Crown and Country

A History of England through the Monarchy

David Starkey

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780007424825
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

PART I
BEGINNINGS

Chapter 1
The Shadow of Rome

SOMETIMES, EVEN WHEN you are a case-hardened professional, you see history differently. I had one such moment when I first visited the Great Hall of the National Archives in Washington. I was faintly shocked by the way in which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were displayed, like Arks of the Covenant, on a dimly lit altar and between American flags and impossibly upright American marines.

But what really struck me was the presence of a copy of Magna Carta. It was, as it were, in a side chapel. Nevertheless, here it was, this archetypically English document, in the American archival Holy of Holies.

It was placed there out of the conviction that it was the ancestor, however remote, of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And its presence set me thinking. Was this assumption correct? Does it help explain current concerns – like Britain’s, or England’s, reluctance to be absorbed in the European Union? Does it mean that there is an Anglo-Saxon way and a European way, as the French undoubtedly think? Does the difference derive from the contrast between Roman Law and English Common Law? Is it, finally, England versus Rome?

The first part of this book attempts to answer some of these questions. It uses the medium of narrative, which I think is the only proper means of historical explanation. And it goes back to the beginning, which is the only right place to start.

Indeed, if I may be excused Irish, it goes back before the beginning. The idea of the English does not appear until the eighth century, and the reality of England not till two hundred years later still. But I start a millennium earlier with the Roman invasions and occupation of Britain. I do so for two reasons. The first is that the great Anglo-Saxon historian Bede, who, more than anyone else, invented the idea of England, thought that this was the right place to start his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The second is that Rome is indeed ‘our common mother’ and is the fount from which all modern western European countries spring.

But, in the case of England, Rome is at best a stepmother. There is, uniquely in the Western Empire, an absolute rupture between the Roman province of Britannia and the eventual successor-state of Anglo-Saxon England. Elsewhere, in France, Italy or Spain, there are continuities: of language, laws, government and religion. In Britain there are none. Instead the Anglo-Saxon invaders of the fifth century found, or perhaps made, a tabula rasa.

This is normally regretted. Civilization was destroyed, the common story goes, and the Dark Ages began. I am not so sure. For Rome was not as civilized as we think and the Dark Ages – at least in Anglo-Saxon England – were by no means so gloomy. The roots of the misunderstanding, I think, lie in the importance we attach to material culture. We too live in a comfortable age, so we are impressed – too impressed – with the apparatus of Roman comfort: the baths, the sanitation, the running water, the central heating and the roads.

All these are, indeed, very sophisticated. But the politics that underpinned them was surprisingly crude. Not only was the Empire a mere military despotism, it was also peculiarly mistrustful of any form of self-help, much less self-government, on the part of its subjects. This is shown by a famous exchange of letters between the Emperor Trajan and the senatorial aristocrat and man of letters Pliny the Younger, who was then governor of the province of Bithynia in Asia Minor. The important provincial city of Nicomedia, Pliny informed the emperor, had suffered a devastating fire. Might he encourage the citizens to set up a guild of firemen to fight future conflagrations? On no account, replied the emperor, since such bodies, whatever their ostensible purpose, become fronts for faction and political dissent.

It was this enforced passivity on the part of its civilian populations that helped make the Empire such easy meat for the barbarian invaders. It is also its sharpest point of contrast with the kingdom of Wessex, round which England coalesced in the ninth and tenth centuries. Wessex was not a democracy, or even a peasant commonwealth, as some of its more enthusiastic Victorian historians assumed. But it was a participatory society, which balanced a powerful and effective monarchy at the centre with institutions of local government which required – and got – the active involvement of most free men. It was this combination, which was unique in Europe at the time and long after, as well as good luck and inspired royal leadership, which enabled Wessex to survive, and finally to thrive, in the face of the Viking invasions that destroyed all the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

The result was England. It was an early, perhaps indeed the earliest, nation-state, with a remarkable unity of language, culture and politics. The vernacular, Anglo-Saxon or Old English, not Latin as elsewhere, was the language of politics and administration. It was also the language of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This was no episodic monastic annal; it was a book of national record that charted, self-consciously and deliberately, the birth and development of a nation. All this gave Anglo-Saxon England a powerful sense of national solidarity: it could negotiate collectively with its kings even when they were conquerors; it could also strive to settle political disputes without the bloodshed of civil war.

It was, in short, different.

I

Two thousand years ago there was only one power that counted in the Western world: Rome. It was perhaps the purest, the most absolute monarchy the world has ever seen. The emperor incorporated in his own person all the powers of the state: military, executive, judicial and (in practice if not at first in theory) legislative. As imperator, he was commander of the army; as holder of the ‘tribunican powers’, he represented the sovereign majesty of the people and was protected by the terrible penalties of laesa maiestatis or treason; as pontifex maximus, he was chief priest. He was even regarded as a god himself, who was worshipped by many of his subjects in life and by more in death. His person, his palace and his very treasury were ‘sacred’.

And Britain, the province of Britannia, was just a tiny part of this monarchy, which, at its maximum extent, stretched from the Bay of Biscay in the west to the River Euphrates in the east and from the moors of Scotland in the north to the sands of the Sahara in the south.

The myriad peoples inhabiting the Empire spoke many different languages and honoured many different gods. But there were also powerful, supervening forces of unity as well. First, there was the army. It was the Roman army which had conquered most of the known world for Rome and it was the army which kept it Roman. So everywhere in the Empire the imperial army performed the same drills; built similar forts and wore the same uniforms. Close behind the soldier marched the tax collector and the lawyer. So everywhere too the imperial bureaucracy, which was mind-numbing in its size, hierarchical complexity and expense, collected the same taxes; enforced the same Roman law on all free men and used the same Roman weights and measures.

In these and all other forms of governmental administration, one official language was employed: Latin – though in the Eastern Provinces Greek also enjoyed a high status as a second, as yet unofficial, language. Everywhere, therefore, anybody who aspired to be anybody had to speak, read and write one or preferably both of these languages, which also carried a common Classical literature and culture with them. The same went for the visual arts where, yet again, there was a single official style – the Roman version of Classicism – which was used for buildings, arte-facts and decoration throughout the Empire.

How would Britain, which the Romans disparaged as the ‘ends of the earth’, fit in with all this?

The first Roman expeditions to Britain were led by the proto-emperor Julius Caesar, in 55 and 54 BC. Born in c.102 BC. into a noble if impoverished family, Caesar soon proved himself as ambitious as he was multi-talented. And, in achieving his ends, he set in train the events which transformed Rome from a Republic – a commonwealth of free men, if bitterly divided by class and interest group – into the absolute monarchy of the Empire.

Caesar’s expeditions to Britain were an interlude in his conquest of Gaul. This established his reputation both as the power-broker of the Roman world and, thanks to his account of the conquest in his De Bello Gallico (The Gallic War), as a great, if self-serving, military historian. The first British expedition was little more than an armed reconnaissance raid. But in the second Caesar brought a substantial force of five legions with their auxiliaries, amounting to about 27,000 men. He defeated Cassivellaunus, and penetrated north of the Thames. Caesar never makes clear Cassivellaunus’s precise status. But the best guess is that he was tribal king of the Catuvellauni. There was some attempt among the warring British tribes to sink their differences with the appointment of Cassivellaunus as overall commander, and some success with guerrilla tactics. But, finally, what turned the day for Caesar was not the force of the Roman army but the weakness and divisions of the British coalition. Nevertheless, Cassivellaunus had held out long enough to stop Caesar capitalizing on his gains. Instead, after signing treaties, Caesar withdrew to deal with more pressing problems in Gaul. The Roman legions would not return to Britain for nearly a hundred years.

In 44 bc, ten years after he had left Britain, Caesar was made life-dictator, though he ostentatiously refused the crown itself. Months later he was dead of multiple stab-wounds from the daggers of former friends and foes alike. The assassination was intended to save the Republic. In fact, it administered the death blow. For the man who emerged victorious from the years of civil war that followed Caesar’s assassination was Caesar’s great-nephew by marriage and adoptive son and heir Octavius, later surnamed Augustus.

Unlike Caesar, Augustus was as subtle as he was ruthless. So, instead of treating republican institutions with contempt, he cherished them. Indeed, he loved them to death. The Republic was ‘restored’, with much fanfare, in 27 BC. But, one by one, Augustus took over all the powers which had been carefully separated under the republican constitution.

But what to call this monarchy that dared not speak its name? Augustus himself liked to be addressed as princeps – that is, ‘first (among equals)’. But he also used the style imperator or general. Since the command of the army was now the real key to power, his successors soon started to use imperator or emperor as their principal title. The title was deliberately not royal to avoid alienating residual republican feeling. But it betokened, as it still does, power that was greater, in both extent and intensity, than that of any mere king.

In ad 43, Claudius, one of the most historically minded emperors, determined to complete the task that Caesar had started. Claudius was eager to establish his warlike credentials, but could not afford to take any personal risks. The result was that this second Roman invasion of Britain became as much a piece of theatre as a military expedition, with its two initial leaders effectively acting the corresponding roles of impresario and general. They were Aulus Plautius, whom the Roman historian Tacitus called a ‘famous soldier’, and Narcissus, Claudius’s all-powerful secretary and an imperial freedman, who accompanied Plautius as a kind of political commissar. But the oddly matched soldier and the manumitted ex-slave proved an effective double act. Plautius, with his Gaulish auxiliaries, fought his way to the Thames, at which point Narcissus informed the emperor that it was time for him to set out. Claudius eventually arrived, complete with ceremonial elephants and a vast cavalcade – and stayed only sixteen days. But it was long enough for him to take part in a set-piece campaign masterminded by Narcissus. He crossed the Thames ‘at the side of his troops’; ‘caused the barbarians to come to hand in battle’ and entered Colchester, capital of the Catuvellauni, in triumph. He was repeatedly acclaimed imperator by the troops and received the submission of no less than eleven British kings.

And all this in barely more than a fortnight! The sense of theatrical artificiality was only heightened by the fact that, when he had returned to Rome, Claudius immediately ordered a repeat performance. He took part in an even grander triumph and laid on a re-enactment of the highlights of his campaign in the Campus Martius. The scenes included ‘the assault and sacking of a town’ and ‘the surrender of the British kings’. We don’t know who played the British kings. But Claudius, ‘presiding in his general’s cloak’, appears to have played himself.

Meanwhile, back in the real world of Britannia, the political situation was more complex. For in ad 43 the Romans, whatever the textbooks might say, did not conquer Britain. Instead, in the smallest of small colonial wars, they defeated a single dominant tribe, the Catuvellauni, and took over their territories in the south-east. Outside this area, other tribal kings continued to exercise their sway under Roman protection. Indeed, the Romans added to their number by setting up the renegade British prince Cogidubnus as king of a new, artificially created tribe called, significantly, the Regnenses (‘The King’s Folk’).

The reason for this apparent generosity was straightforward. British kings, who had started to issue Roman-style coins and to give themselves the Latin title of rex, had been the most effective agents of Romanization before Claudius’s invasion and, led by that accomplished quisling Cogidubnus, they continued to play the same role afterwards.

But not for long. For rebellions, like that of Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, in ad 60, and deliberately fostered quarrels in the British royal families took their toll. The result was that, within thirty years, direct Roman rule covered most of southern Britain and was being aggressively extended far into modern Scotland.

There were to be no more kings in Britain till the Romans had gone.

With the coming of direct Roman rule, Romanization became a matter of public policy. It was pursued especially effectively by Agricola, who was governor for the unusually long period of six years from ad 78 to 84. Within a year of his arrival he had embarked on a major building programme, giving ‘private encouragement and public aid to the building of temples, courts of justice and private dwelling houses’. He also provided a sophisticated Classical education for the sons of the British elite.

His campaign seems to have enjoyed quick success. As early as ad 79 or 81, an inscription was set up at Verulamium (St Albans) to commemorate Agricola’s role in the creation of a splendid new Forum or marketplace. And the British elite at least eagerly embraced Latin, the toga, hot and cold baths and banqueting while reclining on couches. ‘They called [it] civilization’, Tacitus sardonically observes, ‘when it was but a part of their servitude.’

Perhaps. But the prosperity brought to Britain by the pax Romana – ‘the Roman peace’ – was real enough: some six thousand miles of well-engineered, solidly metalled roads were built; towns grew and flourished; farmsteads expanded into substantial, luxurious villas; the spa-complex at Aquae Sulis (Bath) reached its greatest extent in the third and fourth centuries and the population of Britain rose to about four million, a figure that would not be reached again for a millennium.

But there was a price to be paid for this prosperity as Britain, like the rest of the Empire, became a target for raids by less civilized peoples beyond the frontiers. The Romans, borrowing a piece of racial snobbery from the Greeks, called such peoples ‘barbarians’. The word meant ‘non-Roman’ or ‘non-Greek’. But it quickly acquired overtones: of contempt, because the barbarians were uncivilized; and of fear because they were a threat to civilization. For the German tribes, in particular, had never accepted rule from Rome and not even Rome had been able to force them to bend the knee.

There were internal problems as well. All power, in theory and usually in practice, was in the hands of the emperor. He, as we have seen, was a god on earth, whose task it was to rule and defend the Empire. The duty of his subjects was to obey and pay their taxes. The idea that there might be any limit on what the emperor could do, or that his subjects should have a say in what got done, was simply inconceivable.

With no constitutional means of opposition, force was the only – and the frequent – resort. The result was that the later Empire was plagued with rebellions, military revolts and palace coups. Britain, with the strong garrison required by its exposure to barbarian raids, supplied more than its fair share of military usurpers who aspired to the purple. It was also, like other remote outposts of empire, used as a place of internal political exile. The exiles conspired with each other; suborned the troops and generally subverted the province from within.

All these problems came together in the single great crisis of ad 367, known as the barbarica conspiratio, ‘the Conspiracy of the Barbarians’. Britannia was attacked from three sides: by the Picts from the north and the Scots (who then inhabited Ireland) from the west, while the Saxons rampaged on the Channel coast of Gaul and perhaps of Britain too. The Roman generals were killed or overwhelmed; internal conspiracy was given free rein and the fall of the Roman regime seemed certain. But the arrival of an expeditionary force commanded by a general-cum-politician of genius, Theodosius the Elder, saved the day. The barbarians were seen off; military discipline restored and the leading traitors executed.

So Roman Britain lived to fight another day. But just how Roman was it? For some time now it has been gospel among historians that Britannia was a province like any other, as loyal to Rome and as fully integrated into Roman ways. But there are some important pieces of evidence which refuse to fit the theory. For instance, the only Romano-British author whose works survive, Gildas, always distinguishes the ‘Romans’ from the ‘British’ and is almost uniformly hostile to the former: the Romans, he writes, had seized Britain by guile rather than honest victory in the field and they had imposed a rule that was both alien – ‘so that [the country] was no longer thought to be Britain but a Roman island’ – and oppressive, with ‘taskmasters’ and ‘cruel governors’. Historians have explained away Gildas’s hostility by arguing that, though he wrote fluent Latin, he reflected the views of those outside the Romanized elite.

Maybe. But there also have to be doubts about the political, as opposed to the social, Romanization of the elite itself. For even they failed to participate in the imperial administrative machine. Provincials, of course, were not allowed to hold office in their native province. But they could – and, in the case of the Gauls, frequently did – hold office elsewhere. Not so the British. Why? Perhaps, then as now, the Oceanus Britannicus (the English Channel) was seen as a real barrier. Perhaps, bearing in mind the booming prosperity of Britain in the third and fourth centuries, they were simply doing too well at home to want to risk their luck abroad.

We shall, finally, never know.

Whatever the reason, however, the British then remained semi-detached from the Empire, just as the British now are semi-detached from the European Union. And it is as different, semi-detached and even semi-barbarous, that they appear in our final glimpse of Roman Britain. It comes from the poem De Reditu Suo (‘On his Return’) by the Gallo-Roman poet Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, who was returning home after serving as a high official in Rome. He travelled by sea from port to port and in one of these he met his friend Victorinus, the former vicarius (governor) of Britain. Namatianus then gives a pen portrait of Victorinus, which turns into a back-handed picture of late Roman Britain. Victorinus, the ...