Category Archives: modernity

How England became the mother of modern politics

Robert Henderson

I was tempted to entitle this essay “England – the mother of modern democracy”, for the political structures of any state which calls itself democratic today owe their general shape to the English example. In addition, many modern dictatorships have considered it expedient to maintain the form of representative democracy without the content.

But democracy is a slippery word and what we call by that name is very far removed from what the Greeks knew as democracy. The Greeks would probably have described our system as oligarchy – rule by the few. Many modern academics would agree, for they tend to describe representative government as elective oligarchy, a system by which the electorate is permitted to select between competing parts of the political elite every few years, but which has little other direct say in how they are governed.

If democracy today is a debatable concept, the very widespread modern institution of elected representative government is an objective fact. It is the foundations and evolution of this institution that I shall examine here to the point at which modern “democratic” politics emerged during the English Civil Wars of the 1640s.

Elected representative government is an institution of the first importance, for it is a truism that the more power is shared the less abusive the holders of the power will be. Imperfect as it may often be as a reflector of the will and interests of the masses, representative government is still by far the most efficient means of controlling the naturally abusive tendencies of elites and of advancing the interests of the ordinary man or woman, by imposing limits on what those with power may do, either through legal restraints in the form of constitutional law which is superior to that of the legislature, or through fear of losing office in an election. Indeed, no other system of government other than elected representative government manages that even in principle, for no other political arrangements place meaningful restraints on an elite. Whether democratic or not in the Greek sense, representative government is undoubtedly the only reliable and non-violent means by which the democratic will may gain at least some purchase on the behaviour of an elite.

Yet however much utility it has an organising political idea, the fact that we have representative government today is something of a fluke, certainly a very long shot, for had it not developed in England we should probably not have it all. In the non-European world nothing of its nature ever developed before the Western model was imported. Elsewhere in Europe the many nascent parliaments of the later Middle Ages either never went beyond its embryonic form or were crushed by autocratic rulers. In England we have had continuous parliamentary development for the better part of eight centuries.

Why did the English alone developed such a political system? It was a mixture of such traits and circumstances as the democratic spirit, egalitarianism, individualism and royal weakness. But before examining the detail of those traits, consider first the utterly abnormal political success of the English.

The political success of the English

The first genius of the Anglo-Saxon may be reasonably said to be political. Above all peoples they have learned best to live without communal violence and tyranny. Set against any other country the political success of the English throughout history is simply astonishing. Compare England’s political history with that of any other country of any size and it is a miracle of restraint. No English government has been altered by unconstitutional means since 1688. No Englishman has killed an English politician for domestic English political reasons since the assassination of Spencer Percival in 1811, and that was an assassination born of a personal grudge, probably aggravated by mental illness, rather than political principle. (The assassin, John Bellingham, believed he had been unreasonably deserted by the British Government when imprisoned in Russia and ruined by the economic circumstances of the war with Napoleon. He killed Percival after unsuccessfully attempting for a long time to get financial redress from the British Government).

Compare that with the experience of the other major states of the world. In the twentieth century Germany fell prey to Nazism, Italy to Fascism, Russia to Communism. France, is on its fifth republic in a couple of centuries. The United States fought a dreadful civil war in the 1860s and assassinated a president as recently as 1963. China remains the cruel tyranny as it has always been and India, which advertises itself as the “largest democracy in the world”, is home to regular outbreaks of serious ethnic violence, not least during elections which are palpably fraudulent in many parts of the country, especially the rural areas.

Why was England so different?

Why is England so different? Perhaps the immediate answer lies in the fact that she has been wonderfully adept in dealing with the central problem of human life – how to live together peaceably. A Canadian academic, Elliott Leyton, has made a study of English murder through the centuries in his book Men of Blood. Leyton finds that the rate of English (as opposed to British murder) is phenomenally low for a country of her size and industrial development, both now and for centuries past. This strikes Elliott as so singular that he said in a recent interview “The English have an antipathy to murder which borders on eccentricity; it is one of the great cultural oddities of the modern age.” (Sunday Telegraph 4 12 1994).

This restraint extends to warfare and social disorder. That is not to say England has been without violence, but rather that at any point in her history the level of violence was substantially lower than in any other comparable society. For example, the English Civil War in the 17th Century was, apart from the odd inhumane blemish, startlingly free of the gross violence common on the continent of the time during the 30 Years War, where the sacking and pillage of towns and cities was the norm. A particularly notable thing, for civil wars are notorious for their brutality.

The way that England responded to the Reformation is instructive. She did not suffer the savage wars of religion which traumatised the continent and brought human calamities such as the St Bartholomew Day’s Massacre in France in 1572, when thousands of French Protestants were massacred at the instigation of the French king. It was not that the English did not care deeply about their religion, rather that they have been, when left to their own devices, generally loth to fight their fellow countrymen over anything. English civil wars have always been essentially political affairs in which the ordinary person has little say, for the struggles were either dynastic or a clash between Parliamentary ambition and the monarch.

Even the persecution of the Lollards in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the persecution of Protestants under Mary I had a highly political aspect. The former was a vastly disturbing challenge to the established social order with men being told, in so many words, that they could find their own way to salvation and the latter an attempt to re-establish not merely the Catholic order in England, which had been overturned since the time of Henry VIII’s breach with Rome, but also what amounted to a new royal dynasty with Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain.

Even the prohibitions on Catholics and non-Conformists after the Reformation had a fundamental political basis to them, namely, they were predicated on the question of whether such people be trusted to give their first loyalty to the crown.

The treatment of foreigners

Compared with other peoples, the English have been noticeably restrained in their treatment of other peoples residing within England. A few massacres of Jews occurred before their expulsion from England in 1290, but from that time there has not been great slaughter of a minority living within England. Since 1290 there have been occasional outbreaks of anti-foreigner violence. During the Peasants’ Revolt London-based Flemings were murdered. In later times an anti-Spanish “No Popery” mob was frequently got up in London and the influx of Jews and Huguenots in the 17th and 18th centuries caused riots, one so serious in 1753 that it caused the repeal of a law naturalising Jews and Huguenots. But these riots did not result in great numbers of dead, let alone in systematic genocidal persecutions of any particular group. Most notably, the English fonts of authority, whether the crown, church or parliament, have not incited let alone ordered the persecution of a particular racial or ethnic group since the expulsion of the Jews. They have persecuted Christian groups, but that was a matter of religion not ethnicity, the Christians persecuted being English in the main. The only discrimination the English elite have formally sanctioned against an ethnic group for more than half a millennium was the inclusion of Jews within the general prohibitions passed in the half century or so after the Restoration in 1660 which banned those who were not members of the Church of England from holding a crown appointment such as an MP or election to public offices such as that of MP.

Peaceableness and constitutional development Is this comparative lack of violence a consequence of England’s political arrangements, or are the political arrangements the consequence of the comparative lack of violence in the English character? Probably the answer is that one fed the other. But there must have been an initial exceptional tendency towards reasonableness which started the long climb towards settling disputes without violence.

Perhaps the fundamental answer to English peaceableness lies in the fact that the English enjoyed a level of racial cultural homogeneity from very early on. Long before the English kingdom existed Bede wrote of the English as a single people. The English have never killed one another in any great quantity simply because one part of the population thought another part was in some way not English. That is the best possible starting point for the establishment of a coherent community.

The favoured liberal view of England is that it is the mongrel nation par excellence. In fact, this is the exact opposite of the truth. The general facts of immigration into England are these. The English and England were of course created by the immigration of Germanic peoples. The British monk, Gildas, writing in the sixth century, attributed the bulk of the Saxon settlement to the practice of British leaders employing Saxons to protect the Britons from Barbarian attacks after Rome withdrew around 410 A.D. The English monk Bede (who was born in A.D. 673) attributed the origins of the English to the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who came to England in the century following the withdrawal of the Romans at the request of British war leaders.

Archaeological evidence suggests that substantial Germanic settlement in England had a longer history and dated from the Roman centuries, perhaps from as early as the third century. What is certain is that in her formative centuries following the exit of Rome, the various invaders and settlers were drawn from peoples with much in common. They were the same physical type, there was a considerable similarity of general culture, their languages flowed from a common linguistic well.

When the Norsemen came they too brought a Teutonic mentality and origin. Even the Normans were Vikings at one remove who, if frenchified, were not physically different from the English nor one imagines utterly without vestiges of the Norse mentality. Moreover, the number of Normans who settled in England immediately after the Conquest was small, perhaps as few as 5000.

After the Conquest, the only significant immigration into England for many centuries were the Jews. They were expelled from England in 1290. There was then no large scale and sudden immigration from outside the British Isles until the flight of the Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which granted limited toleration to the Huguenots within France) in 1684 by Louis X1V.

There was other immigration in the period 1066-1650, but it was small and highly selective. Craftsmen of talent were encouraged particularly in the Tudor period. Italian families with trading and banking expertise (such as it was in those days) appeared after the expulsion of the Jews. Foreign merchants were permitted, but for much of the period on sufferance and subject to restrictions such as forced residence within specially designated foreign quarters.

The upshot of all this is that for six centuries after the Conquest England was an unusually homogeneous country, both racially and culturally. This is reflected in the absence since the Norman Conquest of any serious regional separatist movement within the heart of English territory.

There has been meaningful resistance at the periphery – Cornwall, the Welsh marches and the far north, but even that has been effectively dead since the sixteenth century. Englishmen have fought but not to create separate nations.

The Free-Born Englishman

It may have taken until 1928 for full adult suffrage of English men and women to arrive, but the essential sentiments which feed the idea of democracy – that human beings are morally equal and enjoy autonomy as individuals and a natural resentment of privilege and inequality – are ancient in England.

If there is one outstanding trait in English political history it is probably the desire for personal freedom. This might seem odd to the modern Englishman who sees the large majority of his country men and women consistently welcoming the idea of the most intrusive forms of ID cards and who stand by dumbly as many of the age-old and ineffably hard-won rights which protect the individual, such as the abridgement of jury trial and the right to silence, being swept away by modern governments. But it was not always so and that “always so” was not so long ago. The great Austrian political and economic thinker Friedrich Hayek put it forcefully during the Second World War:

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that only in English society, and those societies deriving from it, is the notion of individual liberty built into the social fabric. The English have been free not primarily because of legal rights, but because it is their evolved social nature. They accept liberty because it seems natural to them. (The road to Serfdom – chapter Material conditions and ideal ends)

In short, individual liberty has been and is part of being English and part of England. It would be going too far to claim that the English masses have ever had any highly developed sense of liberal with a small ‘l’ sentiments, but throughout English history there has been both a widespread resentment of interference, either public or private, in the private life of English men and women and an acute awareness that privilege was more often than not unearned and frequently cruelly used to oppress the poor.

Most importantly, over the centuries the elite gradually adopted the ideal of personal freedom into their ideology. Here is the elder Pitt speaking on the notion that the idea that an Englishman’s home:

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail – its roof may shake – the wind may blow though it – the storm may enter – the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter! – All his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement! (Quoted in Lord Brougham’s Statesmen in the time of George III)

The desire for liberty and a freeman’s due is seen in the constant demand by mediaeval towns for charters which would free them from aspects of royal control, most particularly taxation. In some respects it helped fuel the barons’ demand for Magna Carta. It drove the Peasant’s Revolt. It provided the emotional engine for the decline of serfdom once circumstances were propitious after the Black Death.

The Levellers made it their ideological centrepiece in the 1640s, their leader, John Lilburne, revelling in the name of “Freeborn John”. “Wilkes and Liberty” was the mob’s popular cry in that most aristocratic of centuries, the eighteenth. The Chartists held tight to the ideal in the nineteenth.

Equality and privilege

Intertwined with the desire for personal freedom was a strain of those seeking material equality and opportunity. It also had its expression in the organisation of society, most notably in the widespread use of common fields which were a natural source of egalitarian feeling. These were a form of agricultural organisation whereby a group of farmers worked strips on a large common plot of land, with the strips being rotated regularly to ensure that no one had the best land permanently.

Prime examples of the egalitarian mentality are found in the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 (which I shall deal with shortly in some detail), the sixteenth century has Thomas More’s Utopia, while the Digger Gerrard Winstanley writing in the 17th century spoke of “The cheat of men buying and selling” (The Law of Freedom 1652).

We also have the literary evidence. The English who people the pages of Langland and Chaucer show a mediaeval England where commoners would not as a matter of course willingly touch their forelock or allow their lives to be circumscribed by those with social status. Later, Shakespeare’s lowlifes and the characters in Ben Johnson’s Bartholomew Fair often show a rumbustious lack of deference for their social betters. It is improbable in the extreme that the worlds depicted by these authors would not have reflected the societies in which they lived. Traits were exaggerated for dramatic effect doubtless, but the cultural story they told was fundamentally rooted in the England in which they wrote.

Langland’s Piers Ploughman is especially interesting because the work begins with a catalogue of the people who inhabited the world he knew (Prologue – The plain full of people). Here are the worldly and the devout, the high and the low. The cleric and the noble jostle with minstrels, tramps, beggars, merchants, tradesmen, and the honest ploughman who tills “the soil for the common good”.

Langland’s clerics are often corrupt, the nobles capricious, the merchants avaricious, the workmen shoddy and cheating in their work, the beggars dishonest and the minstrels bawdy, but they are balanced by honest men in their various callings. In other words, it is a world not so different in terms of human personality to that we inhabit.

The mediaeval elite ideology

There was also in the mediaeval world the idea that although men were unequal in material wealth or social status, nonetheless society was a co-operative enterprise, that all had a place and that all were entitled to that place, which was what God had called them to. Not egalitarianism but a recognition that men whatever their status had a right to life. The ideal was of course frequently breached but it nonetheless had a basis in both the attitude of the elite, especially in the Church, and in the organisation of society.

The ideas that men should just be left to buy and sell as they chose or that economic activity should be the lodestone of a man’s life was admirable or moral, were alien concepts. Usury was officially banned for many centuries and the example of the poverty of the early Christians was given fresh focus by the Friars of SS Francis and Dominic. More mundanely, there was also the concept of the just price, the price of staple foods such as bread, being fixed by magistrates. As a matter of social course it was accepted that the rich and great, and especially the Church, had moral and material obligations to the less fortunate. Noblesse oblige was not an empty letter.

Turning men out of their homes and off the land for profit crashed through this mediaeval moral standard. That was what the grazing of sheep in particular accomplished, for it denuded the countryside of the need for agricultural workers. By the early years of the 16th century the problem

of landless men was becoming acute.

Some members of the elite rebelled against the cruelty of leaving thousands of men and their families without a means to live honestly and the alarming disruption of the mediaeval social order. Thomas More addressed the question most famously in his satire Utopia (1516). More complained

that it was now thought moral to “buy abroad very cheap and sell again exceeding dear”. He wrote of the mania for sheep as that which “consume, destroy and devour whole fields, houses and cities.” More also asked of those who turned men and women off the land to feed sheep “What other thing do you do than make thieves and punish them?” and castigated the rich for a “strange and proud new fangleness in their apparel and too much prodigal riot and sumptuous fare at their table” while the poor starved or turned to crime or begging.

The Peasants’ Revolt

Nothing demonstrates the Englishman’s lack of deference and desire to be his own man better than the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. General resentment of privilege and particular hostility to the imposition of a tax (the Poll Tax) considered to be both unreasonable and illegitimate, was given unambiguous voice. For a brief period the fog of obscurity which ordinarily covers the masses in the mediaeval world clears. A remarkable scene meets the eye for we find not a cowed and servile people but a robust cast of rebels who far from showing respect for their betters display a mixture of contempt and hatred for everyone in authority bar the boy-king Richard II.

Perhaps most surprising to the modern reader is the extreme social radicalism of their demands which might, without too much exaggeration, be described as a demand for a classless society. The Revolt may have had its origins in the hated Poll Tax but it soon developed into a series of general political demands. One of the revolt’s leaders, the hedge-priest John Ball, reputedly preached “Things cannot go right in England and never will until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk but we are all one and the same”, and the anonymous and revolutionary couplet “When Adam delved and Eve span/who was then the gentleman?” was in men’s mouths.

The mediaeval chronicler Jean Froissart has Ball preaching: Are we not descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve? And what can they sow or what reason can they give why they should be more masters than ourselves? They are clothed in velvet and rich stuffs ornamented in ermine and other furs while we are forced to wear poor clothing. They have wines and fine bread while we have only rye and refuse of straw and when we drink it must be water. They have handsome manors…while we must have the wind and rain in our labours in the field and it is by our labours that they…support their pomp. We are called slaves and if we do perform our services we are beaten and we have no sovereign to whom we can complain…let us go to the King and remonstrate with him; he is young and from him we may obtain a favourable answer, and if not we must seek to amend our conditions ourselves. (Simon Schama A History of Britain p 248)

Whether or not these words bore any resemblance to Ball’s actual words, whether or not they were black propaganda (on behalf of the elite) by Froissart to show the dangers society faced from the Revolt, we may note that the sentiments are compatible with the demands made by the rebels in 1381.

When the Kentish men led by Wat Tyler, an Essex man, met the 14-year-old king Richard at Mile End on 14 June, they demanded an end to serfdom and a flat rent of 4 pence an acre. The king granted the plea. When the king met the rebels a second time Tyler shook the king’s hand and called him “brother”. Tyler demanded a new Magna Carta for the common people which would have ended serfdom, pardoned all outlaws, liquidated all church property and declared that all men below the king were equal, in effect abolishing the peerage and gentry. Richard, much to the rebels’ surprise, accepted the demands, although cunningly qualifying the acceptance “saving only the regality of the crown”. A few minutes later Tyler was mortally wounded, supposedly after he had attempted to attack a young esquire in the royal party who had called him a thief. His death signalled the beginning of the end of the revolt for without Tyler the Revolt lost direction and those who remained willing to resist were pacified in the next few weeks.

During the Revolt the rebels did not run riot, but acted in a controlled manner. There was no general riot but rather the , attacking the property of tax collectors, other important royal servants and any property belonging to the king’s uncle, John of Gaunt. Any identifiable Exchequer document was ripe for destruction.

The revolt began in Essex when the commissioners attempting to collect the Poll Tax were surrounded by a hostile crowd on 30 May 1381. Physical threats were made against one of the commissioners, and the commissioners retreated from the immediate task of attempting to collect the tax. This brought in the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas to restore order. He was captured by an even larger crowd and made to swear on oath that no further attempt would be made to collect the tax the area. The names of informers who had provided names to the commissioners was discovered and the culprits beheaded.

The spirit of rebellion soon spread. By 2 June a crowd in the village of Bocking had sworn that they would “have no law in England except only as they themselves moved to be ordained.” The rebellion had infected Kent by the end of the first week in June. By the time Wat Tyler, an Essex man by birth, had been elected to lead the Kentish men the demand was for the heads of the king’s uncle John of Gaunt, the Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury and the Treasurer Sir Robert Hales. After Tyler’s first meeting with Richard, Sudbury and Hales were captured and beheaded by the rebels. No deference or want of ambition there.

The extent to which the Revolt frightened the crown and nobility can be seen in the violence of Richard’s words when he addressed another group of rebels at Walthamstow on 22 June, by which time the danger was felt to have largely passed: You wretches, detestable on land and sea ; you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues. Rustics you were and rustics you are still: you will remain in bondage not as before but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you , and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity . How ever, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful. Choose now which you want to follow . (Simon Schama A History of Britain p 254 )

Anti clericism

There were two great sources of general authority in mediaeval England. The Crown was one, the other was the Church. Yet, before the Reformation the English were renowned throughout Europe for their anticlericism – a good example of this attitude was the response to Sudbury’s warning to Wat Tyler’s rebels that England would be put under an interdict by the Pope if he was harmed. This was met by hearty laughter followed by the grisly dispatch of the unfortunate cleric soon afterwards, whose head to did not part from his shoulders until a goodly number of blows had been struck.

The contempt in which many of the servants of the Church were held can be seen in both John Wycliffe’s complaints against clerical abuse in the latter half of the 14th century and in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and William Langland’s Piers Plowman, both written in the same century in which the Peasants’ Revolt took place. Both works are full of jibes at fat illiterate priests and cheating pardoners who peddled absolution from sins with their indulgences sold for money.

Wycliffe’s doctrine contained the fundamental ideas which were later realised internationally in the Reformation. He questioned the reality of transubstantiation (the Catholic belief that the bread and wine at Communion turn literally into the body and blood of Christ), he attacked the authority of the pope, he railed against the abuses of simony and indulgences. He advocated a bible in English and either he or his followers, the Lollards, produced a complete translation before the end of the fourteenth century.

Implicit within Wycliffe’s thought was the democratic spirit, because it is a short intellectual step from the belief that each man could be his own mediator with God to the idea that he should have a say in his earthly life.

The Black Death

The Peasant’s Revolt was set in the context of the dramatic social changes wrought by the plague. When the Black Death came to England in 1349 it was a source of both immediate misery and future opportunity for those who survived. Estimates of the numbers who died range from a quarter to a half of the population, but whatever the true proportion it had the most dramatic effect on the organisation of society. The immediate result was a widespread transfer of property and consolidation of wealth as the lucky survivors inherited. This consolidation aided people a long way down the social scale, for a man inheriting no more than a couple of oxen and a plough was considerably better off than a man with none.

Most importantly, the country went from being one with an oversupply of labour – England prior to the Black Death was probably as well populated as it was in any time before 1700 – to a country where labour was scarce. Landowners were suddenly faced with a new economic world. They had either lost many of their workers through death or were faced with serfs who were no longer obedient and frequently absconded, often lured to work as free men by other landowners, or drawn to the anonymity of the towns. Landowners had to employ free men who demanded what were considered extortionate wages. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 was a forlorn attempt to keep things as they had been before the Black Death by restricting wages but, like all attempts to buck fundamental economic forces, it failed.

It is probably not overly sanguine to see English society in the late medieval period after the Black Death as a golden age for the common man. Not only was labour scarce and land plentiful, but the great enclosure movement was still in the future and a very large proportion of the population were, to a large extent, their own masters as they worked their land. Even where labour services were still performed, they were not crushing, being commonly forty days work in a year. Moreover, agricultural work is seasonal, especially the arable, and for substantial parts of the year there is relatively little to do on a farm.

Beyond agriculture, many people had a large degree of control over their daily lives. This was the time before industrialisation, before the wage-slave and the factory. Skilled craftsmen were often their own masters, and even those who worked for a master will have organised their own time because they worked from their homes. Indeed, most English men and women today almost certainly have far less control of their time than the average mediaeval inhabitant of England.

The limits of state power

The hand of the state was also light by modern standards, especially so during the century long struggle of the houses of Lancaster and York and partly because mediaeval kingship was of necessity very limited in what it could do administratively because of a lack of funds, the power of the peerage, primitive technology, poor communications, administrative naivety and a radically different view of what government and society should be – apart from looking after his own privileges and estates, kings were expected to defend the land, put down rebellions, provide legal redress through the royal courts, maintain the position of the church and lead in war against other rulers. And that was about it.

But there was also a further check on the monarch. Perhaps the most important practical adjunct of this desire for freedom, has been that the English long hated and mistrusted the idea of a standing army as the creature of tyrants. The English were eventually content to have the strongest navy in the world because it could not be used against them, but a substantial army was not accepted as reasonable until the experiences of the Great War accustomed men to the idea. Soldiers were held in contempt before then. “Gone for a soldier” was little better than “taken for a thief”. The needs of Empire produced more ambivalence into the English view of soldiers as Kipling’s poem “Tommy” shows: “Oh, it’s Tommy this an’ Tommy that, and chuck him out the brute! But it’s ‘Saviour of ‘is country’ when the guns begin to shoot.” But the old resentment, fear and contempt remained until the stark democracy of experience in the trenches during the Great War tempered the English mind to tolerance of the soldier.

Because of a lack of a large standing army, English kings were ever been dependent on the will of others, be it their nobles, parliament or the gentry. Even the most practically tyrannical of English kings, Henry VIII, was most careful to use Parliament to sanction his acts.

The consequences of this weakness was that power was localised. Incredible as it may see today, the practical governance of day-to-day life in England until well into the nineteenth century lay largely in the hands of private gentlemen occupying the post of JP, whose powers were much greater than they are today. Indeed, the central state impinged very little on the ordinary Englishman before 1914. George Bowling, the hero of George Orwell’s “Coming up for air” reflecting on how the arms of the state touched an honest citizen before the Great War could think only of the registration of births, deaths and marriages and the General Post Office.

By keeping the king dependent upon the will of others, the English ensured that a despot such as Louis X1V could not arise in England and in so doing underwrote their general liberties. Without that, it is improbable that parliamentary government (as opposed to a parliament) would have arisen. England would almost certainly have been involved in many debilitating wars for the aggrandisement of the king. In those circumstances it is unlikely that England as a modern state would have arisen.

The mediaeval good times end

But the comparatively good times for the poor of the post-Black Death world did not last forever. The enclosure movement began in earnest in the fifteenth century. Men were driven off the land and their place taken by graziers of sheep. The Tudors put an end to serious dynastic strife and expanded the power of the state. Gradually the population recovered. Trade grew and towns thrived, but it was also, by mediaeval standards, a time of high inflation caused by a mixture of a debased currency under Henry VIII, the economic consequences of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, population growth and the influx of gold and silver from the recently discovered New World.

The way to political success

Whatever its cause, England’s political development is unparalleled. If political success lies in the general tenor of English society, the institutions through which it was achieved were cultivated from the thirteenth century The start of the long climb towards representative government and the neutering of monarchy may reasonably be set in the reign of John. In 1215 he was forced by many of his barons to sign a charter which granted rights to all the free men of the kingdom. This charter, the Magna Carta, was of immense significance because it formally restricted the power of the king in an unprecedented way. The pope of the day thought it such an abomination he granted John absolution for its repudiation. Perhaps for the first time since the end of the classical world, a king had been forced to acknowledge unequivocally that there could be legal limits to his power.

Long regarded as a revolutionary document by historians, the fashion amongst them in recent times has been to treat the charter as little more than as an attempt to preserve and enhance the position of the barons or to restate existing English law and custom. Of course it did that but it did much more. Had it done nothing beyond circumscribing the power of the king it would have been revolutionary, but it went far beyond that by explicitly extending rights that we consider fundamental to a free society to all free men. Perhaps its two most famous clauses show its importance in the development of the future sharing of political power:

Clause 39 No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled or deprived of his standing in any other way , nor will we proceed with force against him or send others to do so, except by judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

Clause 40 To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.

Until the security of a man and his property are secured, there can be no sustained spreading of power, for if a king may imprison and dispossess at will no man is safe. All merely live at the will of the monarch. By providing both, Magna Carta created the necessary legal and ideological infrastructure for the political development which culminated in parliamentary government.

Perhaps the most intriguing clause of Magna Carta was number 61, which gave a committee of 25 Barons legal authority and practical power over the king. It is long clause but worth quoting in full:

Clause 61. Since, moreover, for God and the amendment of our kingdom and for the better allaying of the discord that has arisen between us and our barons we have granted all these things aforesaid, wishing them to enjoy the use of them unimpaired and unshaken for ever, we give and grant them the underwritten security, namely, that the barons shall choose any twenty-five barons of the kingdom they wish, who must with all their might observe, hold and cause to be observed, the peace and liberties which we have granted and confirmed to them by this present charter of ours, so that if we, or our justiciar, or our bailiffs or any one of our servants offend in any way against any one or transgress any of the articles of the peace or the security and the offence be notified to four of the aforesaid twenty-five barons, those four barons shall come to us, or to our justiciar if we are out of the kingdom, and, laying the transgression before us, shall petition us to have that transgression corrected without delay. And if we do not correct the transgression, or if we are out of the kingdom, if our justiciar does not correct it, within forty days, reckoning from the time it was brought to our notice or to that of our justiciar if we were out of the kingdom, the aforesaid four barons shall refer that case to the rest of the twenty-five barons and those twenty-five barons together with the Community of the whole land shall distrain and distress us in every way they can, namely, by seizing castles, lands, possessions, and in such other ways as they can, saving our person and the persons of our queen and our children, until, in their opinion, amends have been made; and when amends have been made, they shall obey us as they did before. And let anyone in the country who wishes to do so take an oath to obey the orders of the said twenty-five barons for the execution of all the aforesaid matters, and with them to distress us as much as he can, and we publicly and freely give anyone leave to take the oath who wishes to take it and we will never prohibit anyone from taking it. Indeed, all those in the land who are unwilling of themselves and of their own accord to take an oath to the twenty-five barons to help them to distrain and distress us, we will make them take the oath as aforesaid at our command. And if any of the twenty-five barons dies or leaves the country or is in any other way prevented from carrying out the things aforesaid, the remainder of the aforesaid twenty-five barons shall choose as they think fit another one in his place, and he shall take the oath like the rest. In all matters the execution of which is committed to these twenty-five barons, if it should happen that these twenty-five are present yet disagree among themselves about anything, or if some of those summoned will not or cannot be present, that shall be held as fixed and established which the majority of those present ordained or commanded, exactly as if all the twenty-five had consented to it; and the said twenty-five shall swear that they will faithfully observe all the things aforesaid and will do all they can to get them observed. And we will procure nothing from anyone, either personally or through any one else, whereby any of these concessions and liberties might be revoked or diminished; and if any such thing be procured let it be void and null, and we will never use it either personally or through another, And we have fully remitted and pardoned to everyone all the ill-will, anger and rancour that have arisen between us and our men, clergy and laity, from the time of the quarrel. Furthermore, we have fully remitted to all, clergy and laity, and as far as pertains to us have completely forgiven all trespasses occasioned by the same quarrel between Easter in the sixteenth year of our reign and the restoration of peace. And, besides, we have caused to be made for them letten testimonial patent of the lord Stephen archbishop of Canterbury, the lord Henry archbishop of Dublin and of the aforementioned bishops.

The extreme nature of the concessions the king made – he gave permission for his subjects to act with force to remedy any Royal failure to observe the charter – is a graphic example of the inherent weakness of the mediaeval monarch. King he might be, but not a tyrant because he did not have the resources to dominate utterly.

This committee was never actually formed, but the clause has great interest. Once such a council of nobles to restrict the behaviour of the king is accepted as reasonable and possible, it is not such a great leap to the idea of a larger assembly which might do the same. That idea was realised before the century was out in a Parliament.

Magna Carta is not as is commonly said the first formal restriction on the powers of a monarch. The coronation oaths of mediaeval kings regularly contained promises to observe the laws and customary freedoms of England, but there was no means of enforcing the oaths other than rebellion. There was even a previous occasion when Ethelred was forced to agree to formal restrictions on his powers in 1014, but that had no practical effect because of his death and the Danish conquest in 1016.

Magna Carta unlike coronation oaths was both specific enough to usefully form the basis of law and in 1215 England did not fall under foreign rule. Instead, in modified form, it quickly became part of the statute books which developed in the thirteenth century. More importantly it acquired a mythological quality which lasts to this day. Every important English rebellion and political movement from 1215 until the Chartists in the 1840s has cited Magna Carta in their defence and derived their programme from it. The Levellers in the 1640s made constantly cited it. It was a benchmark which allowed the powers of the king to be progressively whittled away. Never again could an English king convincingly claim that such restrictions on the prerogative were unthinkable or unprecedented.

Parliament

The distinction of the English parliament is not that it is the oldest such assembly in the world (although it is one of the oldest), nor that it was unusual at its inception for parliaments were widespread in mediaeval Europe. The English parliament’s distinction lies in its truly national nature – it was a national not federal assembly – its longevity and the nature of its development. No other parliament in a country of any size was meaningfully maintained by regular meeting through seven or eight centuries, its only competitors for endurance being the tiny Icelandic assembly and the federal arrangements of the Swiss. Most importantly, before England created such an institution to act as a model, no other Parliament in the world developed into an fully fledged executive as well as a legislature. The English parliament made a very gradual progression to the place we know today. It began as an advising and petitioning body in the 13th century and before the end of the 14th century had come to exercise considerable power over any taxation which was considered over and above the king’s normal and rightful dues, such as the excise. Gradually, this power transmuted into what was effectively a veto over most taxation. Parliament also added the power to propose and pass laws subject to their acceptance by the monarch. These developments meant that executive power gradually drained from the King. From this came cabinet government as the monarch was more and more forced to take the advice of his ministers and by the end of the 18th century the struggle between Crown and Parliament for supremacy had been emphatically decided.

As the Parliament gained power, the Lords gradually diminished in importance and the Commons became by the 19th century, if not before, the dominant House. The final act in the play was a century long extension of the franchise culminating in a government dominated by an assembly elected under full adult suffrage from 1928 onwards.

A corrupted Parliament

By 1600 Parliament had become important enough to the governing of the country for Guy Fawkes and his fellow plotters to think it necessary to blow up Parliament rather than simply killing the king and his ministers. In any other major European country of the time, the idea of destroying Parliamentary representatives rather than just the monarch and his more powerful friends would have seemed rather odd, either because a parliament did not exist or was considered of little account because European monarchs had been generally very successful in abolishing or curtailing the powers of mediaeval assemblies and preventing their political development.

But Parliament, although growing in power and ambition, was suffering the ills of any ancient institution. There were accretions of privilege and it had failed to keep pace with the changing times. In 1600 it neither represented the country as it was nor satisfied the growing wish of its members, especially the elected ones, to have a greater say in the management of England. At the heart of the dissatisfaction lay the unsatisfactory nature of the Commons’ franchise. I shall examine this question in some detail because it will demonstrate the historical political backdrop against which the democratic radicals of the 1640s acted.

The question of the franchise

Serious disquiet with the Commons’ electoral qualifications, provisions and practices began in Elizabeth’s reign and reached its highest pitch, prior to the 1640s, during the years 1621 to 1623. The discontent was provoked primarily by the situation in the boroughs rather than the counties, Since 1430, the county electorate had been restricted to the forty shilling freeholder, which qualification had become almost sacrosanct by the end of the sixteenth century – only one proposal before the 1640s (in 1621) was made to raise or lower it. Tudor inflation had greatly lowered the barrier it represented (40 shillings in 1600 was worth perhaps 15 shillings at 1430 values) and it is reasonable to suppose this considerably increased the rural electorate. Also, there is evidence to suggest that the qualification was not always enforced and some county electorates may have had a very broad manhood franchise indeed prior to 1640.

Borough franchises were anything but uniform. In some the whole ‘commonalty’ (all householders) or even all ‘potwallers’ (men with their own hearths) voted. In others the vote was restricted to all taxpayers (‘scot and lot’), freemen of the town, or those in possession of burgage property. In extreme cases the vote might be restricted to the ruling corporation. Such discrepancies of representation were aggravated by a distribution of borough seats which took insufficient account of the demographic changes of the past two centuries, during which time England’s population increased very substantially, especially during the 16th century, perhaps by as much as a third. These facts prepared a well mulched political soil for agitation for more equal borough representation, both in terms of the breadth of the franchise and in the number of seats.

Tudor monarchs, not unnaturally, did not favour larger electorates. The existence of ‘rotten boroughs’ was a source of patronage and, if the monarch could control the oligarchies who returned the MP, a means of reducing opposition to the Crown. As there was a significant number of such boroughs, this was no small advantage to the monarch. The attitude of Parliament to the franchise was mixed. The Lords had a similar interest to the Crown in distrusting broad franchises. The peers often effectively controlled seats in the Commons. They also had a natural inclination to deny the ‘commonality’ any voice in the affairs of the kingdom. Conversely, it was obviously in the Commons’ interest to increase electorates, where such increases reduced the Monarch’s’ and the Lord’s opportunities for patronage.

There is particular evidence that the Puritans favoured larger electorates, at least in so far as it suited their own purposes. At Warwick in 1586 Job Throckmorton was elected after he threatened to invoke the right of the ‘commonality to vote. In 1587 John Field remarked to colleague ‘seeing we cannot compass these things by suit or dispute, it is the multitude and people that must bring the discipline to pass which we desire.’ (J.H, Plumb. The Growth of the electorate 1600-1715). As Puritans displaced many court nominees and the creatures of aristocrats, this is significant in view of the attitude of the Commons towards electoral qualifications between 1621 and 1628.

By 1621, the Commons had gained the right to decide disputed elections and to revive lapsed borough seats and even make new creations, The tendency until 1628 was to decide in favour of wider franchise and to allow all the ‘commonality’ to vote. At Bletchingly (1624) and Lewes (1628) ‘all the inhabitants ,’ were to be electors’, and at Cirencester (1624) all ‘resients:’.

In the case of Pontefract in 1624 a general principle was formulated: ‘There being no certain custom nor prescription, who should be the electors and who not, we must have recourse to common right which, to this purpose was held to be, that more than the freeholders only ought to have voices in the election, namely all men, inhabitants, householders resient within the borough.’ (J.H, Plunb. The Growth of the electorate 1600-1715).

Further, in the case of Boston (1628) it was asserted that the election of burgesses belonged by common right to the commoners and only prescription or ‘a constant usage beyond all memory’ could rob them of this. (K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise p.62).

It is true that when the Commons revived or created borough seats, they concentrated, as the Tudors had done, on small towns to promote their own advantage. But, even so, they granted ‘scot and lot’ franchises in every case (except Weobley) which meant that even small towns such as Great Marlow or Hilbourne Port had electorate of around 200.

Bills were introduced to regulate elections and standardise,the franchise in 1621, 1623, 1625, 1628 and 1640, The 1621 Bill is of particular interest because it proposed that the 40/- freeholder qualification be increased to œ4 and to admit œ10 copyholders by inheritance. The borough proposals add no more than the various decisions on individual cases (in fact even less), for electors were to be freemen except where they numbered less than twenty-four, in which case all inhabitants not in receipt of alms were to be included,

In 1640 the franchise was raised again by Sir Simonds D’Ewes. It was he who first uttered the idea later made famous by Rainsborough ‘that the poorest man in England ought to have a voice, that it was the birthright of the subjects of England and all had voices in the election of Knights etc. previously.’ (K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise p.63).

In 1641 a bill had reached second reading but was then lost. D’Ewes favoured its contents except that he ‘desired that whereas it was provided in the bill that none that took alms should have voices in elections, which I well allowed, we would likewise provide that no more monopolizing elections might be in cities and boroughs, that all men resients might have voices.’ (K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise p.64)

It is also noteworthy, both for its own sake and the part it played in Leveller literature, that many believed that the Statute of 1430 had disenfranchised people. William May, in 1621, said ‘Anciently, all the commonality had voice, but because such a multitude made the election tumultuous, it was after reduced to freeholders’. The religious radical William Prynne put it even more plainly, ‘Before this Petition and Act every inhabitant and commoner in each county had voice in the election of Knights, whether he were a freeholder or not, or had a freehold only of one penny, six pence or twelve pence by the year as they now claim of late in most cities and boroughs where popular elections are admitted’ (K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise p.64). It is a sobering thought that if the Statute of 1430 did disenfranchise large numbers of county electors, the county franchise may have been wider in medieval England than it was to be again before the end of the nineteenth century and conceivably wider than the Franchise before the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

Wage-earners certainly did so, for those in the ‘potwaller’ and ‘scot and lot’ constituencies were granted the right to vote. Almstakers were excluded in the 1621 and 1640 bills, yet at Great Marlow in 1604 77 of the 245 voters were said to be almstakers, nine of them inmates of the almshouse. In 1640 the right of the Bember inmates to vote was said to have been sustained and in 1662 the St. Albans almsmen were said to have ‘had voices time out of mind’.

The latter point is particularly pertinent because the chief Leveller, John Lilburne, was also of gentle-birth, albeit “small gentry”, a fact he never ceased to emphasise. Clearly, democratic ideas and feeling were not foreign political bodies suddenly introduced by the Levellers and others in the 1640s.

The English civil war, Commonwealth and Protectorate

Stuart society was a world on the physical, economic and intellectual move and waiting to move faster if the right engine appeared. The civil wars of the 1640s was that machine.

Representative government is one thing, democracy quite another. That did not come to England in its formal form of a full adult franchise until the twentieth century. But for a brief period in the 1640s a franchise for the House of Commons broader than any used before the late nineteenth century was more than a pipe dream.

The Civil War and its republican aftermath, the Commonwealth and Protectorate, changed English politics utterly. It brought the end of claims by the English crown

to Divine Right and absolute monarchy. It promoted the political interests of the aristocracy and gentry as a class. It forced those on the Parliamentary side to exercise power on their own responsibility. It created a political class which saw politics as something they could control rather than merely be part of as an adjunct to the crown. It raised the idea that there should be a law superior to that which even a parliament could pass. It began the constitutional process which resulted in cabinet government. It laid the foundations for the formation of political parties as we know them. In short, it planted the seeds of modern representative government.

Into this new world were cast men whose political philosophies ranged from acceptance of the divine right of kings to unyielding communists. In the middle were those, such as Cromwell, who though socially conservative, realised that power and political interest had shifted not merely from the king to Parliament, but also in some sense to an appreciably broader circle of people than before. Such people were willing to extend the franchise to a degree, although still restricting it to those with property for fear that the poor would dispossess the haves if they had the power to elect and that those with no material stake in the country would have no sense of responsibility and duty.

But that was insufficient from many, especially those who fought on the Parliamentary side in the wars, and something else occurred which was to be even more momentous in the long run. The belief that men generally should only be ruled by those they had themselves elected became a serious political idea. That the idea should find expression as a serious political idea in the 1640s was, of course, partly a consequence of the disruption of society by civil war, but that was more an opportunity rather than a reason. Innumerable civil wars all over the world have come and gone without the democratic spirit being given rein. What made the England of the time unusual was the long-existing ideal of individual freedom which had reached a high degree of sophistication, including the notion that free debate, the sine qua no of democracy, was of value in itself. Here are two passages which give a taste of the way minds were working in the 1640s. First,

John Milton writing in the Areogapitica in the 1640s:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose upon the earth, so truth be in the field [and] we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter…

The second statement comes from the Leveller Richard Overton’s ‘An Arrow against all Tyrants’ (19th October, 1646). It contains as good a refutation of the power of authority without consent over the individual as you will find:

No man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s….for by naturall birth all men are equally and alike borne to like propriety, liberty and freedom, and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, everyone with a naturall, innate freedom and propriety….even so are we to live, every one equally and alike to enjoy his birthright and privilege…. [no more of which may be alienated] than is conducive to a better being, more safety and freedome….[for] every man by nature being a King, Priest and Prophet in his own naturall circuit and compasse, whereof no second may partake, but by deputation, commission and free consent from him, whose naturall right and freedome it is. [An Arrow against all tyrants].

These were not odd voices crying in the wilderness. The democratic spirit was widespread in the 1640s. By this I do not mean that men were commonly calling for full manhood suffrage, much less the emancipation of women. Even the most democratically advanced of the important groups which evolved during the Civil War, the Levellers, were unclear as to whether those who were deemed dependent in the sense of not being their own masters – servants and almstakers – should be given the vote or, indeed, who counted as a servant or almstaker.

Rather, there was a sense that the social order had been rearranged by the war, that men were on some new ground of equality and had a right to a public voice. In particular, there was a belief that those who had fought for Parliament had won the right to enfranchisement. There was also a widespread feeling, which penetrated all social classes, that the existing franchises (which as we have seen varied greatly) were frequently too narrow and that the towns, particularly those most recently grown to substantial size, were grossly under-represented.

Ideas of social and political equality had, as we have seen, existed long before the Civil War, but never before had large swathes of the masses and the elite seen anything approaching representative democracy as practical politics under any circumstances. The political and social elite of the period after 1640 may have been desperately afraid of a general representation of the English people, but they did not say it was impossible, merely feared its consequences.

They may have loathed the idea of every man his own political master but they were forced by circumstances to admit that a Parliament elected on a broad franchise was not a fantasy. The Putney Debates in 1647 provide a vivid record of the political fervour and mentality of the times. Parliamentary and Army leaders including Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, met with a variety of people on what might broadly be called the democratic side. A substantial part of the debate was taken down in shorthand. It is a most intriguing and exciting document, despite its incompleteness and some confused passages. The sheer range of political ideas it displays is impressive. It shows clearly that the 1640s experienced a high degree of sophistication amongst the politically interested class and that this class was drawn from a broad swathe of English society. The ideas run discussed from the monarchical to the unreservedly democratic, epitomised in Col Thomas Rainsborough’s famous words:

… I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to lead, as the richest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s 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 not think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under… (Col Thomas Rainsborough Puritanism and Liberty The Putney debates p 53).

Democracy, the revolutionary idea

Why was the idea of every man being an elector so revolutionary? There was of course the age-old traditional fear, known to the Greeks, that the masses would dispossess haves if they had control of who was to hold power. But the matter went much deeper than that. The enfranchisement of a wide electorate is perhaps the most fundamental political change a society can undergo. It forces the elite to take note of the masses in a way that no other system does. Even the humblest man must be considered as a man in his own right, a person with a vote and needs and wishes. Those needs and wishes may be heeded and met to varying degrees according to the success an elite has in subverting the representative process through such tricks as international treaties and the development of disciplined political parties, but what the majority needs and wants cannot as a matter of course be ignored completely when each man has a vote.

A form of male-only democracy existed in the ancient world, but it was never inclusive because the citizens were only a part of the population of a Greek civis and the large numbers of unfree men and free men who were not citizens were excluded. The Roman Republic had enjoyed in varying degrees at various times democratic expression through plebeian institutions such as the concilium plebis and offices such as that of tribune. But that was a class based representation which arose to oppose the Patrician class, not a self-conscious representation of individual men.

Received wisdom it may be now, the idea that every man (but not woman then) should have an active voice in choosing those who would represent and govern them was to most people, poor and rich, a truly novel and disturbing concept in the middle of the 17th century.

The Levellers

The group which gave the strongest voice and effect to democratic feelings in the 1640s was the Levellers. They were a disparate and ever shifting crew, drawing their support primarily from the ranks of the Parliamentary armed forces (especially after the New Model Army was formed in 1645), small tradesmen, journeymen and apprentices. However, they also included those from higher social classes, their most famous leader, John Lilburne, being the child of minor gentry.

The Levellers time was brief. They were a serious political force for, at most, the years 1646 to 1649 and that is probably being a mite too generous. They failed utterly in the end, not least because they were unable to carry the army, especially the junior officers, with them. But they were important both for giving voice to the ideas and creating many of the practices on which modern politics is founded.

Their opponents attempted to portray the Levellers as social revolutionaries who would take the property of the rich, most particularly their land, and give it to the poor. Hence the epithet of Leveller which originated as a term of abuse. But the Levellers consistently denied that they had any such programme and were staunch defenders of the right to property. They might best be characterised as radical democrats with a very strong libertarian streak. Indeed, so far were they from being proto-communists that they had an almost sacramental belief in the individual’s right to personal property.

Intellectually, they started from the view that all Englishmen had a birthright which entitled them to have a say in who should govern them, although at times they accepted that the birthright might be breached through dependence on a master or by receiving alms. More importantly, their ideology contained the germ of the idea of a social contract between the people and those who held power, an idea which was to come to dominate English political thinking for the next century or so through the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

The Levellers were, with one or two exceptions such as Richard Overton, who was a deist at best and an atheist at worst, or John Wildman, who was a libertine and chancer, religious. But their belief had a strong vein of rationalism in it. They saw God not as the often cantakerous and domineering supernatural being of traditional Christianity, but as a rational intelligence who entered every man and allowed him to see what was naturally just and reasonable.

For the Levellers, it seemed a natural right – a rational right – for a man to have a say in who should hold power and what they should do with the power. They were happy to use historical props such as Magna Carta and the legend of Norman oppression when it suited them, but their rationality led them to question how men were governed from first principles. One of the Leveller leaders Richard Overton actually called Magna Carta a “beggarly thing” and went on to comment:

Ye [Parliament] were chosen to work our deliverance, and to estate us in natural and just liberty, agreeable to reason and common equity, for whatever our forefathers were, we are the men of the present age, and ought to be absolutely free from all kinds of exorbitancies, molestations or arbitrary power. (A Remonstrance. Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution)

More balanced was his fellow Leveller William Walwyn:

Magna Carta (you must observe) is but a part of the people’s rights and liberties, being no more but what with much striving and fighting, was wrested from the paws of those kings , who by force had conquered the nation, changed the laws and by strong hand held them in bondage. (England’s Lamentable Slaverie, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution.)

Much of this was the work of Lilburne, a man of preternatural obstinacy, courage and general unreasonableness. It says much for the restraint of the English elite of the day and respect for the law that he was not killed out of hand. It is difficult to imagine such behaviour being tolerated anywhere in Europe in the seventeenth century.

Lilburne by every account of him was a most difficult man – it was said that his nature was so combative that he would seek a quarrel with himself if he were alone – ‘Jack would fight with John’. Yet this man, who came from a very modest gentry background, remained alive despite challenging the authority of first the king and then during and after the civil war, Parliament, Cromwell and the Commonwealth. He thus carried on this mortally dangerous behaviour for almost a generation. To the end of his life in 1657, he was thought dangerous enough to imprison.

Lilburne first came to notice for seditious speeches and writings in the 1630s. For that he was whipped from the Fleet to the Palace Yard where he was stood in the stocks. Whilst in the stocks, he removed copies of the pamphlets which had caused his punishment and threw them to the crowd. That little episode will give a good idea of the Lilburne’s general mentality. He was an extreme example one of those necessary unreasonable men without whom nothing great gets done.

From the time of his flogging onwards, Lilburne’s career was one of studied defiance of authority. He was one of the most potent pamphleteers England has ever seen. For more than a decade, he produced a flood of writings guaranteed to inflame virtually anyone in public authority in the land. He faced down judges in the most powerful courts in the land. He controlled the London mob consummately. He treated the greatest men in the land as equals. In any other place on the planet at that time, he probably would have been dead meat before his career as an agitator began. But not in England. He might be flogged. He might be put in the stocks. He might be imprisoned. He might be tried twice for his life. But what the elite of 17th century England would not do was unreservedly murder him.

The Levellers developed an increasingly sophisticated political programme in a series of documents known as The Agreements of the People. These Agreements dealt extensively with political representation and structure. They were also very successful in creating a sense of historic grievance and an enemy. They did this by portraying 1640s England as having declined from a golden age of freedom to an oppressed land and people under the heel of the Normans and their French successors.

The Levellers and the franchise

The Levellers changed their position on the franchise throughout their existence, tending to compromise when they thought that some accommodation with the likes of Cromwell could be made and ever more radical as political power slipped away from them, although there were times and places throughout their existence when this general tendency did not hold true.

What the Levellers did retain always was a belief that all Englishmen were born with the same birthright. However, they accepted more often than not that certain parts of this birthright could be forfeited under certain conditions. Religious, civil and even possibly economic rights could not be alienated justly, and as such should be protected constitutionally. The right to elect, however, could be forfeited by entering into a condition of dependence, either by taking wages or alms. In such cases, a just dependence resulted and the subservient individual’s voice was deemed to be included in that of his master or benefactor, as far as a voice in elections was concerned, just as that of a wife was deemed to be included in that of her husband. An idea of how the Levellers’ position changed can be gained from these extracts from Leveller tracts:

‘That the People of England,… ought to be more indifferently proportioned according to the number of inhabitants.’ (The first article of the First Agreement.)

[electors] ‘shall be Natives, or Denizen of England, not persons receiving Alms … not servants to, and receiving wages from any particular person’ (The Second Agreement – D.H. Wolfe,Leveller Manifestoes p.403)

‘Whereas it hath been the ancient liberty of this nation, that all the freeborn people have freely elected their representers in Parliament, and their sheriffs and Justices of the Peace, etc. and they were abridged of that their native liberty by a statute of the 8.H.6,7. That, therefore, the birthright of all English men be forthwith restored to all which are not, or shall not be legally disenfranchised for some criminal cause, or are under 21 years of age, or servants or beggars .’ (The franchise clause (section ll) of the Petition of January 1648 -D.H. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes P,269.)

By the time political opportunity had long passed the Levellers by we find in 1653 a pamphlet Leveller in tone – ‘A Charge of High Treason exhibited against Oliver Cromwell’ summoning all the people of England to the polls ‘as well masters, sons of servants’.

Constitutional restraint

The Levellers did one more thing which was to have great influence in the future: they created the idea of constitutional law acting as a restraint on a parliament. The Agreements of the People placed restrictions on what Parliament might do, removing the power from Parliament to repudiate debts it had incurred, interfere with the operation of justice, destroy the rights to property or diminish the liberty of the individual. The Levellers even included provision granting the electorate the right to resist Parliament if they acted beyond their powers. They also called for annual parliaments, i.e., a general election every year, which would have been a great restriction in itself on what those with power might do.

In 1648 the Levellers attempted but failed to convene a Constitutional Convention of the type which more than a century later produced the American constitution. However, the idea of restraining Parliament by superior law was given form in the Instrument of Government which set up the Protectorate. The idea of such constitutional restraint disappeared in England after the Restoration and the novel doctrine of Parliamentary supremacy eventually won the day after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1689, when the monarch became king not by right of birth but by gift of Parliament.

Other radicals

The most uncompromising of the democratic and egalitarian forces in the 1640s were the so-called Diggers or, “True Levellers” led by William Everard but best known through the writings of Gerrard Winstanley. In many ways the Diggers, probably unwittingly, reiterated the most extreme egalitarian sentiments of the Peasant’s Revolt, such as the reputed words of John Ball, and reached back to the mediaeval idea of society as a communal enterprise. They believed that the land belonged to no one saying “None ought to be lords or landlords over another, but the earth is free for every son and daughter of mankind to live upon.” ( Works, ed by Sabine p289).

For the Diggers the “natural” state of man was one of common ownership and the root of evil the egotistic desire for individual advantage including the “cheating art of buying and selling” by which king’s live (Winstanley’s Law of Freedom 1652).

In 1649 a small group of Diggers attempted to put their philosophy into practice camped on St Georges Hill near Walton on Thames in Surrey and attempted to cultivate common land. Further Digger attempts were made at Cobham in Surrey and at Cox Hall in Kent and at Wellingborough in Northamptonshire. All met with a mixture of legal and physical harassment by local landowners and even attracted the attention of the Council of State which sent troopers to repress them. The Diggers were brought twice to court.

Their numbers were small, probably amounting to no more than a hundred or so at most and they had no lasting direct legacy. Yet they are a reminder that many Englishmen have never have never accepted willingly the unearned privileges of social rank or vast differences in wealth while the masses struggled to feed themselves.

The Diggers are also significant for giving voice through Winstanley to the novel idea that the end of politics should be the well-being of the common man and for the clear recognition that liberty rests on the economic state of society.

Exporting Representative Government

After the Cromwell’s establishment of the Protectorate, democratic ideas did not gain serious political currency in England for more than a century, but the example of England’s continually evolving parliamentary government proved a potent one.

The Restoration did not result in serious legal abridgements of the power of the monarch, but Charles II was in practice much restricted by a Parliament unwilling to adequately open the purse strings for a monarch who was, ironically, expected to do more and more as the formal power

of the state grew.

The “Glorious Revolution” of 1689 produced a true constitutional sea-change. From then on the English monarch ascended the throne only with the acceptance of Parliament and the Bill of Rights (1690) placed restrictions on the monarch. Amongst the long list of things the king was forbidden to do were:

Dispense with and suspend of laws, and the execution of laws, without consent of parliament.

Levy money for and to the use of the crown, by pretence of prerogative, for another time, and in other manner, than the same was granted by parliament.

To raise and keep a standing army within England in time of peace, without consent of parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to 4.

To violate the freedom of election of members to serve in parliament.

To demand excessive bail of persons committed in criminal cases, “to elude the benefit of the laws made for the liberty of the subjects.”

To impose excessive fines and illegal and cruel punishments.

The abuses of power by the crown listed in the Bill of Rights are described as being ” utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes, and freedom of this realm.”

That old reliance on the law and the traditional freedoms of the Englishman.

From 1689 began the century long decline of the monarchy as an executive power. The American War of Independence sealed the fate of the monarch and the Americans forged a new version of the English political model, with a formal separation of powers and a written constitution to restrict what governments and legislatures might do.

The received academic opinion on the American constitutional settlement is that it was the offspring of John Locke. In fact, it had at least as much affinity with the ideas of the Levellers. There is no direct intellectual link, but arguably the most important popular propagandist on the American side, the Englishman Tom Paine, shared much of his ideology with the Levellers. The Constitution is a balancing act between Locke Paine, granting a large degree of popular involvement in politics, whilst tempering it with restrictions such as electoral colleges and granting through the Bill of Rights (which was inspired by the English Bill of Rights of 1690) constitutional protections for the individual against the state.

If the American Revolution owed its shape and inspiration to England, the French Revolution was inspired by both English constitutional development and the America revolutionary example. Most political revolutions resulting in an attempt at representative government, have been touched, consciously or not, by the legacy of the American and French revolutions.

England through control of the British Empire, ensured that the Westminster model of government was transplanted with widely differing success, to approximately a quarter of the world’s population, when the empire dissolved in the twenty years after 1945.

The astonishing upshot of the English example, the American and French Revolutions and the British Empire, is that the political structures of most modern states are broadly based on the English constitution of King, Lords and Commons, the overwhelming majority having a head of state plus two assemblies. In addition, the widespread practice of a written constitution derives from the example of the United States, which of course drew its form and inspiration from English settlements in North America, English history and political practices. These political structures apply as readily to dictatorships as they do to liberal democracies.

Of course, the balance of power between the head of state and the assemblies varies widely and there is much difference between Parliamentary and Presidential government, but they all have their ultimate origin in the example of the English system of representative government.

One last thing. Look around the world. How many countries can be said even today to have accepted elected representative government and the rule of law as a banal fact of life, the norm of their society? Britain, the USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand certainly, Switzerland and Scandinavia possibly. But where else? Not France which as recently as 1958 overthrew the Fourth Republic. Not Germany which embraced Hitler nor Italy the land of Mussollini. Not Spain so recently loosed from Franco.

As for the rest of the world, that tells a sorry tale of elites who generally have such a lack of respect for the individual and a contempt for the masses that the idea of shared power with and for the people is simply alien to them.

The fact that the only really stable examples of elected representative government in countries of any size are in those countries which have their ultimate origins in English colonisation strongly suggests that it was no accident that it was in England that the institution evolved. There must be something highly unusual about English society for it both to develop in a manner so different from any other country and to export this rare and valuable difference to colonies.

Well, at least there wasn’t a six-foot dancing penis

Robert Henderson

Prior to the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, the last time Britain put on a taxpayer-funded entertainment that was meant to project the country to the world was on 31 January 1999. The event was broadcast from the Dome (now the O2 Arena) to mark the new millennium. True to the politically correct dicta of the time, the Millennium show said precisely nothing about British history or culture and was an exceptionally trite mishmash of the “we are all one happy global family” variety of painfully right on exhortation and posturing (see http://wwp.millennium-dome.com/news/news-dome-990916show.htm). The lowlight of the show was a six-foot dancing penis.

In 1999 the liberal left propaganda concentrated on pretending that Britain’s past had nothing of merit at best or was positively and unreservedly shameful at worst, while projecting the politically correct wonders of the joyous and fruitful multicultural and multiracial society they fondly but erroneously imagined Britain was in the process of becoming.

By 2012 the politically correct narrative of Britain had changed. The brighter amongst the liberal left had realised that there were dangers in both crudely alienating the native British population at large (and especially the English and the white working class) and in allowing state sponsorship of ethnic and racial divisions through multiculturalism. Consequently, they began to develop a new narrative. The liberal left would present the British past in terms which allowed the multicultural message to be imported into it, most overtly by the pedantically true but grotesquely misleading claim that Britain has received immigrants since time out of mind and non-white immigrants for at least several centuries. (What the pedantically true statement fails to mention is the small numbers and the nature of the immigration – overwhelmingly white and European – until the post-1945 mass influx .) One of the most enthusiastic proponents of the “blacks have always been in Britain” school is the black Labour MP Diane Abbott (a history graduate God help us) who wrote a piece for the BBC’s black history month in which contained this gem: “The earliest blacks in Britain were probably black Roman centurions that came over hundreds of years before Christ.” (Like Captain Queeg I kid you not – see http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/dabbott_01.shtml. For those unfamiliar with British history, let me point out that the first known Roman contact with Britain was in 55 BC – Julius Caesar – and the first Roman settlement in Britain -the Claudian invasion – dates from 43 AD. As for her curious idea that “black centurions” were the likely first black settlers in Britain, I can only guess that she confuses centurion – an officer rank with various meanings in the Roman military – with the ordinary Roman soldier). Three questions arise from Ms Abbott’s concept of British history – how did she obtain a place to read history at Newham College, Cambridge; how did she managed to take a history degree and what does it say about the fruits of positive discrimination, official or unofficial?)

But the storyline that Britain had always been multicultural and multiracial has a gaping practical drawback. The politically correct could fudge present British realities by using their control of the mainstream media to promote the false idea that blacks and Asians occupy a central place in British society by the gross over-representation of ethnic minorities as active participants in programmes and as the subject of programmes. But they could not control the past effectively because the overwhelming majority of those standing large in British history were white, Christian and not immigrants. Of course, attempts were made to promote the idea that non-whites had produced great British figures, such as the attempt in recent years to present the Victorian black woman Mary Seacole – as the equal of Florence Nightingale (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/seacole_mary.shtml) . But these efforts were inevitably puny because there were so few non-whites of note in British history.

Multiculturalist from the word go

The London Olympics were wrapped in the multiculturalist credo from the word go. The central plank of the bid was that a London Olympics would be multicultural celebration not merely in terms of the competitors, but through its positioning in London and specifically a part of London which contained a very large non-white population. Here is the leader of the bid Seb Coe in Singapore making the final bid for the games:

“… we’re serious about inspiring young people. Each of them comes from east London, from the communities who will be touched most directly by our Games.

And thanks to London’s multi-cultural mix of 200 nations, they also represent the youth of the world. Their families have come from every continent. They practice every religion and every faith. What unites them is London. “ (http://www.london2012.com/mm/Document/aboutus/General/01/22/85/87/singapore-presentation-speeches.pdf).

The official London Olympics website makes no bones about its mission either:

“It is our aim to make diversity and inclusion a key differentiator of our Games, celebrating the many differences among the cultures and communities of the United Kingdom.

It’s not simply about recruiting a diverse workforce. It’s about the suppliers, the competitors, the officials and the spectators – in fact, everyone connected with the Games, from the security guards to the bus drivers. Diversity and inclusion influence every detail of our Games-time planning, from accessible transport to our Food Vision.” (http://www.london2012.com/about-us/diversity-and-inclusion/)

Danny Boyle

The man given the job of producing an Olympic ceremony which would accord with the new politically correct propaganda strategy was Danny Boyle, the director of, amongst other films, the heroinfest Trainspotting and the Indian-sited Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle did not have to be told what to do because it would be what he would do naturally. He was Old Labour temperamentally but also plugged into the one world politically correct switchboard.

Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically in the light of the very unTory nature of the Coalition Government, Boyle was appointed by the Coalition. However, as the appointment occurred on 17 June 2010 (six weeks after the Coalition assumed office) it is reasonable to suppose that the Tory-led Coalition were rubber-stamping what the Brown Government had arranged without giving the matter much thought. Nonetheless the appointment got some ringing Tory support:

‘Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, said: “The opening and closing ceremonies are the jewels in the crown of any Olympics and Paralympics and are one of the benchmarks against which all games are judged.

“I am very pleased that British directors and producers of such outstanding international calibre and acclaim have given their backing to London 2012.

With their creativity and expertises on board, I’m sure that London’s showpiece events will make Britain proud.”

His sentiments were echoed by the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who said the “brilliant” team had brought together “some of the most imaginative people in the world”.

“The work they have produced over the years has been quite extraordinary, with an impact not just in the UK, but also on the international stage,” he said.

“They exemplify some of the greatest attributes we have – creativity, vision, and intelligence – which will be critical to ensuring shows that are as stunning as they are uniquely British.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10338048)

The multicultural message is reinforced relentlessly by the mainstream British media. Someone drawing their idea of the make-up of the British Olympic team from British newspapers and broadcasters could be forgiven for thinking that the team was largely composed of black and Asian competitors. The truth is rather different. The Daily Telegraph on 27 July (2012) thoughtfully provided photos of all 541 British Olympic competitors. There were only 40 black, brown and yellow faces amongst them, less than 8% of the total. The small number of black and Asian participants is even more striking when taking into account the fact that blacks and Asians in Britain are on average substantially younger than white Britons and consequently there are proportionately far more blacks and Asians than there are white Britons in the age group suitable for the Olympics.

A political opening ceremony

By its very nature the Olympics opening ceremony should be apolitical because of the vast range of political behaviours and ideologies which are represented by the two hundred or so competing nations. No overtly political production could do other than irritate many whilst pleasing few. It should have gone without saying that that the opening ceremony should have eschewed any ideological message.

Boyle ignored this imperative wholesale and pumped out the liberal internationalist message with shards of Old Labour thinking embedded within it. The world audience was treated to an idealisation of pre-industrial Britain fit for a chocolate box being devoured by industrialisation, toiling workers, suffragettes, Jarrow Hunger Marchers, the arrival of the Windrush symbolising the beginning of the post-war mass immigration, nurses and patients bouncing on beds and dancing to supposedly extol the virtues of the NHS and CND marchers. Apart from being politically partisan it was doubly crass because the overwhelming majority of the foreign audience would not have had a clue about what was going on. The British have an additional beef because they were taxpayers paying for unambiguous political propaganda which came from only one side of the political spectrum. Judging by phones-ins and comments left on blogs, newsgroups and mainstream media comment boards quite a few Britons cavilled at that.

The use of cultural references which were unlikely to be anything other than Greek to foreigners went beyond the politically partisan. Who outside of Britain would be likely to understand references to the film Gregory’s Girl or had a clue what was meant by the attempt to portray the significance of the inventor of the World Wide Webb Tim Berners-Leigh by wrapping him up in a story of staggering banality about British youngsters connecting with each other digitally? It is pointless when catering for the widest of audiences to make references to national events and cultural artefacts which do not have either a wide international currency or are of a nature which is self-explanatory.

There were also what can only be hoped were the last throes of Blair’s “Cool Britannia” , with the celebration of the inane and superficial. Various British personalities with international traction were wheeled out: David Beckham, Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean, Daniel Craig as James Bond, JK Rowling and the Queen as herself, sadly reduced to the status of a pantomime walk-on. The idea that going for a night out represented modern British society at its most emblematic was beyond risible.

To understand how inappropriate Boyle’s show was, imagine an equally politically partisan and uncritical show put on by a director with non-pc nationalist sympathies crossed with a religious belief in free enterprise. (This would be a stupendously improbable event in modern Britain but do your best to get your imagination to stretch to the Herculean lengths required) . Such a director might have started by extolling the British Empire as a great civilising force, portrayed pre-industrial Britain as a place of poverty and brutality which was transformed into a much wealthier and more ordered society by industrial capitalism, created a narrative which depicted state interference with the economy as disastrous with the nationalised industries of Attlee including the NHS being shown as inefficient and wracked with political activists, treated the dockers’ march of 1968 in support of Enoch Powell after his Rivers of Blood speech resulted in his sacking by Tory leader Ted heath and the Notting Hill riots as legitimate political protests against mass immigration before ending with a scene encapsulating the erosion of freedom in Britain by the combination of politically correctness and the vast opportunities for surveillance offered by modern digital technology. This last could have Tim Berners-Leigh with his head in his hands as a court sentenced someone to prison for putting out a non-pc message on Twitter. All that would have been as inappropriate as Boyle’s offering but no more so.

No irony intended

Strenuous attempts have been made to suggest that Boyle was being ironic in his broad historical commentary with his portrayal of Britain as being a pastoral idyll before this was rudely disturbed by the industrial revolution. I wish I could believe he was, but I cannot because this is just the type of sentimental ahistorical pap which a certain type of left liberal adores and, even more worryingly, believes. I would not mind betting that Boyle is an fervent admirer of William Morris and the Arts and Craft Movement of Victorian England, with its wistful looking back to a non-existent pre-industrial golden age.

Boyle’s putative historical representation of a blissful agrarian life filled with peasants who were trampled by the grinding face of capitalist engineered industrialisation is ludicrous to anyone who has any understanding of British and in particular English history. The peasantry of England had effectively ceased to exist long before the industrial revolution because the very extensive enclosure movements of the 15^th century onwards had turned huge numbers of peasants off land they worked themselves and forced them to migrate to the towns, work as casual labourers or become sturdy beggars. By the time the industrial revolution began circa 1700 there was no real peasantry, the nearest being yeoman farmers.

The second absurdity is the idea that pre-industrial Britain was a pre-lapsarian paradise. Life in agrarian societies is and was no bed of roses. Pre-industrial Britain was no exception. Famines were frequent, both because of general crop failures and the absence of a system of reliable roads and fast transport to move food around. Heavy manual labour was the norm and the production of what we now call consumer goods was small. Sanitation was poor to non-existent and cities, especially London, were death traps because of their propensity to spread diseases. Medicine was so rudimentary that doctors, even those attending the rich, were as likely to kill their patients as not, often with a great deal of unnecessary suffering as Charles II found out to his cost. Industrialisation, and its fellow traveller science, eventually changed or at least greatly ameliorated those ills.

Nor is it true that the industrial revolution was simply a catalogue of cruelty and social dislocation. Great entrepreneurs of the early industrial revolution such as Josiah Wedgewood and Matthew Boulton took a pride in the fine condition of their factories and later industrialists such as Titus Salt built model villages for their workers. Moreover, even where conditions were extremely poor in rapidly growing industrial centres such as 19^th Century Manchester, on which Friedrich Engels reported so vividly in the 1840s in his The Condition of the Working Class in England , there is no firm evidence that they were qualitatively worse than the conditions experienced in cities before the coming of the mills and factories. Nor was pre-industrial agrarian labour a sinecure, with most of the work being strictly manual. Imagine cutting a field of corn with scythes.

Boyle’s physical depiction of bucolic pre-industrial England had all the authenticity of a Christmas scene in one of Harrod’s windows. Not only were all things bright and fully sanitary, there was a cricket match of truly howling anachronism. The cricket played in Boyle’s fantasy was modern cricket, with modern pads and bats, wickets with three stump and bails and overarm bowling,. The cricket played in pre-industrial England had batsmen with curved bats, no protective equipment, wickets with two stumps and bowlers delivering the ball underarm. Boyle’s cricket match also carried forward the idea of Britain as a multicultural land way back when because the bowler was black, a sight as rare as a unicorn in the seventeenth, or being generous, the eighteenth century .

The relentless political correctness

The politically correct propaganda did not end with overt message of the various events. It continued with the personnel. Take the nine bearers of the Olympic Flag: Ban-ki Moon, the United Nations secretary general , the runner Haile Gebrselassie , Muhammad Ali , Leyma Gbowee, a Nobel peace prize winner credited with ending the civil war in Liberia, Marina Silva, who has fought against the destruction of the rainforest, musician Daniel Barenboim, Sally Becker, known as the Angel of Mostar for her work rescuing children from war-torn Bosnia, Shami Chakrabarti the director of human rights body Liberty and Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager whose murder in 1993 led to the Metropolitan police being accused of “institutional racism”. All fitted in with the liberal internationalist Boyle theme, both in terms of what they were noted for and their multicultural nature. The racial and ethnic breakdown of the nine is five black, two Asian and two Jewish. The last three on the list represented Britain: a Jew, an Asian and a black.

I mention this not because I think there should be no ethnic and racial diversity on display in such events. Indeed, it is inherently appropriate that they are. But it is a matter of proportion. Boyle’s show was unashamedly slanted towards the politically correct credo and the selection of flag bearers was emblematic of this bias, a bias which completely excluded the large majority of the British population who do not belong to ethnic or racial minorities. It also excluded the wider mainstream European populations and their offshoots in the New World and Australasia. Far from being that favourite modern liberal word “inclusive”, Boyle was excluding vast swathes of humanity.

Chakrabarti coyly worried whether her inclusion might be thought politically correct by bravely overcame her qualms because “… if, like me, you believe internationalism can be for people and values, not just corporations and military alliances, how can you resist sharing the optimism of Boyle’s ambition?” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/news/9436921/London-2012-Olympics-Shami-Chakrabarti-had-doubts-over-flag-honour.html)

The inclusion of Muhammad Ali amused me as it always does. He has totemic status amongst liberals , yet this is a man who, until he became non compos mentis , was an unashamed anti-white racist who disapproved mixed racial sexual relationships and was happy to lend his name to the Nation of Islam, a group led by men such as Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan – see http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/muhammad-ali-and-the-white-liberals/.

The British media and politicians

The fare Boyle offered up was not to Tory MPs’ taste , but there was precious little public dissent by politicians from the mainstream media view that Boyle’s show was generally a triumph. Good examples of the crawlingly uncritical media response can be found within a supposedly conservative newspaper at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/9434563/London-2012-the-experts-view-of-the-Olympic-opening-ceremony.html.

There were apparently rumblings behind the scenes in Tory ministerial ranks about Boyle’s politicisation of the ceremony, but these came to nothing:

“ In one account of the meeting Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, was said to have scored the ceremony just four out 10, a claim his spokesman denied last night.

Mr Gove was also said to have objected to the absence of Winston Churchill from the ceremony.

According to this version, Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, was also sceptical about some of the scenes, while Theresa May, the Home Secretary, was said to have intervened to defend Boyle and to have told her colleagues it was unfair to judge the ceremony in such a crude way…” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/london-2012/9435509/Ministers-pushed-for-changes-to-opening-ceremony.html)

Just one Tory MP, Aidan Burley, spoke out publicly against the political nature of the Boyle’s show. For this he has been roundly attacked by not only his own party leader and politicians of all colours, but by the mainstream media with calls for his expulsion from the Tory Party. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jul/28/olympics-opening-ceremony-multicultural-crap-tory-mp).Small wonder in the ideologically claustrophobic world of politically correct Britain that there was little open criticism from public figures.

Amongst the media Prof Mary Beard , Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, took the pc biscuit with her “ I liked ‘that kiss’ too – the split-second clip of two female characters from Brookside, the 90s soap opera – and what it achieved. What a great way to get the first gay kiss onto Saudi Arabian TV.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/9434563/London-2012-the-experts-view-of-the-Olympic-opening-ceremony.html).

She went on to give the standard multicultural line on Britishness:

“ Governments are always complaining that we don’t feel proud to be British. They wag their fingers at us and instruct us to feel patriotic. But it’s a rather punitive approach to history and to identity – with all that checklist of Kings and Queens we’re supposed to know, and the nasty insinuation that you aren’t a ‘proper’ Brit unless you’ve read The Faerie Queene, or Merchant of Venice, or whatever.

Strikingly, Danny Boyle actually showed us that we are proud to be British.

It wasn’t a parade of majesty; the only monarch who featured was our own dear Queen. But instead of one official version, the stage made room for all sorts of people and many different narratives.

It recognised all kinds of things that people care about – from Amy Winehouse to CND marches – and it let them into the story as symbols that can stand for Britain, and have played their own part in shaping our history. It was a really alert reading of what matters to people in Britain today – from JK Rowling to the NHS – and because of that Boyle managed to inspire pride where finger-wagging governments have failed.

He was able to play with the great symbols of Britain in a way that was both ironic and supportive; that takes a special gift. There are many different sorts and styles of histories. This wasn’t a competition with the Jubilee, which brought us pomp and majesty, this was something different: the people’s story.”

So there you have, it was “the people’s story”, a phrase as redolent of the bogus as Blair’s description of Princess Dianna as “the people’s princess”. Back in the real world, opinion poll after opinion poll says what really matters to the British today are mass immigration and its consequences, the economic mess we are in and our membership of the EU.

The blind alley of Britishness

The claimed promotion of Britishness by the show was bogus for two reasons. Even at its strongest Britishness was not a natural nationality. But in the aftermath of the second world war it did have a certain overarching reach throughout the four home nations and a continuing emotional pull for countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. A mixture of mass immigration from all ends of the Earth, the religious promotion of multiculturalism by the British elite, the devolution of political power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the weakening of links with the old dominions caused by Britain’s entry into what is now the EU have killed Britishness as a functional concept. Liberals left still cling to it because it is the fig-leaf which covers the consequences of mass immigration and to a lesser extent of devolution. Immigrants reluctant to call themselves English call themselves British, although that is usually a hyphenated British such a black-British or Pakistani-British. Pro-unionists insist that everyone is British. What Britrishness no longer represents is the native inhabitants of Britain.

But what Boyle gave the audience in his parade of was not even this bogus Britishness . He gave them Englishness. Not an honest Englishness of course, but Englishness as filtered through the grossly distorting prism of political correctness. The rural pre-industrial idyll could only have been England with its cricket and soft greenness. The industrial revolution scenes are set in an English context with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Not only that but the industrial revolution began in England and spread outwards: all the important early industrial advances took place in England: the invention of the steam engine , the smelting of iron using coke, the various machines which mechanised the cloth industry, the great factories of Wedgewood and Boulton and later the railways which utter transformed the distribution of goods and people. The personalities such as Daniel Craig, David Beckham, JK Rowling and the Queen are all English by birth and upbringing.

An appropriate show

What would have been an appropriate Olympic show for the world audience? There was a truly gaping open goal for Boyle to shoot into. All he had to do was narrow his focus and produce a show based on Britain’s immense contribution to the foundation and formulation of modern sport, including her considerable influence on the founder of the modern Olympics , Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin. Apart from being highly appropriate this would have been something unique because no other country could have done it because they do not have the sporting history.

The show could have begun with a general run through of the games and sports which originated in Britain – football, cricket, rugby union and league, lawn tennis, golf, badminton, squash, table tennis, snooker – those which were derived from British games such as baseball and American and Australian football , and the strong hand of other pursuits such as rowing and horse racing which although not unique to Britain appeared as organised sports very early in Britain.

Having established the British sporting foundations, the show could go on to examine the role played by Britain in establishing large scale spectator sport which could run from the 18th century with cricket and horseracing to the 19th century with the coming of the railways opening the way to sport becoming national and then international as first the four home countries of the UK – England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales played one another at football and rugby then other countries as the 20th century came while England and Australia became the first Test playing cricketing nations to meet. The theme of Britain taking sport to the world could have been expanded with reference to the Empire and the considerable efforts made by private organisations such as the Marylebone Cricket Club to spread individual sports and games.

Having laid out the sporting DNA of Britain, the show could conclude with the long standing idea of Olympic games in Britain, drawing first on the Cotswold Olipick Games of Robert Dover which began in 1612 and ran, with a break during the English civil war and Protectorate, until 1852. A modern revival began in 1965 (http://www.olimpickgames.co.uk/). This would be followed by Dr William Penny Brookes’ Wenlock Olympian Games http://www.wenlock-olympian-society.org.uk/olympian-games/index.shtml and the subsequent formation, by Brooks and others of the National Olympic Association in 1865 (which continued to 1883) with the first National Olympic games being held in 1866 (http://www.tiger2.f2s.com/JohnHulleyMemorialFund/national_olympian_association.shtml ).

The extent of Brookes influence on the modern Olympic movement was recalled by Juan Antonio Samaranch when president of the International Olympic Committee . He visited Much Wenlock in 1994 and laid a wreath at Brookes’ grave and in a speech said “I came to pay homage and tribute to Dr Brookes, who really was the founder of the modern Olympic Games.” (http://www.shropshiretourism.co.uk/much-wenlock/).

What does the opening ceremony tell us?

The extent to which the media and politicians have fallen into line with the Boyle politicking demonstrates the success the liberal left have had in acquiring the levers of power and working them ruthlessly. Whenever a highly contentious subject provokes little public debate you may bet your life on it being the consequence of the suppression of one side of the debate. It is no wonder that in present day Britain so little public opposition to the nature of Boyle’s show should have occurred. Politicians and people with access to the mainstream media know only too well that to go against the politically correct tide is to invite serious trouble.

The real message of the Olympic opening ceremony is simple: the liberal internationalist triumph is at its zenith. As things presently stand no one with contrary views can get a fair public hearing or most of the time any public hearing at all because the mainstream media censors such views severely. The British people, and especially the English, are left with no means to control their own country in their own interests. They are simply spectators of their own destruction.

English education – a project to culturally cleanse the English

Robert Henderson

Ask an English child of 2011 about the iconic dates of English history such as Hastings, Blenheim and Waterloo and your chances of getting a correct answer are very small. Quiz them on who was Alfred the Great or ask them to describe the outcome of the Spanish Armada and the odds are that you will be met with blank stares. Pose a question relating to English geography such as the position of the Chilterns or the course of the Severn and a shrug of the shoulders is the likely outcome. Mention a Shakespeare play or a Dickens novel and childish eyes are wont to roll.

Sadly, the modern English child is more likely to be able to tell a questioner about the Muslim festival of Ramadan than relate the story of Easter. They will know more of the geography of Africa (if they know any geography at all) than of England. On the rare occasions when they are told about England’s history, it will only be in the context of the country’s “evil” past, with the Atlantic slave trade elevated to the status of the ultimate act of historical immorality and the Empire recounted as an unrelieved tale of the exploitation of native peoples.

The upshot is that we have several generations of English children who have commonly left school with next to no meaningful knowledge of their own history and higher culture. That applies not only to those who depart education with a basic school education at the age of 16, but even those who go on to university. Worse, their education is designed to leave them with, at best, a belief that they have nothing to be proud of because they are English, and, at worst, that they should be thoroughly ashamed of the fact that they are English.

The conscious intent of the liberal elite is to create a belief amongst the English that they, of all peoples, are not worthy of a national identity. Most of the English do not actually believe this even at the intellectual level and they still have a primal sense of being English because of Man’s innate tendency to associate with “the tribe”. But this is beside the point. By being denied access to their history and culture, English children are left without a bedrock of conscious cultural imprinting to build upon their natural and healthy communal instincts. They are like children of good natural parts who have been denied schooling.

Education, of course, is far more than academic study. It is about the general development of the child. Modern psychological research consistently fingers the peer group as most potent influence on the development of a child, far more influential than the family. Those who doubt this is might care to reflect on the fact that children speak with the accent of their peer group not that of their parents.

The dominance of the peer group is vitally important because it means that children can potentially be manipulated en masse. If they do not take their view of the world from their parents – and children commonly reject their parents’ views – they have to take their view from elsewhere. That leaves them vulnerable to elite propaganda, especially that pedalled by the mass media and schools. The important point here is that parents as a class have many views, an elite ideology has one view. The danger is that the elite can succeed at least partially in forcing a single view of the world onto all or at least most children.

A peer group whose members have been properly socialised in their history and culture and who have been given a generally positive view of their society, will reinforce that view themselves. A group robbed of that knowledge and mentality will be less inclined – because they have less positive information and reinforcement about their “tribe” – to amplify what they glean from the adult world. They may build upon the negative propaganda ceaselessly fed to them by schools, by the media and by politicians and by the persistent promotion of other cultures as superior to their own. Most damagingly, they are in danger of being conditioned to believe that they, the native people of England, are but one ethnic group amongst many, that they have no special cultural claim within their own land.

A teacher from 40 years ago transported to the present would be astounded by what they saw in schools and universities, so alien to them would be the current state of our education in terms of content and execution. How, they would ask, can such a fine system of education have been brought so low? Why are children today so ignorant of their own past and society? Why are they so often incompetent in even the basics of literacy and numeracy? How did we come to such a degraded educational state in such a short space of time?

It is those questions I shall attempt to answer. But before I begin let me say one thing more. It is very tempting to look at what we have now and attribute all that has gone wrong to a self-conscious desire on the part of the teaching profession to destroy English identity by wilfully denigrating England and the English and by withholding her history and culture from English children. That is the most obvious and probably the most important part of the story, but progressive education, the consequences of comprehensivisation, the problems of rampant bureaucracy, anti-elitism, Thatcherism and mass immigration all have all played their part in the project to deracinate the English.

The way it was I was born in 1947. Never, perhaps, has England (and Britain) been more of a coherent community. The dramatic recent experience of the Second World War filled the minds of everyone and that shared experience bound together even more tightly a very racially and culturally homogenous country. It was rare to see a black or brown face even in London, and any suggestion that someone from a racial or cultural minority should do anything but their best to assimilate into English culture would have been generally thought to touch the confines of lunacy. It was a very English, very British world.

It was a time when Britain made most of the manufactured goods that it consumed, including its own cars, aircraft, ships, and it would have been thought extraordinary for a British Government to fail to protect British industry. Great industrial names such as Austin (cars) and Fry’s (chocolate) were not only English-owned and English made but leaders in the English market. The shops which people used were generally owned by the English and more often than not family enterprises. Every day an inhabitant of England was reminded that they were members of an advanced technological society which could make or grow what it wanted and that most of what they consumed was made in England (or at least Britain) or came from the Empire.

The idea of Empire was still important – just. The fifties were the very last moment when an English boy could grow up with an imperial consciousness as part of everyday life. There was no assumption that the Empire would collapse. India might have gone in 1947, but the assumption amongst both the general population and the political elite was that Britain would have to bear “the white man’s burden” for many a long year yet. That will seem extraordinary to the point of fantasy now, but it is true. In the forties and fifties the Foreign and Colonial Office continued to recruit and train young men for careers as imperial servants such as District Officers and white emigration from Britain to places such as Kenya and Rhodesia was officially encouraged.

Against this background English schools taught as a matter of course a curriculum that extolled English and British values, history and culture. History for the English child was British and imperial history first with European history a poor second. Geography was concerned primarily with the physical and demographic demography of Britain. English literature concentrated on the classic English texts from Chaucer through to Trollope.

But it was not simply English history and culture which was imparted. Whole class teaching was the norm with the teacher firmly in charge. Children were expected to acquire the factual knowledge of a subject as well as its process. Because discipline was not generally a problem, schools were primarily institutions to teach people rather than being the child-minding depots we all too often see today. There is a good case for saying that the general standard of English education was never higher than in the quarter century between 1945 and 1970. This was not only because of the good overall educational standard, but because all pupils, unlike the pre-war system, now got a secondary education as of right.

That is not to say everything in the post-war educational garden was lovely. Before comprehensive education began under the first Wilson Government, English state education was divided between grammar schools, secondary moderns and a small number of technical schools – the last were intended as training grounds for artisans, to use an old fashioned word. The consequence was to lower, irrevocably in most instances, the social horizons and aspirations of those who did not pass the 11-plus and go to grammar schools, because it was very difficult to move to a grammar school after the age of 11. It also created a sense of inferiority and resentment amongst many 11-plus failures.

Despite these shortcomings, the system was unreservedly to be preferred to what we have today. The grammar schools not only produced a genuinely educated class, but provided an escape route to something better for clever children from even the poorest backgrounds. That opportunity grew with the significant expansion of university and polytechnic places in the fifties and sixties. In 1950 approximately 2 per cent of English school-leavers went on to higher education: by 1970, following the implementation of the Robbins Report (1963), the figure was approximately 7 per cent (and this was the age of the post-war baby-boomer generation, so there were more pupils in the age group in 1970 than 1950). Most tellingly, in the 1960s, before the destruction of the grammar schools, workingclass children in higher education formed a greater proportion of the whole student body than it does now – there are more workingclass students now, but that is simply a consequence of the vast increase in those in higher education to more than 40 per cent. More on the consequences of that when I deal with the decline in educational standards since the sixties.

How things changed

By the time I left school in the mid-sixties the Empire was effectively finished – the final nail in the coffin of imperial feeling was banged in by our entry into the EU in 1972, which alienated the white dominions – and a new spirit of anti-Establishment feeling was beginning to erode school discipline. But progressive ideals had not yet taken hold the educational establishment and the comprehensive disaster was only in its infancy. The school leaving exams, the O and A Levels, were a real test of competence in both their subjects and of the literacy and numeracy of candidates. To take but one example of the difference between then and now: even O Level science exams had, for 16-year-olds, demanding practicals as well as written papers.

By the mid seventies the grammar schools had been reduced to a rump of a few hundred. Ironically, most of those which had converted to comprehensive schools or which had chosen to become private schools to preserve their status, had been forced to change by a supposedly conservative government, that of Ted Heath, whose education minister was Margaret Thatcher. The failure of Heath to stop comprehensivisation was a harbinger of what was to happen under the future Conservative governments of Thatcher and Major.

Comprehensivisation

The comprehensive ideal is not innately wrong. Children of very widely differing abilities can be successfully taught together. Traditionally, the greatest public schools in England have been comprehensives of a sort. They took boys who varied from the exceptionally bright to the stonewall stupid and managed largely to successfully educate both groups and all those in between. The very bright won scholarships to Oxbridge, while the stonewall stupid at least left school functionally literate.

But these schools were hopeless models for a state comprehensive system. They drew almost all of their pupils from the middle and upper classes and the resources available to the schools from fees and endowments vastly outstripped any that could ever be available to state funded schools. The social class of the pupils meant that the pupils had expectations of being in the higher reaches of society when they entered adult life and parents who actively wanted and expected their children to be educated. To these advantages were added greatly superior financial resources which permitted the recruitment of first rate staff, small classes and personal tuition.

A general comprehensive system lacks the advantages of a great public school. Most of the schools will be dominated by the children of the working class simply because they are by far the most numerous. That would be true even if all private schools were abolished and “bussing” of middle and upper class children was enforced to ensure that schools were socially mixed.

Inevitably the adult expectations of working class children tend to be lower than those of the middle and upper classes. Their parents are generally less supportive of the idea of education. A significant minority are actively hostile to their children becoming better educated than they are because it divorces the children from their workingclass roots. Few will be able to provide active academic assistance to their children. Those facts alone make mixed ability teaching difficult. Add in the much smaller financial resources available to state schools – which expresses itself in larger classes, a narrower curriculum and, on average, less able and less well motivated staff – and you have a recipe for low educational attainment. In such schools the bright and academically interested pupils often become isolated, under-challenged intellectually and frequently bullied, while the duller, non-academic majority are allowed to plough an educational furrow, which stretches from academic inadequacy to an outright failure of education.

In practice comprehensivisation was much worse than that. Bussing was not enforced. The better off continued to send their children to fee-paying schools – today approximately 7 per cent of our schoolchildren are privately educated, a higher proportion than in the 1960s when many middleclass parents were happy to send their children to state grammar schools. (It is a grand irony that comprehensivisation rescued the public schools, many of which were struggling to maintain numbers by 1965).

Social segregation by the use of fee-paying schools was amplified both by the natural segregation of social classes into geographical areas – in the absence of enforced “bussing” a middle class suburb will have a local school which is largely filled with middleclass children – and by the widespread practice of middle class parents moving to areas where good state schools were available. The consequence has been a state school system which is heavily segregated by class, with the schools dominated by the working class tending to be the lowest achieving.

The subversion of the social mixing part of the comprehensive ideal was further complicated by mass immigration. This introduced not only racial and ethnic conflict into schools, a toxic enough disruptive element in itself, but also created grave practical problems because so many of the immigrant children did not have a competence in English. The official promotion of multiculturalism and its concomitant idea that any member of an ethnic minority is automatically a victim of white society complicated the position further, not least in the area of discipline. Ethnic minorities soon realised that in the context of an official sponsorship of “victimhood” they could get away with more and more. Native English children seeing this, naturally enough, also became more inclined to misbehave.

Because immigrants settled almost entirely in large towns and cities, these problems were and are confined almost exclusively to schools where the white pupils were workingclass, who found their already inferior opportunities for education further reduced. Worse, as we shall see, immigration was the final lever which allowed progressive education to not only gain absolute ascendency in the English state educational system, but to transform the progressive ideal into an overt political movement.

Progressive education

When the second Wilson government was elected in 1974,progressive education had gone a fair way to obtaining the stranglehold it has today and to developing from an educational theory into a political doctrine.

Progressive or child-centred educational theories have a long history. The idea that the child should not be actively, (and to the progressive mind oppressively) educated by adults but be provided with the opportunity to learn as its nature drives it to learn, is not in itself an ignoble idea and people throughout history have expressed concern about the stultifying of children through too strict a regime. However, all ideas, once they harden into an ideology have a nasty habit of being driven to extremes, becoming both fundamentally unreasonable and impracticable. Rousseau made what we now called child-centred education unreasonable in the 18th century by taking it to the extremes of believing that children would “naturally” find their true nature and intellectual level if placed in the right circumstances, that it was European society that corrupted the individual – from this mentality the Romantic fantasy of the noble savage emerged. It is as good an example of an intellectual construction unrelated to reality as one could find. That the vast majority of children do not respond positively to undirected education and a general lack of adult authority is clear to anyone who has had anything to do with children, let alone having been responsible for their formal education, a process, incidentally, which is primarily concerned with teaching children things they would not naturally learn or even come into contact with if left to their own devices.

Rousseau’s intellectual descendents followed consciously or unconsciously in his mistaken wake. Those in England in the nineteen sixties and seventies were both extreme in their progressive beliefs and politically motivated. They not only believed that children should not be actively instructed, but also that the power relationship between teachers and pupils should become one of equality. (This idea has just reached its reductio ad absurdum with Ofsted introducing various questionnaires to be completed by pupils at primary schools, secondary schools and sixth form colleges. The pupils will assess their schools’ performance through these questionnaires, which will only be seen by Ofsted – Daily Telegraph 19 2 2005)

Whole class teaching with the teacher at the front of the class gradually gave way to groups of children clustered around tables and enjoying only sporadic contact with their teacher. Children hearing their teachers spouting progressive mantras about non-oppressive teaching and the evil of exams, responded in an absolutely predictable way: they became ill-disciplined and utterly disinclined to learn. These traits were reinforced by the growing failure of the comprehensive system to even equip many of them with the basic tools to learn: literacy and numeracy and the general lack of intellectual challenge with which they were faced. A child who has spent his or her years before the age of 14 (when the 16-year-old school exam courses begin) being asked to do nothing demanding is inevitably going to be daunted if they are suddenly faced with a Shakespeare text or Newton’s laws of motion.

This lack of intellectual challenge arose because educational progressives saw it as their duty to socially engineer class differences out of society. Academically, this desire translated itself into a tendency towards ensuring a general mediocrity of performance throughout the comprehensive schools rather than an attempt to raise the academic horizons of children from poor homes. Not only were exams frowned upon but competition of any sort was deemed to be harmful. Children were, the progressives said, damaged by failure and consequently opportunities for demonstrable failure must be removed.

When it came to the content of the academic curricula, the progressives attacked on two fronts. One was what might be broadly called the “I hate everything about England” policy, which overtly despised and denigrated everything that England had ever done or was. The other was to promote social egalitarianism. Nowhere was this seen more perniciously than in the teaching of history. Complaints about an over concentration on “Kings and Queens” history had long existed, but no one in the mainstream academic world seriously suggested that such history was unimportant. Now it was to be considered worthless because it was not “relevant” to the lives of the pupils. Facts and chronology were replaced by “historical empathy” and investigative skills. Where once pupils would have learnt of Henry V, Wellington and the Great Reform Bill, they now were asked to imagine that they were a peasant in 14th Century England or an African slave on a slave ship, going to market in the New World. The results of such “empathy” were not judged in relation to the historical record, but as exercises in their own right. Whatever this is, it is not historical understanding.

Other disciplines were contaminated by the same mentality. A subject was judged by its “relevance” to the pupil or the difficulty theaverage pupil had in mastering it. Shakespeare was deemed too difficult and remote for workingclass children and traditional maths was largely replaced by modern maths”, which instead of teaching children how to complete a calculation or demonstrate a theorem, attempted, with precious little success, to teach esoterica such as Set theory and the theory of numbers.

When teaching is largely removed from facts, the assessment of the work of those taught becomes nothing more than the opinion of the teacher. This inevitably resulted in the prejudices of the teacher being reflected in their pupils work and the teacher’s marking. In 2005 this means political correctness wins the day. History teaching, and the teaching of other subjects such as geography which can be given a PC colouring, has become little better than propaganda. This would be unfortunate if the propaganda promoted English history and culture uncritically. But to have anti-English propaganda in English schools and universities is positively suicidal. That it is state policy is barely credible.

The extent to which the state has embraced the politically correct, anti-British line is illustrated by this letter to the Daily Telegraph from Chris McGovern the director of the History Curriculum Association, which campaigns against the failure to teach British history fairly or comprehensively:

SIR–The landmarks of British history have become optional parts of the national curriculum (report Sept. 10). They appear only as italicised examples of what is permissible to teach.

However, this permission is offered in guarded terms. A guidance letter already sent to every school in the country states: “… we would also like to emphasise that it is very much up to individual schools to determine whether or not to use the italicised examples”. However, there is no such equivocation about teaching history through a host of politically correct social themes. Failure to filter history through such perspectives as gender, race, agent and cultural diversity will be in breach of the law. (Daily Telegraph 13 9 1999).

Skills more important than facts

Alongside this process of de-factualisation grew the pernicious idea that the learning of “skills” was more important than knowledge. This resulted in the absurdity of children being taught how to “research” a topic rather than being taught a subject. The idea that one can have any understanding of a subject without a proper grasp of its content is best described as bonkers. Anyone who has ever been asked to do anything of any complexity with which they are unfamiliar will know from painful experience how difficult it is to suddenly master the knowledge needed to perform the task – attempting to assemble flat-pack furniture from the instructions is a good way of learning this sad fact.

There is also the growing obsession with technology as a teaching medium. There is the Daily Telegraph education editor, John Clare writing on 26

1 2005 under the title “Is learning a thing of the past?

Something very odd is happening in secondary schools. The focus of teaching is switching from imparting knowledge to preparing pupils for employment – in, ironically, the ”knowledge economy”. The change, unannounced and undiscussed, is being brought about through the wholesale introduction of computer technology….

[According to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority] Thirteen-year-olds, instead of learning about Henry VIII, should search the internet for images of the king – “old, young, fat, thin” – and use these to “produce leaflets presenting different views of him”. Fourteen-year-olds, instead of learning about the First World War, should “produce presentations to sell a history trip to the battlefields in northern France, tailoring the content and form to the perceived needs of their audience”.

Teaching history, in other words, is secondary. The point is to get pupils searching the internet, selecting websites, learning about word-processing, data collection, desktop publishing and making PowerPoint presentations of their conclusions…

A creeping totalitarianism

Education has officially become not a way of enlarging the mind and opening up intellectual doors, but merely a means to produce “good” politically correct citizens and workers equipped for the modern jobs market. The Labour Government has decreed that pupils are no longer to be pupils but “learners”. The desired ends for these “learners” are “Be healthy; stay safe; enjoy and achieve; make a positive contribution; and achieve economic well being.” (Daily Telegraph 19 2 2005). This is a programme couched in language remarkably similar to those of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The Blair Government has already introduced citizenship lessons in schools – I will leave readers to guess what makes a good citizen in the Blairite mind – and intends to introduce a citizenship ceremony for all 18-year-olds.

Immigration and multiculturalism

What allowed progressive education to go from being a primarily a method and philosophy of teaching to a potent political ideology was mass immigration. Originally the progressive view of immigrants was that they must be assimilated into English society. When it became clear by the mid-seventies that assimilation was not going to work, progressive educationalists rapidly switched to the doctrine which became multiculturalism. By the early eighties assimilation was a dirty word in educational circles. The educationalists were followed by the politicians.

Multiculturalism was embraced as a mainstream political ideal in the late 1970s because politicians did not know what to do about mass coloured immigration and its consequences. Both Labour and the Conservatives initially promoted the French solution to immigration – make them black and brown Britons. But by the end of the seventies integration was deemed by our political elite to be a failure at best and oppression at worst. Multiculturalism was its successor. Once it became the new official doctrine, the many eager Anglophobic and internationalist hands in English education and the mass media were free to give reign to their natural instincts.

The idea behind multiculturalism is that it squares the immigration circle of unassimilable immigrants and a resentful native mass by saying everyone may live in their own cultural bubble. In practice, this required the suppression of British interests and the silencing of British dissidents on one side and the promotion of minority cultures and the privileging of the immigrant minorities on the other.

English history and culture ceased to be taught in schools in any meaningful way. Where it was part of the curriculum, it was the subject of ever increasing denigration. Politicians of all parties gradually became more and more reluctant to speak out for the interests of the native Briton. Laws were passed – most notably the Race Relations Act of 1976 and the Public Order Act of 1986 – potentially making it an offence to tell the unvarnished truth about race and immigration or make any telling criticism of any minority ethnic group.

As the new elite doctrine of multiculturalism became established, it became necessary not only for the elite themselves to espouse it but anyone who worked for the elite. Any public servant, any member of the media, any senior businessman, an professional person, was brought within the net. This produced the situation we have today whereby no honest speaking about any subject within the pc ambit is allowed in public without the person being shouted down and in all probability becoming either a non-person or forced to make a public “confession” reminiscent of those during the Cultural Revolution.

Most importantly, multiculturalism allowed the progressives to portray Englishness as just one competing culture amongst many, all of which were equally “valid”. This had two primary implications: other cultures should be given equal consideration within the curriculum and any promotion of one culture over another was illegitimate. In fact, these implications were never followed through. Practicality meant that the multiplicity of cultures in England could not all have equal billing, while the promotion English culture was deemed to be “oppressive” both because they are the dominant “ethnic” group in England and because of their “evil” imperial, slave-trading past. The educationalists’ cut the Gordian knot by treating the inclusion of items of any culture other than English within the school curriculum as a “good”, while insisting that references to England and her people should always be derogatory and guilt inducing.

The better part of a quarter of century of this policy has resulted in English education system being successfully subverted. English cultural content has been marvellously diluted and denigration of the English is routine bar one thing: the liberal bigot invariably lauds the toleration of the English towards immigrants, a claim at odds both with historical reality and the liberal’s general claim that England is a peculiarly wicked and undeserving place.

The conscious hatred of England

That progressive educational ideas should so readily be adapted to the political doctrine of multiculturalism is unsurprising for the English Left’s habit of denigration has a long history. Here is Friedrich Hayek’s writing in the 1940s:

The Left intelligentsia…have so long worshipped foreign gods that they seem to have become almost incapable of seeing any good in the characteristic English institutions and traditions. That the moral values on which most of them pride themselves are largely the products of the institutions they are out to destroy, these socialists cannot, of course, admit. And this attitude is unfortunately not confined to avowed socialists. Though one must hope that it is not true of the less vocal but more numerous cultivated Englishman, if one were to judge by the ideas which find expression in current political discussion and propaganda the Englishman who not only “the language speak that Shakespeare spake”, but also “the faith and morals hold that Milton held” seems to have almost vanished. [The Road to Serfdom]

Victimhood – minorities become sacred cows

Two of the practical effects of multiculturalism were the creation of a grievance culture within the various ethnic minorities and a belief that English laws and customs may be ignored with impunity, a belief perhaps best exemplified by the growing attack on free expression, primarily but by no means exclusively by Muslims.

Barbara Amiel writing about the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone’s embroilment in a row over alleged anti-semitic remarks (“Welcome, Ken, to the gulag you helped create”) describes the present position of minorities beautifully. “People with minority status perform the same function in a society of inclusiveness as India’s sacred cows or the sacred deer in Nara, Japan. They can bite you in the midriff but you can’t hit them on the nose. If they lie in front of a bus, the vehicle must wait until they get up and go away before driving on…” Just so. Minorities have to a large extent become a law unto themselves – but only with the active connivance of the British elite.

With the growth of a culture of victimhood, the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish were able to climb on the “victim bandwagon” and to largely withstand the deracination of their children – or at least to promote a sense of tribal unity. The English, being always represented as the villain of the piece, were not only deracinated, but unable to defend themselves because the whole of public life was dominated and controlled by those responsible for the deracination.

Political correctness

Along with multiculturalism came feminism and gay rights which reinforced the message that no group had priority and all ways of life were equally valid. Over a quarter a century or so, these three ideologies solidified into the totalitarian creed of that is political correctness.

The pc creed is literally totalitarian because it (1) allows only one legitimate view on any subject it covers, (2) it can be infiltrated into virtually any area of human activity and (3) because it is an elite ideology, the elite use their power through the control of the media and public life to punish and exclude anyone who denies the “truth” by being non-PC. This was immensely useful in deracinating English children because it both discouraged them from voicing any contrary views and prevented those adults who opposed the ideology from having a public voice.

Occasionally political correctness provides some tart amusement for the non-pc majority. Like all religions, sacred or profane, it devours its own, and its most assiduous ideologues find themselves cast in the role of the heretic. The case of Ken Livingstone cited above (see Victimhood) is a particularly amusing example because of his incessant portrayal of himself as the most pc of men.

Exams and the decline in standards

The most obvious consequence of the gradual decline in educational standards was an erosion in exam quality. At first it was small things. Practical exams for science O Levels were dropped. Then came multiple choice questions. The curricula in all subjects shrank. New, less academic subjects such as media studies found their way into the exam system and elbowed the academic aside. Eventually came the ultimate corruption of the exam system with the introduction of continuous assessment. With the fall in school standards, the universities and polytechnics inevitably had to drop their standards.

The corruption of exam standards was further driven by a desire to expand the numbers of children passing school exams and the numbers going on to Higher Education. To this end O Levels and the old CSE exams for less able pupils were abolished in the 1980s and replaced with the General Certificate of Education (GCSE). Around the same time a decision was made to vastly increase the numbers of students in Higher Education. To make this policy more attractive to would-be students, the polytechnics were renamed universities in 1992, with the consequence that more than 100 institutions with that title were suddenly competing for students, with as we shall see later, evil effects.

The consequence of having a single exam (GCSE) for all 16 year olds was predictable: to prevent embarrassing numbers of failures, the standard of the new exam had to be reduced below that of the already much less demanding O Levels of the 1980s (even so, in 2005 around 30 per cent of children fail to gain five GCSEs at C grade or higher.) The upshot was that the GCSE candidates either left school at 16 lacking even the rudiments of education needed to fill run-of-the-mill jobs – many are functionally illiterate and even more lack basic numeracy – or entered A Level courses woefully under-prepared, especially in subjects such as maths. A Levels and degree courses were again, of necessity, reduced in standard to adapt to pupils and students who were substantially under-prepared compared with those arriving under the pre-GCSE examination regime.

At the same time as standards were eroding, the Tories introduced in the 1980s the madness of league tables and targets. The consequence of these – not just in education but generally – is to distract from the actual purpose of what an organisation is supposed to do and to promote dishonesty in the pursuit of attaining the targets and showing well in league tables.

The league tables provoked even more tampering with the academic standards of school exams as examination boards competed with one another to produce the “best” results, that is, ever higher pass rates and grades and schools chose the examination board most likely to give them ostensible examination success.

The response of both politicians and educationalists to the inexorable rise in GCSE and A Level results since GCSE was introduced has been to hail them as evidence that educational standards are continually rising. Such claims have the same relationship to reality as Soviet figures for the turnip harvest or tractor production. All that has happened is that both the difficulty of exams and the severity of marking has been reduced. In 2004 an A Grade in GCSE Maths from Edexcel, one of the largest exam boards, could be gained with 45 per cent (Daily Telegraph 18 9 2004), while a “B” grade at one Board in 2004 (OCR) could be a obtained with a mere 17 per cent (Sunday Telegraph 16 1 2005). (When challenged about lowered grade marks, those setting the exams claim that the questions are becoming more difficult.) Course work, which counts towards the overall exam mark, is reported as being either routinely plagiarised from the Web or showing other evidence of being other than the pupil’s unaided work.

In addition to the lowering of exam marks and the fraud of continuous assessment, school exams have begun to shift from final tests to modular exams which are taken throughout the course. Hence, pupils on such courses never take an exam which tests them on their entire course.

Of course, all this change to school exams, combined with the introduction of the national curriculum tests, creates a great deal of extra work for teachers and distracts them from the actual task of teaching – pupils are tested at 7, 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18. It has also spawned a truly monstrous examination bureaucracy, which according to a recent report from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (a state body) costs œ610 million per year (Daily Telegraph 14 2 2005) and has left the country desperately scrabbling around for sufficient qualified examiners.

The frequent complaints of university teachers about the inadequacy of the students coming to them and the even more vociferous complaints of employers about applicants who lack competence in even the three “Rs” are pretty substantial straws in the wind suggesting a general educational failure. My own direct experience of youngsters all too often bears out such complaints – I find especially depressing recent graduates with good degrees from top universities who are bizarrely ignorant of their degree subjects and poorly equipped to research or analyse.

Anecdotes are always tricky as evidence, so let us consider an objective fact which explains why widespread educational incompetence is inevitable in the circumstances which have been created. IQ is normally distributed within a population, that is it forms a Bell Curve with most people clustering in the middle of the curve and a few people at the extremes of the curve. Such a distribution means that the proportion of the population with IQs substantially above the average is quite small – approximately 25 per cent of the UK population have IQs of 110 or more. Now, it is true that IQ as a measure of academic success is not infallible, not least because motivation is necessary as well as intellect. But what is true is that a decent IQ is necessary for academic success. Put another way, someone with an IQ of 150 may or may not take a First in maths: someone with an IQ of 90 never will.

The way IQ is distributed means that the ideal of an exam suited to everyone (GCSE) is a literal nonsense, because that which would test the brightest would be beyond the large majority and even that which the majority could cope with would be beyond those in the lower part of the ability range. The grades awarded for GCSE bear this out. The large numbers of those getting the top marks mean that the exam is too easy for the brightest, while the 30 per cent or so of school-leavers who cannot attain 5 passes at C grade or better tell you it is too difficult for the lower part of the academic ability continuum.

A similar problem of fitting exams to a very wide ability range has affected universities. Tony Blair has set a target of 50 per cent of either school-leavers or people under the age of 28 (the target seems to move) to be in Higher Education – at the beginning of 2005 the percentage is over 40 per cent. Blair’s target means that many of those at university will have mediocre IQs.

Let us assume for the sake of simplicity that 50 per cent of school-leavers is the target rather than 50 per cent of those under 28. There are only around 25 per cent of people with IQs of 110 or higher in any age group. If every one of those 25 per cent went to university (50 per cent of those scheduled to go to university if the Blair target is met) it would still leave the other half of those going to university to be found from those with IQs of less than 109. Hence, with 50 per cent of school-leavers at university, at least half the people taking degrees would have, as a matter of necessity, moderate IQs. In fact, the position is worse than that, because significant numbers of those with IQs substantially above average will not go to university. That means even more than 50 per cent of students would have moderate IQs. Trying to set degree courses suitable for people with, say, IQs ranging from 90-160 cannot be a practical proposition.

Thatcherism

When Margaret Thatcher came to power many thought she would attempt to undo the damage of the comprehensive experiment and progressive methods, damage which was already visible. In her 11 years in power she not only failed to repair the damage, but she made things worse through her attempts to translate her free market ideology into education.

The Thatcher Governments neither reinstituted the grammar schools (or an equivalent) nor drove out the anti-examination, anti-competitive ethos of the teaching profession. Instead, Margaret Thatcher contented herself with introducing Thatcherite ideas such as a national curriculum and league tables and by encouraging parents and pupils (and later university students) to think of themselves as consumers while leaving things much as they were in terms of teaching methods, mentality and administrative structure.

This bizarre marriage of the prevailing progressive ideology with Thatcherite ideals would have been unsuccessful at the best of times because the two were simply incompatible. But the Thatcherite part of the equation was in practice more or less nullified as a means to raise standards. Over the 18 years of the Thatcher and Major governments, the educational establishment persuaded the Tories that not only should the comprehensive settlement be left unchanged, but that the O Level/CSE exams should be scrapped in favour of GCSE, that more and more coursework should be introduced into school exam marks, that the national curriculum tests should move from simple evaluations of the three “Rs” and a few other subjects to overblown and time consuming events, that polytechnics should become universities and that the numbers in higher education should rise to previously undreamt of levels.

Thatcherism extended more dramatically into higher education. University grants were first allowed to wither on the vine through inadequate uprating and then abolished. In their place came student loans to be repaid after graduation. The post-war ideal of free higher education finally died with the introduction of tuition fees by in the 1990s. Students suddenly found themselves faced with debts of £10,000 or more on graduation with future students living under the threat of ever rising fees.

When people pay for something they become resentful if they feel that they do not get what they pay for. In the case of university students they object to not merely failing their degree entirely, but even to getting a poor degree. That any failure to gain a good degree is largely due to themselves is lost in the resentment that something has been paid for which has not been delivered. Of course, the undergraduate is not paying the full cost of their tuition and they receive a loan on very favourable non-commercial terms. But because they do end up with a hefty debt at the end of their degree, that makes any perceived academic failure more poignant that it was in the days of grants and no tuition fees.

Although the relationship between the teacher and the taught was changed by tuition fees and loans, that in itself would not have been too damaging for university standards. In the end a disgruntled student can do little unless they have money to go to law, which few do. Nor, in all probability, would the courts be eager to get involved in disturbing the ideal of academic freedom. What was damaging was the ending in 1988 of university funding by block grants from a central awarding authority, the University Grants Committee (UGC). The UGC was replaced by the Universities Funding Council (UFC) and block grants were replaced by state money primarily attached to students (quality of teaching and research were also taken into account). The more students, the more income. Universities were immediately changed from places which awarded degrees as they chose to award them based on academic performance to institutions which were anxious to “sell” their wares to students. To do this they needed to present themselves as a university which not only failed few people but awarded most students “good” degrees. The upshot was that the proportion of First Class and Upper Second degrees rose inexorably until today around two thirds of students in the UK receive one or other of them and one third receive Lower Seconds or worse. (Forty years ago the proportions were roughly reversed with a third receiving Firsts and Upper Seconds and two thirds Lower Seconds or worse.)

The decline of the universities was hastened by the vast and unprecedented expansion of those in higher education:

“The number of students at university had risen from 321,000 in the early 1960s to 671,000 in 1979. By 1996 it was headed for 1.5 million, far in excess of the target of 560,000 places set by Robbins thirty years earlier. At the Labour Party Conference in September 1997, Tony Blair promised another 500,000 places at university by 2002.” Dominic Hobson The National Wealth p 325.

The increase in numbers was not matched with an increase in funding. The consequence was a substantial increase in the student/teacher ratio, less tutorial and lecture time and a tendency to favour cheaper arts and social science courses over expensive science degrees. In addition, although staff did not increase in line with student numbers, they did rise and competition for the best staff increased, with the inevitable consequence that the universities at the bottom of the pile – almost exclusively the polytechnics which became universities in 1992 – became institutions which should be described as universities only when the word is placed in inverted commas, with drop out rates previously unheard of in England.

The consequences of the Thatcher period were, as in so many areas, the very reverse of what she supposedly stood for. Just as the European Common Market undermined British sovereignty more than any other single treaty EU treaty agreement rather than achieving Thatcher’s intended aim of strengthening Britain’s position within the EU, so her education reforms promoted the ideas of those who were supposedly her sworn ideological enemies, the progressives. Thatcher became their useful idiot.

Back to the future

That in broad terms is how we got from the A of post war excellence to the B of the damaging educational inadequacy which we have today. How may we mend the present state?

As with all peoples, the English need to be taught their history to give them a psychological habitation. Moreover, the myths of the England haters dissolve readily enough in the acid of fact. Happily, English history is especially well suited to building national consciousness, because it is both a continuous narrative lasting more than a thousand years and because it contains so much of which its people may be justly proud. Not only did she possess the only world empire ever worthy of the name, she produced the one bootstrapped industrial revolution, has displayed a quite unparalleled political stability and a unique political evolution leading to representative government and, perhaps most importantly in the long run, created a language which for its all round utility and modern importance cannot be equalled.

England is in truth the cause of the modern world. Let her self-respect rest on that massive fact. The English do not need to invent a mythical past for their self-esteem: the reality, warts and all, is splendid and marvellous.

But history is more than events and institutions. It is about great and influential personalities. England has many to chose from, I will be indulgent and put forward some of my favourites. Alfred The Great (for his preservation of England), Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Bunyan, Queen Elizabeth, Cromwell, Newton, Locke, Wellington, Darwin. All left a mark on the world which went far beyond these shores. (My choice does not include any person from the twentieth century because I believe it is too soon to judge their significance.)

But to put matters right we need to do much more than teach our history, geography and literature honestly and to concentrate on our own place in the world. All political correctness and progressive teaching methods must be stripped out of educational practice. This is absolutely vital because while both poisons remain nothing can be done. In particular school exams must be purged of them otherwise all schools, including private schools, will of necessity be forced to teach the presently deformed curricula simply because the exams require it.

Children must be made competent in the three “Rs” before anything else is attempted, because without those basics not only will they be severely and generally handicapped in a modern society. Most importantly, such people will not be properly equipped to learn those things necessary to both understand where they have come from and to participate meaningfully in the political process – the simplest way to control a population in a formal democracy is to leave it ignorant and uneducated.

School exams also need to be rescued from their present worthlessness by removing continuous assessment and modular exams and by returning to the old system of single exams at 16 and 18 for the academic pupils. The needs of the less academic can be met with a simpler, narrower and less demanding exam, whose purpose would be primarily to demonstrate that the pupils was functionally literate and competent in basic arithmetic and had a general understanding of the main elements of our history, political system and geography.

There are also the structural problems. Schools must be freed from the destructive treadmill of targets and league tables, draconian inspections by Ofsted and the hand of central government direction loosened.

University standards can be revived by ending the pernicious linking of money to students and by greatly reducing the numbers at university. The idea that an advanced society needs vast numbers of graduates regardless of what the graduate subjects are or the quality of the graduates is demonstrable nonsense. Even at our present levels of university participation, a substantial number of graduates are either unemployed or employed in jobs which do not retire a graduate level education. Nor is there any uniformity of graduate numbers or types and quality of degrees in the First World – Japan has far fewer than most First World countries and continental degrees take an age to gain compared to those in Anglo-Saxon countries – while many Third World countries, Egypt is a good example, have vast numbers of graduates while remaining economic basket-cases.

How many graduates do we need? I would suggest this: the state should provide scholarships which will meet the full cost of courses and maintenance grants capable of supporting students during termtime for 20 per cent of the school-leaving population. This would be funded by the reduction in funding for the other 20-30 per cent who are currently funded or it is proposed should be funded. Anyone else wanting to study to degree level would have to either fund their full time course or take a part time course through institutions such as the Open University and Birkbeck College.

A matter of national life and death

As a matter of urgency the English must learn to resist the incessant insult to which they re now subject. A nation may be likened to a man. If a man continually accepts insult or engages in repeated self- denigration, we think him a poor fellow. At first such behaviour is embarrassing. Soon it becomes irritating. Eventually it breeds a profound contempt and contempt is mother to all enormities. So it is with peoples. On the simple ground of self-preservation, the English cannot afford to continue to permit the present gratuitous and incontinent abuse offered by both foreigners and her own ruling elite nor tolerate the suppression of the English voice.

If England is to survive as more than a geographical entity, it is essential that the young be imprinted with a knowledge of the immense achievements of Britain in general and England in particular and a sense of what the English have been.

No nation can maintain itself if it does not have a profound sense of its worth. In a healthy society this sense of worth simply exists and children imbibe it unconsciously. Our society has been so corrupted by a mistaken educational ideology and the liberal’s hatred of his own culture, that a conscious programme of cultural imprinting is necessary. If it is not done, how long will it be before English children express surprise when told they are speaking English and not American? The corrosion of English society can only be halted if pride of England and her achievements is instilled in the young.

The words of the younger Pitt in 1783 (following the disaster of the American War of Independence) seem peculiarly apt for our deracinated time:

We must recollect … what is we have at stake, what it is we have to contend for. It is for our property, it is for our liberty, it is for our independence, nay, for our existence as a nation; it is for our character, it is for our very name as Englishmen, it is for everything dear and valuable to man on this side of the grave.

That the tribal sense of English identity is still immensely strong can be seen in the way the English take the opportunity to publicly express their patriotism in the only regular way left to them – through their support for sporting teams. The English fans of all the major team sports are truly amazing in their dedication to their national teams. Go to any football game or Test match involving England played overseas and you will see a support unmatched by any other travelling supporters. See how a forest of St George’s Crosses sprout when a football world cup is on. Marvel at the reception given to the England Rugby team after they returned as world champions. It is also noteworthy that in recent years the English have taken the opportunity to come out in ever increasing numbers for occasional national events such as the Queen’s Jubilee and the Queen Mother’s funeral, surely a sign of English national pride being frustrated in most other ways. There is a generation of English children just waiting to be given their sense of historical place and culture back. All it needs is the political will to do it.

Is there any hope of changing things? At present precious little because no major political party will seriously challenge political correctness. It is also probable that behind the EU scenes a concerted attempt is being made to produce a uniform educational system across the EU – the proposals for exam reform made in the Tomlinson Report (18 October 2004 www.reform-14-19.gov.uk) call for the GCSE and A-Levels to be absorbed/replaced by a European-style diploma. As both Labour and Tories have a lamentable record of resisting EU policies, it is unlikely that they would oppose one for a uniform EU exam system.

All pretty bleak. But one should always remember Harold Wilson’s one political comment of any significance: “A week is a long time in politics”. Things can and may change suddenly.

Human Accomplishment and the English

Robert Henderson

In his book “Human Accomplishment” the American Charles Murray calculates the contribution to civilisation made by individuals throughout history up until 1950. To give his calculations as much objectivity as possible he measures the amount of attention given to an individual by specialists in their field in sources such as biographical dictionaries – put crudely, the greater the frequency of mention and the larger the space devoted to an individual, the higher they score.

Murray quantifies achievements under the headings of astronomy (Galileo and Kepler tied for first place), biology (Darwin and Aristotle), chemistry (Lavoisier), earth sciences (Lyell), physics (Newton and Einstein), mathematics (Euler), medicine (Pasteur, Hippocrates and Koch), technology (Edison and Watt), combined scientific (Newton), Chinese philosophy (Confucious), Indian philosophy (Sankara), Western philosophy (Aristotle), Western music (Beethoven and Mozart), Chinese painting (Gu Kaizhi and Zhao Mengfu), Japanese painting (Sesshu, Sotatsu and Korin), Western art (Michelangelo), Arabic literature, (al-Mutanabbi) Chinese literature (Du Fu), Indian literature (Kalidasa), Japanese literature (Basho and Chikamatsu Monzaemon), Western literature (Shakespeare).

Objections have been made to Murray’s methodology such as the fact that many of the great achievements of the past, especially in the arts, have been anonymous, which give it a bias towards the modern period, and fears that it has a built-in Western bias – the representation of non-Western figures in the science and technology categories is minimal. Nothing can be done about anonymity – it is worth pointing out that the majority of those heading the categories lived at least several centuries ago – but Murray substantially guards against pro-Western bias with the breadth and number of his sources and it is simply a fact that science and advanced technology arose only in the past few centuries and that both are essentially Western achievements.

It is also noteworthy that Murray’s method only places one of his fellow countrymen at number one in any category (Edison in technology). If any bias exists it is unlikely to be conscious. At worst, Murray’s findings can be seem as a fair rating of Western achievement.

The list of those heading the various categories (see second paragraph above) suggests that Murray’s method is pretty sound despite any possible methodological shortcomings, because those who come top are all men of extreme achievement. There might be arguments over whether Aristotle should take precedence over Plato or Kant, but no one could honestly argue that Aristotle was an obviously unworthy winner of first place in the philosophy category.

Of the 13 categories which can include Westerners (they are obviously excluded from non-European literature and art), Englishmen are undisputed firsts or share first place with one other in four: biology Darwin with Aristotle; Physics Newton with Einstein; combined scientific Newton alone; Western literature Shakespeare alone. No other nation has more than two representatives at the top of a category. The thirteen Western including categories have a total of 18 people in sole or joint first place. England has nearly a quarter of those in first place and more than a quarter of the 15 who are drawn from the modern period, say 1500 AD onwards.

Apart from those coming first, the English show strongly in most of the Western qualifying categories (especially in physics – 9 out of the top 20, technology – 8 out of the top twenty – and Western literature). The major exceptions are Western art and music, where English representation is mediocre. I think most people who think about the matter at all would feel those cultural strengths and weaknesses represent the reality of English history and society.

The fact that England shows so strongly in Murray’s exercise gives the lie to the common representation of the English as unintellectual. Moreover, there is much more to human intellectual accomplishment than the fields covered by Murray, most notably the writing of history and the social sciences, areas in which England has been at the forefront throughout the modern period: think Gibbon, Macaulay, Herbert Spencer and Keynes.

English intellectual history is a long one. It can reasonably be said to begin in the early eighth century with Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English, which amongst other things firmly establishes the English as a people before England as a kingdom existed (“At present there are in Britain…five languages and four nations – English, British, Irish and Picts…” Book One).

In the late ninth century comes Alfred the Great, a king whose reign was one of constant struggle against the Danes, but who thought enough of learning to teach himself to read as an adult and then engage in translations into Old English of devotional works such as Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy.

From Alfred’s reign comes the Anglo-Saxon Journal (ASJ), a work also written in Old English. (There are nine surviving versions written at different places, eight of which are in Old English with the odd man out being in Old English with a Latin translation). The journal is a history/myth of Britain and a narrative of the settlement of Anglo-Saxons within it until the time of Alfred and then a putative record of and commentary on the great events of English life from the time of Alfred until the middle of the 12th century (like all such medieval works the veracity of the ASJ is questionable, but at worst it gives a flavour of the mentality of those living at the time). The work is unique in medieval Europe for its scope and longevity and is particularly noteworthy for the fact that it was written in the vernacular throughout the three centuries or so of its existence, this at a time when the normal language for writing in Western Europe was Latin.

The Norman Conquest subordinated the English politically, linguistically and socially for the better part of three centuries, but it did not kill English intellectual endeavour. Those three centuries of oppression saw the emergence of many of the ideas which were later to produce the modern world. John of Salisbury produced a work on politics (Policraticus 1159) which was “the first attempt in the Middle Ages at an extended and systematic treatment of political philosophy” (G H Sabine A History of Political Theory p246) and one which argued for a form of limited monarchy and the overthrow of tyrants, views given practical English expression in Magna Carta (1215). The period was also noteworthy for the strong showing of annals and histories, most notably those of Eadmer (Historia Novorum or The History of Recent Events – it covered the period 950-1109), Henry of Huntingdon (Historia Anglorum or History of the English 5BC-1129) and Matthew Paris (Chronica Majora). In addition, the Common Law was formed, English became once more a literary language (Chaucer, Langland), John Wycliffe laid the intellectual roots of the Reformation and, perhaps most impressively, ideas which were later to provide the basis for a true science emerged.

Literature

The quintessential English art is literature. I doubt whether any nation can excel England here, either in quality or international influence. Take a few names from her literary past: Chaucer, Langland, Mallory, Sir Thomas More, Ben Jonson, Kit Marlowe, Bunyan, Dryden, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Sam Johnson, Fielding, Wordsworth, Byron, Austen, the Brontes, George Elliott, Tennyson, Shelley, Keates, Dickens, Trollope, Waugh, Greene and Golding.

And then there is Shakespeare, still being read, performed, analysed and reinterpreted nearly four centuries after his death. Most authors famous in their day do not remain so for long after their death. Those few who are remembered tend to be honoured more in the lauding of the name than by reading or watching. Shakespeare has never been entirely out of fashion. Today he is performed more than ever. His reach stretches throughout the English speaking world and beyond – The Germans in particular have a great liking for the Bard. No playwright in history has been so often performed. He has provided inspiration for men as diverse as Dr Johnson, Freud and Verdi. The man was truly exceptional, arguably unique.

The Intellectual roots of the Reformation In the latter half of the 14th Century John Wycliffe and his followers developed the theological and practical foundations of the Reformation in the second half of the fourteenth century, one hundred and fifty odd years before Luther pinned his theses on the door of the castle church of Wittenberg. Wycliffe questioned the reality of transubstantiation (the Catholic belief that the bread and wine at Communion turn literally into the body and blood of Christ), he attacked the uncontrolled authority of the Pope, he railed against the abuses of simony and indulgences. He advocated a Bible in English and either he or some of his followers (who became known as Lollards) produced a complete translation before the end of the fourteenth century. Lollardy was officially and harshly suppressed early in the next century, but their ideas lingered, both here and abroad, feeding into the European consciousness, for example through the Bohemian Jan Hus.

The concept of science

The development of the concept of what we call science is arguably the most dramatic intellectual event in history, for it utterly changed both the way in which men viewed the world and provided them with the means to mould it ever more completely to their will.

Science is the opposite of “by guess and by God”. It is the process of not only knowing that something has worked before and replicating the event or process to achieve the same result, but of understanding the process behind an event or process.

The classic scientific experiment involves the generation of an hypothesis to be tested (for example, the behaviour of falling objects) or a defined field to be investigated (for example, an animal’s behaviour), the creation of the means of doing so and a strict observance of the rules by which the experiment are to be conducted and meticulous recording of data. That in essence is the scientific method, although in practice science is far from being as neat and regular as that. Nonetheless, it does encapsulate what science is supposed to be about: the rigorous observation and rational interpretation of what is rather than what the mind might fancy to be the case. It is inductive rather than deductive.

The beginnings of the scientific mentality can be found in the minds of two 13th Century Englishmen, the Franciscan Roger Bacon (c1214-1292) and Robert Grossteste (c1168-1253), Chancellor of Oxford then Bishop of Lincoln. Both saw the importance of experimentation and observation, Bacon advocated mathematics as the sure foundation of science while Grosseteste anticipated the idea of the scientific hypothesis. Grossteste was also the first to understood the value of falsification, namely, although any number of observed events cannot prove beyond doubt that something is true, but a it can be proved false by a single case which shows it to be false. There are difficulties with the principle of falsification philosophically but it is in practice a most useful tool for scientists.

Another important intellectual tool for the scientist was developed in the fourteenth Century by the Franciscan, William of Ockham. Ockham formulated the principle of parsimony which we know today as Ockham’s Razor. This is commonly expressed as “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity” or, more bluntly, always choose the simplest explanation for something unless there is good reason not to.

Apart from being philosophically important, this dictum is immensely valuable as a guide for scientists, especially those engaged in the “hard” sciences of physics and chemistry, where the simplest explanation has often been found to be the correct one.

Roger Bacon, Grossteste and William of Ockham were also responsible for a substantial amount of important philosophy related to the other aspects of the physical world and metaphysics. In addition, Ockham was a radical political theorist who fought the conciliar case in the long schism in the papacy (which straddled the fourteenth and fifteenth Centuries), arguing that authority within the Church should not rest solely with the Pope but be delegated in part to a council of the Church.

At the beginning of the Seventeenth Century Francis Bacon moved the idea of the scientific method forward in his Novum Organum (1620), in which he laid out the classic version of scientific method and reinforced the ideas of induction and the importance of falsifiability (Bacon stands as the first in the long line of important British empirical philosophers). Bacon was also responsible for the re-classification of sciences in something approaching their modern form in his Advancement of Learning (1625) and argued vigorously forthe separation of reason and revelation.

On the practical science side there is William Gilbert with his work on magnetism (published in his De Magneto 1600), who was one of the first men, even perhaps the first, known to have conducted a controlled experiment, that is, one in which the experiment is entirely artificial and can be exactly repeated. It is the difference between simply watching falling objects which fall without human intent and creating a situation where falling objects can be observed repeatedly under the same conditions.

The practice of science

England was from the seventeenth century in the vanguard of the rise of science. William Gilbert’s work on magnetism was followed by William Harvey tracing the circulation of the blood, Halley’s work on comets and Robert Hooke’s polymathic span from microscopy to a nascent theory of gravitation. Above all stood the formidable figure of Newton, neurotic, splenetic and marvellous, a man who demonstrated the composition of light and developed the powerful mathematical tool of the differential calculus, besides formulating the laws of motion which form the basis of all mechanical science and the theory of gravitation, which was the most complete explanation of the physical universe until Einstein.

Newton probably had more influence on the world than any man before him. Even today his importance is vast. Quantum mechanics and Einstein’s physics may have superseded the Newtonian as the most advanced explanation of the physical world, but Newton still rules as the practical means of understanding the world above the subatomic.

More generally, Newton provided an intellectual engine which allowed men to make sense of the universe and to see order and predictability where before there had been an order seemingly kept from chaos, and often not that, by the capricious will of a god or gods. The psychological as well as the scientific impact of Newton was great.

To these early scientific pioneers may be added the likes of Joseph Priestly (the practical discoverer of oxygen), John Dalton who proposed the first modern atomic theory), Michael Faraday (who laid the foundations of the science of electromagnetism), J.J. Thompson (who discovered the first atomic particle, the electron), James Chadwick (the discover of the neutron) and Francis Crick (who jointly discovered the structure of DNA with his pupil, the American James Watson).

Then there is Charles Darwin, the man with a strong claim to be the individual who has most shaped the way we view the world, because natural selection provides a universal means of explication for dynamic systems. We can as readily visualise pebbles on a beach being selected for their utility in their environment (from qualities such as crystal structure, size, shape) as we can a horse. As with Newton, Darwin profoundly affected the way men look at the world.

Of all the important scientific fields established since 1600, I can think of only two in which an Englishman did not play a substantial role. Those exceptions are Pasteur’s proof of germ theory and Mendel’s discovery of genes. Box A gives an idea of the scope of English scientific discoveries.

Contents of Box A

Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Gravitation, laws of motion, theory of light.

Robert Hooke (1625-1703). Wrote Micrographia, the first book describing observations made through a microscope. Was the first person to use the word “cell” to identify microscopic structures. Formulated Hooke’s Law – a law of elasticity for solid bodies.

Henry Cavendish (1731-1810). Discovered the composition of water and measured the gravitational attraction between two bodies.

Joseph Priestly, (1733-1804). Discovered Oxygen.

Humphrey Davy (1778-1829). Discovered the elements potassium, sodium, strontium, calcium, magnesium and barium nitrous oxide.

Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Widely regarded as the greatest ever experimental scientist. Conceived the idea of lines of force in magnetism, discovered electromagnetic induction, developed the laws of electrolysis.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Created modern evolutionary theory.

John Prescott Joule (1818-1889). Calculated the mechanical equivalent of heat.

John Dalton, (1766-1844). Created modern atomic theory.

Sir J J Thomson (1856-1940). Discovered the electron and made the first attempt to represent atoms in terms of positive and negative energy.

Sir James Chadwick 1891-1974. Discovered the neutron.

Francis Crick (1916- ). Joint discoverer of the structure of DNA.

End of contents of Box A

The Enlightenment

In his “Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world”, the historian Roy Porter remarks how peculiar it is “that historians have so little to say about the role of English thinkers in the European Enlightenment as a whole” (p3). Peculiar indeed when one considers the English intellectual personnel of the 17th and 18th Centuries and the high reputation English institutions and ideas had amongst the leading lights of the continental Enlightenment, especially in the country which is generally represented as the powerhouse of Enlightenment thinking, France. Here is the philosophe of philosophes, Voltaire, at full Anglophile admire:

“The English are the only people on earth who have been able to prescribe the limits of Kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last established that wise Government, where the prince is all powerful to do good, and at the same time is restrain’d from committing evil; where the Nobles are great without insolence, tho’ there are no vassals; and where the People share in the government without confusion.” Lettres philosophiques on Lettres Anglais (1775).

A strong argument can be made for the English Enlightenment not only existing but occurring a century or so before that of any other nation and subsequently providing much of the basis for the general Enlightenment movement.

Consider these figures from the seventeenth century: William Gilbert (science, especially magnetism), Francis Bacon (philosophy and science), Thomas Hobbes (philosophy), John Locke (philosophy), Thomas Harrington (economics and sociology), William Harvey (biology/medicine), Robert Hooke (polymathic scientist and technologist), John Rae (biologist), Edmund Halley (astronomy), Isaac Newton (mathematics and physics). What did they have in common other than intellectual distinction? They were all driven by the idea of reason, by the belief that the world could be understood rationally.

That is the real essence of the Enlightenment, the belief in rationality, in particular, the belief that the world is subject to physical laws, that God does not intervene capriciously, that the world is not governed by magic. Such ideas did not preclude a God or prevent an intense relationship with the putatively divine, but they did encase God within a rational system of thought in which His action was limited, voluntarily or otherwise. Newton may have been utterly fixated with the numerology of the Bible but he believed the world was ordered according to physical laws.

From the belief that the universe is organised rationally comes the corollary that it can be understood, that everything is governed by laws which can be discovered by men. This idea pre-dated Newton, but it was his ideas, most notably his laws of motion and theory of gravity, that elevated the idea to almost a secular religion. During the next century intellectuals took the example of Newton’s inanimate mechanistic physical world and extrapolated the idea to every aspect of existence, from biology to philosophy to social policy. If only enough was known, if only enough effort was made, then everything, of thisworld at least, could be understood and controlled and everything could be the subject of rational decision making.

The 18th century Enlightenment had another aspect, an association with the democratic or at least a wish that the power of kings should be greatly curtailed – the Voltaire quote given above is a good example of the mentality. This also has its roots in England. The ferment of the English Civil war not only produced proto-democratic political movements such as the Levellers, it also started Parliament along the road of being more than a subordinate constitutional player by forcing it to act as not only a legislature but an executive. Stir in the experience of the Protectorate, simmer for 30 years or so of the restored Stuart kings, mix in the Glorious Revolution of 1689 which resulted in the Bill of Rights and established the English crown as being in the gift of Parliament and season with half a century of the German Georges and you have the British (in reality the English) constitution which was so admired by Voltaire, who thought it quite perfect, and which gave the American colonists the inspiration for their own political arrangements (president = king, Senate = Lords, House of Representatives = Commons, with a Constitution and Bill of Rights heavily influenced by the English Bill of Rights.)

The Industrial Revolution

Of all the social changes which have occurred in human history, none has been so profound as the process of industrialisation. The two previous great general amendments to human life – farming and urbanisation – pale into insignificance. Before industrialisation, man lived primarily from the land and animals whether from farming, husbandry or hunter-gathering. In the most advanced civilisations, the vast majority of populations lived outside large towns and cities. Even in industrialising England a majority of the population derived their living directly from the land as late as the 1830s. France did not become a predominantly urban nation until the 1930s. With industrialisation came not merely a change in the material circumstances, but profound social alteration. There arose much greater opportunity to move from the small world of the village. The massive increase in wealth eventually made even the poor rich enough to have aspirations. Sufficient numbers of the wealthier classes became guilty enough about abject poverty existing beside great wealth that the condition of the poor was further mitigated by greater educational opportunity, welfare provision and legislation regulating the abuse of workers by employers. Political horizons were expanded by the extension of the franchise.

The industrial revolution altered the balance of power throughout the world. David Landes “In the wealth and Poverty of Nations” describes the effect succinctly: “The industrial revolution made some countries richer, others (relatively) poorer; or more accurately, some countries made an industrial revolution and became rich; and others did not and stayed poor.”(p168). Prior to industrialisation, the disparity in wealth between states, regions and even continents was relatively small. Come the Industrial Revolution and massive disparities begin to appear. For Dr Landes, it is to the success or otherwise in industrialising which is the primary cause of present disparities in national wealth.

All of this tremendous amendment to human existence occurred because the one and only bootstrapped Industrial Revolution took place in England. Why England? David Landes in the “Wealth and Poverty of Nations” sees the historical process of industrialisation as twofold.

First, comes a pre-industrial preparatory period in which irrationality of thought is gradually replaced by scientific method and what he calls “autonomy of intellectual inquiry”(p201), that is, thought divorced from unquestioned reliance on authority, irrationality, especially superstition. At the same time technology begins to be something more than by-guess-and-by-God. This gives birth to industrialisation by creating both the intellectual climate and the acquired knowledge, both scientific and technological, necessary for the transformation from traditional to modern society. It is as good an explanation as any and fits the flow of England’s historical development. It is not utterly implausible to suggest that without England the world might have had no Industrial Revolution. Those who would scoff at such a proposition should consider the cold facts: even with England and Britain’s example to follow no other nation matched her industrial development until the 1870′s and then the first country to do so was a state ultimately derived from England, namely the USA. Nor did England produce an industrial revolution only in England, they actively exported and financed it throughout the world, for example, most of the European railway building of the years 1840-70 was the result of British engineers and money.

Some may point to scientific advance in Europe from 1600 onwards as reason to believe that industrialisation would have been achieved without England. It is true that Europe advanced scientifically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but scientific knowledge is no guarantee of technological progress. Moreover, a good deal of that scientific advance came from England. Nor does scientific knowledge have any natural connection with the severe social upheaval required for a transformation from the land-working dominated pre-industrial state to capitalism. Indeed, the landowners of pre-industrial Europe had a vested interest in not promoting industrial advance. Moreover, in many parts of Europe, particularly the East, feudal burdens became greater not less after 1500. This was so even in as advanced a country as France. Consequently, the widespread social mobility which historians have generally thought necessary to promote a bootstrapped industrial revolution simply did not exist in Europe at the beginning of the British Industrial revolution. Even the country most like England in its commercial development, the Netherlands, became socially and politically ossified in the Eighteenth century, with a bourgeoise developing into an aristocracy and representative government narrowed to what was in effect a parliament of nobles.

There will be those – Scots in particular – who will chafe at the idea that the industrial revolution was dependent upon England. The facts are against them. Scotland before the union with England (1707) was a remarkably poor state. Nor, despite its much vaunted educational system – supposedly much the superior of England – had it produced many men of international importance. Read a general history of Europe, either old or modern, and you will find precious few Scots mentioned on their own account before the Union. The names John Eringa and Duns Scotus with perhaps a nod to John Knox are the best the reader may hope for, and the former two had to leave Scotland to make their names. If any other Scotsman who lived before the Union is mentioned, he will be noticed only because of his connection with another country, most commonly England. It required the union with England to give Scots a larger stage to act upon. Without the union, the likes of David Hume, Adam Smith and James Watt would in all probability have been roses which bloomed unseen in the desert air. That is not to decry the talents and contributions of Scots, which are considerable, merely to describe a necessary sociological condition for their realisation. Let me demonstrate how much of an English enterprise the Industrial

Revolution was by using the example of the development of steam power. Contrary to many a schoolboy’s imagining, James Watt did not invent the steam engine. That was the province of Englishmen. The Marquess of Worcester may have produced a working steam engine on his estates in 1663; James Savery certainly did in 1698. This was improved by another Englishman, Thomas Newcomen. Their machines were crude beam engines, but the technological Rubicon had been crossed.

It is true that the Scotsman Watt’s improvements to the steam engine – the conversion of linear to rotary action and the introduction of a separate condenser – were profoundly important and provided the means to extend the use of steam engines from their limited applications in pumping water from mines. But it should be noted that he had to come to England to achieve his improvements through his association with an English entrepreneur of genius, Mathew Boulton, who in his Soho works in Birmingham had probably the best engineering facilities then in the world. It was also Boulton who pressed Watt to develop the conversion of linear to rotary action. It is worth adding that Watt was a timid, retiring personality who left to his own devices would probably have achieved little of practical consequence. Moreover, within a generation of Watt’s improvements, the English engineer, Rchard Trevithick had greatly improved on Watt’s engine by producing high pressure steam engine. It is also true that the very wide ranging patents granted to Watt and Boulton almost certainly delayed the development of the steam engine.

But before steam could play its full role there had to be a revolution in iron production. This was accomplished by Englishmen. Until Abraham Darby began smelting iron with coke made from coal in the early 1700s, iron making in Europe was an expensive and uncertain business carried on in small foundries using charcoal to fire the kilns (an ironmaker named Dudley claimed to have used coal successfully for smelting as early as 1619 but died without establishing a business to carry the work on).

Compared with coal, charcoal was in short supply. Worse, it did not produce the same intensity of heat as coal converted into coke. Darby and his son solved the basic problem of smelting with coke made from coal. Henry Cort’s puddling process allowed cast-iron to be refined to remove the brittleness. A little later Benjamin Huntsman improved steel making. In the middle of the next century the Bessemer revolutionised steel production to such a degree that its price fell dramatically enough to make steel no longer a luxury but the common material of construction. All these advances were made by Englishmen.

Large scale organisation is also intellectually demanding. If a ready and cheaper supply of iron was a necessary condition for the industrial revolution, so was the very idea of large scale manufactories using machines. Undertakings employing hundreds of men on one site were not unknown before the 18 century – a clothier named Jack of Newbury had a factory employing 500 in Tudor times – but they were very rare. In 18th Century England such enterprises became if not commonplace, at least not extraordinary. By the next century they were the norm.

Industry became for the first time geared to a mass market. Nor was this new method of manufacturing confined to the necessities and banalities of life. Factories such as Josiah Wedgewood’s at Etruria manufactured high quality and imaginative china directed deliberately at the growing middle classes. All the most successful 18th century machines for mass production were developed by Englishmen. Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s mule, James Hargreaves spinning jenny.

Once the first blast of the industrial revolution had passed, the fundamental fine tuning was undertaken by Englishmen, with men such as Whitworth leading the way with machine tools and new standards of exactness in measurement and industrial cutting and finishing. All very boring to the ordinary man, but utterly essential for the foundation of a successful industrial society.

Many vital industries since have originated in England. To take a few, George Stephenson produced the first practical railway (the railway probably did more than anything to drive the Industrial Revolution because it allowed a true national market to operate within England); Brunel issued in the age of the ocean going steamship; William Perkins laid the foundation for the modern chemical industry by discovering the first synthetic dye; the first electronic computer was designed in Britain, after theoretical conception by the Englishman, Alan Turing. (In the previous century another Englishman, Charles Babbage, designed but did not finished building the first programmable machine.)

Alongside the development of manufacturing ran that of agriculture. The enclosure movement was already well advanced by 1700. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was effectively finished. Not merely feudalism but the peasantry were gone. The old, inefficient open-field system was a dead letter. With enclosure came agricultural innovation.

In the eighteenth century we have Jethro Tull, whose seed drill greatly reduced the amount of seed needed for sowing, Robert Bakewell whose selective breeding greatly increased the size of sheep and cattle and “Turnip” Townsend who greatly increased crop efficiency by various mean such as the marling of sandy soil. The importance of such developments cannot be overestimated because the population of Britain rose so dramatically in the next century.

The technological inventions and discoveries made by the English are legion. Box B gives some idea of their importance and range.

Contents of Box B

Thomas Savery (1650-1715). Invented the first commercial steam engine – a steam pump.

Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729). Improved Savery’s engine by introducing the piston.

Richard Trevithick (1771 – 1833). Invented the high pressure steam engine. Built the first steam locomotive.

George Stephenson (1781-1848). Made the railway a practical reality.

Abraham Darby (1678-1717). Developed the process of smelting iron using coke.

Sir Henry Bessemer, 1813-1898. Devised a process for making steel on a large scale.

James Hargreaves (1722-1778). Invented the spinning jenny.

John Kay (1733-1764). Invented the flying shuttle.

Samuel Crompton (1753-1827). Invented the spinning mule.

Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) Invented the waterframe.

Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823). Invented the power loom.

John Harrison (1693-1776) First to build watches accurate enough to solve the longitude measurement problem.

Edward Jenner (1743-1823). Developed scientific vaccination.

Joseph Lister (1827-1912). Developed antisepsis.

Sir Joseph Whitworth (1803-1887) standardised screw threads, produced first true plane surfaces in metal, developed ductile steel.

Henry Maudslay (1771-1831). Invented the screw-cutting lathe and the first bench micrometer that was capable of measuring to one ten thousandth of an inch.

Joseph Bramah (1748-1814). Invented the hydraulic press.

John Walker (1781- 1859). Invented the first friction matches.

John Smeaton (1724-1792) made the first modern concrete (hydraulic cement).

Joseph Aspdin (1788-1855) invented Portland Cement, the first true artificial cement.

Humphrey Davy (1778-1829). Invented the first electric light, the arc lamp.

Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Invented the electric motor.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859). Built the first really large steam ships – the Great Britain, Great Western, Great Eastern.

Sir Isaac Pitman (1813-1897). Devised the most widely used modern shorthand.

Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802 – 1875). Developed an electric telegraph at the same time as Samuel Morse.

Rowland Hill (1795-1879). Invented adhesive postage stamps.

John Herschel (1792-1871). Invented the blueprint.

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) Invented the negative-positive photography and latent image shorter exposure time.

Sir Joseph William Swan (1828-1914). Invented the dry photographic plate. Invented, concurrently with Edison, the light bulb.

Sir William Henry Perkin (1838-1907). Created the first artificial dye – aniline purple or mauveine – and the first artificial scent, coumarin.

Alexander Parkes (1813-90). Created the first artificial plastic, Parkensine.

Sir George Cayley (1773-1857). Worked out the principles of aerodynamics, his “On Ariel Navigation” showed that a fixed wing aircraft with a power system for propulsion, and a tail to assist in the control of the airplane, would be the best way to allow man to fly. Also invented the caterpillar track.

Sir Frank Whittle (1907-1996). Took out the first patents for a turbojet.

Sir Christopher Cockerell (1910-1999). Invented the hovercraft.

Charles Babbage (1792-1871). Worked out the basic principles of the computer.

Alan Turin (1912-1954). Widely considered the father of modern computer science – worked out the principles of the digital computer.

Tim Berners-Lee (1955-). Invented the World Wide Web defining HTML (hypertextmarkup language), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators).

End of contents on Box B

Just a brief sketch

This article is just a brief sketch of what the English have achieved intellectually. There is much which has been either omitted or mentioned too briefly, for example, I have barely touched on the considerable accomplishments in literature, philosophy, history. But there is enough here to show that England has been so far from an intellectual backwater troughout her history that she may be lausibly considered the primary cause of the modern world and its way of thinking and existing. Indeed, without England it is difficult to imagine the world as it is today.

To have produced Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin alone would have been a great thing for any nation, but for England they are merely the cherries on the top of a very substantial intellectual cake. Beneath them sit dozens of others of serious human consequence: the likes of Ockham, Chaucer, Wycliffe, Francis Bacon, Marlowe, Halley, Hobbes, Locke, Gibbon, Priestly, Cavendish, Newcomen, Faraday, Austen, Dickens, Keynes, Turing… ‘Nuff said.

The English in North America – Locating the Hidden Diaspora

http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/browse/ne/uninews/searchenglish

Locating the Hidden Diaspora

In search of the English

Historians at Northumbria University are embarking on a groundbreaking project to explore why “Englishness” has been overlooked in America, while other ethnic groups are celebrated and well-known.

Englishness as an ethnicity is now being rediscovered and defined in opposition to other competing groups

The team, led by Professor Don MacRaild, Dr Tanja Bueltmann and Dr David Gleeson, argue that the existence of English cultural communities in North America has been largely ignored by traditional historians who see the English as assimilating into Anglo-American culture without any need to overtly express a separate English ethnicity.

Their initial research has found that from the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, North American towns and cities boasted organisations such as the Sons of St George, where traditional English food and folk culture were maintained. The evidence suggests that the English were distinctly aware of being an ethnic group within the emerging settlements at the time, exhibiting and maintaining their ethnicity in similar ways to the Irish, Scottish and German colonists. Yet this does not appear to be recognised in history.

The three-year project entitled ‘Locating the Hidden Diaspora: The English in North America in Transatlantic Perspective, 1760-1950’, has received £286,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It aims to take a fresh look at English ethnicity using thousands of untapped sources, including manuscripts and newspaper articles from this period. The team believes that their research will have wider reaching implications in shedding light on current debates in UK identity politics and Englishness.

Professor MacRaild said: “It struck us as highly surprising that, though the English in North America formed an array of ethnic clubs and societies, such as the St George’s Society, no one has shown much interest in these associations, their activities and English cultural legacies.

“The English were one of the largest European groups of immigrants in the US yet, while they settled alongside the other migrants who powerfully exerted ethnic awareness, the English are not ascribed the attributes of ethnicity associated with other immigrants.

“The Irish, Scots, Germans, and many other European ethnic groups have been subjected to dozens if not hundreds of studies, but not so the English. The standard historian’s answer has been that the English assimilated more easily to Anglo-American culture so removing the need for ethnic expression. However, far from being an invisible group within a world of noticeably ethnicised European immigrants, the English consciously ethnicised themselves in an active way. ”

Evident expressions of Englishness are found in English immigrants to America celebrating St George’s Day, toasting Queen Victoria, marking Shakespeare’s birthday, and Morris dancing. Benevolence was also of great importance, with many English associations being involved in providing charity – from meal tickets to ‘Christmas cheer’ – towards English immigrants experiencing hardships.

The team believe that Englishness has been overlooked by historians because, as the founding colonists, the English were the benchmark against which all other ethnic groups measured themselves.

Ironically, England’s relatively recent decline in global influence and the cultural changes produced by mass immigration and regional devolution has sparked increasing attempts to rediscover and define Englishness – seen in calls to celebrate St George’s Day as a national holiday and the rise in the English Defence League (EDL).

“At present,” Professor MacRaild argues, “Englishness in England is bedevilled with fears about right-wing extremists, football hooligans, and the uses and abuses of the now prevalent St George’s flag. We hope a project which will demonstrate the vibrancy of Englishness beyond England’s shores will contribute to debates about how Englishness fits into today’s multi-ethnic and increasingly federal political culture.”

Dr Tanja Bueltmann, an expert in the history of ethnic associations in the Scottish and English diasporas, added: “The growing movement for an independent Scotland has raised the issue of “Britishness” and “Englishness” in the wider society and influenced national debate about identity.

“Englishness as an ethnicity is now being rediscovered as a result of a crisis of confidence, partly influenced by the increasing fluidity of national borders and migration. Englishness is again being defined in opposition to other competing groups.”

Dr David Gleeson, historian of nineteenth-century America, said: “The project also has implications for the other side of the Atlantic. Recognising the English as a distinct diaspora gives us a clearer picture of the development of an American identity in that it complicates the idea of a coherent ‘Anglo’ cultural mainstream and indicates the fluid and adaptable nature of what it meant and means to be an American or Canadian.”

The research project will produce books, articles, an exhibition, and a series of public lectures to expatriate community groups throughout North America. The team will also work with local folk groups, including the Hexham Morris Men, and Folkworks at the Sage, Gateshead, to disseminate their findings to the wider public. International partners also working on the project are based in Guelph and Kansas Universities and from the College of Charleston.

Dr Gleeson added: “Perhaps English-Americans and Canadians will make a ‘Homecoming’, similar to the one organised by the Scottish government in 2009 for those of Scottish background, to re-establish connections with the land of their ancestors.”

Date posted: May 24, 2011

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Locating the Hidden Diaspora

The English in North America in Transatlantic Perspective, 1760-1950

Starting in 2011, the project will be funded by the AHRC for three years (Standard Route Research Grant).

Project Context

Emigration from the British Isles became one of Europe’s most significant population movements after 1600. Yet compared to what has been written about the migration of Scots and Irish, relatively little energy has been expended on the numerically more significant English flows. In fact, the Scottish and Irish Diasporas in North America, together with those of the German, Italian, Jewish and Black Diasporas, are well known and studied, but there is virtual silence on the English. Why, then, is there no English Diaspora? Why has little been said about the English other than to map their main emigration flows? Did the English simply disappear into the host population? Or were they so fundamental, and foundational, to the Anglo-phone, Protestant cultures of the evolving British World that they could not be distinguished in the way Catholic Irish or continental Europeans were? Given the recent vogue for these other diasporas, our project seeks to uncover the hidden English Diaspora in North America.

Aims & Objectives

The project’s overall objective is to offer a knowledge-shaping new reading of English ethnicity abroad, particularly in North America, by exploding enduring historical mythologies about the absence of a strong ethnic identity among emigre English between the 17th and 20th centuries. Some of the key issues of concern are:

English ethnic associationism: examining aspects of English clubs, societies and sociability around the Diaspora.

English folk traditions in the Diaspora: locating the popular culture of celebrating particular forms of Englishness.
English sporting traditions: examining the export around the world of sports from cricket, rugby and association football to Cumberland wrestling.
English literary and dramatic cultures: exploring the cultural transfer of key literary figures around the Diaspora.

Project Team

The English Diaspora team is led by Prof Don MacRaild, Dr Tanja Bueltmann and Dr David Gleeson. Researchers associated with the project are Dr James McConnel (History), as well as Dr Monika Smialkowska(English), Visiting Fellow Dr Mike Sutton and Dr Dean Allen (Stellenbosch). Dr Joe Hardwick from History also works on related themes.

You can contact us using our project email address: az.englishdiaspora@northumbria.ac.uk

Where are the English-Americans?

There are Irish-Americans, Scots-Americans, Scotch-Irish-Americans, Welsh-Americans, Polish-Americans, German-Americans , Italian-Americans, Korean-Americans, Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Colombian Americans, Dominican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Spanish Americans, and Salvadoran Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Iranian-Americans, and a host of other hyphenated citizens in the USA. Sometimes the hyphenation is based not on nationality but religion, for example, Muslim-American or Jewish-American. Sometimes it is based on race as in African-American or Asian-American.

There is one seemingly glaring omission from the catalogue of the culturally undecided: English-Americans. I say seemingly because there is a most obvious explanation for their absence: England was the cultural founder of the USA. Englishness is the default culture of the USA. Consequently, when the English have emigrated to the USA over the centuries they have not come to a land they felt was wholly alien or with a sense of victimhood or paranoia about their new home.

The English were the numerically dominant settlers from the Jamestown settlement in 1607 until the Revolution. Moreover, and this is the vital matter, they were overwhelmingly the dominant settlers for the first one hundred years. At the time of the first US census English descended settlers formed, according to the historical section of the American Bureau of Census, sixty per cent of the white population (http://tinyurl.com/67faop70 )and the majority of the rest of the white population was from the non-English parts of Britain ( In 1790 the population of the USA was 3,929,214 of which 3,172,006 were white and 757,208 black. http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab01.pdf).
It is possible that English ancestry was downplayed in the 1790 census and for much of the 19^th century because of the anti-British feeling caused by the American Revolution and various disputes afterwards such as the war of 1812. If so, the under recording of English ancestry would be amplified as the population expanded as time went on as the descendants of those wrongly classified continued the incorrect classification. However, whichever figures are taken one thing is certain, by 1790 the template for American society was cut and most importantly English was the dominant language, a fact which alone shows who were the dominant group for no minority could force a language on a majority.

In the House of Commons on 22 March 1775 Edmund Burke made a plea for understanding of the American colonists’ demands which was firmly based on their Englishness:

“…the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen…. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles. The people are Protestants… a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it…. My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government,—they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once
understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation,—the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect
will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you…”(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15198/15198-h/15198-h.htm#CONCILIATION_WITH_THE_COLONIES).

The colonists for their part more often than not themselves as English. Even the rebels placed their rebellion on the ground that they were defending true English liberty, a liberty that had been usurped by the king. The Declaration of independence is a catalogue of breaches of what the colonists considered were their rights as Englishmen. (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/american-declaration-of-independence/)

The early English predominance may not seem important at first glance because of the heavy non-Anglo-Saxon immigration which occurred from the eighteenth century onwards. Would not, a reasonable man might ask, would not the later immigration swamp
the earlier simply because of its greater scale? The answer is no because the numbers of non-Anglo Saxons coming into America were always very small compared with the existing population of the USA. At any time in the development of the USA the bulk of the population were practisers of a general culture which strongly reflected that of the
original colonisers, namely the English.

A distinction needs to be made between settlers and immigrants. Those colonising a land do not come with the intent to assimilate into an existing culture but to transplant their own ways onto fresh territory. The Greeks in the ancient world are a prime historical example.

The English who came to America in the 17^th century were intent on creating a world in their own cultural image, albeit with certain variations most notably different religious regimes. This they did in ways which remain to this day.

When immigrants enter a country their descendants will generally in time adopt at least some of the social and cultural colouring of the native population. Where there is no barrier such as racial difference or membership of an ethnic group with a very strong sense of identity such as the Jews, assimilation will often be complete within a generation or two. Even in a situation of deliberate conquest, the invader if fewer in number than the conquered – as is normally the case – will become integrated through intermarriage
and the general pressure of the culture of the majority population working through the generations. The demographic working out of the Norman Conquest over several centuries as the French invaders became English is a good example.

In the creation of a society, the further the distance from the founding culture the greater the need to maintain a sense of separateness. It is interesting that other missing hyphenated Americans are Canadian-American, Australian-American and New Zealand-American. That is plausibly because they are coming from societies which derive ultimately from England and which were founded by predominantely English settlers. That does raise the question of why the non-English Britons who went to the USA have self-consciously maintained their hyphenated status, most notably the Scots and the Irish. The answer most probably lies in the fact that they felt themselves to be peoples who were subject to England. In short, they were people who bore a grudge against England. It is worth adding that Americans who call themselves Scots-American or Irish-American today are indistinguishable from American-Americans in everything except for a sentimental attachment to their Celtic ancestry and a residual polishing of an historical victimhood.

The demographic significance of the English in the USA remains to this day. It is true that the percentage of those formally identifying themselves as of English origin has diminished. The 1980 US Census showed 26.34% of the US population (49, 598,035) claiming English ancestry (http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/pc80-s1-10/tab02.pdf). There is no up to date census information, but the US Census Office’s 2008 American Community Survey shows only 9% of respondents claiming English ancestry, although that still makes them the third most numerous national group after the Germans and the Irish (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ADPTable?_bm=y&-qr_name=ACS_2008_1YR_G00_DP2&-geo_id=01000US&-ds_name=ACS_2008_1YR_G00_&-_lang=en&-redoLog=false&-format=).

This strong diminution in 28 years makes no sense if it is taken as a literal reduction. Common sense says that millions of English descended people have not suddenly vanished from the USA. Nor, in view of their early predominance and continuing substantial emigration of the English to the USA after independence, does it make any sense for there to be more Americans with Irish or German ancestry than English ancestry.

The explanation for the fall is plausibly threefold: as the founding culture of the USA those with English simply think of themselves as Americans; as the oldest group in the USA, English ancestry on average is probably far more distant than other ethnic groups and lastly many of those with English ancestry will have mixed that ancestry with other groups especially more recent arrivals and will have claimed that allegiance instead of English. There is also the temptation in an age of group politics for people to claim an ancestry which they feel will be most advantageous to them. As the English in the USA do not make a song and dance about being English, other groups which do are likely to attract
those with a divided ancestry. The prime example of this is the way American presidents claim Irish ancestry no matter how tenuous whilst often ignoring much more substantial English ancestry. (http://presidentsparents.com/ancestry.html). There is also the general pressure of political correctness which casts WASPs (into which category English-Americans would generally fall) as an abusive and dislikeable elite ethnicity. That may
add to a general propensity to not identify as English.

A strong pointer to the continuing English connection with the USA are surnames. In 2000 the US Census Office released statistics showing that of the top ten most frequently occurring surnames in the USA, eight were of English/British origin. http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/data/2000surnames/index.html

Because of her origins and history Englishness is spread throughout US society. Her law is founded on English common law. The most famous of American law officers is the English office of sheriff. Congress imitates the eighteenth century British Constitution
(President = King; Senate = Lords; House of Representatives = The House of Commons) with, of course, the difference of a codified constitution. (It would incidentally be truer to describe the British Constitution as uncodified rather than unwritten). It is an irony that their system of government has retained a large degree of the monarchical and aristocratic principles whilst that of Britain has removed power remorselessly from King and aristocracy and placed it resolutely in the hands of elected representatives who have no formal mandate beyond the representation of their constituents.

The prime political texts of the American revolution were those of the Englishmen John Locke and Tom Paine. The American Constitution is designed to alleviate faults in the
British Constitution not to abrogate it utterly. The first ten amendments which form the American Bill of Rights draw their inspiration from the English Bill of Rights granted by William of Orange.

The American Revolution was conducted by men whose whole thought was in the English political tradition. English influence is written deeply into the American landscape. Take a map of the States and see how many of the place names are English, even outside the original thirteen colonies which formed the USA. Note that they are divided into parishes and counties.

Above all other cultural influences stands the English language. Bismarck thought that the fact that America spoke English was the most significant political fact of his time. I am inclined to agree with him. But at a more fundamental level, the simple fact that English is spoken by Americans as their first language means that their thought processes will be broadly similar to that of the English. Language is the ultimate colonisation of a people.

Moreover, the English spoken by the majority of Americans is still very much the English of their forebears. It is, for example, far less mutated than the English spoken in India. The English have little difficulty in understanding USA-born white Americans whatever their regional origin. Americans often affect not to understand English accents other than received pronunciation, but it is amazing how well they understand them when they need something. Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “America and England are two countries divided by a common language” was witty but, as with so much of what he said, utterly at variance with reality.

There is a special relationship between England and America but it is not the one beloved of politicians. The special relationship is one of history and culture. American culture is an evolved Englishness, much added to superficially, but which is still remarkably and recognisably English. English-American would be a tautology.

The importance of the continuing influence of the English for the USA can be seen by imagining what the situation would be were no unhyphenated Americans, if there was no group within the population which was devoid of a sense of victimhood, of being ill-at-ease with the society in which its members were born and raised. All that would be left would
be a society in which every racial or ethnic group competed,. There would be no stability or sense of social cohesion. At worst, it could be a recipe for incessant civil war. The English descended and English assimilated part of the population which sees itself as simply American provides the ballast which holds US society upright.

Notable English technologists and inventors

Thomas Savery (1650-1715). Invented the first commercial steam engine -a steam pump.

Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729). Improved Savery’s engine by introducing the piston.

Richard Trevithick (1771 – 1833). Invented the high pressure steam engine. Built the first steam locomotive.

George Stephenson (1781-1848). Made the railway a practical reality.

Abraham Darby (1678-1717). Developed the process of smelting iron using coke.

Sir Henry Bessemer, 1813-1898. Devised a process for making steel on a large scale.

James Hargreaves (1722-1778). Invented the spinning jenny.

John Kay (1733-1764). Invented the flying shuttle.

Samuel Crompton (1753-1827). Invented the spinning mule.

Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) Invented the waterframe.

Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823). Invented the power loom.

John Harrison (1693-1776) First to build watches accurate enough to solve the longitude measurement problem.

Edward Jenner (1743-1823). Developed vaccination.

Joseph Lister (1827-1912). Developed antisepsis.

Sir Joseph Whitworth (1803-1887) standardised screw threads, produced first true plane surfaces in metal, developed ductile steel.

Henry Maudslay (1771-1831). Invented the screw-cutting lathe and the first bench micrometer that was capable of measuring to one ten thousandth of an inch.

Joseph Bramah (1748-1814). Invented the hydraulic press.

John Walker (1781- 1859). Invented the first friction matches.

John Smeaton (1724-1792) made the first modern concrete (hydraulic cement).

Joseph Aspdin (1788-1855) invented Portland Cement, the first true artificial cement.

Humphrey Davy (1778-1829). Invented the first electric light, the arc lamp.

Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Invented the electric motor.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859). Built the first really large steam ships – the Great Britain, Great Western, Great Eastern.

Sir Isaac Pitman (1813-1897). Devised the most widely used modern shorthand.

Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802 – 1875). Developed an electric telegraph at the same time as Samuel Morse.

Rowland Hill (1795-1879). Invented adhesive postage stamps.

John Herschel (1792-1871). Invented the blueprint.

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) Invented the negative-positive photography and latent image shorter exposure time.

Sir Joseph William Swan (1828-1914). Invented the dry photographic plate. Invented, concurrently with Edison, the light bulb.

Sir William Henry Perkin (1838-1907). Created the first artificial dye – aniline purple or mauveine – and the first artificial scent, coumarin.

Alexander Parkes (1813-90). Created the first artificial plastic, Parkensine.

Sir Frank Whittle (1907-1996). Took out the first patents for a Turbojet.

Sir Christopher Cockerell (1910-1999). Invented the hovercraft.

Charles Babbage (1792-1871). Worked out the basic principles of the computer.

Alan Turin (1912-1954). Widely considered the father of modern computer science – worked out the principles of the digital computer.

Tim Berners-Lee (1955-). Invented the World Wide Web defining HTML (hypertextmarkup language), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators).

The development of the franchise in England

Serious disquiet with the Commons’ electoral qualifications, provisions and practices began in Elizabeth’s reign and reached its highest pitch, prior to the 1640s, during the years 1621 to 1623.

The discontent was provoked primarily by the situation in the boroughs rather than the counties, Since 1430, the county electorate had been restricted to the forty shilling freeholder, which qualification had become almost sacrosanct by the end of the sixteenth century – only one proposal before the 1640s (in 1621) was made to raise or lower it. Tudor inflation had greatly lowered the barrier it represented (40 shillings in 1600 was worth perhaps 15 shillings at 1430 values) and it is reasonable to suppose this considerably increased the rural electorate. Also, there is evidence to suggest that the qualification was not always enforced and some county electorates may have had a very broad manhood franchise indeed prior to 1640.

Borough franchises were anything but uniform. In some the whole ‘commonalty’ (all householders) or even all ’potwallers’ (men with their own hearths) voted. In others the vote was restricted to all taxpayers (‘scot and lot’), freemen of the town, or those in possession of burgage property. In extreme cases the vote might be restricted to the ruling corporation. Such discrepancies of representation were aggravated by a distribution of borough seats which took insufficient account of the demographic changes of the past two centuries, during which time England’s population increased very substantially, especially during the 16th century, perhaps by as much as a third. These facts prepared a well mulched political soil for agitation for more equal borough representation, both in terms of the breadth of the franchise and in the number of seats.

The attitude of Parliament to the franchise was mixed. The Lords had a similar interest to the Crown in distrusting broad franchises. The peers often effectively controlled seats in the Commons. They also had a natural inclination to deny the ‘commonality’ any voice in the affairs of the kingdom. Conversely, it was obviously in the Commons’ interest to increase electorates, where such increases reduced the Monarch’s’ and the Lord’s opportunities for patronage.

There is particular evidence that the Puritans favoured larger electorates, at least in so far as it suited their own purposes. At Warwick in 1586 Job Throckmorton was elected after he threatened to invoke the right of the ‘commonality to vote. In 1587 John Field remarked to colleague ‘seeing we cannot compass these things by suit or dispute, it is the multitude and people that must bring the discipline to pass which we desire.’ (J.H. Plunb. The Growth of the electorate 1600-1715). As Puritans displaced many court nominees and the creatures of aristocrats, this is significant in view of the attitude of the Commons towards electoral qualifications between 1621 and 1628.

By 1621, the Commons had gained the right to decide disputed elections and to revive lapsed borough seats and even make new creations, The tendency until 1628 was to decide in favour of wider franchise and to allow all the ‘commonality’ to vote. At Bletchingly (1624) and Lewes (1628) ‘all the inhabitants,’ were to be electors’, and at Cirencester (1624) all ‘resients:’. In the case of Pontefract in 1624 a general principle was formulated:

‘There being no certain custom nor prescription, who should be the electors and who not, we must have recourse to common right which, to this purpose was held to be, that more than the freeholders only ought to have voices in the election, namely all men, inhabitants, householders resient within the borough.’ (J.H, Plunb. The Growth of the electorate 1600-1715).

Bills were introduced to regulate electionsand standardise,the franchise in 1621, 1623, 1625, 1628 and 1640, The 1621 Bill is of particular interest because it proposed that the 40/- freeholder qualification be increased to £4 and to admit £10 copyholders by inheritance. The borough proposals add no more than the various decisions on individual cases (in fact even less), for electors were to be freemen except where they numbered less than twenty-four, in which case all inhabitants not in receipt of alms were to be included,

The religious radical William Prynne put it even more plainly,’Before this Petition and Act every inhabitant and commoner in each county had voice in the election of Knights, whether he were a freeholder or not, or had a freehold only of one penny, six pence or twelve pence by the year as they now claim of late in most cities and boroughs where popular elections are admitted’ (K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise p.64).

It is a sobering thought that if the Statute of 1430 did disenfranchise large numbers of county electors, the county franchise may have been wider in medieval England than it was to be again before the end of the nineteenth century and conceivably wider than the Franchise before the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

What of the position of those deemed to be dependents: the servants, wage-earners and almstakers? Resident household servants were generally considered beyond the electoral pale, although ‘servants’ were said to have voted in the Worcestershire county election of 1604. Wage-earners certainly did so, for those in the ‘potwaller’ and ‘scot and lot’ constituencies were granted the right to vote. Almstakers were excluded in the 1621 and 1640 bills, yet at Great Marlow in 1604 77 of the 245 voters were said to be almstakers, nine of them inmates of the almshouse. In 1640 the right of the Bember inmates to vote was said to have been sustained and in 1662 the St. Albans almsmen were said to have ‘had voices time out of mind’.

It is clear from all this that those who promoted the radical or democratic cause in the 1640s, most particularly the Levellers, did not enter untilled ground. There are also three points of particular interest. First, the Commons, or at least an influential part of it, was not unduly disturbed by the prospect of an enlarged electorate. Second, those deemed to be dependent such as servants and almstakers – were included on occasion in the franchise long before the Civil War. Third, that there existed even gentlemen (such as Sir Simonds D’Ewes) who had an active and unambiguous democratic spirit. The latter point is particularly pertinent because the chief Leveller, John Lilburne, was also of gentle-birth, albeit ”small gentry”, a fact he never ceased to emphasise. Clearly, democratic ideas and feeling were not foreign political bodies suddenly introduced by the Levellers and others in the 1640s.

After ferment of the Civil Wars and their aftermath had quietened, the voices of those who sought a broad franchise (especially the Levellers) faded and the Restoration in 1660 placed the franchise in aspic until 1832 when the Great Reform Act granted a franchise much narrower than that envisaged in the 1640s, with about one in six adult men being enfranchised. Indeed, the years between the Restoration and 1832 saw a squeezing of franchises as rotten boroughs with minute numbers of electors increased and the populations of the new great urban developments such as Manchester and Birmingham went largely enfranchised. The 1832 Act removed the most glaring examples of rotten boroughs and allocated seats to places such as Manchester).

In 1867 the Second Reform Act enfranchised around two in five adult men, still well short of that demanded in the 1640s. The third Reform Act of 1884 doubled the electorate. This produced the breadth of franchise wanted by the mainstream democratically inclined advocates in the 1640s. (There were those who would have gone further).

All 19^th century electoral reform was based on property qualifications and women were excluded, although ironically before the 1832 Act women arguably had the right to vote because the gender of voters was not laid down. The 1832 Act altered that by referring to males not persons. (http://www.historyofwomen.org/suffrage.html). It was not until the 1918 Representation Act that full manhood suffrage at the age of twenty-one was granted and women aged thirty were definitely enfranchised. The final Act of full adult suffrage did not occur until 1928, although the qualification was not reduced to its present age of eighteen until 1969.

The democratic spirit and the English civil war, Commonwealth and Protectorate

Stuart society was a world on the physical, economic and intellectual move and waiting to move faster if the right engine appeared. The civil wars of the 1640s was that machine.

The Civil War and its republican aftermath, the Commonwealth and Protectorate, changed English politics utterly. It brought the end of claims by the English crown to Divine Right and absolute monarchy. It promoted the political interests of the aristocracy and gentry as a class. It forced those on the Parliamentary side to exercise power on their own responsibility. It created a political class which saw politics as something they could control rather than merely be part of as an adjunct to the crown. It raised the idea that there should be a law superior to that which even a parliament could pass. It began the constitutional process which resulted in cabinet government. It laid the foundations for the formation of political parties as we know them. In short, it planted the seeds of modern representative government.

That the idea should find expression as a serious political idea in the 1640s was, of course, partly a consequence of the disruption of society by civil war, but that was more an opportunity rather than a reason. Innumerable civil wars all over the world have come and gone without the democratic spirit being given rein. What made the England of the time unusual was the long-existing ideal of individual freedom which had reached a high degree of sophistication, including the notion that free debate, the sine qua no of democracy, was of value in itself. Here are two passages which give a taste of the way minds were working in the 1640s. First, John Milton writing in the Areogapitica in the 1640s:

The Putney Debates in 1647 provide a vivid record of the political fervour and mentality of the times. Parliamentary and Army leaders including Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, met with a variety of people on what might broadly be called the democratic side. A substantial part of the debate was taken down in shorthand. It is a most intriguing and exciting document, despite its incompleteness and some confused passages. The sheer range of political ideas it displays is impressive. It shows clearly that the 1640s experienced a high degree of sophistication amongst the politically interested class and that this class was drawn from a broad swathe of English society. The ideas run discussed from the monarchical to the unreservedly democratic, epitomised in Col Thomas Rainsborough’s famous words:

Democracy, the revolutionary idea

The Levellers: the first English radicals

Radical has a special meaning in English political history. It describes those whose instincts were democratic although they did not espouse the idea of a full male adult suffrage let alone a suffrage which included women until very late in their existence. But what they all had was a desire to see political power taken from the few and given to many more. Their means of doing this was not to overthrow Parliament but to make it responsive to the interests and needs of the general population, something which was to be achieved by devices such as broadening the franchise, ending rotten boroughs, annual parliaments. As for the monarchy, this might be allowed or not, but if it was to continue the powers of the crown had be emasculated. With few exception such as Gerrard Winstanley and his Diggers, they were not socialists or egalitarian in a general sense. The sort of people who became radicals were typically men with some material independence and education such as tradesmen and those educated at non-conformist colleges. Constitutional reform – in which they had a naive trust as a panacea for all the ills they wished to mend – was what they sought, not social revolution.

The English radical emerged in the struggle between Charles I and Parliament. The group which gave the strongest voice and effect to the new radical was the Levellers. They were a disparate and ever shifting crew, drawing their support primarily from the ranks of the Parliamentary armed forces (especially after the New Model Army was formed in 1645), small tradesmen, journeymen and apprentices. However, they also included those from higher social classes, their most famous leader, John Lilburne, being the child of minor gentry.

What the Levellers were most certainly not, were the thorough going democrats and proto-socialists portrayed by the likes of Tony Benn and Bill Bragg. Rather they were men who would have fitted much more comfortably into the ideological sleeve of Margaret Thatcher than that of social democracy.

The Levellers were, with one or two exceptions such as Richard Overton, who was a deist at best and an atheist at worst, or John Wildman, who was a libertine and chancer, religious. But their belief had a strong vein of rationalism in it. They saw God not as the often cantankerous and domineering supernatural being of traditional Christianity, but as a rational intelligence who entered every man and allowed him to see what was naturally just and reasonable. For the Levellers, it seemed a natural right – a rational right – for a man to have a say in who should hold power and what they should do with the power.

The Levellers were happy to use historical props such as Magna Carta and the legend of Norman oppression when it suited them, but their rationality led them to question how men were governed from first principles. One of the Leveller leaders Richard Overton actually called Magna Carta a ”beggarly thing” and went on to comment:

More balanced was his fellow Leveller William Walwyn:

To call the Levellers a political party in the modern sense would be misleading. Yet they were the closest thing to it both then and, arguably, for several centuries. Their tactics and organisation were modern – the use of pamphletering and newspapers, the ability to get large number of supporters onto the streets (especially in London) at the drop of a hat, the creation of local associations. Much of this was the work of Lilburne, a man of preternatural obstinacy, courage and general unreasonableness. It says much for the restraint of the English elite of the day and respect for the law that he was not killed out of hand. It is difficult to imagine such behaviour being tolerated anywhere in Europe in the seventeenth century.

From the time of his flogging onwards, Lilburne’s career was one of studied defiance of authority. He was one of the most potent pamphleteers England has ever seen. For more than a decade, he produced a flood of writings guaranteed to inflame virtually anyone in public authority in the land. He faced down judges in the most powerful courts in the land. He controlled the London mob consummately. He treated the greatest men in the land as equals. In any other place on the planet at that time, he would have been dead meat before his career as an agitator began. But not in England. He might be flogged. He might be put in the stocks. He might be imprisoned. He might be tried twice for his life. But what 17th century England would not do was unreservedly murder him.