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 by 1453 the English possessions were reduced to a small area around Calais. Despite new French wars under Henry VIII, Calais was eventually lost in 1558, though subsequent English monarchs did not stop reiterating their nominal claim to be rulers of France until the Napoleonic era.
Defeat in the Hundred Years’ War therefore ended a period of almost four centuries when the Channel was a bridge as much as a barrier, linking two sides of an Anglo–French culture in which the English elite had roots and often lands in France. Over the next four centuries there slowly emerged a sense of contrasting and competing national identities, sharpened by the Reformation and the protracted struggle to establish a distinctively English form of Protestantism, which lasted till 1690, and then by another on-off Hundred Years’ War with the French, this time against Louis XIV and later Napoleon. In this process, the Channel did assume the character of an iconic barrier, especially in official rhetoric.Yet it never ceased to function as a bridge because, as a Protestant nation, England could not be indifferent to the fate of the Reformation on the continent, now wracked by conflicts between Protestants and Catholics.[13]
Henry VIII’s break with Rome began for very personal reasons: his desire for the Papacy to annul his barren marriage in the hope of producing a legitimate male heir with his latest infatuation, Anne Boleyn. When the Pope refused to grant him a divorce from his wife Catherine of Aragon, Henry set himself up as ‘supreme head’ of the English church and then, seizing on the convenient ideas of anti-clerical reformers, his regime attacked the institution of monasticism and dissolved all the religious houses, owners of about a third of the land in England. Instead of prudently managing those assets, however, Henry flogged them for ready cash to pay for an ego-trip bid to regain England’s lost French empire. The war of 1544–6 was a costly disaster and England’s incremental Protestant Reformation left the country increasingly exposed in Counter-Reformation Europe.
The 1550s proved a critical turning point, defined by the accidents of gender and mortality. Henry died in 1547. His young son Edward VI was an ardent Protestant, eager to promote his faith, but he died – probably of tuberculosis – in 1553, aged 15. Anticipating his death, Edward tried to ensure a Protestant succession by willing the Crown to his cousin, Lady Jane Grey. But her reign lasted only nine days before Mary, Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, was installed on the throne. A staunch Catholic, committed to extirpating Protestantism, Mary married the heir to the Spanish throne, who became King Philip II in 1556. This placed England on the other side of Europe’s wars of religion. But then in 1558, Mary died aged 42, possibly from cancer of the uterus. She was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth – the daughter of Anne Boleyn, who was then 25. Given the fate of her siblings, few would have predicted at her accession that Elizabeth would reign for nearly 45 years. In 1562, for instance, she contracted smallpox and seemed close to death. Her fortuitous longevity proved to be of huge historical significance.
Elizabeth was a firm but cautious Protestant. Both those adjectives mattered: she secured the Reformation but did not allow religion to divide the country as happened in France. Equally important, in 1559–60 Scotland’s anti-Catholic nobles expelled the French and established a Protestant regime. What ensued has been described as ‘the greatest transformation in England’s foreign relations since the start of the Hundred Years’ War’ – making ‘an ally of England’s medieval enemies the Scots, and an enemy of its medieval allies the Burgundians’ whose possessions in the Netherlands had now passed to Philip of Spain.[14] What’s more, France and Spain finally made peace in 1559 after nearly seven decades of periodic conflict, freeing Philip to concentrate on his mission of rolling back the Reformation.
In 1567 the Duke of Parma began a ruthless Spanish campaign to suppress the Protestant-led rebellion in the Low Countries; in 1572 thousands of French Protestants were killed in what became known as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. At home Elizabeth, pressed by her advisers, turned on recalcitrant Catholics as potential traitors; abroad she began to aid the Dutch revolt in the interests of national security. This escalating confrontation with Spain climaxed in Philip’s abortive invasion in July 1588 – which was defeated not so much by English naval prowess as by the fabled ‘Protestant wind’ that prevented the Spanish Armada from linking up with Parma’s army in Flanders and instead drove the sailing ships into the North Sea. A third of the original 130 vessels did not make it around Scotland and home to Spain.
From these years of fevered insecurity, when regime and religion both seemed to hang in the balance, there emerged a new national ideology. Rooted in providentialist