This Little Britain Read online

  The confusion over names points to a deeper truth. Our ancient, once vastly powerful state is a hotchpotch, a bodge job, a thing of shreds and patches. In the Olympic Games, when the country is on show to the rest of the world, we compete as Great Britain. But in the Commonwealth Games, when we’re among family, we relax into the groupings we’re more comfortable with: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, of course, but also the crown dependencies of the Isle of Man and the bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey. These islands are not part of the United Kingdom or the European Union, though the Crown is sovereign over them and their citizens carry British passports. (And although little Sark is joined with Guernsey, it possesses its own feudal government, operated according to laws dating back to the rule of Queen Elizabeth I, according to which there is no freehold land—because it all belongs to the seigneur—and the only pigeons or unspayed female dogs permitted on the island are those belonging to that same lucky eminence.) Britain, however, is more than just this cluster of islands. The residue of empire comprises fourteen overseas territories* whose citizens carry British passports, and are therefore just as British as everyone else, though, naturally enough, each sends a separate team to the Commonwealth Games, assuming, that is, that they have any athletes.

  This patchwork of nationality, law, government and geography is reflected in that most basic of national emblems, the national anthem. The anthem comprises just two short verses, sixty-four words in total. Yet almost no one knows it. Most of us can stumble through the first verse, but it’s a rare person who is confident on the second. When the song is to be sung in a location where the Queen will be close to those singing it, courtiers will warn those seated close by to bone up on the second verse beforehand, as the Queen hates to see people forced to rely on a printed hymn sheet. So, just to refresh your memory, here is that anthem in full.

  God save our gracious Queen,

  Long live our noble Queen,

  God save the Queen!

  Send her victorious,

  Happy and glorious,

  Long to reign over us;

  God save the Queen!

  Thy choicest gifts in store

  On her be pleased to pour;

  Long may she reign;

  May she defend our laws,

  And ever give us cause

  To sing with heart and voice,

  God save the Queen!

  Sung by enough voices with a few trumpets in the background, the song can sound all right, but it has to be confessed that it’s fairly lamentable stuff. The first stanza sounds like something developed by the Year 4s at the local primary school. Whoever thought of rhyming ‘queen’ with itself four times over was clearly having a bad verse day, and rhyming ‘cause’ with ‘voice’ in the second stanza suggests that the day didn’t improve much as it went on.

  But the song’s problems go well beyond just being a bit rubbish. The two verses of the official anthem are extracted from a longer piece that includes the following:

  Lord grant that Marshal Wade

  May by thy mighty aid

  Victory bring.

  May he sedition hush,

  And like a torrent rush,

  Rebellious Scots to crush.

  God save the Queen!*

  Given that Scotland has been part of the Union for three centuries now, this verse is a wee bit embarrassing—or would be, if the Scots national anthem weren’t even worse. ‘Flower of Scotland’ has four stanzas, all of which celebrate the slaughter of English soldiers. The first one, below, is typical:

  O Flower of Scotland,

  When will we see your like again

  That fought and died for

  Your wee bit hill and glen.

  And stood against him,

  Proud Edward’s army,

  And sent him homeward

  Tae think again.†

  The Welsh anthem, though rather less bloodthirsty, is equally clear about the identity of the enemy:

  My country though crushed by a hostile array,

  The language of Cambria lives on to this day;

  The muse has eluded the traitors’ foul knives,

  The harp of my country survives.

  It’s not simply that the national anthems of the ‘home nations’ are all about murdering each other. Because of Britain’s imperial past, our national anthem is hardly even ours. ‘God Save the Queen’ was the Canadian national anthem until 1980, the Australian national anthem until 1984, and still remains one of two official New Zealand anthems today.

  The mish-mash of songs, states, laws, flags and identities may be bizarre, but it is certainly British. The contradiction we started with—an ancient state on the one hand, a thing of shreds and patches on the other—is actually no contradiction at all. Why is the British state so old? In large part, because it has managed to absorb without seeking to submerge. The 1707 union with Scotland left that country with its own laws, its own educational system, its own identity. When Sark joined Guernsey, nobody thought it necessary to tell Sark to stop being so feudal. When Guernsey became a crown dependency, no one told her to grow up and join the United Kingdom like everyone else. It is that quality of tolerance, that acceptance of localism—including a localism in which the Scots sing about slaughtering the English and vice versa—which makes us what we are.

  Extending the point a bit, one could argue that it was precisely that tolerance of difference which enabled the empire to hold together as long as it did. The American War of Independence came about because the British state in London failed to understand and flex to the demands of its British-American subjects. Generally speaking, the lessons of history are no sooner delivered than forgotten, but this one was learned and learned well. In Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere, the British state showed remarkable tact, exerting control where control was needed, flexibility where something softer was required. Admittedly, one consequence of this policy was that Britain ended up with a number of ‘colonies’ that could only be ordered to do things that they quite wanted to do anyway—which slightly calls into question the extent to which they were really colonies at all. Yet the result, here in the twenty-first century, was to produce a group of nations that genuinely do feel like extended family, with all the familial virtues and vices: affection and rivalry, banter and bitchiness.

  As for the nuclear family of Great Britain itself, now celebrating the three hundredth wedding anniversary between England and Scotland, surely it’s time to find a national anthem that avoids insulting any one of its component parts. Many suggestions have been put forward, but none has met with universal acclaim. ‘Rule Britannia’ is stirring but imperialist. ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is noble but Tory. ‘Jerusalem’ is wonderful but weird. ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ is just too public school. The Sex Pistols’ ‘God save the Queen / The fascist regime’ sold a lot of records, but the song might find it hard to secure the royal blessing.

  So how about a national anthem that is wonderfully stirring, honours British ideals of courage and liberty, is extremely well known, has universal acceptance as a national anthem, and actually succeeds in commemorating a British war against a non-British enemy, and along the way tosses in a reference to British technological and naval supremacy? Sounds good, huh? Such an anthem already exists. It’s the American ‘The Star-spangled Banner’, which commemorates the British shelling of Fort McHenry in 1814. The ‘rockets’ red glare’ is a reference to the world-leading rocket technology developed by the British inventor William Congreve. The ‘foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes’ alludes to the invincible strength of the Royal Navy. Although the incident in question was a setback for the British, the war as a whole was a score-draw at worst, a points victory at best. (We burned Washington, but they didn’t get Canada.) Obviously a few words would need to be switched around, but surely the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’ is something that we could all get behind—English, Welsh, Scots, Northern Irish, Manx, Channel Islanders, Gibraltarians,
Falkland Islanders and the rest.

  * Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena including Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands, Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, plus the Turks and Caicos Islands.

  * Wade was a British soldier tasked to make the Highlands secure against a possible Jacobite uprising.

  † The Edward in question was Edward II, the battle Bannockburn, the date some seven centuries ago.

  THE GATES OF MERCY

  Early in the seventeenth century, an English trader, one Richard Jobson, found himself off the Gambian coast. He discovered that the locals were greatly afraid of him, as well they might be, given that their compatriots had been ‘many times by several nations surprized, taken and carried away’. Offered slaves himself, Jobson refused, saying, ‘we were a people who did not deal in such commodities, neither did we buy or sell one another, or any that had our own shapes’.

  Jobson spoke too much, too early. At the time, it was true that the European market for African slaves was dominated by Spain and Portugal. Whereas northern Europe had been free of slavery for centuries, the institution had existed across the Mediterranean world since Roman times and before. Moors took Christian captives, Christians took Moors. (Plenty of Britons, indeed, were captured and enslaved by corsairs operating from North African ports, the most famous of them being the fictional Robinson Crusoe.) With the rise of their empires in the Americas, the Iberian powers found it natural to extend old ways to new shores. Since wind and currents placed Africa squarely en route for either the outward or return leg of the journey to the New World, the Atlantic slave trade was born.

  The commerce didn’t seem to bother anyone’s conscience all that much. A pope prohibited the enslavement of Christians, but since no Christians were being enslaved anyway the ban was meaningless. European monarchs invested quite happily in the trade. There was a general convenient view that it was easier to be a slave in America than free and in Africa. (Needless to say, the view was not subjected to very much empirical scrutiny.) Nor was it even as though slavery was a new institution in Africa. Far from it. Slaves had long been taken in war and sold within Africa, or across the Red Sea to the Middle East. The ‘white men, with horrible looks, red faces and loose hair’* merely represented a new market for a long-established industry.

  This was the commerce in which Jobson so roundly refused to take part, yet the true significance of his voyages lay less in his personal integrity than in his investors’ bottom line. Aside from slaves, Africa offered gold, ivory and Guinea pepper, yet not one of Jobson’s three slaveless trips to Africa made a profit. Slaving made money, compassion did not.

  From small beginnings, the British trade started to grow. At the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714, Britain won, among other things, the trading concession, known simply as the contract or ‘asiento’, to sell slaves to the Spanish Empire. The asiento was promptly sold to the South Sea Company as part of a complex transaction that effectively reduced the stock of government debt. Most famous now for its stock market boom and bust, the South Sea Company was in essence a slaving corporation, backed by the highest in the kingdom. A majority of the House of Commons bought shares. So did half of the House of Lords. So did every member of the royal family, royal bastards and mistresses not excepted.

  From the start, the British broke the restrictive terms of the asiento. In a kind of semi-legal twilight, British slaving flourished. Even after the South Sea Bubble had well and truly burst, the fundamentally profitable trade continued. All major European trading nations participated. Over the centuries, Portugal carried the most slaves, transporting about 4,650,000. (The numbers are guesstimates only. Reliable records were never kept.) Britain carried about 2,600,000, with British North America, later the United States, accounting for a further 300,000. France transported 1,250,000, Holland around 500,000. Catholics and Protestants were involved in the trade. So was every Protestant denomination. So were the royal families of every trading nation.

  The trade caused misery and violence wherever it touched: in the African interior, where it fuelled war and kidnap; on board ship, in the notorious Middle Passage, where death rates averaged around 15-20 per cent in the earlier years, falling to more like 10 per cent later on; in the cane fields of the New World, where conditions were brutal and lives short. Unexpectedly, perhaps, the trade also sowed death and destruction among Europeans, the death rates for crew members being higher than they were for the slaves themselves.

  The trade inflicted a kind of moral brutality too, coarsening and numbing those who participated. Euphemism and silence cloaked the industry. Nobody referred to the business by its name. There were no traders in slaves, only adventurers in the Africa (or Guinea) trade. There were no shackles, only ‘collars’. For four decades, the chaplain at Cape Coast Castle was a black Anglican, named Philip Quaque. During that time, not one single officer attended Holy Communion. The problem, wrote Quaque, wasn’t racism, but guilt: ‘The only plea they offer is that while they are here acting against Light and Conscience they dare not come to that Holy Table.’

  At home, public opinion didn’t reflect much on the trade, but when it did, it was mostly supportive. When Dr Johnson argued that ‘no man is by nature the property of another’, he represented a minority. Boswell’s own view was commoner by far: ‘To abolish a status which in all ages God has sanctioned…would be extreme cruelty to the African savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre or bondage in their own country; and introduces into a much happier state of life…To abolish this trade would be to shut the gates of mercy on mankind.’

  Thus far, there is nothing remotely exceptional in the English or British record. It’s true that, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, Britain was the leading slave-trading nation, but leadership came about from commercial and naval primacy more generally, not from any particular zeal for this trade over others. All the same, exceptional or not, Britain’s participation in the commerce was arguably the ugliest episode in a history that’s had its full share of ugliness. Though there have been occasions when Britain has been involved in a much greater loss of life (the Indian famine of 1770, or the violence of the 1947 Partition, for example), the slave trade lasted for centuries, was plainly murderous and was wholly avoidable. Comparisons with the Nazi holocaust are justifiable, not because the trade was genocidal (it wasn’t), nor because it was intrinsically racist (ditto), but because ordinary men persisted in a course of action that they knew to be grossly wrong, and wrong on a colossal scale.

  Finally, however, the code of omerta proved unsustainable. In France, Britain and parts of the new United States, public opinion began to turn—or more accurately, began to get a true sense of what was involved. In 1781, the Liverpool slaveship Zong mistook its course and ran low on water. The captain argued that if slaves died of natural causes, the loss would be borne by the vessel’s owners. If, on the other hand, considerations for the crew’s safety made it necessary for the slaves to be ‘thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters’. Against the protests of the first mate, 133 slaves were thrown overboard and left to drown. When the case finally came to court—not as a prosecution for murder, but by way of an insurance dispute—public uproar ensued.

  Out of uproar, action. In 1785, a Cambridge student, Thomas Clarkson, won a university prize for an essay on slavery, written in Latin. Yet the essay was, to begin with at least, no more than the party-piece of a gifted student; a piece of brilliant writing, nothing more. Then, making his way to London to arrange for an English-language publication of the essay, Clarkson was struck by a sudden thought. In his own words: ‘I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside…Here a thought came to my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to the end.’ That per
son, thought Clarkson, might as well be him.

  His weapon was truth. Travelling to the major slaving ports of Bristol and Liverpool, he sought out those who knew the trade. Few were willing to speak, but enough did. In Bristol, he recorded stories of torture and murder. In Liverpool, he was given shackles, thumbscrews and a tool for force-feeding salves. Better still, he obtained a diagram of how slaves should be stowed, 482 human beings treated worse than any cattle. He made these things public. He carefully and cleverly broadened the anti-slavery lobby from its Quaker base to include leading representatives of every tier of the British establishment. He organized the first effective mass consumer boycott of sugar, a boycott that came to involve at least 300,000 people.

  The blood-red tide had turned. In 1803, Denmark became the first country to abolish the slave trade,* but Denmark was hardly a major player. Britain was; and when, in 1807, Britain abolished the commerce, it put blood and treasure behind the abolition. From 1807 until the outbreak of the First World War, the Royal Navy pursued the slave trade with relentless zeal. British-owned slavers could simply be pursued and boarded, but the government’s aim was to exterminate the trade generally, not simply the British share of it. Yet if Royal Navy vessels intercepted and boarded slavers of third-party nations, then the act could easily be interpreted as one of war. While the navy was willing to push the rules of diplomacy to their very limits, it was reluctant to indulge in overt aggression against third-party vessels.

  Nevertheless, and despite these restrictions on their freedom of action, the British persisted. Even during the height of the Napoleonic Wars, when the Royal Navy had a few other things on its mind, there were British anti-slave ships stationed in West Africa. By the 1830s, there were fourteen vessels on permanent duty; by the 1840s, well over thirty. Behind naval might lay political will. When Brazil signed a treaty banning the trade but then refused to enforce it, the British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, dispatched a naval flotilla to bully the country into submission—gunboat diplomacy of the most benevolent kind. If thuggery didn’t work, then bribes probably would. Britain paid more than three million pounds to Portugal and a further million to Spain to cease the trade. In 1862, the Civil War in America forced President Lincoln to accede to British demands for stop-and-search rights of American flagged vessels. France (as ever) was a peculiar and difficult case. On the one hand, the anti-slavery lobby had once been as powerful there as it had been in Britain. On the other hand, French national pride was unable to accept any British role in enforcement—so while the trade was banned in theory from 1815, it flourished happily nonetheless.