Changing The Original Great Game
Ruling Perfidious Albion And The Coming Of Independence In North America
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No ruler of Britain sat easy on the throne before the 19th Century.
They ruled only because the Englishmen allowed it. A contract between the fiercely independent yeomen and townspeople, their noble guides, and whichever European noble house had won the last civil war or revolution—and confirmed by Parliament or force of arms—always defined the British monarchy.
People are very open-minded about new things - as long as they're exactly like the old ones.
Charles Kettering
By 1776, Great Britain had been through a major revolution in governance and rule roughly every other generation. When the American colonies declared their independence, they were in the company of many other “rebel” ancestors who had left, even if briefly, the rule of a crowned head of Great Britain, and invoked “ancient rights” that only free Britons, of all of Europe, always routinely expected.
Invaders: Romans, Norse, Normans, and Dutch
From the time the Romans withdrew from Britain and the Americans declared their independence, every part of Europe had had claimants to the throne. Since the end of the Hundred Years War (1453), Britain had had less than a dozen rulers whose families were predominantly “English” and had no ties or obligations to European thrones or royal houses.
The British Isles are both blessed and cursed by their geography. They are largely an island nation that, until roughly 13,000 years ago, separated from continental Europe by a river that grew into what is now known as the English Channel. The Picts and Celts who first populated the islands suffered invasion by successive waves of raiders and refugees millennia before Caesar’s legions landed. By the time the Romans came, the Angles, Jutes, Saxons and Mercians had all found niches in different parts of the fertile islands. The Roman invasions presented them with a common cause for temporary unity, if only briefly. Rome could not tame the Britons completely, and left when imperial communications became so poor that the administrators could no longer be Roman.
What followed was a shadowy, dimly understood period of legendary rulers like Arthur Pendragon and Alfred the Great, joined by better documented Norwegians and Danes. Arthur and Alfred left traditions of fairness, justice, and equality; the Norse left kings. But neither Ireland nor Scotland nor England nor Wales agreed to be ruled by the “foreigners.” They preferred to live by the Arthur/Alfred legends of rule by agreement, a unique contract between crown and people that only Britain seemed willing to pursue and enforce.
By the time Harold I sat on the throne of England in 1063, Norsemen who had gone “a’Viking” centuries before had settled in northwest France—Normandy. Edward the Confessor left the throne of England to William of Normandy. When Edward died, Harold decided he would not give up his birthright. William took exception to the abandonment of Edward’s promise and invaded England in 1066. Harold was killed at Hastings in October 1066, but that was after he had defeated and killed the last close-to-legitimate Norse claimants to the throne of England at Stamford Bridge.
The Norman Conquest was a landmark in British history, but not because of the Norman influence on English. Since royalty has a predilection for marrying only other royalty, in a matter of generations, there were claims to Britain from the Rhine to the Danube to North Cape to Gibraltar; at one time there were six claimants. But even within the English realm (which included much of modern France. Until the mid-1600s) there were multiple family trees with a dimly remembered ancestor making claims to the throne.
During this period, between the Shipwreck/Anarchy (1120-1153) and the Wars of the Roses (1455-85), the thrones of Wales, Scotland and (sometimes, parts of) Ireland joined to England by conquest and marriage, a process that sometimes had to be repeated several times. The Tudors made the last great domestic bid for the throne, killing the last of the Plantagenets, Richard III of Lancaster in 1497. Henry VII and his son, Henry VIII, settled the crown until Elizabeth I died in 1604. Because the Tudors had trouble making and keeping heirs, a claimant with a different lineage but the most solid claim, James Stuart, came down from Scotland.[1]
While having another “foreigner” on the throne wasn’t that extraordinary, having one with an alien religion was. James I had no qualms about the English Church, but his grandson Charles, who inherited his crown, did. Sensing that its religious freedom was being curtailed, England revolted against Charles. After Parliament executed him, there was a sort of republic in the British Isles, usually called the Protectorate, during which Parliament maintained large armies under the control of Protestant generals and a Lord Protector.[2]
While this last English Civil War was ongoing, the colonies in the New World had other things to worry about. What was happening in England was exactly what most colonists crossed an ocean to escape. Though dynastic and civil wars ripped all of Europe with alarming alacrity and regularity, most of the English colonists had their French, Dutch and Spanish neighbors to fend off, not to mention the Native Americans who were more numerous than all the Europeans in the New World put together. Mere survival was a paramount concern for most of the religious refugees who settled in America, and the economic refugees (those who came to exploit opportunities unavailable in Europe) were too few and preoccupied to take much notice.[3]
But the Protectorate/republic lasted only a generation. There was a Stuart back on the throne for a short while until William of Orange took over in 1688. But this time, things were different. Parliament presented this foreign monarch with an “English Declaration of Rights” that outlined how Englishmen expected to be treated before the new king took the throne. The Declaration was a broadly worded Magna Charta for the Everyman and strictly limited what England would allow their monarchs to do. While the Declaration did not stipulate remedies for grievances, William agreed to the Declaration as a compact with the people of Britain, and by default of the colonies.
The transparent accounting methods the Dutch introduced revolutionized English financial systems, since it allowed almost anyone to figure out exactly what who owed to whom. This made credit more available based on a documented history of payments and balances. This part of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 was the greatest secondary effect of the House of Orange, but it also made the rise of the middle class possible. And nowhere was it made more possible than in the Americas.[4]
The refugees from Europe’s periodic bloodletting came to the Americas for one of several reasons, chief among them being to exploit a virgin territory that few Europeans, Africans or Asians had ever seen before. To secure credit markets, early promoters of the New World described streets paved with gold and curbed in silver, but they left out the part about the 25 million inhabitants already there, the primitive conditions, the colonies of other major European powers, and the long journey that required English ships to sail through Spanish-claimed waters.
The nature of the North Atlantic “trade winds” and navigation means up to the mid-18th Century meant that the fastest journey (which still could take months) brought all vessels sailing from European waters to the Azores and on westwards to at least the edges of the Caribbean. Having made their “easting,” non-Spanish ships turned north along the Gulf Stream that flows from the Straights of Florida up towards the Atlantic coast of North America as far as Nova Scotia.
Sailing from Europe west without using the North Atlantic Gyre could significantly prolong the journey, potentially by weeks or even months, or even make it impossible to complete. Few captains would hazard it, and no underwriters would back it. This meant that when Europe was undergoing one of its periodic spasms of killing, sailing the Atlantic with colonists or soldiers or resources or instructions would be perilous, and many a voyage fell afoul of Spanish ships as a matter of unfortunate geography. This inescapable fact made any non-Spanish colonies somewhat perilous to even reach. That made the non-Spanish colonies in North America very independent of the “mother country” economically, militarily, and socially. Combined with accounting transparency making credit available, English colonists were not only prepared to be on their own, for many years they simply could not depend on the Crown for much of anything except a market. So they didn’t.[5]
The Electors of Hannover
The Hanovers took over from the House of Orange on the death of William II in1704. Another bunch of non-English monarchs wasn’t that bad, but there were complications. The Act of Union joined Scotland to England and Wales with some permanence, and the British Army took on Highland units from old clan and tribe organizations. The Americas regarded these units as foreign mercenaries sent by pretenders when the first companies reached the Americas in 1720.
The Hanovers were more foreign than monarchs had been for a while, because they had firm and ancient ties not only to western Germany but also to a medieval edifice that had been England’s enemy for ages. Their hereditary rights included a voice in who was to be the next Holy Roman Emperor (Electors), which by the 18th Century was still barely sovereign over a scattering of central European baronies and dukedoms. Though the nobles of Britain agreed having the Hanovers was better than another civil war, most Englishmen resented their new king as being too foreign. George I never learned English; his son George II spoke it with a coarse accent and spent most of his life in Hesse; George II’s grandson George III spoke English, French and German, but never quite felt at home among the common English people.[6]
By the middle of the 18th Century and the Seven Years/French and Indian War, the ships’ chronometer and the all-wind ship rigging scheme combined in English ships to make sailing into the eye of the wind a matter of routine and a more northerly route to the Americas possible. By then the Americans had been depending on their own devices for so long the Crown was to them little more than a collector of taxes. They had long enjoyed administrative, judicial and a great measure of military autonomy. Local legislatures could levy tolls and allow bills of subscription for local improvements like roads, bridges and municipal buildings. While their legal system was English and their judges came from the Crown, not every legal matter in America needed a judge; grand juries often took over on the frontiers, with men of learning to provide arguments and rendering judgments based a little on the written law and a lot on community standards. British regular troops had long showed an incapacity to fight on the frontiers in the everyday raiding and patrolling that marked American warfare; militias in English traditions were self-organizing and, most times, self-funding. The locals knew the conditions and the demands of the kinds of war they normally fought. A force comprised almost entirely of Americans had taken the strongest fortress in French North America at Louisburg. Standing armies just consumed precious resources with no real benefit.[7]
When the British Parliament taxed the Americans to pay for the freedom they enjoyed before 1763, and that indeed they had provided a great deal of blood and treasure to secure, the unruly Americans decided they had had enough of Perfidious Albion’s prerogatives. Reenacting the traditions of their forebears, they simmered on the edges of open revolt until 1775. Their war started as a “patriotic” extension of the Stuart war against Parliament, the one that Cromwell won. When George III finally expressed his views about his subjects with disdain, the Americans decided that they had had enough of kings, too, and the Americans severed all ties with the English Parliament and with foreign kings.[8]
But it wasn’t like Englishmen hadn’t done that before.
[1]. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3500 BC-1605 (New York: Hyperion, 2000).
[2]. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The Wars of the British, 1605–1776 (New York: Hyperion, 2001).
[3]. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967).
[4]. Peter Padfield, Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom: Naval Campaigns That Shaped the Modern World, 1688–1851 (New York: Overlook Press, 2005).
[5]. AJ Langguth, Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1988); Peter Padfield, Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns That Shaped the Modern World (New York: Overlook Press, 2002).
[6]. Schama, Britain II.
[7]. Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Penguin, 2001).
[8]. Alan Axelrod, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the American Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, Inc., Academic Marketing, 2000); Bailyn, op. cit.; Griffin, op. cit.; Langguth, op. cit.
Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study In Miscalculation And Folly
In many ways, Japan before 1945 was like the Britain/America relationship. Japan’s governing body was completely alien to the mass of Japanese, who had very little voice in their own fates.
Later this year, I’ll start a series on the rage that led up to those fateful years before 1945. Available from your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
Choice or Destiny
Of Parks and Excuses
And Finally...
On 18 January:
1871: The Second German Empire/Reich is proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, near Paris, France. Following France’s humiliating defeat against the Prussian coalition, and during the siege of Paris, the proclamation united most of the states in the German customs union.
1919: The post-WWI Peace Conference opens on the Quai d'Orsay, Paris, France. While the above Second Empire/Reich ended in October 1918 when Wilhelm II abdicated and fled, the peace the victorious Allies and the United States would impose on Germany at the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in June 1919 would be written here.
And today is NATIONAL POPCORN DAY, for reasons that exceed understanding. The earliest corn in the Americas (where maize was domesticated) goes back ten millennia and fossilized popcorn kernels go back five, but the modern “inventor” of popcorn, John Creators of Chicago, popularized the snack in the 1880s.