If It wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French

King Charles, Washington and the making of America

What do Elizabeth I, Charles I, James II and George II have in common? A great pub quiz question, the answer to which is that they all have US states named after them, although Charles had two (North and South Carolina), whereas the others only had, respectively, Virginia, New York (after the then Duke of York) and Georgia.

Other states bear witness to their links to the Mother Country, among them New Hampshire, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, although William Penn wanted to call it New Wales and Quaker modesty would never have allowed him to name it after himself; this honour was imposed on him by Charles II. To the south of that colony, Maryland was founded as a haven for Catholics and so-called in tribute to Charles I’s consort Henrietta Maria.

On top of this, hundreds of towns in the north-eastern United States in particular still testify to the Great Migration of settlers from eight eastern counties of England, the Puritan heartland that stretched from Lincolnshire down to Essex – ancestral homeland to both the Washington and Bush families – and Kent.

From the BBC

This was the subject of the current King Charles’s brilliant speech in Washington last month, which for all my pride nonetheless left me feeling bittersweet. His joke, that ‘If it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French’, was the title for a book idea I had, and gave up on, many years ago. The document is still there on my desktop, last opened on 10 May 2007 at 11.30. It’s safe to say that I’ve missed the hook of the 250^th anniversary of the United States, now only six weeks away. In fact, my book idea is now so deep into the backburner that its genesis is about eight per cent as old as the United States itself.

The story would start in the 1750s. The first truly world war is in full flow, as Britain and France battle for supremacy of the continent and the oceans. In North America, British colonial troops fight side by side with soldiers from the old country, who mock the bumpkin locals with their ditty ‘Yankee Doodle’. But, rivalries aside, they both know what they’re fighting for: if Louis XV’s absolute monarchy wins, all their liberties will be gone.

In a heroic battle the British regular and colonial forces take the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne and rename it Fort Pitt, after cabinet minister William Pitt ‘the elder’ – it later becomes Pittsburgh. By 1763 the French are driven out of North America altogether. The British colonies are safe. One officer particularly shines during this war, and diarist Horace Walpole writes how ‘The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.’

That Virginian was George Washington. Born in Wakefield in Westmoreland County, this British hero was the great-grandson of an Essex clergyman thrown out of the church for drunkenness, and who had landed in that colony in 1657. Washington was an impressive man in every way – standing at 6’2”, with enormous hands and feet and a massive nose, he was notably strong and able to throw objects immense distances (although many of these accounts improved in the telling).

Despite having almost no teeth, like any good British patriot, Washington was very proper about his appearance, insisting on bringing a selection of fine linen shirts even into the backwoods. A conservative by nature and with ambitions to serve as an officer in His Majesty’s forces, he didn’t like the new fashion for shaking hands, preferring the more formal bow.

A major at 21, Washington’s first job was to lead his men into the Ohio Valley to warn away any Frenchmen they found there. The following year, 1754, and now a lieutenant-colonel, he went back and built Fort Necessity close to Fort Duquesne, where he stumbled upon a contingent of enemy troops. They ran for their muskets and Washington ordered his company to fire. Ten Frenchmen were killed, including their lieutenant, and the incident would spark a war in North America between the two great powers, which in 1756 linked up with a Europe-wide conflict later known as the Seven Years’ War. It’s strange to think that, as well as being the first president of a future global superpower, Washington basically started the world’s first global war.

But what if France had won that struggle? Would French-controlled colonies in North America have formed constitutions centred on the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not to mention the often-overlooked right to property? Would they have enshrined religious tolerance or the right to free speech? Trial by jury? Innocence until proven guilty? Hell, no! And if it wasn’t for us, my thesis went, you’d be speaking French.

Without England’s history of Parliamentary freedom, habeas corpus, Magna Carta and the jury system, the colonies would never have developed as they did. Neither would they have the same commercial spirit, downstream of their Puritan and Quaker inheritance.

I think I came up with the proposal after reading David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, one of the most discussed and popular analyses of American culture. This great work of history and anthropology charts the foundation of the country’s cultural folkways through four migrations – East Anglian Puritans to New England, Cavaliers from England’s south and south-west to Virginia, the mostly northern Quakers to the middle colonies, and Borderers from Ulster to the Appalachians.

I was always very interested in founder effects, whereby colonies come to take on aspects of the mother country which subsequently disappear back home. This is reflected in the fact that many ‘Americanisms’ are actually old English words, like fall, trash and garbage, even ‘gotten’. It’s also true to some extent of the American accent, developing out of various regional dialects which have since been flattened by the dominance of London. This is especially the case with Ocracoke Island in North Carolina, which apparently is the closest thing to Shakespearean English, although I fear that if I went there this would no longer be true, and they’d all say ‘like’ four times in every sentence and tell you they’re ‘reaching out’.

The most culturally influential of these groups were the ‘Puritans’, many of whom were actually Separatists who believed that the Church of England was too riddled with popery to save. Their story begins with the Mayflower which arrived in modern-day Massachusetts, although they were supposed to land much further south. Only around 35 of the 102 people on board the Mayflower were actually ‘pilgrims’, but they brought with them a powerful sense of divine mission, a religious zeal mixed with a particularly English sense of national destiny, a feeling that they were a chosen people.

Famously, they didn’t bring much else of use. As well as one bible per family, Captain Miles Standish brought Caesar’s Gallic War and a Historie of Turkie, while William Mullins helpfully packed 126 pairs of shoes. But not seeds that would suit the new climate.

But they had God on their side, or so they thought. William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, later reflected that: ‘Our Fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in the wilderness, but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard this voice and looked on their adversities.’

They also brought with them political ideas that would be of huge influence, and this small colony had an outsized founder effect on the gigantic nation of the 21^st century, seen in every aspect of its unusual political culture. On November 21, 1619, the ship’s passengers gathered together in the main cabin and drew up a social compact, to provide ‘just and equal laws’. This was influenced by church teaching, the contract being based on the covenant between God and the Israelites.

In July 1629 it was decided that the new colony should be self-governing. They would meet four times a year at the General Courts, pass laws, elect new members, choose their officers and a governor, deputy governor and eighteen assistants, and do what they want so long as it wasn’t ‘contrary to English lawe.’

The future America’s national culture was downstream of the earliest leaders of this colony, men like John Winthrop, elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company in October 1629. A native of Suffolk, a Cambridge graduate and already twice-widowed, Winthrop was imbued with a religious zeal that verged on utopianism and which co-existed with great pessimism. Like many Englishmen down the years, he felt that the country was going to the dogs, lamenting that ‘Most children, even the best wittes and fairest hopes, are perverted, corrupted and utterly over-throwne by the multitude of evil examples and the licensious government of those seminaries.’

Winthrop believed that the corrupted Church of England to which he belonged could only be redeemed in the New World, and so he coined the phrase ‘a City upon a Hill’ to describe a new political community built on righteousness.

The Pilgrim Fathers would shape the country’s strong sense of morality, still notable today in its puritanical attitudes to sex, alcohol and idleness. These Congregationalists brought with them a strong work ethic, and a Calvinist respect for money-making. Many believed that being poor was a sign of evil; when Winthrop went bankrupt, some people suspected it was a sign of God’s disfavour. Nevertheless, his community-minded neighbours supported him and he got back on his feet, a classic American story.

In the 20^th century the United States would be the driving force of feminism, and from the earliest days there were opportunities for women not available elsewhere. New England even had female preachers, among them Anne Hutchinson, who held religious discussion groups every Sunday afternoon. Typically half of the people present were women, and according to their Calvinist theology both sexes could be part of the elect - and it wasn’t the church’s place to decide otherwise.

The colonists brought with them an intensely English sense of their rights, one that was long remembered by their descendants. On the door of the US House of Representatives in Washington, one will today see the portrait of Simon De Montfort, leader of the English barons in their conflict with Henry III. De Montfort was something of a monster (and, even worse, French), but he played a central part in the creation of the English Parliament in the 1250s. De Montfort lost the Second Barons’ War – in fact he ended up having his testicles chopped off and hung around his nose – but parliamentary rule came to pass and would find especially fertile soil in the new world.

Another tradition which the English settlers brought with them was the jury system, which dates to the time of Henry II in the 12^th century. Earlier still, in Anglo-Saxon England, the law was enforced by a system in which men within the hundred (the smallest administrative area) were responsible for each other’s behaviour. This became the basis of a system called the posse comitatus, the force of the county, a term that survived in that other lawless frontier zone, the American West. All able men were expected to follow the ‘hue and cry’ and to catch a wrongdoer.

The 1283 Statue of Westminster declared that every man was a policeman, and spelled out which weapons each subject was expected to possess to defend the realm and keep the peace. Everyone had to serve their time as constables, except ‘religious persons, Knights, clerkes and women’. This right to bear arms survived longer in the New World than in old England, and it wasn’t the only aspect of English tradition to do so. Grand juries have long been abolished here, as has the process of impeachment, dating back to 1376 but last used in old country in 1806: the British consider it too spiteful; the Americans love it.

Perhaps most important of all was Magna Carta, which ensured that by 1600 even the poorest in England had some basic freedom, such as the right to be tried by jury and to consent to taxes (the latter more in theory than practice). Many saw their rights as ancient, a nostalgic view of Saxon freedoms trampled on by a Norman yoke. Even if this was 17^th century myth-making, it was one that fuelled a real sense of national rights; besides which, the real sources of anti-Norman demonology – hostility to an absolute monarchy and French tyranny – were real.

In contrast to Puritan-Yankee New England, the earlier colony of Jamestown, Virginia, established in 1607, seeded a different America. This folkway was less egalitarian and less literate, although also less fanatical, but even here representative government developed at an early stage. As early as July 1619, 22 men, two from each borough in Jamestown, met in the first participative democracy in the New World.

Virginia struggled at first but blossomed when settlers stumbled on exporting tobacco. The native version of this crop was unpleasant, but John Rolfe, who is perhaps most famous for marrying Pocahontas, experimented – a great American trait – with an imported Caribbean variant instead. Rolfe only did this because he feared he was going to be prosecuted for idleness, a crime in the colony, but by 1616 Virginia tobacco was being sold to the old country and the colony was profitable. Virginia would be joined by the Carolinas, semi-tropical colonies characterised by languid, fun-loving towns that maintained an English aesthetic. The South, suited to the hard work of planting rice and later cotton, would also go down another path with the arrival of the first African slaves in 1619.

The English ran their colonies differently to other European countries. More accurately, they didn’t run their colonies at all. Much of the political direction of the proto-United States resulted from the fact that the British government was too tight-fisted to fund the project, as is typical of British governments down the ages. Unlike with the Spanish or French, the English settlements were largely works of private enterprise promoted by a growing class of merchants.

Their French and Spanish counterparts were characterised by huge state interference, and King Louis’s government also involved itself with unhelpful edicts such as that of 1717 stating which ports could trade with the colonies. From the 1660s the French colonies were run by royal governors and intendants, following from their provincial system of government. Intendants were appointed royal officials in charge of finance, usually middle class, while governors were local aristocratic soldiers. In New France the capitaines de milice, militia officers, had civil as well as military powers, and ruled as local agents of the intendant.

In contrast, there was no real organisation in the English colonies, which were established in a haphazard way. While the governors of New Spain acted like viceroys, with life and death powers over the population, in Anglo America local people paid for their governors, and so wielded power. These governors were assisted by a council, which developed into clones of the House of Lords.

James I astutely saw that this would be a problem for his worldview, calling America ‘a seminary for a seditious Parliament’ - and as on a surprising number of issues, including tobacco, he turned out to be right. The wily monarch didn’t like the Virginia Assembly and ‘the populousness of the government’, but in 1621 he also denied that Virginia was Parliament’s business when they debated the colony. This would set a royalist precedent ironically taken up by the colonial rebels almost two centuries later.

Virginia’s representative government in 1619 was followed by Bermuda the following year, Maryland in 1638, Barbados in 1639, Jamaica in 1663, New Jersey in 1668, New Hampshire in 1680, Pennsylvania in 1682 and New York in 1683. These lower houses of elected officials came to be called the House of Burgess, although South Carolina had a House of Commons Assembly, and they felt a strong sense of their own rights.

Over the course of the 18^th century the new world lower houses, especially in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New York and Massachusetts, took over the running of the colonies, setting the order of business, including their elections, press releases, money bills, and tax raising. In acquiring power, the colonists were inspired by the Parliamentarians back home, and most assemblies had copies of John Rushworth’s Historical Collections, a subversive book that recorded the 17^th century struggles between King and Parliament. They sometimes even pushed at royal authority, and Maryland and New England both overthrew their governments during the reign of James II.

From the establishment of the first of the thirteen colonies, Virginia in 1607, to the last, Georgia in 1732, England itself had gone through a political transformation. The divine right of kings was now so distant as to be absurd, with power very much resting with an oligarchy of landed gentry and merchants through Parliament. Now a constitutional monarchy, the new United Kingdom of Great Britain was de facto a republic with a king. In contrast, the Estates-General of France hadn’t met since 1614, and wouldn’t until the revolution.

English philosophers had also developed a new political theory that would become the foundation of the future United States – liberalism. Emerging after the religious bloodshed of both the Thirty Years’ War and English Civil War, liberalism’s central figure was John Locke, who argued that government should defend ‘life, liberty, health and indolency [freedom from pain] of body, and the possession of outward things such as money, land, houses, furniture and the like’, which became ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration of Independence. Typical Americans – take an English concept and make it snappier.

As the now united Britain evolved into a liberal oligarchy, it grew increasingly wealthy, and globally dominant – and that dominance would prove its undoing in North America, where Albion’s seed no longer need the mother country to protect them. What was emerging was the making of a sequel to the civil war between the progeny of Cavaliers and Roundheads, the theme of Kevin Phillips’s The Cousins’ War, which framed the American revolution as the second of three civil wars in the English world – the ‘Whigs’ would score a hat-trick of victories in 1865.

The colonies didn’t rebel because they were harshly treated: Spain crushed colonial rebellion far more brutally. They rebelled because they’d inherited an English sense of political rights, its religious inheritance and high levels of literacy, just more so; as Neil Postman pointed out in Amusing Ourselves to Death, until the advent of the television the United States was considerably more book-orientated than almost any other country.

Just as Americans today obsessively read about their own febrile politics, the colonists were highly politicised by a proliferation of newspapers. John Campbell set up the first colonial publication, the Boston News-Letter, in 1704, and by 1750 there were 20 of them. One, the Pennsylvania Gazette, was bought in 1729 by a young man called Benjamin Franklin.

This is why the British made such a huge mistake when in 1765 prime minister George Grenville introduced the Stamp Act. The new tax most affected newspapermen, lawyers, publicans and publishers – all the colonies’ biggest loudmouths. Grenville had form when it came to bad laws – his previous master stroke, the Sugar Duty, cost four times as much to raise as it received in revenue. This, among many other gripes, led over the course of the 1760s and 1770s to a growing conflict between Parliament and the colonies, especially Massachusetts.

On July 6, 1775, Congress issued the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, although at this point it still rejected independence. On January 1, 1776, the flag was raised over Prospect Hill in Boston – the Grand Union Flag, with thirteen stripes and a Union Jack in the corner. They continued to use this until June 1777, and even afterwards some flag designers put the stars in a pattern based on the Union Jack.

Increasingly the colonists started to think of themselves as American, a word popularised by Virginian Patrick Henry who declared that ‘The distinction between Virginians and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian but an American’. In reality, more of the second Continental Congress delegates had been to London than to Pennsylvania.

Still the Continental Congress declared that ‘we mean not to dissolve the union which has so long and happily subsisted between us.’ Even the Declaration of Independence only mentions ‘the present King of Great Britain’ responsible for ‘a history of repeated injuries and usurpations’, reflecting their bitterness at a constitutional monarch who could not do what they were asking - overruling Parliament. (Poor George III was subject of all sorts of invective, despite being an obviously kindly man who lavished love on all his subjects. Sadly, I was the only one cheering among the audience of Hamilton when he came up to sing.)

The Founding Fathers considered themselves British; they epitomised a practical English political philosophy, without the dogmatism or anti-clericalism that marked continental revolutions. The Founding Fathers were indeed the greatest generation of British philosopher-statesmen, perhaps the greatest collection of people to walk the earth.

Among them was Benjamin Franklin, a best-selling writer, publisher, postmaster and inventor. Paul Johnson described how ‘he crossed the Atlantic eight times, discovered the Gulf Stream, met leading scientists and engineers, invented the damper and various smokeless chimneys - a vexed topic which continued to occupy him till the end of his life - designed two new stoves, but refused to patent them from humanitarian principles, invented a new hearth called a Pennsylvania Fireplace, manufactured a new whale-oil candle, studied geology, farming, archaeology, eclipses, sunspots, whirlwinds, earthquakes, ants, alphabets, and lightning conductors. He made himself one of the earliest experts on electricity, publishing in 1751 an eighty-six-page treatise, Experiments and Observations on electricity made in Philadelphia, which over twenty years went into four editions in English, three in French and one each in German and Italian, giving him a European reputation.’ One biographer reflected that ‘he found electricity a curiosity and left it a science.’

In the late 1760s Franklin underwent a political transformation after visiting London, where he was disdained by the British elite, and angered by a newspaper calling American colonists a ‘mixed rabble of Scotch, Irish and foreign vagabonds, descendants of convicts’ and ‘ungrateful rebels’.

Then there was Thomas Jefferson, an especially impressive figure who played a key role in the development of religious freedom. A British officer said of Jefferson that ‘if he was put besides any king in Europe, that king would appear to be his lackey.’

The third president was radical in many ways – some of his views were cranky – but he was also a British patriot of sorts, and would refer to ‘our mother country’. He saw himself as an inheritor of English freedoms that stretched back to Alfred the Great and the Witenagemot, and wished to have Horsa and Hengest, ‘the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed’, placed on the seal of the United States. The other side would have ‘the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night’. American exceptionalism, that oddly religious sense of being a chosen people, is impossible to understand without its English roots.

In 1786, now citizens of an independent United States of America, Jefferson and his long-standing frenemy John Adams even went on a tour of English Civil War battlefields. Adams complained in his diary that ‘The people in the neighborhood appeared so ignorant and careless at Worcester, that I was provoked, and asked, “And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for? Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground; much holier than that on which your churches stand. All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year.” This animated them, and they seemed much pleased with it. Perhaps their awkwardness before might arise from their uncertainty of our sentiments concerning the civil wars.’ One can only imagine the thoughts of the bemused local villagers at this strange American tourist with his odd questions about local sights of interest.

Like that earlier conflict, the American War of Independence had a strong sectarian undercurrent, with low-church Protestants in revolt against the crown once again. George III called it ‘a Presbyterian Rebellion’, and indeed the Calvinist Scots-Irish and Huguenots were the most pro-patriot section of the population, while Scots Highlanders were the most loyal to the crown. The Dutch were divided, the Germans were neutral. English-Americans were split along sectarian lines; Anglicans tended to be loyalists, especially in New York but not so in Virginia, while Catholics tended to be patriots. The Quakers sided with the king – a fat lot of use they were in any case. Quebec also took the side of Britain, so that after the French intervention Britain and the French colonies were fighting France and the British colonies. But what is certainly true is that one side of this second English Civil War was far more English than the other.

Many families were torn. Benjamin’s son William Franklin, governor of New Jersey, was a loyalist, and died destitute and in exile in 1813, cut out of his father’s will. Many more loyalists, facing mob justice, fled to England or to Canada, where they formed a major folkway of that country.

Yet the Americans had plenty of sympathisers back in England. Edmund Burke agreed with Jefferson, that Parliamentary rule of the colonies was an abuse of power. By ‘a succession of Acts of Tyranny’ and ‘Governing by an Army’, he said of his government, ‘you drove them into the declaration of independency’, because what they put up with ‘was more than what ought to be endured.’ After the Declaration of independence Burke was so disturbed ‘that I courted sleep in vain’.

The younger William Pitt was praised for a speech lamenting ‘the accursed, cruel, unnatural, wicked American war, a war of injustice and moral depravity, marked by blood, slaughter, persecution and devastation’. The radical John Wilkes subscribed to the Constitutional Society which held meetings in Cornhill in London, inaugurating a fund for the ‘relief of widows [and] orphans… of our beloved American fellow subjects… inhumanely murdered by the King’s Troops.’

Even Edward Gibbon, a supporter of Lord North’s government who considered the colonists to be in the wrong, concluded that it was ‘easier to defend the justice than the policy of’ the government’s ‘measures’ and that ‘it is better to be humbled than ruined’. Even if the policy was good in theory, in other words, it didn’t work in practice.

Although all wars are marked by cruelty and crime, there were moments of fellow-feeling even among the fighting men. General William Phillips wrote that when he struck an American he ‘wounded a brother’. After British Lieutenant General John Burgoyne surrendered to General Horatio Gates at Saratoga in 1777, he announced that ‘the fortunes of war, General, have made me your prisoner’, to which Gates politely replied: ‘I shall always be ready to bear testimony that it has not been through any fault of Your Excellency.’

The Essex-born General Gates then wrote to the Marquess of Rockingham, the most senior opposition members who spoke up for the colonists, ‘presuming upon former friendship’, and stating: ‘Born & Bred an Englishman, I cannot help feeling for the misfortunes brought upon my country by the wickedness of that Administration who begun & have continued this most unjust, unpolitic and unnatural War… the United States of America are willing to be the Friends but will never submit to the Slaves of the Parent Country. They are by Consanguinity, by Commerce, by Language & by the Affection which naturally flow from these more attached to England than any country under the sun.’ Withdraw the fleet, he advised, ‘and cultivate the Friendship and commerce of America.’

It took another four years for them to see sense, after the surrender at Yorktown. When the British finally laid down their arms, one of their officers recorded how ‘to do them justice, the Americans behaved with great delicacy and forbearance, while the French, by what motive I will not pretend to say, were profuse in their protestations of sympathy… When I visited their lines immediately after our parade had been dismissed, I was overwhelmed by the civilities of my late enemies’. (Maybe, and I know it’s impossible to contemplate, the French were just being nice.)

Despite everything, well after the Revolution began Washington and his officers toasted the mother country. When the great man died in 1799, the British fleet fired a salute of twenty guns in his honour. Today a statue of the first president can be found in Trafalgar Square, a gift to the British people from the Commonwealth of Virginia, her oldest colony.

Just as Gates advised, Britain instead cultivated the friendship and commerce of America, and soon the two nations were major trading partners again. After a brief hiccup when, as the King said, ‘we British made our own small attempt at real estate redevelopment of the White House in 1814,’ relations grew stronger and stronger, helped of course by a share language which created natural empathy between the two countries. It’s easy to be cynical about history, and I normally am, but two and a half centuries on the creation of the United States remains a magnificent achievement. We should be proud of it.