When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  If the speech was ever delivered, it was given to the English troops who had assembled in Tilbury to resist invasion by the Spanish Armada. Relations between England and Spain had been tottering for years, and Philip II of Spain had twice supported plans to invade England and place Mary Stuart on the throne. Elizabeth hadn’t exactly eased the tension with her refusal of Philip’s courtship. It broke after the execution of Mary Stuart, who shortly before her death had written to Philip to make her claim on the English throne. He greeted her death as the invitation to enforce that claim.

  On 28 May 1588, Philip’s naval fighting force left Spain for England. As the Spanish Armada gathered in the North Sea there was also a large and professional Spanish army in the Low Countries. The force of the words that follow derives from the troubling fact that, as Elizabeth steps up to speak, England faces genuine peril.

  My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear.

  This speech is a telling example of the idea of character in rhetoric, and the character Elizabeth is playing, to great effect here, is the nation itself. There is a scholarly controversy about whether Elizabeth created this sense of formidable character by her physical image. Many of the historical and pictorial accounts of the occasion depict the queen on the back of a white steed in, variously, different types of armour, a white gown with a steel corselet, wielding a truncheon and sporting a helmet with a plume of feathers. The typical armoured representation is Britomart, an allegorical character in Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queen who stands for English virtue and military power. It is more than likely that these representations depict the character Elizabeth was displaying rather than the clothing she actually wore.

  In his famous trinity of rhetorical virtues, Aristotle distinguished the appeal to rational argument (logos) from the call on the emotions (pathos). But the hardest of the three elements to manufacture was ethos, the character of the speaker, the sense of the personal communicated when a speaker stands alone. The word ‘character’ has an important dual connotation. Character is a set of virtues we display which add up to who we are. But we also use the word ‘character’ to describe a figure in fiction. That usage too is relevant to rhetoric, and it is highly relevant to the imagined community of the nation.

  In the case of Elizabeth, the character on display is an enhanced version of the actual person who had stood nervously at the mouth of the river Thames a few moments before. Elizabeth Tudor has one major advantage over any other speaker. She is the Queen of England. She is the nation. She uses this immediately to define her character. She identifies here at once with the people, seeking authority from the subjects she is addressing. She does this by refusing to doubt their fidelity to a task that is, by implication, bound to be onerous. She transfers the fear that she will be feeling and that her audience and soldiers will have been feeling onto the absent tyrant.

  I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.

  The peril is so grave that a sacrifice may be called for. Victory is by no means assured, and Elizabeth makes it clear that she is prepared to pay the price herself. That is a vital message, as her purpose here is to rally the troops. Before speaking, Elizabeth had watched a mimicked battle in which the English were victorious. She then seeks to inspire the troops by conjuring the spirit of her people. They are not citizens, of course. The word subjects also conjures the shadow of the monarch who makes them so, but it is still notable that Elizabeth’s appeal to the troops is done not in the name of power and the prestige of office but in that of service to the nation, which she evokes by asserting her own. This is a democratic form of address for a monarch to make, an association with the nation. No political institution is so wrapped up in the personal as the monarchy. The queen, in time of war, is the embodiment of national mythology.

  I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm: to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

  This is the critical question that has, until this point in the speech, been unspoken. Elizabeth knows that the most barbed criticism of her reign, at a time of military crisis, is that she is a woman who does not have the strength to command the armed forces. The contrast with the excessively masculine Henry VIII lay like a shadow over the scene. Instead of stepping around the problem, Elizabeth confronts it by articulating the criticism. There is a general lesson here. Criticism is better countered if it is named honestly. Elizabeth describes exactly the thought the objector will have. She takes the opposing view seriously by seeming to accept it before she renders it irrelevant. It is not the body that matters but the spirit, and the confrontation shows that she has plenty of that. Call me weak and you call this nation weak. The nation in question was, of course, England.

  Then, at the end of the counter-attack, she associates herself directly with the king. This is the king in general, the attributes that men might hitherto have regarded as a male preserve, but also the king in particular, Elizabeth’s father Henry. In a single sentence she has turned an apparent weakness into a signal strength.

  That shift of tone allows her to name the enemy. The duke of Parma was the governor-general of the Netherlands and leader of the Spanish army. He had a plan that the Armada would pick up his troops there before crossing the Channel to invade England. The Armada was already, at this point, assembled in the North Sea, but neither Elizabeth nor anyone else knew exactly where. The danger was palpable and the men at Tilbury would have been scared. So would the monarch. The rhetorical moment demands that she betrays no fear and countenances no prospect of defeat. The question of Elizabeth’s gender is pertinent here. The fear of a king might conceivably have been attributed to realism. A queen’s fear would certainly have been ascribed to her gender.

  I know already, for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and we do assure you in the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the meantime, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.

  And there, after two and a half minutes and two hundred and fifty words, she concludes. It was customary for Elizabethan orators to speak, in church and in Parliament, for at least an hour. Elizabeth was known at the time for appreciating good writing and the speech is elegantly put together. She was also known not to like long disquisitions, but this speech is short even for her.

  Of course, once she has established her credentials as a national leader, Elizabeth has the perfect way of ensuring that her words are heeded. As queen she is the sovereign authority and the embodiment of the law. That is a quite an advantage when, as a speaker, you are asking for attention. To refuse to countenance defeat is a risky strategy because it is, after all, a defiance of the truth. No such certainty is warranted. But rhetoric is not a strict observation of the facts. It is an attempt to inspire. Elizabeth is saying here not what is but what must be. She strives to elicit the outcome she desires, to define the national characteristics that will prevail.

  The end of the speech was greeted, according
to contemporary reports, with great acclamation from the men in the battalion. The queen stayed near the camp for a week, and then learnt, soon after she had left, that the Armada had been scattered and the plan for an invasion abandoned. It was a defining moment in her reign. To the extent that Elizabeth I remains an English icon today, her reputation is owed largely to this speech, this moment at Tilbury.

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  I Agree to This Constitution with All Its Faults

  The Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia

  17 September 1787

  Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) was the only man to sign all three of the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Treaty of Paris (1783) and the American Constitution (1787). A man of polymathic capacity, he was an author, a printer, a scientist, an inventor, and a diplomat. He was, in the title given to him by Immanuel Kant in 1753, ‘the modern Prometheus’.

  Franklin was born into a devout Puritan family in the Boston of the early eighteenth century, the fifteenth child of his father’s seventeen children. He learnt the art of printing and gained an acquaintance with the political classics as an apprentice to his older brother James. In 1721 the Franklins published the Whig bible, Henry Care’s English Liberties. James Franklin also published a newspaper, The New England Courant, which was notably critical of the secular and religious authorities. Work as a printer in Philadelphia and London followed before Franklin established his own enterprise in Philadelphia. His newspaper and almanac soon became the best-selling periodical in colonial America.

  At the age of forty-two Franklin retired to devote himself to the pursuit of civil life, science and literature, in all three of which endeavours he was accomplished to an almost incredible standard. Franklin was the first American to become internationally famous. He became renowned as the greatest scientist of the mid-eighteenth century. He was a fellow of the Royal Society in London and a foreign member of the French Royal Academy of Science. Franklin’s proof that lightning was electrical opened a new frontier of knowledge. For his studies in electricity he won the 1753 Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London, the nearest contemporary equivalent of which would be the Nobel Prize for Physics. Crossing the two cultures seemingly without strain, Franklin was also regarded by David Hume as the first great American man of letters and the outstanding literary propagandist of his time. His reputation was forged by his essays, satires, letters, bagatelles and an Autobiography that became the most popular of the century.

  In the spare time he found when he wasn’t adding to knowledge through his scientific invention or to the culture through his writing, Franklin was active in public life. He threw himself into the civic life of Pennsylvania, founding hospitals and insurance companies and introducing street lighting. He was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly, became the state’s representative to Great Britain and was a personal and political success as minister plenipotentiary to France.

  The speech that follows comes at the end of this long, vigorous and almost incredibly successful life. The Constitutional Convention, which was held in closed sessions at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, was the crowning act of the American Revolution. Under George Washington as president, fifty-five delegates devised a permanent framework for the government of the American nation. Success, though, was not guaranteed. After more than three months of deliberation, a draft was finally agreed on 15 September. Two days later the convention was due to meet to sign the official parchment version. If agreement could not be reached, the convention leaders were anxious that delegates might revisit the grievances that had accumulated in the course of discussion and refuse to sign the final document.

  Franklin had written to Jefferson a month before the meeting to insist that if the convention could do no good then he, Jefferson, must ensure that it did no harm. Franklin had been active in the Constitutional Convention, in which he had proposed the Great Compromise that would ensure that election to the House of Representatives was by population while election to the Senate was by state. The leaders of the convention therefore approached him to ask Franklin to speak last, to make a plea for unity, to speak for the fledgling nation of America. On 17 September 1787 that was what he did.

  Mr. President, I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but, Sir, I am not sure I shall never approve them: for having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.

  This was meant to be Franklin’s final public speech. In the event it almost was. At the age of eighty-one, Franklin was frail, and these opening lines were the only ones he got to speak. Then, his voice faltering, he had to hand his script to the lawyer James Wilson to read the rest. It is apparent at once that the tone of the speech is going to be conciliatory. This is a clever, almost sly, opening. On a first reading it seems humble – the style is plain and the idiom demotic – but there is more under the surface. Alan Bennett gave a line to George II that we should keep in mind with brilliant speakers: ‘I have remembered how to seem’. Or ‘pretending to be me’, as Larkin said. James McHenry, delegate to the convention from Maryland, described the speech afterwards as ‘plain, insinuating, persuasive’, three epithets that point in three different directions.

  The revisions in the extant manuscripts of Franklin’s speech show how hard he worked for exactly the desired effects. In his original draft Franklin’s first sentence was blunter: ‘I must own that there are several Parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall ever approve them’. The change of ever to never reverses the meaning. It adds humility; doubt replaces the original certainty. Franklin inserts the word ‘confess’ in the first sentence, rather than ‘must own’, which adds gravity to his deliberation. Throughout he is trying to be soft. The original drafting had Franklin saying that ‘I do not approve’ the Constitution. This gets muffled, on reflection, to ‘I do not at present approve’, thereby permitting the possibility of change. Franklin’s labour shows that speech-writing is a poorly named discipline. The real tasks – thinking and editing – come before and after the writing. The craft and the rewriting here produce the insinuating effect.

  The last important drafting revision is the insertion of the word ‘Sir’ into the first sentence. This is both a direct address to the man at the top and, in the presence of an exclusively male audience, a way of binding the assembled to the president. The word ‘Sir’ breaks the sentence nicely, pays homage to the office and signals the complicity of the audience in the request that is about to come. Franklin introduces his governing theme, which is flexibility, tolerance of dissent, a spirit of compromise. There is a pleasing symmetry of content and style throughout. Look at the odd usage of ‘otherwise’ in counterposition to ‘right’, when the obvious word, begging to be used, is the more straightforward ‘wrong’. But though ‘wrong’ has the right meaning it has the wrong effect. Franklin is not only talking about an open mind. He is dramatising an open mind. The axiom of the novelist and the screen-writer – show, don’t tell – applies to the good speechwriter too.

  In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other. I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, t
heir passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.

  Franklin gets democratic theory and democratic practice into a sentence: ‘I agree to this Constitution with all its faults’. Democracy is never perfect. The ideal is a standard against which we gauge our practice, not a measure of our fidelity. A nation is a living process and all citizens will find something to quarrel with. The task, which Franklin captures, is not agreement but consensus; an acceptable deal rather than total satisfaction.

  It is important, though, not to be taken in by Franklin’s highly crafted rhetoric. The style is, ultimately, a pose. He is making the case for compromise, in a spirit of rapprochement, and yet this is still a partisan exercise. Every speech ever made has one of three possible functions: to change knowledge, perception or behaviour. Franklin knows what he wants his audience to do and is seeking to induce them to act after his instruction. His studied moderation is feigned. This is the art that Cicero called concessio; appearing to give way then, having won the right to speak by deliberately losing an unimportant battle, joining the war. Don’t forget that the reason Franklin has prepared this speech is so that delegates may sign the document. He longs for the nation to be born. It is not an exercise in academic inquiry.