England as prototype

Abstract

What have I done for you, England, my England? What is there I would not do, England, my own? William Ernest Henley's poem certainly fits Anderson's dating for a surge of English nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century. We may note in passing that it was still England, not Britain, that Henley hailed as ‘chosen daughter of the Lord’, but while his poem, like many others, certainly shows that English nationalism was alive and well in the 1880s, it does not at all show where it began, and that is the question which must concern us now. One can find historians to date ‘the dawn of English national consciousness’ (or some such phrase) in almost every century from the eighth to the nineteenth. If Anderson puts it in the heyday of late Victorian imperialism and Greenfeld in the early years of the Tudor monarchy, others see it as a product of Foxe's Book of Martyrs , the Hundred Years War, the reign of Stephen, the Saxon monarchy in the age of Athelstan and Edgar, or even the Venerable Bede for whom a decisive ‘role in defining English national identity and English national destiny’ has been claimed by Patrick Wormald. There is, I suspect, a fairly widespread willingness even among modernists to admit that late Elizabethan England was already becoming a genuinely national society, with tinges of nationalism strongly fed on Protestantism.