Lightning Before Death: The English Civil War

2,584 words

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

Mark Twain

“It was still at the stage of clubs and fists.”

The Clash,  “English Civil War” 

A week ago, I wrote the following concerning tensions in England:

“As I write, there is an ongoing incident in which a number of children have been stabbed, very seriously, it would seem.

Whatever the combination of attacker and victims might be, everyone is currently wondering how this is going to turn out. Which of the increasing number of potentially incendiary clashes between Muslims and kufir is going to strike and apply the match?”

I am not claiming Cassandra-like powers of precognition. To phrase it in old English, it was as plain as a pikestaff. The knife attack in Southport was indeed the incident noted that provided the spark of a conflagration which is still building, and as of Friday morning the dreaded code for imminent disaster in the UK had been issued; all police leave has been cancelled. I watched proceedings unfold over the weekend, hours of livestream rioting, via the panopticon of the internet and the ever-increasing numbers of citizen journalists who do not apply the selective editing of the MSM.

Three of the children have died – girls aged six, seven, and nine – after the savage knife attack at a dance party by a man “born in Wales” (as the BBC reiterated) of Rwandan parents. Many are still seriously injured, and the killer’s identity was kept under official wraps long enough to alert the keen-eyed political observer to the fact that this was going to have repercussions. The details, including the role of (for once) genuine misinformation in the saga, were covered by Jim Goad here at Counter Currents.

For at least a year there have been online rumors of civil war on both sides of the Atlantic. America had its famous internecine conflict in the 19^th century over the question of Southern secession from the Union, but England had three civil wars (which I will refer to as “the English Civil War” for simplicity) during the course of a decade two centuries earlier, and given the state of the nation at the time of writing, the causes repay inspection. What was the tipping-point at which civil disturbance became civil war? What is it now?

Like the American Civil War, the grim inevitability of its English forerunner can be seen coming in hindsight, and is summed up in a letter written in 1641 by a young man named James Spencer who had reluctantly joined the Royalist army. Their opponents were known at first as Parliamentarians and a little later as “Puritans”, and had formed a union. War seemed inevitable as neither side looked likely to back down. Spencer tells his wife of his foreboding concerning the future of their country, England:

“The discontent that I and many other honest men receive daily is beyond expression. People are much divided, and the King is of late very averse to peace. This is lightning before death.”

The King was Charles I, still eight years away from his death on a scaffold in London at the exact spot on which I am watching a man throw a bottle at a police line as I write. In 1726, in a letter written during his sojourn in England, Voltaire noted a reluctance in his host country to allow their monarchs the untrammelled exercise of power notable in his native France:

“The English are the only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of kings by resisting them.”

The British still talk of people being “axed” from their jobs, although methods are somewhat more modern now than those used to dispatch Charles I.

There seems to be no consensus among historians concerning a clear-cut cause of the English Civil War. There was no territorial threat of secession as there was in the US, and no military coup as there was in Spain in 1936. England in the mid-17^th century was caught up in a power struggle between Charles as the embodiment of the divine right of kings, and the Parliamentarians, eventually led by Oliver Cromwell, who sought to institute a temporally ordained system of governance. There were other contributory factors, and these included demographics. A doubling of the population had taken place very quickly, and increased tensions among the English people. It is difficult not to draw parallels with the current uprising.

It might be argued that Charles saw his role as monarch not simply as the instantiation of divine right, but also as steward and shepherd of the country, but this is unnecessary duplication. The new systems of governance which emerged in Europe during the Medieval period were, by the 17^th century, viewed as just as much a part of divine design as the sky and the ocean. Where the Buddhist might see God in a grain of sand, the devout monarch saw Him in a well-run government. But then so did the Parliamentarians.

The most glaringly obvious cause of the English Civil War, however, was Charles’ period of autocratic government, the period of so-called “personal rule”, from 1629 to 1640, the eve of civil war. Charles simply dispensed with Parliament. British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t need to do that, and this won’t be the so-called “Short Parliament” of the Spring of 1640. But a month into their tenure, Labour have already combined the end of Winter fuel payments for the elderly with the news that gas prices will increase by up to 77% in October as Starmer pursues the ruinous policy of so-called “net zero” carbon emissions. Labour’s huge majority in Parliament may give Starmer leave to act in a rather more monarchical fashion than his wretched predecessor, the Hindu Rishi Sunak, but how far that will be permitted, not by Parliament but by ordinary people, will quickly become apparent. Starmer in the meantime, with part of the country he now rules in flames, announced plans to go on holiday, a month into his new job. By Sunday evening he had cancelled this jaunt, ostensibly for reasons of state, but almost certainly because the media noticed.

Of course, like many Londoners, he might just want to escape the city for a break. Crowds of unhappy, unruly people in a capital city tend to have an effect, whether in the 17^th century or now, and it was traditional to look to the monarch as a commanding presence in times of national crisis. In a press conference as rigged and pre-scripted as their counterparts in the US, Sir Keir Starmer spent 20 minutes answering questions his special advisers could have written and issued to the journalists present. He did not mention Muslim attacks on non-believers in the UK, which at one point shortly before the Southport massacre numbered 17 in 48 hours, but he did emphasize his determination to protect the Muslim community. He also mentioned the “far–Right” half-a dozen times and announced the formation of a new police force dedicated to hunting them down. In 1640, baying mobs in London’s streets were a significant reason Charles I signed the death warrant for his friend Thomas Wentworth, 1^st Earl of Strafford, and revolting peasants have always had the ability to make their rulers uneasy. Wentworth’s execution was followed by The Great Remonstrance, a list of 201 objections Parliament had to Charles’ rule. The updated version will be growing by the day.

One question hangs over the possibility of civil war and/or revolution in Britain today; on whose side will those sanctioned by the state to use violence – i.e. the army and the police – fight? The nearest current revolution to me is just down the continent in Venezuela (head south from Costa Rica, through Panama and Colombia, and it’s first on the left) whose inhabitants were breaking into Caracas Zoo three years ago to steal animals for the family pot. In the latest round of rioting, soldiers have been seen removing their uniforms and joining in – on the side of the rioters. Employing the army in the UK has already been considered if the situation worsens while Starmer was to have been relaxing by the pool. Could the army soon be patrolling Britain’s cities in a way they did most recently in Northern Ireland during The Troubles? Bumptious Muslim loser and former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf has called for military employment.

Soldiers in London were very unhappy, to say the least, when soldier Lee Rigby was hacked to death in broad daylight on a London street back in 2013. His killers, who only just failed to cut off the soldier’s head with a field knife, were two black converts to Islam. This martial mood will not have been improved by the recent machete attack on Lt. Colonel Mark Teeton, stabbed many times while in full uniform near his barracks in Kent. Starmer may be aware of Sir Oswald Mosley’s comment that a revolution is impossible in a country with a well-armed and loyal militia, and he will be hoping his fellow Knight of the Realm was correct, particularly the loyalty part.

Labour had no substantive pre-election manifesto, and many feared the worst once they were in power. They were right to be apprehensive. The government just squashed a Parliamentary Bill to guarantee free speech on university campuses. Even Charles I didn’t do that. Starmer has also announced the government’s intention to use facial recognition technology to arrest rioters, despite the system having acknowledged flaws. In China, this was the precursor to the notorious social credit system, allowing the government to disable a citizen financially and socially if they contravene a raft of new laws. The cameras themselves have been tested with results ranging from a 0.8% error margin for light-skinned men to a 34.7% error margin for dark-skinned women. So it’s not just whites who think blacks all look the same, although blacks won’t need to worry about the new technology. It’s not them they are looking for.

And what of ordinary English people? The counties in 1641 – counties are like American states but with no independent legislative power – petitioned the King to keep the war away from their areas, and were less concerned with the issue of the constitution than they were with peace at a local level. Here are more parallels with today, as ordinary people are rising up not against some abstract political principle, but to protect themselves and their children. The petition failed, and in August 1642 the first battle of the English Civil War was fought at Nottingham, famously home to a legendary conflict between authority and dissidence, that of the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood and his merry men. As with everywhere else in the UK, there was trouble there this weekend.

In terms of policing strategy in the field, where horses and dogs were a big deal in 17th-century warfare, both play a part in modern British policing. They were out in force over the weekend in a way that they were not during the BLM riots, and I believe they have never been used when Muslims are creating a disturbance. Blacks are not animal lovers, you see, unless they have big, aggressive dogs they can weaponize and which further enhance their macho self-image. Muslims just think dogs are unclean. Both animals, however, are deemed suitable for use against whites.

One contributory cause is the media, although propaganda wars are not a modern invention. The English Civil War was very much a propaganda war, and that propaganda went on to become historical documentation, although it was severely limited set against our online metaverse of information. Going viral for the printers of a Royalist or Parliamentarian pamphlet in the 1640s just meant getting it copied.

The media, of course, have not stopped parroting the term “far Right” to describe the demonstrators, although many are ordinary family people. The phrase “far Right” is a description entirely free of definition and effective only by association, as I wrote about here at Counter Currents. The British media, including what little there is on the political Right, are nothing if not bourgeois. Their dislike of “Right-wing thugs” is actually a masked distaste for the white British working class. Who the hell did they think was at Agincourt and Flanders? HR managers and people who buy expensive coffee rather than make their own?

Here is the news the British MSM don’t want you to read. The people of Britain, and particularly England, do not want Islam either in their country or, given that train has left, interfering in their process of governance any more than the Roundheads wanted Charles I doing the same thing by dismissing Parliament when he felt like it, as though the Mother of all Parliaments were some tardy footman. We don’t like Islam and we don’t want it fouling the water supply. I have droned on sufficiently about the fact that many on the dissident Right give Islam a pass on the “my enemy’s enemy” principle, and if you want to spend the party in the kitchen, be my guest. But this party has two ominous ingredients: gatecrashers and doormen. And I have also said that while England might not have Cromwell’s superbly drilled New Model Army, it does have a standing army of reservists (if that’s not an oxymoron), and they are not best pleased. They are the country’s male football supporters. Football violence seems to be unknown in America and baffling to Americans, but the British are old hands at this particular sport. You don’t ever want to be in the middle of an English football fight, something the police are rapidly discovering. These people are nutters and they won’t stop.

King Charles III, the idiot son of Britain’s much-loved Queen Elizabeth II, may not lose his head over this like Charles I, and he is not yet presiding over the Great Plague like Charles II, but it’s third time unlucky for him, it seems. Then again, the King doesn’t run the country these days. That would be the government. Labour have badly misjudged the white majority, duped by an electoral victory whose huge margin they took for approval when it was actually a register of the disapproval of the previous and only nominally Conservative government. In his biography of Oliver Cromwell, John Buchan notes the following:

“To many Royalists the people on the eve of the Civil War seemed to be surfeited with happiness, and the rebellion to be the crazy and perverse impulse of a nation which, in Izaak Walton’s phrase, was ‘sick of being well’. The truth is far otherwise.”

Sir Keir Starmer might be advised to go on vacation after all, and maybe even to start scouting around in Brussels for a job with the European Union, that pension-pot of the British political class.

A former Prime Minister, John Major (1990-1997), may be grateful to Starmer (and Sunak) for saving him from the ignominy of being the worst PM in living history. One of Major’s jovial phrases, however, lives on. Tread on an Englishman’s foot, he said, and he will apologize. Step on his foot again and he will apologize again. Step on his foot a third time and he will knock you down. Like a drowning man, England may be coming up for the third time.