SOURCE: Bray, Matthew. “Removing the Anglo-Saxon Yoke: The Francocentric Vision of Charlotte Smith's Later Works.” The Wordsworth Circle 24, no. 3 (summer 1993): 155-58.

[In the following essay, Bray examines the increasingly pro-French version of the history of English-French relations.]

Charlotte Smith initially opposed the British war with France for humanitarian reasons. In her polemical blank-verse poem, The Emigrants (1793), for instance, Smith argues that her fellow country men and women should derive national pride from “acts of pure humanity” toward French ecclesiastical emigrés displaced by the Revolution rather than from “the deafening roar / Of Victory from a thousand brazen throats, / That tell with what success wide wasting War / Has by our Compatriots thinned the world” (33-34). During the Napoleonic era, however, Smith's opposition to the war moved beyond mere humanitarian pacifism. From 1798 until her death in 1806, she articulated an increasingly seditious vision of England's historical and political ties to France, a vision that went against the patriotic Anglo-Saxonism that consumed England during the early years of the war. I wish here to trace the development of Smith's Francocentric vision of English History—of English history as French history—paying special attention to the remarkable military history section of her final major poem, “Beachy Head” (1807, posthumous).

My first two examples come from works that Smith ostensibly wrote for children: Minor Morals, interspersed with sketchs of natural history, historical anecdotes, and original stories (1798) and History of England, from the earliest records, to the peace of Amiens; in a series of letters to a young lady at school (1806). Through the book's authoritative teacher Mrs. Belmour, Minor Morals strongly opposes the idea that the physical barriers between nations should carry any ideological significance: “Nor could the Omnipotent implant in the inhabitants of two divisions of the earth parted from each other only by a few leagues of water … a natural antipathy, so that, from mere hatred and detestation of each other, the study of whole generations of these men should be mutual annoyance, and their whole ambition to sweep each other from the earth” (2nd. ed. 1799, 7-8). She proceeds to critique further the anti-French, nationalist mindset of the English by asserting that England was first “peopled from Gaul”; therefore, “we can trace our origin no farther back than to the people [the French] we hate and despise” (17). Thus Smith's opposition to the war with France acquires a new ideological dimension here: not only is war inhumane but also, the English should realize that in fighting the French they are in fact futilely battling themselves.

The emergence of a patriotic Anglo-Saxonism in England during the first decade of the 19th century found expression in historical account such as Sharon Turner's popular History of the Manners, Landed Property, Government, Laws, Poetry, Literature, Religion, and Language of the Anglo-Saxons (1805), in the spate of national epics that emphasized King Alfred's central role in the formation of English character, in anti-Napoleon broadsides, and in the manifold sermons, military histories and poems occasioned by Nelson's victory and death at Trafalgar. Although the argument that contemporary English liberties stemmed from Anglo-Saxon institutions had been used since the Civil War to justify constitutional arguments for either a stronger parliament or monarchy, by 1805 it was tied to a generalized patriotism, one complacent with contemporary English institutions and with the supposed coherence of English liberty over the past millennium.¹ In her History of England (3 vols. 1806), Smith first mimics and then subverts this nationalistic Anglo-Saxonism.

Like contemporary patriotic poets and historians, she begins conventionally by stating that “the rudiments of those laws which made this country the cradle of freedom” can be found in Anglo-Saxon England. Smith declares that demonstrating this continuity has been “so ably executed by our historians” that she only aims “to abridge their more elaborate accounts” (I. 79). Her “abridgement” consists, however, of an ironic account of Anglo-Saxon England as a brutally militarist land where the average working man had no say in his government, where slavery was a fact of life, and where marriage was a transaction in which women functioned solely as economic tokens. In constructing this counter-history, moreover, Smith appropriates and augments the historical narrative of David Hume, the one major British historian who dissented from the dominant seventeenth and eighteenth-century view of Anglo-Saxon England as the cradle of English liberty (Simmons 38).

Of the Wittenagemote, or the national council of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, which the majority of historians took to be the precursor to the House of Commons (Hill 65-122, passim), Smith writes: “… it is doubtful whether that rank of men which we call the Commons … formed a part of this assembly … it is not probable that the Saxon conquerors, who thought nothing glorious or honourable but the profession of arms, should admit those to a share of the government who were engaged in trade or commerce, or employed as tillers of the land. … The landed property of England was in the hands of a few; and these, most likely, formed the national assembly of those limits.”² When the possession of slaves is added to the generally unrepresentative nature of the Wittenagemote, “All the evidence we possess agrees that they had no liberal ideas of general freedom” (I: 81). Smith characterizes the Anglo-Saxons as “extremely credulous and bigoted”: in their houses of mourning “drinking and riot prevailed,” they educated their children solely for war, and marriage was primarily an economic exchange in which a bride “was frequently purchased of her guardian” by her intended husband (I: 82-3). If there exists any connection between Anglo-Saxon and modern England, Smith seems to suggest, then it is a continuity of barbarism, ignorance and oppression.

A highly compressed, loco-descriptive meditation on war, poverty, history and human happiness, “Beachy Head” carries Smith's subversive historiography to its logical conclusion. It does so by reversing a central emphasis of patriotic Anglo-Saxonism: the notion that the Norman Conquest imposed a short-lived, tyrannical “yoke” upon nascent Anglo-Saxon liberties. Going completely against this anti-Norman grain, Smith exalts the Normans' valor and piety, making their deeds the centerpiece of her account of English military history (lines 117-167). Thus “Beachy Head”'s “proudest roll by glory fill'd” (167) begins not with the earliest English military victories that other contemporary accounts featured,³ but instead with an extensive, celebratory history of the Normans, beginning with the Rollo's conquest of Normandy and Brittany and ending with William the Conqueror's defeat of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy.

In her note to this passage, Smith describes how Rollo, after Charles the Simple granted him Normandy and Brittany, “… added the more solid virtues of the legislator to the fierce valour of the conqueror—converted to Christianity, he established justice, and repressed the excesses of his Danish subjects, till then accustomed to live only by plunder. His name became the signal for pursuing those who violated the law.” (p. 148) She fills in the gap between Rollo and William with a second incident illustrating the Normans' Christian nobleness. In 983, a small party of Normans, returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, helped to liberate Salerno from Islamic rule; this act initiated the chain of events that led to the Norman sovereignty over Naples and Sicily (pp. 148-50).

Unlike the early history of the Normans, Smith does not relegate the Norman Invasion of England to the footnotes. She first emphasizes the Normans' military prowess. The “One not inglorious struggle” England made could not repel “The war song daring Roland sang … with astounding voice” and thus “the Saxon heptarchy, / [was] Finish[ed] for ever” (133-8). Smith, however, goes beyond depicting the Norman's superior military might by also describing their humility and piety in victory, perhaps in satiric contrast to the loud boasting that nearly all of England voiced after Nelson's victory at Trafalgar. William constructed a holy pile at Battle Abbey, where “to appease the heaven's wrath for so much blood, / The conqueror bade unceasing prayers ascend, / And requiem for the slayers and the slain” (140-42).

It is worth recounting how potentially dangerous such a positive account of Norman history was in the post-Amiens period. For the English, the Norman Conquest immediately brought to mind fears of a second French conquest by Napoleon. Thus, in the contemporary imagination, William the Conqueror equalled Napoleon, and the Normans represented the modern French, poised to invade England at any moment. One satiric handbill from 1803, “Bonaparte's Ten Commandments,” cites Napoleon's desire to become “future Conqueror of the base English, while another “[Napoleon's] Epitaph” refers to his “boasted Conquest” (emphases added).⁴ W. T. Fitzgerald's poem, “Britons, to Arms,” declares that, after the English fleet crushes Napoleon, “ENGLAND [will] never know INVASION more.”⁵ The Letter “I” in “The Loyalist's Alphabet” (1804) stands for “Invasion once stood,” another direct reference which implicitly contrasts the successful Norman Invasion to the imputed failure of a Napoleonic Invasion (Ashton, 241).

Contrary to this spate of patriotic propaganda, Smith invokes the Norman Conquest not to bury it in the past as an example of the disastrous consequences of national irresoluteness, but to praise it and, by unavoidable historical analogy, to praise Napoleon. And if lauding the Normans was risky, then equally dangerous was Smith's assertion that the Saxon heptarchy was finished “for ever.” This pointed statement could not fail to carry significant ideological weight in the spring of 1806, when Smith submitted the poem to her publisher,⁶ suggesting as it does that the supposedly enduring Anglo-Saxon institutions championed by the patriotic historians and poets were extinguished as well, that modern England, by implication, could really only trace itself back to the Normans—to the French. Furthermore, not to decry past occupations of England as tyrannical and unnatural was tantamount to advocating a new French invasion during the tense, post-Amiens period during which Smith wrote “Beachy Head.”

Smith pushes her seditious historiography yet one step further in her note on the Normans, the longest by far of any that she writes for “Beachy Head.” Here, after recounting the establishment of Normandy and their victory over Saracens at Jerusalem, Smith traces the Norman advance in the tenth and eleventh centuries down through the Italian peninsula, where they made an alliance with the Pope and “became the sovereigns both of Sicily and Naples.” Immediately after making this statement, Smith declares that “How William … possessed himself of England, is too well known to be repeated here” (but she gives a detailed account anyway) (pp. 149-150).

The latter of this narrative resonates strongly and, I would suggest, intentionally with contemporary European history. On September 27, 1805, Napoleon announced his conquest of Naples and, in early 1806, Joseph Bonaparte declared himself the “King of the Two Sicilies.”⁷ With Napoleon's troops poised to sail across the Channel as late as August, 1805, fear of invasion, though temporarily assuaged by Nelson's victory at Trafalgar, would still have been prominent in the minds of English men and women in early 1806.⁸ The strong parallel between Norman and recent French history suggests that William's “well-known” conquest of England may find a logical historical repetition—with England falling after Naples and Sicily—in an imminent Napoleonic conquest.

It seems unlikely that Smith did not have in mind this parallel because of her pointed selection of Naples and Sicily out of the scores of Italian city-states that the Normans subdued in the tenth and eleventh centuries—many of these more powerful than Naples—and because of her rearrangement of historical chronology: the Normans in fact did not conquer Sicily until 1072, six years after the conquest of Anglo-Saxon England.⁹ Smith's repeated emphasis on the cooperation of the Normans with papal authority and on William's Christian piety may, furthermore, also have a parallel among Smith's readers with Napoleon's own alliances with the Vatican and his coronation by Pope Pius VII on December 2, 1804.

After presenting this dangerous account of the Norman history, Smith more carefully satirizes the manifold apostrophes to English naval power that appeared after Trafalgar: e.g. The British Flag Triumphant! or the Wooden Walls of Old England! (1806). Declaring initially that France would be presumptuous to hope “that ever thou again, Queen of the isles! shalt crouch to foreign arms,” Smith further mimics hyperbolic assertions of national power in the remainder of this section: England is the “Imperial Mistress of the obedient sea” who will “now undaunted meet a world in arms” (144-5, 151, 153). And yet the only specific event recalled within this mimicry of nationalistic discourse is the French victory over a combined English and Dutch fleet in 1690 off of Beachy Head:

England! 'twas where this promontory rears
Its rugged brow above the channel wave,
Parting the hostile nations, that thy fame,
Thy naval fame was tarnish'd, at what time
Thou, leagued with the Batavian, gavest to France
One day of triumph. …

(154-59)

Within this passage, Smith suggests that England's claim to military fame is limited to its naval exploits when the narrator immediately qualifies “thy fame” with “thy naval fame,” perhaps implying that England has almost desperately celebrated its victories at sea in order to cover over the fact of its inadequate army, which had been all but useless for checking France's European conquests. Or, as John Thelwall said in The Triumph of Albion, “the Sea redeems The Land's disasters” (192-93). On land as well as at sea, France's contemporary triumphs were hardly rare: Napoleon himself viewed Trafalgar merely as a “painful incident” (Lefebvre 194).

By presenting events from “the proudest roll by glory fill'd” that were, in fact, significant defeats, this section of “Beachy Head” continues to chip away at the nationalistic version of England's military glory. Moreover, the Norman Invasion and the lost battle directly off Beachy Head seriously challenge a belief in the inviolable integrity of England, since they represent French victories both within England and perilously close to England. Smith further discredits the notion of England's mythical invulnerability by pointing out, in another note, that it was only French ignorance of the English coast and failure to communicate effectively among themselves that prevented them, in 1690, from taking “all the advantage they might have done from this victory” (p. 153). One hundred and sixteen years later, this note implies, the French under Napoleon do not suffer these handicaps of intelligence and organization.

By the time Smith recounts the Battle of Beachy Head, she has violated in all possible ways the implicit code in the growing patriotic discourse of the era. “Beachy Head” never invokes the key figure of King Alfred, the supposed progenitor of English liberties, and, indeed, does not discuss Anglo-Saxon England at all, except to narrate its ultimate defeat. Nor does it allude to Nelson's victories at the Nile and Trafalgar, a commonplace in contemporary verse accounts of England's military history such as The Triumph of Albion (9-19). The poem, in fact, never mentions any specific English victories, highlighting instead the disastrous Battle of Beachy Head. Finally, and most seditiously, she places a glorified account of William the Conqueror and the Normans at the center of her narrative.

Smith does not, moreover, limit her attention to the relationship between England and France to military history. The inciting incidents in “Beachy Head” is the prehistoric geological separation of England from France, the time when

                    … the Omnipotent
Stretch'd forth his arm, and rent the solid hills,
Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between
The rifted shores, and from the continent
Eternally divided this green isle.

(6-10)

Lines 117-166 of “Beachy Head” effectively place this geological division into an historical epic framework. Smith's emphasis upon the Norman Conquest as the founding event of English history and her drawing of implicit parallels between the Normans and the modern French suggest that the paradise lost during the divisive wars between England and France since the Norman Conquest—a division that exacerbates their physical separation by the English Channel—will be regained when England recognizes its common political and historical ties to France. Napoleon, as the second conqueror of England, may be the messiah who will forcibly bring about this recognition. Thus, far from echoing the popular hatred of the “Norman Yoke,” Smith, in her later works, calls for a removal of the ideological Anglo-Saxon yoke that allows the English people to support an untenable division with France, the country from whence they came and with whom they may again soon unite.

Notes

1. On the constitutional arguments, Chapter 3, “The Norman Yoke,” in Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (1958) 50-122 and J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1967). On patriotic epics of the early 1800s, Stuart Curran Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986) 161-62. On Sharon Turner's patriotic Anglo-Saxonism, Clare Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (1990) 55-60.

2. This passage closely follows Hume's assessment; see The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, 6 vols. (1762) I:146.

3. E.g., John Thelwall, The Triumph of Albion (1805) in Donald H. Reiman, comp. John Thelwall: Ode to Science; John Gilpin's Ghost; Poems; The Triumph of Albion (1978).

4. Quoted in John Ashton, English Caricature and Satire on Napoleon I (1888; rpt. 1968) 159, 177.

5. The Northampton Mercury, July 23, 1803, quoted in Colin Pedly, “Anticipating Invasion: Some Wordsworthian Contexts,” TWC [The Wordsworth Circle] 21:2 (Spring, 1990):64.

6. Florence May Anna Hilbish, “Charlotte Smith: Poet and Novelist (1749-1806),” diss., U of Pennsylvania, 1941, pp. 217-18.

7. Mack Smith Denis, A History of Sicily: Modern Sicily after 1715 (1968) 336-40. The French did not, however, fully conquer Sicily at this time, despite Joseph's decree.

8. Georges Lefebvre, Napoleon: From 18 Brumaire to Tilset 1799-1807, trans. Henry F. Stockhold (1969) 188-94.

9. David C. Douglas, The Norman Achievement: 1050-1100 (1969) 235-41.