Trump and the Glorious Revolution

Sometimes, the spirit of the nation suddenly changes. What had suited it before, what it had thought before, is over. They turn a corner.

In his tribute of love to his people and the gifts they brought the world, The History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill shows how this assent of the people was a mighty force in the development of constitutional freedom. In doing so, he consciously teaches that republican democracy can rely on such deep awakenings of the people’s will at times of crisis.

The English Civil War turned on these awakenings. The nascent constitution was put under terrible stress as first the king and then his opponents broke the constitutional consensus and sought to consolidate their own control of the realm.

The king asserted his right to rule Britain without Parliament. The people were at first not bothered, as it seemed a quarrel among politicians. But as Charles made misstep after misstep, attempting to foist unpopular taxes and to make religious changes, he gradually lost the heart of his people.

When the king allowed enforcement of an old statute fining people who did not attend church, it had seemed a good idea — religious uniformity under his church and a new revenue stream.

The people thought otherwise, and it became a defining moment. Churchill writes:

Now all over England men and women found themselves haled before justices for not attending church and fined one shilling a time. Here indeed was something ordinary men and women could understand. This was no question for lawyers and judges in the court of the Exchequer; it was something new and teasing … The Parliamentary agitation which had been conducted during all these years with so much difficulty gained a widespread accession of strength.

So many of the issues that exercise think tanks and the chattering classes don’t mean much to those who are not professionally political. Most people feel the most important things are their homes and families and their jobs, and the local issues of their communities. They wish to be free to be political only in ways that reflect the sense and logic of their lives and ignore as best they can the attempts to recruit them to some simplistic but all-involving ideology. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: It’s Final: Biden Has Chosen to Support Hamas)

But when the politics forces its way into their lives in a way they can no longer ignore, they do get involved, then and now.

That is what the first King Charles had awakened. His fortunes were to spiral down, until the mobs on the street combined with Charles’ enemies in Parliament forced him to agree to the execution of his closest friend and ally as a traitor. And at that low point, the mood of the people slowly began to turn again, with a natural sympathy beginning to show for the king in the face of his doctrinaire, implacable enemies.

But the will of the people for peace was no match for the doctrinaire hatreds that now could find resolution only in war. Britain was convulsed with civil war from 1642 until 1649, when Cromwell took over as military dictator, had the king executed in a show trial, and ruled until 1658.

Cromwell had killed the king, dissolved the nobility’s political power, and eventually sent even the House of Commons packing. But on his death, his successors saw that Parliament would have to be called back — they had no control over the people. And then over the next year, the mood of the people swung around hard. Soon, all the supporters of King Charles who had been expelled from Parliament during the Civil War were recalled.

Now Churchill cites diarist Samuel Pepys’ account of the night the Parliament was restored to the royalists. In the City of London, which had led the revolt against the king in 1642, Pepys saw “from one end to the other with a glory about it, so high was the light of the bonfires and so thick round the city and the bells rang everywhere.”

A popular song of the day expressed the mood of the people, something Churchill would point out on many occasions. Some of its lyrics went:

Then will I wait, till the waters abate,

Which now disturb my troubled brain:

Else never rejoice till I hear the voice

That the King enjoys his own again.

The son of the decapitated king now was called to return from exile and be crowned as King Charles II. Of his triumphal welcome back, Churchill writes:

All classes crowded to welcome the King home to his own. They cheered and wept in uncontrollable emotion. They felt themselves delivered from a nightmare. They dreamed they had now entered a Golden Age.

The king was back, but not as an absolute autocrat; Parliament was re-established but had to respect the powers the king found he could still assert, such as dissolving or recessing Parliament as he willed or keeping it in session as he might choose. The clearest winner was the unwritten Constitution, and the people who defended it and were loyal to it, even when it was eclipsed by ideological struggle. (READ MORE: Chamberlain and Biden: Appeasement Then and Now)

The people were to find it was no Golden Age only gradually. In the meantime, they were distracted by the relaxing of the strict Puritan code of virtues that had held in Cromwell’s day. Eventually, Charles II died and his brother took the throne as James II.

James had become a Catholic and that brought back bad memories of the last Catholic monarch, Mary, who had conducted a religious war and consigned Protestants to the flames. The people had long ago rejected Mary and Catholicism and considered the matter settled.

Yet their innate peacefulness gave the king a sense that he could do as he wished, and step after step, he made every indication of replacing all the most important people in the kingdom with Catholics. He expanded his army, seeming to ready himself to impose his religion on the people by force.

This caused the mood to suddenly turn foreboding. This time, there was no extended civil war. From May of 1688, when the king ordered a declaration of powers he was assuming to be read in all churches, it took only a few months. By the end of November, revolt broke out all over the country. Churchill writes: “City after city rose in rebellion. By one spontaneous, tremendous convulsion the English nation repudiated James.” By mid-December, James had fled to France, never to return, ending what is called the Glorious Revolution, glorious for its swiftness, finality, and lack of bloodshed.

Churchill was setting out for us how the people bore forward their constitution and how they assert their self-governance. They want restraint and moderation in government and practice it themselves. This means that they often allow leaders a chance to show who they are, rather than constantly inserting themselves into the leadership struggle. But there comes a reckoning eventually, and the people will not be denied.

The chaos of the Trump first term repelled many people, who could not imagine the degree to which a government they had believed trustworthy had abused its trust and lied again and again and again.

The coordinated undermining of the justice system may well have been the last straw. The people have not been blind to Trump’s sins, but now there is a sense growing every day that they are nothing compared to the betrayal of the people’s trust and faith that has been the staple of those trying to destroy him.

Churchill wrote of the change in the people as Cromwell had him put to death:

A strange destiny had engulfed the King of England. None had resisted with more untimely stubbornness the movement of his age. He had been in his heyday the convinced opponent of all we now call our Parliamentary liberties. Yet as misfortunes crowded upon him he increasingly became the physical embodiment of the liberties and traditions of England.

The people were the people, not to be reduced to one political movement. The king who had broken faith with them had regained it by nobly suffering a terrible and deadly persecution. The people restored the kingdom and put his son back on the throne.

Trump was overthrown and is suffering a prosecution almost as political and disrespectful of the law as was King Charles’. He, too, is seeing a change in the hearts of the people. (READ MORE: The Bible Calls Us to Courage and Freedom)

A change in the breeze is coming again. Always, in the end, it will strengthen the will and the power of the people to live free under the constitution they have ordained.

The post Trump and the Glorious Revolution appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.