29 June 2016
To understand what is happening in England one has to go back to the beginning. In fact England has no memory, that is no racial and no cultural memory of how they began. The early Viking settlers left behind the Danegeld. The presence of Rome left little impression on the English and even less upon the Romans. Or one can begin as every school boy learned – or used to learn when history was taught (why it was stopped being taught will become clear as this narrative unfolds) – that date of course is 1066, which marked the establishment of a highly cultured French speaking governance. From that day until today the English have never ruled themselves. The only people who could claim this royal authority were in fact the Plantagenets. Their rule degenerated, after the longest period of unified government, in what became known as the Wars of the Roses. When Richard III was defeated on Bosworth Hill by Henry VII, the victor was to become the first Tudor monarch of England. His son, Henry VIII, proved a great ruler. Thus the power and the genealogical record had passed to the Welsh.
Tudor leadership ended when, traumatised by the beheading of her mother, Elizabeth never married. Setting up her council she chose a Cecil who in effect took over the running of the country. On the death of Elizabeth, the inheritance passed from her to James I and so it was that England became a Stuart monarchy. James in turn, was the son of an assassinated mother – egged on by the Cecils, Elizabeth had had her cousin Mary beheaded. James’ father, King Henry Stuart, was assassinated in the final traumas which opened the door to James I of England and VI of Scotland. The Stuart family were doomed from the beginning. Civil war, and Cromwell’s dictatorship, led in turn to the beheading of Charles I. Charles II, brought back from exile, ruled until his death. It was then that modern Britain, named by Hobbes as the Leviathan, faced with a crisis of rulership laid down two principles. One, that the ruler must be a Protestant and two, against a profound and unconfronted reality, it was accepted that heredity determined monarchy. The second decision was more disastrous than the first.
In 1948 Sir Compton Mackenzie wrote:
“Constitutional historians have come to a gentleman’s agreement that the Act of Settlement, which decided that on the death of Queen Anne the Crown should pass to the Electress Sophia and her Protestant descendants, did not establish the elective character of the English Crown. A deliberate avoidance of the shallows of the legal casuistry and the moral overalls they so often cause in the stormy weather does not commit that the Act of Settlement completed the destructive process against kingship which began with the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, was carried on by the execution of Charles I, and was taken a step further by the fictitious presumption of James II’s abdication at the inglorious Revolution. The Act of Settlement may not establish the elective character of the English Crown may be considered elective, and to the mind which refuses to regard compromise as a philosophic absolute it must appear as a distinction without a difference. Perhaps the following extract from Mr Harold Temperley’s account of the Revolution and Revolution Settlement in Great Britain from the Cambridge Modern History will serve as well as any to illustrate that illogical English conception of the Constitution for which Lord Baldwin has expressed his admiration:
Expediency had rendered it needful to alter the succession, and to make the Crown elective, pro hac vice, but the case was not intended to form a precedent. In this, as in every other instance, the Revolution Settlement rested upon compromise rather than upon the general principles, which, however, the particular occasion went far towards establishing in each case.
The result of that particular occasion was the substitution of a new king at the expense of over sixty royal personages with a better right to the throne, outside election, than the Elector of Hanover, and with the introduction of that dynasty, the introduction of a set of moral standards hitherto unknown in the country over which they were called upon to rule.
When George I came over from Hamburg and ascended the throne in 1714 he left behind him in the gloomy lodge of Ahlden a divorced wife who had been imprisoned there for twenty years…[their] horrible and unnatural wedding was celebrated in a private chapel of the Castle of Zell on November 21st 1682. There were two children – George Augustus, afterwards George II, King of Great Britain, and Sophia Dorothea, afterwards Queen of Prussia. George I treated his wife with complete brutality during the few years they lived together, surrounding himself with those ghastly German mistresses for whom his appetite, even in old age, was never exhausted. There was the Countess of Darlington, who, from her bulk, was called the “Elephant and Castle”…[Sophia Dorothea] was divorced in December 1694 and kept a close prisoner in the lodge of Ahlden and its marshy demesne for thirty-three years…George II never forgave his father for the treatment of his mother and he had intended, if she had outlived George I, to bring her over to England and declare her Queen Dowager; but Sophie Dorothea, from whose outraged womb sprang the two royal families that a couple of centuries later, would lead one half of the world in war against the other, died before her son could indulge his piety. She was released from her misery on November 3rd 1726. Shortly before her death she was seized with a kind of brain fever, following still another wrong done to her by that implacable husband, and she wrote a letter which she gave under seal to be delivered by a confidential attendant to George I. Then delirium seized her and, after some days railing against her ruined and tormented life, she died.
In this letter, she summoned him to appear within a year and a day before the Judgment Seat of God and there to answer for the many injuries she had received from him. Soon after he read that missive he had a seizure. Before he lost consciousness he kept groaning, “To Osnabruck, to Osnabruck”, and at ten o’clock that night he was carried into the little room at Osnabruck where he was born. Here he was laid fully clothed on the bed, and the doctors worked upon his apoplexy; but neither plasters nor Spanish flies, warm irons nor cupping availed. At forty minutes after midnight on Wednesday, June 12th, the death rattle was heard and the soul of George I went to keep that fearful tryst. For a long time after the death his tongue hung far out of his bluish mouth, and in broadsheets it was widely circulated that the Devil had caught him by the throat at last.”
Every story of the Georges from I to VI gets worse and worse. Over that period of history, that harrowing story is paralleled, understandably, with the tale of how parliament stripped the monarchy of all their rights and privileges. They were reduced to cutting ribbons and launching ships with a bottle of champagne. There was one exception, which is why Compton Mackenzie’s book the Windsor Tapestry is kept well out of reach, this was the abdication, forced on him by the hated Baldwin – I refer to King Edward VIII. It must be understood that he was enormously loved wherever he went and the refusal of the title of the Duchess of Windsor, his consort, may be the final undoing of the German rule over England, were it not that worse was to come.
The burial of Princess Diana was quickly followed by the appropriate divorces, and all seemed set up that this disastrous German family should continue as titular heads of what the parliament had renamed the United Kingdom. There is however, one matter of grave concern to the Muslim community of England. On the birth of Prince William’s son, to the astonishment of that well placed community the Anglicans – founded it must be remembered by Henry VIII’s beheading of Anne Boleyn – the Archbishop of Canterbury announced, without any authorisation from any known synod, that he would baptise the new child, but would not make the sign of the cross on his forehead, which would confirm his christianity and imply his embracing of the Anglican Church. Given the fact that the mother of the child is jewish, it is an unquestioned and unconfronted issue. It was neither discussed in press nor parliament. Is it the final step of the collapse of the House of Hanover, who’s recent name Windsor, cuts little ice? While an Anglican as King is acceptable, the abandoning seemed to suggest the head of Hanover rule in England is finished.
Meanwhile the rigged referendum deprived the Scottish people of their right to choose who will govern them. They then found they had chosen not to stay in the European Union when in fact it had been run by the descendants of the ghastly Elector of Hanover. The truth is, the so-called English people don’t know who they were, why they were and how they got to be the people who have suddenly become a matter of crisis and debate. Scotland out – is historically simply the taking over of the boasted “auld alliance”. There is no doubt that the breaking up of the United Kingdom lies across the path of a free Scotland and there is no doubt that Wales will follow. Perhaps, at last, the English will realise that they must govern themselves. Westminster has failed! Scotland is well able to look after itself and so goodnight!
