It might be helpful if we were to stop referring to "the English" as if there were one simple, homogenous entity. There is not. Attitudes toward traditional culture are largely class-driven. Tradition has in the first instance tended to be marginalised so that it survived principally among the working classes, while at the same time those same people were taught to aspire, so far as music was concerned, instead to the bourgeois art music model, based largely upon fashionable foreign styles; and to despise their own culture as clumsy yokel stuff, fit only for those who didn't want to get on in the world. The targets for aspiration have changed, but the underlying principle remains the same. The ordinary working people of England were never the masters of an empire; they were that empire's first colony, and its first victims.