Episode 1 Rule Britannia! Music, Mischief and Morals in the 18th Century

CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS

From Glastonbury to Glyndebourne,

from the glitter of London's West End shows

to our thriving regional choirs and amateur orchestras,

Britain today is alive with music.

But while we think of the 21st century

as the era of impresarios and celebrities,

gossip magazines and social networking, pop stars and groupies,

all these were first forged in the energy and inventiveness

of 18th century Britain.

I've been playing, studying and loving 18th century music

for as long as I can remember.

In this series I'll be discovering what it must have felt like

to be at the very centre of that cultural explosion,

visiting its refined salons and concert halls,

playing on its newfangled cutting-edge instruments,

and trying to make some money as a ballad singer on the side.

I'm going to explore how and why 18th century Britain

became the centre of a musical revolution,

as a rage for music swept the country.

Patriotic songs and anthems, operas and ballads,

polite entertainments and rowdy rallying cries,

all played their part in creating a shared sense of identity

and national allegiance.

From Rule Britannia to music for the royal fireworks,

from Auld Lang Syne to Amazing Grace.

It's music that sits deep within our cultural DNA,

that ties us together with the invisible bonds of shared memory.

More than anything else - books or newspapers, paintings or poetry -

I think it was music that truly touched the lives of everyone

in 18th century Britain. This is its story.

In 1695, British music suffered a catastrophic loss

when the nation's leading composer died at the age of just 36.

Henry Purcell was buried here at Westminster Abbey

where he'd been organist.

He'd single-handedly revived English music

with a series of glittering operas,

stage shows, songs, and music for state occasions.

This is the gravestone of Henry Purcell and his wife, Frances.

It's got an inscription in Latin.

It reads, "Here rests Henry Purcell. Died the 21st of November, AD1695.

"Immortals welcome an illustrious guest.

"The many sided master of his art.

"The brief delight and glory of his age."

Not much is said about his wife, Frances.

She only gets "Uxor" - wife.

She is a crucial part in all this

because it was she who locked Purcell out of the house

one night after he'd been out on a particularly heavy pub crawl.

He caught a cold and he never recovered.

Possibly the worst case of man flu in history.

If his death was untimely,

Purcell's life had also been touched by disaster.

Born in 1659, he'd lived through the Great Fire and the Plague.

He'd seen the turmoil of the glorious Revolution,

when Britain had deposed her King, the Catholic James II.

But in the years after Purcell's death,

London was beginning to reawaken.

After the devastation of the Plague and then the Great Fire,

London, at the close of the 17th century,

was a city of despair - its population decimated,

many of its great buildings lying in ruins.

But the capital rebuilt quickly and by the early 18th century,

London had overtaken Paris as Europe's largest city.

The wealthy metropolis needed world-class culture.

Purcell's death had left a chasm and a new national musical hero

was desperately needed, because a new nation was being formed.

In 1707 the Acts of Union were passed,

joining together England and Wales with Scotland, making a new country.

It was to be called Great Britain.

But persuading the population that they had, overnight,

become British was more of a problem.

Britishness at the start of the 18th century is really quite precarious.

It's only in 1688 that James II of England, James VII of Scotland,

has been thrown out.

And thereafter there is a war of the British succession.

And people sitting in London are not sure how long this new country,

this new state, is going to be able to hold together.

What this newly-forged Great Britain needed was a national identity,

a shorthand that Britons could buy into, that would unite us

through a celebration of our shared culture.

And in this fight for national cohesion,

music would become a battleground.

Working out what British music should sound like

wasn't going to be easy.

Britain's arbiters of elite taste and fashion - the aristocracy -

had their cultural sights set far away from these shores...

in Italy.

Their tastes were formed on the Grand Tour,

an odyssey lasting anything up to three years,

where wealthy young Brits would descend in hordes on Italy

to drink in the culture of the ancient world

and the glories of the Renaissance.

It's like, in the mid 20th century,

going abroad and getting a tan.

In the 18th century it was going abroad,

going on the Grand Tour of Italy and collecting -

collecting art, collecting music, collecting singers sometimes,

collecting musicians, bringing them back to England

and flaunting your stuff, flaunting your knowledge.

But the fashion for the Grand Tour wasn't just a journey of the mind.

It was a voyage into the heartland of Protestant Great Britain's

sworn enemy, to the very home of Catholicism.

You have large numbers of the elite going abroad, going to France

and Italy, rather as if the principal place that American tourists

in the 1950s had gone was Moscow.

You have these tourists going to Catholic states and coming back

and showing an interest in a culture

which parts of British society is uneasy about.

And there is a tendency,

particularly that's developed in the press and among critics,

to argue that there's a form of what we could call cultural betrayal.

The music London's elite beau monde went mad for was Italian Opera,

which first arrived in the capital in 1705.

Boatloads of Italian musicians and singers pitched up on our shores

to perform it. Try as they might,

British performers simply weren't a patch on the imported stars,

and British composers couldn't come up with anything

to rival their Italian counterparts.

There was no native composer who was capable, really,

of writing a good, full-length English opera or Italian opera.

There was a big gap in England for a composer to arrive who would be

settled in England and would write Italian opera.

And, of course, one did arrive.

A German composer, who'd studied in Italy,

was about to take Britain by storm.

In 1710 a 25-year-old called George Frideric Handel

arrived in London. It turned out to be rather a smart move.

What Handel grasps is that there is a gap in the market

after the death of Henry Purcell.

He also senses that there is a new kind of cultural scene

emerging in London.

There may be no home-grown native composer there but there is

an audience desperate for new music, and with the money to pay for it.

To cash in on the Italian opera craze,

Handel quickly cobbled together a selection of music he'd written

back in Italy and turned it into an opera - Rinaldo.

Rinaldo in itself is not really a great opera. It's a great review.

-It's like the Greatest Hits today.

-Yeah, Greatest Hits of Handel, 1711.

Now, That's What I Call Handel 1.

It's a real... All his best bits.

So, it was bound to succeed.

Full of high drama and sensuality,

with fast and furious music,

Rinaldo quickly became a sensation.

Audiences swooned.

SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN

It wasn't just Handel's music that was spectacular -

so, too, was the staging, with chariots, fire-breathing dragons

and live sparrows and chaffinches released onstage.

We get this explosion onto the London stage

of Handel and Rinaldo in 1711.

What was it that audiences heard in that music that they sensed,

that really thrilled them?

Rinaldo is an all-out attempt to do everything -

to have the best cast in Europe, which it did,

to have absolutely thrilling music, tremendous scenery -

the stage directions are extraordinary -

and it didn't quite work on the first night -

fabulously expensive costumes and more music than had been

performed in any Opera in England, ever, with a larger band.

So, no wonder it was a financial disaster for the manager.

Whatever it did for the promoter,

Rinaldo certainly put Handel on the map.

More Italian operas followed as he became the go-to musician

for London's wealthy and influential elite.

Then he had the good fortune to find that a former German employer

of his had been elevated right to the top of British society.

In 1714 the reining monarch, Queen Anne, died.

She'd produced no surviving heir

and by law only a Protestant could succeed her.

The throne passed, not to the 50 or so people who were next in line -

they were all Catholics - instead it went to the 51st,

a Protestant from the House of Hanover.

George I was crowned King and the Georgian era had begun.

But it was to be rocky start.

The union with England was hugely unpopular with many Scots,

and the arrival of this German king ignited their anger.

In 1715 the Jacobites, supporters of the deposed Catholic Stuarts,

rebelled, and tried to overthrow the Protestant House of Hanover.

The uprising failed but George knew that if he wanted to stay in power

a PR campaign was needed, and music would be at its heart.

George and his team of advisors knew right from the start

that if they wanted legitimacy in the hearts and minds of

the British public then they had to harness a little show business.

So they started injecting music into festivals, masquerades,

and river parties.

Music is very important in supporting the authority of power.

It's part of a general pattern to strengthen the idea that the Crown

is the centre of British society,

it's the focus of British symbolism, and that,

if you oppose the Crown, you are going to be left out.

And so on the evening of the 17th of July, 1717,

the King boarded a royal barge at Whitehall

with a bevy of fashionable aristocratic guests

and celebrated beauties.

George commissioned Handel to write the soundtrack for this

glittering piece of public spectacle, called The Water Music.

And its premier was one of the most unusual

musical performances in history.

I can't imagine what it must have been like to be one of those

50 musicians crammed on to a single boat.

They must have been jostling one another.

Barely room to draw your bow arm and be able to move at all,

and you'd be staring in virtual darkness -

only candle light to light the notes on that manuscript paper,

hastily scrawled by hand and the ink barely dry.

When you think of all the chatter and cheering of those crowds,

plus all the noise that would have been coming off the river,

you probably wouldn't have heard a note of music.

But if you'd been on that crowded boat next to all those musicians,

this is what it would have sounded like.

Handel included horns in The Water Music,

the first time they'd ever been used in a piece of British music.

An instrument thought of as only good for chasing foxes,

they gave this music real oomph.

Here was music in the British style -

stirring, manly, bombastic, and loud.

The Water Music didn't need words to convey its message.

It did it through the sheer force of its instrumental sound.

Handel is saying, "This is music for a proud King,

"a confident King, a British King."

And he does it brilliantly.

The battle to make Britain love its new King had begun in earnest.

And he was going to need all the friends he could get.

George I is a foreigner, doesn't speak English

and does spend a certain amount of time back in his native Hanover

and does devote quite a lot of time to using the resources

of British foreign policy to forward Hanoverian expansionism.

The Water Music is part of George I persuading himself,

being told by his minsters to stay in London, not to go to Hanover,

and to make himself available to the elite

and seen by the bulk of the population.

George set about ingratiating himself with the aristocracy,

becoming an enthusiastic supporter of Italian opera.

In 1719, the King stumped up £1,000

to help launch a new Royal Academy of Music.

A golden age for Italian opera in Britain was now under way.

For London's toffs, at least.

It was very much enfolded into aristocratic life,

aristocratic culture.

And the fact that you might, as a young man,

be able to buy a ticket in the pit

to come and stand or sit and watch the opera,

or that you might, as a family, occasionally be able to buy a ticket

if you were from the middling ranks of society.

That took away nothing from the fact it was primarily

an aristocratic entertainment.

So, you were as much there to be seen and recognised

by your peers as you were to sit there and actually enjoy it.

Yes, absolutely. And there's a wonderful fan that shows a

seating plan of the King's Theatre and all the names are carefully

written in to the fan so that when she holds up the fan, it's a

crib note, so that she can look down and see who's sitting in the box

and whom she should make eye contact with.

And there was a lot of exchanges going on between boxes,

between audience members.

But if the aristocrats found themselves safely cocooned

within the confines of the opera house,

the theatre district was a different proposition.

Much of London was very mixed.

You'd have beggars and paupers in every part of London.

You have the West End but that morphs quickly into the Covent Garden area,

which is notorious for prostitution, as well as being the area where

all the fashionable world go for the theatre and for entertainment.

Never mind the show itself,

just getting to the opera was a piece of pure theatre.

I'm imagining you're wearing your finery.

You're very, very much an object.

You're dressing so that people will look at you.

But you're not dressing for comfort when you come to the opera,

-particularly as a woman.

-No. No, it's all about the show.

As...

"Pride feels no pain."

As the Duchess of Devonshire once said.

So, I'm there in this very uncomfortable dress.

Being run along through the streets on a sedan chair.

How much would you know the other people

who you would be seeing at the opera? Would you be waving hello?

Who might I recognise?

You would recognise almost all of your social contemporaries,

very much so.

London was a hugely visible city

and the culture of celebrity is absolutely on the rise.

So, in many ways, you wanted to be as visible as possible,

as recognisable as possible.

And this culture of show is becoming very strong.

Even when you got inside the theatre

the drama wasn't confined to the stage.

Theatre-going in general was a perilous business.

Theatres were noisy, unruly and often downright dangerous.

The Drury Lane Theatre in London, for example,

was destroyed by rioting on six occasions during the century.

People would eat and get drunk.

They'd arrive and leave in the middle of a performance

and well-to-do young men would prowl the theatre on the lookout

for women in search of a good time.

The aisles were known as "Fops Alley."

People would talk or even play cards during the recitatives.

These were rapid-fire bits of singing

which drove the plot forward.

What the audience was really there to listen to were the arias.

These are operas' show tunes, if you like, the moment where the

characters get to express their inner-most feelings.

They would start with a clarion call from the orchestra

with a little preview of the tune.

This was your cue to stop your conversation,

finish up your game of whist, and listen. Because this was where

the singers really earned their vast salaries.

The public came to hear the singers, not actually to hear the music.

They wanted to hear what wonderful things

the singers could do, technically.

What made Italian opera attractive was the calibre of the singers

and that's what people said over and over again -

"We do not have singers trained to this standard who can perform

"this wonderfully virtuosic music."

What made the singers so exciting was the unstoppable energy,

the thrilling newness of the music they got to sing,

as Handel proved time and again.

Handel's real strength lies in the simplicity of the music.

That's what makes it so sexy.

And there's something sexy about the style. You just think,

"How have you managed to do that with so few resources?"

Just a couple of instruments. Something very simple.

He never over-eggs the pudding.

SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN

Most Londoners couldn't afford to see these superstars but they

certainly knew about them from the wealth of newspapers

and periodicals printed daily in the capital.

Here were the beginnings of today's tabloids,

gossip mags and celebrities.

Readers loved the antics of the opera stars

with their ridiculous behaviour,

most notoriously the Italian singer, Francesca Cuzzoni,

who arrived in London in 1723.

Handel once had to threaten to throw her out of a window

because he was so infuriated by her diva-ish histrionics.

After her debut in his opera, Ottone,

she became the toast of the town.

But she didn't have the field to herself for long.

Cuzzoni soon had a rival -

another Italian soprano called Faustina Bordoni.

She arrived in London to the delight of the capital's satirists,

who started penning acid pieces about these overpaid,

imported and vastly extravagant singers.

The managers of the opera houses

absolutely rubbed their hands together in glee

because what a good way, what better way, in fact,

was there to guarantee bums on seats

than to have a really good showdown

between two fabulous singers on stage?

There were racehorses called Faustina and Cuzzoni

pitted against each other at race meetings, and fans of one

prima donna started refusing to even socialise

with fans of the other, such was the intensity of their celebrity.

The rivalry between sopranos was identified at the time with women -

high society ladies who held assemblies in their private rooms,

invited their elite guests, and split themselves into factions

in order to demonstrate their inordinate good taste.

One night in June, 1727, there was a riot among the factions.

A legend quickly grew that Faustina and Cuzzoni had themselves indulged

in a full-scale catfight, tearing off each others' wigs

and hurling unspeakable insults at each other in Italian.

It's a great story that's gone down in music history.

Unfortunately, it's not actually true.

I'm afraid to say, it didn't happen.

But it's really interesting that we still have that myth with us.

So, there's nowhere in the newspapers that says that

hair-pulling happened? Where'd that come from?

All the newspapers say is the audience factions produced

so much noise that you couldn't hear the singing any more

and they had to stop the opera. And this dreadful because it happened

while the Princess of Wales was there, so it was a real breach

of royal protocol that the audience factions didn't pay more respect.

Such was the scandal

that the whole opera season came shuddering to a halt.

But nothing could stem the tide of opera mania

that swept the salons of the capital.

Bored by the soprano wars, Londoners became obsessed instead

with opera's leading men - the castrati.

They got opera's heroic roles, sung today by countertenors in falsetto.

HE SINGS IN ITALIAN

I think the people who don't go to the opera,

who don't hear countertenor voices, the whole idea of a heroic figure in

opera being a guy who's singing in a very high register feels quite odd.

And yet we're really used to it in some ways

because if you listen to The Bee Gees or The Beach Boys

or Freddie Mercury, men sing high all the time.

It's just a question of what we're used to, isn't it?

I think what throws some people when they come to hear classical music

and they hear a countertenor singing,

and it's the complete reversal of what we expect now,

that the heroic man to be the sort of Daniel Craig, muscle,

coming out of the water and singing this big tenor aria,

which happened in the late 18th century and then the tenors took over

and their high notes became the true, you know, heroic noise.

The castrati were a gift from Catholic Italy.

After the Pope had banned women from singing in church,

choirs found they needed a way of preserving those high voices,

their male sopranos. So, if you were Italian and you were poor

and you had a son with a promising voice,

you would take him off to a backstreet surgeon who would

drug him with opium and put him in a hot bath.

And then came the gruesome bit.

This is a castratori.

It's a tool for human castration.

Essentially, it's a giant nut cracker.

And this would be opened.

Clamped tightly around the testicles and held there for several minutes.

It would then be whipped away and you'd be stitched up -

all with no anaesthetic.

Even by 18th century standards

this was a particularly unbearable operation.

But with one snip the 18th century's greatest opera stars were created.

They paid a heavy price.

Physically, they were monsters.

The castrato fell into two body types.

One was very fat with short stumpy legs and a huge belly.

And the other one was what they called "the long thin one."

And they had very long legs, a tiny torso, an overbite,

often very fleshy lips, long, luxurious hair, no Adam's apple.

So, there were these various physical characteristics

that made them monstrous.

But the practice continued

because the combination of a boy's high-treble voice

and the lungs of a fully-grown man

could produce singing of legendary power and sweetness.

This is the great mystery nowadays -

we really don't know what they sounded like and we can only imagine.

And voices such as myself are trying to help people

to access that sort of memory.

The castrati had a most extraordinary effect

on female listeners.

They would arrive at the opera proudly displaying wax figurines

of their heroes stashed in their bosoms.

And they went weak at the knees

when they heard them sing music like this.

HE SINGS IN ITALIAN

The star castrati and sopranos may have wowed their wealthy fans,

but the rest of the population was growing tired of these foreign

musical invaders.

London has a very high proportion of Italian musicians and singers

and they get paid an awful lot money, so there's resentment.

And also it's associated with a Catholic country.

Catholicism carried with it negative moral values as well,

so there was this idea that the opera brought with it

elements of immorality that were associated with particularly

Catholic society, both in France and in Italy.

Right from the start of Italian opera in London

there had been voices raised against this foreign musical form.

Now a backlash began in earnest.

It was shameful that all these people were going to hear

something in a language they simply didn't speak.

It wasn't right and it wasn't British.

This was the supreme art form of Catholics,

of foreigners, lording it over our native Protestant elite.

A rebellion was brewing.

There are newspapers which argue that this is

a form of cultural betrayal, this preference for Italian opera

and French theatre, and that something should be done about it.

Concerns were raised that Italian opera actually contained

secret messages for Jacobite sympathisers

and Catholic agents eager to restore the Stuarts to the throne.

As if that wasn't bad enough,

it was also seen as a threat to the nation's manhood.

Take a look at this.

It's a pamphlet called Plain Reasons For The Growth Of Sodomy In England.

We don't know who wrote it,

but it was published in the 1720s

and it asserted in the strongest terms

that opera, Italian opera, was a kind of cultural Trojan horse.

Everything that proper Britons should shun.

It was foreign, it was Catholic and, most awful of all,

with all those castrated men warbling away,

it was dangerously effeminate.

What was needed was a form of musical theatre

sung in English that could appeal beyond a snobbish elite.

And there was such a form alive and well in every

nook and cranny of the British Isles.

A wealth of ballads and songs sung by an army of street performers.

There are literally thousands of people who earned

something of a living as street ballad singers.

People who sell these penny or halfpenny sheets to anybody

who'd buy them.

And sometimes these people actually get done for obstruction

because they've got a crowd of 100 or 200 people around them.

So this is a form of street entertainment.

WOMAN: What people loved most in England, always,

was to sing the same old tunes over and over again,

and they loved nice, straightforward songs.

So although the beau monde are listening to all kinds

of wonderful twiddly music, this is not really particularly

popular amongst the ordinary people of England.

They want to hear good old-fashioned songs that you can understand.

So, I am a ballad seller.

I go and pick up the piece of paper, the physical ballad,

from the publisher in Seven Dials. How do I advertise my wares?

How do I get people to buy and what are they buying?

Well, I have to say, you don't

look anything like a ballad seller of the 18th century.

You just don't look poor enough.

And so by the 18th century, women especially, who might decide

to sell ballads, they are going to sell these little slips.

You're going to shout that you've got ballads, you're going to try

singing some of those ballads.

You might not be the world's best singer but you'll give it a go.

OK...

# There was a fair maid of Islington

# As I heard many tell

# And she was going to London town

# Her apples and pears to sell

# As she was going on the road

# A vintner did she espy

# And what shall I give, fair maid says he,

# One night with thee to lie?

# If you would lie with me one night

# You must give to me five pounds

# A match, a match, the vintner said

# So let's go round

# And when he had lain with her all night her money she did crave

# No, oh, no, the vintner said the devil a penny you'll have

# Oh, no, oh, no, the vintner said the devil a penny you have. #

Penny for a song?

Give us a penny!

The ballad I'm failing to sell is fairly typical,

in that a well-to-do man offers to pay a woman from a lower class

to sleep with him.

When he refuses to pay up, the fair maid takes him to court and,

this is the unusual bit, she wins.

Go, girlfriend!

It was these street ballads, with their familiarity,

their lowlife subject matter and their potential subversiveness,

that inspired one of the most sensational musical dramas

ever created.

It was resolutely and unapologetically British.

No more falsetto voices, no overpaid Italian singers,

no more ridiculous plots about kings and queens,

this brought opera much closer to home.

It told the real-life story of a criminal who'd been hanged.

It was set in the London underworld and it was sung in English.

It became the most successful music theatre piece ever staged

and it was called The Beggar's Opera.

Created by the writer John Gay, it opened in London in 1728.

Not only did the plot and characters come from the street,

the music did, too.

Gay took a collection of well-known tunes and gave them new words.

# When my Hero in court appears

# And stands arraign'd for his life

# Then think of poor Polly's tears

# For ah, poor Polly, his wife

# Like the sailor he holds up his hand

# Distrest on the dashing wave

# To die a dry death at land

# Is a bad and a wat'ry grave

# And alas, poor Polly!

# Alack and well a day!

# Before I was in love

# Oh...

# Ev'ry month was May. #

The story of The Beggar's Opera was something any Londoner could

recognise, because it was based on a real-life drama that had been

keeping tabloid hacks and ballad writers busy for several years.

On the morning of 4 September 1724,

a young man by the name of Jack Sheppard

was due to be hanged at the gallows at Tyburn.

His crime - stealing three rolls of cloth, two silver spoons

and one silk handkerchief.

And then the astonishing news spread that Shepherd had escaped

from the condemned cell of London's notorious Newgate Prison.

Sheppard was soon caught and hanged.

He became the subject of countless ballads, songs and plays.

He's also the model for the antihero of The Beggar's Opera,

the highwayman, Captain Macheath.

Alongside him were a cast of rogues, lowlifes and ne'er-do-wells,

the likes of whom had never been

seen on a British operatic stage before.

The social order had become so perverted

that the ways of thieves and beggars

and of thief takers were somehow more reflective of British society

than the kinds of high stories seen in serious opera.

It suggested that the amount of money being spent on silly opera singers

was related to the corruption of court society

and the corruption of the Whig Party under Robert Walpole.

Legendary for his corruption,

Walpole was a prime target for British satirists.

For many in the audience, Walpole's government bore

a distinct resemblance to the highwaymen, whores and thieves

of The Beggar's Opera.

Walpole actually went to it, enjoyed it,

until he started to realise quite how it was being read

by the opposition as being a satire on himself.

# Through all the employments of life

# Each neighbour abuses his brother

# Whore and rogue they call husband and wife

# All professions be-rogue one another. #

The piece is also a satire on Handel's famously

brattish sopranos, the divas, Faustina and Cuzzoni,

in a brilliant spoof catfight

between the characters of Polly and Lucy.

# Why how now, Madam Flirt?

# If you thus must chatter

# And are for flinging di-i-i-i-rt

# Let's try who best can spatter. #

But the two people who reflect Faustina and Cuzzoni,

the rivals for Macheath, that's Polly and Lucy,

they meet and suddenly they're going into

"A-ha-ha-ha-ha" type stuff,

instead of one word per syllable,

and that is the one moment at which Gay actually parodies Italian opera,

rather than just making a satire of the form of Italian opera.

# How can you see me ma-a-a-a-ade

# The scoff of such a gypsy

# Saucy jade! #

The Beggar's Opera spread like wildfire to cities across

the British Isles and travelled as far afield as Jamaica and America.

In 1750, it played in New York, today the home of musical theatre.

If you wanted to locate the very beginnings of the Broadway musical,

I'd argue it was there.

The Beggar's Opera, that intoxicating piece

of British culture, where pop songs and street culture

and real characters

were fused together on the musical stage for the very first time.

After two decades in thrall to Italian opera,

a British musical model has finally arrived.

The Beggar's Opera, and this desperation to say,

"We can do it as well, in English, as anyone else would do an Italian,"

is part of a nascent patriotism,

is part of a growing what we would call nationalism,

which is directed culturally as much as politically.

Dozens of new stage works followed,

inspired by the box office gold of John Gay's jukebox musical.

The fuse had been lit for a new kind of British cultural patriotism.

Songs in English with a way to bring the nation together

through its music.

And one incendiary new piece was brewing in the mind

of the British composer, Thomas Arne.

A piece for which he pulled out all the stops.

JANGLY RENDITION OF "RULE, BRITANNIA!"

# Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves

# Britons never never never will be slaves. #

Rule, Britannia! is still sung proudly today.

An iconic piece of British national music.

But it came from a much bigger work

and one that was commissioned

not as a celebration of national unity at all,

but as an attack by a royal son on his hated father.

This is Cliveden, a country house famous in the 20th century

for playing host to John Profumo and Christine Keeler

in one of the great scandals of British politics.

It was also a hotbed of scandal in the 18th century.

Cliveden was the country seat of George II's eldest son,

Frederick Prince of Wales.

And here in Cliveden's grounds, in this grass amphitheatre,

a new piece was heard. It was called Alfred.

And it was a musical model

for an explosive kind of British patriotism.

Alfred was a musical entertainment

that told the story of Alfred The Great,

the Anglo-Saxon king who defended England from the marauding Danes.

Rule Britannia! is its stirring finale.

But the hero of the piece wasn't Alfred at all,

but his son and successor.

The central character in Alfred isn't the King himself,

but his son Edward. He stands for virtue and honour and liberty.

And for Edward, read Frederick, Prince of Wales.

If in public, the Georgian royal family was trying to capture

the hearts of the British people,

in private it was using music as a weapon

in a prolonged family squabble.

The Hanoverians did not have the best relations with their children

and particularly with their eldest sons.

And in each case one of the ways in which the oldest child shows

their opposition is by patronising musical and culture of their own

in order to show that, as it were,

they are the Augustus of the modern age.

They are the cultural figure who best actually represents

what monarchy and majesty should be.

And in the case of a piece like Alfred, with Rule Britannia!

it's also a way of saying you're more British

and more patriotic, isn't it?

Patriotism is very important there.

Frederick Prince of Wales aligns, in the late 1730s and 1740s,

with a group of politicians calling themselves the Patriots.

And this group argue that the government has failed

to defend British interests, and that in singing about British values,

one is actually demanded that the government takes steps.

# Rule, Britannia!

# Britannia rule the waves. #

The real story behind Rule, Britannia!

reminds us that the patriotic songs we still sing today were,

three centuries ago,

not celebrations of strength and unity at all,

but symbols of weakness and division.

And not just within the royal family.

The monarchy was also under attack from the Jacobites

and their French allies.

A struggle that had been bubbling away for more than 50 years

was about to come to the boil again.

BAGPIPES PLAY

On 22 June 1745, a ship called the Doutelle set sail from Nantes,

in France, headed for Scotland.

On board was a man named Charles Edward Stuart,

grandson of King James II and the man who believed he would reinstate

the Catholic Stuart dynasty to the British throne.

He came closer than anyone could have expected.

Early one morning in September 1745, the Jacobite forces surprised

the sleeping Hanoverians of Prestonpans, near Edinburgh.

Scots still celebrate the victory in a song that haunts Sir John Cope,

the beaten English general, asking if he and his troops are awake.

# Hey, Johnnie Cope are ye awaking yet?

# Are your drums a-beating yet?

# If you were walking, I would wait

# To gang to the coals in the morning. #

By December 1745, the Jacobite forces were as far south as Derby.

Panic spread among George's supporters.

At this crucial moment of instability,

where the future looked to many uncertain,

a rousing new song began to be sung in London's theatres

and it's stayed with us to this day.

# God save our gracious King

# Long live our noble King

# God save the King

# Send him victorious

# Happy and glorious

# Long to reign over us

# God save the King. #

Arranged by Thomas Arne,

it's got all the ingredients of a great national song.

A tune that is simple enough for anyone to learn,

that sweeping melody that really hits and emotional nerve,

and stirring, patriotic lyrics.

In 1745 those words were critically important

and they were rather different to the ones we know today.

# Confound their politics

# Frustrate their knavish tricks

# On him our hearts are fixed

# God save us all. #

The coup de grace, God Save The King was actually a Jacobite tune.

The supporters of the Georgian monarchy had appropriated

the music of their opponents and transformed it into their own

battle cry against their enemies within Britain.

Another verse not often sung today begs George's commander to

"sedition hush and like a torrent rush, rebellious Scots to crush."

The anthem quickly caught on in pubs, playhouses and streets

up and down the country, its lyrics printed in newspapers and prints.

This was a song for a people who had been saved

through their faith in God and their King.

# God save our gracious Queen

# Long live our noble Queen... #

It's a faith that, for many, still survives.

When people sing the national anthem,

what they are expressing is a sense of personal identity.

And this is not being dragooned to sing it, this is not North Korea.

I mean, what is very interesting is that nationhood

is expressed in cultural forms in which people can take part.

# God save our Queen. #

CHEERING

There was no official decree, but God Save The King gradually became

adopted as our national anthem.

But there was a dark side to all this,

as patriotism's evil twin, xenophobia, reared its head.

In defining ourselves through our songs,

we began also to tell the world what we weren't - foreign.

Master of the art of nationalistic music was Thomas Arne,

composer of Rule, Britannia! and arranger of God Save The King.

His song, Beer Drinking Britons, was a dig at both the Scots

and our most feared enemy of all.

If you thought the national stereotype of the French

as cheese-eating, Beaujolais- swilling, surrender monkeys

was something new, think again.

# Ye true honest Britons who love your own land

# Whose sires were so brave so victorious and free

# Who always beat France when they took her in her hand

# Come join honest Britons in chorus with me

# Join in chorus, in chorus with me

# Come join honest Britons in chorus with me

# Let us sing our own treasures Old England's good cheer

# The profits and pleasures of stout British beer

# Your wine sipping, dram-tippling fellows retreat

# But your beer drinking Britons can never be beat. #

There were more wars come, with France and America

as well as an Irish rebellion.

But there were no more Jacobite risings after 1745.

Great Britain had survived and it would grow ever stronger.

Music had played a powerful part in bolstering the monarchy,

the union and supporters of both.

Not just Handel's grand ceremonial music,

not just the national anthem or Rule, Britannia!

but also a wealth of popular music and song

which had truly fostered a sense of community,

nationhood and togetherness.

Songs like Tom Bowling, by the composer Charles Dibdin,

are still sung today.

Tom is a young sailor in the Navy who dies tragically at sea.

A man with all the qualities Great Britain wanted to show

to the world - strength and patriotism, duty and nobility.

# Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling

# The darling of our crew

# No more he'll hear the tempest howling

# For death has broached him to

# His form was of the manliest beauty

# His heart was kind and soft

# Faithful below, Tom did his duty

# And now he's gone aloft

# And now he's gone aloft. #

In the next programme, as the money pours in from colonies abroad,

the British go mad for pleasure.

The middle classes get the music bug

and music and culture become a passport

to power, money and prestige.