The Global Anthem

One of the biggest surprises I recall, when moving to Australia in 1979 from the States, was my discovery that the classic piece of patriotic Americana that I had been singing since a child, “America (My Country ’tis of Thee)”, was also known, in Australia, as “God Save the Queen”—same melody, but with different words. And quite a different patriotism!

“God Save the Queen” was the national anthem of Australia, until “Advance Australia Fair” topped an opinion poll conducted by the Whitlam government in 1974 and became the de facto anthem. “Advance Australia Fair” was eventually legislated as the national anthem by the Hawke government in 1984.

Ironically England, the country most commonly associated with the song, has no official national anthem of its own. “God Save the Queen” is, of course, the common royal anthem of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, although Scotland has its own national song, and Wales its own national anthem.  But official status of “God Save the Queen” in the UK derives from custom and use, not from royal proclamation, or any act of parliament.

 

God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the Queen!

 

No one knows for certain who came up with the persuasive melody. John Bull, an English composer, may have written the music during the reign of Elizabeth I. Henry Carey is also referenced as having possibly composed it, in 1742. It has been attributed to Henry Purcell and John Dowland, and some musicologists credit Thomas Ravenscroft, one of Bull’s contemporaries, as having adapted it from an old Scots carol, “Remember O Thou Man” (which is in a minor key, although to my ear this is too far of a stretch to be credible). Its true origins remain unknown.

On the nature of the anthem’s musical charm, Garrick Alder cynically commented:

 

It’s a catchy, bombastic, easy-to-follow, unadventurous tune, with a flexible and innately “vocal” structure, and these factors have made it consistently ideal for anthemic purposes. “God Save the Queen” is the ultimate off-the-peg national anthem.

 

Beethoven disagreed, and wrote: “I have to show the English a little of what a blessing ‘God Save the King’ is.” In 1796, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham praised the tune: “the melody recommending itself by beauty to the most polished ears, and by its simplicity to the rudest ear”.

The author of the English lyrics remains unknown as well, although the melody has had words authored by many different writers in many different languages. The phrase God Save the King itself, dates back as far as a coronation anthem used for King Edgar, in 973, with words from the Bible (1 Kings 1:38–40):

 

And all the people rejoic’d, and said:

God save the King! Long live the King!

May the King live for ever,

Amen, Allelujah.

 

The first copy of the completed lyric appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1745, without attribution. That year, the British composer Thomas Arne, the author of “Rule Britannia!” arranged it, with the title, “God Save Our Noble King”. Charles Dimont recalled in History Today in 1953:

 

In September, 1745 … demonstrations of loyalty to the reigning house were in special demand. Prince Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, had routed Cope at Prestonpans, and was about to invade England; London was preparing to defend itself and its Hanoverian rulers. An example of popular feeling was given on September 28th when the entire male cast of Drury Lane theatre announced their intention of forming a special unit of the Volunteer Defence Force. That evening they gave a performance of Jonson’s The Alchemist. At its conclusion, there was an additional item. Three of the leading singers of the day—Mrs Cibber, Beard and Reinhold—stepped forward and began a special anthem:

God bless our Noble King,

God Save great George our King …

 

The Daily Advertiser reported: “The universal applause sufficiently denoted in how just an Abhorrence they (the audience) hold the Arbitrary Schemes of our invidious enemies …” The other theatres were quick to follow Drury Lane.

The following year, Handel incorporated the theme into his Occasional Oratorio, a response to the Jacobite Rebellion of ’45. In the pubs, loyal Britons made up impromptu lyrics:

 

Lord, grant that Marshal Wade,

May by thy mighty aid,

Victory bring.

May he sedition hush,

and like a torrent rush,

Rebellious Scots to crush,

God save the King.

 

The Jacobites, in response, came up with:

 

God bless the prince, I pray,

God bless the prince, I pray,

Charlie, I mean;

That Scotland we may see

Freed from vile Presbyt’ry,

Both George and his Feckie,

Ever so, Amen.

 

In the USA, Samuel Francis Smith, a Baptist minister and composer of over 150 hymns, wrote “America (My Country ’tis of Thee)”, in 1832. He had been studying theology in Germany and liked the way daily classes began, with students singing a hymn, and thought he’d like to write something like that for Americans. He heard Muzio Clementi’s Symphony No. 3, which contained the melody of “God Save the Queen” (as a tribute to the UK, Clementi’s adopted country), and it was in this orchestral context that the tune first caught Smith’s ear. He copied out the melody and thirty minutes later, the classic American lyric was written.

Samuel Francis Smith’s version became one of the United States’ de facto national anthems—along with “Hail, Columbia” and a few others—until Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner” was officially adopted in 1931.

As had happened in the UK, “America (My Country ’tis of Thee)”, with its extraordinarily memorable tune, underwent many similar lyric “cover versions” in the States, as various groups, such as abolitionists, organised labour and farm unions, the growing women’s suffrage movement, Native Americans, and the Civil Rights movement, all hung their respective political messages on the resilient melody. In the late 1830s, the Temperance League published dozens of lyric variations to the same tune, all sanctioned, remarkably, by Samuel Francis Smith himself, who, as well as a minister, had also been an influential temperance activist.

 

Here at her altar swear

Your country’s ark to tear

From despot’s hand:

Midst drunkard hosts be brave—

Your holy birthright save!

Roll back that Hellish wave

Which sweeps the land.

 

During the Civil War in the 1860s, both the Northern and Southern armies adapted it for patriotic purposes. In 1963, Martin Luther King incorporated some of the text in the close to his famous I Have a Dream speech:

 

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning:

My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrim’s pride,
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring!

 

Recalling the stirring clarion calls of Churchill, a reporter in the Los Angeles Times wrote that King had the “matchless eloquence [of] a supreme orator … a type so rare as almost to be forgotten in our age”.

 

“God Save the Queen” became a pervasive force throughout Europe. It was sung as “Ober am jungen Rhein”, the national anthem of Liechtenstein (the last of the 343 states which once made up the Holy Roman Empire). Bismarck personally chose it for “Heil dir im Siegerkranz”, and it became the anthem of the German Empire until the end of the First World War. It was the royal song of Norway (“Kongesangen”), and also of France, in honour of Louis XIV. “Dieu Sauve le Roy” was composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully, as a prayer, during King Louis XIV’s surgery on an anal fistula in 1792!

It was heard in the anthems of Sweden (“Bevare Gud vår kung”) and Switzerland (“Rufst du, mein Vaterland”), in all the fifty-four Commonwealth nations, and in Russia, where it was the national anthem from 1816 to 1833, with the title, “Molitva Russkikh” (The Prayer of Russians), with lyrics by Vasily Zhukovsky.

“God Save the Queen” was the national anthem of the Kingdom of Hawaii before 1860, and a Hawaiian language version, “E Ola Ke Alii Ke Akua”, became the official anthem from 1860 to 1886. Hawaii was a sovereign nation until 1893, when the monarchy was overthrown, but it remained a republic until it became a territory of the US, and formally achieved statehood in 1959. (Hawaii was one of two US states—the other being the Republic of Texas—that had had international diplomatic recognition as a country, before becoming a state.)

Many well-known composers have incorporated the melody of “God Save the Queen” into compositions, including Beethoven in no fewer than seven variations, as, in his lifetime, his music was more popular in England than anywhere else in Europe besides Germany. The theme also appears in the works of Haydn, Brahms,J.C. Bach, Liszt, Britten, Debussy, Weber, Paganini, Strauss, Elgar and many others.

Abdullah Quilliam, a nineteenth-century English convert to Islam, and a leading Islamic scholar in the UK, wrote an Islamic lyric adaptation:

 

God bless the Muslim cause:

Bless all who keep Thy laws

And do the right.

Uphold the Muslim band,

In this and every land;

Give them full strength to stand

Firm in the fight.

 

“God Save the Queen” was one of the first pieces of music played by computer (along with “Baa Baa Black Sheep”) and was the first computerised music ever recorded, programmed by Alan Turing at the Computing Machine Laboratory of the University of Manchester in 1948.

 

There were originally five verses, but the second verse is hardly ever sung:

 

O Lord our God arise,

Scatter her enemies,

And make them fall:

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On Thee our hopes we fix:

God save us all.

 

The inaugural version of “America (My Country ’tis of Thee)” also had five verses. The third verse never made it past the initial performance in 1831:

 

No more shall tyrants here
With haughty steps appear,
And solder bands;
No more shall tyrants tread
Above the patriot dead—
No more our blood be shed
By alien hands.

 

Perhaps it’s time to put the missing verses back in.