So Oliver Cromwell
invented the
"Self Denying Ordinance" which meant that one could not be a member of
Parliament
and
a military leader .....
This centralised military authority in a few people ... and eventually
in one person - Oliver Cromwell. On the plus side this made the
armed forces of Parliament extremely effective. And on the
negative side it made Oliver Cromwell effectively a military dictator.
Opinion was then divided between whether to disband much of the New
Model Army, and restore Charles I in return for a Presbyterian
settlement of the Church or to go for a non-compulsory Episcopalian
settlement. Cromwell, who now thought the Presbyterians were as
dictatorial as the Episcopalian systems, wrote out a manifesto for his
personal idea of a good fudge called the "Heads of Proposals" - the
main propositions were:
Royalists
had to wait five years before running for or holding an office.
The Book of
Common Prayer was allowed to be read but not mandatory, and
no
penalties should be made for not going to church, or attending other
acts of worship.
The sitting
Parliament was to set a date for its own termination. Thereafter,
biennial Parliaments were to be called (i.e. every two years),
which
would sit for a minimum of 120 days and maximum of 240 days.
Constituencies were to be reorganized.
Episcopacy
would be retained in church government, but the power of the bishops
would be substantially reduced.
Parliament
was to control the appointment of state officials and officers in the
army and navy for 10 years.
A new set of political eccentrics then came on the scene via the lower
ranks of the army called the Levellers led by John Lilburne, who
had odd ideas of full political equality. While this
was all being procrastinated about at the Putney debates during the
autumn of 1647 there emerged a slight issue when it was noticed that
nobody had paid the New Model Army for ages and during May 1647,
Cromwell was sent to the army's headquarters in Saffron Walden to
negotiate with them, but he failed to agree a deal and in June a troop
of cavalry under Cornet George Joyce seized the king from Parliament's
imprisonment. This sparked the second civil war.
Oliver started reading the Bible again and at some point during the
second civil war became enamoured of the doctrine of Providentialism
and the belief that God's plan is beyond the control of humans but
manifested though a few chosen individuals - mainly himself. And
generally decided he was always right. In December 1648, those
MPs who wished to continue negotiations with the king were prevented
from sitting for parliament by a troop of soldiers headed by Colonel
Thomas Pride, an episode soon to be known as Pride's Purge. The
remaining body of MPs, known as the Rump, agreed
that Charles should be tried on a charge of treason. And on 30
January 1649 matters came to a
Cromwell couldn't even get on with the Rump Parliament either
though. And very soon it had been paired down to the "Barebones"
Parliament. And finally the Protectorates - i.e. Just
Oliver. And so an idea of bottom up administration turned into
one of the most top down regimes in English history. Having a New
Model Army with no Cavaliers to fight any more Cromwell
then went off to Ireland to sort out the problems created by the Irish
Rebellion of 1641 that had kick started the civil war. Cromwell's
nine
month military campaign is estimated to have killed quite a lot of
people and in the wake of the Commonwealth's conquest, the public
practice of Catholicism was banned and Catholic priests were murdered
when captured. Under the Commonwealth, Catholic
landownership dropped from 60% of the total to just 8%. This
created the traditional Irish curse "mallacht Chromail ort" or "the
curse of Cromwell upon you".
After pissing off the Irish, Cromwell turned his attention to the
performing arts and in 1644 the Globe Theatre was demolished by the
Puritans. In 1647 even
stricter rules were passed regarding stage plays and theatres. This
culminated in 1648 when all playhouses were ordered to be pulled down.
All players were to be seized and whipped, and anyone caught attending
a play to be fined five shillings.
The lack of fun associated with puritanism was heightened further due
to the predominance of black and white clothes to symbolise simplicity
and purity. However, the choice of boring colours was partly
economic. The Roman Catholic Church controlled all the best
sources of European alum (basically urea) so when King Henry VIII broke
with Rome supplies of European alum were cut off. The only source
of alum left for English clothiers came from Flanders, in the Spanish
Netherlands. This was expensive and, like trying to dye clothes
with
your own urea, generally resulted in an inferior product. Not
that stopped anyone trying. In it's heyday the British alum dye
industry used over 200,000 litres
of urine per year. This meant a regular supply of
urine from about a thousand people. To get more urine, the
chemists
turned to populous Newcastle, Sunderland, Hull and London, where
buckets were placed on street corners for local 'contributions'.
Eventually, they discovered that the urea content in urine from poorer
working class districts was higher than urea in urine from wealthier
areas, because poorer people drank proportionately less strong
drink. It took more than 70 years for the English to find a
satisfactory
replacement.
In 1657, the public admission came that Cromwell was now King in
all but name came when he was offered the crown by Parliament. Cromwell
didn't need a crown though he as there by "God's providence" : “
I would
not seek to set up that which Providence hath destroyed and laid in the
dust, and I would not build Jericho again”. After he died
in 1658, Cromwell was succeeded as Lord Protector by his son, Richard.
However, the new Lord Protector, had no power base in either Parliament
or the New Model Army and very little interest in either. He was
forced to abdicate in 1659 and the Protectorate was abolished when
George Monck, the Governor of Scotland and his army marched into the
City of
London and forced the Rump Parliament to re-admit members of the Long
Parliament excluded in December 1648 during Pride's Purge.
Parliament then dissolved itself and there was a general
election. The outgoing Parliament designed the
electoral qualifications so as to connive a Presbyterian
majority. However, the restrictions against royalist candidates
and voters were ignored, and the elections resulted in a House of
Commons fairly evenly divided between Royalists and Parliamentarians
and between Anglicans and Presbyterians. Parliament then sent
Charles an invite to return which he received on the 8 May 1660 so in
July Richard Cromwell left for France, where he lived by a variety of
pseudonyms before travelling around European courts which found him
amusing for his celebrity and amusing anecdotes such as the story he
used to tell of this bit of witty banter with the prince of Conti
who was unaware of his identity :
The
lesson that if you want to totally destroy a monarchy you have to
annihilate all the King's offspring was not lost on later
revolutionaries in other countries.
Charles I's regime restored the official position of the King as Head
of the Church of England. However, the King no longer claimed
divine right. He did, however, claim £1.2 million from
taxes levied through Parliament to run the government. The worst
excesses of the puritan administration (banning all fun) were retracted
and Charles "tolerated" what became known as "non conformism" to the
Church of England [i.e. any
form of Christianity that wasn't Catholicism] via the use
legislation designed to repress the non-conformists.
Together Charles and his right hand man the Earl of Clarendon came up
with what became known as the Clarendon Code. This combined four pieces
of legislation into a patchwork of non-conformist repression:
Corporation Act
(1661) - All municipal officials to take Anglican communion, and
formally reject the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. The effect of
this act was to exclude nonconformists from public office.
Act of Uniformity,
(1662)
-
Made use of the Book of Common Prayer compulsory in religious
service. Over two thousand clergy refused to comply and so were forced
to resign their livings (the Great Ejection).
Conventicle Act (1664)
-
This
act forbade conventicles (a meeting for unauthorized worship) of
more than 5 people who were not members of the same household. The
purpose was to prevent dissenting religious groups from meeting.
Five Mile Act (1665)
-
Was
aimed at Nonconformist ministers, who were forbidden from coming
within five miles of incorporated towns or the place of their former
livings. They were also forbidden to teach in schools.
Of course since the aristocracy had started throwing everyone off the
fields and into towns via the Inclosure Acts ....
...of which there were to be
many many more in the next centuries and since the population had more
than doubled since 1500 the problems of people meeting up and having
their own ideas had got a lot worse and legislation to stop this got
more and more impractical. Also there seemed to be even more new
religious ideas than there used to be after the forced attempt to merge
presbyterian with the official church was aborted allowing
presbyterianism to schism. Charles
attempted to relax religious freedom for Catholics and non
conformists with his 1672 Royal Declaration of Indulgence, but
Parliament forced him to withdraw it. For although Charles was in
favour of more religious tolerance he had a lot of obstacles to
overcome - being the victim himself of one of the strangest conspiracy
theories in the history of wild conspiracy theory. The unrest of
the civil war had
created a society riven with religious
paranoia. Probably the most famous exploiter of which was Matthew
Hopkins self-proclaimed "witchfinder general". Between 1645 and
1647 Hopkins and his his colleage John Stearne sent to the gallows more
people than all the other witchhunters in the 160 years of persecution
in England. Of about 500 executions for witchcraft between 1400
and 1700 Hopkins and Stearn are reconned to be responsible for over 200
(around 40%) all within the space of 18 months. However, Hopkins
was arguably not as mad as...
...Titus
Oates. Titus
Oates had trained as an Anglican priest and had been the vicar of
Bobbing in Kent. Oates had a fertile imagination and accused a
local school teacher in Hastings of sodomy. sodomy was
capitol offense in England from 1533 to 1707 under the 1533 Buggery
act. This resulted in a court case which resulted in Oates being
charged with perjury and imprisoned. Oates escaped to London
where he got a job as Chaplin on the ship the Adventurer. He was
soon accused of sodomy himself but got off being hanged because he was
a clergyman. Back in London Oates became friends with Israel
Tonge who was obsessed with conspiracy theories about the Catholic
Church and particularly the Jesuits.
Between them Oates and
Tonge set up a very healthy publishing business that thrived on the
publication of anti-Catholic propaganda. To further this Oates
joined the household of the Catholic Duke of Norfolk as an Anglican
chaplain. On Ash Wednesday, 1677 he was received into the Catholic
Church. From there Oates went to the Jesuit house of St Omer in
France but he was expelled by Thomas Whitbread because he was too lazy
to learn any Latin. Returning to
London with the false claim that
he was now a Catholic doctor of Divinity, Oates set out to visit get
invited to as many Catholic meetings as possible and met up again with
Tonge who was hungry for conspiracy stories to print. However,
all the Catholics Oates seemed to meet were more interested in
going to mass and saying the rosary than in interesting things like
sedition. This was a bit boring. So in
the tradition of all the greatest journalists Oates and Tonge decided
to make stuff up and wrote a large manuscript that accused the Roman
Catholic Church of approving an assassination of Charles II by the
Jesuits and "named" 199 "conspirators".
Charles was very into chemistry and had a lab assistant called
Christopher Kirkby who was a
friend of a friend of Tonge. Tonge showed the manuscript to Kirby
and Kirby told the King. Charles said it was ridiculous and told
Kirkby to present Tonge before Lord Danby. Tonge then lied to
Danby that he had "found" the manuscript but did not know the
author. Danby advised the King to order an investigation. Charles
said this was absurd but told Danby to keep the events secret so as not
to cause alarm. Eventually when everyone and their dog at court
had read the manuscript an investigation was started. Inevitably
Oates was sent for by the King and testified on oath that he had
been at a Jesuit meeting held at the White Horse Tavern in the Strand,
London on April 24, 1678...
..the purpose of
which was to
discuss the
assassination of Charles II.
Oates and Tonge were brought
before the Privy Council later that month
following which Oates made 43 allegations against various members of
Catholic religious orders and numerous Catholic nobles. Some of
these people had connections with Jesuits that could be proven even if
they were not treasonous so were condemned. Even minor civil
servants like Samuel Pepys were implicated. With the help
of the Earl of Danby the list grew to 81 accusations. Eventually Oates
was given a squad of soldiers and he began to round up Jesuits.
In 1678 someone murdered Sir Edmund Godfrey, MP and a strong supporter
of Protestantism, and Oates accused five Catholic Lords. There
were hangings and even a set of playing cards (see above). When
on 24 November 1685, Oates claimed the Queen
was working with the King's physician to poison him, Charles personally
interrogated Oates, caught him out in a number of lies, and ordered his
arrest. However, a couple days later, Parliament forced
Oates's release with the threat of constitutional crisis. By the
time the hysteria had subsided at least 15 innocent men executed, the
last being Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, on 1 July 1681.
Oates, now living in a state apartment in Whitehall and an annual
allowance of £1,200, then claimed assassins intended to shoot the
king with silver bullets so the wound would not heal. Although it
was a bit late in the day now for people to start realising that Oates
was a
total mentalist, on 31
August 1681 he was finaly told to leave his apartments in Whitehall,
but
remained undeterred and denounced the King, his brother and
anyone he regarded as an opponent. He was arrested for sedition,
sentenced to a fine of £100,000 and thrown into prison.
When James II acceded to the throne in 1685 he had Oates retried for
perjury and sentenced to annual pillory, loss of clerical dress, and
imprisonment for life until William and Mary decided he was nice again.
However, this hysteria was not totally without foundation for there
were a lot of prominent Catholics - and this was why Charles had such
problems dispelling the hysteria. After all, Charles's wife was a
Catholic and so was his brother and he was secretly taking
£300,000 a year from the French King on the back of a promise to
convert the whole country to Catholicism eventually which was never
going to happen and upon the anti-Catholic tide,
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, leader of the Whigs
demanded that the King's brother, James, should be excluded from the
royal succession. This began the Exclusion Crisis. The
crisis saw the birth of
the pro-exclusion Whig and anti-exclusion
Tory parties ...who later evolved into David Cameron and Nick
Clegg. Of course modern day politics is still one group of people
trying to gain economic, social and financial advantage over the other
- we just dress it up in different nonsense these days as sectarian
divisions aren't a con anyone believes in any more. In modern
politics new nonsense is required at a rate that even organised
religion would find hard to furnish fast enough... but the
Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are still in the most
chronological and literal sense the direct descendant parties of the
Whigs and the Torys. So...
...politics started to become about more than just religion and a
system started to fall into place to allow greater levels of dissent
without it meaning bloodshed or the dissenters having any power.
But anyway...
During the interregnum James II had been living in France. And
there he had become enamoured of Catholicism. And it's hardly
surprising he had become enamoured of
Catholicism. Louis XIV was a big fan of it too and had more or
less merged it with the divine right of Kings to become the most
powerful ruler about at the time. Louis XIII and Louis XIV
accomplished a massive centralisation of power. In fact Louis XIV
even
said he was the state and that state was him ...and spent a lot of time
imagining himself as a massive, luminous ball of plasma held together
by gravity.
Of course no one personified this centralisation better than Louis
XIII's
Cheif Minister the flamboyant and controversial Armand Jean du Plessis
de Richelieu, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu who thanks to Alexandre Dumas's
The Three Musketeers is the most regularly portrayed clergyman on film.
He is widely regarded as the First Nearest thing any country had to a
Prime Minister. His successor Cardinal Giulio Raimondo Mazarino,
due to Louis XIV being 5 on his accession, effectively ran France with
Louis' mum from 1638 until 1661. Although Louis XIV eventually
exercised personal rule the groundwork to allow him to do this was very
much the handiwork of Richelieu and Mazarino.
The physical
manifestation of Louis XIV's power was of course his massive Palace of
Versailles. Louis had figured out that by making absolutely
everyone who was any kind of aristocrat live near it or around it, he
could keep an eye and ear on their machinations and make himself more
powerful still. Louis filled it with images of himself and his
family as Roman Gods and had lots of fountains made of Roman gods but
somehow the Catholic church didn't seem too bothered by this obsession
with pagan ideology. James II converted fully to
Catholicism in 1668 or 1669, although his
conversion was kept secret until 1676. As the Exclusion Bill was
submitted several times to Parliament, Charles was "forced" to keep
dissolving parliament to prevent it being enacted. From
1680-1885he took a leaf out of Louis XIV's book and ruled alone but
this went well as Parliament had made its self very unpopular after the
civil war.
While everyone was winding themselves up about the
Popish plot a real plot against the King was brewing. This was
the Rye House plot to replace Charles with a Cromwellian
republic. The plan was simple: assassinate King Charles II and
James, as they passed by Rye House in Hertfordshire on their way back
from Newmarket, Cambridgeshire, to London. Unfortunately
Charles's lodging house in Newmarket accidentally caught fire, so the
Charles set out on his journey earlier than expected and missed the
plotters. That there was a plot was not in doubt but the fact
that it just happened to implicate most of Charles II's Whig enemies
did not go unnoticed. Still one could counter argue that those
that live by the conspiracy theory must die by conspiracy
theories. The Rye House plot created a surge in popularity that
gave Charles to chance to invite James back onto the privy council in
1684. James had withdrawn from all policy-making bodies in the
wake of the Exclusion crisis.
A year later Charles died
prematurely and James set out to be a Catholic King. This
did not go well. After crushing the immediate rebellions
James set about pushing Catholic Emancipation legislation through
parliament. However, the non conformists didn't trust him to seek
an equal repeal of Charles's
repressive laws against them. James' nightmare was
the Test Act which meant that anyone of any position of any importance
except himself had to renounce their Catholicism. Not content
with trying to force Parliament to repeal this he issued the
Declaration of Indulgence and ordered Anglican clergymen to read it in
their churches. To try to enable this to happen James made the
following interesting comment that sought to equate sectarianism with
racism:
As it was felt a bit much for the Head of the
Church of England to start telling the Church of England what to do
seven
Bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, submitted a petition
requesting the reconsideration of the King's religious policies.
They
were arrested and tried for seditious libel. However pure or
cynical James's motives this caused a total breakdown of trust between
parliament and the King which was made worse when the charges against
the bishops were laughed out of court. When Queen Mary gave birth
to a Catholic son and
heir, superseding his Protestant daughters several influential
Protestants claimed the child was "supposititious" and had been
smuggled into the Queen's bedchamber in a warming pan.
Several
senior Protestant politicians had already entered into negotiations
with
William, Prince of Orange. In December when the invasion came
James's political authority had virtually dissolved but he was allowed
to escape to France to hang out with Louis XIV and start plotting his
restoration as William was scared of making him a martyr. On the
plus side he cheered up the Quakers.
Having
near zero political support in England James made an attempt to
take over Ireland with the assistance of French troops, in March
1689. The Irish Parliament backed him but he was ultimately
defeated at the Battle of the Boyne on 1 July 1690. William led
the army personally which made him even more of a hero. James
fled to France again and became known in Ireland as Séamus an
Chaca or 'James the be-shitten'. This is the military victory the
Orange Order "celebrate". The
English Parliament passed a Bill of Rights that denounced James for
abusing his power. This is the famous Bill that declared that
henceforth,
no Catholic would be permitted to ascend to the English throne, nor
could any English monarch marry a Catholic. The Act, which
restated and confirmed many provisions of the earlier Declaration of
Right established restrictions on the royal prerogative. It provided,
amongst
other things, that
the Sovereign
could not:
suspend
laws
passed
by Parliament
levy taxes
without parliamentary consent
infringe the
right to petition
raise a
standing army during peacetime without parliamentary consent
deny the
right to bear arms to Protestant subjects
unduly
interfere with parliamentary elections
punish
members of either House of Parliament for anything said during
debates
require
excessive bail or inflict cruel and unusual punishments
This settlement is
also, of course,
the origin of the Civil List under which the Royal Famill gets
£30,000,000 a year for MCing a lot of
functions. Unfortunately while the general public seem to enjoy
airbrushed celluloid stories about Royalty filled with amusing fictions
that the removal of Edward VIII had something to do with his political
opinions or that Winston Churchill was in favour of forcing Edward to
abdicate whereas in actuality on 5 December 1936, he issued a lengthy
statement implying that the Ministry was applying unconstitutional
pressure on the King to force him to make a hasty decision, ...and
while the general public seem to enjoy the vicarious pleasures of a
good Royal funeral or bust up or love match still.... It is a
fact that when it comes to the
Royal family asking for a pay rise they do tend to a range of
emotions from antipathy to the hump.
For this reason, Prince Charles has been lobbying for years for a more
opaque system than the current one where the profits of the Crown
Estate £6.6 billion property empire go to the Treasury and then
parliament votes on how much he and mum should derive from the Civil
List. Like this:
To one one where a percentage of the Crown Estate profits go directly
back to the Treasury and Parliament is cut out of the Equation so it is
much harder to put the Monarchy under financial scrutiny. Like
this:
The Estate’s income is £211million ... expected to rise to a
whopping £450million by 2020. Prince Charles is also very
keen to get himself exempted from the Freedom of Information Act having
written lots of letters to everyone at every level of government and
indeed every sphere of public life he'd like us not to read because
they're silly. In fact Ian Davidson MP, a former member of
Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC), told
The
Independent
So if all
correspondence between
the Palace and the treasury is to be protected from FOI in future who
knows what the Palace could get up to? One sympathises that the
Heir to the throne might find this legislation an invasion of personal
privacy. But maybe if he hadn't
lobbied every minister in Government in an attempt to pursue his
alternative medicine agenda maybe Edzard Ernst,the professor of
complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School at Exeter, may
not have accused him of
promoting "
quackery"
with
some
of the products in his Duchy Originals range.
Parliament's new position as now more important and powerful than the
King was, of course, cemented by the fact the King was not the person
with the most genealogically logical claim to the throne. William
was Charles I's grandson and, in the spirit of international inbreeding
so popular with Royalty at the time, had married his first cousin, Mary
Stewart (James's Daughter) who technically had the most valid claim to
the throne. However, as Mary refused to rule without her husband,
Parliament was able to fudge the issue of who had the least logical
claim to the throne by making them co-monarchs and allowing William to
rule alone after her death.
Unfortunately Mary had no children having suffered a serious
miscarriage early in life that left her unable to have any and Queen
Anne her cousin, though enduring 18 pregnancies, only produced 5
children who were not stillborn and all those died in infancy except
for one who died aged 11.
The reign of
Queen Anne there was a big increase in the influence of ministers and a
decrease in the influence of the Crown. Anne didn't like
dissenters so Daniel Defoe wrote a pamphlet called "
The Shortest Way with
Dissenters" in which he argued anonymously that the solution to
this was simple.
He was sentenced to
the pillory but
unfortunately too many people got the joke so instead of being
vilified he became a celebrity. Daniel having made a lot of
money out of promoting religious freedom then went off and invested it
all in ethical worthy enterprises - like the newly emerging slave trade.
To square the circle of restoring a
bloodline that was going to die out
eventually returning them to the point where James II or his son were
the geneolgically logical heirs Parliament passed the Act of Settlement
1701 in which it was provided that the Crown would be inherited by a
distant relative, Sophia, Electress of Hanover. So although over
fifty Catholics bore closer blood relationships to Anne than Geroge I
the crown eventually passed to him because that was the nearest
protestant blood relative parliament could find.
In 1708, Anne became the last British Sovereign to withhold the Royal
Assent from a bill. When the country got into difficulty with the
South Sea Bubble George I was more than happy to let his First Lord of
the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Robert Walpole sort
out the mess. Sir Robert didn't like the title Prime Minister as
it made him sound a bit too much like Cromwell or Richelieu or like he
was more powerful than the King (which he was) so the Prime Ministers
went around saying they were first among equals in the Cabinet...
Having become Britain's first Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole's main
problem was there was nothing in the kitty. So he adopted a
policy of No-Wars-They're-Too-Expensive. This went very well and
Britain stuck to expanding their Empire instead. Mostly in
America. This led to a lot of competition with France and some
colonial wars that were eventually quite expensive. Eventually
George Grenville's administration came up with a fantastic money making
scheme known as let's raise more money for the public finances by
taxing the Americans.
The Americans got quite upset about
paying
ridiculous taxes to Britain in return for zero public services so, as
it was now the fashion, they decided that if Britain could have a
Revolution so would they.
And so in 1775 they started the
American Revolutionary War.
France, not liking England, set up a major program of aid to the
Americans. At first secretly via a dummy corporation and later
openly. This
cost huge sums of money. And the huge debts from it were
one of the reasons that in 1789 Louis
XVI's absolute monarchy in France collapsed.
The church in pre-Revolutionary
France was intertwined very very closely with the state - they were
almost one - the Catholic Church still took a 10% tythe of everything,
owned 10% of
the land and was almost an entire branch of the civil service.
France under the Ancien Régime (before the French Revolution)
divided society into three estates: the First Estate (clergy 0.5 % of
the population), the Second Estate (nobility 1.5 % of the population)
and the Third Estate (everyone else) and the King himself (no estate).
Like this:
Louis XVI had been gradually losing
control of his Parliament and, more
importantly, his ministers for ages and inspired by events in Britain
and America the Third
Estate, now meeting as the Communes ("Commons") decided to cut out the
top management and declare its self the National
Assembly of the "people". Louis tried to stop them doing this by
closing the Salle des
États so they went down the road to a local indoor tennis court
and declared him a waste of space in a different space.
Representatives of the clergy soon joined them, as
did 47 members of the nobility.
In order to more fairly distribute the tax burden and/or plug the huge
budget deficit the National Assembly
abolished the Church's authority to impose it's tithe. And in an
attempt to address the financial crisis, the Assembly declared that the
property of the Church was “at the disposal of the nation.” - and
basically nationalised the Monasteries as Henry VIII had done in the
1500s. Monks and nuns were encouraged to return to private life and a
small percentage did eventually marry. The Civil Constitution of
the Clergy, passed on 12 July 1790, turned the remaining clergy into
employees of the state. However, the state still needed the
Church and it's staff to perform some of the functions of running the
state that they used to so it established an election system for parish
priests and bishops and set a pay rate for the clergy.
Of course this created a direct conflict between the proto-democratic
authority of the state and the theological and business promotional
authority of the Pope so eventually (as
there were very few protestants in France - the result of a small
incident called the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre) the National
Assembly began to require an oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution
from all the members of the clergy. This led to a schism between
those clergy who swore the required oath and accepted the new
arrangement and those who remained loyal to the Pope. 24 percent
of the clergy nationwide took the oath.
In order to make the Nationalisation go more smoothly during the Reign
of
Terror a unique social experiment was attempted - the complete, sudden
and total
de-Christianization of France - including the imprisonment and massacre
of priests
and destruction of churches and religious images. Of course the trouble
with pure atheism is that it's never had a big
customer base and had an even smaller one in the 18th century so
Maximilien Robespierre came up with the fun idea of inventing his own
monotheistic religion - the much ridiculed Cult of the Supreme
being.
The idea
of the Cult of the Supreme Being was that there should a belief in the
existence of God and in the immortality of the human soul but
Christianity would be completely dumped where it didn't fit with
Robespierre's political ideas - which was in quite a lot of
places. Robespierre declared that 20
Prairial of Year III (June 8, 1794) would be the first day of national
celebration of the Supreme Being, and future republican holidays were
to be held on every day of rest (décadi) in the official
calendar. Eventually, Robespierre and the Committee of Public
Safety were forced to denounce their own campaign as it was simply
laughable
and the failed Cult of the Supreme Being and its much-derided festivals
definitely contributed to the downfall of Robespierre - although the
10s of thousands of decapitated corpses may also have had an effect on
public opinion.
With Robespierre's own death at the guillotine on
July 28, 1794, the cult lost all
official sanction and disappeared from public view. It was
officially banned by Napoleon Bonaparte with his Law on Cults of 18
Germinal which was followed by a Concordat of 1801 between Napoleon and
the Church that ended the
de-Christianization period and lasted until 1905 when the Third
Republic completely separated Church and State.
Following the French Revolution
having gone so well (or badly) there
was in turn a Rebellion in Ireland in 1798 which was part funded by the
French Revolutionary
government. There had even been an attempted French invasion of
Ireland in 1796 however the Expédition d'Irlande was defeated
by the weather. So to keep the Irish happy...
From the 1790s Roman Catholics gained the
right to vote (but not to be voted for)... then the 1800 Acts
of Union were passed which created Great Britain.
These acts also resulted in the merger of the English and Scottish
Parliaments into the Westminster Parliament. In order to make
this all go more smoothly William Pitt (the Younger) promised Catholic
Emancipation but it never seemed to happen so he had to resign when
George III said
During this period there were lots of Problems withe the Corn
Laws. Originally intended to protect British trade interests they
seemed to make a lot of people unhappy and actually pushed up the UK
price of food during a famine. This made everyone unhappy and
there were a lot of protests particularly in the north of England
against the forty shilling freehold system. A big rally was organised
in Manchester.
60,000 pro-democracy reformers were attacked by armed cavalry resulting
in 15 deaths and over 600 injuries - an event that has been described
as "Manchester's Tiananmen Square". Fortunately the Prince Regent
(later George III) was on hand to cheer everybody up conveying to the
Manchester Yeomanry his fullsome and heartfelt thanks.
Every MP elected after 1807, with one exception, announced in favour of
Catholic Emancipation. However it was blocked by the House of
Lords
until the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. The legislation proved a
good excuse to actually raise as the minimum property requirement for
voters to take account of inflation so the number of £ to vote
required rose froma rental value of forty
shillings per annum ...
to £10 per annum....
...so reducing the
total number of voters even further and increasing the
number of rotten
boroughs. Even given this George IV
still felt that giving Catholics the vote sounded too democratic and
threatened not to give royal assent but eventually when the entire
cabinet resigned he said
The increased income to vote
situation was reversed three years later by The Representation of the
People Act 1832. Lord Grey had a lot of trouble getting this bill
through Parliament as the House of Lords continually blocked it so
eventually he told the King that unless he made enough new peers to
ensure the passage of the bill he would resign. William IV said
...
... and appointed the Duke of Wellington as Prime
Minister. There were protests, people refused to pay taxes, there
was a run on the
banks, and £1½ million in gold was withdrawn from the Bank
of England. The Duke of Wellington was unable to form a government so
resigned and the Act was finally passed. However, loads of people
still didn't have the vote. And this was born the Chartist
movement. In 1837, six Members of Parliament and six working men,
including William Lovett, (from the London Working Men's Association,
set up in 1836) formed a committee, which then published the People's
Charter in 1838. This stipulated the six main aims of the movement as:
A vote for every
man twenty-one years of age, of sound mind, and not undergoing
punishment for crime.
The secret
ballot. - To protect the elector in the exercise of his vote.
No property
qualification for members of Parliament - thus enabling the
constituencies to return the man of their choice, be he rich or poor.
Payment of members,
thus
enabling
an
honest tradesman, working man, or other person, to serve a
constituency, when taken from his business to attend to the interests
of the Country.
Equal Constituencies,
securing
the
same
amount of representation for the same number of electors, instead
of allowing small constituencies to swamp the votes of large ones.
Annual parliaments,
thus
presenting
the
most effectual check to bribery and intimidation, since though a
constituency might be bought once in seven years (even with the
ballot), no purse could buy a constituency (under a system of universal
suffrage) in each ensuing twelve-month; and since members, when elected
for a year only, would not be able to defy and betray their
constituents as now.
Meanwhile in France under King
Louis-Philippe's constitutional monarchy which had
replaced Napoleon's military dictatorship all the men in France who
weren't landowners decided they wanted the right to vote too.
This triggered yet another revolution in France and the 1848
international wave of revolutions that affected
France, Germany, Denmark, Schleswig, the Habsburg Empire, Slovakia,
Switzerland, Poland, Wallachia, Brazil and Belgium. Feeling he was
getting a bit unpopular Karl Marx left France and moved to England
where he settled in Dean Street, London and wrote
... with Friedrich Engels. England was now the hangout for
naughty revolutionary thinkers as the repeal in 1828 of the Test and
Corporation Acts had legalised atheism and agnosticism as well as
non-conformism. There were even more arguments and someone even
came up with the idea of giving women the vote. However,
fortunately Queen Victoria was on hand to say
We could carry on till Universal Sufferage in 1928 but lots of really
really really really really really really really really really really
really really really really really really really really really really
really really really really really really really really really really
really really really really really really reallyreally really really
really really really really really really really really really really
really really really really really reallyreally really really really
really really really really really really really really really really
really really really really reallyreally really really really really
really really really really really really really really really really
really really really really depressing things happened in the
20th century so we are
going to draw a veil over it and end here.
