Stick a Flag in It by Arran Lomas

Author:Arran Lomas [Lomas, Arran]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783529155
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2020-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

For really I think that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee; and therefore truly, Sr, I think itt clear, that every Man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.

This was remarkably iconoclastic for a society still dragging its heels out of feudalism. However, none of the grand ideas from the Putney Debates were implemented as they broke up before any significant progress was made. Yet the fact that they happened at all, in the 1640s no less, shows that this was a nation eager for change.

Moves towards an amicable peace were useless so long as a tyrannical king still roamed the land; as the Earl of Manchester put it so eloquently in Parliament: ‘If we beat the King ninety and nine times yet he is king still, and so will his posterity be after him; but if the King beat us once, we shall be all hanged, and our posterity be made slaves.’ And so, a second civil war was inevitable.

What also didn’t help to keep the peace was the fact that Charles was busy scheming and dreaming any possible means to claw back power. He secretly negotiated a treaty with the Scots called ‘The Engagement’, in which the Scots would invade England on his behalf and restore him to the throne. In return, Charles would implement their desired Presbyterian Church in England for an experimental three-year period. But it was no good; at the deciding Battle of Preston in August 1648, the New Model Army, now under Cromwell’s sole command, obliterated the Royalists and their new Scottish allies, putting a swift end to the short Second English Civil War.

When Parliament inevitably found out about Charles’s secret dealings they decreed that inviting foreign powers to waltz into one’s own country to overthrow Parliament could be nothing but an act of treason. Which is interesting, because treason was typically associated with overthrowing a king; after all, the king was considered ‘the state’. That the king himself could be accused of treason was a paradoxical shift, strongly indicating that, for the first time, power in England was flowing away from the monarchy and towards Parliament. It also marked an epoch when nations ceased being monarchical kingdoms and transformed into nation-states. This was the birth of early nationalism, a trend that France would follow with its revolution over 130 years later.

Despite Charles’s transgressions, those in England who wanted to see the king overthrown or possibly killed were still a small minority. Indeed, it’s believed there was only a handful in the entire realm who could have happily killed their own king. But this mattered little, because Cromwell, now the most powerful man in England, was among them.

Cromwell’s change of mind was only a recent development.

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