Chances are, if you’re an Irish person, that “Rule Britannia”, even if you sneakily regard it as a bit of a tune, is not on the top of your party playlist. As British patriotic hymns go, it’s the most in-your-face, with all that talk of a heavenly mandate to “rule the waves” and about how “Britons never shall be slaves”. Understandably, those are lyrics that might not sit well with those of us who might have historic reasons to believe that Britain did not always extend this love of liberty to those over whom its Government claimed dominion.
You might therefore be tempted to agree with those in Britain who’ve piped up this week to demand that the song be, in effect, cancelled: Its most well-known annual outing is when it is played every year at the BBC’s “last night of the proms”. Here’s the 2011 version:
The controversy kicked off with an appearance on the BBC’s long-running “desert island disks” show by a musician who has performed at the proms saying the song should no longer be played because of its “associations with colonialism and slavery”:
Musician Sheku Kanneh-Mason has said Rule, Britannia! “makes people feel uncomfortable” and should not be sung at the Last Night of the Proms.
The song sparked debate in 2020 when the BBC reversed its decision to drop its lyrics from the Proms.
Rule, Britannia! is controversial due to its associations with colonialism and slavery.
The BBC said the Proms were built on “long-standing traditions” which were “loved by people around the world”.
But here’s the problem with all of this: While you might watch union flags flying, and hear talk of heaven’s command for Britain to rule the waves, the song does not in fact commemorate either slavery or colonialism at all.
The song was written in 1740, intended to be the finale of the opera Alfred by the renowned composer Thomas Arne. The opera tells the story not of the British empire, but of the victory of Alfred the Great over the Vikings at the battle of Edington in the year 878, almost 200 years before the Normans arrived and 50 years before the crowning of the first King of England, Aethelstan, in 927AD.
Alfred, then the Petty King (or Duke) of Wessex, was the last remaining Anglo-Saxon ruler in England standing against the viking invasion known to viewers of the TV show “Vikings” as the invasion of the sons of Ragnar Lodbrok. The Vikings had conquered most of England, and would have taken it all, if not for Alfred’s victories against the odds. The lyrics about Britons never being slaves refer to the Viking practice of seizing christians into slavery.
Further context is this: At the time when Rule, Britannia was written, Britain was still experiencing the wrath of the Barbary Pirates. Indeed, just 100 years earlier, Baltimore in Cork had been sacked by the Barbaries, with 107 Irish villagers carried off to slavery in arab lands. Similar raids had been experienced all around the UK.
In other words, what we’re presently seeing is a campaign to cancel a song that bears no relationship to what the song is actually about: You can loathe Rule Britannia as an expression of English patriotism (with which Irish people have never been especially comfortable) while at the same time recognising that it has nothing to do, at all, with lauding the British Empire or British Colonialism. It’s a song about defensive battles, not conquests or colonialism.