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Composer Howard Goodall explores why England does not have an anthem distinct from that of Great Britain and Northern Ireland at sporting events and assesses the leading candidates
We seem to be caught in an endless, inescapable loop about national anthems, great and small.
Whether it is prompted by the oddity of an English team playing a Scottish team at Wembley in the Euros with one constituent nation of the United Kingdom singing God save the Queen, the other Flower of Scotland; or the Department of Education urging primary school children to sing a newly-composed ‘official song’, One Britain, One Nation; or what’s to be in the Last Night of the Proms, we are divided and unhappy as a population on the subject of patriotic songs.
Why does England not have an anthem distinct from that of Great Britain and Northern Ireland at sporting events? It’s particularly curious since the footballing authorities of these small islands are very firm in insisting that its constituent nations compete separately in EUFA/FIFA competitions, not as Team GB, the Olympic model.
God Save the Queen is, from a musical, soul-stirring point of view, sub-optimal. Its solemnity borders on funereal.
With over one-eighth of the world’s landmass, 85 administrative regions or states, containing 22 separate republics, speaking 36 official languages and over 100 minority languages, Russia is just Russia on the international football field. So it is weird, under the circumstances, to use the national anthem of the United Kingdom for just the England bit of it.
Land of Hope and Glory
It’s not as if there aren’t quite a few English anthem possibilities lurking around, often discussed, though there are problems with quite a few of the front-runners. The words of Land of Hope and Glory, for example, were originally written in 1902 by Etonian A.C. Benson to extol the virtues of the Empire, indeed calling for it to be expanded further still.
This echoed Cecil Rhodes’ clarion call of the same year (in his will) for ‘the extension of British rule throughout the world’, following triumphantly on from victory in the Boer War (1899-1902).
The Boer War(s), let’s not forget, saw the ‘Mother of the Free’ British Empire introduce concentration camps for both white Afrikaner women and children, and black Africans, in which an estimated 50,000 civilians died. This was the hushed-up reality of the ‘Global Britain’ Rhodes and Benson wanted to expand.
Edward Elgar, who composed the tune, before Edward VII’s suggestion to Benson to add a lyric for his (eventually delayed) coronation, was uneasy at the jingoistic tone of the text. This unease turned to outright distaste during the First World War, a conflict both he and (pacifist) Benson felt was a catastrophic tragedy, not to be celebrated, even at the point of victory.
Handel could have written us a cracking national anthem if asked, though being a German migrant who was granted British naturalisation by a unique act of Parliament
It’s also worth noting that the other stirring melody Elgar is famous for, Nimrod, from the Enigma Variations (1899), often used to underscore patriotic videos or party political broadcasts as the quintessential ‘English’ tune, is not quite what it seems. Elgar, lifelong Germanophile, intended the movement to be his tribute to German composer Beethoven’s symphonic slow movement style, to fit neatly with the fact that the dedicatee of Nimrod, his dear friend Augustus J Jaeger, was a German who had settled in Britain (his name, Jaeger, means ‘hunter’ in German, and Nimrod was a ‘mighty hunter’ in the Old Testament).
If it’s anything, then, Nimrod is a loving homage to German friendship, even if its melodic arc is admittedly rather Anglican in its shape and harmony.
Jerusalem
Charles Hubert Parry’s magnificent setting of William Blake’s 1808 poem, And did those feet in ancient time, known better as Jerusalem, is another contender for English national anthem, and at least of all of the front-runners it actually mentions the country by name.
Again, the genesis of this great hymn is not quite what you’d expect. Leaving aside the somewhat outlandish premise that provokes the poem’s opening questions – namely that Jesus of Nazareth manage to fit into his busy schedule an in-person visit to Tiberius’ Provincia Britannia with his friend Joseph of Arithamea – Blake’s message was certainly not that Britain’s heavenly purpose was to rule the world.
Blake, a serious, brilliant and radical thinker, asks the question whether Jesus, were he indeed to have visited, would have tried to establish a peaceful, natural haven in England rather than the grim industrial reality of what it was becoming in Blake’s lifetime: a machine of exploitation, cruelty and enslavement tearing up the beauty and harmony of the landscape and the communities that used to live in it.
Blake was taking aim at capitalist greed: did successive Tory party conferences in the 20th century, ending their annual gatherings with the hymn, know this, one wonders? Did they know Blake underlined this point in another epic poem of his, also called Jerusalem, writing ‘And all the Arts of Life they changed into the Arts of Death in Albion’? Did they know Blake was charged (though acquitted) with high treason and sedition for writing in favour of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte?
Jerusalem’s composer, Old Etonian Parry, added music to the Blake text, fairly reluctantly, in the event, for the occasion of a patriotic rally at The Royal Albert Hall in the middle of the First World War, promoted by an organisation called ‘Fight for the Right’.
Parry had misgivings about the jingoistic nature of the campaign. At the same time he was composing a series of ‘Songs of Farewell’, deeply personal reflections on grief and loss, a response to the deaths of so many of his students in the war and what he saw as the disastrous rupturing of the previous comradeship between Britain and his beloved Germany.
He later withdrew his support for the campaign and was delighted and relieved that, at the request of Millicent Fawcett, his hymn was taken up instead, almost immediately, by the women’s suffrage movement, of which he and his wife were firm supporters.
Rule Brittania
The divine instruction of Rule, Britannia!, whose 1740 text, written by Scottish Londoner James Thomson, was taken from a larger-scale musical entertainment for the then Prince of Wales, a German called Frederick, on the subject of the Saxon king, Alfred the Great.
To approve uncritically of Rule, Britannia! is to be comfortable that it was written at a time when Britain, all of it, was heavily engaged in the Atlantic slave trade, that it calls for Britain’s navy, in particular, to see off competition, notably from the Spanish and Dutch fleets and – citing the ‘liberty’ that it would thereafter spread across the globe –fulfil the call of God’s angels in so doing.
It is the equivalent of the concept of Manifest Destiny that attempted to justify America’s 19th-century white settlers spreading across the North American continent from East to West, brutally purging the prairies of the native peoples already there. God told us to, they proclaimed, in an echo of Spain’s conquistadors bringing genocide and disease to central and southern America in the 15th and 16th centuries.
It would be odd, wouldn’t it, if Spain’s modern national anthem referred to its imperial conquest of Latin America?
It would be odd, wouldn’t it, if Spain’s modern national anthem referred to its imperial conquest of Latin America? Perhaps therefore it’s just as well that it has no lyrics (one of only four in the world that are word-less). Yet that’s where we are with Rule, Britannia! Flag-waving fans of the song may or may not be tickled to learn that its composer, Thomas Arne (yet another Old Etonian) was a pre-emancipation era Catholic and a Freemason, two conspicuously pan-European, supra-national organisations.
Arne wasn’t the most famous composer in England in the 1740s: George Frideric Handel was, a fact Arne himself would readily have acknowledged. German-born Handel wrote plenty of music in honour of his monarch and of his adopted country Great Britain, like Zadok the Priest, which has been included in every coronation since George II’s in 1727.
Handel’s Hallelujah chorus from Messiah (1742) is a glorious, full-throttle blast of affirmation towards the human king on his non-Jacobite, Protestant throne, in the guise of a hymn of praise to that other, more divine king in heaven. No wonder King George rose in exhilaration when he first heard it, according to (not very reliable) legend.
Handel could have written us a cracking national anthem if asked, though being a German migrant who was granted British naturalisation by a unique act of Parliament, there might have been raised eyebrows by the ancestors of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Theresa May, for whom the composer would presumably have been seen as a ‘queue-jumper’. Also, he didn’t go to Eton.
God Save the King
It is not known exactly who composed the tune of Rule, Britannia’s companion anthem of the 1740s, God Save the King, but Thomas Arne, again, certainly had a hand in spreading the latter’s popularity in a version he arranged to be performed in London theatres during the period of the Jacobite Rebellion, for which the song in its nearly-modern form was adopted, as a loyal riposte to the ‘pretender’ to the throne, Charles Stuart.
Thus God Save the King (at the time, George II, a German) became the first ceremonial national anthem of the modern age.
Many would agree that despite its historical significance and the genuine affection millions feel for the current monarch that it honours, God Save the Queen is, from a musical, soul-stirring point of view, sub-optimal. Its solemnity borders on funereal. Given the sensitivities associated with the Jacobite cause