The Best of Friends

The key moment came on July 4, 1918, as Americans and Britons fought as allies on the Western Front. In London, various influential figures took the opportunity to revisit the history of American independence. For instance, Winston Churchill, later the most famous advocate for a “special relationship”, delighted in telling an audience of Anglo-American dignitaries that Britons were now “glad to know that an English colony declared itself independent under a German king”. As he gave this speech, government buildings across London and the British Empire proudly flew the Stars and Stripes.

British claims on American independence continued in the years that followed. In 1921, Lord Curzon, the foreign secretary, happily proclaimed Washington a “great Englishman” while dedicating a statue of the first president in Trafalgar Square. Much the same sentiment was heard a few days earlier when a gathering of politicians and diplomats opened Washington’s ancestral home in Northamptonshire, Sulgrave Manor, as an Anglo-American shrine.

By the time of the bicentennial of American independence in 1976, the British political elite were well prepared to meet the challenge of celebrating July 4. In a masterstroke of political symbolism, the government gifted to the US a copy of the Magna Carta. The message was clear: while Jefferson’s famous text appeared to mark a moment of transatlantic severance, in actual fact it revealed the deep history of the Anglo-American bond. The Declaration of Independence stood with the document signed at Runnymede in 1215 in the pantheon of English constitutional history.

Will a similar claim on American independence surface in the pronouncements and performances linked to Trump’s visit to Britain this July? May will surely follow precedent and celebrate the ties of the “special relationship”; Trump will likely bluster, reciprocate, and talk about his Scottish roots. But Trump’s brand of nativism has little time or space for expansive Anglophilia, and he and May have yet to find an ideological or personal affinity of the sort enjoyed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. This Independence Day, the special relationship may lose out.

Edwards is Senior Lecturer in History at the Manchester Metropolitan University, in the United Kingdom. He has previously received funding from the ESRC, the United States Army Military History Institute, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission.