English politics

            We often discuss American History & Revolutionary War but miss the broader main points of the British experience and how it made the colonies think.  In 1776 practically all the Americans thought of themselves as good British subjects willing to do what came natural in throwing off an English king.

            Kings of England were a subset of the feudal order, where a strong tribal leader doles out privileges and land to his best warriors, then has a contract with them to solicit soldiers and money to defend the realm.  It was all about war and defense.  The best warriors were called dukes (counts in France from which we get “county”) and the soldiers were knights, a class of men who trained from age 7 in warfare.  Few could read.  Only the church and monasteries had literate personnel. If you wanted an accountant or a guy to design castles, get someone from the church.  And nobody lived very long.  A cut turned into gangrene, small pox killed 1/3 of it’s victims, women died often in childbirth.  So kings had a problem with succession and heirs.  1/3 died without a filial heir.  That caused a war of succession among claimants, often generations later as well.  Marriages were arranged for alliances, so a French king’s daughter at age 2 might be pledged to a dashing crown prince from England, age 18. But by the time she was marriageable, he may have had a dozen mistresses and be a drunken old coot with war wounds.  Or a king’s queen might be put away for her affair to a rival for the throne, never to see her children, who in turn grow up loathing their father (George II, mid-1700s). 

            All that baloney about the romance of being a princess that young girls adore never happened.  A queen had to be the manager of warring dukes.  She’d be expected to marry quickly, with good political alliance, to provide an heir. A contender to the throne was sure to challenge, since women weren’t warriors. (Men have about 3X the muscular mass of women and when it comes to swinging swords and jousting, have unchallenged ability.) Thusthe beloved Elizabeth I, was beset by Protestants vs. Catholics, suitors from all over Europe, challenges to her status, parliament’s funding, decided never to marry but to marry England instead. But within the girl was the heart of an emperor. She brought England to tears on the eve of the Armada’s invasion and again when she opened Parliament the last year of her life, “Although God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves…though you have had many mightier and wiser princes sitting in this seat, yet you have never had, nor shall have, any that love you better.”

            Kings got warriors from feudal dukes but money and supplies were problems. They had to get it from Parliament who could tax. Kings did fees. King John was an ass, and the dukes ganged up on him to get concessions in Magna Carta.  John signed but got the pope to nullify.  But then he suddenly died and his boy heir, Henry III, had a power vacuum and the Magna Carta was re-instated   It provided for an advisory council (“Parliament” from the French word for talk, parlez).  These barons, every time there was a weak king of a tyrant, would make limits and demands and the Parliament became a unique feature of England. Eventually the Magna Carta rights were deemed apply to all English, not just the nobles.  (3 classes in middle ages—nobles, clergy, and commoners.  Nobles thought themselves literally superior to the subhuman common people.  This began to change about 1500.)

            Edward III 1327-77, had a legitimate claim to the French throne and started a war to win it.  But the Black Death and his long reign that outlived his sons, threw a rock into the cogwheels.  A dearth of people developed and survivor guilt caused a religious revival of Christian principles.  The grandsons of Ed divided into factions and it led to civil war, War of Roses. When a guy took the throne, he would kill the families of rivals.  Who gets their land?  King does.  This led to more abuse when Henry VIII took over monastic lands after declaring Protestant. Parliament passed a law against Bills of Attainder—you can’t just pass a law against one person or family with the designs on killing them and taking their land. It’s evil.  Bottom line: If a king wants money or powers he has to ask for it.  Chaos of English successions caused Parliaments to assert themselves.  Then Henry VIII not only muddled the succession, but brought on religious strife pertaining to it.  Parliament, trying to get control of the army in 1640 ran afoul of Charles I, the pretty boy who chased good-looking Catholic women from the Continent.  That was the other problem with kings.  They had a limited stock of acceptable girls.  And Parliament went to war against Charles, defeated him, and sent his French wife back to France in exile.  Her boys were raised Catholic.  After the Interregnum, when Parliament unsuccessfully ruled, they invited Charles II to be king, but he was AINO, Anglican In Name Only, and believed in divine right of kings like the French. His brother, James II was far worse.  In 1688, English went shopping for a new King and Queen—William and Mary. 

            This all occurred in early American colonial times, before 1700.  One rationale of the English was that the king James II had violated the “social contract” with the people, an idea of John Locke.  Locke’s ideas didn’t have much popularity in England but they caught on with the clergy in America, who, after the religious revival of Great Awakening, 1740-42, became big spokesmen of communities.  Thus 19 of the 56 people who signed the Declaration were pastors. And the English originally mistook the colonial revolt for a bunch of radical Presbyterian ministers.

            Meanwhile after William and Mary and then Queen Anne, the throne was filled by a German prince, George I, because he was the only available Protestant heir.  He spoke no English and left Parliament to do most business. He caught his wife having an affair and banished her to a castle, never to see her children again. Thus his son, George II loathed his father.  The ideal of the Americans was that a leader should be moral, communicative, and a servant of people, is much a reaction to the dysfunctional Georges. George II, because of his lonely childhood could never have close relationships, and became a macho soldier with many mistresses. Same deal with his son Frederick. How would Americans see this, people who had come here dearly wanting to worship as they saw fit?  And George II kept getting into wars.  Eventually, the Seven Years War led to such broken finances that for the first time, the British treasury began to tax all people, not just nobles, and colonists, who, by Act weren’t supposed to be. George III continued taxation and Parliament passed a number of martial law acts that killed freedom in the colonies.  In 1773, a Philadelphia printer named Benjamin Franklin reprinted Two Treatises on Government by John Locke and it ignited the colonists.

            Oh, did I mention that when Scotland and England united, 1707, English gentry bought up and bankrupted Scots and turned their land into sheep ranches for the blooming wool trade—thereby exiling Scots to Ireland and America? That kings liked Catholicism and Anglicanism because they could appoint bishops as a power grab.  Or that lack of free land in England led many to emigrate? (And they came up with a term “American Dream”, meaning the Lockean right to have a relationship with God, own land, and do as you saw fit.)