1710 Anthems – whether national or not – often come of unexpected antecedents. ‘La Marseillaise’ was set to a tune from Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 25, by a royalist who narrowly escaped the guillotine. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, a poem about the American flag surviving a night’s bombardment by the British navy, was set to a popular English drinking song. The origins of ‘God Save the King/Queen’ are lost in history, with the words echoed in a Biblical salutation and an old Royal Navy oath inviting the response ‘Long to reign over us’, and the tune popping up in medieval plainsong, a 1619 keyboard piece by John Bull, and a Scottish carol, ‘Remember O Thou Man’.
Where it all came together, oddly enough, was in the post-Restoration metropolitan theatre. In 1745, The Gentleman’s Magazine published ‘a new song set for two voices’, ‘God Save our Lord the King’, ‘as sung at both playhouses’, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden. The catalyst was the landing in Scotland of James Francis Edward Stewart in pursuit of the Jacobite claim to the British throne, and his defeat of George II at the Battle of Prestonpans on 21 September 1745. In London, players, managers and audiences alike thrilled to Thomas Arne’s setting of the anthem at Drury Lane (see 24 February).
Arne, born on this day in 1710, had cut his teeth on the music for a masque first performed for Frederick of Hanover, Prince of Wales, son of George II, at his country house, Cliveden, in 1740. Entitled Arthur, the spectacle rested on a preposterous analogy between King Arthur and Frederick, both reposing in their rural retreats ready to sally forth and restore the nation to ‘liberty, virtue and honour’. The high point of the performance was the first outing given to ‘Rule Britannia’, with lyrics by David Mallet and James Thomson. Later, Arne expanded the music of the piece, turning the masque into a full-blown oratorio, to be performed first in Dublin and then again at Drury Lane.
Why was it that ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’, drawing on obscure traditional sources, first emerged as patriotic songs during the 1740s? Was it because the experience of being ruled and threatened by foreign monarchs concentrated the country’s collective mind on its national identity? And why should those solemn anthems have first been voiced in the metropolitan theatre – and that of a distinctly ‘light’ variety? Perhaps at the Last Night of the Proms, when the groundlings dress up in funny costumes, blow hooters and shout ‘Rule Britannia’, they are not engaged in some postmodern parody, but behaving squarely within the tradition of the song’s performance.