Before you begin reading, please note my apology for the length of this entry. It is a complex if woolly argument which to many will be uninteresting and, because of the narrowness in scope necessary for a blog entry, unconvincing. It’s just something to think about. The last post of equal or greater length was on the more obviously important subject of tax and most of it rhymed. Speaking to some of our new members this year, however, I was a little concerned to hear how exclusively important to them taxing and spending, the size of the state, and ‘democracy’ was to them: I think any historical context to May 2010 will be of use. Furthermore, every time I think about writing on this blog I always decide I don’t have anything pithy and interesting enough to say. This time I’ve gone for it anyway…
This Easter I’ve been listening to Seth Lakeman and reading the 1847 children’s novel The Children of the New Forest (credited with changing public perceptions of Roundheads and Cavaliers to correct prevalent Whig History assumptions…of which more below). I’ve also been browsing post-structuralist media criticism in online back-issues of Jump Cut. A favourite article is a 1996 review of Disney’s The Lion King by Matt Roth (Google it, you’ll enjoy it). These three activities have resulted in the sweeping and cavalier (and Cavalier…) analysis of the decline in British patriotism that you will read below.
Roth’s argument is essentially that the Lion King represents the internalization of Nazi ideals in American culture by the fact that Disney’s avowedly ‘liberal’ successors put out such a film. The Lion King is supposed to revile the alliance between ‘smooth-talking’ liberal intellectual elites (Scar) and the urban working class (the hyenas) that overthrows the natural rural/suburban, hierarchical order represented by Mufasa and the Pride, who govern with divine right while preying upon their subjects.
I believe that The Lion King is an excellent example of a much more long-standing myth than any some nationalist socialist upstarts may have dreamt up in 1920. The Lion King is about the dependence of the collective upon its concrete representative – the best member it can support and therefore must – and the chaos that ensues when this concrete representative of order and communal purpose is driven out because of the individual ambitions of other members of the community, followed by the restoration of order and glory when he returns. Let us call this, and variations thereof, the ‘Exiled Prince Myth’. It is my contention that the Exiled Prince Myth is of central importance to the formation of British identity as opposed to that of continental neighbours. I have introduced it using the Lion King to show how basic a trope it is: it is repeated from children’s fiction, here, to what was once regarded as an obvious fact about the universe (the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation, Ascension and immanent Second Coming).
One of the stories of the origins of British democracy is that it was formed gradually throughout centuries of tension between the crown and other powerful forces in the realm. The ‘voter’ is conceived of as a subject and his or her ‘ancient rights’ developed in scope because the nobility or Parliament were able to defend them from ‘tyrannical’ kings at some points and at other points the King protected these rights from ‘tyrannical’ Parliaments or noblemen. Thereafter the question was of contest between political parties that represent different interest groups, who had their stand-offs at the ballot box rather than the battlefield. Now, British democracy is often supposed to be a key constituent of an exclusively British cultural identity. William the Conqueror had de jure central control of all England when the King of France could barely control the fields around Paris; by the time they got round to the Republican Reign of Terror one hundred and fifty years had passed since Cromwell tried to ban Christmas and got the boot.
Defenders of the Establishment will make much of the extent to which “Christian values” have underpinned the development of the British constitution and culture from the days of Ss Augustine and Patrick. Which ‘values’ we really all hold and which of these are exclusively ‘Christian’ in origin are two questions which I think are probably impossible to answer. Nevertheless, if they are correct, then the greatest Exiled Prince Myth is also central to British identity. England can become the New Jerusalem only insofar as the King of Kings is going to come back.
More concrete is the importance of the Exiled Prince Myth for the sustaining the belief that Parliament must be held accountable to a higher power. Notwithstanding the Magnificat and the idea that when the Prince returns to earth powers and principalities will be judged, both stages of the emergence of our constitutional monarchy in the 17th century are intimately bound up with this Myth: its apex of relevance initially and then the events that led to its memetic decline. It is not simply ‘Royalist’ sentiment that made Cromwell’s government seem illegitimate to British subjects. Let me quote you a passage from the above-mentioned The Children of the New Forest. A Malignant living on the edge of the Forest has his house burnt down by Roundheads whilst he is in prison; before this occurs one of the woodsmen hears of the plans and spirits the children away to his cottage where they grow up. The eldest son, Edward, is taught how to stalk deer and provides for his siblings by poaching and selling the venison using discrete contacts in the nearby town. During the War, King Charles I had given woodsmen the right to hunt his deer to sustain themselves because he could not afford to pay them. Afterwards, they must gain permission from the new Roundhead intendant.
When Edward meets the intendant and is told he will be prosecuted if he is caught hunting deer in future, he replies that “I consider that the deer in this forest belong to King Charles, who is my lawful sovereign, and I own no authority but from him. I hold myself answerable to him alone for any deer I may kill, and I feel sure of his permission and full forgiveness for what I may do.”
This assertion is pregnant with political assumptions. The first is that governmental authority earns legitimacy neither by force nor by constitutional right (the deposition of the king was legal in accordance with assumed ‘ancient rights’ to armed rebellion; Royalists disputed the legality of the king’s execution). ‘Belonging’ to Britain is tied up with ‘believing’ in Britain. The second is that the ‘ancient rights’ of the Briton – to hunt deer in exchange for missing pay as a forester, to minimum wage and maximum working hours as an industrial worker, to privacy, or whatever else one claims Britons’ ‘rights’ are – can be sustained over against the de facto government when it undermines them, by appeal to the alternative source of authority in a binary system. That Edward can hold this principle in a vice versa situation is shown when he later comes to accept the initial legitimacy of the Parliamentarian cause. Finally, what is important about this statement, and Edward’s attitude, is that it would not function in the same way if Charles II was on the throne. If the prince were not in exile, then the intendant would be able to write to him or his ministers asking whether he wants to continue allowing his foresters to hunt his deer: Edward could not make such a confident appeal to justify his ‘criminal’ behaviour.
Constitutional monarchy consists in a balance of two sources of authority wherein we can defend our interests against the one by appealing to the other. Yet this idea can only operate effectively in a situation where one of the sources is not actually present, but rather a mere ‘point of principle’. Edward can appeal to Charles II’s authority, and so believe in the legitimacy of the British state to govern aspects of his life, more easily because Charles II is not there to fail in his duties protecting poor foresters from intruding Parliamentarian intendants. Hence the importance of the Exiled Prince Myth.
A decade or two after the Restoration, the principle of binary authorities began to be invoked against a ‘tyrannical’ king, culminating in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 when the actual king was not popular enough. In this case, English people needed Parliament to protect their ‘ancient right’ to discriminate against Catholics (a right so important that, if necessary, the right to discriminate against Nonconformists could be surrendered in order to preserve it). James II’s attempts to provide for religious freedom were being attained in a manner at odds with what many were told was proper Parliamentary process. Parliament’s authority was invoked to save supposed ancient rights, liberties (with a contemporary, early Enlightenment gloss) and the Anglican Church: what the people got was some Dutch Calvinist bloke and the Bill of Rights.
After the Dutch invasion of England in 1688, the king and the infant Prince James were in exile. Persecuted Loyalists and Catholics treated the return of the “King O’er the Water” as the hypothesized solution to their woes for the next seventy years. While wars were fought in Ireland and Scotland, however, in England the political discourse became dominated by a new myth: the original “Whig History”. The Exiled Prince Myth became the grand narrative that sustained the ‘baddies’, those locked out of the dominant discourse and hiding in caves in Scotland or palaces in France.
Any historian reading this will know why Whig histories in general are unhelpful. A recent surge in scholarship in the 1990s (thanks to the 300th anniversary of the Revolution), however, has shown how misrepresentative of the ‘facts’ the original Whig History is. This History is important because it underlies the other story about where British democracy comes from. According to this history, British democracy has evolved through a series of stages in which the ‘people’ assert their rights and liberties against autocratic oppression, culminating in the Civil War and then the Bill of Rights (then the Reform Bill, the NHS etc.). The Magna Carta, for example, is seen as an agreement between an otherwise inevitably oppressive, because undemocratic, government – and ordinary Englishmen. Actually it was a deal cut between the king and some of his mates to stop them getting rid of him because they could get together enough soldiers to do so. Likewise the ‘Bill of Rights’: the document represents whatever the proto-Whigs could squeeze out of their less than democratically minded new king.
This History is also important because it underlies modern British assumptions about the purposes and natures of democracy, rights, liberties and government control which are much more in line with European understandings of these. Over the course of their development into a party and then into a broadly accepted political philosophy, Whigs took great inspiration from European political thinkers. ‘Democracy’ is about giving ordinary people power over the organs of government; ‘rights’ are natural or God-given rather than practical and legal, ‘liberties’ are based upon ‘ownership’ of one’s ‘self’ and so on. Whig History began as a way to legitimate a coup, but went on to appropriate British history and strap it to a new set of ‘values’ or theoretical assumptions about the nature of government.
How this relates back to British patriotism is that if patriotism means anything it is how members of one nation-state pride themselves in their positive differences from members of another. Let us make no bones about this: patriotism is competitive and parochial. These are not bad characteristics, as long as they help people to achieve good things (rather than, say turning into racists).
We see an overwhelming dominance of Whig history and ideology in modern British politics. The party called ‘Tory’ blasts out messages of ‘empowerment’, calling themselves ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ and it is not their fault: they must do so to win votes, however theoretically insubstantial and historically suspect these concepts may be. Besides, long ago the Conservative Party absorbed conservative Whigs and digested them into its system.
At the same time, people find it very difficult to persuade themselves that Britain is ‘special’. Attempts to delineate ‘British values’ by (modernist, Whig,) politicians are really only lists of things that everyone, everywhere, values just as much. I think Mr Brown would hesitate to claim that French people do not also value hard work and fairness.
I contend that British patriotism has collapsed because the myths that sustained it and that sustained our constitutional uniqueness have been forgotten. Patriotism is a feeling about something abstract – a nation. Such feelings are usually cultivated with what we might regard as ‘folk tales’, ‘grand narratives’ and so on: stories with obvious depictions of good and evil, in which good triumphs because it is good, and in which goodness is associated with the state of affairs with which the narrator wishes to associate feelings of loyalty, hope and so on. The Exiled Prince Myth is only one of these paradigmatic stories which our children used to hear, but it is, I think an important one.
Furthermore, proponents (or victims) of the ‘Progressive’ or ‘Liberal’ successor to the Whig History can already be seen to have found ways to subvert versions of these myths. Compare old dramatizations of Robin Hood with recent ones. In the original legend Robin, himself an ‘exiled’ nobleman returned to defend his people from the ‘other authority’ exploiting them, has his mission sanctified and given meaning by the imminent return of King Richard, who will provide the ultimate deus ex solution. Yet modern Robin Hood films villainize the clergy and obscure the fact that Prince John is bad because he overtaxes, not because he is a Prince. Disney fans might want to check out their cartoon of Robin Hood. It could do more to bring out the importance of King Richard’s return, but the scenes where Prince John rolls in gold coins cooing ‘taxes, taxes!’ are pretty good.
Ok, I’m out of steam. Discuss. I hope I haven’t too nakedly tracked Broken Britain back to 1688.
