotten gains as a highwayman, a swashbuckling mythic figure who dodged officials and dashed to York to escape them on his horse Black Bess, or so it was said later. They are heroes on our side.

  Both these legendary outlaws became magical touchstones for turning the existing world, and existing powers, upside down. There was a seek-him-here-seek-him-there element to them. They slip through our fingers just as they slipped through the fingers of their pursuers. They dash in and turn people’s lives and luck inside out and dash out again. They are devious, riotous and overwhelmingly amoral.

  In reality, Dick Turpin was a horse thief, with a pockmarked face and a record of gratuitous violence, arrested under the alias John Palmer, and hanged in his best frock coat in York in 1739. As usual for English outlaw-heroes, there is some confusion about what happened to his body – he was buried in the small church of St George in York, but a mob dug him up three days later and carried him away to save him from the anatomists.

  The real-life Robin Hood is much more elusive. His first mention in literature was in 1377 in William Langland’s classic Piers Plowman, where a drunken priest criticises himself for knowing the rhymes of Robin Hood better than he knows his prayers.

  The legend itself is much older than that. An English troubadour, Adam de la Halle, wrote a song in the 1260s called ‘Jeu de Robin et Marion’. By then the legend must have been so widespread that many people were nicknamed ‘Robinhood’, and not all of them criminals.

  When the historians started to write about him in the sixteenth century, he was reported as having been born in 1160 in Loxley – in Yorkshire or Nottinghamshire or possibly even Warwickshire – and been called Robert Fitzooth. He was also supposed to have used the title, perhaps ironically, of the Earl of Huntingdon.

  He died, so the story goes, at Kirklees Monastery on 18 November 1248 at the age of eighty-seven. In 1690, his gravestone was still in what had been the monastery grounds, with an almost indecipherable inscription – in spelling unknown to antiquarians. It said:

  Hear undernead dis laitl stean,

  Laiz Robert earl of Huntingtun.

  Near archir ver az hie sa geud

  And pipl kauld im Robin Heud.

  His sidekick Little John was supposed to have been exiled to Ireland, though there was also a grave claimed to be his in Hathersage in Derbyshire. The grave was opened in 1764 and a thirty-inch thigh bone taken out, which was put in the window of the home of the parish clerk. It was stolen from there by the antiquarian Sir George Strickland.

  Unfortunately for Robin Hood’s gravestone at Kirklees, the earth had not actually been disturbed underneath it and most of the stone disappeared in the nineteenth century, despite Victorian railings, because the navvies working on the Yorkshire & Lancashire Railway believed that fragments from it could cure toothache. It was a fake.

  Since then, the hunt for the original Robin Hood has been almost as intense as it was in the stories. The most promising name in the legal records was a fugitive in the Yorkshire assize rolls for 1225/6 called Robert Hod or Hobbehod, who may also have been the hanged outlaw Robert of Wetherby. The man who hunted him down, Eustace of Lowdham, had been deputy sheriff of Nottingham, and later became the sheriff. There was also a Robert FitzOdo from Loxley who was stripped of his knighthood in the 1190s. The sheriff of Nottingham from 1209 to 1224, Philip Mark, was known for his own robberies, false imprisonments and seizure of land.

  But for all the work of historians, the story of Robin Hood will always be related to the peculiar p
eriod when the king of England, Richard the Lionheart, was in prison in Austria and Germany, and a vast ransom was being collected in silver in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral to pay for his release.

  This explains some of Robin’s talismanic properties – a lonely, loyal struggle on behalf of the true king, battling against his corrupt officials. Similarly, the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 regarded themselves as loyal subjects of Richard II, fighting in just the same way against his corrupt placemen.

  The Robin Hood legend implies a kind of millenarian hope that the king would return, like Odysseus to Ithaca or Christ to the temple – cleansing and righting wrongs. ‘I love not man in all the worlde / So well as I do my King,’ says Robin in an early version of the ballad.

  It is a legend that says the world is upside down, radical in an English populist way, which is why it still has resonance today.

  How hath the knyght his leue i-take,

  And wente hym on his way;

  Robyn Hode and his mery men

  Dwelled styll full many a day.

  Lyth and lysten, gentil men,

  And herken what I shall say,

  How the proude sheryfe of Notyngham

  Dyde crye a full fayre play.

  From the ‘Gest of Robyn Hode’, c.1460

  REVOLUTIONARIES HAVE ALWAYS found England a frustrating place. They waited on tenterhooks for revolt to spread during the 1926 General Strike, only to find that bored trade union pickets were playing football with the police. This peculiarity goes right the way back – to the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and probably before.

  In 1381, the peasants were stirred up by the tensions generated by the Black Death, and the high taxes to pay for the Hundred Years War with France. Their demands seemed pretty radical: lower taxation and changes in the regulations about labourers’ pay. Equally radical was the preaching of John Ball and the other leaders, Jack Straw, Wat Tyler and the rest, whose names still echo down the centuries; as was their behaviour, breaking into the Tower of London and murdering the Archbishop of Canterbury. But once they got to Smithfield, there was no question of overthrowing the boy king, Richard II. On the contrary, the peasants regarded themselves as his loyal subjects. It was the king’s corrupt officials they wanted to dismiss.