BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

hegemony. 29 Hugh Cunningham likewise placed Greek political thought via Machiavelli and
opposition to the aristocratic suppression of Saxon liberties (the Norman Yoke) alongside the
Protestant ideal of an elect nation as sources of English radical patriotism. 30 More recently,
Louise Marshall has recognized in British theater between 1719 and 1745 an arena for political
debate. 31 Patriotic themes became standard fare, often in allegorical form, and attacks on
Walpole dealt with favoritism, factionalism, political placement and unsound treaties. The cult
of Parliament, the fall of the Machiavellian favorite and allegories idealizing the protection of
ancient liberties, Marshall argues, created a “homogenous” version of British identity in a unique
space for encoding stereotypes, a function later to be extended in nineteenth-century periodical
literature. 32 Peter Mandler has stressed the institutional orientation of British identity following
an age of revolutions and Burkean pragmatic conservatism, and how the celebration of
Parliament, English law and abstractions like the “spirit of the gentleman” could stand for
universal values and progress in spite of class inequities. 33 By the early nineteenth century liberal
gradualism would lie at the core of British identity as illustrated by the aristocratic Whigs’ return
29 “National Pride in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Samuel, 1:47-50.
30 “The Language of Patriotism,” in Samuel, 1:58-60
31 National Myth and Imperial Fantasy: Representations of Britishness on the Early
Eighteenth-Century Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 3-4.
32 Ibid., 11, 41, 44-45, 47, 65, 183.
33 The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony
Blair (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2006), 25-26. Burke’s influential
Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared in 1790.
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