ENGLISH VOICES
Also by Ferdinand Mount
NON-FICTION
The Theatre of Politics
The Subversive Family
The British Constitution Now
Communism (ed.)
Mind the Gap
Cold Cream
Full Circle
The New Few
The Tears of the Rajas
FICTION
Tales of History and Imagination
Umbrella
Jem (and Sam)
The Condor’s Head
A Chronicle of Modern Twilight
The Man Who Rode Ampersand
The Selkirk Strip
Of Love and Asthma
The Liquidator
Fairness
Heads You Win
Very Like a Whale
The Clique
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2016
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Copyright © 2016 by Ferdinand Mount
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‘From this amphibious, ill-born mob began
That vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman’
Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman, 1701
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Amphibious Mob
VOICES IN OUR TIME
Kingsley Amis: the craving machine
Alan Bennett: against splother
Muriel Spark: the Go-Away Bird
V. S. Naipaul: no home for Mr Biswas
Hugh Trevor-Roper: the Voltaire of St Aldate’s
W. G. Sebald: a master shrouded in mist
John le Carré: spooking the spooks
Elias Canetti: the God-Monster of Hampstead
John Osborne: anger management?
Professor Derek Jackson: off the radar
Germaine Greer: still strapped in the cuirass
EARLY MODERNS
Rudyard Kipling: the sensitive bounder
George Gissing: the downfall of a pessimist
Virginia Woolf: go with the flow
Arthur Ransome: Lenin in the Lake District
E. M. Forster: shy, remorseless shade
Arthur Machen: faerie strains
Fred Perry: winner takes all
M. R. James: the sexless ghost
Wilfred Owen: the last telegram
John Maynard Keynes: copulation and macroeconomics
DIVINE DISCONTENTS
Basil Hume: the English cardinal
The Red Dean
Charles Bradlaugh: the admirable atheist
Mr Gladstone’s religion
The rise and fall and rise of Methodism
IN SEARCH OF ENGLAND
Pevsner in Berkshire
Oliver Rackham: magus of the woods
The last of Betjeman
Ronald Blythe: glory in the ruts
The suburb and the village
Mark Girouard and the English town
SOME OLD MASTERS
Thomas Hardy: the twilight of aftering
Charles Dickens: kindly leave the stage
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a wonderful leaper
John Keats: what’s become of Junkets?
Samuel Pepys: from the scaffold to Mr Pooter
Shakespeare at Stratford: the divine pork butcher
THE GREAT VICTORIANS
Sir Robert Peel: the first modern
Lord Palmerston: the unstoppable Pam
Walter Bagehot: money matters
Lord Rosebery: the palm without the dust
Arthur Balfour: a fatal charm
OUR STATESMEN
Margot, Asquith and the Great War
Churchill’s calamity: day trip to Gallipoli
Oswald Mosley: the poor old Führer
Roy Jenkins: trainspotting lothario
Denis Healey: the bruiser aesthete
Harold Macmillan: lonely are the brave
Edward Heath: the great sulk
Margaret Thatcher: making your own luck
Notes and references
Acknowledgements
Picture permissions
Index
List of Illustrations
INTRODUCTION
The Amphibious Mob
The English have always had a fierce sense of themselves. As they waded up the beaches, our ancestors were apparently shouting ‘Engla-Lond, Engla-Lond’, as if the World Cup had already started. In King Alfred’s day, women who adopted Danish hairstyles were attacked for being un-English. The Venerable Bede of Jarrow, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished as early as ad 731, laments the vices of his countrymen, notably sodomy, adultery and drunkenness, but also picks out their positives such as stoicism, telling the story of a fellow Tyneside monk bathing in a freezing river with blocks of ice all round him and someone calling from the bank that ‘it is wonderful how you can manage to bear such bitter cold’, to which the monk replies, like any true Geordie, ‘I have known it colder.’
Further back still, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, our ancestors were already making their own suburbs, ‘refusing to have their houses set together like the Romans and preferring to live apart, dotted here and there where spring, plain or grove has taken their fancy, each leaving an open space round his house’. The point is not so much how accurate these stereotypes were but rather how, from very early times, observers were fascinated by the quiddities of the English.
Modern historians do not care for this kind of thing. In the eyes of scholars as diverse as Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and Linda Colley, national identity is mostly an artificial construct. According to Benedict Anderson, national communities don’t just grow, they have to be ‘imagined’. From a very different viewpoint, Hugh Trevor-Roper claimed that ‘Scottishness’ was largely invented by Sir Walter Scott. Colley argues in her influential Britons that you can see unmistakable evidence through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of politicians and propagandists pushing the idea of Britishness, for fear that the Union might founder without this ideological buttressing. Even so, Colley does not deny that the idea of Britain was knocking around way before the union of Parliaments in 1707 and even before the union of the Scottish and English Crowns in 1603. And if Britishness is not quite such a latecomer as all that, Englishness is something else.
Patrick Wormald, that brilliant alcoholic depressive who lit up Anglo-Saxon history for all too brief a
period before his early death, contends that a sense of Englishness was always present, as thick as the fog, as pervasive and pungent as the drains, long before the Norman Conquest and long after it, enduring through that conquest and then through all the twists and turns of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation: ‘the onus probandi lies on those who would deny that such a sense remained embedded in the bulk of the English population throughout this long period. Unless a sense of English identity had penetrated towards the roots of society, it is very difficult to understand how it survived at all.’ Wormald contends, not without passion, that ‘there is evidence of a remarkably precocious sense of common “Englishness” and not just in politically interested circles. It is arguable that it is because “Englishness” was first an ideal that the enterprise launched by Alfred, his children and his grandchildren was so successful.’
In other words, the people in Wessex, Mercia and the rest were consciously and cussedly English for a long period before these territories were unified into a political realm called England, although that realm is itself remarkably ancient in both its boundaries and its monarchy, more ancient perhaps than any other significant realm in Europe, and more continuous if not unbroken in its duration. After the breaks – the Norman Conquest, the Commonwealth – the English simply re-emerged, not unaltered by the trauma but convinced that they were in essentials the same people they had been before.
This persisting sense of identity has rarely been bolstered by any feelings of racial purity. The English might think of themselves as different, but they have not gone in for myths of a unique genetic origin. English churchmen believed that mankind developed from a single common ancestor, the theory of monogenesis, as opposed to polygenesis, the belief that men originated in separate races and that, as a consequence, the differences between those races were ineradicable and important. The most notorious English racialist, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), found so little support for his theories in England that he made his career in Germany and took German citizenship. Pseudo-scientific racial theories never stood up to the facts of common observation in this country. An English crowd looks so diverse – tall, short, blond, dark, ginger, blobby, aquiline, eyes of every colour.
Quite early on, in fact, the English became proud of their mongrel heredity. Daniel Defoe’s satire, The True-Born Englishman (1701), was an instant and lasting bestseller which went through forty editions in as many years. In it, Defoe mocks those of his fellow countrymen who object to foreign-born rulers such as William of Orange. Who, after all, were our ancestors? ‘Auxiliaries and slaves of every nation’ who had followed in the baggage train of the Romans, then the plundering Saxons and Danes, followed by waves of Picts, Scots and Irishmen, finishing up with the Norman heavies:
All these their barbarous offspring left behind
The dregs of armies, they of all mankind.
From this amphibious, ill-born mob began
That vain, ill-natured thing an Englishman.
As Jonathan Clark points out in Our Shadowed Present, the way the English usually described themselves was not ‘true-born’ but ‘free-born’. Their heritage was not genetic but political. The ‘amphibious mob’ prided itself not on its ancient bloodlines but on its ancient liberties.
Of course they thought themselves not only different, but superior. Most nations do. But their claims to superiority were often tinged with self-mockery. In the heyday of Empire, the Victorian bourgeoisie guffawed at W. S. Gilbert’s parodies of patriotic ditties:
He is an Englishman!
For he himself has said it
And it’s greatly to his credit
That he is an Englishman!
Gilbert even asserts ironically that there is an element of choice in the matter:
In spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations
He remains an Englishman!
Nor have the English been conspicuously pleased with their nation and themselves, except perhaps under the first Elizabeth and in the high Victorian age. More often the dominant tone of English discourse is one of regret, of nostalgia rather than self-congratulation. In Albion, his vast sprawling enquiry into the origins of the English imagination, Peter Ackroyd identifies Bede as the first English writer, typically brooding on ruins and relics of the past and already, in the early eighth century, exuding that melancholy characteristic of these rainswept islanders. If there is a theme common to English writers from Bede to Betjeman, it is this regret for the past. The best has already come and gone and will not come again. Shortly after the Norman Conquest, a scribe charmingly known as the Tremulous Hand of Worcester sighs over the demise of Old English: nobody teaches the language properly any more, the people are lost and wrecked.
Only a gross imperialist like Cecil Rhodes would think of claiming that ‘to be an Englishman was to draw first prize in the lottery of life’. In any case, it was always possible to buy a lottery ticket. In fact, from Disraeli onwards, paeans to Englishness have so often come from historians and political writers who are not English by descent. The philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, who was born in Riga and as a child witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution from his parents’ apartment in St Petersburg, writes of the historian Sir Lewis Namier, born Ludwik Bernsztajn in Poland to a Jewish land agent who had converted to Catholicism:
He was not disappointed in England. It took, as he had supposed, a humane, civilised and, above all, sober, undramatised, empirical view of life. Englishmen seemed to him to take account, more than most men, of the real ends of human life – pleasure, justice, power, freedom, glory, the sense of human solidarity which underlay both patriotism and adherence to tradition; above all they loathed abstract principles and general theories.
From almost everything that Berlin wrote and said, it is clear that these are Berlin’s own sentiments too. It was, I think, his experience of England that helped to shape his crucial insight, that political theories and principles do not by nature fit neatly with one another and that wisdom consists in learning to live with the conflicts between them.
In the writing of English history, it has so often been incomers who have constructed the most vivid pictures of the way we were. Who has inked in our image of the Tudors more forcefully than G. R. Elton, Sir Geoffrey Elton, born Gottfried Rudolf Ehrenberg in Prague? In the introduction to his little book The English (1992), Elton touchingly records: ‘I was well over seventeen years old when I landed in England on St Valentine’s Day in 1939, and I knew virtually nothing of that country, not even its language. Within a few months it dawned upon me that I had arrived in the country in which I ought to have been born.’
What then are the characteristics of that country that were so immediately attractive to the young Ehrenberg? What makes or made it so enviable to be English, either by birth or by adoption? It is an inconvenient truth that just as our characteristics are not exclusive to us, neither are they unchanging. That sober, tolerant country which entranced Berlin, Namier and Elton had, three centuries earlier, been notorious for its sectarian ferocity and its terrible civil wars; one king had his head cut off, another was driven into exile. Fifty years later, the country was still being convulsed by violent uprisings in support of the exiled dynasty.
Neither our sexual mores nor our religious habits are constant, either. If the Victorians were pious and prudish, the Georgians were unbuttoned and tepid in their devotions. As for our supposed aversion to sexual display, what about Shakespeare’s bawdry or the bare bosoms of Sir Peter Lely’s beauties? English phlegm was unknown to the hot-tempered gallants of Restoration England. The stiff upper lip seems more like a by-product of Empire than an enduring feature of the English face; it crumpled terminally at the funeral of Princess Diana. In the 1930s, English bohemians fled their suffocating homeland, or ‘Pudding Island’ as Lawrence Durrell called it, for a climate where they could take their clothes off and let their hair down. Now foreigners flood into London, because it seems to them the least inhibited met
ropolis on earth.
Is there in fact any specific quality in life, or art or literature that we can pin down as intrinsically, enduringly and uniquely English? Ackroyd claims, for example, that the English have a special relationship to trees and hate seeing them cut down. Odd, seeing that we have cut down more of them than almost any other nation. Aren’t the Germans rather more notoriously in love with their forests, even naming their gâteaux after them? One of the most famous lines in French nursery rhymes laments that ‘we shall go no more to the woods, the laurels are cut down’.
Even where one can identify some cultural trait that appears idiosyncratically English, there always seem to be exceptions. The ‘serpentine line of beauty’ recommended by Hogarth certainly does apply to the English tradition in gardening – all meanders and no straight lines – but can you apply it to English architecture, the single unique style of which we happen to call perpendicular? Our Georgian terraces are anything but serpentine, certainly not when compared with the fantastic curlicues of Bavarian rococo. On none of these supposedly English qualities – understatement and modesty, sexual unease, or enduring love of the eclectic and the countryside, aversion to order and straight lines – can the English claim exclusive copyright.
But there are two ancient and continuing features of English culture which do have a solid claim to be peculiar and fundamental: the common law and the common language. The two are crucially interlinked, and between them, I would argue, are constitutive of Englishness.
At first sight it may seem bizarre that the most famous – and best – description of what the English common law does should come from a poem. But then it’s a bizarre poem. It has no title. Alfred Tennyson simply begins with a question:
You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits falter in the mist,
And languish for the purple seas.
In other words, why the hell should he stay in England? And he answers himself with a paean to the liberty and tolerance of a country
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