Friday 12 May 2017

Tom O’ Bedlam



Tom o’ Bedlam

From the hag and hungry goblin
That into rags would rend ye,
The spirit that stands by the naked man
In the Book of Moons defend ye,
That of your five sound senses
You never be forsaken,
Nor wander from your selves with Tom
Abroad to beg your bacon,
While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.

Of thirty bare years have I
Twice twenty been enragèd,
And of forty been three times fifteen
In durance soundly cagèd
On the lordly lofts of Bedlam,
With stubble soft and dainty,
Brave bracelets strong, sweet whips ding-dong,
With wholesome hunger plenty,
And now I sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.

With a thought I took for Maudlin
And a cruse of cockle pottage,
With a thing thus tall, sky bless you all,
I befell into this dotage.
I slept not since the Conquest,
Till then I never wakèd,
Till the roguish boy of love where I lay
Me found and stript me nakèd.
And now I sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.

When I short have shorn my sow’s face
And swigged my horny barrel,
In an oaken inn I pound my skin
As a suit of gilt apparel;
The moon’s my constant mistress,
And the lowly owl my marrow;
The flaming drake and the night crow make
Me music to my sorrow.
While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.

The palsy plagues my pulses
When I prig your pigs or pullen,
Your culvers take, or matchless make
Your Chanticleer or Sullen.
When I want provant with Humphrey
I sup, and when benighted,
I repose in Paul’s with waking souls
Yet never am affrighted.
But I do sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.

I know more than Apollo,
For oft, when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at bloody wars
In the wounded welkin weeping;
The moon embrace her shepherd,
And the Queen of Love her warrior,
While the first doth horn the star of morn,
And the next the heavenly Farrier.
While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.

The gypsies, Snap and Pedro,
Are none of Tom’s comradoes,
The punk I scorn and the cutpurse sworn,
And the roaring boy’s bravadoes.
The meek, the white, the gentle
Me handle, touch, and spare not;
But those that cross Tom Rynosseros
Do what the panther dare not.
Although I sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.

With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end::
Methinks it is no journey.
Yet will I sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.

Wednesday 10 May 2017

Accession : The Fall of the House of Plantagenet





It is only by chance that Titulus Regius has survived

Titulus Regius: The Title of the King
by Tracy Bryce

Titulus Regius is a rare document in the history of the monarchy of England.  In a country where rights of succession were usually determined by inheritance and bloodlines, or more dramatically through rights of conquest, the Titulus is a legal document, written in English, which cogently argues for presenting the throne of England to the most eminently qualified candidate available – Richard Plantagenet.  My purpose today is to take a tour of TitulusRegius, reading and interpreting the text, as well as to discuss the background and history of this pivotal document of Richard’s short reign.

Origin

This Act of Settlement transcribed into the Rolls of Richard’s only Parliament is allegedly based upon the text of the petition made by Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, to an assembly of the Lords and Commons in the London Guildhall on Wednesday, June 25th1483.  The petition was presented to the Duke of Gloucester at Baynard’s Castle on the next day, after which he acknowledged his acceptance, and King Richard’s reign began. 

Parliament had been called for November 6th, but, being delayed by Buckingham’s rebellion in October, it did not convene until January 23rd 1484.  Titulus Regiuswas the first act on the agenda, to verify the credentials of the reigning monarch and the prerogative of the Parliament that elected him.  We start with a kind of prologue, which establishes the association between the petition in June and this Act of Settlement now read into the Parliamentary record.  It is also carefully argued that, while those who presented the original petition – the roll of Parchment - were not a lawfully formed Parliament, this present body is a lawfully formed Parliament, and accordingly confirms all that was said the previous June.

The Preamble starts…

Where late heretofore, that is to say, before the Consecration, Coronation and Enthronization of our Sovereign Lord the King Richard the Third, a Roll of Parchment, containing in writing certain Articles of the tenor underwritten, on the behalf and in the name of the three Estates of this Realm of England, that is to wit, of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and of the Commons, by many and diverse Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and other Nobles and notable persons of the Commons in great multitude, was presented and actually delivered unto our said Sovereign Lord the King, to the intent and effect expressed at large in the same Roll; to the which Roll, and to the Considerations and instant Petition comprised in the same, our said Sovereign Lord, for the public weal and tranquility of this Land, benignly assented.
Now forasmuch as neither the said three Estates, neither the said persons, which in their name presented and delivered, as is abovesaid, the said Roll unto our said Sovereign Lord the King, were assembled in form of Parliament; by occasion whereof, diverse doubts, questions and ambiguities, been moved and engendered in the minds of diverse persons, as it is said: Therefore, to the perpetual memory of the truth, and declaration of the same, be it ordained, provided and established in this present Parliament, that the tenor of the said Roll, with all the continue of the same, presented, as is abovesaid, and delivered to our before said Sovereign Lord the King, in the name and on the behalf of the said three Estates out of Parliament, now by the same three Estates assembled in this present Parliament, and by authority of the same, be  ratified, enrolled, recorded, approved and authorized, into removing the occasion of doubts and ambiguities, and to all other lawful effect that shall more thereof ensue; so that all things said, affirmed, specified, desired and remembered in the said Roll, and in the tenor of the same underwritten, in the name of the said three Estates, to the effect expressed in the same Roll, be of like effect, virtue and force, as if all the same things had been so said, affirmed, specified, desired and remembered in a full Parliament, and by authority of the same accepted and approved. The tenor of the said Roll of Parchment, whereof above is made mention, follows and is such. 

Suppression

It is only by chance that TitulusRegius has survived.   One of the first acts of Henry VII’s Parliament in November 1485  was to repeal Richard’s Act of Settlement unread; orders were passed down to have it deleted from the Statute book, and all copies were to be destroyed under pain of punishment.  As stated in the rolls of Henry’s first Parliament: 

“So that all things said and remembered in the said Bill and Act thereof may be for ever out of remembrance and also forgot.”[1]

The intent was to wipe out the stain of illegitimacy on Henry’s prospective wife, Elizabeth of York.  Her legitimacy as an heir of Edward IV served to strengthen Henry’s claim to the throne.

Sir Thomas More and Tudor historian Polydore Vergil, writing in the later years of Henry’s reign and beyond, consequently did not have access to the Titulus.  Its subsequent discovery sorely damaged the credibility of their own scholarly works.  In the 18thcentury, Horace Walpole in his Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III takes great delight in skewering More with the inaccuracies of the Eleanor Butler pre-contract story, whom More had misidentified as a royal mistress named Elizabeth Lucy.[2]  But if you believe, as Sir Clements Markham does, that “Thomas More” was really Cardinal John Morton in disguise, then the naming of the well-known mistress Elizabeth Lucy as the woman to whom Edward was betrothed, now appears to be a deliberate and nefarious scheme to discredit the veracity of Titulus Regius.  But that’s not a debate for this paper.

Discovery

We have to thank the anonymous Second Continuator of the Croyland Chronicle who summarized the contents of this “rolle of parchement”, which set forth Richard’s claim to the throne.  The Chronicle itself came to light early in the 17th century, and soon afterwards William Camden discovered the long-buried Act of Settlement amongst Private Acts filed away in the Tower, where it had escaped Henry’s purge. Cartographer John Speed printed more details from the Titulus in his book, History of Great Britain in 1611, and Sir George Buck used it as a source document for his better known work, The History of the life and reigne of Richard the Third, written circa 1619.  It was the beginning of Ricardian revisionism. 

Content

Charles Ross dismisses the Titulusas blatant propaganda, but political documents are invariably just that – an attempt to sway the minds and beliefs of the public on behalf of the party or body that generates it.  The goal of such documents is to justify governmental action or influence public opinion.   The language of Titulus is rather pedantic, a form of “legalese” with the constant repetition of key phrases to emphasize and to clarify the message delivered.  It sounds rather laborious to modern ears.  The Titulus is divided into three discernable themes:

Part I – The Previous Regime 

The first part of Titulus Regiusfollows a typical pattern of casting aspersions on the reigns of previous kings, as an explanation for why a change was needed.  Time and again in political documents one party accuses the other of various “murders, extortions and oppressions…with every good maiden and woman standing in dread to be ravished and defouled”.  We’ve seen it previously in the 1469 manifesto published by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick and George of Clarence in justification for their coup against Edward.  Henry Tudor’s Act of Attainder against Richard follows the same practice, and decries: 

 “…the unnatural, mischievous and great perjuries, treasons, homicides and murders, in shedding of infants’ blood, with many other wrongs, odious offences and abominations against God and man.”[3]

Perhaps recognizing that these conventions were common in political writing, Richard apparently did not contest the unflattering things said about his brother’s statecraft.  Or perhaps he thought there was some truth in the matter.

To the High and Mighty Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester

Please it your Noble Grace to understand the consideration, election and petition of us the lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons of this Realm of England, and thereunto agreeably to give your assent, to the common and public weal of this land, to the comforts and gladness of all the people of the same. 

 “First, we consider how that heretofore in time past, this Land many years stood in great prosperity, honour and tranquility; which was caused, foresomuch as the Kings then reigning, used and followed the advice and counsel of certain Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and other persons of approved sadness, prudence, policy and experience, dreading God, and having tender zeal and affection to indifferent ministration of Justice and to the common and political weal of the Land, then our Lord God was dread, loved and honoured; when within the Land was peace and tranquility, and among neighbours concord and charity; then the malice of outward enemies was mightily resisted and repressed, and the Land honourably defended with many great and glorious victories, then the intercourse of merchandises was largely used and exercised; by which things above remembered, the Land was greatly enriched, so that as well the merchants and artificers, as other poor people, labouring for their living in diverse occupations, had competent gain, to the sustentation of them and their households, living without miserable and intolerable poverty. 

”But afterward, when that such as had the rule and governance of this Land, delighting in adulation and flattery, and led by sensuality and concupiscence, followed the counsel of persons insolent, vicious, and of inordinate avarice, despising the counsel of good, virtuous and prudent persons such as above be remembered; the prosperity of this Land daily decreased, so that felicity was turned into misery, and prosperity into adversity, and the order of policy and of the law of God and Man confounded; whereby it is likely this Realm to fall into extreme misery and desolation, which God defend, without due provision of convenable remedy be had in this behalf in all goodly haste.
Over this, amongst other things, more specially we consider how that, the time of the Reign of King Edward IV, late deceased, after the ungracious pretensed marriage, as all England had cause so to say, made between the said King Edward IV and Elizabeth, sometime wife to Sir John Grey, Knight, late naming herself and many years heretofore Queen of England, the order of all politic rule was perverted, the laws of God and of God’s Church, and also the laws of nature, and of England, and also the laudable customs and liberties of the same, wherein every Englishman is inheritor; broken, subverted and contempted, against all reason and justice, so that this Land was ruled by self-will and pleasure, fear and dread, all manner of equity and laws laid apart and despised, whereof ensued many inconveniences and mischiefs, as murders, extortions and oppressions, namely of poor and impotent people, so that no man was sure of his life, land nor livelihood, nor of his wife, daughter nor servant, every good maiden and woman standing in dread to be ravished and defouled.  And besides this, what discords, inward battles, effusion of Christian men’s blood and namely, by the destruction of the noble blood of this Land, was had and committed within the same, it is evident and notary (notorious) through all this Realm unto the great sorrow and heaviness of all true Englishmen.

Part II – The Disqualification of Edward’s Heirs

The second section of the Titulusrelates how the marriage of Edward IV to Elizabeth Woodville was deemed to be invalid for a litany of reasons:  it was contracted without the assent of the Lords, it was conducted secretly, in a “profane place” without the proclamation of banns and in defiance of Church laws, and in fact, was brought about through the sorcery of Elizabeth and her mother, Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford.  As if this wasn’t enough, there was this little matter of a pre-contract with Dame Eleanor Butler, the daughter of the old Earl of Shrewsbury.

All this was served as evidence that the children of Edward and Elizabeth, being bastards, were ineligible to claim the throne by inheritance.  The children of George, Duke of Clarence, were legally disqualified by their father’s attainder for treason.   In concordance with the ancient laws and customs of the land, there was only one way forward.  
The text reads:

“And here also we consider, how the said pretensed marriage, between the above named King Edward and Elizabeth Grey, was made of great presumption, without the knowing or assent of the Lords of this Land, and also by sorcery and witchcraft, committed by the said Elizabeth and her mother, Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, as the common opinion of the people and the public voice, and fame is through all this Land; and hereafter, if and as the case shall require, shall be proved sufficiently in time and place convenient.  

This sentence is significant, because it suggests that the matter of the late king’s invalid marriage was to be more thoroughly demonstrated, admitting that here and now was not the place to do it.  It does not preclude some future ecclesiastical examination into the pre-contract, and hints that there is more to this issue than is prudent to discuss here.

And here also we consider how that the said pretensed marriage was made privately and secretly, with edition of banns, in a private chamber, a profane place, and not openly in the face of the church, after the laws of God’s church, but contrary thereunto, and the laudable custom of the Church of England.  And how also, that at the time of the contract of the same pretensed marriage, and before and long time after, the said King Edward was and stood married and troth plight to one Dame Eleanor Butler, daughter of the old Earl of Shrewsbury, with whom the said King Edward had made a precontract of matrimony, long time before he made the said pretensed marriage with the said Elizabeth Grey in manner and form aforesaid.  Which premises being true, as in very truth they been true, it appears and follows evidently, that the said King Edward during his life, and the said Elizabeth, lived together sinfully and damnably in adultery, against the law of God and his Church; and therefore no marvel  that the sovereign Lord and head of this Land, being of such ungodly disposition, and provoking the ire and indignation of our Lord God, such heinous mischiefs and inconveniences, as is above remembered, were used and committed in the Realm amongst the subjects.  Also it appears evidently and follows that all the issue and children of the said King, been (being) bastards, and unable to inherit or to claim anything by inheritance, by the law and custom of England.

“Moreover we consider how that afterward, by the three estates of this Realm assembled in a Parliament held at Westminster the 17th year of the reign of the said King Edward the Fourth, he then being in possession of the crown and royal estate, by an act made in the same Parliament, George, Duke of Clarence, brother to the said King Edward now deceased, was convicted and attainted of high treason, as in the same act is contained more at large.  Because and by treason whereof all the issue of the said George was and is disabled and barred of all right and claim that in any wise they might have or challenge by inheritance to the crown and royal dignity of this Realm, by the ancient law and custom of this same Realm.

Part III – The Birthright

Once the credentials of all other contenders for the throne were refuted, there remained only to establish the rightfulness of the claim of Richard Plantagenet.  This section of the Titulus outlines Richard’s worthiness to rule by inheritance through his father, Richard, Duke of York, by his birthright as an Englishman, and by his past services in defence of the Realm on the field of battle.  

“Over this we consider, how that you be the undoubted son and heir of Richard late Duke of York, very inheritor to the said crown and dignity royal and as in right King of England, by way to inheritance, and that at this time the premises duly considered, there is none other person living but you only, that by right may claim the said crown and dignity royal, by way of inheritance, and how that you be born within this Land; by reason whereof, as we deem in our minds, you be more naturally inclined to the prosperity and common weal of the same: and all the three Estates of the Land have, and may have, more certain knowledge of your birth and affiliation above said."[4]  We consider also, the great wit, prudence, justice, princely courage, and the memorable and laudable acts in diverse battles, which as we by experience know you heretofore have done for the salvation and defence of this same Realm; and also the great nobility and excellence of your birth and blood, as of him that is descended of the three most royal houses in Christendom, that is to say, England, France and Spain.”

The text goes on to confirm the authority of Parliament to endorse Richard’s claim and election to the crown and dignity of the Realm of England.  This is significant in English political history, as it is one of the first glimpses of Parliament, acting as a tool of the three estates, asserting power to influence the estate of kingship.  There is, in fact, a contract established here, between king and people.

Wherefore these premises by us diligently considered, we desiring affectuously the peace, tranquility and weal public of this Land, and the reduction of the same to the ancient honourable estate, and prosperity, and having in your great prudence, justice, princely courage and excellent virtue, singular confidence, have chosen in all that is in us is, and by this our writing choose you, high and mighty Prince, into our King and sovereign Lord, etc., to whom we know for certain it appertains of inheritance so to be chosen.  And hereupon we humbly desire, pray and require your said Noble Grace, that, according to this election of us the three Estates of this Land, as by your true inheritance, as by lawful election; and in case you so do, we promise to serve and to assist your Highness, as true and faithful subjects and liegemen, and to live and die with you in this matter, and every other just quarrel.  For certainly we be determined rather to adventure and commit us to peril of our lives and jeopardy of death, than to live in such thraldom and bondage as we have lived long time heretofore, oppressed and injured by new extortions and impositions, against the laws of God and man, and the liberty, old policy and laws of this Realm wherein every Englishman is inherited.  Our Lord God King of all Kings by whose infinite goodness and eternal providence all things have been principally governed in this world lighten your soul, and grant you grace to do, as well in this matter as in all other, all that may be according to his will and pleasure, and to the common and public weal of this Land, so that after great clouds, troubles, storms and tempests, the son (sun) of justice and of grace may shine upon us, to the comfort and gladness of all true Englishmen.”

Richard’s right to rule is grounded on the laws of God, of Nature and ancient social decrees.  Now, for those common people who do not understand these things, the Titulus asserts that Parliament knows what’s best, and seeks to “quiet men’s minds”…
  
“Albeit that the right, title and estate, which our sovereign Lord the King Richard the Third has to and in the crown and royal dignity of this Realm of England, with all things thereunto within this same Realm and without it, united, annexed and appertaining, have been just and lawful, as grounded upon the laws of God and of Nature, and also upon the ancient laws and laudable customs of this said Realm, and so taken and reputed by all such persons as been learnēd in the above said laws and customs.  Yet, nevertheless, for as much as it is considered that the most part of the people of this Land is not sufficiently learnēd in the abovesaid laws and customs, whereby the truth and right in this behalf of likelihood may be hid, and not clearly known to all the people, and thereupon put in doubt and question.  And over this, how that the Court of Parliament is of such authority, and the people of the Land of such nature and disposition, as experience teaches, that manifestation and declaration of any truth or right, made by the three Estates of this Realm assembled in Parliament, and by authority of the same, makes, before all other things, most faith and certainty, and, quietening men’s minds, removes the occasion of all doubts and seditious language.
“Therefore at the request, and by the assent of the three Estates of this Realm, that is to say, the Lords Spiritual, and Temporal and Commons of this Land, assembled in this present Parliament by authority of the same, be it pronounced, decreed and declared, that our said sovereign Lord the King was and is very and undoubted King of this Realm of England; with all things thereunto within this same Realm, and without it united, annexed and appertaining, as well by right of consanguinity and inheritance as by lawful election, consecration and coronation.  And over this, that, at the request, and by the assent and authority abovesaid be it ordained, enacted and established that the said crown and royal dignity of this Realm, and the inheritance of the same, and other things thereunto within the same Realm, or without it, united, annexed, and now appertaining, rest and abide in the person of our said sovereign Lord the King, during his life, and, after his decease, in his heirs of his body begotten.”

This part concludes with the acknowledgement of Edward of Middleham as Richard’s lawful son and heir, and his successor to the throne, in accordance with the laws of inheritance.

“And specially, at the request, and by the assent and authority abovesaid, be it ordained, enacted, established, pronounced, decreed and declared that the high and excellent Prince Edward, son of our said sovereign Lord the King, be heir apparent of the same our sovereign Lord the King, to succeed to him in the above said crown and royal dignity, with all things as is aforesaid thereunto united, annexed and appertaining; to have them after the decease of our said sovereign Lord the King to him and to his heirs of his body lawfully begotten.”

To this bill the Commons gave their assent and it consequently passed.


Professor Charles Wood was to write in 1975:  “Ironic though it may be, Richard III, legendary usurper and tyrant, has some claim to having been the one possessor of a genuinely parliamentary title during the entire middle ages.”[5]

Titulus Regius is invaluable to us today as evidence of Richard’s right to rule.  It is a document which, if Henry had been successful, would have been lost to all history, leaving us even farther away from the truth that we Ricardians struggle to reach.




Bibliography

Cunningham, Sean. Richard III: A Royal Enigma.  The National Archives, Richmond, 2003.

Dunham, William Huse Jr, and Wood, Charles T. The Right to Rule in England: Depositions and the Kingdom’s Authority 1327-1485The American Historical Review, October 1976.

Gairdner, James.  History of the Life and Reign of Richard the Third.  Cedric Chivers Ltd., Bath 1972.

Kendall, Paul Murray (ed.).  The Great Debate:  More’s History of King Richard III and Walpole’s Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1992.

Lamb, V. B.  The Betrayal of Richard III. Sutton Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1997.

Potter, Jeremy. Good King Richard?  Constable, London, 1985.

Ross, Charles. Richard III. Eyre Methuen, London, 1981.

Shepherd, Kenneth R.  The Title of the King:  Aspects of Richard III’sAct of Succession.  The Ricardian.Vol. VII, No. 94, September 1986. 

The Croyland Chronicle. Part VII and Part VIII.  The Richard III Society, http://www.r3.org/bookcase/croyland/index.html.



Tuesday 9 May 2017

The Birth of Prince Arthur Tudor




The Six





European Currency Snake (Basle, 10 April 1972)

On 10 April 1972, the Basle Agreement is concluded with a view to implementing, as from 24 April, the intervention system of the central banks to limit fluctuation between currencies to a maximum of 2.25 %. This photograph shows the coins of the currencies of the Member States of the European Economic Community (EEC) symbolically placed to represent the European Currency Snake.



They said you'd come... 
From the North, a Man of Great Strength... 
A Conqueror. 
A Man who would some day be King by his own hands.
One who would crush the Snakes of the Earth.
B C N U
B C N U


The Valeyard :
Peri. 

PERI: 
Yes? 

The Valeyard:
How did you come by A Name like that? 

PERI: 
It's the diminutive of 
My Proper Name, 'Perpugilliam'. 

The Valeyard 
Indeed. 

" One morn, a peri at the gate of Eden stood disconsolate. "
Who wrote that? 

PERI: 
I haven't the faintest idea. 

The Valeyard 
Of course you don't. 
You don't even know what a peeri  is, do you, Peri

PERI: 
No. 

The Valeyard : 
I'll Tell You. 
A peeri is a good and beautiful fairy in Persian mythology. 

The interesting thing is, before it became good, it was evil

And that's what you are

Thoroughly evil. 

PERI: 
Doctor, stop it! 

The Valeyard: 
No. No, not even a fairy.

 An alien spy, sent here to spy on me!

Well, we all know the fate of alien spies...!!!

(The Doctor lunges at Peri and grabs her around the throat. She manages to grab the mirror from the console before he throws her to the floor, then she shows him his reflection. He lets her go, recoiling in tears.)

Original Transcription courtesy of
http://www.chakoteya.net/DoctorWho/21-7.htm

The Ultimate Foe :
The Motley Fool (6) and The Evil One



VALEYARD: 

Why waste your breath on that simple minded oaf? 

 You cannot speak as though reality is a one-dimensional concept. 

 Fortunately, there is a reality that you and I can both agree on. 
The Ultimate Reality. 


The Motley Fool
Death?

VALEYARD: 
The Undiscovered Country - from whose bourn no traveller returns. 


The Motley Fool
:
 Puzzles the will. Hamlet, Act Three Scene One.
VALEYARD: 
I really must curb these urges. 
I've no wish to be contaminated by your whims and idiosyncrasies. 


The Motley Fool
Quite so. But what I don't comprehend... 

GLITZ: 
He's over 'ere, Doc. 
Slippery customer, Your Other Persona. 


The Motley Fool
What I don't comprehend is why you want me dead. 

No. No, let me rephrase that. 

It would satisfy my curiosity 
to know why you should go 
to such extraordinary lengths 
to kill me

VALEYARD: 
Come now, Doctor. 

How else can I obtain My Freedom, 
Operate as A Complete Entity
unfettered by Your Side of My Existence

Only by ridding myself of you and your misplaced morality, your constant crusading, your...

GLITZ: 
Idiotic honesty? 

VALEYARD: 
Oaf. Microbe. 

GLITZ: 
Pardon me for trying to help. I'm neutral in this set-up, you know. 

VALEYARD: 
Only by releasing myself from the misguided maxims that you nurture can I be free. 

GLITZ: 
Sounds to me like Armageddon's beckoning you, Doc. 

VALEYARD: 
With you destroyed and no longer able to constrain me, and with unlimited access to the Matrix, there will be nothing beyond my reach. 

Original Transcription courtesy of
http://www.chakoteya.net/DoctorWho/23-4.htm

The Hex on Planet 6


Well - so, that was unlucky...

Accession : The Coup d'etat of 1688 (and All That)


This outright usurpation is blithely referred to in British-Venetian parlance as 
``The Glorious Revolution''
--which should give you some idea of how little regard for Truth prevails in these circles.

"By the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Stadholther of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau, Defender of the Faith, etc."


If you crown him, let me prophesy:

The blood of English shall manure the ground,
And future ages groan for this foul act;
Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels,
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound;
Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny
Shall here inhabit, and this land be call'd
The field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls.
O, if you raise this house against this house,
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursed earth.
Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,
Lest child, child's children, cry against you woe!


Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord:
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel: then, if angels fight,

Weak men must fall, for Heaven still guards the right.


HIST-251: Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts

Chapter 1. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 [00:00:00]

Professor Keith Wrightson: Okay. Let's get started.

When I was at school we were often told that one of the great things about British history was that the country had never been successfully invaded by a foreign power since 1066 when William the Conqueror and the Normans conquered the Saxon kingdom, and this was part of the national story as we got it. There was a great deal of emphasis upon successfully resisting foreign powers, the Spanish Armada, Napoleon, Hitler, whatever. 


So no successful foreign invasion since 1066, and this makes a good story, but unfortunately it's not actually true. 

Britain was very successfully invaded in November 1688 by a largely Dutch army under William of Orange, Stadtholder of the Netherlands.

But that of course didn't count. The whole events of 1688 had been successfully repackaged as the essential prelude to the English Revolution Part Two, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, taken in the classic Whig interpretation of national history as a fundamental watershed. 

Before 1688, the country had been beset with chronic political instability and indeed social conflict. 1688 cleared the way. It cleared the way for the establishment of a stable constitutional monarchy; cleared the way for political liberty. It cleared the way for religious toleration and cultural pluralism, the triumph of Whig principles in that respect; and security of property and growing economic opulence and the formation of the United Kingdom by the Union of England and Scotland, and finally the successful assertion of national power internationally and the growth of an overseas empire.

Well, these are some of the key elements classically stressed from the eighteenth century onwards in Whig historiography. It's a bit of a myth; a particular, rather self-serving, interpretation of the national past with a strong ideological message about what it is to be British. But like all historiographical myths of that kind it did have a kernel of truth, even if it airbrushed out an awful lot of the real complexities of the story and tended to represent as being almost inevitable a set of outcomes which were in fact far more complex, far more hesitant, far more messy than was usually recognized. But still, be that as it may, these are the processes that we need to consider in the final days of this course.

Well, as you'll remember, by 1688 King James II had succeeded in undermining the initial strength of his position when he came to the crown by utterly alienating what's usually referred to as the Tory Anglican majority in the political nation, people upon whom Charles II had counted when he faced down the Whig opposition in the Exclusion Crisis of 1678 to '81. And, at the same time as he alienated those people, James had failed to win the trust and support of the Protestant dissenters, [and] the low church Anglicans who had been the backbone of the Whig and exclusionist cause. The extent of this general alienation from the King and his policies was of course revealed in the fact that some of the leaders of the political nation were willing to actively support intervention by a foreign power in 1688, indeed to invite it in their famous letter to William III. And even more, including James II's own army, were willing at least to acquiesce in the face of William's intervention. 

They sat on their hands.

To this extent one could say that the Revolution of 1688 was in different ways both a Whig and a Tory revolution. It was in part an elite coup d'etat; it was in part a country revolution. It merged a range of political opinion in opposition to James, in opposition to the specter of "popery and arbitrary power." And the political settlement as it emerged reflected that composite character of the Revolution. On the 22nd of January 1689, a Convention Parliament met to begin working out the settlement. It had, it's estimated, 319 members of broadly Whig sympathy and 232 of broadly Tory sympathy plus the House of Lords, but the debates as they went on seemed to have become largely dominated by those of the middle ground who managed to hold the minorities of extremists of both political persuasions in check. It seems to have been one of those rare but instructive situations in history when the center is tough and holds firm.

The Convention's formal definition of the situation reflected that. It resolved — and I'm quoting — it resolved almost unanimously that, "King James II, having attempted to subvert the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the contract between king and people and by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws and having withdrawn himself out of this kingdom has abdicated the government and that the throne is thereby vacant."

That's what they resolved, and note carefully in those words; it's another masterpiece of ambiguity comparable to the communion service in the Anglican Prayer Book of 1559, which you'll remember. They say that James broke the contract between king and people. 

That's Whig ideology, the notion of a contract. But he also withdrew himself and abdicated, so he hadn't actually been deposed for his offenses. That's an appeal to Tory sympathy. They didn't believe in resistance to a divinely appointed and anointed king; so he'd abdicated. As for the Jesuits and so forth, well, everyone could agree on that. 


And in all of this of course the status of the baby Prince James was conveniently forgotten.

Chapter 2. Settlement

Now this kind of interpret-it-your-own-way attitude also suffused a lot of the rest of the settlement as it unfolded in 1689 and 1690. William was not content to be simply a regent, but he and Mary shared the crown until her death in 1694. He was king in effect but he wasn't an elected king. He held the crown in right of his wife who was a legitimate Stuart heir, the Protestant daughter of James II by his first marriage. And it was agreed that Mary's youngest sister, Princess Anne, would be the next heir, ahead of any children that William and Mary themselves might have. 

Again, all very odd.

The Convention also drew up a Declaration of Rights later passed into law as the Bill of Rights. It was clear on some matters which found almost universal assent, but it was also cautious and ambiguous in other respects. The power of the monarch, for example, to suspend the laws was declared to be illegal but the dispensing power of the monarch, the traditional dispensing power, was illegal "only as it hath been exercised of late," i.e., as it had been exercised by James II. Parliaments should be called frequently and should be freely elected, but as yet there were no specific measures to ensure that that would happen. Roman Catholics were to be excluded from the crown, but as yet there was no specific provision to ensure that that would be the case. And, above all, the status of the whole document was rather obscure. It looked rather like a contract with the new monarchs, but in fact the offer of the crown to William and Mary was not made conditional upon accepting it. The offer of the crown was actually made on the 13th of February before the Declaration of Rights had been presented to William and Mary, and they hadn't formally accepted it before they were proclaimed monarchs the next day.

So 1689 saw a series of measures intended to advance the transfer of power to William and Mary and that was rapidly consolidated with other acts of Parliament which again reflect the coalition of interests involved in the Revolution. They passed a Mutiny Act. That laid down that no standing army would be permitted in peace time unless authorized by Parliament. They voted income to the crown by taxation but the sums which were voted were well known to be inadequate for even peacetime administration, let alone war time, and so Parliament would always be needed in order to grant additional necessary supply. They passed a Toleration Act. Protestant dissenters were allowed to worship publicly, and by the end of 1690 some 9,000 dissenting meeting houses had been opened, but they were still not accorded full civil rights. The Church of England remained the legally established church, the Test Acts were still there to exclude nonmembers of the Church of England from holding public office. But Protestant dissenters were allowed to worship openly and meanwhile Roman Catholics, Unitarians and Jews were permitted to worship in private. They were tolerated, officially.

Altogether the settlement of 1688 and '9 constituted a kind of pragmatic compromise designed, obviously enough, to appeal to as many people as possible and to alienate as few as possible from the Revolutionary Settlement. John Morrill has put it well, he calls it "a centrist compromise and a constitutional blur." And as with the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 it was full of inconsistencies and it remained to be seen just how they would work it out in practice, how it would be worked out by political groups who had somewhat different interpretations of just what it actually meant.

But worked out it was. And in the course of the next twenty-five years or so that involved a significant refashioning of the state as a result, and the emergence by 1714 of a British state of a shape and structure which no one had quite anticipated in 1688.

Chapter 3. War

Well, that British state was shaped partly by political principles. It was shaped partly by political and religious prejudices, and partly also by the constraining force of immediate circumstances. And of those circumstances the dominant circumstance was war. The modern British state, it could be said, was forged under the stresses of war.

William of Orange hadn't intervened in 1688 out of his deep personal concern for England's religion and liberties. His intervention was part and parcel of his life's mission of containing the threatened hegemony of the French monarchy of Louis XIV and in particular the threat it posed to his own country, the Netherlands. And the price of William's intervention was war. War first of all to defend the Revolutionary Settlement against Jacobite risings — Jacobites being supporters of James — Jacobite risings in Scotland in 1689 to '90, then to oust James II from Ireland where he'd landed with an army in 1689 to '91, culminating in the Battle of the Boyne at which James was defeated and fled back to France. Then war in the Netherlands against Louis XIV between 1688 and 1697 to contain the French who were James' principal supporters, and then again after William III's death in 1702 renewed war between 1702 and 1713 to defeat the renewed menace of French hegemony, which included French recognition of the claims of James II's son. James had died in 1701. His son and heir, James III, to those who supported him, was known as "The Pretender" to the crowns of England and Scotland; thirteen years old when his father died.

So then between 1688 and 1713 we have a whole generation of major wars being fought on land and sea, mostly against the French. Given its commitment to the Revolution, the political nation represented in Parliament was willing, though very reluctant, to recognize the need for these wars. But at the same time Parliament was acutely sensitive to the danger that they might lead to a buildup of royal power which might threaten its own position, might raise again that specter of arbitrary power. Out of the interaction of that necessity to fight the wars and that anxiety about where they might lead, there eventually emerged what was, on the one hand, a far more powerful state apparatus — it's been described famously by John Brewer as the "fiscal military state" which emerges at this time — and yet, on the other hand, it was a more powerful state apparatus which remained very firmly under parliamentary control. The key to the whole process, as you'll be aware, was finance, but to understand that we have to step back first a little bit in time and look at what's known as the 'Financial Revolution'.

Chapter 4. The Financial Revolution 

Now, as you know, by the standards of the day England was a relatively rich country by the late seventeenth century and getting richer. Earlier in the century, however, governments had rarely succeeded in tapping that wealth effectively for their own purposes. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and the so-called Financial Revolution saw a transformation of the 'fiscal capacity' of the state, that is its ability to raise money for its purposes, and consequently a transformation of its capacity for effective action. And this was the outcome of developments which, in the words of one recent historian of the Financial Revolution, "transformed the willingness, rather than the ability, of the English people to pay high taxes, lend large sums, and above all repose great trust in the financial institutions of their parliamentary government." That's Henry Roseveare I'm quoting.

Parliamentary government and the trust which it could inspire was perhaps indeed the key to this whole development. Under Charles II, Parliament's ultimate control of the public purse was of course not in doubt but, as you know, suspicion of the crown's policies could mean that Parliament was unwilling to grant supply. Indeed, in 1672 the situation in royal finances had become so bad, the crown became so overstretched as a debtor, that it led to what's known as the 'Stop of the Exchequer' in which Charles II postponed repayments of his debts to private lenders. Many London bankers were completely ruined as a result. It was a very severe blow to the crown's credit and its ability to raise money.

Well after 1688 that kind of situation was transformed, transformed in less than ten years, in the face of the need to raise money for the wars fought to defend the Revolutionary Settlement. It's a long and complex story, but the essence of it all was quite nicely contained in a statement made by Lord Macaulay in his history of all this written back in 1848. Macaulay wrote, "from a period of immemorial antiquity it has been the practice of every English government to contract debts. What the Revolution introduced was the practice of honestly paying them back." Parliament was now fully in control not only of grant of supply but of its expenditure. Annual estimates were made of need. Supply was voted. The accounts were audited by parliamentary commissioners. Revenue was now regarded as the public revenue rather than the monarch's revenue. And from 1698 even the ordinary day-to-day expenses of the crown were controlled by an annual grant, the so-called 'Civil List', the money paid for running the day-to-day business of the monarchy, as still happens.

Parliament sanctioned a whole series of devices to raise money for the war. In 1690, it voted a Land Tax, a quite heavy tax on landowners which brought in a reliable annual income. Loans were raised on the security of parliamentary taxation. Longer term borrowing was achieved by means of the sale of annuities to the public with the regular payment of those annuities secured by parliamentary taxation. They tried out lotteries as a way of raising money, again with Parliament's sanction. In 1694, the Bank of England was chartered. Lenders were brought to subscribe to a 1.2 million pound loan with the interest and the eventual repayment of the capital guaranteed from taxation. The Bank of England was not a central bank in the modern sense, but it was a vehicle devised to raise money for the needs of the state. There was also the development of a market in various forms of state securities, these new state securities which were being issued. They could be sold on to third parties and it was at the core of the emergence of dealings in stocks, the beginnings of the London Stock Exchange.

All of this was initiated in a piecemeal and a rather improvised manner, year by year they dreamed up something new as a way of raising the money they needed. But gradually by the early eighteenth century it had coalesced into a system, and fundamental to the whole emerging edifice was an effective tax system which made possible the servicing of a growing public debt. Initially the Land Tax, quite heavy, about 20% on landed income in the richest counties, and then increasingly the use of the Excise, which was indirect taxes collected by a growing corpus of public officials, Excise Men as they were known. And as this system developed there was a growth of confidence in the financial probity and reliability of the state, and that growing confidence transformed people's willingness to lend their money to the government. Public revenues increased massively. By 1700, it's been estimated that about 9% of national income was being taken in taxation, and by the same year about a third of the revenue raised by the state was being used to fund the debts.

By 1714, the national debt had risen to 48 million pounds, a massive sum by the standards of the day, most of it funded by parliamentary pledges to pay the interest and eventually the principal. In 1717, after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, a variety of sinking funds were established to pay off parts of the debt, but it was generally recognized that a public debt of some size, reliably serviced in the way I've described, would be a permanent fact of life thereafter. In short, what they'd done in the Financial Revolution was to create, gradually, a stable system of public credit based upon parliamentary taxation and with it a regime which has been described as having "the political support, the administrative capacity and the fiscal base required to accumulate and service a perpetual national debt."

So in the years after 1688 the fiscal capacity of the state was rapidly and massively transformed. John Brewer calls this a "fiscal military state" because so much of the enhanced public revenue was spent on war. Military expenditure as a proportion of national income was about 2% at the death of Charles II in 1685. By 1700 it was 4%, in 1710 at the height of the War of the Spanish Succession it peaked at over 14%, and then it settled down after peace came in 1714 at about 5% even in peace time, mostly as a result of the regular expenditure which was maintaining the Royal Navy as a permanent military presence.

Now all of this could have been potentially destabilizing, and there were times in the 1690s as they went from year to year trying to raise money that the whole thing sometimes teetered on the edge of potential collapse. There was a real risk in 1696 that they wouldn't be able to raise enough money, for example, to pay the army. But they managed to sustain it. They improvised their way through and eventually, as I said, it coalesced into a system which provided the underpinning for the emergence of England as a significant military power, a significant world power.

But if Parliament was willing to provide the resources which made possible that kind of growth in the power of the state, Parliament also exacted a price. It exacted a price politically. As John Brewer shows, the prevalent suspicion of central government amongst parliamentarians meant that they exerted themselves to try to shape this emergent state apparatus in ways that would accord with their own preferences, their so-called country attitudes, their suspicion of central government. The need for annual parliamentary supply meant that Parliament became a permanent part of the government of the country. They had to have parliamentary sessions every single year. No one had anticipated that. It just happened; it was necessary.

The money which was granted to the government by these parliaments was very carefully monitored according to the system of 'appropriation', the principle of 'appropriation'. That's to say parliamentary grants could be used only for the purposes for which they had been granted. Therefore, policy had to be in accord with Parliament's wishes, to meet Parliament's approval. Royal ministers might be chosen by the crown but, again, they needed to be men who could command the support of a majority in the House of Commons. If they had no majority in the House of Commons, they were unable to achieve anything, they were unable to get the supply that they needed. And in other more specific ways, as Brewer puts it, "fiscal control put the bite into the bark of country politics."

Sometimes they would tack on to revenue bills a Place Act. That was an act which attempted to exclude government officials from the House of Commons in order to preserve the independence of Parliament. In 1694, William III was forced to accept a new and strengthened Triennial Act, under which Parliament should be not only called every three years but should not sit longer than three years without new elections. So they had to have elections every three years, a very significant curtailment of the royal prerogative to call and then to dissolve Parliament when the king chose. William resisted it strongly but he had to give way in the end.

By 1700, the relationship between the ministers in the royal government, those who sat in the Cabinet, and Parliament, had become the crucial axis of political life. And the struggle of those ministers to establish and to maintain a working majority in Parliament, above all in the House of Commons, was giving rise to an increasingly vigorous brand of organized party politics in Parliament. The old abusive labels, Whig and Tory, which, as you know, had first appeared to hurl against your enemies in the Exclusion Crisis, these were now revived and perpetuated to describe different groupings, groupings which had different interpretations of the meaning of the Revolution and differences of view about how the Revolutionary Settlement should be developed.

By 1700, the Whigs and the Tories were fairly organized groups: they had their own favorite meeting places in London, they had their own newspapers, they had their own national followings. The adversarial politics of Whigs and Tories influenced political life at the level of the city, at the level of county politics. It erupted periodically in the vigorous contests of the many general elections which were held between 1695 and 1715. There were ten general elections in those years in which it's estimated something like a quarter of the adult male population exercised their votes and the election campaigns were full of competing — of competition — for seats in which the Whigs and Tories organized their supporters. These alignments were even such that in the city of York, where they had assembly rooms where polite society met to hold balls and other occasions, concerts and so forth, there was one assembly room for the Whigs and one for the Tories.

But if Whigs and Tories fought furiously for dominance in both Parliament and in local politics, there were also vital areas in which they were fundamentally at one, and that was revealed in 1701 when the death of Princess Anne's only child, the ultimate heir to the throne, called into question the future succession of the crown. This precipitated the so-called Act of Settlement of 1701. It's known as the Act of Settlement but the actual title of the act is quite significant. It was actually called "An Act for the Further Limitation of the Crown and Better Securing the Rights of the Subject". This act, which obtained support from both sides politically, passed over fifty-seven possible claimants to the crown on the grounds that they were Roman Catholics and it fixed the succession on the Electress Sophia of Hanover, ruler of a small north German principality who was descended from King James I. 

Sophia of Hanover and her heirs were chosen as the nearest Protestant successors


The Act also required that future monarchs should be communicants of the 
Church of England; 
It forbade their marriage to Roman Catholics; 

It restricted the movements of the monarch outside the kingdom, they could not leave the kingdom without permission; 

and, in addition, it made royal privy councilors more accountable to Parliament, restricted the election of placemen from the government to the House of Commons, and declared that, in future, judges in the law courts should enjoy their tenure during good behavior and not merely at the will of the monarch. 

So a specific contingency, the problem over the succession, gave rise to a far-reaching set of statutory restrictions on the crown's actions which found widespread support.

In sum then, by the time Queen Anne came to the throne in 1702 with the prospect of the future Hanoverian succession, which actually eventually took place in 1714 when Electress Sophia's son, George, became king,, with all of that it can be said that some of the fundamental political issues which had so disturbed the seventeenth century were close to being resolved, with general acceptance of those resolutions. The issue of the security of the Protestant religion and of the toleration of religious dissenters had been resolved. The issue of Parliament's role and its permanence in the constitution had been resolved. The issue of the royal prerogative in matters of state and how far it could be controlled or reduced. The problem of effective government finance. The problem of how to contain differences of political principle without those partisan differences leading to the breakdown of government or to civil war had been resolved with party politics. The structures and practices of the English state had been refashioned in a manner which both enhanced the power of the state and at the same time contained the power of the state in ways which would be conducive to safeguarding the liberties of the subject.

Chapter 5. Scotland

Well, one final element remains. From 1707, this emergent state was not just an English but a British state, with the constitutional union in May 1707 of England and Scotland. Ireland remained technically a separate kingdom until 1801, though one ruled by a Protestant landed elite.

Now in Scotland much of the kingdom, particularly lowland Scotland and some parts of the Highlands, those parts of the western Highlands of Scotland which were dominated by the Clan Campbell who were both Protestants and Whigs in politics, much of Scotland then had welcomed the Revolution of 1688. And rebellions by some of the Jacobite clans of highland Scotland were swiftly put down in 1690. But in the years that followed, if the 1690s witnessed a kind of resurgence of Scotland's political independence it was also a profoundly traumatic decade for the Scots.

Scotland remained a relatively poor country; magnificent landscape but somewhat barren. It was largely a subsistence economy in the rural areas and it was a very fragile one


In 1695 to '99, Scotland suffered dreadful famine known as the "ill Years of King William." 

It's possible that as much as 13% of the population of Scotland died in those years and indeed much more in the most marginal highland areas. 

In the highland Aberdeenshire up here, the highland areas of northeastern Scotland, it's estimated that perhaps a third of the population died in the 1690s. 

Scotland had relatively little manufacturing industry. It was little developed. The most important sector was the manufacture of linen on Tayside up here and over near Glasgow in the west, and this was an industry which was principally dependent upon selling that linen to English markets.

Overseas trade was also relatively limited. Scotland was excluded from England's colonial trade as a separate kingdom, and efforts made by some Scots in the 1690s to try to establish a colonial foothold of their own, when they attempted to establish a colony in Panama, the Darien scheme in 1695 to '99, unfortunately those efforts proved to be a disastrous failure. Not least because the English government refused to help a venture which antagonized Spain by attempting to establish a Scottish colonial presence in territories regarded as part of the Spanish empire. Well, all of these unhappy events provided the political and economic context of the Union of 1707.

The Scots were extremely conscious, of course, of their distinctive national identity and history. They were anxious to preserve their national integrity.


In the 1690s, the Scottish Parliament was enjoying a greater independence from the crown than it had ever done so hitherto. 

But economically the most dynamic sectors of the Scottish economy were heavily dependent upon England and some Scots were also attracted to the possibility of obtaining greater access to English markets and participation as equals in English colonial trade. Meanwhile, the English government was interested in a closer union with Scotland for quite different reasons, for largely political reasons.

In 1701, when the Act of Settlement was passed fixing the succession in the Hanoverian line, the Scottish Parliament did not at first follow England's lead in recognizing the Hanoverian succession. This raised, in the early years of the eighteenth century, a potentially dangerous situation. 

What if the Scottish Parliament decided to recognize a Stuart succession, decided to vest their crown in the old line, the Stuart line, after Queen Anne's death?

If that happened it could potentially provide a major security risk. 

It could return to a situation in which the two kingdoms, which had been joined only in the person of their monarchs, might fully separate. 

That might pose a new threat to England from the North, especially if the Scots had a Stuart crown allied to the French.

The English government therefore began to put on pressure for a union which would remove that threat and they were willing to use economic leverage to try to do so. In 1705, the English parliament passed the Alien Acts, which excluded the Scots from English markets unless they commenced negotiations for a possible union. And, on the other hand, it held out the prospect of economic advantages for Scotland if they were willing to do so. Now in Scotland the issue was very passionately debated both in Parliament and in the streets of Edinburgh, but in those debates the economic advantages of union soon came well to the fore. As one opponent of the union, Alexander Fletcher of Saltoun, put it, the economic issues were "the bait that covers the hook." And, in the event, that carried the day with those of the Scottish elite in Scotland's Parliament who ended up making the decision.

In 1707, after protracted negotiations a Treaty of Union was at last agreed. There would be a single United Kingdom of Great Britain with a single flag, the "Union Jack." You'll see, lovingly drawn on the bottom of your handout, the St. George flag of England, the St. Andrew's flag of Scotland, and how they merged together into the Union Jack, a flag now familiar to us on the tops of mini-cars and on swimming costumes. [Laughter] 

The Hanoverian succession to the united throne was recognized. The Scots would join a single parliament for the United Kingdom meeting in Westminster. Sixteen members would be sent to the House of Lords, forty-five to the House of Commons, in rough proportion to population. 

The Scottish legal system, however, would retain its full jurisdictional independence. The Scottish church, the Kirk, would also retain its independence as a Presbyterian church.

But fifteen of the twenty-five articles of the Treaty of Union concerned economic arrangements. The Scots would be granted full access to English trade. Lower taxes would be levied in Scotland, because of the relative economic poverty of Scotland as compared to England. Scotland's industries would be protected. Substantial compensation would be paid to those Scots who had lost heavily through their investment in the Darien adventure of the 1690s. 

And so on the first of May, 1707, Scotland's Parliament dissolved itself, not to meet again until the year 1999 when it was reinstated as part of the current constitutional reconfiguration of the United Kingdom. 


So the Union had taken place.

Was it, one might ask, a union of absorption, a union in which Scotland was to be dominated by England, a union of absorption, or was it to be a union of fusion, one of cooperation rather than domination? Many Scots at the time feared that it would be the former. In the long run I think it turned out to be more the latter. Scots certainly proved to have a quite disproportionately large role, almost from the beginning of the Union, in the running of the British Empire for example. But in the early eighteenth century it was not yet quite either. England was not actually much interested in dominating Scotland beyond the question of security, and indeed Scottish affairs remained largely in the hands of Scots themselves. Conversely, it took a while before Scotland was able to fully exploit the economic advantages of Union, though by the 1750s they were indeed doing so very successfully. The emergence of Glasgow as one of the major Atlantic ports is one of the biggest success stories of that part of the Union.

The Union then, one could say, confirmed neither the fears nor initially the full hopes of the Scots who had agreed to it. But from the English point of view it had resolved a pressing security problem and it completed the refashioning of the state which had been introduced by the Revolution of 1688. 

Culturally, there was an England and a Scotland and a Wales, as there still is, but politically by 1714 there was what Jonathan Swift described as that "crazy double-bottomed realm Great Britain."

And crazy it was in many ways; a monarchy which was actually run by a Parliament, truly a monarchical republic, in which The King after 1701 actually had fewer powers than were later granted to Presidents of the United States. 


A confessional state and yet a confessional state which actually had two established religions

The Church of England in England, 
The Presbyterian Church of Scotland in Scotland, 

and which, by 1714, was headed by a "King" who was actually a German Lutheran

but was an Anglican when he was in England 
and 
a Presbyterian when he was in Scotland

and meanwhile practicing greater religious freedom than was tolerated by any other state save the Netherlands. 


An offshore island deeply hostile to foreign involvement, deeply hostile to militarism, and yet which was playing a key role in destroying the threat of Louis XIV's monarchy and which had emerged as a great military power.

It was all very confusing, but there it was. They had finally muddled through to something that worked.

Okay. And we all lived happily ever after. [Laughter]

Right. Next time I'll have a short lecture as a kind of windup and then talk in some detail about the examination and what to expect when the examination comes. The examination's going to be held here on the 16th at 2 p.m., remember.

[end of transcript]


God forbid!
Worst in this royal presence may I speak,
Yet best beseeming me to speak the truth.
Would God that any in this noble presence
Were enough noble to be upright judge
Of noble Richard! then true noblesse would
Learn him forbearance from so foul a wrong.
What subject can give sentence on his king?
And who sits here that is not Richard's subject?
Thieves are not judged but they are by to hear,
Although apparent guilt be seen in them;
And shall the figure of God's majesty,
His captain, steward, deputy-elect,
Anointed, crowned, planted many years,
Be judged by subject and inferior breath,
And he himself not present? O, forfend it, God,
That in a Christian climate souls refined
Should show so heinous, black, obscene a deed!
I speak to subjects, and a subject speaks,
Stirr'd up by God, thus boldly for his King:
My Lord of Hereford here, whom you call king,
Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford's king:


And if you crown him, let me prophesy:

The blood of English shall manure the ground,
And future ages groan for this foul act;
Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels,
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound;
Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny
Shall here inhabit, and this land be call'd
The field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls.
O, if you raise this house against this house,
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursed earth.
Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,
Lest child, child's children, cry against you woe!




Schiller Institute 1994-Palmerston Zoo conference-G. Lowry --Venice Takeover of England

How The Venetian Virus Infected


by H. Graham Lowry
Chorus: (WGT) The consolidation of the Venetian Party in England and Britain was a question of culture. Francesco Zorzi of Venice, the close friend and relative of Gasparo Contarini, who was sent by the Venetian oligarchy to England as the sex adviser to Henry VIII, was a cabbalist and Rosicrucian. In 1529, Zorzi came to London to deliver his opinion, and he remained at the court for the rest of his life, building up an important party of followers--the nucleus of the modern Venetian Party in England. In 1525, Zorzi had published the treatise De Harmonia Mundi, which uses the cabbalistic Sephiroth to expound a mystical, irrationalist outlook and to undercut the influence of Nicolaus of Cusa.
In 1536, when he was at the English court, Zorzi wrote his second major work, In Scripturam Sacram Problemata. This is a manual of magic, with Zorzi assuring the aspiring wizard that Christian angels will guard him to make sure he does not fall into the hands of demons.

Zorzi was a great influence on certain Elizabethan poets. Sir Philip Sidney was a follower of Zorzi, as was the immensely popular Edmund Spencer, the author of the long narrative poem The Faerie Queene. Spencer is a key source for the idea of English imperial destiny as God's chosen people, with broad hints of British Israel. Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare both attacked Zorzi's influence in such plays as Doctor Faustus and Othello, but the Venetian school was carried on by the Rosicrucian Robert Fludd, and, of course, by Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes.

John Milton, the admirer of Paolo Sarpi and apologist for usury, is an example of the pro-Venetian Puritan of the Cromwell Commonwealth period. Milton taught that the Son of God is inferior to the Father, a kind of afterthought, and in any case not necessary. Milton was the contemporary of Sabbatai Zevi, the false messiah from Smyrna, Turkey, whose father was an agent for English Puritan merchants. Did Milton's Paradise Regained of 1671 reflect knowledge of Sabbatai Zevi's meteoric career, which burst on the world in 1665?

The British East India Company was founded in 1600. By 1672, adventurers, such as Diamond Pitt, were freebooting around India.


H. Graham Lowry: 


In December 1688, the armies of the Dutch Prince William of Orange invaded England, interrupting the Hobbesian nightmare the country had experienced under the deranged King Charles II and his brother James II. A worse nightmare was to follow when William seized the throne of James II, for he embodied a more highly distilled form of poison which Venice had perfected during its sway over the remains of the Dutch Republic. 


This outright usurpation is blithely referred to in British-Venetian parlance as the ``Glorious Revolution''--which should give you some idea of how little regard for truth prevails in these circles.

The notion of ``English rights and liberties'' was quickly transformed from fiction to fraud under William's dictatorial regime. When King James II fled to France, the rightful successor to the English throne was his eldest daughter Mary, who had married William of Orange reluctantly (he was a notorious homosexual). 



William's demand to be declared King was never submitted to Parliament for a ``constitutional'' veneer. 

Instead, he summoned a special ``convention,'' which granted him full power, rather than simply the rank of the Queen's Consort.

King William's Venetian baggage included the evil John Locke, who became the chief propagandist for foisting the Bank of England on that hapless country in 1694. 



This was not the sort of bank you turned to for financial assistance. It was a gargantuan Venetian swindle, which promptly created England's first national debt to finance ongoing wars of attrition in Europe, imposed a credit crunch by cutting the amount of circulating English coinage nearly in half, and loaded new taxes on an already-collapsing economy. The bank's chief architect was Venetian Party leader Charles Montagu, William's new chancellor of the exchequer, who later attained the loftier position of British ambassador to Venice. Montagu appointed the pathetic Sir Isaac Newton to oversee the ``recoinage'' swindle, and Newton repaid that debt by prostituting his own niece to serve as Montagu's mistress.

The bank's promotional hireling John Locke is better known as the peddler of the obscene notion that the human mind is nothing more than a tabula rasa--a passive register of animal sensations. He clearly had a higher regard for the cash register, however, and openly defended usury as a necessary service for those whose ``estates'' lie ``in money.'' Locke's theories of government approximate those of a casino operator who lays down rules rigged for the house, under which the bestialized players compete for sums of money, which then define their worth as individuals. This is Locke's ``liberty'' to pursue property. His notion of the ``social contract,'' which guarantees the players' club members the right to enter the casino, was in fact advanced in order to justify William of Orange's usurpation of the British throne. James II, in effect, was charged with having denied those rights to his more speculative subjects, thus breaking the contract. Locke argued that the Venetian mob was therefore entitled to move in under a new contract.

By 1697, the Venetian Party's coup inside England was nearly total, and its members filled William's ``ship of state'' from stem to stern. They looked forward to reducing a most troubling matter in the English colonies of America: the impulse toward building an independent nation, which had been driving the Venetians berserk since the 1630s founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1701, John Locke, as a member of England's Board of Trade, advocated revoking all the independent charters of the American colonies, placing their economic activity under royal dictatorship, and banning their manufacture of any finished goods.


Leibniz builds anti-Venice movement
Yet, even as the Venetians were swaggering over their apparent triumph, a powerful republican opposition was building around a higher conception of the nature and purpose of man, which both inspired and opened the way for the later founding of the United States. Its leader was the great German scientist and statesman Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who led what might well be called a movement for the pursuit of happiness--the ultimate goal of the liberty which America embraced in its Declaration of Independence.

In the face of the new Venetian onslaught in England, Leibniz set forth his view of human happiness, from the standpoint of man's creation in imago Dei. Writing ``On the Notions of Right and Justice'' in 1693, Leibniz defines charity as ``universal benevolence,'' which he calls the habit of loving, i.e., ``to regard another's happiness as one's own.'' That joy is first approximated, he says, in the contemplation of a beautiful painting by Raphael, for example, ``by one who understands it, even if it brings no riches, in such a way that it is kept before his eyes and regarded with delight, as a symbol of love.''

When the object of delight ``is at the same time also capable of happiness, his affection passes over into true love,'' Leibniz says. ``But the divine love surpasses other loves, because God can be loved with the greatest result, since nothing is at once happier than God, and nothing more beautiful and more worthy of happiness can be known than He.'' And, since God possesses the ultimate wisdom, Leibniz says, ``the notions of men are best satisfied if we say that wisdom is nothing else than the very science of happiness.''

As the leading scientist and philosopher of his day, Leibniz was widely known throughout Europe, and among such republican leaders of New England as the Winthrops and Mathers, later extending to include, most significantly, Benjamin Franklin. From the 1690s onward, Leibniz's leading ally within England, Scotland, and Ireland, was the brilliant anti-Venetian polemicist Jonathan Swift, who directed a cultural onslaught against the bestial notions of Bacon, Hobbes, René Descartes, Newton, and Locke, for more than 40 years.

From the standpoint of reason, the Aristotelian empiricism of the likes of Descartes and Locke reduces the notion of man to the level of a mere beast, which, of course, is the prerequisite for imposing an empire of the sort the Venetians sought, then and now. When Jonathan Swift took up his cudgels on behalf of Leibniz's refutation of empiricism, he ridiculed their enemies' ideas for what they were: insane. Swift's ``A Digression on Madness,'' in his 1696 work A Tale of a Tub, examines ``the great introducers of new schemes in philosophy,'' both ancient and modern. They were usually mistaken by all but their own followers, Swift says, ``to have been persons crazed, or out of their wits;|... agreeing for the most part in their several models, with their present undoubted successors in the academy of modern Bedlam.''


Oligarchical Families Move In

By 1701, the lunatics of the late-model incarnation of the Venetian Party had typically inbred a set of oligarchical families, mixing and matching Spencers, and Godolphins, and Churchills--the last headed by John Churchill, soon to become duke of Marlborough.
Churchill had begun as a page boy to Charles II in 1665, behind the skirts of his sister Arabella, the mistress of the king's brother James. Then, for similar services rendered, Churchill received £10,000 from Charles II's favorite mistress.

With things apparently moving so swimmingly, the Venetians set their course for their next major objective: the destruction of France, the most productive economic power in Europe. Under the ministry of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the patron of the scientific academy at Paris where Leibniz himself was engaged in the early 1670s, France had led the way in infrastructural and industrial development. So in 1701, England launched war on France. More than a decade of bloodshed and destruction followed--for the populations of both countries, and their European allies. It was yet another rigged game, in which Venice expected to be the only winner.

There are inevitably loose ends in any foul scheme. Queen Mary had died in 1694, leaving William without a direct heir. Her sister Anne was next in line to the throne, but the death of Anne's only surviving child in 1700 presented a new succession crisis. An Act of Settlement was imposed in 1701. James I's 71-year-old granddaughter Sophie, the head of the German House of Hanover, was designated as Anne's successor. King William died in 1702, and Anne became queen of England.
As the Venetian Party expected, she quickly bestowed preeminence at court upon the duke and duchess of Marlborough, who had spun their webs of influence over her for many years. The problem for the Venetians, was that Sophie's chief adviser and privy counsellor, was Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.

The Battle for Britain 

With Leibniz virtually one step away from guiding policy in London, the final battle against Venetian Party dictatorship within England broke out in earnest. It was a conflict between the pursuit of happiness, and the lust for empire. The Marlboroughs resorted to deceit, terror, and treachery to cut off political relations--or even ordinary civilities--between Queen Anne and Sophie of Hanover. Swift maintained a fierce barrage both publicly and privately against Marlborough's Venetian gang, to the point that he broke their domination of Queen Anne's cabinet. He extended his own influence to her innermost circle, and, during 1710 and 1711, he drove the Marlboroughs and all their cronies from office.

London desperately hurled Isaac Newton into the fray against Leibniz, puffing the old fraud up with the lie that differential calculus was his invention rather than Leibniz's. Leibniz and Swift conspired to bring the great composer George Frideric Handel from Hanover to London in 1710, seeking to uplift English musical culture from decadent braying and outright snoring.


The American Flank

And in the midst of all this, Swift managed to get two of his allies appointed to royal governorships in the American colonies. Robert Hunter in New York, and Alexander Spotswood in Virginia, launched a drive in 1710 which opened the door to our future continental republic.

That same year, in Massachusetts, Cotton Mather published his republican organizing manual, An Essay upon the Good, which spread Leibniz's notion of the science of happiness throughout America for more than a century. Benjamin Franklin paid tribute to Mather's book as the single most important influence upon his life.

Jonathan Swift said of this period, that he doubted there was another in history ``more full of passages which the curious of another age would be glad to know the secret springs of.'' The Venetians would not like you to know that Leibniz and Swift constructed some of the secret passages which led to the founding of the American Republic. But within Britain (as it came to be known after the 1707 union which England forced upon Scotland), the battle against the Venetian Party was soon lost.

Leibniz's patron, Sophie of Hanover, the designated successor to Queen Anne, died in May 1714, at the age of 84. Her son George was now the heir to the British throne. William of Orange had been George's idol, and Marlborough and the Venetian Party had bought him many times over. Barely two months after Sophie's death, Queen Anne's life was ended, probably by poison, at the age of 49. The duke of Marlborough, who had plotted in exile for years for Anne's overthrow, landed in England the same day; and George of Hanover was proclaimed Great Britain's King George I. Jonathan Swift had been forced to flee to Ireland, and George soon dismissed Leibniz from the court of Hanover.

How serious was the threat Leibniz and Swift posed to the Venetian Party's conspirators? Just consider the conspirators' satanic rage against the dead Queen Anne, who for all her faults had learned to seek something better in life than they could ever know. There was no public mourning, nor royal funeral; her corpse was left to rot for more than three weeks. Then a chosen few, serving George I, buried her secretly at night, in Westminster Abbey--beneath the tomb of her great-great-grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots. To this day, no stone or tablet marks her grave.

Leibniz himself died in 1716. Jonathan Swift fought on from Ireland, from the position Queen Anne had granted him as the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

He became the acknowledged political leader of all Ireland during the 1720s, building a mass-based movement on the principles of man's God-given right to liberty, and the right to national sovereignty based on natural law. Swift thereby extended Leibniz's movement for the pursuit of happiness, and immeasurably influenced the growth of republicanism in eighteenth-century America.

Britain, however, began a rapid descent into hell, under the new regime of George I. Previously secret Satan-worshipping societies such as the Hell-Fire Club now surfaced, heralded by the publication in 1714 of Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits. Very simply, Mandeville argued that the interests of the state were nothing more than the maximum fulfillment of its individuals' hedonistic pleasures: The more private vices, the more public benefits. Therefore, the state thrives most upon the corruption of its subjects. Inevitably, Britain was soon locked into a Venetian orgy of corruption and new heights of financial speculation, leading to the massive blowout of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. Appropriately, the government which emerged in 1721 from this devastating collapse, was headed by Prime Minister Robert Walpole, who held that post in the service of evil for the next 20 years. 
The Hell-Fire Clubs not only proliferated; they became the inner sanctum of Britain's degenerate elite. The most prominent one, founded in 1720 by Lord Wharton, included on its dining-room menu ``Hell-Fire Punch,'' ``Holy Ghost Pie,'' ``Devil's Loins,'' and ``Breast of Venus'' (garnished with cherries for nipples). By the 1760s, when the American colonies began to openly break with Britain, most of the king's cabinet were members of the Hell-Fire Club. When Benjamin Franklin served as our colonial postmaster general, for example, his official superior, Sir Francis Dashwood, was the head of the Hell-Fire Club!

The murderous toll of such a regime upon the British population is expressed by the following statistics: From 1738 to 1758, there were only 297,000 births recorded--against 486,000 deaths. Typifying the bestiality of the emerging British Empire, was the phrase smugly coined by Robert Walpole, ``Every man has his price.''

We must not pay it.