Terence Hawkes

Few things unhinge the British as much as doublet and hose. The merest hint unleashes golden fantasies of order and well-being, yoking together gentility and free-born earthiness within a deep dream of peace. And so, in 1989, when bulldozers in Southwark accidentally laid bare the foundations first of the Rose Theatre and then of the Globe, a furore began fit to astonish any passing Elizabethan ghost. The possibility that one of these sites might fall prey to property developers generated more squeaking and gibbering in the London streets than you could shake a severed head at. Greenrooms of actors ranged anoraked bodies against the pile-drivers. Guggenheims of scholars jumboed in from North America. There was weeping and wailing and the gnashing of clapperboards for the TV cameras. The air thickened with pronouncements about culture, art, our ‘national heritage’.

We haven’t been allowed to forget that 1994 has brought the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings. But their sound and fury masked another, no less fateful event whose anniversary we will probably not be asked to remember. As the Italian campaign of 1943 slowed to a painful crawl, the British found themselves more and more dependent on the Americans both to maintain it and to mount any effective invasion of Northern France in the following year. No conclusive Churchillian thrust into the soft underbelly of Europe remained on the cards. And so at this point, just 50 years ago, the balance of the world decisively shifted. The United States took over the role of premier Western power and it began to dawn on British politicians and their generals that the game was finally up. In any case, Roosevelt had already made it quite clear that the price of the United States’s entry into the war in Europe was that the British should give up their empire. In consequence, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out in his matchless Blood, Class and Nostalgia (1990), the British underwent a massive and soul-gelding relegation. Harold Macmillan’s remark that ‘these Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go’ was never anything but whistling in the dark.