Today is the anniversary of the execution of Charles I. In sillier circles, this imposition of the greatest tyranny in English (never mind Irish) history is termed “the English Revolution”.
In fact, of course, it long preceded the emergence of any industrial proletariat and is wholly inexplicable in Marxist terms, just as is the very existence of any Marxist movement in, say, the Russia of 1917, or Albania, or China at least until very recent years, or Korea, or Vietnam, or Nepal, or Bengal, or Sri Lanka, or Ethiopia, or Zimbabwe, or Uganda, or Rwanda, South Africa, or Cuba, or Peru, or Bolivia, or … well, make your own list. At their respective heights of Communism, certainly Spain, and arguably also Italy and even France, were standing contradictions of the whole theory.
If there is any truth at all in the Marxist analysis of history, then these things simply cannot be. I think we all know what follows from the fact that these things are.
But didn’t Charles I believe in the Divine Right of Kings? No, he did not. Or at least he certainly expressed no such view at his grotesque “trial” pursuant to a Bill of Attainder, and before eighty of his carefully selected parliamentary and military enemies under a second-rate lawyer, John Bradshaw, created “Lord President” because all the proper judges had fled London rather than have anything to do with the wretched proceedings.
There, Charles declared repeatedly that, by denying the authority of the “court” to try him, he was simply upholding the law as it then existed, including the liberties of the English people and the parliamentary institutions of the English State. No law permitted the trial of the monarch, he argued. On the contrary, the law of treason then in force provided for exactly the opposite, namely that any attack on the monarch’s person was itself an offence. Simply as a matter of fact, he was right.
And the subsequent behaviour of the Cromwellian regime fully vindicated him.
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"No law permitted the trial of the monarch, he argued"
ReplyDeleteUnder common law tradition, you don't need laws to justify things explicitly; that's napoleonic...
As for the Cromwellian counter revolution justifying Charles I, I don't see how one remotely justifies the moral behaviour of the other.
You are certainly right that this is pre-capitalist; but the establishment of a Parliament capable of levying taxes based on the will of the people rather than the whim of monarchs was crucial to establishing a sound and productive business environment; the English revolution contributed to making the later industrial one possible.
A necessary step in this transition was the dispersal of power from the Monarch to land owners.
"Under common law tradition, you don't need laws to justify things explicitly; that's napoleonic..."
ReplyDeleteI'm tempted to say that it can't be, or else Charles I could not have said it in 1649. Of course, the law at the time did specifically preclude the trial of the monarch.
"As for the Cromwellian counter revolution justifying Charles I, I don't see how one remotely justifies the moral behaviour of the other"
It as infinitely worse.
"the establishment of a Parliament capable of levying taxes based on the will of the people rather than the whim of monarchs was crucial to establishing a sound and productive business environment"
That didn't happen until a long time later,a bd was only made possible by the consequences of restoring more or less the status quo ante.
"A necessary step in this transition was the dispersal of power from the Monarch to land owners"
That depends who you mean by "land owners". And why was this "necessary", anyway? There was in fact very diffused land ownership in pre-Reformation England, and the rise of the gentry (mostly created by the distribution of misappropriated monastery land, so very new indeed at the time of the Civil War) resulted in enclosure. What sort of progress was that?