by Simon Schama
THIS was the charter, the charter of the land
And guardian ay-ay-ay-ay-ANGELS sung this . . . strain.
[pause, drum roll]
Chorus: RULE, BRITANNIA . . . Britannia rules the waves.
Whether the applause was polite or deafening, the performance was not quite over. Back came the hermit (not to be confused with the bard) for a final oracle, prophesying British dominion of the seas. This, too, had already become a standard fixture of Alfredomania since on a reading of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle he was credited (not completely without foundation) as the first native king to have built a formidable war-fleet. If Alfred kept to the tradition of the masque this would have been the moment for an allegorical dumb show with personifications of the oceans (the ‘golden South’, the ‘Soft East’, the ‘stormy North’ and the ‘vast Atlantic surge’), each accompanied by appropriate music from Arne, entering to unload their respective tributes to Britannia.
Hermit: Alfred! Go forth! Lead on the radiant years . . .
I see thy commerce, BRITAIN grasp the world
All nations serve thee, every foreign flood pays its tribute to the Thames
. . . Britons proceed, the subject deep command
Awe with your navies every hostile land
Vain are their threats, their armies all in vain
They rule the world who rule the main.
And then (surely) yet another chorus with more trumpets and drums:
Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves.
Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham, at any rate was nobody’s slave. Nor did he need tutorials from Bolingbroke on the antiquity or the posterity of British liberty. His entire career, he supposed, had been selflessly devoted to its preservation. A veteran of the wars against Louis XIV, he had fought for William and then for Queen Anne and Marlborough as colonel of a regiment of foot and had come to be known, for his passionate defence of the Glorious Revolution, as ‘the greatest Whig in the army’. Cobham and his wife Anne, the daughter of a wealthy brewer, had no surviving children and instead had poured their affections into their nephews and nieces, the Grenvilles, and their money into one of the most beautiful if grandiose Palladian country houses in England: Stowe. It was, though, always meant to be more than a pleasure-palace, Cobham’s Buckinghamshire retort to Walpole’s Houghton. Stowe was supposed to stand for something: for the perpetuity of British freedom. James Thomson had written his ode ‘Liberty’ while staying there and probably read Bolingbroke’s Patriot King in Cobham’s library. The ‘cubs’ who congregated at the house – George Lyttelton, William Pitt and the Grenvilles – all saw themselves as very British lions, ready to roar.
It was in the park behind the house, though, that Cobham made his political sentiments unmistakably visible. Ironically, it was from the translated work of a French landscape architect, Dézalliers d’Argenville, that the designers of the inspirational garden had taken their cue. The lessons were all classical. The park was studded with little pavilions, domed and colonnaded like miniature versions of the Pantheon, and artfully sited atop knolls or at the end of pools of water which allowed the walker, following a carefully prescribed route, to pause, literally, for reflection. The fashion was self-consciously painterly, owing much to the enormous popularity of landscapes by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain among the English aristocracy. But in Cobham’s case, the intended effect was deliberately historical and political. Between 1731 and 1735, he brought the architect William Kent to Stowe to design for the park a new set of structures, each of which was a piece of his own public philosophy. Opposite the Temple of Ancient Virtue (modelled loosely on the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli near Rome), Kent built a Temple of British Worthies. Though later also called a ‘temple’, the structure is not a solid pavilion at all, but an unroofed enclosure and terrace based on the classical exedra. Beneath a pyramid surmounted by Mercury (not just the usher to Elysium but the god of commerce), a sweeping, semicircular wall enclosed a row of niches, each with its own pediment, in which were placed the ‘bustoes’ (as the printed guides called them) of the worthies.
They were divided, right and left, into heroes of contemplation and heroes (and one heroine) of action. Both groups included inevitable and uncontroversially admirable figures – Shakespeare and Bacon among the thinkers (as well as Richard Gresham, the founder of the New Exchange); the Black Prince and Elizabeth I among the doers. But there were other personalities who were much more assertive embodiments of Cobham’s conviction that patriotism was ever the enemy of ‘slavishness’: John Milton among the thinkers and John Hampden among the doers. It may be that, as a fellow Buckinghamshire gentleman of the opposition, Cobham flattered himself as a latter-day Hampden, a century on. For it was in the 1730s that not only Milton but Oliver Cromwell too was experiencing a revival of sympathy. Cromwell was being taken not just as another epitome of a Free Briton but as one of the founders of the modern British Empire as well. And the ‘bustoes’ of the doers did, in fact, make up a procession of the creators of Anglo-British maritime and imperial power: Alfred, the ‘creator’ of the navy (sculpted again by Rysbrack, who must have been knocking them off on an Anglo-Saxon production line); Elizabeth; but also Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake who, the inscription read, ‘through many perils was the First Briton that adventured to sail round the Globe and carried into . . . the Seas and Nations the knowledge and glory of the English Name’.
The connection between the championship of liberty at home and the creation of a maritime, commercial empire overseas was at the heart of the new, the first truly British, patriotism. Bolingbroke spoke for all the Patriots when he insisted that ‘the Empire of the Seas is ours; we have been many Ages in Possession of it; we have had many Sea-Fights, at a vast effusion of Blood and Expense of Treasure to preserve it and preserve it we still must, at all Risks and Events if we have a Mind to preserve ourselves.’ As the heirs to their heroes Drake and Raleigh, Cobham and his protégés believed that this empire would be something new in the world precisely because it would not suffer from Rome’s fatal addiction to territorial conquest, a vice that had led to despotism at the heart of the empire and auto-destruction on its over-extended frontiers. The aristocratic ‘boy Patriots’ had seen for themselves on the Grand Tour (on which Thomson, for example, had travelled as a tutor) the eloquent ruins of that imperial hubris in Rome. Pompeo Batoni’s paintings of themselves posed against the melancholy debris of the Palatine Hill, as well as Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s extraordinary engravings, first published in the 1750s, acted as a salutory reminder of the history to be avoided. Four years later, during the wars against the French, Cobham had Kent build him a Gothic Temple of Liberty in tawny ironstone (a more ruggedly earthy material than the creamy oolitic limestone of the classical buildings), decorated inside with the imaginary heraldry of the Saxon kings. Over the door, an inscription from Pierre Corneille’s Horace (1639) left no one in doubt: ‘Je rends graces aux dieux n’estre pas Romain’ – ‘I thank the Gods that I am not a Roman’.
As the years went by and the history of the British Empire turned from fantasy to military reality, Stowe turned into a theme park of the Empire of Liberty. One of the Grenville boys, Thomas, killed in the naval battle off Cape Finisterre in May 1747, was memorialized by his own column. Another obelisk went up in 1759 to mourn (along with the rest of the nation) the most celebrated of all imperial martyrs, James Wolfe; yet another monument towards the end of the century commemorated James Cook. Significantly, Stowe became the first country house in Britain to open its park and gardens to the public, and to print inexpensive guides to go with the visit. By the early 1750s, prospective patriotic tourists had a choice of at least three (some as cheap as sixpence; others, with engraved views, two shillings and sixpence) to lead them round the patriotic landscape. At the Palladian Bridge they could ponder the bas-relief depicting ‘The History of Commerce and the Four Quarters of the World bringing their Productions to Britannia’. Inside the Temple of Friendship, in a
gallery filled with the heads of Pitt, Cobham (passed on to his British elysium in 1749), Lyttelton and the rest, they could crane their necks at a painting of Britannia yet again enthroned in her glory and congratulate themselves on their good fortune to live in a country in which liberty and empire, usually mutually exclusive, were so harmoniously and so miraculously conjoined.
When they ritually invoked ‘liberty’, though, what did its champions actually mean? In the first instance, freedom from the ‘slavery’ of Roman Catholicism (which perhaps pained the Catholic composer of ‘Rule, Britannia’, Arne). But they were recalling a very specific historical tradition of seventeenth-century resistance to the efforts of ‘despots’ either to smuggle it in surreptitiously (in the case of Archbishop Laud and Charles I) or to impose it through a standing army (like James II). Liberty meant parliamentary consent to taxation; regular elections; and habeas corpus – all the virtues assumed to be absent from the slave states of Catholic Europe and that had been immemorially rooted in English (even Anglo-Saxon) nationhood. Liberty meant the constant reiteration of its historical epics – Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and, most recently and therefore most hallowed, the Bill of Rights of 1689 – and its heroes and martyrs: John Hampden, John Milton and Algernon Sydney. In the 1730s, the attacks on Walpole had added a modern inventory of despots: the Robinocrats, perhaps even worse than the Stuarts because of their hypocritical pretence to be defending the principles of 1688 that, by means of the Septennial Act of 1716 (elections every seven, rather than every three, years), parliamentary placemen and sinister armies of excisemen, they were in fact bent on corrupting and annihilating. In contrast to the grovelling hacks and the epicene toadies who lived off the leavings of the oligarchs were the honest sort of the country, men who sweated for a living: ordinary country gentlemen, merchants, decent artisans, men of commerce – the ‘Heart Blood’ of the nation. It was these men who believed themselves tyrannized by the arbitrary powers of Walpole’s excisemen, and who looked to the promotion of blue-water empire to fulfil their partnership between trade and freedom. So when they spoke of liberty they meant, among other enterprises, the liberty to buy and sell slaves.
For one thing is certain about this generation: the kind of liberty they mouthed so freely was not for black Africans, whose welfare had definitely not been uppermost in the minds of those who had written Magna Carta or the Petition of Right. It seldom occurred to those who parroted nostrums about the empire of liberty that its prosperity depended on the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Africans, since it would take another generation before ‘natural’ equality would join liberty in the radical canon. For an African to invoke the precepts of a Free Briton, these patriots supposed, was to make a mockery of their meaning. So while William Kent was erecting his memorial to the founding fathers of the empire of the free seventy-seven Akan-speaking Antiguan slaves, the leaders of an aborted rising intended to seize the island on the anniversary of George II’s coronation in October 1736 were being publicly burned alive. If the authorities on the island followed the Procedures described by Hans Sloane, later physician to George II, the slaves would have been nailed ‘on the ground with crooked sticks on every Limb, and then applying the Fire by degrees from the Feet and Hands, burning them gradually up to the Head, whereby their pains are extravagant’. According to official records, five slaves were broken on the wheel, six gibbeted alive and seventy-seven burned – a total of eighty-eight executions in less than four months. Those less directly implicated in the plot might have got away with a castration, a mutilated hand or foot or a flogging ‘till they are Raw, some put on their skins Pepper and salt to make them smart’.
The irony that an empire so noisily advertised as an empire of free Britons should depend on the most brutal coercion of enslaved Africans is not just an academic paradox. It was the condition of the empire’s success, its original sin: a stain that no amount of righteous self-congratulation at its eventual abolition can altogether wash away.
And there were other twists of historical fate waiting just round the corner for the empire-builders – outcomes that they could never have foreseen in the bright prospectus of the foundation years. The blue-water character of the British Empire, the preference of its promoters for business opportunities over territorial conquest; and their instinct that military and commercial ventures should be mutually exclusive were supposed to immunize it from the evils notorious, not just in the empires of antiquity, but also in the imperial autocracies of the recent past – Ottoman and Catholic-Spanish. The British Empire was supposed to satisfy itself with just enough power, and just enough central regulation, to make the interlocking parts of its economic machinery work with well-oiled smoothness. Properly ‘planted’ and protected from foreign despoilers and interlopers, the colonies would furnish raw materials to the motherland, which in turn would send its manufactures and finished goods back. With a buoyant home market, the suppliers across the sea would make enough money to afford their imports and would plough some of the proceeds into making their plantations even more productive; this would lower costs, which in turn would make the goods more widely available to a bigger proportion of the population back in Britain. The rising tide of reciprocal good fortune would lift all boats, and, without the expense and distraction of vain conquests to protect, the empire of freedom and enterprise would knit the world together in an endlessly benevolent cycle of mutual improvement.
By the end of the eighteenth century it was apparent that this was not how things had worked out. Instead of an empire of farmers and traders the British Empire was, overwhelmingly, an empire of soldiers and slaves. The Americans who had taken the professions of liberty most seriously had flung them back in the teeth of Britain and gone their own way. And instead of an empire based on lightly garrisoned commercial stations around the world, Britain had somehow found itself responsible for nearly a million Caribbean slaves and at least 50 million inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. The British had gone east to make a little money on the side and ended up, somehow, as the Raj. The footnote had become the main story. Look around the streets of urban Britain today, and you see that it still is.
So just how had Britain ended up with the wrong empire?
From the beginning the British Empire was habit-forming. The genial encouragement of addiction was its speciality: a quiet smoke, a nice cup of tea, a sweet tooth (and, a bit later, a pipe of opium) – exotic rarities converted into consumer cravings, exceptional wants turned into daily needs. Where profit beckoned, distaste could be overcome. King James I may have published tracts against the filthy weed Nicotiana tabacum (‘good Countrey-men let us (I pray you) consider what honour or policy can move us to imitate the barbarous and beastly manners of the wild, godles and slavish Indians . . . in so vile and stinking a custom?’), but the first settlement the Virginia Company established to grow it still bore his name. Given the chance, the Jamestown settlers would have preferred to discover the gold and silver that seemed to have fallen into the lap of the Spanish empire of the south. But there was no gold in the Chesapeake Bay and the settlers had to make do with their dependably prolific flopleaved plant. Many times, during the first half of the seventeenth century, the English tobacco colonies seemed close to obliteration: victims of disease, vicious wars with the Native Americans (in which the English, as well as the natives, slaughtered men, women and children) and their own profligate, unrealistic expectations. The climate, the insects and the unwelcome gifts they carried devoured men. Though 6000 immigrants had come between 1607 and 1625, in the latter year a census found the population of Virginia to be just 1200. Yet, as the tobacco habit became ingrained in European culture and Virginia leaf was established as the marker of quality, demand boomed, prices rose and the settlements in Lord Baltimore’s Maryland and in Virginia hung on, consolidated and pushed inland. Attracted by the possibility of owning ‘manors’ of hundreds of acres, the younger sons of gentry and tradesmen arrived to become tobacco barons. Supplying the
labour, alongside a limited number of African slaves, were boys – median age sixteen, seldom over nineteen; boys in their tens of thousands, out from the rookeries and tenements of London and Bristol, about 70 to 80 per cent ‘indentured’ (contractually committed) to work for three to five years for room and board before being freed to claim a small plot of promised land, to hire out their labour or set up shop.
Early English settlements in North America, c. 1600–1700.
This was how the colonial ‘planting’ was supposed to work: an antisocial no-hope population drained from the mother country and set to work with every prospect of ‘improvement’; the land itself likewise kissed by amelioration; the mother country on the (carefully controlled) receiving end of a valuable raw commodity, busy turning out goods that it could ship back to the growing colony. And, unlike in Ireland where the obstreperous natives happened to be Christians (of a deluded, papistical sort) and could attract the support of mischievous foreign powers to make a nuisance of themselves, the American natives, who were evidently resistant to the Gospel, could now be shoved further and further up-river and into the trees and hills. Sir Francis Wyatt had spoken for the whole Anglo-American project in 1622 when he unblushingly declared that ‘our first worke is expulsion of the Savages to gaine the free range of the countrey . . . for it is infinitely better to have no heathen among us, who at best were but thornes in our sides, than to be at peace and at league with them’.
But then it all went badly wrong. Beginning in the 1680s, tobacco prices began to decline and then went into free-fall, bankrupting the smaller planters, brokers and processors. The shock was not enough to abort the Chesapeake experiment altogether. There were upwards of 50,000 settlers in Maryland and Virginia, and they managed to find a more diversified range of crops to farm – indigo and wheat in particular. The colony would survive, and the tobacco market revive in the next century, but the bonanza was, for the time being, over.
