CHAPTER THREE
When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain, sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles – but never England.
GEORGE MIKES, How to be an Alien
One of the characteristics of the English which has most enraged the other races who occupy their island is their thoughtless readiness to muddle up ‘England’ with ‘Britain’. It is, to listen to some English people talk, as if the Scots and Welsh either did not exist, or were just aspiring to join some master race which has always been in control of its God-ordained destiny. The English would do well to mind their language.
Unlike England, which was totally or partially subjugated by Romans, Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and Normans, Scotland was never fully conquered by any foreign invader until after it had become part of the ‘United Kingdom’. A nationalist reading of Scottish history shows the Act of Union, which united the country with England, to have been signed by bribed Scottish aristocrats. In the Highlands there is still, nearly two centuries after the Clearances, outrage at ‘the Scottish holocaust’, when families were driven from the land to make way for wide-scale sheep-farming. As one Scots nationalist put it to me, this was ‘the most efficient ethnic cleansing in Europe, perpetrated by Anglicised homosexual clan chiefs and landlords, assisted by police, army, the Church of Scotland and MPs, to create the biggest desert in Europe’. He went on to claim that the reward of the Scottish islanders for their disproportionately great sacrifice in the Second World War was to have the highest unemployment and emigration rate in the Union. ‘They would have been better off if Hitler had won the war: at least there would still be people living in the now derelict villages,’ he concluded furiously.1
It is also true that the British Empire was in large part the creation of Scots: once dreams of their own empire had died in the disastrous attempt to establish a colony on the isthmus of Panama in 1698, Scots served with huge distinction in the British army, built roads and bridges, became great traders and built vast fortunes. The famous signal at the Battle of Trafalgar, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty,’ is said to have been hoisted by John Robertson, a sailor from Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. ‘In British settlements from Dunedin to Bombay, for every Englishman who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings, you find ten Scotchmen,’ wrote Sir Charles Dilke in 1869, adding mischievously, ‘It is strange indeed that Scotland has not become the popular name for the United Kingdom.’2 The last words of Lieutenant General Sir John Moore – a Glasgow-born Scot – say it all. As he lay mortally wounded by a blast of grapeshot at the battle of Corunna in 1809, he certainly had no doubts about whom he was serving. He died saying, ‘I hope the people of England will be satisfied. I hope my country will do me justice.’
The foundations for what the medieval historian John Gillingham calls the true Thousand Year Reich – the one within Britain – were based upon English assumptions of their moral incomparability, often held to date from their conversion to Christianity. But William of Malmesbury, in his Deeds of the Kings of the English, gives another reason for their self-proclaimed superiority, the sixth century marriage of King Ethelbert to Bertha, daughter of the rex Francorum. It ‘was by this connexion with the French that a once barbarous people began to divest themselves of their wild frame of mind and incline towards a gentler way of life’.3
In this interpretation, it was the French influence which began to civilize the English. Certainly, although the Norman conquerors five centuries later may have been uninvited, once they had taken control, the English showed a tremendous willingness to embrace mainland European ideas. Laws of marriage, property, war and sexual behaviour all changed. Intermarriage between the natives and their new rulers was commonplace, and by the 1140s the English élite were writing (in Latin) and talking (in French) about their land as the ‘seat of justice, the abode of peace, the apex of piety, the mirror of religion’, whereas Wales was ‘a country of woodland and pasture … abounding in deer and fish, milk and herds, but breeding a bestial type of man’.4 William of Newburgh described the Scots as ‘a horde of barbarians … It is a delight to that inhuman nation, more savage than wild beasts, to cut the throats of old men, to slaughter little children, to rip open the bowels of women’.5 Gerald de Barri thought the Irish ‘so barbarous that they cannot be said to have any culture … they are a wild people, living like beasts, who have not progressed at all from primitive habits of pastoral farming’.6 Richard of Hexham was horrified by the barbaric way the Scots waged war:
[They] slaughtered husbands in the sight of their wives, then they carried off the women together with their spoil. The women, both widows and maidens, were stripped, bound and then roped together by cords and thongs, and were driven off at arrow point, goaded by spears … Those bestial men who think nothing of adultery, incest and other crimes, when they were tired of abusing their victims, either kept them as slaves or sold them to other barbarians in exchange for cattle.7
It wasn’t just their habits of agriculture and war which made the English feel superior, it was their sex lives too. John of Salisbury – one of the clergy who was with St Thomas Becket when he was stabbed to death in Canterbury Cathedral – described the Welsh as living like ‘beasts’: ‘they keep concubines as well as wives’.8
These comments at least demonstrate that ‘taking up the white man’s burden’ was no nineteenth-century invention. In the twentieth century, the English have learned to shy away from generalizing about West Indians or Asians, yet still feel free to make sweeping assertions about their immediate neighbours. The nursery rhyme,
Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief;
Taffy came to my house and stole a piece of beef:
I went to Taffy’s house, Taffy was not at home,
Taffy came to my house and stole a marrow-bone.
has been expunged from most children’s anthologies, although you can still find it in second-hand bookshops. Presumably it was originally a reference to the raiding parties that came across the English border from Wales. But even in these more touchy times, the English caricature of the Welsh continues to be that they are wheedling, duplicitous windbags, full of bogus sentimentality. In an attack on the stereotypes which dominate English television soap opera, the Sunday Times television critic (one of the many Scots who had taken the high road to London) asserted in 1997 that ‘Wales enjoys a panoramic range of prejudice. We all know that the Welsh are loquacious dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls’,9 on the assumption that it was just the small-change of the union. He discovered that a lot of Welsh have got sick of the stereotype; they referred the article to the Wales Commissioner for Racial Equality, a Mr Ray Singh.10
English prejudices about Scotland are less abusive. The Scots are mocked for their meanness and their gloom: it is, as P. G. Wodehouse said, ‘never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine’. The Welsh, when they are praised at all, are celebrated for ‘Celtic’ qualities – as poets and singers – whereas the Scots, especially the Lowland Scots, are respected as doctors, lawyers, engineers and businessmen. To continue the generalizing, the English regard the Scots as tough, cantankerous and upstanding (except when drunk). Certainly, the two greatest public moralizers of twentieth-century England, Archbishop Cosmo Lang and the first boss of the BBC, John Reith, were both Scots.
It is, of course, quite possible that both sets of generalizations are as they are for the simple reason that they’re true. But how they see their neighbours must also tell us something about the English. Both Scotland and Wales were effectively annexed by England. But the Scots joined the partnership as apparently balanced partners and saw their king, James VI of Scotland, become England’s James I (although some of them do still get miffed at descriptions of the present Queen as Elizabeth the Second: the Scots had no Elizabeth the First). They maintained, and maintain, separate legal and educational systems and a distinct intellectual tradition. The relationship between England and Wales, by contrast, has never remotely looked a relationship of equals. Once Owen Glendower’s rebellion against the colonizers had been extinguished, early in the fifteenth century, the principality became an adjunct of England. Henry VIII may have removed punitive laws banning the Welsh from owning land in England (they had been brought in following Glendower’s uprising), but, despite the Welsh blood in his veins, he still required those who held public office there to use the English language.* Despite these inhibitions, the Welsh continued to use their own language between themselves, so that it is estimated that as late as the 1880s, three out of four Welsh people still spoke it by choice.11 Perhaps this should have made them more, rather than less, their own masters. But, crucially, they had no capital city to match the pretensions of Edinburgh, nor separate legal, educational, or (until the arrival of non-conformism, by which time it was too late) religious institutions.
For the two centuries after King James united England and Scotland, the English seemed to have veered between hostility for the Scots – for their ‘treachery’ in the Civil War, and the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 – and indifference. ‘Scotland … is certainly the sink of the earth’, was how one grandee put it in a letter after the battle of Culloden. He received the reply from the Duke of Newcastle, the Prime Minister’s brother, ‘As to Scotland, I am as little partial to it as any man alive … However, we must consider that they are within our island.’12 It is hard to escape the feeling that both the animosity and the affected indifference were expressing the same feeling, that deep down the English rather respected the Scots. The most celebrated English contempt for the Scottish belonged to Dr Johnson, who thought ‘seeing Scotland is only seeing a worse England’. Boswell records his reaction on being told that Scotland had ‘a great many noble wild prospects’: ‘I believe, sir, you have a great many,’ replied the great man. ‘Norway, too, has wild noble prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England.’13 Even Johnson himself was unable to explain his prejudice, but the Scots could console themselves with the thought that at least they had managed to get under his skin: the only thing he could find to tell Boswell about Wales was that it ‘is so little different from England that it offers nothing to the speculation of the traveller’.
But by the eighteen hundreds, the picture of the Scots as blood-thirsty traitors was giving way to positive enthusiasm, as the English embraced the romance of the Highlanders, George IV arriving on a visit to Edinburgh dressed in full Highland rig. Scotland retains a social status through its connections with the monarchy and aristocracy, the enduring romantic folly of the Highland estates and the fact that half of Chelsea claims to belong to some clan or other. If you include Scots in disguise, like Andrew Bonar Law, Harold Macmillan and Tony Blair, the country has provided 11 of the 49 Prime Ministers since George III came to the throne, a contribution out of all proportion to its share of the population. The Welsh are another matter altogether. They have produced only one memorable Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, but at least he stands head-and-shoulders above many of the rest of the holders of that office this century. Figures like Aneurin Bevan have kept the radical Welsh tradition alive, but their advancement has been barred not only because so many of the English are, with rare exceptions in their history, inherently conservative, but because they just find it so difficult to trust the Welsh. When Neil Kinnock failed to lead the Labour party to victory in the 1992 election, the party sensed it was partly because of English distrust of the Welsh, and immediately replaced him with a Scot, John Smith. Smith possessed the subfusc Scottish virtues that the English appreciate. They are the qualities of Lowland Scots, listed by the historian Richard Faber as ‘industry, economy, toughness, caution, pedantry, argumentativeness, lack of humour’.14 The last is certainly unfair to Smith, who, had he not been struck down by a heart attack, would no doubt have become the first Scottish Labour Prime Minister since Ramsay MacDonald in the 1930s.
One consequence of the fact that so much Welsh and Scottish ambition was bound up in Britain and the British Empire is that in neither place has much of the nationalist cause advanced far beyond the ‘We Hate the English’ stage. For every Scots and Welsh nationalist leader working out a coherent relationship with the rest of Europe, there are a thousand who simply harbour a sullen resentment of the English. They are still at the stage which Douglas Hyde, later to become the first president of Eire, described a century ago as ‘a dull, ever-abiding animosity’ towards England which ensures that they ‘grieve when she prospers and joy when she is hurt’.15 One famous Scottish reporter has even dubbed foreign teams playing England at cricket – cricket for heaven’s sake – honorary Scots. So the West Indies are the Black Jocks, India the Dark-brown Jocks, Australia the Upside-down Jocks and New Zealand the Upside-down, Closed-on-Sunday Jocks.16 In this chippy view of the world it doesn’t matter who wins, just as long as England loses. A Scottish friend who was trying to keep up with the Euro ’96 football championship while on a sailing holiday called into a bar in the little port of Stranraer in south-west Scotland to watch the semi-final between England and Germany. After extra time, the scores were level at 1–1. At the end of the penalty shootout, the England central defender Gareth Southgate had his penalty saved by the German keeper, thereby ending England’s European Championship dreams. ‘The place erupted,’ he remembered. ‘There was an old man sitting in the corner. I’d never seen him before in my life. And we kissed each other. That’s how bad we wanted the English to get beat.’
The only English neighbour to have outgrown this stage is the one to whom they have behaved worst: not Scotland or Wales, but Ireland. Here, perhaps because their involvement has brought them nothing but trouble, the English attitude can swing from indulgence to dislike in no time. Having a far stronger sense of being an oppressed people for most of their history, Irish folk memory keeps alive a chain of acts of cruelty by the English from the murder of prisoners during the twelfth century, through the appalling slaughter of Oliver Cromwell’s campaigns and the official indifference to the famine of the 1840s, right up to the British army’s shooting dead of unarmed civilians in Londonderry on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in 1972.
It is because English dominion in Ireland was always more precarious than anywhere else in the British Isles that they behaved with the greatest arrogance. (Although born in Ireland and registered in Dublin, when the Irish tried to claim the Duke of Wellington, he remarked that ‘just because a man is born in a stable, it doesn’t make him a horse’.) The relationship has always been deeply ambivalent, shot through with contradictions. Victorian England was eager to celebrate the importance of Celtic blood to the ‘English race’, while simultaneously quailing at the potential of the raw Ireland beyond the colonial Pale. Dr Johnson’s teasing of the Scots is positively benign by comparison with the crude abuse the English have thrown at the Irish. A Punch piece of the 1860s claimed to have found the Missing Link in human evolution, ‘the Irish yahoo’, in parts of London and Liverpool:
When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder with a hod of bricks. The Irish yahoo generally confines itself within the limits of its own colony, except when it goes out of them to get its living. Sometimes, however, it sallies forth in states of excitement, and attacks civilized human beings that have provoked its fury.17
The ‘joke’ belongs to the period: the English, as we shall see, were in the grip of a delusion that they belonged to a higher order of beings. It followed that those who rejected the embrace of the Empire were part of a lower order. But the fact of being a recognizable colony, with the English colonial class belonging to a different religious denomination, backed by its own army of occupation, eventually worked to Ireland’s advantage. Once the colonists had packed their bags, Ireland was able to shape its own identity within the European Union, seizing the opportunities offered by membership of the European Union far more readily than other parts of the British Isles, which have had to stagger into the future dragging behind them the baggage of their involvement in an empire which is no more.
How were the English able to get away with their prejudices? Firstly, of course, they were unassailably the dominant power in the islands, so what others thought didn’t matter much. Secondly, by the nineteenth century they were presiding over the most successful empire the world had ever seen, in which it was clear that what got results were the practical, self-disciplined qualities of the Anglo-Saxon: it followed that the best thing an emotional Celt could do was to acquire them, instead of messing about with sentimental excursions into the history of a marginalized people. And thirdly, so many of the Celts suffered from an inferiority complex about their own birthplaces. ‘The land of my fathers,’ said Dylan Thomas, ‘my fathers can keep it.’ The self-loathing lives on. In Trainspotting, one of Irving Welsh’s smackheads says to another:
It’s nae good blaming it oan the English fir colonizing us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, healthy culture to be colonized by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin’ low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation.18
The cultural accomplishments the Celts had to set against the Anglo-Saxon empire were vestigial: the ancient civilization to which they claimed to belong was an oral culture which had taken whatever rhetorical heights it achieved to druidical graves. Scottish pride has still hardly properly recovered from the revelation that Ossian’s Fingal, the Gaelic epic which James Macpherson claimed to have discovered while travelling around Scotland in 1760, and which Gibbon declared showed ‘the untutored Caledonians glowing with warm virtues of nature’, was an elaborate hoax. The Scots were left with the sort of effusion W. B. Yeats fell into in The Celtic Twilight, talking of ‘the great Celtic phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor any angel revealed’.19 Yet Yeats himself spoke, and wrote and read in English, and admitted that ‘everything I love has come to me through English’.
For every pseudo-druidical Welsh eisteddfod (dating back to all of 1792), which celebrated native poetry and song, huge numbers were engaging with Anglo-Saxon reality. So great has been the intermarriage that it is virtually impossible to be sure how many pure-bred Celts still exist. Their history is one of relentless reverse – the last native Cornish speaker died in 1777, the last speaker of Manx in 1974, the last speaker of Deeside Gaelic in 1984. There are more native speakers of Chinese in Northern Ireland than there are native speakers of Irish. Whatever vigour remains in the languages survives as a consequence of political ideology and the subsidy of English taxpayers, as the Welsh-language television channel and the great number of Irish speakers among former IRA prisoners attest.
Against these ancient cultures, the English seemed to have developed a culture which had become world-beating. And it was because the English dominated the organization which dominated so much of the world that the words ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ were soon being used interchangeably. Walter Bagehot’s monumental work on the relationship between Parliament, the crown and the courts of the United Kingdom – still the classic introduction to the subject, despite being over 100 years old – is called The English Constitution. In the 1920s Andrew Bonar Law, a Canadian of Scots-Ulster descent, and therefore, one might have thought, sensitive about these things, was happy to be called ‘Prime Minister of England’. In the 1930s, the Oxford History of England began to appear: it deals with Scottish universities under the heading of English education, and the internal affairs of colonies as part of English history.
But the artificiality of any belief in Anglo-Saxon racial purity becomes clear the moment you start to examine the roots of the English people. The original inhabitants of the country do not seem to have been a particularly advanced civilization. Some amulets, toe-rings and bracelets that survive from Celtic Britain have a certain simple charm. But its priests encouraged human sacrifice and cannibalism. The most sophisticated tribe, the Belgae in Kent, grew wheat and flax, and while they could tend cattle, they were, apparently, incapable of making cheese and knew nothing about horticulture. That was the height of ‘English’ sophistication before the arrival of the Romans, and the further you travelled from the south coast, the more ‘uncivilized’ the tribes became. It is not necessary to make a long list of the benefits of Roman rule, for the evidence is there on any map of England. And in drawing a border from the Tyne to the Solway, the Romans included ‘England’ inside the limits of the civilized world, and left Scotland outside. England owes its existence as a single entity to foreign invasion.
But the Romans do not, of course, qualify as ‘English’. How many remained when, after 400 years, the decision was taken that the colony was no longer worth defending against the attacks of Saxons, Irish and Picts we do not know, but in strictly ethnic terms they cannot, surely, be considered to be part of the English race, whatever it is. According to eighth-century historians, the first ‘English’ English arrived in England in three small ships that bumped ashore on the pebbles of Pegwell Bay in Kent in the middle of the fifth century. They, too, were warriors. The two or three hundred soldiers who plashed up the beach had either (according to one account) been invited in by King Vortigern to repel Pictish raiders, or (according to another) been offered refuge as exiles. Either way, the first thing you discover about the English, is that they are not English – in the sense of coming from England – at all. They had arrived from Jutland, Anglen and Lower Saxony. The ‘English race’, if such a thing exists, is German.
These first English people certainly demonstrated characteristics which have reasserted themselves periodically through the English story. Firstly, they showed early symptoms of that urge to smash things which seizes the country from time to time, whether in the destruction of the monasteries or the levelling of town centres in the 1960s. In the case of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, it was the demolition of the cities built during the Roman occupation, when they tore down stone dwellings and threw up wooden buildings organized around feudal clan structures. Their advances in agriculture – the development of ploughing and crop-rotation – must count as worthwhile achievements. But the fairy tale of Pope Gregory’s appreciation of the handsomeness of the English when he saw captured slaveboys on sale in a Rome street-market (‘They are not Angles but angels’) does nothing to disguise the fact that Augustine and the fellow missionaries given the mission to convert these ‘angels’, thought they were travelling to the end of the civilized world.
The reputation of the invaders went before them as a result of their plundering raids along the coast. Vortigern’s idea may have been to lure them in as allies with the promise of land and supplies, but within nine years, they had already displayed a second characteristic for which their enemies despise the English, and perfidiously revolted. Vortigern bought them off by offering Kent to their king, Hengist. With pickings so easy, more invaders followed and divided the country between them. The West Saxons held the area known as Wessex, the East Saxons had Essex, the South Saxons had Sussex and the Middle Saxons, what became known as Middlesex. To the north lay the Kingdom of Mercia, to the east were the Angles, and, further north, the kingdom of Northumbria.
The next wave of foreign invaders, from Norway and Denmark, fought their way across England and left their spoor in about 1,400 towns or villages with Scandinavian placenames. Over 400 of them remain in Yorkshire, where places like Wetherby and Selby incorporate by, the Danish word for village, 300 in Lincolnshire where Mablethorpe and Scunthorpe recall hamlets – thorps in Danish – with more in Norfolk and Northamptonshire. So, by the time of the most celebrated invasion, that of the Normans in 1066, there was less an indigenous English people than a ragout, part Celtic Briton (part pre-Celtic, even), part Roman, partly Angles, Saxons and Jutes, partly Scandinavian. All the Norman Conquest could do was to add a little seasoning.
For almost 900 years after the Norman Conquest the population remained remarkably stable. Elsewhere in Europe borders were repeatedly redrawn. France, for example, only took formal sovereignty over Nice in 1860, while Alsace-Lorraine was under German rule from 1871 to 1918 and again from 1940 to 1945. England, centrally administered since the Conquest and with manageable borders in the comparatively small distances where they were not defined by the sea, was a much more stable entity. It was thus able to remain profoundly ignorant of other races. Civic leaders in Hartlepool are still trying to live down the story that when a live monkey was washed ashore from a shipwreck during the Napoleonic wars, local people hanged it from a gallows on the beach, on the grounds that since it had been unable to understand their questions, it must have been a French spy.
Had the monkey been a deaf-and-dumb Englishman, what might have saved him from hanging? Stripped naked, is there any English type? Long before the Saxons, Vikings, Normans and the rest had arrived, Tacitus remarked upon the physical diversity of the island the Romans had occupied: he thought it reflected the different genetic inheritances of their roots. Yet still we generalize that the Welsh are shorter and darker than the English, particularly the fairer English from the parts of the island heavily settled by the Saxons and Scandinavians, or that red hair is evidence of Celtic ancestry. Portraits of those English wealthy enough to have been immortalized in oils do seem to show some characteristics shining through, despite Oscar Wilde’s disdain about the English face (‘once seen, never remembered’). However plain, the women tend to be shown with long necks, while the men are more bothered about showing off their houses or horses. But it is the job of the artist to please his patron and we cannot be sure how far family portraits tell the truth, anyway. There is a constant refrain from foreign visitors about how the wet climate has given English women a stunningly rich complexion; the consistent defect noted is that so many of them seem to have such big feet.
Rushing in where angels fear to tread, in 1939 an American ethnologist felt confident enough to declare that ‘although the British are quite variable in facial form, the features by which a foreigner would remember them would be a longness and narrowness of head and face, floridity, and a pinched prominence of nose’.20 Apart from the flushed complexion, it does not really convey John Bull. In 1998, pathologists from Manchester University produced the first facial reconstruction of ‘Cheddar Man’, the skeleton of a Stone Age man who had died in the Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, some 9,000 years earlier. They concluded he had been almost six feet tall, with a ‘slightly lopsided head, broad face, rounded forehead and a blobby nose’. The scientist leading the team commented that he ‘probably looked pretty much like any modern inhabitant of a Somerset pub’, which led to howls of anguished protest from Somerset publicans. After twenty years living in England and studying English portraiture, the German émigré Nikolaus Pevsner decided that you could confidently attribute physical characteristics to the ‘English race’:
To this day [he wrote], there are two distinct racial types recognizable in England, one tall with long head and long features, little display and little gesticulation, the other round-faced, more agile and more active. The proverbial Englishman of ruddy complexion and indomitable health, busy in house and garden and garage with his own hands in his spare time and devoted to outdoor sports, is of the second type. In popular mythology this type is John Bull.21
This is painting with a very broad brush: there are a dozen other archetypes, too. And if it really was possible fifty or a hundred years ago to discern something of an Englishman from his facial and body appearance, it was much more likely to be a deduction about social class than anything else. The wealthy ate well and prospered. The poor ate badly and it showed. That thin Old Etonian George Orwell remarked, with the sort of sweeping condescension of which only someone of his background was capable, that ‘the prevailing physical type does not agree with the caricatures, for the tall, lanky physique which is traditionally English is almost confined to upper classes: the working people, as a rule, are rather small, with short limbs and brisk movements, and with a tendency among the women to grow dumpy in early middle life’.22 (This is getting dangerously close to the John Glashan cartoon in which two well-dressed women pass a group of workmen digging a hole in the ground. ‘I think working-class people are wonderful,’ says the first. ‘Yes, I love the sharp animal-like way their eyes dart about,’ says the second.)
A eugenicist would have to conclude that in strictly racial terms, the English are a lost cause. Despite the long period of relative insulation, they remain an undistinguished-looking lot. Daniel Defoe had a much more accurate idea of the ethnic origins of the English three centuries ago. When he heard English people disdaining foreigners as having corrupted blood, he described ‘the most scoundrel race that ever lived’, the English.
In between rapes and furious lust begot,
Betwixt a painted Briton and a Scot:
Whose gend’ring offspring quickly learnt to bow,
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name nor nation, speech or fame
In whose hot veins now mixtures quickly ran
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their rank daughters, to their parents just,
Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.
This nauseous brood directly did contain
The well-extracted blood of Englishmen …
… A True Born Englishman’s a contradiction!
In speech, an irony! In fact, a fiction!23
There are plenty of other contributors one could add to Defoe’s list of antecedents – immigrants from Flanders in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Huguenots fleeing persecution in France in the seventeenth century or, later, Jewish refugees from eastern Europe. Any sensible reading of history would have to conclude that for the English to talk of racial purity is whistling in the wind; there is scarcely a family in the land which has no Celtic blood in it, to say nothing of Romans, Jutes, Normans, Huguenots, and all the others who have added their contribution to the national bloodstock. Defoe was right. The English are a mongrel race, and it has taken the development of communities living in England that are visibly different to demonstrate the point.