England : an elegy

278 Pages·2000·41.518 MB·English

by  Roger Scruton

ENGLAND: AN ELEGY
ROGER SCRUTON
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Chatto & Windus
LONDON
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England: an elegy
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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Published by Chatto & Windus 2000
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Copyright © Roger Scruton 2000
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Contents
..
Preface vu
Chapter One: What on Earth was England?
I
Chapter Two: First Glimpses
23
Chapter Three: English Character
43
Chapter Four: Community as Person 68
Chapter Five: The English Religion 87
Chapter Six: The English Law
112
Chapter Seven: English Society
132
Chapter Eight: English Government 174
Chapter Nine: English Culture 199
Chapter Ten: English Countryside
234
Chapter Eleven: Epilogue: The Forbidding of England 244
Acknowledgements 258
Index 259
Preface
'The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the gathering of the
dusk.' Hegel's words ring true of every form of human life: it is only
at the end of things that we begin to understand them. And
understanding them, we know that they are lost. Which comes first -
the understanding or the losing? Often it seems that we kill things by
examining them; and then again, that understanding is a way to keep
what we value, when all other means have vanished.
What follows is a memorial address: I speak of England as I knew
it, not as the country might appear to the historian. My intention is
not to add to the store of factual knowledge, but to pay a personal
tribute to the civilisation that made me and which is now passing
from the world. Since the Second World War the Owl of Minerva
has hovered uninterruptedly above my subject: book upon book has
appeared, describing, denouncing, analysing, and anatomising Eng
land - whether or not under this, its true and proper description. I
cannot add to, still less compete with, the work of diligent historians,
and if the names of Sir Geoffrey Elton, Alan Macfarlane, Jonathan
Clark, David Cannadine, Linda Colley, A.O. Harvey and the late
Raphael Samuel appear rarely, if at all, I hope that I will be forgiven
for making so little acknowledgement of their influence. My aim is
that of all funeral orations: to praise the dead, and to cheer the
.
survivors.
This is not the first such oration. Lamentations over England's
passing have been a feature of English literature throughout the
...
ENGLAND: AN ELEGY
Vlll
twentieth century - so much so that one can be forgiven for
questioning their sincerity. From George Sturt's Change in the
Village (1912) to Peter Laslett's collection devoted to The World We
Have Lost (1984), writers have brooded on the destruction caused by
social and material progress, to a country which a century earlier had
made 'progress' its motto. But these lamentations, often dismissed as
nostalgia, and criticised on all sides for their failure to compare the
fate of England with the fate of everywhere else, have been
superseded by a newer and more genuinely valedictory literature, in
which the uniqueness of England is recognised, and its mortal nature
shown. In a work packed with historical knowledge (In Memory Of
England, London, 1998), Peter VanSittart has given an account of
our disappearing country whose erudition I could not hope to rival.
In more lyrical vein Linda Proud has evoked the spirit of England in
a book - Consider England (London, 1994) - whose message is
powerfully reinforced by the watercolours of Valerie Petts, and
which makes an unanswerable case, both literary and visual, for the
Old England of our dreams. Some, like Philippe Daudy in Les
Anglais (Paris, 1991), have said their farewells from abroad. Some,
like Jerellly Paxman in The English (London, 1998), have picked up
the pieces (a few of them at least) while pieces remain. Others have
documented, whether in anger, in sorrow or in secret or not so secret
satisfaction, the passing of some aspect of our culture - of the
countryside (Graham Harvey, The Killing of the Countryside,
London, 1996), of the education system (George Walden, We Should
Know Better, London, 1998), of our political institutions and political
independence Oohn Redwood, The Death ofB ritain?, London, 1999),
of the class system (David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the
British Aristocracy, Yale, 1990, and Class in Britain, London, 1999),
of the ritual and liturgy of the Anglican Church (Brian Morris, ed.,
Ritual Murder, Manchester, 1980), or of the entire English culture
and settlement (Clive Aslett, Anyone for England?, London, 1997, and
Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain, London, 1999). Unique
among the many obituaries is that of Julian Barnes, whose witty
.
Preface
IX
account of a represented and re-presented England (in England,
England, London, 1998) contains a strangely moving evocation of the
old tranquillity.
My excuses for this book are two: first, that it is a personal tribute;
second, that it is an attempt to understand, from a philosophical
perspective, what we are now losing as our form of life decays.
England furnished us with an ideal, and the English people acquired
some of the gentleness, amiability and civilised manners which that
ideal prescribed. What the English people have since become is, to
my mind, a proof that ideals are important.
Malmesbury,
2000
Chapter One
What on Earth was England.I
What was England: a nation? A territory? A language? A culture? An
empire? An idea? All answers seem inadequate; in this chapter I
attempt to say why.
The English enjoyed the strange privilege of knowing exactly who
they were, but not what they were. In moments of crisis they would
reach for abstract ideas. Asserting his sovereignty against the Pope,
Henry VIII described England as an 'empire, entire unto itself'. His
subjects called it a kingdom, but were astonished to discover, when
James VI of Scotland ascended the throne, that the kingdom
stretched to the Outer Hebrides. Under Cromwell, England became a
'protectorate', though protected from what it was impossible to say.
Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the English spoke first of
empire, then of union and finally of a United Kingdom. Meanwhile,
they accepted a foreign king, George I, who spoke no English, and
they learned to revise the geographical description of their country. It
was no longer England but Great Britain and Ireland - the latter
dragged in protestingly and with a just grievance that has never been
answered or atoned for.
The English began to call themselves British and the most popular
of their patriotic songs affirms that 'Britons never never never shall
be slaves!'1 Their empire - having been acquired, as Sir John Seeley
1 Although 'Britain' was contained in the royal title after the Act of Union of 1707,
the use of the word 'Briton' was subsequently an object of satire - especially from
2 ENGLAND: AN ELEGY
famously put it, 'in a fit of absence of mind', in other words not by
political planning but by private enterprise in which the Scots, the
Welsh and the Irish played an equal part1 was not the English but
-
the British Empire. Even at the height of imperial splendour,
however, England was the focus of their loyalty. Macaulay gave his
countrymen the canonical image of their past in an unfinished work
entitled History of England (184cr55). France had defined itself
already as a nation; Germany and Italy were following suit, in each
case with no small measure of violence, revolutionary upheaval and
intoxicated speechifying.2 But still the English had no real equivalent
of the national idea. Vague notions of 'kith and kin' animated the
builders of empire; but who was included and why remained
uncertain. When politicians appealed for support, they addressed not
the nation or the kingdom but 'the country' - meaning all those
people who were represented in the Parliament of Westminster. But
what these people had in common, and what had brought them
together under a single crown, remained wholly obscure. The Scots
were still governed by their own laws, and possessed institutions,
offices and ceremonies that made little sense to those brought up
south of the Border. When politicians appealed to the country it was
as though they were waving vaguely from the Palace of Westminster,
towards territory that stretched without definition until falling, in
some distant and unvisited region, into the sea. That territory was
England - and it was an enchanted territory, which called to its
children in every far-flung corner of the globe, furnishing them with
the idea and the love of home.
It was therefore as the home country that England was most easily
Wilkes, in his The True Briton - and Scots and Irish soldiers were still referring to
themselves as 'English' (being in service to the English crown) in the 1800s. See A.O.
Harvey, Collision ofE mpires: Britain in the Three World Wars, 1793-1945, London, 1992,
p. 6n.
1 Sir John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of· England in the Eighteenth Century,
London, 188 3.
2 See Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries,
1776-1871, London, 1999.