Events kick off at 3 pm on 28 May 2013 with a lecture by Dr. David Gleeson of Northumbria, entitled ‘England and the Antebellum South’ which is part of the Charleston Library Society’s Piccolo Spoleto Literary Festival. That evening, at 6 pm, the project opens the exhibition ‘England, the English & English Culture in North America’ [opens .pdf] at the Addlestone Library at the College of Charleston.  The exhibition runs to June 10 but will be available permanently through the Lowcountry Digitial Library. The opening will feature a performance by the Hexham Morris troupe, a group of 32 folk dancers and musicians from the Northeast of England.  As well as performing in the Piccolo Spoleto Arts Festival, they will also be giving a free concert on Thursday 30 May at 7 pm in Physicians Auditorium at the College of Charleston entitled, ‘Dance the Seasons Round:  A Celebration of Traditional English Dance and Song’ [opens .pdf], which will trace through the performance the 500 years of the England’s oldest surviving dance tradition.

For more information please contact David Gleeson by email at david.gleeson@northumbria.ac.uk  or @englishdiaspora on twitter. If you plan to come to the exhibition opening please rsvp to David Gleeson by email or twitter @dgleesonhistory

Nowadays, it seems incredible that anybody would feel strongly enough about two actors’ different interpretations of the character of Macbeth to engage in violent riots, leading to numerous fatalities. Yet this is exactly what happened during what became known as the Astor Place Riot in New York, on 10^th May 1849. During that night, thousands of supporters of the first American-born star actor, Edwin Forrest, took to the streets to object vigorously to the performance of the ‘Scottish Play’ by his rival, the eminent English tragedian William Charles Macready, at the Astor Place Opera House in Manhattan. With the authorities unable to contain the escalating violence, the National Guard fired into the crowd, killing over twenty people and injuring many more.

Of course, what led to this bloody chapter in the history of the world theatre were not just artistic differences or misplaced loyalties to individual thespian idols. The Astor Place Riot was the result of an explosive combination of these issues with wider socio-political factors, which included festering animosity between the US and Britain and increasing social divisions within the US itself, felt particularly acutely in New York. In the mid-1840s, debates over American expansionism (particularly in relation to the Oregon Territory and Texas) and the repudiation crisis (some American states refusing to pay their outstanding overseas debts) caused a deterioration in Anglo-American relations, accompanied by an increasingly hostile rhetoric used by the press and popular agitators in both countries (see Cliff, pp. 141-47). Simultaneously, New York’s financial and cultural elites swelled in numbers and became more ostentatious in their display of wealth and superiority, eager to distance themselves from the poor urban masses teeming on their doorstep, in the city’s ‘lower wards’ (Cliff, pp. 184-200). For their part, poorer New Yorkers saw the upper classes as English in their tastes and behaviours: ‘by the late 1840s … the epithet “English” had become such a useful term of abuse that it was applied by association to the whole Upper Ten, the “shallow-pated, milk hearted sucklings of foppery and fashion”’.[1] The situation was made even more complicated by an upsurge of immigration, which created bitter economic competition amid the lower classes (often divided along ethnic lines) and an escalation of nativist (ultra-patriotic and xenophobic) attitudes on the part of ‘native’ Americans.

In this highly charged atmosphere, all that was needed was an excuse to bring the conflicts to a head, and the Forrest-Macready dispute provided it. Macready represented the school of acting which appealed to the upper classes: understated, intellectual, and, at least according to the nativists, unpardonably English. Forrest, on the other hand, was renowned for his over-the-top, muscular, and crowd-pleasing approach. Moreover, he was a home-grown talent, fiercely patriotic and overtly populist. The two actors started out as friends, but gradually became rivals and bitter enemies, with Forrest alleging (almost certainly erroneously) that Macready’s machinations were to blame for his unfavourable reception by some sections of the British public. As the press broadcast the increasingly hostile exchanges between the two stars and their respective supporters, the atmosphere reached fever pitch during Macready’s engagement in New York in May 1849.

Theatrical riots with nationalistic undertones were not uncommon in the US at the time. There were disturbances in New York in 1831 and 1834 and in Philadelphia in 1835 over perceived slights to America by English performers or managers, and Macready himself was on the verge of causing a serious incident on his first US tour in 1826 by complaining of not being able to obtain a particular type of stage arrow, which some took as ‘an insult to American timber’ (Cliff, pp. 126-30). This time, however, due to the social tensions in New York already at the breaking point, the scale of the protest and the ferocity of the violence were unprecedented. Forrest’s nativist supporters mobilised the notorious gangs of Bowery to disturb Macready’s performance of Macbeth at the upper-class Astor Place theatre on 7^th May, driving him off the stage with a barrage of food, furniture, stink bombs, and shouts of ‘Down with the English hog! Take off the Devonshire bull! Huzza for native talent!’ (Cliff, pp. xviii-xix). Meanwhile, Forrest was also playing the ‘Scottish play’, at the lower-class Broadway Theatre. Before delivering the lines: ‘What rhubarb, senna or what purgative drug would scour these English hence?’, he made a dramatic pause. After he shouted out the words, the audience jumped to their feet and exploded into a several-minute-long bout of cheering for America (Cliff, p. xx).

This could still have ended without bloodshed, had not some prominent members of New York’s elite persuaded Macready to continue his engagement with another performance on 10^th May. The objectors gathered again, spurred on by nationalistic posters containing such phrases as ‘Working men, shall Americans or English rule in this city?’, and identifying the Astor Place as ‘the English aristocratic opera house’ (Cliff, p. 211). The city’s Whig mayor Caleb S. Woodhull, eager to please the upper classes, authorised the employment of the military. By the end of the night, the streets around the Astor Place were littered not only by the rioters’ improvised missiles, but also by the bodies of dead and wounded protestors and passers-by. Astonishingly, a deadly confrontation between two visions of America – populist and elitist, egalitarian and class-riven – was played out on cultural grounds, and expressed in terms of the ownership of the American theatre and the ‘right’ ways to interpret Shakespeare.

And here to our King.

And O Long May he reign.

The Lord of those Men who are Lords of all Man;

While all the contention among us shall be To make Him as happy as We are made free.

Loyal expressions to the royal family were by no means uncommon, documenting the strong links that were maintained between the English in the United States and the old homeland even after the US became independent. In fact: loyalty to the Crown was a crucial connector on St George’s Day for many of the English who gathered together abroad to celebrate England’s patron saint. Or as another speaker, Walter H. Page, the American Ambassador to England, observed: ‘Our race on both sides of the sea keeps its youth well and keeps its youth better by remembering its common immortal inheritance of men of great deeds and men of noble speech.’

Banquet given by Order Sons of St. George, St. George Day, 23 April 1904, Auditorium, Chicago

Banquets on St George’s Day had been held in many cities in North America since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but they became more numerous when English societies and clubs began to  flourish in larger numbers, spreading throughout the US and Canada from the mid-nineteenth century (learn more here). Further north, in St John, New Brunswick, the local St George’s Society had organised a dinner and also a church service in 1913. In Winnipeg, Manitoba, the Sons of England and the English Counties Association assembled for a luncheon in honour of St George, for which ‘[e]very man present wore a rose … and the gathering bubbled over with patriotic sentiment.’ A.J. Andrews proposed the toast of His Majesty, and then read a number of telegrams from kindred societies. One of the telegrams had been sent by the Royal Society of St George in London saying ‘England is watching.’ Another came from the President of the Ottawa St George’s Society, and there were further greetings from the St George’s Societies of Hamilton, Ontario, and Regina in Sasketchewan.

The sending of telegrams on St George’s Day was a central feature of annual St George’s Day celebrations all over the world, and the St George’s Society of New York too sent greetings to several sister societies in the United States, as well as to the Royal Society of St George in London. The Society replied that it was ‘honouring England’s Day in English fashion’, and that it ‘most heartily and fraternally welcomed the sentiments of love and loyalty to England and to England’s King.’ The dispensation of greetings was crucial to maintaining the global tradition of St George. Substantial communication networks were in place to facilitate the exchange of greetings on St George’s Day; channelled through associations, these greetings united otherwise unconnected peoples as a single identity expressed through England’s patron saint.

This was the case even more so for the English who came together in the remoter climes of the formal and informal British Empire. In Singapore in 1913 a special dinner was held at the famous Raffles Hotel, while in Queensland in Australia well over 250 people came to together for the celebrations of the Brisbane branch of the Royal Society of St George. Further inland, at Barcaldine, sports were organised by the local St George’s Society and there was a good attendance at the social – perhaps like there had been a few years earlier in c1905. Elsewhere, in Adelaide, the dinner seems to have been more of an elite affair. In Warwick, a procession was organised through town.

Back home in England it was the Royal Society of St George that played a major part in promoting the 1913 St George’s Day celebrations that took place throughout the country. It was at the behest of the Society, as the Manchester Courier reported, that the the motto ‘“Wear the rose”’ was issued. And it ‘was liberally observed … and many thousands of loyal Englishmen sported the red national flower in every part of the country.’ (Manchester Courier, 24 April 1913.)

In that same spirit we hope that you will all have a happy St George’s Day this year. If you are in or near Newcastle, join us later tonight for our final Icons of Englishness talk.

Links and further reading

• Royal Society of St George
• New York St George’s Society
• England, the English & English Culture in North America: Exhibition in Charleston, South Carolina, 28 May to 10 June 2013
• To learn more about Global St George, have a look at this article.

It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.

[The Noble Bachelor]

In several of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes expresses admiration for the USA and its people. For many years, this admiration has been reciprocated. Doyle’s books have sold well there, and American authors have written numerous sequels and critical studies. Meanwhile American actors, from William Gillette to Robert Downey Junior, have impersonated the great detective on stage and screen.

A remarkable illustration of this transatlantic regard for Doyle’s immortal character is a flourishing network of convivial societies, whose members celebrate (and re-enact) the adventures of their hero and his adversaries and allies. At the centre of this network is a New York group, named after the troop of street urchins employed by Holmes as auxiliaries – The Baker Street Irregulars.

There’s more work to be got out of one of these little beggars than out of a dozen of the force” Holmes remarked. “The mere sight of an official looking person seals men’s lips. These youngsters, however, go everywhere and hear everything. They are as sharp as needles too; all they want is organisation.

[A Study in Scarlet]

America’s Baker Street Irregulars were organised in 1934 by Christopher Morley – a former Rhodes Scholar and prominent New York journalist, editor, and novelist. Admission is by invitation only. The list of distinguished Irregulars includes US Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the mathematician Banesh Hoffman and many prominent authors. Affiliated societies, named after significant characters or objects in Doyle’s stories, include the Sons of the Copper Beeches in Philadelphia, The Diogenes Club of Dallas, and The Giant Rats of Sumatra in Memphis. (A number of similar societies are based in Canadian cities.) Their members convene regularly for lectures, seminars, theatrical performances and general socialising.

Why do these enthusiasts idolise Holmes, rather than an American detective hero like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow? Is it mere snobbery, fostered by ex-Ivy Leaguers and their would-be emulators? Or does something in Doyle’s stories resonate with more widely held American aspirations? It seems probable that this question would repay further investigation.

One Holmesian characteristic which American readers may well admire is his dismissive attitude towards social hierarchies. He shows no deference to aristocrats, especially if they behave shabbily, and in “A Scandal in Bohemia” he delivers a crushing put-down to a contemptible king who is too insensitive to perceive its ironic meaning. Yet in “The Copper Beeches” he pursues an apparently trivial case brought to him by a frightened governess with the same commitment that he gives to the recovery of stolen Foreign Office documents in “The Naval Treaty”.

Holmes’ dealings with law-breakers are equally revealing. While confessing his respect for the villain’s intelligence and courage he pursues the master-criminal Moriarty to the death. But he allows a first offender to evade punishment, remarking to Dr Watson:

I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again. He is too terribly frightened. Send him to gaol now and you make a gaolbird of him for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness.

[The Blue Carbuncle]

All in all, Holmes seems more of a meritocrat than an egalitarian. Like such archetypal American heroes as Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Edison, he has built a distinguished career on innate talent and hard work. To men or women who follow a similar path (and remain honest) he shows courtesy and compassion, whatever their status.

Holmes also believes firmly in another central pillar of the American dream – the importance of education. On a train journey near Clapham Junction he remarks to Watson:

Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea.

The Board schools.

Lighthouses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.

[The Naval Treaty]

This remark has a special significance for me, because one of those “brick islands” near Clapham Junction was where my own education began in the nineteen-forties. But its wider significance is clear enough. Holmes believes that compulsory schooling can convert unwashed and illiterate street children into worthy citizens – for their own benefit, and for the good of society. (This might have seemed a dismal prospect to Huckleberry Finn, but Tom Sawyer would certainly have profited from it.)

The liberating power of education has been particularly emphasised by African-American activists from Booker T Washington onwards, and hence school desegregation in the 1950s was a critical point in the civil rights struggle. That struggle was already under way when the Holmes stories first appeared in print, and one of them addresses a particularly sensitive aspect of the racial question.

It concerns a British merchant, Grant Munroe of Norbury, who has recently married the young widow of a successful American lawyer. He seeks Holmes’ assistance because his wife lives in fear of something relating to her past, about which she refuses to confide in him. Several other Holmes adventures involve sinister transatlantic connections – for example with the Mafia (“The Red Circle”), the Ku Klux Klan (“The Five Dried Orange Pips”) and the Chicago Mob (“The Dancing Men”). In this case, however, the story is very different.

The lady’s first husband was an African-American. Fearing to tell her second husband this, or to reveal the existence of her dark-skinned daughter, she has installed the child with a nursemaid in a nearby cottage, and is visiting her secretly. When Holmes, Watson and Munroe enter this cottage – expecting to discover a blackmailer, if not something worse – the truth is exposed.

And now tonight you at last know all, and I ask you what is to become of us, my child and me? She clasped her hands, and waited for an answer.

It was a long two minutes before Grant Munroe broke the silence, and when his answer came, it was one of which I love to think. He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held out his other hand to his wife, and turned towards the door.

We can talk it over more comfortably at home”, said he. “I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.

Holmes and I followed them down to the lane, and my friend plucked at my sleeve as we came out. “I think”, said he,” that we shall be of more use in London than in Norbury.

[The Yellow Face]

Holmes often reminds us that it is profitless to speculate without evidence. And yet one is tempted to think that it would have gladdened his heart to learn that one day another child of a black father and a white mother would occupy the Oval Office.

In the 40 years before the outbreak of the First World War one of the most notable social phenomena in Britain was the dramatic rise of organised sport, both amateur and, increasingly, professional. In much the same way that civilian society’s passion for sport grew, the military was also affected as sport came to dominate the lives of soldiers during this period. The development of sport and physical training in the late Victorian British army meant that for the soldiers serving in South Africa during the 1899-1902 campaign, sporting activity formed an important part of their daily existence.

'Sports at the Sanatorium during the Siege of Kimberley, 1899' 'No. 2 Company, King's Regiment at the Pull' (Public Collection, McGregor Museum, Kimberley)

An important factor in the growth of regimental sport in the latter part of the 1800’s was, according to Campbell, the movement throughout English society to form associations and leagues to regulate play and provide for championships. The Football Association (soccer) was formed in 1863, and the Rugby Union in 1871. The army was heavily represented among the individuals and teams that initially formed these bodies, and something of this organising and propagating spirit was transferred to the nascent institution of regimental sport in South Africa. Within this culture, soldiers of all ranks were encouraged to participate in army sport and build upon interests they had carried with them from civilian society. As a result, accounts of regimental sport during the South Africa campaign continued to dominate the journals of the various regiments based across the country. Around the turn of the century, as Campbell shows, The Thistle, the monthly journal of the 1st Regiment of Foot, The Royal Scots, and The Thin Red Line, journal of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, contained more information about company and regimental football than about the regiment’s actions on active service in India and in South Africa. For the English, regimental cricket was especially popular with reports in the April 1901 issue of St. George’s Gazette detailing the exploits of The Northumberland Fusiliers in cricket matches played throughout South Africa against rival regiments (St. George’s Gazette, 30 April 1901).

This keen interest in sport was in fact shared by the Boers who, on numerous occasions, challenged the British to less deadly contests during the war. For example, shortly after Jan Smut’s departure from the North Western Cape for the peace talks at Vereeniging in April 1902, Field General Manie Maritz challenged the besieged British garrison at Okiep to a football match. Originally written in High Dutch this now famous letter is housed in the South African Rugby Museum at Newlands in Cape Town. The English translation reads:

The Honourable Major Edwards,

O’kiep

Dear Sir,

I wish to inform you that I have agreed to a football match taking place between you and us. I, from my side, will agree to a cease-fire tomorrow afternoon from 12 o’clock until sunset, the time and venue of the match to be arranged by you in consultation with Messrs. Roberts and Van Rooyen who I am sending to you.

I have the honour etc.,

pp. S.G. Moritz

Field General

Transvaal Scouting Corps.

Concordia, April 28, 1902.[1]

Although the match never took place, the challenge itself indicates a common ground represented here by rugby, between Boer and Briton. At Mafeking too, towards the end of April 1900, cricket and war also mixed in a lighter vein. A British patrol inspecting railway lines to the south west of the town found a letter addressed to Colonel Baden-Powell from Sarel Eloff, Commandant of the Johannesburg Commando and one of Paul Kruger’s thirty-five grandsons. It read:

Dear Sir,

I see in The Bulawayo Chronicle that your men in Mafeking play cricket on Sundays, and give concerts and balls on Sunday evenings. In case you will allow my men to join in, it would be very agreeable to me, as here, outside Mafeking, there are seldom any of the fair sex, and there can be no merriment without them being present. In case you would allow this we could spend some of the Sundays, which we still have to get through round Mafeking, and of which there will probably be several, in friendship and unity. During the course of the week, you can let us know if you accept my proposition and I shall then, with my men, be on the cricket field, and at the ballroom at the time so appointed by you.

I remain,

Your obedient friend,

Sarel Eloff,

Commandant.[2]

Baden-Powell, his biographer Hillcourt records, read the letter with a sardonic smile – a Sunday cricket match with the Boers – he sent his answer to the Boer lines under a white flag:

Sir,

I beg to thank you for your letter of yesterday, in which you propose that your men should come and play cricket with us. I should like nothing better – after the match in which we are at present engaged is over. But just now we are having our innings and have so far scored 200 days not out against the bowling of Cronje, Snyman, Botha and Eloff, and we are having a very enjoyable game.

I remain,

Yours truly,
R.S.S. Baden-Powell[3]

Despite their many differences these incidents, although isolated, indicate a mutual appreciation for sport. The Anglo-Boer War it would seem, did not prevent either side from continuing forms of sporting activity and the shared passion for games such as rugby and cricket would form part of the reconciliation process long after the last shot was fired.

In June 2012, a small group of young people calling themselves ‘Diggers2012’ left London and the corporatism of the capital and established an ‘eco-village’ on land in Brunel University’s Runnymede Campus: an area, they claimed, that was designated for the development of luxury homes and student accommodation, but was ostensibly terra nullius. According to newspaper reports, their initial destination had been disused farmland near the Queen’s estates at Windsor, but after clashes with the authorities the group—who at the time of writing in October 2012 appear to number fifteen—were forced to settle in fields not far from where King John signed one of the defining documents of the English political tradition, Magna Carta (see this Guardian article). In subsequent weeks the historical significance of the land provided a fitting context for the clashes that developed between the eco-village and the National Trust, which, after claiming that the Diggers had trespassed on their land (something the diggers deny), organised for an injunction that would allow them to evict the group from the Runnymede Estate. In addition to raising questions about the possibility of forming an alternative to the social, political and economic order, the conflict is one in which various institutions, values and images that have at one time or another been evoked as capturing a sense of Englishness and what it means to be English appear to sit in tension. Representative democracy, agriculture, the land, Magna Carta and, perhaps, the National Trust, might all conjure up images of England, but here they seem to be in conflict (The voice-piece for the Digger2012 movement is their website).

In branding themselves Diggers2012 the group are positioning themselves as the descendants of the English agrarian reformers who, in response to the excursions into common land by an entrepreneurial yeoman elite, moved in 1649—the year of the execution of Charles I—to establish ‘digger’ communities on common land at St. George’s Hill in Surrey and three other places in Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Essex. The current diggers will probably hope that their own experiment in the idea that the earth is a common treasury from which each should benefit equally will be more long-lasting than their seventeenth-century forbears: through late 1649 and ’50 the settlements endured attacks from local yeoman and authorities, with the final nail in the coffin of the Surrey settlement coming in Easter 1650 when a gang led by the local parson tore down the digger homes. But in reclaiming the spirit of the diggers and the digger leader Gerrard Winstanley (who once wrote that the reform of land ownership would mean there was no ‘need of Lawyers, prisons, or engines of punishment one over another, for all shall walk and act righteously in the Creation, and there shall be no beggar’) the modern diggers are doing more than just drawing links between the inequalities of land ownership past and present, between the revolutionary ferment of the late 1640s and today, and between contemporary and historical disillusionment with the ability of the parliamentary political process to bring a more equitable future: they are also pointing to the enduring importance of a tradition of English radicalism whose counter-hegemonic ideas on liberty, democracy, land ownership and community have tended to lurk at the background, if not obscured entirely, during debates about English national identity or Britishness. Certainly the radicalism and extremism of the digger take on the English past and identity was for many a welcome relief from an Olympic summer where debates about national identity were crowded with those familiar English tropes of monarchy and fair play.

The recovery of this radical tradition extending from the 1381 Peasants Revolt, through the diggers and up to the Chartists and beyond was driven by a group of left-wing (if not communist) historians in the 1960s. While this group—the names of E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm are perhaps the most famous—had success in bringing this radical history to the awareness of the historical academy, left-leaning members of the public, and history undergraduates, they always had a much harder time communicating their thesis to a wider constituency. The main problem was that they could not convince the British public the campaigns for social justice of Winstanley, the apocalyptic millennialism of Joanna Southcott (‘O England! O England! England!…The midnight hour is coming for you all’),[1] the republicanism of Tom Paine or the proto-communism of Thomas Spence were genuinely an English tradition rather than something brought from outside to disturb England and her comfortable traditions of Magna Carta, parliamentary government and the separation of power in Kings, Lord and Commons (it is worth noting that none of the radical luminaries mentioned above got a walk on part in the Olympic opening ceremony).

This is not to say that the radical narrative has greater claim to represent true Englishness than those myths of identity that involve Morris Dancing, warm beer and ladies cycling to communion. As with all ideas about the existence of a native tradition the Marxist notion of a continuous English radicalism linking Winstanley and Wollstonecraft, Jack Straw and Thomas Spence had more than just a hint of myth about it. Though all were labelled radicals, it was not clear whether Winstanley’s ‘socialism’ (if he was a proto-socialist at all), bore any resemblance to modern socialism, and it was not clear that the ideas on republicanism articulated by the Thetford-born Tom Paine in the last decades of the eighteenth century were peculiarly English. All these ideas were worked out in a larger European, and American context.[2] Hence the English radical tradition is maybe just another example of one of the ‘invented traditions’ that Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, in a book published in the early 1980s, spotted elsewhere.

But regardless of the historical accuracy of the English radical tradition, it may be that the shadow of Scottish devolution, the rising political significance of the Englishness debate, and current efforts to shed Englishness of its right-wing and xenophobic associations will mean that the work of the Marxist historians and the characters they wrote about will once again come on the political and cultural radar of the English: certainly a group wider than the more than just the well-read and articulate members of the Diggers2012 movement. It might also be, as one commentator has pointed out, that those politicians who have favoured the deployment of the more inclusive ‘Britishness’—most notably those in the Labour Party, the supposed heirs to the radical tradition—might be forced by Scottish devolution and the break-up of Britain to embark on a new project of rethinking a more equitable, inclusive and possibly radical understanding of English national identity (also see this Guardian article).

In the ‘Elizabethan Gardens’ on Roanoke Island, of the coast of North Carolina, stands a modern statue of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Depicted gathering roses, the Elizabeth’s statue commemorates her granting of a charter to Sir Walter Raleigh to establish an English colony on the island in the 1580s (click here for an image). Although Roanoke’s statue may well be the only one of an English queen in the United States, perhaps surprisingly (given that the eighteenth-century revolution rejected monarchism in favour of republicanism) it is far from being the only statue of an English monarch in modern-day America. Indeed, it is merely one of a number that continue a long and fascinating tradition of royal statuery which stretches back to America’s colonial era.

Perhaps the most well known royal example is that of America’s last king, George III, in New York. Produced by a London sculptor and erected at the Bowling Green in 1770 in appreciation of the repeal of the Stamp Act, the one-third larger than life equestrian statue of a gilded king dressed as Marcus Aurelius was made of lead, weighed four thousand pounds, and situated upon a marble pedestal. A symbol of loyalty in 1770, within three years laws had to be enacted to protect it against desecration by patriots and a fence erected, and by 1776 the statue had been transformed into an emblem of royal oppression.

The removal of King George from his marble base was part of what the historian Brendan McConville has called ‘the orgy of iconoclastic [street] violence’ which marked the end of the British Empire in America in the years 1773–76. Royal arms, tavern signs, and portraits were taken down, coins bearing the king’s head were refused or devalued, the king’s name was removed from official documents, and street names with royal associations were altered (especially in the northern colonies). Thus, in Philadelphia, the proclamation of independence prompted patriots to dismantle the royal arms on the state house, while in Boston locals built a bonfire on the shortly to be renamed ‘King Street’, comprising every king’s arms to be found. Washington’s image, it has been claimed, partly filled the space left by these symbolic dethronings.

One of the most famous instances of this iconoclasm (and, indeed, the revolution as a whole) was the bringing down of the king’s statue in New York by a crowd consisting of Continental troops and local citizens. According to one contemporary account, the king was ‘laid prostrate in the dirt the just desert of an ungrateful tyrant’. Having been toppled, George was then symbolically decapitated. Most of the statue was then taken to Lichfield, Connecticut, to be melted down for the production of over 42,000 lead bullets for the Continental Army in the hope that – as one witness put it – ‘the emanations of the leaden George will make … deep impressions in the Bodies of some of his red coated and Torie subjects’.

In contrast, George’s much ill-used head survived. It was rescued by loyalists before being smuggled to England, where the exiled governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson saw it before it disappeared for good. In America itself, various bits of moulded lead appeared over the course of the next two centuries which have been linked to the original statue. Some of these are now in the possession of the New York Historical Society (click here for details).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, statues of British monarchs were not popular during the new republic’s first century. As Don MacRaild has described elsewhere on this website, however, the late nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of American interest for the nation’s pre-revolutionary constitutional history. Along with societies and anniversaries, this mood manifested itself in the form of murals and statues, many of which featured King John. For example, the king features as part of a scene depicting the signing of Magna Charta on Nebraska’s State Capitol building, while a mural depicting the same scene is housed inside the Wisconsin State Supreme Court. John is also depicted on one of the bronze doors of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC.

Of course, in the context of the Magna Charta, King John is not himself being celebrated in these statues and murals; instead, it is the occasion itself that is regarded as important, since 1215 marked the crown’s recognition that its subjects possessed certain inalienable rights and liberties. In contrast, John’s grandson, Edward I, is celebrated in America in his own right. For instance, statues of Edward surmount the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland and the Franklin County Courthouse in Columbus, Ohio. But perhaps most significantly, Edward I is one of twenty-three marble relief portraits of historical figures in the House of Representatives’ chamber in Washington, DC. As an English king, Edward I keeps such distinguished company because he was judged to be among those seen to have contributed to principles that now underpin American constitutional law. In Edward’s case, he is credited with founding England’s parliamentary constitution and eliminating the effects of feudalism.

While English king’s such as John and Edward still feature on public buildings in America’s state and national capitals, to find a statue of an English monarch of a vintage more recent than the seventeenth century requires travelling above the forty-ninth parallel. With the exception of Elizabeth I’s likeness in North Carolina (erected because of her associations with the early years of American colonialism), those English king’s rendered in modern American statuery possess the distinction not only of having been dead centuries before Colombus arrived, but also of having played a role in America’s history of constitutional development. Perhaps this is why, for all her popularity there, Princess Diana has yet to be immortalisd in stone in the USA.

The series will kick off on 9 April 2013 with a lecture by Dr Joanne Parker (Exeter University) on King Alfred. This will be followed, on 16 April 2013, by Dr Mike Sutton (Visiting Fellow at Northumbria), who will describe the English Morris tradition in transatlantic context. The final talk will be on 23 April 2013, St George’s Day, and is a joint presentation by Professor Don MacRaild, Dr Tanja Bueltmann, and Dr Sally-Anne Huxtable on ‘Global St George.’ This talk will include an analysis of the material culture of Englishness abroad. All lectures are free to the public and will begin at 6 pm.

For more information contact Dr David Gleeson at david.gleeson@englishdiaspora.co.uk.

With Scotland readying itself for an historic national debate on its constitutional future in 2014, there are growing calls from pressure groups and politicians alike for the English people to engage in a similar debate and campaign for a devolved English parliament. Ostensibly this increasing desire for English devolution is a relatively modern phenomenon, advanced most noticeably by Scotland’s acceleration towards independence. In truth, the issues being raised at present by those campaigning for English devolution had already been broached over a century ago as members of the upper and middle classes began considering England’s constitutional future.

In the early years of the twentieth century the case for English devolution was tied up with wider debates about Irish Home Rule and the future of the British Empire. The 1904 publication Problems of Empire made reference to the enduring argument that too much time was, and some would argue still is, spent in Parliament debating issues of Scottish concern. ‘At present we find that a large proportion of the time of our representatives in Parliament is taken up in dealing with Irish, Scotch, or Welsh business, with matters which only indirectly concern ourselves. If the Irish have a right to manage their own affairs, have not we Englishmen a right to manage ours?’ This question about England’s political future, posed by the work’s author Thomas Allnutt Brassey, a man well-known and respected in imperial circles, was picked up on a number of occasions and by a variety of people.

In 1912, as the Third Home Rule Bill was introduced in Ireland, the question of English Home Rule was prominent in the minds of many and featured in a number of House of Commons debates. The possibility of establishing a scheme of Home Rule for England was mooted by Captain George Sandys; seven years later, and with no real progress having been made, Sir Ryland Adkins pondered: ‘Is it not time that England and the case for its Home Rule was considered?’. The formation of the London-based Scots National League in 1920 and Plaid Cymru in 1925, coupled with the partition of Ireland as a result of the Fourth Home Rule Bill, all contributed to a heightened state of national consciousness in Britain. If ever there was a time for Englishmen to transform their desires into a more solid movement, it was at this point in time.

In the 1920s those who supported English Home Rule could look to the Royal Society of St George (RSStG) for support. The RSStG was an association established in 1894 with the overriding objective to ‘strengthen and encourage the instinctive patriotism of the English people, and to develop the race consciousness all of English birth or origin’. Given the remit of this association it is not surprising that the RSStG was fully alert to the importance of the issue of home rule and identified in its official journal The English Race that ‘Home Rule for England would undoubtedly quicken the race-consciousness of our people’. At this time of growing nationalism in the home nations, the calls for home rule in England looked likely to develop into something of a more robust, political nature with the RSStG at the helm. In 1920 the RSStG published an article entitled ‘Home Rule for England’ in The English Race. The article, written the previous year by Thomas Brassey, proposes that the association should become the centre of a movement concerned with securing English Home Rule and urges the patriotic members of the Society to take up the cause, ‘If the Royal Society of St George believes as I do that Home Rule for England is a necessity, and will be the means of arousing Englishmen in the matter, it will do an invaluable service to the country and to the Empire’. In the same issue the Earl of Selborne declared that devolution in England would ‘give the English people freedom to deal with purely English affairs in a purely English way and would relieve them from the ill-informed influence of Scottish and of Welsh Members of Parliament’. The publication of these commentaries buoyed members of the RSStG who supported Brassey’s position and were quite vocal in their desire to see the vision of Home Rule for England realised.

However, as we know, his vision did not come to fruition. Given the nationalist discourse in Britain at the time it may seem surprising that the sentiments expressed by Brassey, and supported by the Royal Society of St George, did not crystallise into a solid political movement interested in establishing English Home Rule. We do know that the RSStG tended to engage itself in the promotion of cultural Englishness rather than political Englishness and was not often drawn into discussions of a distinctly political nature. Perhaps following the buoyant reception to Brassey’s proposals the association quickly returned to the promotion of Englishness at a more local level. Or, perhaps it was the loss of the movement’s advocate in 1919 owing to Brassey’s untimely death? Had he not been killed at the age of fifty-six would he have gone on to establish a party similar to the Scots and the Welsh? Perhaps he would. Which begs the question: if he had, would England also be counting down to an historic debate on its constitutional future? What do you think? We’d love to hear your views.

Family portrait: the King family from England

We are currently in the process of planning an exhibition about English migration to North America. The exhibition will focus on the general migration story of the English, but also their club culture (see also our recent video on the subject). The exhibition will be hosted in the Addlestone Library at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina, and will be opened at the end of May 2013 during the city’s Spoleto Festival. We will also bring with us a group of Morris dancers from Hexham who will perform, and we will give talks on the English in North America.

So here’s where you could come in and help us! We have a lot of good material, but we are keen on telling a genuine community story. So if, by any chance, you have any material in a box in your basement or up in the attic that might include any colourful additional exhibit for our exhibition, please do get in touch. Perhaps you have an old photograph from your ancestors coming out to North America, an image of their first home, or even their ticket over? Or maybe your ancestors were members of English societies such as St George’s societies and you have some memorabilia that you could share with us for the exhibition? Or is there an old bundle of letters? If you feel that you may have items that would be interesting to display, please do get in touch with us. Contact details here. And please spread the word.

The exhibition will focus on the period up to 1920 in particular and will come to the UK (Newcastle upon Tyne) in 2014 as part of the end-of-project activities we’ll be organising in connection with our research.