in the British market – this role is about played out. Great Britain, attempting to be a broker between the United States and Russia, has seemed to conduct policy as weak as its military power. H.M.G. [Her Majesty’s Government] is now attempting – wisely, in my opinion – to reenter Europe, from which it was banished at the time of the Plantagenets, and the battle seems to be about as hard-fought as were those of an earlier day.[3]
That whole paragraph is worth quoting both because of its contemptuous dismissal of the Commonwealth, the Sterling Area and Britain’s Cold War diplomacy and also because of its (now rather uncanny) prediction that Britain’s attempt to enter the EEC might presage another Hundred Years’ War. Above all, however, it was the epigram about Britain losing an empire without finding a role that caught the eye in London and provoked an outcry in Tory circles. The Express denounced this American ‘stab in the back’ of its devoted ally; the Telegraph observed snidely that Acheson had always been ‘more immaculate in dress than in judgement’.[4] And because the former Secretary of State was deemed to be close to President Kennedy, the Prime Minister himself felt it necessary to offer his own capsule narrative of British history, to placate his party and what he called ‘the “patriotic” elements in the country’. Macmillan declared that ‘Mr Acheson has fallen into an error which has been made by quite a lot of people in the course of the last four hundred years, including Philip of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler.’[5]
An Evening Standard cartoon showing Prime Minister Harold Macmillan begging President John F. Kennedy to let him be the back legs of the American pantomime horse, while Dean Acheson looks on from the wings.
Acheson never retracted his argument but he did later express regret about how he had expressed it – albeit in a typically sardonic manner. ‘The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull,’ he told an interviewer in 1970, adding that this was ‘not always easy to achieve’. He admitted that the controversial sentence in his West Point speech suffered from being too epigrammatic and quotable. ‘If I’d taken twice the number of words to express it, it would have been inoffensive and recognised as true at once. Since then it has been adopted by almost every British politician, though they have never given me credit for it at all.’[6]
Acheson was right: his one-liner about losing empire and not yet finding a role became almost a cliché of British commentary, especially for those who wanted Britain to join ‘Europe’.[7] Yet the emotional invocations of national history by Gaitskell and Macmillan reflect an abiding counter-strain, which re-emerged, for instance, at the time of German unification in 1989–90. ‘We beat the Germans twice, and now they’re back,’ Margaret Thatcher exclaimed during a European summit in December 1989, a month after the Berlin Wall was breached.[8] Her close friend Nicholas Ridley vented similar feelings splenetically to a Spectator journalist, calling the European monetary union ‘a German racket, designed to take over the whole of Europe’ and exclaiming that, as for handing over sovereignty to the EC, ‘you might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’ The Spectator gleefully ran the interview as a cover story, graced by a poster of the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl daubed with a Hitler moustache, and Ridley was obliged to resign from the Cabinet. So Boris Johnson’s battle cry in 2016 that the British must again be ‘heroes of Europe’ and stand up to German domination was more of the same. The Telegraph headlined that story: ‘Boris Johnson: The EU wants a superstate, just as Hitler did’.[9]
To make some sense of these potted narratives we need to take in more than the Second World War and its aftermath, and look across the broad sweep of Gaitskell’s ‘thousand years’. An appropriate way to do so is by reflecting on the ‘English Channel’. Although this figures much less in the narratives of Welsh or Scottish history (defined by the Marches or the Borders) and hardly at all for Ireland (across the Irish Sea), the Channel has come to symbolise the Britain–Europe divide: a maritime frontier etched out in the White Cliffs of Dover. But we need a more fluid understanding of the Channel within ‘our island story’ – a more nuanced perspective on Britain’s changing interactions with a changing Continent.
The Channel – barrier and bridge
A millennium ago, what we British now call the English Channel was described as not so much a divide but a passageway between two land masses. Geoffrey of Monmouth, the twelfth-century chronicler, referred to it as ‘the straits to the south’ which ‘allow one to sail to Gaul’.[10] His perspective was hardly surprising because, for several centuries after 1066, England was ruled by a political elite who spoke a version of French and who moved naturally between their domains on either side of the water. And in the age of sail, not rail, France could be reached from London far more quickly than Scotland. The result was ‘a shared culture’, ruled by an intermarried aristocracy and by the Roman Catholic Church, whose clerics constituted the administrative class (and also the historians).[11]
The sharing was, however, far from harmonious because of rival claims to territory and title. Armies from the French side of the Channel invaded England on several occasions, notably during the civil war of 1139–53 over the succession to Henry I and again in 1215–17 during the ‘Barons’ War’ against King John about how to interpret and implement the Magna Carta. More common, however, were armies crossing in the opposite direction, from north to south. After Henry I, the Anglo–Norman dynasty founded by William the Conqueror were succeeded by the descendants of Geoffrey of Anjou – Henry II and his sons Richard and John – whose ‘Angevin empire’ at its peak in the 1170s stretched in a great arc from Normandy west to encompass Brittany and then south down the coast to Bordeaux, Aquitaine and the Pyrenees, as well as east through the Massif Central to the Auvergne. Although covering about half of modern France, this ‘empire’ was a hodgepodge of separate possessions, plagued by disputes within Henry’s fractious family. It fell apart during the Anglo–French wars in John’s reign, with the loss of Normandy and all the other lands apart from Gascony, the southwest rump of the once vast duchy of Aquitaine.
Edward I and the Plantagenets struggled to hang on to what was left of their French lands. Their crucial claim was to the duchy of Aquitaine. The Capetian kings of France – engaged, like Edward I in Britain, in an aggressive programme of state building – claimed that, under the 1259 Treaty of Paris, the duchy could only be held in homage and fealty to the French crown. In 1286, Edward I did perform an act of homage to Philippe IV of France, using the words, ‘I become your man for the lands which I hold from you on this side of the sea according to the form of peace made between our ancestors.’[12]
The implications of this vow became increasingly intolerable to his successors: a monarch who claimed to be sovereign on the English side of the sea was in a position of feudal inferiority to the Valois dynasty in respect of his continental inheritance. As the confrontation escalated, Edward III (the grandson of Edward I) took advantage of a French succession crisis in 1328 to assert his claim, via his mother, to rule France as well as England. The result was open warfare between the two monarchies on and off from 1337 – what became known as the Hundred Years’ War. After Henry V’s surprise victory at Agincourt in 1415, the English and their Burgundian allies did finally seem close to enforcing their claim. In the 1420s they controlled much of France from Brittany and the Channel to the Loire. But then the war turned against them, in part due to the inspirational leadership of Jeanne d’Arc, and
