This Little Britain Page 8

  * Or, strictly speaking, at home in Angeln, Friesland and Jutland. The area now called Saxony is not actually where the Anglo-Saxon Saxons came from. Got that?

  * Edward II was the unfortunate monarch, and the circumstances surrounding his deposition were of murky constitutionality at best.

  NO REMOTE IMPASSIVE GAZE

  War is, and always has been, alarmingly expensive. In the period after about 1500, however, and for reasons that are still being debated, those costs began to grow at an explosive rate.

  Military manpower

  Date Spain Dutch Republic France Sweden Russia

  1470s 20,000 — 40,000 — —

  1590s 200,000 20,000 80,000 15,000 —

  1630s 300,000 50,000 150,000 45,000 35,000

  1700s — 100,000 400,000 100,000 170,000

  The Dutch and Russian armies grew five times over, the Swedish almost sevenfold, the French tenfold; the Spanish army grew by a multiple of fifteen times to its peak. A cost explosion of this sort was without precedent, and it forced a simple choice on European states of the era: keep up or go under. Those states that played the game successfully survived. Those that didn’t were swatted from existence.

  Unsurprisingly, statesmen of the time were well aware of the problem, well aware of the threat. But the issue posing the deepest challenge was not military but political in nature. After all, seventeenth-century armies were pretty basic affairs. To put together an army you needed a lot of unemployed peasants for men, some unemployed noblemen for officers, and a large number of fairly basic weapons. If you wanted a bigger army, you simply needed more peasants, more nobles, more weapons, more cash.

  It was assembling the men and the cash which proved the trickiest part of the challenge. In the late 1400s, most European states functioned via representative institutions that had grown and developed through medieval times. Those bodies didn’t have the clout that parliament had grown to possess in England, but they still mattered enough to cause a problem. How, after all, was a king to go about building a massive army, if he constantly needed to bargain with his noblemen and taxpayers for manpower and resources? The thing couldn’t be done and the state adapted accordingly. Traditional liberties were done away with. Those old medieval bodies were either abolished or emasculated. Kings became supreme monarchs: absolute, centralized, powerful. In effect, countries themselves came to take on the command structures of armies: always top-down, never bottom-up. A purely military problem—how to keep up with the army of the Joneses—became one with political ramifications of the greatest possible consequence.

  This then was the pattern for Europe: bigger armies, political strain, then either collapse (if you failed the challenge) or autocracy (if you didn’t). Every major country to survive followed this pattern. Except England. Far from becoming more autocratic over the two hundred years from 1500, England became the exact opposite: a country under firm parliamentary rule, whose king was ever more firmly excluded from real power. By the time George I came to the British throne in 1714, the country had a king who couldn’t speak English, and a parliament that didn’t want him to. As so often before, and as so often later, England was the solitary exception to an otherwise solid European rule.

  How come? The answer certainly has nothing to do any lack of military spending. True enough, the English army grew less than most: it went from being 25,000 strong at its (temporary) peak in the 1470s to some 87,000 strong in the 1700s, a three-and-a-half-fold increase. But it’s an error to focus on the army, when it was England’s navy which most counted. In 1509, Henry VIII’s England had no navy at all. Ships, when needed for royal purposes, were simply borrowed or commandeered from the private sector. There were no royal shipyards, no permanent bureaucracy, no fixed naval hierarchy of officers and men. Scroll forwards to 1688, and James II vacated the throne leaving behind a navy of 151 seriously expensive ships, second in power only to the French navy, and even then not by much.

  This battle fleet was supported by a vast and costly hinterland of dockyards, victualling yards, shipbuilders, administrators, financiers, and so forth. In short, if all defence spending is taken into account, not just the purely military part, then England experienced a cost explosion every bit as dramatic as those found elsewhere. If cost pressure alone was enough to drive nations into autocracy then England should have ended up with one of the most centralized and absolutist monarchies in Europe. Should have, but didn’t. So why not?

  The first point, of course, is that England’s starting point was different. In 1485, the English parliament had tight control over tax and legislation, and it boasted a level of social inclusiveness unknown on the Continent. To a large extent, the survival of parliament through two centuries of ever more costly warfare has a lot to do with the strength of its position at the start. A weaker parliament might well have gone under.

  There’s a second point, however, more intriguing and perhaps more persuasive too. Armies and navies are both expensive, but the costs involved are of a very different sort. Armies—those simple agglomerations of peasants, noblemen, pikes and muskets—could simply be ordered into existence, assuming that the command structure and the cash existed so to order them. Navies were never like that. Not then, and not now. A naval fighting ship was a formidably complex piece of equipment. She needed to be built by experienced shipwrights; serviced in suitable dockyards; supplied with cordage, spars, victuals, sailcloth, ammunition and powder; manned by skilled and experienced seamen; managed by experienced officers. All this meant that a navy was far more intensive in capital and skills than any army. Such a complex animal simply couldn’t be coerced into being. What a navy required was, to quote N.A.M. Rodger, Britain’s leading naval historian:

  a system of government which involved the maximum participation by those interest groups whose money and skills were indispensable to sea-power—not just the nobility and the peasants whom absolutism set to work, but the shipowners and seafarers, the urban merchants and financiers, the industrial investors and managers, the skilled craftsmen; all the classes in short, which absolutist government least represented and least favoured…A military regime could sustain itself by force, but a navy had to earn public support. Autocracy was adequate for an army, but navies needed consensus.

  Rodger is surely right—so right, indeed, that the creator came to take on the shape of the created. Army discipline emphasized drill above all else. The object was to have men move, turn, stand and fire with the oiled predictability of a machine. The effectiveness of men in land combat depended on precisely that element of predictability and obedience to command. The autocracies of the Continent came to operate in a very similar way themselves—disciplined, hierarchical; the political echoing the military.

  Command, of course, was important for navies too, but the purpose of naval discipline was never to produce automatons. A ship’s crew was skilled and specialized, with its own master (navigator), carpenter, bosun, gunner, cook, purser and petty officers. Even the humble seaman was skilled to a degree that would astonish us today. An ‘able’ seaman was one able to ‘hand, reef and steer’—no small accomplishment this, when the necessity for reefing might involve climbing a hundred feet above deck to battle flying canvas in a gale-torn night. These seamen were responsive to command, but also proactive, resourceful, independent and skilled. They also, and unlike soldiers, had other employers, the merchant marine, willing to pay a good price for their particular brand of skill—a fact of life that forced the navy to compete for talent, in a way that armies never quite had to.

  The contrast between army and navy is brought to life by Patrick O’Brian in The Far Side of the World. (The action is set in the navy of Nelson rather than Blake, but the contrast drawn would have been true of either era.) The ship’s captain, Jack Aubrey, is inspecting his men, just after they have managed to rescue him from a deserted island.

  Jack…turned aft, to where the Marines were standing as straight as ramrods in their scarlet coats: their cross-belts
were brilliant with pipeclay, their muskets and side-arms shone again, their hair was powdered to a turn, their leather stocks were as tight as stocks could well be and allow a little circulation of the blood; and although awnings had been rigged, the eastern sun, not yet at its height, beat on their backs with shocking force. They might not be beautiful, but they were certainly suffering. Accompanied by Howard [the captain of Marines], and by Mowett [the ship’s first lieutenant], he passed along the rows of faces, many of them nameless to him even now and all of them impersonal, gazing out beyond him, wholly without expression.

  ‘Very creditable, Mr Howard,’ said Jack…Then, still with Mowett and with each of the divisional officers in turn, he went round the rest of the ship.

  This was quite a different ceremony. Here he knew every man, many of them—indeed most of them—intimately well, knew their virtues, vices, particular skills, particular failings. And here there was no remote impassive gaze, no eyes trained to avoid the charge of familiarity or dumb insolence. Far from it: they were very pleased to see him and they smiled and nodded as he came by—Davis even laughed aloud. Furthermore it was perfectly obvious to all concerned that a rescued captain, just returned to his ship by a combination of extraordinary luck and extraordinary exertions, could not decently find fault with his ship’s company. As an inspection his tour was therefore a matter of pure though amiable form; and it very nearly turned into a farce when the bosun’s cat joined them and marched steadily in front of the Captain, its tail in the air.

  Naval vessels didn’t just tolerate this kind of mutually respectful intercourse between officer and sailor, they required it, just as the effectiveness of armies (and Patrick O’Brian’s marines) depended on their total submission to command. In lurching towards democracy, England, like its neighbours, came to resemble the creatures that each had conjured into existence: armies on the Continent, the navy in Britain.

  This line of thought is intriguing for two reasons. The first is the obvious one. England was, as so often, exceptional in a way that mattered, and understanding the causes of that uniqueness is of interest in its own right. The second reason is this. Modern historical scholarship is an astonishingly specialized affair. This chapter is largely based on arguments presented in N.A.M. Rodger’s Safeguard of the Sea. That book, the first in a three-volume history of British seapower, contains a ‘select’ bibliography that is fifty pages long. The successor volume offers a further ‘select’ list which runs to almost ninety. To a jackdaw mind like mine, scholarship of this depth is almost impossible to conceive; it’s certainly no longer possible for a single historian to combine a profound grasp of, say, British naval history with an equally detailed view of, say, parliamentary history. The resultant, inevitable specialization means that history can often seem over-compartmentalized. (Rodger, I might add, is a notable exception to the rule.)

  Yet everything is connected. Britain’s naval exceptionalism can’t be divorced from its unique path on the parliamentary front, or the industrial and commercial fronts, or the later imperial front. Connections have a habit of existing even where they might be least expected. I doubt that anyone has ever written a book about the English constitutional upheavals in the seventeenth century and dedicated a large chunk of their discussion to naval developments, but perhaps it’s high time that someone did. That the navy has long protected our borders is obvious. That it acted as midwife to our fledgling democracy is so little obvious that almost no one suggests it—yet for all that, it may be every bit as true.

  GOOD KING FRANK

  Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste,

  Harry, Dick, John, Harry three,

  One, two, three Neds, Richard two,

  Henries four, five, six—then who?

  Edwards four, five, Dick the bad,

  Harries twain and Ned the lad,

  Mary, Bessie, James the vain,

  Charlie, Charlie, James again,

  William & Mary, Anna Gloria,

  Four Georges, William and Victoria,

  Ted, George, Ned, then George were seen

  And now it’s Liz—God Save Our Queen.

  When our present queen dies, then her eldest son, all being well, will ascend to the throne. The line of succession would then pass to Charles’s eldest son, William, who would in due course expect to become King William V. Or so convention has it. But the convention hides a slightly embarrassing truth: that Kings William I, II and III weren’t really Williams at all.

  The first monarch with any name remotely like William was a certain Guillaume of Normandy, known as Le Bâtard. Guillaume le Bâtard was born in France, christened in France and spent most of his life in France. He spoke French. When he invaded England, he brought with him a French-speaking court, French-speaking nobles and French-speaking churchmen. King Guillaume was definitely not called William, just as his son (Guillaume II le Roux) was not called William either.

  Of course, many European names have equivalents in other languages. John translates as Ian, Iáin, Evan, Ieuan, Eóin, Jean, Juan, João, Giovanni, Johann, Jan, Ivan and many other variants. But we don’t call Ivan the Terrible, John the Terrible. Johann Sebastian Bach isn’t John Bach. Likewise, given that Guillaume I and II were never christened William, called William or thought of themselves as William, it seems perverse to insist on calling them that. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that when the French arrived in England in 1066, typically English names included such splendours as Æ∂elfrid, Ceolwulf, Earpwald, Hlothere, Thrydwulf and (my favourite) Yffi. Though we may think of names like Tom, Dick and Harry as quintessentially English, they’re simply anglicizations of French originals. In 1066, the name William didn’t exist.

  The new court was foreign, and so it stayed. Schoolchildren used to learn the kings and queens of England with a version of the rhyme quoted at the start of this piece, a comfortable verse that sounds like a roll-call of names in some Edwardian classroom. But let’s call a spade a spade (or rather bêche). The kings of England from the Norman Conquest to Henry V were as follows:

  1066-87 Guillaume I le Bâtard

  1087-1100 Guillaume II le Roux

  1100-35 Henri I Beauclerc

  1135-54 Etienne de Blois

  1154-89 Henri II Courtmanteau

  1189-99 Richard I Coeur de Lion

  1199-1216 Jean Sans Terre

  1216-72 Henri III

  1272-1307 Edouard I

  1307-27 Edouard II

  1327-77 Edouard III

  1377-99 Richard II

  1399-1413 Henri IV

  1413-22 Henry V

  What’s more, the wives (and therefore mothers) of the kings were mostly as foreign as the kings themselves. Guillaume I was married to Mathilde de Flandre. Henri II was married to Aliénor de Guyenne. From Jean Sans Terre to Edouard III, the queens comprised Isabella d’Angoulême, Aliénor de Provence, Leanor de Castilla, Margarete de France, Isabelle de France and Philippa de Hainault (the place in Belgium, that is; not the stop on the London Underground). Even that most English of kings, Henry V, married one Catherine de Valois. Only in the late fifteenth century did there come a period when most English monarchs had two native English speakers for parents. (That didn’t necessarily mean those monarchs were English, however. Henry Tudor, who seized the throne in 1485, was born in Wales of a Welsh dynasty whose founding father was one Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudwr ap Goronwy.)

  As the Tudors settled in, however, they anglicized, bringing something like English rule to England throughout the sixteenth century. Then, in 1603, and with Elizabeth childless, English rule came to an end again with the coronation of James I of England. James was Scottish, and was already King James VI of Scotland. It’s easy for us now to think of him as British and so not really foreign at all, but this is a hopelessly anachronistic attitude. Scotland was an independent country with its own laws, parliament and religious make-up. James spoke with a broad accent that firmly placed him as being un-English. Indeed, James’s inability to deal with the different requirements of his
different kingdoms (and his son, Charles’s, equal lack of sensitivity) was a major part of what precipitated civil wars in and between England, Scotland and Ireland in the middle of the century.

  Those conflicts quietened, but didn’t altogether settle until the turbulent year of 1688, when the Dutchman, Willem Hendrik, Prins van Oranje, landed with 40,000 men to contest the crown of England. James II chose to run away. Willem summoned an illegal parliament, surrounded it with troops, and asked those assembled to choose their new king. They chose the Dutchman. But was he King William? William certainly wasn’t his name. Just like Guillaume le Bâtard before him, the new king was a foreign conqueror whose name and native language were not English. If one is being strict about these things, England up to this point had had two King Guillaumes and one King Willem. It had never had a King William at all.

  In 1707, England united with Scotland. There would never be another foreign invasion. The dynastic line settled down, with no more of the bloody excitement of medieval times, but the monarchs that ruled were still hardly English. On the death of Queen Anne in 1714, it was necessary to find a new monarch. This wasn’t quite as simple as it should have been, because the 1701 Act of Settlement excluded any Catholic or anyone married to a Catholic from the throne. Unfortunately, the fifty-seven people closest in line to the throne were all Catholic. The lucky fifty-eighth was one Georg Ludwig, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Georg, of course, was as German as Bratwurst. He spoke almost no English, and what little he did speak was overlaid with a thick German accent.

  Much more astonishing is how German the family stayed. Heirs to the British throne needed to marry those who were both Protestant and of princely blood. Since the best supply of such marital material was to be found in the principalities of Germany and Scandinavia, it came about that every single monarch from George I to Victoria married a German spouse, so that every British monarch from 1714 to 1901 had two German-speaking parents, at least one of whom was also German-born. That icon of high British imperialism, Queen Victoria, preferred speaking German to English and spoke mostly German with her children. In 1901, Edward VII came to the throne (fluent in German, naturally), accompanied by his Danish wife, the magnificently styled Alexandra von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksberg. It wasn’t until 1910 that Britain, for the first time in its history, would have a British king married to a British queen—and this is true only if we include those who are naturalised British.* The Queen Mother, a Scot, was the first Briton to marry a British royal. The first Englishwoman to come close to the British throne was Princess Diana. Since Camilla will not become queen, there’s not a clear contender even now.