English nationalism

Saint George's Cross, the Flag of England

Map of the British Isles: England (red) within the United Kingdom (pink)

English nationalism or English patriotism (the terms are sometimes distinguished) is a sentiment that asserts that the English are a nation and promotes the cultural unity of English people. In a general sense, it comprises political and social movements and sentiment inspired by a love for English culture, language and history, and a sense of pride in England and the English people. English nationalists often see themselves as predominantly English rather than British.

Quotes

• Poitiers and Cressy tell,
  When most their pride did swell,
  Under our swords they fell:
    No less our skill is
  Than when our grandsire great,
  Claiming the regal seat,
  By many a warlike feat
    Lopp’d the French lilies.’
  • Michael Drayton, "Ballad of Agincourt" (1619)
  • (English victories in the Hundred Years War)

• Agincourt, Agincourt, know ye not Agincourt?
  • Song quoted in full by Thomas Heywood in Edward IV (1600). This line quoted by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in the preface to the new edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse (1939)

• This happy breed of men, this little world,
  This precious stone set in the silver sea,
  Which serves it in the office of a wall,
  Or as a moat defensive to a house,
  Against the envy of less happier lands,
  This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England, ...
  • Shakespeare, Richard II, 2:1

• I know I have the body but of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; ...
  • Queen Elizabeth I, speech to the troops at Tilbury, 19 August 1588. Reported in a letter from Leonel Sharp to the Duke of Buckingham
  • (This speech preceded the defeat of the Spanish Armada)

• You brave heroic minds
    Worthy your country’s name,
      That honour still pursue;
      Go and subdue!
  Whilst loitering hinds
    Lurk here at home with shame.
  • Michael Drayton, "To the Virginian Voyage"
  • Poems (1606, 1619)
  • (The London Company sent an expedition to establish a settlement in the Virginia Colony in December 1606)

• The true Lover of his country is ready to communicate his fears and to sound the alarm, whenever he perceives the approach of mischief. But he sounds no alarm, when there is no enemy: he never terrifies his countrymen till he is terrified himself. The patriotism therefore may be justly doubted of him, who professes to be disturbed by incredibilities; ...
  • Samuel Johnson, The Patriot (1774)

• ... In our halls is hung
  Armoury of the invincible Knights of old:
  We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
  That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
  Which Milton held.—In every thing we are sprung
  Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.
  • William Wordsworth, sonnet included in Poems in Two Volumes (1807)
  • Quoted by Quiller-Couch, op. cit.

• The knights are dust,
  And their good swords are rust;—
  Their souls are with the saints, we trust.
  • Adapted by Sir Walter Scott (from the final lines of Coleridge’s "The Knight’s Tomb") as an epigraph for Ivanhoe, Ch. 8 and Castle Dangerous, Ch. 9

• God of our fathers, known of old—
    Lord of our far-flung battle-line—
  Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
    Dominion over palm and pine—
  Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
  Lest we forget, lest we forget!
  • Rudyard Kipling, "Recessional", printed in The Times (17 July 1897)
  • (On the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, the zenith of the British Empire)

• The real motive force of neo-Toryism, giving it its nationalistic character and differentiating it from ordinary Conservatism, is the desire not to recognize that British power and influence have declined. Even those who are realistic enough to see that Britain’s military position is not what it was, tend to claim that ‘English ideas’ (usually left undefined) must dominate the world. All neo-Tories are anti-Russian, but sometimes the main emphasis is anti-American. The significant thing is that this school of thought seems to be gaining ground among youngish intellectual, sometimes ex-Communists, who have passed through the usual process of disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The anglophobe who suddenly becomes violently pro-British is a fairly common figure. Writers who illustrate this tendency are F. A. Voigt, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Kingsmill, and a psychologically similar development can be observed in T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and various of their followers.
  • George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism," Polemic, 1945, reproduced on orwellfoundation.com

• I should have hated the Roman Empire in its day (as I do), and remained a patriotic Roman citizen, while preferring a free Gaul and seeing good in Carthaginians. Delenda est Carthago. We hear rather a lot of that nowadays.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien, from a letter to Christopher Tolkien, 31 July 1944
  • Humphrey Carpenter, ed. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)

• A new scent troubles the air—to you, friendly perhaps—
  But we with animal wisdom have understood that smell.
  To all our kind its message is Guns, Ferrets, and Traps,
  And a Ministry gassing the little holes in which we dwell.
  
  • C. S. Lewis, "The Condemned" or "Under Sentence"
  • The Spectator (7 September 1945); revised in Poems (1964)