Who Do the English Think They Are? by Derek J. Taylor

Author:Derek J. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750984881
Publisher: The History Press

Statue of Oliver Cromwell, erected outside the Palace of Westminster in 1899. The Victorians saw him as a hero of English democracy fighting against an autocratic monarch. Historians today point out that he suppressed Parliament so he himself could be an autocratic ruler. (Beata May)

The Protectorate was Cromwell, and Cromwell, with his uncompromising ethics, was the Protectorate. When he died suddenly in 1658, his son became a feeble replacement. Within two years, the monarchy was restored.

On the 25 May 1660, an English ship, formerly the Naseby, renamed the Royal Charles, brought a new king, Charles II, from exile. On board was the diarist Samuel Pepys, who observed, as they approached Dover, that the king had with him his pet dog, which ‘shit in the boat and made us laugh and me think that a king and all that belong to him are but just as others are’. And as Charles II set foot on English soil, ‘the shouting and joy expressed by all’, Pepys added, was ‘past imagination.’

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The suffering that English people had endured changed their outlook forever. War had split the nation, killed hundreds of thousands and left many more bereaved and without a breadwinner. Eleven years of a republican dictatorship had imposed the most uncompromising religious zealotry and had snuffed out any semblance of democratically agreed law or appropriate punishment. In welcoming the demise of both evils, Pepys spoke for the majority in the country.

The reaction to these oppressive events reached a peaceful, constitutional climax in 1689. It was a very English coup. The Dutch prince William of Orange had landed on the shore of Devon with his wife Mary. Parliament offered them the throne, to replace the Catholic James II. The old king fled, and William was crowned. It had all been achieved without a shot being fired. It became known as the Glorious – or sometimes the Bloodless – Revolution.

Two parties had by now emerged in Parliament: the Whigs, moderate descendants of the Civil War Parliamentarians, and the Tories, with a distant line back to the old Royalists. The two sides did something that would have been unthinkable in Cromwell’s day: they agreed. They declared England a Protestant country and so brought to an end 130 years of religious conflict. But they also did something even more powerful, something that was the foundation of the way we are governed today. They defined for the first time two great, interlocking principles: Monarchs would no longer have absolute power. And Parliament was now supreme.

From the Whigs we get the principle, founded in Magna Carta, that those who rule us must obey the law like the rest of us. From the Tories comes the principle that disagreeing with the government does not give us the right to take up arms in rebellion. We could argue that these two ideas are incompatible. But the English have made them work together for the past 325 years.

The result of the Glorious Revolution was a very English way of thinking and acting, not only in politics, but in much of everyday life in England, even today.

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