Robert Gibson - Best of Enemies

First published in 1995 by Sinclair Stevenson

Second edition published in 2004
by Impress Books, Innovation Centre, Rennes Drive, Exeter, EX4 4RN

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved
Robert Gibson, 2004

The right of Robert Gibson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 9781907605222

The original edition of this book has been updated to include the second Gulf War and the centenary of the Entente Cordiale. It has been extensively revised. One third of the material is completely new. Errors noted by discerning critics have been rectified and gaps filled. More biographical information has been provided on all the major historical figures and the sections on foreign travel have been significantly expanded.

For literary and linguistic matters, I have drawn on the various essays I wrote over the years following my Inaugural Professorial Lecture, La Msentente Cordiale, at the Queens University of Belfast in May 1963. For the historical and political background, I have consulted the works and authors listed in the bibliography at the end of this book. To a greater or lesser degree, their patient quarrying provided me with most of the fragments from which my mosaic has been constructed. For what I hope are significant improvements in this new edition, I am particularly beholden to outstanding work by Philip Bell, Linda Colley, Robert Gildea, Gerald Newman and Andrew Roberts.

I particularly want to thank Richard Willis and Colin Morgan of Impress Books whose work on the editing and design of the book has been exemplary. For their consistent encouragement and practical help, I am grateful to two friends of long standing: to Ian Roberts for providing a wealth of quotations on nineteenth-century diplomacy and to Andrew Tew for the illustration on the front cover. Most of the English cartoons reproduced here come from the voluminous archives of the Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature at the University of Kent and I am indebted to its Head, Dr Nicholas Hiley for so promptly providing high quality images for reproduction.

For permission to reproduce cartoons still under copyright, I wish to thank the following: Express Newspapers for 8.2 and 8.3; Ewan Macnaughton Associates (agents for The Daily Telegraph) for 8.6; The New Statesman for 8.5; Punch for 8.7; Solo Syndication (agents for The Evening Standard) for 7.4, 8.1 and 8.8; the Trinity Mirror Group for 6.9 and 7.3.

For permission to quote from books still under copyright, I wish to thank the following: Curtis Brown Ltd and the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill for the quotations from the speeches and writings of Sir Winston Churchill; Macmillan Publishers Ltd and the Estate of Charles Morgan for quotations from his writings.

Robert Gibson, Sidmouth, October 2004

England, which has been our enemy since time immemorial, is now our model [of parliamentary democracy]. Down the years, she has been our occasional ally and our everlasting enemy; so similar to us, indeed so close to us in culture and in power, that we have to fear her; too different in character and in customs for her really to love us. Any alliance, however long it lasts, can never be more than an unfortunate fiction, especially if it leads us to forget our experience of history: the lessons Time has taught us make this crystal-clear. Great nations do not combine together either because of institutions they may have in common or because of their geographic proximity. On the contrary, when nations resemble one another too closely, their keen desire to vie with one another can sometimes turn to envy. Peoples unite only because of what they dont have in common, because of the difference in their interests and desires, because of the different weight they register on the worlds scales. If two blocks of marble identical in shape and weight, carved and polished in exactly the same fashion are placed side by side, they will need support brass tenons for the Parthenon, cement for the Roman amphitheatres if they are to form an edifice which will inevitably be eroded and undermined by Time. On the other hand, stones of uneven cut and shape, piled together in apparent disorder, are locked together and strengthened by their jagged protrusions, presenting to the surprise of posterity the spectacle of Cyclopean walls, rock-solid victors over the passing years.

(Le comte Auguste de Marcellus: Souvenirs diplomatiques, 1850; a confidant of Chateaubriand, Marcellus was a diplomat and an archaeologist. In 1829, he brought back the Venus de Milo from the island of Melos in the Cyclades. It has been on display in the Louvre ever since.)

From this period, we may date the commencement of that great animosity which the English nation has ever since borne to the French, which has so visible an influence on all future transactions and which has been, and continues to be, the spring of many rash and precipitate resolutions among them.

David Hume, History of Great Britain (17547)

The notion of nationhood is a relatively modern concept. The term natio was by no means unknown in the Middle Ages indeed it occurs in Cicero, Caesar and the Latin Bible but it did not then have the resonance it unfailingly has today. Self-awareness and self-importance are now essential components: pride in a common descent, a common history and a common culture. Scale too is significant : the size of the community claiming nationhood is impossible to quantify but must surely be considerable. None of this was true of the medieval natio: it could denote an entity as small as a city state, a district or even a group of university students from the same geographical locality. At the University of Paris in the Middle Ages, there were four such nations: the French, the Normans, the Picardians and the English. The present-day rue des Anglais, in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, commemorates where once they were housed, though in medieval times, the university English nation also included Scots, Irish, German, Scandinavian and Slavonic students.

Medieval man was clannish, his horizons were literally limited and his loyalties were strictly circumscribed. The community which commanded his allegiance had to be small, tangible and immediately accessible. He would regularly have been enlisted to fight on behalf of his local overlord but not for a cause as vague as his country. The present-day entities of England and France took centuries to forge. In the early medieval period, England was subdivided into many kingdoms , fighting as fiercely amongst themselves as they were obliged to do against waves of rapacious invaders from over the North Sea. Across the Channel, the political situation was equally fissile but somewhat more advanced. In Roman Gaul, there had been Franci from the third century. They played the leading part in destroying the old Roman Empire and they dominated the new order, with Frankish kings and Frankish warriors. Francia came to designate that region of their greatest strength. In the period of its greatest power, under Charlemagne (742841), Francia designated all the Cisalpine provinces of ancient Gaul, from the marches of Brittany in the west to beyond the Rhine in the east. When the Carolingian Empire broke up in the tenth century, the eastern provinces passed over to the German kingdom while western or Gallic Francia, the nucleus of modern France, designated the Paris basin together with some outlying districts to the south and the west. Brittany became a separate kingdom as were Toulouse, Poitou, Aquitaine and Normandy, all immensely powerful and jealous of their independence. How and why France and England fought intermittently for five hundred years to secure mastery of those provinces will be the subject of this chapter.