Confessions of a Yankee Anglophile

The English were the first great villains of my childhood. I was quite taken with the Prince Valiant comics’ colourful but historically dubious depiction of King Arthur and his knights fighting Dark Age Anglo-Saxon warbands. Later, I devoured Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman Britain books, a more careful treatment of the same era. Sutcliff had the bright idea to reimagine Arthur as Artorius, a Romano-British cavalry commander fighting to save the dying embers of classical civilisation from invading barbarians.

I never held a grudge against the Saxons. They fit neatly into a splendid pageant of historical villains and heroes who seem to populate every corner of English history. If you’re British or an American Anglophile, these figures are surely familiar. Norman knights charging the English shield wall at the Battle of Hastings. Robin Hood thumbing his nose at Prince John while Good King Richard languished in the dungeon of a perfidious Austrian duke. The longbowmen at Agincourt humbling the flower of French chivalry. Francis Drake and the Spanish Armada. “England expects that every man will do his duty.” Spitfire pilots and the Battle of Britain. I’m getting misty eyed just typing this. 

These historical episodes blended seamlessly with childhood favorites who borrowed extravagantly from British myth and history. Tolkien and Lewis, naturally, but also Sutcliff and Lloyd Alexander. Long before I ever laid eyes on the English countryside, I could taste the damp aroma of shrubbery, thanks to Watership Down. Growing up, I didn’t want to be a cowboy or an astronaut; I wanted to be a knight, or perhaps one of the Merry Men.

You start with King Arthur and the next thing you know you’re reading Patrick O’Brien, John Le Carré, Eric Ambler, Steven Runciman, and a succession of travel writers — Patrick Leigh Fermor, Rebecca West, Lesley Blanch — who put lie to the notion that the English are an inward-looking, incurious people. As I write this, I am consulting my venerable copy of The English and Their History by Robert Tombs. It is more lovingly dog-eared than any book I own about America. 

I suppose this doesn’t make me all that different from a “Plastic Paddy” or a native New Jerseyan who obsesses over his Italian heritage. But while there are many worthy Irish and Italian Americans, if the United States has a mother country, that country is surely England. It is sad but probably inevitable that Benjamin Franklin went from predicting a British Empire with a North American capital to helping found a new country. But as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, we should remember that our revolution was very much a family affair. Even Le Carré, who was no fan of Americans, still called us “the Cousins.”

Americans don’t really talk about this connection, maybe because it’s bad form for a creedal nation (and we Americans are creedal, despite what you read in the darker corners of the internet) to dwell on blood relations. But creeds spring from particular peoples and places, and ours originated somewhere in England. To return to our friends the Saxons, Thomas Jefferson wanted to acknowledge this national debt by putting the tribal war chiefs Hengist and Horsa on our national seal. It is very funny to think of two Dark Age pirates in place of the bald eagle. 

When I finally encountered Modern England, I confess I was baffled and a bit disappointed. I never liked Oasis. I don’t care for soccer. The Bond movies are fine. The distinctive brand of British humour that emerged after World War Two is often amusing but seems thin gruel compared to past glories. I don’t feel the bone-deep resentments about class, family, and education that still permeate British society. Now that I live in Budapest, my most frequent interaction with the English involves crossing the street to avoid stag parties that always include at least one fellow (bloke?) with bad sunburn, a generous beer gut, and three forearm tattoos. 

By the way, I know I have a tendency to use “English” and “British” interchangeably, something modern Brits get very touchy about. But this language wouldn’t have raised eyebrows circa 1750 or 1850 or even 1950. I have a dear friend, a Scot so proud of his heritage he once wore a wool kilt with all the traditional Highland accessories to a summer wedding in the Hungarian countryside. Naturally, he votes SNP. He once told me that the English used his ancestors as colonial cannon fodder. Gordon, I love you, but there’s a reason they called the empire “the Scottish Raj.”

Mostly I am confused by the fact that the English seem uninterested or even embarrassed by their own national story, which I still find wonderful and fascinating and the wellspring of so many admirable ideas. Maybe this tendency started in the halcyon 90s, with “Cool Britannia” and the self-conscious rejection of musty historical memory. Around the same time, the English started worrying that their country was turning into a glorified theme park. I still notice this strain of cultural anxiety today: the survivors of a zombie apocalypse in 28 Years Later cling to their own distorted version of English history, complete with longbows and the cross of St. George. 

But what is England shorn of her history? What is Britain? A succession of forgettable Prime Ministers mouthing shopworn cliches about “British values.” A country trying to convince itself that it is a “nation of immigrants,” a dubious American idea that has somehow gotten a foothold on the wrong side of the Atlantic. An “English history festival” in London that looks like an arid museum display on the folkways and customs of a long-vanished tribe. A country that arrests roughly one thousand people a month for “speech violations.” I saw a British journalist recently refer to “American-style” free speech, as if it was an item on a fast food menu. My man, where do you think “American-style” free speech comes from? 

To be fair, Americans have also contributed to this sorry state of affairs. Many of the worst ideas in British politics originate in obscure corners of American academia or from our demented class of professional activists. Meanwhile, a significant portion of the American Right seems to think England means no AC, genteel poverty, and roaming gangs of swarthy rapists. Hollywood making an upper class English accent its factory default for villains probably hasn’t helped matters.

The English increasingly reciprocate our disdain. The more sophisticated blame us for the post-World War Two demise of their empire and bridle at the lack of gratitude shown to a faithful ally. The latter charge is entirely fair; as for the former, it’s a bit much to lay a historical inevitability at America’s doorstep. Cruder anti-Americanism hits all the usual themes: Trump, capitalism, guns, the vague but persistent feeling that American society is always on the verge of tearing itself to pieces. It is genuinely distressing to see British opinion of America decline so precipitously.    

Speaking of Trump, he gave a decent little speech recently on the occasion of King Charles’s state visit. Our current president is, shall we say, not very detail oriented, and the speech was surely written by a staffer who imbibed many of the same stories I did as a child. Way back in the early days of Trump’s first term, Politico identified Albion’s Seed, a dense history on Britain’s enduring cultural influence in modern America, as one of the key texts of the so-called Alt–Right. I’ll just bet that speechwriter read all 946 pages. 

Trump’s address, which praised “Anglo-Saxon courage,” inevitably drew the ire of left-wing pundits on both sides of the Atlantic. The Guardian, a publication that has spent the past few decades doing its level best to cure me of my instinctive Anglophilia, said that the speech “indulged disturbing blood-and-soil nationalism.” This was seconded in The Atlantic: “The analysis Trump endorsed is that America is defined not by its founding values but by its Anglo-Saxon cultural and genetic heritage.” 

Perceptive readers will note the sly rhetorical sleight-of-hand in that last sentence, which conflates culture and genetics to discredit the commonsensical observation that America’s “founding values” are derived from its English heritage. This is also the conclusion of Albion’s Seed, which painstakingly traces the influence of four distinct British migrations on American history.

In other words, America’s most cherished principles and ideas did not appear ex machina — they came from England (and Great Britain). This connection is trivially obvious to outsiders. The French still refer to us collectively as “Les Anglo Saxons.” 

There is a danger in wallowing in past glories, and I’ve always admired the English tendency towards understatement and reserve. But there is also a danger in veering too far in the other direction. I searched in vain for a definition of “Englishness” in a recent BBC article on “the deeply contentious debate around what it means to be English.” The closest I got was a charming but woefully unsatisfying line about “Leather on willow, country pubs and just the loveliness of England.”

I don’t mean to lecture the English about their own history, but surely there’s more to it than pubs and hedgerows. The BBC’s lack of interest in what it means to be English points to a larger problem. A country that disavows its cultural parentage of the United States disavows so much of what makes it special in the first place. I don’t think England and America are identical twins. I don’t think Great Britain needs to reinvent itself as an island version of the United States. I dearly wish Trump’s speech was unnecessary. But if it takes a clumsy lecture from our president to remind us of the enduring importance of English values and English history, so be it. 

On the occasion of America’s 250th birthday, there is a corner of this American’s heart that is forever England

I’m not sure what Trump really thinks about England, but he seems to have a sentimental attachment to the English countryside. I understand the feeling. The most homesick I’ve ever felt was a Fourth of July spent in Devon, where every cottage, street sign, and town name reminded me of my native Virginia. David Hackett Fischer, author of Albion’s Seed, wrote movingly about a similar experience: “Even today, this historian who was born and raised in Maryland feels strangely at home when walking the country lanes of southwestern England . . .  As the traveler passes through these lanes, he has an eerie feeling that he has entered a tunnel through time. When he emerges into the light and the English landscape opens before him, this American from the Chesapeake Bay has a sense of coming home.” 

Sometimes it takes a change of scenery to appreciate your own home. On the occasion of America’s 250th birthday, there is a corner of this American’s heart that is forever England.