Rule, Britannia!

The story

"Rule, Britannia!" began as the final number of Alfred, a masque about Alfred the Great with music by Thomas Arne and words by James Thomson and David Mallet. It was first performed on 1 August 1740 at Cliveden, the country home of Frederick, Prince of Wales, to mark the accession of his grandfather George I and the birthday of Princess Augusta. The song soon took on a life of its own. First heard in London in 1745, it was at once popular, and Handel quoted its opening phrase in his Occasional Oratorio the following year. The Jacobites took it up with words altered in their favour. In 1751 Mallet reused its text, with stanzas by Lord Bolingbroke, as the chorus of the comic song "Married to a Mermaid", which became very popular in his masque Britannia at Drury Lane in 1755.

The historian Armitage sees the song as the most lasting expression of the idea of Britain and the British Empire that emerged in the 1730s, built on "a mixture of adulterated mercantilism, nationalistic anxiety and libertarian fervour". He links it with Bolingbroke's On the Idea of a Patriot King (1738), written for the same circle around Frederick: a strong navy would let an island nation do without a standing army, which since Cromwell's time had been feared as a tool of tyranny, so that naval power could be equated with civil liberty. When the song appeared it was an exhortation, not a description. Britain did not yet rule the seas; written during the War of Jenkins' Ear, it may have answered alleged Spanish attacks on British merchant ships. Its words took on a material and patriotic sense only by the end of the 19th century. Maurice Willson Disher notes that the Victorians, who by then did command the seas, changed the refrain from an exhortation to a statement, and Richard Dawkins used that altered refrain as an example of a successful meme.

The song is most closely tied to the Royal Navy, but the British Army uses it too. In 1945 a massed band of Australian, British and American forces played it as Lord Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, arrived for the surrender of the Japanese forces in Singapore. It closes Henry Wood's Fantasia on British Sea Songs (1905) and is sung each year at the BBC's Last Night of the Proms, for many years in Malcolm Sargent's arrangement, with a guest soloist; Bryn Terfel sang its third verse in Welsh in 1994 and 2008. Its place there, and that of other patriotic songs, has been much criticised, notably by the conductor Leonard Slatkin.

In 2020 the BBC announced that "Rule, Britannia!" and "Land of Hope and Glory" would not be sung at the Last Night of the Proms. Reports linked the decision to the Black Lives Matter movement, whose supporters, after the murder of George Floyd that summer, accused the songs of glorifying colonialism and slavery. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and others protested; the BBC said the change had been due to social distancing in the COVID-19 pandemic, reversed it, and both songs were performed with a reduced choir and orchestra. A recording with the mezzo-soprano Della Jones reached number 10 in the UK Singles Chart during those Proms.

What it says

A patriotic ode urging Britain to rule the seas, which ties command of the sea to the liberty of the British people, set against servitude. The mood is proud and rousing, a call to naval greatness written before that greatness existed.

The words