How to Be English (16 page)

What was it about Nelson? He certainly had a sense of destiny. He was also physically courageous, losing arms and eyes with abandon. But did he really have something else? This was the question the Board of Admiralty asked themselves as they tried to decide who should prevent Napoleon's invasion fleet arriving on English shores. Was Nelson all bravado and good luck? They asked to see his private diaries of the period in the Mediterranean, when he had been searching for the French fleet, and were convinced that he was the man for them. What made Nelson almost unique was his combination of compelling, humanitarian leadership and strategic brilliance.

There was an element of anarchy about Nelson – disobeying orders by putting his telescope to his blind eye at the Battle of Copenhagen to avoid the signal ordering him to withdraw, and founding a tradition of disobedience that was unique in the armed forces – because he expected to be trusted by his superiors just as he trusted his own men.

Which brings us back to the Battle of the Nile. One of Nelson's captains, Thomas Foley in the
Goliath
, happened to be leading the line of ships when the French came into sight. Foley ordered his men to get the battle sails ready, so that he could stay in front when the order came to get into line of battle.

So it was Foley, standing next to his helmsman, the battle ensigns flying behind him, who saw the emerging opportunity as the disposition of the French ships became clear. There they were anchored along the shore, and Foley realised that there might just be enough space to squeeze along their undefended side, between the French line and the shore itself.

It was a risky decision. Thinking fast as the battle got ever nearer, Foley grasped that the French commander Bruey's ships must have anchored with enough space to swing round at anchor as the tide changed, so there would almost certainly be enough sea to avoid running aground. But there was no time to consult anyone else. Foley steered between the French ships and the shore, leading the British line after him. Foley was rightly hailed as the hero of the victory at Aboukir Bay, of which Nelson had been the architect.

Foley knew he was allowed to take bold steps if he saw an opportunity. He was able to break with conventional thinking, and the apparent drift of his orders, and use his intuition. This was not rigid control – this was the English way.

Let me alone. I have yet my legs and one arm. Tell the surgeon to make haste and his instruments. I know I must lose my right arm, so the sooner it's off the better.

Nelson facing the inevitable after his wound on Tenerife, 1797

UTOPIAN SCENARIOS TEND
to be frustrating to read about. The heroes and heroines find themselves in the past, future or present, encountering a ‘perfect' society, with the reason why everything turned out so perfectly gently explained to them in patient tones.

One Utopia stands out, not because it breaks the pattern but because it evokes a dreamlike journey into Ruskinian medievalism that has had a deep influence on the English psyche. It manages to be radical, futuristic and nostalgic all at the same time, as much medieval as it is Marxist, looking back to the Peasant's Revolt as much as it looks forward to the inevitable revolution.

William Morris never liked the idea of violence, and it was the gentleness, beauty and sheer craftsmanship of the Middle Ages that really inspired him. This is how he described a return to the fourteenth century in
A Dream of John Ball
:

Moreover, as we passed up the street again, I was once again smitten with the great beauty of the scene; the houses, the church with its new chancel and tower, new-white in the moonbeams now; the dresses and arms of the people, men and women (for the latter were now mixed up with the men); their grave sonorous language. And the quaint and measured forms of speech, were again become a wonder to me and affected me almost to tears.

His most famous and influential dream was to become
News From Nowhere
, which unfolds as he sails from Kelmscott House, his home in Hammersmith, down the Thames to the original Oxfordshire Kelmscott in a remote medieval future. It follows the same themes as
John Ball
and was written in response to the frightening American utopian novel,
Looking Backward
by Edward Bellamy, which predicted an unpleasant authoritarian and militaristic future, which he neither believed in nor desired.

Morris' own predictions have not quite come to pass. We do not live in a rural London, and the Houses of Parliament are not yet a dung store. Yet in other ways, he did peer accurately into our present-day London: where salmon have returned to the Thames, where the inner cities have been cleared, where homes are simpler, and where state socialism has been tried and failed.

Morris thrived in the all-male medieval craft community. He dreamed of medieval guilds. He had already built one of his own, in the thriving Morris & Co., providing wallpaper and furniture to an increasingly affluent middle class. But
News From Nowhere
provides a glimpse of his own romantic yearnings, as he encounters a picture of empowered womanhood. ‘She led me up close to the house, and laid her shapely sun-browned hand and arm on the lichened wall as if to embrace it,' he wrote, ‘and cried out, “O me! O me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows of it – as this has done!”'

The shapely, sun-browned hand is also a bit of a clue. There is something of the erotic dream about
News From Nowhere
. The heroine is one of those powerful female characters that seem to dominate the lives of the back-to-the-land writers of the Victorian age. There was some element of erotic yearning about them. There certainly was about Morris, who married one of the great beauties of the age who embodied the pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty, Jane Burden, but lost her to his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

As he formed the words, the train stopped at his station, five minutes' walk from his own house, which stood on the banks of the Thames, a little way above an ugly suspension bridge. He went out of the station, still discontented and unhappy, muttering ‘If I could but see it! If I could but see it!' but had not gone many steps towards the river before (says our friend who tells the story) all that discontent and trouble seemed to slip off him.

William Morris,
News From Nowhere
(1890)

WHEN THE YOUNG
Charles II famously took refuge in the Boscobel Oak on the border between Shropshire and Staffordshire in 1651, as he escaped from the Battle of Worcester, he added a royal dimension to the idea of sturdy, enduring Englishness. There are Royal Oak pubs all over England now, and even a Tube station of the same name. There was a battleship called
Royal Oak
, unfortunately now at the bottom of the sea at Scapa Flow, where it was despatched in 1939 by U-47.

The royal-oak idea dovetailed neatly with the wooden walls of England, the oak-built ships which defended the English, not to mention ‘Heart of Oak', the patriotic song penned by the actor David Garrick, which included the immortal and slightly excessive lines ‘heart of oak are our ships / Heart of oak are our men'. The song was written to celebrate this ‘wonderful year' (1759), where the British forces managed the military equivalent of the 2012 Olympics, with a whole series of victories, including that of Quiberon Bay.

But England is not the only country to have embraced the oak as its official national tree. The others include: Cyprus, Estonia, France, Germany, Moldova, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia and the USA.

And you can see why. The oak is an amazing tree, supporting about 500 other species, and spread by birds – one single jay can gather and store up to 5,000 acorns in ten weeks. Its potential longevity is also downright staggering. A 1,000-year-old oak tree stands in a field at Manthorpe, near Bourne in Lincolnshire, where its hollow trunk is still used for parties. At one point, it is claimed, three dozen people managed to stand up inside it.

Nor is it alone. The Major Oak in Sherwood Forest is old enough to have sheltered Robin Hood, as old as the English language itself, as one history noted back in 1790. Or the Knightwood Oak, the tallest in the New Forest, planted around the time of the Battle of Agincourt. Or the Allerton Oak in Liverpool which used to be the venue for the local hundred court another couple of centuries before that.

There are hanging trees, from where highwaymen breathed their last. There are gospel trees and writers' trees. There are even some which were used as pubs inside their hollow trunks. There are also far fewer oaks than maybe there ought to be, mainly because of the navy – a ship like HMS
Victory
took about 2,000 of them to build.

The celebration of oak trees and the Royalist cause was linked with the development of Oak Apple Day, celebrated on Charles II's birthday on 29 May by wearing oak leaves. It was known in the West Country as Shick-Shack Day, for reasons that are now a little obscure, and turned out to be a wonderful opportunity for ragging anyone suspected of republican opinions.

This is not to be confused with Apple Day (the nearest weekend to 30 October), introduced in 1990 by the charity Common Ground, dedicated to celebrating ordinary beauty and designed to celebrate the role of apples in English culture. It manages to catch some of the spirit of Oak Apple Day without the Royalist connotations.

Sing for the oak-tree

This monarch of the wood,

Sing for the oak-tree

That growth green and good;

That growth broad and branching

Within the forest shade

That growth now; and yet shall grow

When we are lowly laid!

Mary Howitt (1799–1888)

THE ENGLISH ARE
certainly not the only nation to have a penchant for loveable rogues and thieves. The Australians have Ned Kelly; the Americans have Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde and a whole coachload of other baddies to love. But the legendary English outlaws have another quality to them, a streak of romance and generosity.

Robin Hood gave away his money to the poor. He faced down sheriffs and bishops and even Bad King John. Dick Turpin gave away his ill-gotten gains as a highwayman, a swashbuckling mythic figure who dodged officials and dashed to York to escape them on his horse Black Bess, or so it was said later. They are heroes on our side.

Both these legendary outlaws became magical touchstones for turning the existing world, and existing powers, upside down. There was a seek-him-here-seek-him-there element to them. They slip through our fingers just as they slipped through the fingers of their pursuers. They dash in and turn people's lives and luck inside out and dash out again. They are devious, riotous and overwhelmingly amoral.

In reality, Dick Turpin was a horse thief, with a pockmarked face and a record of gratuitous violence, arrested under the alias John Palmer, and hanged in his best frock coat in York in 1739. As usual for English outlaw-heroes, there is some confusion about what happened to his body – he was buried in the small church of St George in York, but a mob dug him up three days later and carried him away to save him from the anatomists.