‘Rule Britannia’
When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain:
‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves.’
The nations, not so blest as thee
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
‘Rule’ etc.
Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful from each foreign stroke;
As the loud blast that tears the skies
Serves but to root thy native oak.
‘Rule’ etc.
Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame;
All their attempts to bend thee down
Will but arouse thy generous flame,
But work their woe, and thy renown.
‘Rule’ etc.
To thee belongs the rural reign;
Thy cities shall with commerce shine;
All thine shall be the subject main;
And every shore it circles, thine.
‘Rule’ etc.
The Muses, still with freedom found,
Shall to thy happy coast repair:
Blest isle! with matchless beauty crowned,
And manly hearts to guard the fair:
‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves.’
Will you be singing this at your jubilee party? Or perhaps you’ve no patience for all that Last Night of the Proms rubbish. But ‘Rule Britannia’ is more than tub thumping. Patriotic songs are normally flattering — but ‘Rule Britannia’ also makes an argument for what we should value which isn’t as jingoistic as you might think.
The lyrics were written by Thomson and set to music by Thomas Arne. The song was part of a masque presented by the Prince of Wales in 1740 to celebrate his eldest child’s birthday. It was the culmination of a vision enjoyed by King Alfred (hiding, predictably, amid marshes) in which he sees a long line of monarchs who will rule England gloriously.
But ‘Rule Britannia’ presents a very careful vision of Britain which is far from gung-ho. For a start, Thomson doesn’t choose to celebrate British victories and conquests (and after Marlborough, there actually were some). Instead the theme is Britain’s supposed invulnerability to foreign invasion: ‘Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame’. This goes hand in hand with a natural tendency towards domestic liberty:
‘The nations, not so blest as thee
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish great and free.’
As described in ‘Rule Britannia’, the fruits of this are not Empire abroad but prosperity at home. And whilst Britain’s ‘cities shall with commerce shine’ culture will flourish: ‘Muses, still with freedom found, Shall to thy happy coast repair’. Admittedly, the song prophesises that ‘All thine shall be the subject main; And every shore it circles, thine.’ That is to say, Britain will militarily control the oceans. But this is celebrated as an opportunity for defence, not military aggression. Naval power is the guarantee of freedom because it allows the navy’s ‘manly hearts to guard the fair’.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to point to the hypocrisies that this glosses over. Anyone can see that it ignores the injustices upon which British prosperity rested. What liberty for slaves in the West Indies? Who were the foreign tyrants in India? And Britain was claiming colonies right over the world all century. All these things were only possible because Britannia ruled the waves. And she press-ganged her own children to do so. ‘Rule Britannia’ is a transparently self-serving piece of mythologizing served up for the Prince of Wales.
Yet it is also an attempt to grapple with the problem of Britishness. By the mid-18th century Britain had found an Empire and needed to decide what its role in the world was. The idea of Britain which Thomson wants to celebrate in ‘Rule Britannia’ is profoundly un-Imperial. It is a of an independent trading nation wary of its own freedoms, careful to protect itself against threats to its way of life from abroad, but without a desire to aggressively project power (the hypothetical victories Thomson celebrates are all in response to foreign powers’ ‘attempts to bend thee down’).
This isn’t the way things worked out over the next two-hundred years. But it’s not a problem that’s gone away. How should a commercial island nation with a sizable (but not hegemonic) military capability and an ambiguous relationship with Europe think about its place in the world? Sometimes it’s important to hold up a mirror to a nation and show it its crimes. But it’s also important to give it things to believe in. And one way to do that is to show it a picture of what you think it should be.
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