The mixed heritage of Rule Britannia: From Empire to the Freeborn Englishman
The usual Culture War over whether Rule Britannia should be played at the Last Night of the Proms(10th September) has been largely absent this year.
The exception has been the Times where the paper’s Chief Culture writer Richard Morrison described it as a ‘racist chant’ (5th Septemer)
The song was offensive of course when it was first sung in the eighteenth century when British run slavery still existed in numerous locations globally and it was designed to be so.
The history of the usage of the song is more complex.
While officially it celebrated far less than glorious official English (if not necessarily in the 1740s British) traditions, what these actually were was disputed.
Radicals held to a concept of the Freeborn Englishman with a number of liberties and rights. While these in theory accorded with how Governments of the day saw things, the practice often diverged. Hence on occasion the singing of Rule Britannia could be subversive.
E P Thompson gives an example in the Making of the English Working Class.
In the Middlesex By-Election of 1804 the radical candidate was Sir Francis Burdett. He won the poll (in pre-1832 Reform Act conditions) but his opponent was declared the winner by one vote by the Sheriff who determined that the poll had closed when his opponent was ahead after 15 days of voting.
Even so a moral victory was celebrated by Burdett’s supporters:
An exultant crowd dragged him through London ‘amidst a cavalcade, that appeared like a moving wood- the carriages and horsemen being covered with green boughs’, while the band played ‘Rule Britannia’ and a flag flew above Burdett’s coverage painted with Hercules treading on the Hydra’.
An appropriate Last Night of the Proms anthem for our times is surely William Blake’s Jerusalem though. A vision, as Thompson notes, based partly on a millenarian understanding of the future, of a post market-capitalist society.
Leave a Reply