How "God Save the King" Became "America"

Aretha Franklin singing My Country, 'Tis of Thee at the first inauguration of President Barack Obama on January 20, 2009 (Photo by Cecilio Ricardo/U.S. Air Force)

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FIFA's 2026 World Cup ushers in the strains of national anthems into our living rooms, pubs and restaurants from countries around the world. Surprisingly, some songs have more in common with each other than others.

Growing up in New York, I sang America, or My Country,´Tis of Thee, after saying the Pledge of Allegiance, hand over heart, and before classes began in elementary school. I knew God Save the King because Belize, my family's home, was still British Honduras, a colony of Britain.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary on July 4, I revisited the songs' histories.

It was not until I was an adult, living in England and Wales, that I grasped what I believed to be the shrewdness of the Americans, who transformed the patriotic sentiment for Britain to the United States by keeping the melody but changing the lyrics. Yet, it was not cleverness, merely happenstance. And it is not just those two countries which share the tune.

The melody of God Save the King is used for the royal anthem of Norway, Kongesangen (King's Song), officially adopted about 1906, and Liechtenstein's national anthem, Oben am jungen Rhein (High on the Young Rhine), officially adopted in 1920. Switzerland also used the melody for its de facto national anthem from 1848 until 1961; Russia used it as its imperial anthem from 1816 to 1833, and the German Empire used it for its national anthem from 1871 to 1918. Today, other countries, including the United States, use the melody for patriotic songs, not necessarily official national anthems, according to Classical Music, BBC Classical Music Magazine (April 29, 2024).

"However, almost from the start, the famous melody had become equally the property of the wider world of music. Way more than a hundred composers, from J.C. Bach (in 1768) to Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (in the 1970s) have incorporated the tune into their compositions."

God Save the King is one of the world's oldest national anthems.

"No one knows when the song was written or even when the words and lyrics were first put together. The earliest known publication of the work was in 1744, according to the Oxford Companion to Music, which notes that the song was the world's first national anthem," according to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News (CBC) (May 4, 2023).

What was happening in the 18th century in Britain? Why was there a need for an anthem?

The Jacobite Uprisings

The Jacobites were supporters of the exiled Catholic Stuart king, James II, and his descendants after the king was deposed in the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689). The Jacobite movement extended from 1688 until at least the 1750s, according to Britannica.

The Jacobites staged a series of rebellions in Scotland in the 18th century, attempting to overthrow the ruling House of Hanover and restore the House of Stuart to the British throne, according to Jacobite Uprisings, National Army Museum. They were encouraged and assisted by Britain's enemies, who saw their cause as a way of distracting Britain from its military campaigns overseas.

In Wales and Scotland, the movement was strong and primarily dynastic while, in Ireland, support was mainly religious. Roman Catholics and Anglican Tories were natural Jacobites, according to Britannica.

Within 60 years after the Glorious Revolution, five attempts at restoration were made for the the exiled Stuarts.

The Forty-five

The last and most formidable attempt was the Forty-five in 1745, according to Jacobite Uprisings, National Army Museum. The king was German-born George II, whose father had been given the throne to ensure that Britain was ruled by a Protestant, according to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News (CBC).

In July 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, the son of James Stuart, arrived in the Hebrides aboard a French frigate, according to Jacobite Uprisings. On August 19, he raised his standard at Glenfinnan, near Fort William. About 2,000 Highland clansmen rallied behind him. On September 17, 1745, "the Young Pretender", entered Edinburgh and proclaimed his father as King James III with himself as Regent.

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Route of Jacobite invasion and retreat (From 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, Coronation Garden, Rotary Club of Penrith)

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At the time, most of the British Army was fighting on the Continent in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), a European power struggle. Initially, the government had to rely on inexperienced troops. On September 21, 1745, the Jacobites defeated the government soldiers at Prestonpans, outside Edinburgh.

In early November, Charles' 6,000-strong army crossed the border into England. It captured Carlisle and marched south through Lancashire. On December 4, 1745, Charles entered Derby. He was only 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of London.

Paul Monod, who teaches 18th-century British history at Middlebury College in Vermont, told CNC News that the threat of the Jacobite Rebellion was real.

"London was in something of a panic."

Amid the Jacobite's southward campaign, Thomas Arne, composer of Rule, Britannia, and musical director of London's Theater Royal, on Drury Lane, decided that the troubled times needed another inspirational song. The well-known composer created an arrangement from a work published the previous year in the songbook, Thesaurus Musicus. He got his sister, the celebrated singer Susannah Maria Cibber, to lead a surprise performance to end the theater's evening's entertainment on September 28, 1745.

"And that seems to have resulted in the first public singing of God Save the King that we know of," said historian Paul Monod, about the patriotic song of several stanzas.

God save our gracious King

Long live our noble King

God Save the King

Send him victorious

Happy and glorious

Long to reign over us

God Save the King

The song was a hit.

The Daily Advertiser reported that it was greeted with "universal applause" and "repeated huzzahs".

Other theaters adopted the practice of playing it at the end of the evening's entertainment, even using the song as a selling point. Popular magazines printed both the music and lyrics.

The Jacobite Rebellion was crushed on April 16, 1746, at the Battle of Culloden, near Inverness, according to 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, Coronation Garden. However, the song proved resilient.

America (1831)

Samuel Francis Smith was a 24-year-old Baptist seminary student in Massachusetts when he wrote the lyrics of America, or My Country, 'Tis of Thee, the patriotic song which would serve as an unofficial national anthem for nearly 100 years, according to My Country, 'Tis of Thee, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The Bostonian was born in October 1808, 32 years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, which declared that the 13 colonies were no longer subject to the British monarch and were united and free states.

In 1831, the country consisted of 24 states and was defined by rapid territorial expansion, the entrenchment of slavery and the early rumblings of the abolitionist movement. Major milestones that year included Nat Turner's slave rebellion, the publication of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator and the Supreme Court ruling against Cherokee sovereignty following the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

In 1831, in Boston, while studying at Andover Theological Seminary, Smith, who learned 15 languages over the course of his life, was asked by hymn composer Lowell Mason to translate some German song books, according to Samuel F. Smith, Patriotic hymnnwriter, Died Suddenly, Christian History Institute.

Emboldened by one of the songs -- Heil dir im Siegerkranz (Hail to Thee in Victor's Crown), Smith set out to write a patriotic song for the United States set to the same melody.

"I was instantly inspired to write a patriotic hymn of my own," he said later, according to Samuel F. Smith, Patriotic hymnnwriter, Died Suddenly, Christian History Institute. He would write more than 150 other hymns in his life.

He had been writing verse since the age of eight, and it took him only about half an hour to dash off the famous lines. He did not know that the tune was the same as the British God Save the King.

"He would be criticized for using it. But evidently Lowell Mason wasn't bothered. He surprised Smith by playing America, which would become better known as My Country, 'Tis of Thee, that Fourth of July.

The song was first performed at an Independence Day celebration, on July 4, 1831, by a children's choir in Boston, according to My Country, 'Tis of Thee, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

"Smith's lyrics invoked the history of America --Land where my fathers died,/ Land of the Pilgrim's pride, / From every mountain side/ Let freedom ring -- as well as its beauty and sense of itself as a blessed land -- I love thy rocks and rills, / Thy woods and templed hills, / My heart with rapture trills, / Like that above.

"America soon took on a life of its own, quickly becoming widely known and well loved, and the song served as an unofficial national anthem until the adoption of The Star-Spangled Banner in 1931."

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 mountain side let freedom ring

In 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, Smith sent a copy of the song to former U.S. Representative J. Wiley Edmands, of Massachusetts. More than 30 years after he composed the lyrics, Smith wrote of the words' enduring power, according to My Country, 'Tis of Thee, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

"I am happy to have been the means through them of adding a momentary joy to a festivity or light to a gloomy hour."

Poet and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., with whom Smith had attended Harvard College, recommended him as a candidate for an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Harvard University in 1893, related Oliver Wendell Holmes (1962), by Miriam Rossiter Small, according to Wikipedia.

Harvard President Charles William Eliot declined, noting that My Country, 'Tis of Thee was better known for its tune rather than its lyrics. Holmes disagreed, noting that "his song will be sung centuries from now, when most of us and our pipings are forgotten".