Blood of the Isles by Bryan Sykes Read Free Book Online Page B

definitely in the minority, and the myth grew and grew, finding a new outlet in the development of the African slave trade. Though European attitudes to black people and a readiness to exploit them for personal gain were nothing new, the resurgent racial pride which accompanied the growth of the Teutonic myth encouraged further victimization. While there may have been some uncertainty about the purity of the Saxon pedigree within England, there could be no cause for doubt that blackAfricans had no claims whatsoever to the Teutonic bloodline with its attendant virtues of enterprise, independence and high moral character.
    During the eighteenth century, the myth had grown to such prominence that it was scarcely, if ever, questioned. It attained an invincibility equal to that of the Arthurian legends of Geoffrey’s
History
500 years earlier. But now its effects were felt not just in Britain, but throughout the world. The influential French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu wrote in 1734 that the English political system came straight from the forests of Germany, imported and elaborated by their Saxon descendants. Even the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, who constantly required evidence as the foundation for any belief, accepted without question the purity of the German race first expressed so long ago by Tacitus. Thomas Jefferson, one of the draftsmen of the Declaration of Independence, who became the third President of the United States, wrote in 1774 that it was the Saxon ancestry of the American colonists that gave them a natural right to build for themselves a free and independent state, liberated from British colonial rule.
    The triumph of the Teutonic myth was almost complete as its popularity reached its peak during the nineteenth century. Indeed the superiority and self-belief with which its adherents cloaked themselves was central to the construction and administration of the British Empire. The myth gave to the Englishmen abroad the absolute conviction that their ancient Saxon pedigree imbued them with inherited qualities of honour and leadership, and the politicalinstitutions to go with it, that were far superior to any in the world. Bolstered with that ingrained sense of destiny the English did, indeed, rule the world – for a while.
    But the triumph of the myth came at a price. The growing sense of racial superiority among the English set them increasingly at odds with the other inhabitants of the Isles, the Welsh and the Scots on the British mainland, and with the Irish. The simple racism of the myth collapsed all three into the same denomination, ‘the Celts’, and poured scorn on them.
    By now, science had been harnessed to the myth in an enthusiastic attempt to build a solid frame to underpin its more extravagant assumptions. And when science and racism are mixed, the cocktail becomes increasingly volatile. At the end of his rambling book
The Races of Men
, published in 1850, Robert Knox MD, surgeon and enthusiast for the new science of comparative anatomy, concludes after 350 pages of Saxon worship and Celtic insult that, ‘The Celtic Race must be forced from this soil. England’s safety requires it.’ This outrageous suggestion, as it appears to us now, was completely in tune with the prevailing view, if not of an actual genocide, then certainly of cultural and spiritual suppression. In a superbly argued defence of the value of Celtic literature, published in 1867, the literary critic Matthew Arnold quotes a leader from
The Times
on the subject of the Welsh language:
    The Welsh language is the curse of Wales. Its prevalence, and the ignorance of English have excluded, and even now exclude, the Welsh people from the civilisation of theirEnglish neighbours. An Eisteddfod [the annual Welsh literary and musical festival] is one of the most mischievous and selfish pieces of sentimentalism which could possibly be perpetrated. It is simply a foolish interference with the natural progress of