Feature writing

Americans may have won independence 250 years ago, but they have never stopped caring what the Brits think of them.

If you ever puzzle over Britain and America’s long and complicated relationship, consider (as one always should) Violet Crawley. The Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey, as played by Dame Maggie Smith, has many condescending things to say about Americans—mostly aimed at her daughter-in-law’s mother, played by Shirley MacLaine.

“You Americans never understand the importance of tradition,” Violet tells MacLaine’s Martha Levinson.

“Yes, we do. We just don’t give it power over us,” Martha replies.

Two silent, dueling impulses are present in the scene: the snobbery encased in history of the British versus the newer country’s then-proud freedom from both. The added layer of irony is that it was the dowry Martha’s daughter brought to the marriage that kept Downton alive. As gold-standard as Violet’s put-downs are, she also knows that the very American Levinsons saved the Crawleys’ posh British behinds. It was a trend at the time: The so-called “dollar princesses” brought billions in cold hard cash across the pond. They got titles, while British aristocrats got the capital to save their crumbling stately homes. The arrangement also brought along with it an amplification of a deep-seated mutual resentment around identity and superiority.

In recent times that resentment has bloomed into a full-blown, toxic diplomatic crisis, with the so-called “special relationship” in seemingly dire freefall—with President Donald Trump fiercely criticizing Britain and Prime Minister Keir Starmer for not, in Trump’s eyes, adequately supporting America’s war with Iran, and the British vigorously rolling their eyes in return.

“Brits do judge Americans,” Tina Brown, one of the old country’s most celebrated human exports, former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and now queen of Substack, tells T&C. “They could forgive Americans for voting for Trump once, but not twice.”

As Trump’s anti-British invective became more extreme, King Charles and Queen Camilla’s state visit to America in late April was intended to ameliorate frayed relations. According to famed trans­atlantic broadcaster Piers Morgan, Charles’s “super-successful” state visit “did more to repair the strained ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America than all the politicians, diplomats, and bureaucrats put together. And he’s done it while managing to appeal to conservatives, liberals, royal-bashers, monarchists, and—most importantly—President Trump himself.”

Morgan, who recently launched a new show, The Royals Uncensored, adds, “In the last few months, President Trump has savaged Britain’s ‘weak’ prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and ridiculed Britain’s Royal Navy as ‘nonexistent.’ Charles was able to make all of that feel like small beer without mentioning any of it. That takes some diplomatic skill—as does giving the U.S. and the president a subtle lesson in democratic checks and balances without sending Trump into a tailspin.” Brown agrees. “King Charles’s state visit was a triumph of tailoring,” she says. “And he did his best to repair the erstwhile ‘special relationship,’ if only briefly.”

Transatlantic closeness has long cut both ways, oscillating between warm admiration and scornful disdain, via a midpoint of affectionate mockery. George Bernard Shaw is reputed to have once said that England and America were “two countries separated by a common language,” but the differences go far beyond “tomayto” versus “tomahto.”

Throughout history, the most effective weapon the British have deployed to undermine American swagger has been, as Violet understood, cut-glass-accented condescension—to pass judgment on American loudness and vulgarity, and its political and cultural excesses and lunacies, in contrast with the Old World panoply of castles, queens, princesses, booming Shakespearean actors, ceremony, eccentricity, and afternoon tea.

America threw the Brits out 250 years ago—“No Kings” and all that tea in Boston Harbor—yet well-worn tensions around accents, language, power, class, taste, politics, and culture persist. The trans­atlantic jousting is variously serious and silly. Pre-1776, the British monarchy was mercantile-minded in a modern and ruthless way, says British journalist and author Clive Irving, who has moved between the two countries throughout his life.

“Colonization was basically an extraction business: tobacco in the South, sugar in the Caribbean. The crown was deeply involved in shipping slaves from Africa to do the actual extracting,” says Irving, author of The Last Queen: Elizabeth II’s Seventy Year Battle to Save the House of Windsor. “King George III was more a problem to the colonists as a mercurial CEO of that business than he was as a sovereign. The revolution was in part like a stockholder revolt by men who thought they could do better at the business by electing CEOs on merit, not birthright.”

Post-revolution, British condescension was soon on vivid display. In her two-volume travel book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832, Frances Milton Trollope, mother of novelist Anthony, wrote: “If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess.”

In his 1842 travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation, Charles Dickens wrote: “No visitor can ever have set foot on those shores with a stronger faith in the Republic than I had when I landed in America.” However, he went on to write a cutting critique of the country, decrying Washington, DC, as the home of “despicable trickery at elections; underhanded tamperings with public officers; and cowardly attacks upon opponents…”

The shorthand for Americans, the derogatory “yanks,” is thought to date from the 18th century; it had entered mainstream parlance by World War II (with the presence of American GIs in the UK). After the war Britain’s attitude toward the U.S. was a study in contrasts: one part envy, as a country emerging from rationing eyed America’s “land of plenty,” alongside a disavowal of what was seen as the vulgar Americanization of British culture and language.

Britain was once a small country with a geographically far-flung empire; America is a vastly bigger country that today proudly puffs its chest out to the world. The two nations can best be seen as an archetypal Odd Couple, or a never-ending Tom & Jerry cartoon: very different, scratchy and provoking, codependent, hostile, and affectionate. Culturally, the differences between Britain and America are both distinct and blurred. National characteristics, language, and mores have been swapped, mocked, and embraced. A British accent in America is adored; an American accent is Britain is scorned. If you need a villain with an accent reeking of malign intent (Joan Collins in Dynasty) or a ruffle-haired hero (Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, all the James Bonds), the Brits will supply one. If you need a stunning princess (Diana, Kate), iconic queen (Elizabeth I and II), or scandalous headline (Harry and Meghan, Andrew ­Mountbatten-Windsor), the royals will always deliver.

But after going to all that trouble to declare independence, why do Americans still so often defer to the Brits? Perhaps it’s the posh accent, or perhaps it comes down to historical bragging rights: America was officially born in 1776, whereas—as King Charles joked during his visit—the old country is so much older, and with age comes superiority and innate condescension.

Anyway, America may have rejected a British monarch 250 years ago, but as U.S. tourism figures to the UK show (a record-­breaking 5.6 million visits in 2024, with travelers spending $9 billion), the new country ended up quite liking royalty and history, and all the glittery arcana that comes with it.

It is often said that America, in spirit, is classless compared to Britain, and that the American Dream is a cornerstone of a more meritocratic society. However, in both countries the widening gaps between rich and poor—and an increasingly extreme political landscape—tell a darker story. “London and New York are both successful multi­cultural entrepôts, distinctive in size, character, and wealth, open to every free thought,” says Irving. “So, the most unsettling change in my lifetime has been, in both countries, a strong nativist reaction to those qualities—Brexit in the UK and MAGA in the U.S.”

Even as political upheaval roils both Britain and America, human traffic between the two flows freely. Many boldface Brits—the Beatles, Prince Harry, Anna Wintour—have minted their professional success in America; “conquering” the U.S. is seen as a career pinnacle. Expats from each live in both countries, and the culture-clash comedy and drama of doing so—and between Brits and Americans generally—have been evoked in many books, movies, and TV shows.

“The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it’s had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply,” the late British author Christopher Hitchens said in 2012, five years after gaining U.S. citizenship. “Broad-mindedness, curiosity, willingness to accept strangers, allow them to become citizens really quite easily, assimilate to their arrival.” This was striking, Hitchens noted, in light of the “mean-spirited” racism being leveled at then President Obama and immigrants more generally.

“America is a country in which I see the most persistent idealism and the blandest of cynicism, and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence,” the broadcaster Alistair Cooke, famed for his long-running Letter from America on BBC radio, once wrote.

As both Hitchens and Cooke captured, the British are fascinated by America’s expansiveness—geographical and otherwise—while also attuned to its capacity and instincts to both welcome and exclude. America does “big” in a way that a small island nation does not. The British may sneer at American brashness, but—as a people who apologize when someone else stands on their feet—they are also envious of American directness. And there is little condescension when it comes to American culture exported to Britain; American pop culture has long been embraced. A nation dedicated to good chocolate may hate the American equivalent (deservedly so, because it is awful apart from Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups), but Brits merrily chow down on American foods.

Trump’s recent rhetoric may have given Britain carte blanche to do what it does naturally regarding America—judge, and judge harshly—but the “special relationship,” while certainly currently roughed-up and spiraling, will likely endure. When it comes to both countries’ eternally in-flux dance, it is useful to consider another Downton scene, in which Violet flails in the unfamiliar clutches of a swivel chair. It is not a modern invention, Matthew (Dan Stevens) informs her, but widely held to be the brainchild of Founding Father and third U.S. president Thomas Jefferson. Struggling to maintain her posture, Violet scoffs, “Why does every day involve a fight with an American?” It’s another classic Dame Maggie zinger, with an unspoken, significant addendum: Jefferson is said to have invented the chair while drafting the Declaration of Independence.