The English climate, being what it is, commends the written word to all but the hardiest or most square-eyed holidaymaker.  Being neither I hope, and having spent a few days footloose with my family in the folds of the North Devon countryside, I, too, have been reading a good deal of late.

Of course, we had travelled west well equipped for the conditions.  Three weighty tomes, in my case - two historical, one political.  But in the event I was charmed instead by the double row of titles supplied for his rained-in clientele by the owner of the farmhouse we had rented.

For anyone remotely interested in ideas another person’s choice of reading has the potential for some fascination.  I am not a voracious reader myself but I respect those that are … at least, the ones who read something of substance.  Without fail, when I go into a home where books are important I will find a chance to survey the titles.  A picture speaks a thousand words, they say, and a bathroom cabinet probably ten thousand.  But a bookshelf is much, much more illuminating.

Our host, I already knew, was a Reverend gentleman living on the coast some half-hour’s drive to the north of Petrockstowe.  A religious is a more interesting subject than most, and while I have no proof that he didn’t stock the bookshelf with a few yards from a dealer in the local flea-market, the New International Version of the Christian Growth Study Bible did militate somewhat against this.  So did the very well-thumbed paperback collection: all large works of fiction by the likes of PD James, John Fowles and, somewhat incongruously, Umberto Eco.

Fiction, however, rarely engages me.  It was mostly the concentration on English history which did that, and which really convinced me that the Reverend had donated his own books to my intellectual welfare.  Arthur Bryant topped the list with four ageing titles, including Volume 1 of the summation of his life’s work, Set in a Silver Sea.  It is largely compiled from material published from 1953 to 1963, and the edition in my hands was published in 1984.  I found Bryant, therefore, refreshingly free from the political constraints of modern thought.  Of the founding moment of the history of England as the land of an English nation he writes:-

But in the middle of the sixth century the Saxons and Angles, first in the south and then in the north, resumed their advance.  By the end of it the Britons of the south-west, driven into the Devonian-Cornish peninsula, were cut off from the Celtic kinsfolk of the little, quarrelling principalities of Wales … In the north an Angle or English kingdom called Northumbria, stretching from coast to coast across the Pennine moors, soon afterwards separated the Welsh from their fellow Celts of the Cumbrian mountains and Strathclyde.  For in 603 the Northumbrian king defeated the Britons of Strathclyde and their northern Christian neighbours, the Scots of Dalriada or Argyllshire, in a great battle at Liddesdale.  “From that day,” a Saxon boasted, “no king of the Scots dared to meet the English nation in battle.”  From the north to the Severn and Dee, from the Channel to the Forth, the conquest of Britain was complete.  Except for the rocky, rain-swept west and north, it was Britain no longer.  It had become England.

Among the Reverend’s other histories was Christopher Lee’s This Sceptred Isle, recently recommended to MR readers by Martin Hutchinson.  Martin reported that a new edition is to be forthcoming.  The Reverend’s was published in 1997 by Penguin History ISBN 0-140-26133-8.  (For any fans of garlic and silver bullets, this Christopher Lee is a former luminary of Cambridge and a specialist in contemporary and military history.)

As to his dating of the genesis of England he is less specific than Bryant.  Working from 449 and the first Germanic arrivals he writes:-

One hundred and fifty years had gone by since the Angles, Saxons & Jutes, in other words the English, had come to Britain.  Britain was now being called England …

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells what happened in the year 595.  “In this year, “says the chronicler, “Pope Gregory sent Augustine to Britain with very many monks who preached God’s word to the English nation.”

So be it principally racial or cultural in character, a consciousness of an English people and land called England which they had won for themselves and were winning still was generally extanct by the turn of the seventh century.

Lee’s book was written to accompany a BBC TV series, and it is a work by another teleophyte, Michael Wood, which brings to the reverend’s bookshelf a third version of nascent England.  It is, in these questionable times, unquestionably the Authorised Version.

Wood’s feeling for the England for which he searches in In Search of England is a long way from Bryant’s high-flown patriotism.  Wood eschews race and culture, and posits the English genesis on the formation of a state unified under a common crown.  This he dates from the reign of Athelstan.  It was, he makes clear, less a consequence of some irresistible march of Anglo-Saxon conquest but of a threat from without – from the Viking – which brought a English state into being.

When Wood does address the English as a race he takes pains to be multicultural:-

It was the military conquest of the Midlands and East Anglia by Alfred’s son, Edward Elder (a ‘reconquest’ in all the historiography until only recently) which set up a West Saxon kingdom of all England, which was finally achieved by Athelstan after 927.  This is the real foundation of the English state.  By 973, Athelstan’s descendant Edgar could celebrate his coronation in Bath with unmistakable imperial overtones …  Edgar was a ‘king of the English’, but legislated within that for nation of Englishmen, Danes and Britons: one kingdom, but one whose language and customs varied.  Speaking the English language was a help, but not essential.  From the start, England was ethnically diverse; the key was allegiance to the English king and his law.

The pregnancy of Wood’s language leaves no doubt as to his wider intentions.  Sure enough, he concludes the book with a chapter titled, “An English Family”.  It extols the liberal wonders of African genes in the English bloodstream.  So it’s not even diversity which he is hawking but openness to difference as a precursor to assimilation - and an assimilation that spells unmitigated racial destruction at that.  He has a TV career to which he must tend, I suppose.  But am I alone in wishing such low bows to the “correct” were accompanied by an official health warning.  PeeCee kills would suffice.

I might add, in laborious contradiction to Wood, that there was precious little ethnic diversity between Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes - and the Britons, too, were peoples of coastal North-European.  From the start, actually, England was ethnically homogenous.

Such a sentiment would no doubt be wholly shared by old Arthur B.  But it would have my Reverend host nailing garlic to our farmhouse door and checking the availability of silver bullets on E-bay.  The body of the Church of England is riddled with bacterial liberalism.  Scarcely an Anglican today can conceive of a duty to his kindred people above that to the eternally suffering Third World.  Any negative consequence or cost to bringing the Third World into our midst is likewise inconceivable.  Social schisms and instability arise solely because there is not enough charity towards the incomers.  Murders, rapes, violent assaults and muggings?  Not enough charity.  White flight?  Not enough charity.  White resistance?  Not so much a paucity of charity but of all human goodness.  The illiberal right is uniquely unworthy of Christian love and prayer and fit for nothing save damnation.  The modern Christian may, therefore, utilise the special and specially pleasurable forms of discourse developed by liberals specifically for writing off resistance among the indigenes.  You know: the usual charges of ignorance, fear, hatred and – wait for it – racism.

It’s as though a choir consisting of “tricky” Franz Boas, the Frankfurt School, George Soros, Abe Foxman and his dearest friends and the trustees of the Ford Foundation, all under the masterly direction of Saint Karl himself, was a-singin’ in their ears.

On the Reverend’s bookshelf, for example, I discovered the 79th Edition of Pears Cyclopaedia, published in 1970.  It sports this little gem of liberal rectitude, which shows how sixties thinking was: (a) amazingly partisan and unsceptical, (b) wrong, and (c) is still the thinking of the liberal-left today:-

Racism is simply a vulgar superstition believed in by the ignorant or mentally unbalanced, and it may be stated as a fact that racial superiority is a myth believed in by no scientist of repute.  There are, therefore, only two questions which it is necessary to answer: (1) if no race is superior why are there obvious differences between the backward and the technically advanced peoples?  (2) If there are no inherent differences between peoples, then why does racial prejudice exist?  Both of these are, strictly-speaking, questions to which the scientists must give an answer: the former is answered in Section F, Part V, the latter under Anti-semitism J3.

So that’s that, then.  Good old Section F.  And, well, J3 … boy (or girl or it), are we grateful for that?  Isn’t it all simply splendid when one is right up there with The Great And The Good?  Now for that warm, fuzzy feeling one gets from being a being of moral superiority.  And, obviously, not a whit superstitious or ignorant or, heaven forbid, mentally unbal … un … mental …

Liberalism, really, is such a bitch … an exercise in self-delusion and vanity.  But, obviously, one has to give it its homicidal due.  One has to admit that after three centuries mutating bacteria-style into new and ever more extreme forms it does possess longevity.  It attacks the social structure like rising damp attacks the average 300-year old North Devon farmhouse.  Even though the walls are a yard thick and have outlasted Napoleon and the Luftwaffe they spall and the air is perfumed with an unmistakably close, sour mustiness.

Take by way of example the British monarchy.  It’s more than 300 years old - there’s Athelstan, for example.  Yet the crown arrived, eventually, at Edward VIII.

The Kings Story, the memoirs of H.R.H The Duke of Windsor K.G. published in 1951 (and dedicated “To Wallis”), was perhaps the oddest of the Reverend’s reads.  It is the testimony of an unashamed (and possibly unaware) devotee of individualism … a man who considered duty to be, well, a matter of duty and not of love.

On the one occasion he might have exercise love he exercised humanitarianism instead.  It was the famous incident of his tour of the South Wales mining communities in the grip of thirties depression.  One can plainly distinguish in it the upward spread of liberalism into a formerly rock-solid institution.

For two days I had travelled among the little mining villages of the Rhondda and Monmouth valleys – Penygraig, Pontypridd, Merthyr Tydfil, Dowlais …  But the once-rich coal-mines upon which the wealth and power of Britain so largely depended had become a monument to the transitoryness of human institutions.  Even a king, who would be the last to feel the pinch of depression, could see that something was manifestly wrong.

However, an incident occurred that momentarily brought tension into the atmosphere surrounding the journey.  I was quoted as having said, in the midst of some dismal scene of ruined industry, that “something must be done” to repair the ravages of the dreadful inertia that had gripped the region.

The statement was the minimum humanitarian response that I could have made to what I had seen.  The liberal press naturally took approving note.  But certain government circles were not pleased.  It was intimated that by saying that “something must be done” I had suggested in effect that the government had neglected to do all it might have done.

So we see the “the liberal press” as opportunistic as ever and the establishment as guilty, and concerned to impute sensibilities to the British public which it probably never possessed.

The working class ceased to be the left’s great cause celebre in the 1980’s.  Today, the fateful triangle of liberal politics, a morally weak, easily marxised establishment and imaginary public sentiment are centred on race.  But the race of aliens - not the race of the English, Scots, or Welsh.

The continuity of the people should mean something to an institution itself founded on continuity.  As we have seen from Prince Charles’ desire to be “The Defender of Faiths” and from Her Majesty the Queen’s last Christmas Day address to the nation it does not.  Or not very much, anyway.  I find that quite shocking.

The problem is that wealth, power, fame - even if they are not unimaginable - invariably commend excess and individualism, not duty to kind.  So kind slips away quietly and progressively from the centre of considerations.  As a matter of course other, obviously liberal imperatives are drawn in.  Doubtless, it is asking a great deal – perhaps too much – of a monarch in a liberal milieu to set aside the temptations of individualism for mindfulness of where his true duty lies.  But in our lesser ways we all face the same choice.  Either we are loyal to one another or we are not.  And if we are not we have no recourse to complaint at the consequences.

When the abdication crisis was over and all the choices made by H.R.H The Duke of Windsor K.G., this is how he excused his disloyalty:-

And so it came to pass that at two o’clock on the morning of December 12, 1936, HMS Fury slid silently and unescorted out of Portsmouth Harbour.  Watching the shore of England recede, I was swept by many emotions.  If it had been hard to give up the Throne, it had been even harder to give up my country.  I knew now I was irretrievably on my own.  The draw-bridges were going up behind me.  But of one thing I was certain: so far as I was concerned love had triumphed over the exigencies of politics.

Mere politics.  A curious reduction.  Perhaps the brutal contrast in scale between “me” and “kind” necessitates such a device.  Not one, I would think, that would have occurred to the Saxon kings.