The Venetian Takeover of England:
A 200-Year Project
by Gerald Rose
It was one of the most well-known ``secrets'' of the British oligarchy, that the model for the British Empire was Venice. Benjamin Disraeli, the late-nineteenth-century prime minister of England, let the cat out of the bag in his novel Coningsby when he wrote,
``The great object of Whig leaders in England from the first movement under Hampden to the last most successful one in 1688, was to establish in England a high aristocratic republic on the model of the Venetian.... William the Third told ... Whig leaders, `I will not be a doge.'... They brought in a new family on their own terms. George I was a doge; George II was a doge.... George III tried not to be a doge.... He might try to get rid of the Whig Magnificoes, but he could not rid himself of the Venetian constitution.''
The well-known secret of all the Whig insiders was that the Venetian takeover of England was a 200-year project beginning with the break of Henry VIII with Rome and concluding in 1714, with the accession to the throne of George I.
What Disraeli was publicly referring to was that in 1688, for the first time, a non-hereditary king, William of Orange (William the Third), was invited to rule by a group of noble families. This was a decisive break with previous English history. For the first time, you had a king beholden to the English oligarchy, though William was not particularly happy about his power being circumscribed.
The English parliamentary system of government was modeled explicitly on the Venetian system of a Great Assembly and Senate that controls the doge. England officially in 1688 became an oligarchy.
This formality was merely the tip of the iceberg. The Venetian takeover of England had been nearly a 200-year project, proceeding in two phases. The first began in the 1530s under Henry VIII with the break from Rome engineered by Thomas Cromwell. The later, more radical, phase was the takeover of England by the Giovani (``the young ones'') of Paolo Sarpi, beginning 70 years later.
What was Venice?
The best way to understand the evil of Venice is to look at the great poets' portrayal of the unbelievable duplicity that Venice represented: portrayals by Marlowe in The Jew of Malta, and by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice and especially in Othello, the Moor of Venice. The quintessential Venetian is Iago. Yet the most brilliant portrait of Venetian method was done by Friedrich Schiller in his The Ghostseer.
You can never understand Venice by studying what positions the Venetians took on an issue. The Venetians did not care what position they took. They always took all positions. Their method was one of looking for the weak point and corrupting the person. At this form of evil, they were the masters. Their diplomatic corps was the best in the world at the time, and the British diplomatic corps was trained by the Venetians.
The year is 1509. The League of Cambrai, representing the total combined power of western Europe, is called upon by the papacy to crush Venice. At the Battle of Agnadello, the Venetian forces are completely destroyed. France is poised to invade the very islands that comprise Venice to deliver the coup de grace. The papacy relents, fearing a war that will be fought on Italian soil by foreign troops. Several times before, such troops had seized parts of Italy. In a series of diplomatic moves, the alliance falls apart, and, miraculously, Venice is saved.
Venice, which worked with the Turks to create a republic of usury and slavery; Venice, the slave trader of Europe, so close to being destroyed, survived. Its survival would now wreak havoc on western civilization.
Modern history commences with Nicolaus of Cusa and the Council of Florence, and the Italian Renaissance that Cusa and his collaborators inspired. It was Cusa, with the help of Pius II, who created the basis for a war on the pagan idea of man as a beast, and to defend the concept of man as imago Dei and capax Dei. It was the power of these ideas which caused the greatest increase in human population in the history of man. This idea of the power of hypothesis and its relationship to transforming nature proved conclusively that man was fundamentally different from the beast, and as such could not be used as a slave. Venice reacted wildly against the ascendancy of this idea. With the papacy in the firm grip of Pius II and Cusa, Venice launched a war to destroy Christianity.
Contarini and the evil of Aristotle
The figure of Gasparo Contarini is the key one for Venice in its war. Contarini was trained at Padua University, the son of one of the oldest families in Venice. It was said of him that he was so versed in Aristotle, that if all of Aristotle's work were lost, he could reproduce it in its entirety. He learned his Aristotle from his mentor at Padua, Pietro Pomponazzi. Every Venetian oligarchical family sent their children to Padua University to become trained Aristotelians. To understand Venice, you must understand that Aristotle is pure evil, and has been so since the time he wrote his diatribe against the method of Plato, approximately 2,300 years ago.
Since Aristotle is almost unreadable, you must ask the question, what is it about Aristotle that has made his writings so influential in western civilization? Aristotle is a thoroughgoing defense of oligarchical society.
In his Politics, Aristotle is most explicit. His theory of the purpose of politics is to maintain inequality. The state must carry on this natural idea and maintain it. The very basis for Aristotle's politics is the maintenance of the ``master-slave'' relationship, because it is, as he asserts, ``natural'':
``That one should command and another obey is both necesary and expedient. Indeed some things are so divided right from birth, some to rule, some to be ruled.... It is clear then that by nature some are free, others are slaves, and that for these it is both just and expedient that they should serve as slaves.''
One could accuse me of taking quotes out of context, but this would be false. It is true that even Plato makes a case for slavery, but, unlike Aristotle, Plato bases his state on the idea of Justice. Just compare Aristotle's Politics with Plato's Republic, where Plato from the very beginning launches a diatribe against arbitrary power. In the Thrasymachus section of the dialogue, he proves that the very basis for the Republic is a universal, that only universal ideas are fundamentally causal. That idea for the Republic, as he shows, must be based on the good.
Since Aristotle is functioning within a philosophical environment created by Plato, he cannot throw out the concept of universals altogether. What he does instead, is to assign them to the realm of vita contemplativa, since they are not known by the senses, and we can only have faith in their existence. Contrast that to Plato, in which the ideas of the Good and Justice are causal, not contemplative and unknowable. These innate ideas, which in another dialogue Plato proves by showing a slave to possess them, are the very basis for the Republic. I contend that the reason Aristotle was so widely influential in Venice, is that Venice was a slave society based on a principle of oligarchism. Renaissance Christianity is the antithesis of this bestial conception. For Venice and Contarini, the Christian idea of man and the rejection of slavery and usury called their very existence into question, and they reacted with cold, hard evil, in defense of their way of life.
This is Gasparo Contarini.
Contarini's Aristotelianism was highlighted by his early writings, in which he asserted, ``and in truth, I understood that even if I did all the penance I could and more, it would not suffice in the least to merit happiness or even render satisfaction for past sins.... Truly I have arrived at the firm conclusion ... that nobody can become justified through his own works or cleansed from the desires in his own heart.'' In another letter, he calls man a ``worm.'' Radical Protestantism and Contarini's Catholicism are the Aristotelian split between vita contemplativa (faith) and vita activa (works). Aristotelianism is the hatred of both God and man.
It is remarkable that there was no real difference between him and Luther, yet Contarini and several other Venetian noblemen later dominated the reform commission which nominally prosecuted the war on the Reformation.
Contarini's views were the essence of the Spirituali movement, which was to dominate a section of the most powerful Venetian oligarchy. Let us now look briefly at Contarini's career, to understand how critical he is to Venice.
Contarini was Venice's ambassador to the papacy. At another time he was the ambassador to the court of Charles V. He profiled both Charles V and the papacy. He was next appointed to the Council of Ten and later the Council of Three, the supreme ruling body of Venice. This council was justice in Venice; it ruled on all cases and could order assassinations. This was how Venice kept control of its oligarchical families. From the Council of Three, Contarini was appointed a cardinal. As a cardinal, he was first asked to create the reform commission for the Council of Trent. He and four other Spirituali dominated the commission. He was next appointed to negotiate with the Lutherans at Regensburg, at the behest of the Hapsburg Emperor Charles in 1541. At Regensburg, he gave away the Venetian game. Contarini, in what was to be called Article Five, reiterated his Lutheran beliefs. It is a bit of an embarrassment that Calvin praised Article Five at Regensburg: ``You will marvel when you read Article Five ... that our adversaries have conceded so much.... Nothing is to be found in it that does not stand in our own writings.'' Then, in typical Venetian fashion, Contarini created an Aristotelian (Fideist) faction inside the church, which insisted that the only thing that separates Protestants from Catholics be reduced fundamentally to the question of the Magisterium.
It can now be stated what happened to the Renaissance: Venice manipulated both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, leading to a series of wars which drowned the Renaissance legacy of Cusa and Pius II in a sea of blood that culminated in the Thirty Years' War.
This war depopulated most of Europe. It set up the basis for an onslaught against Christianity, much like the cultural pessimism that dominated Europe after World War I.
This Venetian evil was now to descend on England.
Designs on England
What was Venice's strategic objective?
It is now the 1520s.
According to the Venetians' profile of the Spanish Hapsburgs, the major vulnerability of the Hapsburgs was the strategic shipping lanes across the English Channel. Spain needed the Netherlands for massive tax revenue that these holdings brought, in order to maintain the Spanish army. The problem was that the Spanish were also very much aware of the strategic need to have good relations with England, and the Hapsburg monarchy married Catherine to Henry VIII to ensure such an alliance. For Venice to succeed, Henry had to be broken from Spain.
How was this accomplished, and through whom?
The Venetian faction in England got the upper hand when Henry VIII fell for the sexual bait that faction put before him: Anne Boleyn. Anne was the granddaughter of the leader of the Venetian faction in England, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, of the powerful Howard family. The Howards continued to be agents of Venetian influence for a very long time, and may still be so today, even though they were also occasionally Venice's victims. Other great families such as the Russells, Herberts, and Cavendishes also became consistent carriers of the Venetian virus.
Henry's insistence upon divorce from Catherine of Aragon and remarriage to Anne entailed the fall of his chief minister Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey knew very well what evil Venice represented and, at least on one occasion, told the Venetian ambassador so to his face. In Wolsey's place emerged a technocrat of the Venetian faction, Thomas Cromwell, who had learned the Venetian system while working in Venice as an accountant to a well-known leading Spirituali, Reginald Pole. Cromwell effectively ran the English government in the 1530s, until his own fall and execution in 1540.
Cromwell had cultivated those humanists who were favorable to the break with Rome, and a ``little Padua'' came to be developed around one of these figures at Cambridge University, by the name of Thomas Smith. Smith returned from Padua to become the head of Cambridge in 1544. He is best known for a book on English government which asserts that kings were too powerful. Other leading figures of this ``little Padua'' were Roger Ascham, John Cheke, and William Cecil. This was a tight-knit group, tutors to the Protestant children of Henry VIII, Edward and Elizabeth.
At this point, we must add the infamous Francesco Zorzi. Zorzi was the Venetian sex counsellor for Henry VIII. It was Zorzi who rendered Venice's official pronouncement that, according to his reading of the ancient Hebrew text, the pope did not have the right to grant dispensation for Henry to marry Catherine. Therefore, according to Venice, Henry never truly married Catherine. For Henry, this sealed the alliance with Venice against Spain, and unleashed his own ambitions.
How explicit they are on the question of Venice is identified by Thomas Starkey, a Spirituali who traveled through Venice with Reginald Pole. Pole is a Plantagenet, possibly one of the claimants to the English throne. He later became the chief adviser to Mary Tudor, who reigned in England after Henry VIII. Previously, Pole was almost elected pope. Starkey became one of Thomas Cromwell's chief spies. In a fictional dialogue between ``Thomas Lupset and Reginald Pole,'' Starkey states, ``For this cause the most wise men considering the nature of princes, and the nature of man as it is indeed, affirm a mixed state to be of all others the best most convenient, to conserve the whole out of tyranny.... For, as in Venice, is no great ambitious desire to be there Duke, because he is restrained to order and politic, so with us, also, should be our king, if his power were tempered after the manner before described.''
This tightly knit group of Venetian Aristotelians organized Henry's break with Rome. It was this break which opened England wide for Venetian operations.
The role of Paolo Sarpi
The second phase of the Venetian operations was much more devastating. It was launched by the notorious Paolo Sarpi. It was in this phase that England's mind and soul were taken, and England was set up to become the bastion of the New Age. To understand this, you must understand the mind of Paolo Sarpi, and who in Venice deployed him.
This phase was highlighted by what was understood in Venetian history as the 1583 fight between the Giovani (young houses) and the Vecchi (old houses). In this phase, a very radical faction took over. The Giovani realized that time had run out for the Islands of Venice. They were increasingly less viable as a military force. For the Giovani, the only defense Venice had was a desperate attempt to destroy both the papacy and the Hapsburgs, by securing Germany for the Protestants with the help of France.
The Vecchi wanted to control the papacy and stay within a neutralized Catholic Church. The Giovani organized the Protestant rebellion and wanted to see the destruction of even the name of Christianity.
Further, the plan that evolved was to move part of the money from the massive funds in the vaults of the Church of St. Mark to the Dutch Calvinist republic, Holland, and to England.
For this phase, the takover of England was left to Paolo Sarpi.
Paolo Sarpi was nominally a Servite monk who was exceptionally talented. Yet he was much more. He was the leading organizer of the Giovani. Out of the Giovani salons and secret society, Venice planned the destruction of Christianity in what was later to be called Freemasonry.
In a book about Sarpi, a modern historian by the name of Wooton proves that Sarpi was the creator of empiricism and taught Francis Bacon his so-called scientific method. The thesis of this book, which the author proves conclusively, is that Sarpi, while nominally a Catholic monk, revealed himself in his philosophical work to be a radical atheist. Sarpi was to argue that the idea of the need for a providential religion, as the basis for the majority of men acting morally, was unnecessary. He insisted that belief in God was irrational, since it is not necessary to explain the existence of the physical universe by an act of creation. This is the empiricism of Bacon. It was later revealed by sources that Sarpi was a homosexual and a blasphemer, who believed that the Bible was just some fantastic stories. He especially attacked the idea that Moses was given the Ten Commandments by God. Since one could be burned for these beliefs, he never published his philosophical writings. Some of you may be aware of the phrase, ``The pope is the Anti-Christ.'' It was Paolo Sarpi that created that myth.
He is the real founder of modernism and the Enlightenment. With these ideas, he created a pagan cult later called Freemasonry, which dominates England to this day. Out of this salon came Giordano Bruno, Galileo (a complicated case), the Rosicrucian cult, and the Thirty Years' War.
How was this phase accomplished?
The story begins with an interdict by the pope against Venice in 1606. This dispute was nominally about two jurisdictional matters respecting the right of Rome to try two accused prelates, and the right to collect monies in Venice. Venice retained Paolo Sarpi as its defender. In this fight, Sarpi wrote pamphlet after pamphlet, defending the rights of the state against those of the papacy. Henry Wooten, the ambassador from England to Venice, sent all of Sarpi's writings back to England immediately, to be translated. In the course of this fight, Sarpi became the most famous man in Europe. The papacy ended the interdict without achieving its ends and breaking Venice. Sarpi had won. In the ensuing days after the interdict was lifted, an assassin tried to kill Sarpi, but he survived. The attempt was laid at the papacy's doorstep, and now Sarpi was a hero in England and throughout Europe. He had faced down the papacy and survived.
Sarpi immediately launched a thoroughgoing attack on the very existence of the church, in two works called History of Benefices, and the most famous work of his career, The History of the Council of Trent. The latter book was dedicated to James I of England, and was first published in England. It is ironic that the nominally Catholic Sarpi organized the radical Protestant opposition throughout Europe. After all, this is Venice.
Sarpi was introduced by a circle around Wooten to Francis Bacon, who corresponded with him. Bacon picked up Sarpi's writing on method from Sarpi's Arte del Ben Pensare, where he insists that the only way an individual can know anything is through the senses. With this, modern empiricism is launched, which later becomes the radical nominalism of David Hume.
The Giovani very consciously had to build up their own faction among the English nobility. England had to be totally controlled. The drawback that the Giovani had to correct, was the fact that England was not really reliable, because the kings tended to act independently of Venetian strategic considerations. The way the Giovani functioned was by the creation of a Protestant-controlled merchant class. This was most explicit with the creation of the Venice Company by the Earl of Leicester, the funder of the Puritan movement in England. It was he who was granted by Venice certain trading routes. In 1581, another trading company was created with Venetian agreement, called the Turkey Company. These two companies later merged and became the Levant Company, which later became the infamous British East India Company. The first governor of the East India Company was Thomas Smythe, who studied law in Padua. Through this process of creating a rich merchant class, predominantly Puritan, Venice also created a battering ram against the king. These radical Protestant cults took over England during the so-called Commonwealth period.
While it takes some 80 more years to complete the Venetian takeover of England (which will be detailed by Graham Lowry in another presentation), the empire of the mind became ensconced in England. Sarpi and Venice create the Rosicrucian cult of syncretic religion that becomes Freemasonry. Once that process of takeover is complete, England becomes the bastion of paganism: usury and slavery. In short, real Aristotelians. This hatred of imago Dei is the basis of England's promotion of the New Age. This was Sarpi's program and intention, and it completed the essential destruction of the English soul. Venice and Venetian methods had transplanted themselves in England.
How The Venetian Virus Infected
and Took Over England
by H. Graham Lowry
Chorus: (WGT) The consolidation of the Venetian Party in England and Britain was a question of culture. Francesco Zorzi of Venice, the close friend and relative of Gasparo Contarini, who was sent by the Venetian oligarchy to England as the sex adviser to Henry VIII, was a cabbalist and Rosicrucian. In 1529, Zorzi came to London to deliver his opinion, and he remained at the court for the rest of his life, building up an important party of followers--the nucleus of the modern Venetian Party in England. In 1525, Zorzi had published the treatise De Harmonia Mundi, which uses the cabbalistic Sephiroth to expound a mystical, irrationalist outlook and to undercut the influence of Nicolaus of Cusa.
In 1536, when he was at the English court, Zorzi wrote his second major work, In Scripturam Sacram Problemata. This is a manual of magic, with Zorzi assuring the aspiring wizard that Christian angels will guard him to make sure he does not fall into the hands of demons.
Zorzi was a great influence on certain Elizabethan poets. Sir Philip Sidney was a follower of Zorzi, as was the immensely popular Edmund Spencer, the author of the long narrative poem The Faerie Queene. Spencer is a key source for the idea of English imperial destiny as God's chosen people, with broad hints of British Israel. Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare both attacked Zorzi's influence in such plays as Doctor Faustus and Othello, but the Venetian school was carried on by the Rosicrucian Robert Fludd, and, of course, by Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes.
John Milton, the admirer of Paolo Sarpi and apologist for usury, is an example of the pro-Venetian Puritan of the Cromwell Commonwealth period. Milton taught that the Son of God is inferior to the Father, a kind of afterthought, and in any case not necessary. Milton was the contemporary of Sabbatai Zevi, the false messiah from Smyrna, Turkey, whose father was an agent for English Puritan merchants. Did Milton's Paradise Regained of 1671 reflect knowledge of Sabbatai Zevi's meteoric career, which burst on the world in 1665?
The British East India Company was founded in 1600. By 1672, adventurers, such as Diamond Pitt, were freebooting around India.
H. Graham Lowry: In December 1688, the armies of the Dutch Prince William of Orange invaded England, interrupting the Hobbesian nightmare the country had experienced under the deranged King Charles II and his brother James II. A worse nightmare was to follow when William seized the throne of James II, for he embodied a more highly distilled form of poison which Venice had perfected during its sway over the remains of the Dutch Republic. This outright usurpation is blithely referred to in British-Venetian parlance as the ``Glorious Revolution''--which should give you some idea of how little regard for truth prevails in these circles.
The notion of ``English rights and liberties'' was quickly transformed from fiction to fraud under William's dictatorial regime. When King James II fled to France, the rightful successor to the English throne was his eldest daughter Mary, who had married William of Orange reluctantly (he was a notorious homosexual). William's demand to be declared king was never submitted to Parliament for a ``constitutional'' veneer. Instead, he summoned a special ``convention,'' which granted him full power, rather than simply the rank of the Queen's Consort.
King William's Venetian baggage included the evil John Locke, who became the chief propagandist for foisting the Bank of England on that hapless country in 1694. This was not the sort of bank you turned to for financial assistance. It was a gargantuan Venetian swindle, which promptly created England's first national debt to finance ongoing wars of attrition in Europe, imposed a credit crunch by cutting the amount of circulating English coinage nearly in half, and loaded new taxes on an already-collapsing economy. The bank's chief architect was Venetian Party leader Charles Montagu, William's new chancellor of the exchequer, who later attained the loftier position of British ambassador to Venice. Montagu appointed the pathetic Sir Isaac Newton to oversee the ``recoinage'' swindle, and Newton repaid that debt by prostituting his own niece to serve as Montagu's mistress.
The bank's promotional hireling John Locke is better known as the peddler of the obscene notion that the human mind is nothing more than a tabula rasa--a passive register of animal sensations. He clearly had a higher regard for the cash register, however, and openly defended usury as a necessary service for those whose ``estates'' lie ``in money.'' Locke's theories of government approximate those of a casino operator who lays down rules rigged for the house, under which the bestialized players compete for sums of money, which then define their worth as individuals. This is Locke's ``liberty'' to pursue property. His notion of the ``social contract,'' which guarantees the players' club members the right to enter the casino, was in fact advanced in order to justify William of Orange's usurpation of the British throne. James II, in effect, was charged with having denied those rights to his more speculative subjects, thus breaking the contract. Locke argued that the Venetian mob was therefore entitled to move in under a new contract.
By 1697, the Venetian Party's coup inside England was nearly total, and its members filled William's ``ship of state'' from stem to stern. They looked forward to reducing a most troubling matter in the English colonies of America: the impulse toward building an independent nation, which had been driving the Venetians berserk since the 1630s founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1701, John Locke, as a member of England's Board of Trade, advocated revoking all the independent charters of the American colonies, placing their economic activity under royal dictatorship, and banning their manufacture of any finished goods.
Leibniz builds anti-Venice movement
Yet, even as the Venetians were swaggering over their apparent triumph, a powerful republican opposition was building around a higher conception of the nature and purpose of man, which both inspired and opened the way for the later founding of the United States. Its leader was the great German scientist and statesman Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who led what might well be called a movement for the pursuit of happiness--the ultimate goal of the liberty which America embraced in its Declaration of Independence.
In the face of the new Venetian onslaught in England, Leibniz set forth his view of human happiness, from the standpoint of man's creation in imago Dei. Writing ``On the Notions of Right and Justice'' in 1693, Leibniz defines charity as ``universal benevolence,'' which he calls the habit of loving, i.e., ``to regard another's happiness as one's own.'' That joy is first approximated, he says, in the contemplation of a beautiful painting by Raphael, for example, ``by one who understands it, even if it brings no riches, in such a way that it is kept before his eyes and regarded with delight, as a symbol of love.''
When the object of delight ``is at the same time also capable of happiness, his affection passes over into true love,'' Leibniz says. ``But the divine love surpasses other loves, because God can be loved with the greatest result, since nothing is at once happier than God, and nothing more beautiful and more worthy of happiness can be known than He.'' And, since God possesses the ultimate wisdom, Leibniz says, ``the notions of men are best satisfied if we say that wisdom is nothing else than the very science of happiness.''
As the leading scientist and philosopher of his day, Leibniz was widely known throughout Europe, and among such republican leaders of New England as the Winthrops and Mathers, later extending to include, most significantly, Benjamin Franklin. From the 1690s onward, Leibniz's leading ally within England, Scotland, and Ireland, was the brilliant anti-Venetian polemicist Jonathan Swift, who directed a cultural onslaught against the bestial notions of Bacon, Hobbes, René Descartes, Newton, and Locke, for more than 40 years.
From the standpoint of reason, the Aristotelian empiricism of the likes of Descartes and Locke reduces the notion of man to the level of a mere beast, which, of course, is the prerequisite for imposing an empire of the sort the Venetians sought, then and now. When Jonathan Swift took up his cudgels on behalf of Leibniz's refutation of empiricism, he ridiculed their enemies' ideas for what they were: insane. Swift's ``A Digression on Madness,'' in his 1696 work A Tale of a Tub, examines ``the great introducers of new schemes in philosophy,'' both ancient and modern. They were usually mistaken by all but their own followers, Swift says, ``to have been persons crazed, or out of their wits;|... agreeing for the most part in their several models, with their present undoubted successors in the academy of modern Bedlam.''
Oligarchical Families Move In
By 1701, the lunatics of the late-model incarnation of the Venetian Party had typically inbred a set of oligarchical families, mixing and matching Spencers, and Godolphins, and Churchills--the last headed by John Churchill, soon to become duke of Marlborough.
Churchill had begun as a page boy to Charles II in 1665, behind the skirts of his sister Arabella, the mistress of the king's brother James. Then, for similar services rendered, Churchill received £10,000 from Charles II's favorite mistress.
With things apparently moving so swimmingly, the Venetians set their course for their next major objective: the destruction of France, the most productive economic power in Europe. Under the ministry of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the patron of the scientific academy at Paris where Leibniz himself was engaged in the early 1670s, France had led the way in infrastructural and industrial development. So in 1701, England launched war on France. More than a decade of bloodshed and destruction followed--for the populations of both countries, and their European allies. It was yet another rigged game, in which Venice expected to be the only winner.
There are inevitably loose ends in any foul scheme. Queen Mary had died in 1694, leaving William without a direct heir. Her sister Anne was next in line to the throne, but the death of Anne's only surviving child in 1700 presented a new succession crisis. An Act of Settlement was imposed in 1701. James I's 71-year-old granddaughter Sophie, the head of the German House of Hanover, was designated as Anne's successor. King William died in 1702, and Anne became queen of England.
As the Venetian Party expected, she quickly bestowed preeminence at court upon the duke and duchess of Marlborough, who had spun their webs of influence over her for many years. The problem for the Venetians, was that Sophie's chief adviser and privy counsellor, was Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.
The Battle for Britain
With Leibniz virtually one step away from guiding policy in London, the final battle against Venetian Party dictatorship within England broke out in earnest. It was a conflict between the pursuit of happiness, and the lust for empire. The Marlboroughs resorted to deceit, terror, and treachery to cut off political relations--or even ordinary civilities--between Queen Anne and Sophie of Hanover. Swift maintained a fierce barrage both publicly and privately against Marlborough's Venetian gang, to the point that he broke their domination of Queen Anne's cabinet. He extended his own influence to her innermost circle, and, during 1710 and 1711, he drove the Marlboroughs and all their cronies from office.
London desperately hurled Isaac Newton into the fray against Leibniz, puffing the old fraud up with the lie that differential calculus was his invention rather than Leibniz's. Leibniz and Swift conspired to bring the great composer George Frideric Handel from Hanover to London in 1710, seeking to uplift English musical culture from decadent braying and outright snoring.
The American Flank
And in the midst of all this, Swift managed to get two of his allies appointed to royal governorships in the American colonies. Robert Hunter in New York, and Alexander Spotswood in Virginia, launched a drive in 1710 which opened the door to our future continental republic.
That same year, in Massachusetts, Cotton Mather published his republican organizing manual, An Essay upon the Good, which spread Leibniz's notion of the science of happiness throughout America for more than a century. Benjamin Franklin paid tribute to Mather's book as the single most important influence upon his life.
Jonathan Swift said of this period, that he doubted there was another in history ``more full of passages which the curious of another age would be glad to know the secret springs of.'' The Venetians would not like you to know that Leibniz and Swift constructed some of the secret passages which led to the founding of the American Republic. But within Britain (as it came to be known after the 1707 union which England forced upon Scotland), the battle against the Venetian Party was soon lost.
Leibniz's patron, Sophie of Hanover, the designated successor to Queen Anne, died in May 1714, at the age of 84. Her son George was now the heir to the British throne. William of Orange had been George's idol, and Marlborough and the Venetian Party had bought him many times over. Barely two months after Sophie's death, Queen Anne's life was ended, probably by poison, at the age of 49. The duke of Marlborough, who had plotted in exile for years for Anne's overthrow, landed in England the same day; and George of Hanover was proclaimed Great Britain's King George I. Jonathan Swift had been forced to flee to Ireland, and George soon dismissed Leibniz from the court of Hanover.
How serious was the threat Leibniz and Swift posed to the Venetian Party's conspirators? Just consider the conspirators' satanic rage against the dead Queen Anne, who for all her faults had learned to seek something better in life than they could ever know. There was no public mourning, nor royal funeral; her corpse was left to rot for more than three weeks. Then a chosen few, serving George I, buried her secretly at night, in Westminster Abbey--beneath the tomb of her great-great-grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots. To this day, no stone or tablet marks her grave.
Leibniz himself died in 1716. Jonathan Swift fought on from Ireland, from the position Queen Anne had granted him as the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.
He became the acknowledged political leader of all Ireland during the 1720s, building a mass-based movement on the principles of man's God-given right to liberty, and the right to national sovereignty based on natural law. Swift thereby extended Leibniz's movement for the pursuit of happiness, and immeasurably influenced the growth of republicanism in eighteenth-century America.
Britain, however, began a rapid descent into hell, under the new regime of George I. Previously secret Satan-worshipping societies such as the Hell-Fire Club now surfaced, heralded by the publication in 1714 of Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits. Very simply, Mandeville argued that the interests of the state were nothing more than the maximum fulfillment of its individuals' hedonistic pleasures: The more private vices, the more public benefits. Therefore, the state thrives most upon the corruption of its subjects. Inevitably, Britain was soon locked into a Venetian orgy of corruption and new heights of financial speculation, leading to the massive blowout of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. Appropriately, the government which emerged in 1721 from this devastating collapse, was headed by Prime Minister Robert Walpole, who held that post in the service of evil for the next 20 years.
The Hell-Fire Clubs not only proliferated; they became the inner sanctum of Britain's degenerate elite. The most prominent one, founded in 1720 by Lord Wharton, included on its dining-room menu ``Hell-Fire Punch,'' ``Holy Ghost Pie,'' ``Devil's Loins,'' and ``Breast of Venus'' (garnished with cherries for nipples). By the 1760s, when the American colonies began to openly break with Britain, most of the king's cabinet were members of the Hell-Fire Club. When Benjamin Franklin served as our colonial postmaster general, for example, his official superior, Sir Francis Dashwood, was the head of the Hell-Fire Club!
The murderous toll of such a regime upon the British population is expressed by the following statistics: From 1738 to 1758, there were only 297,000 births recorded--against 486,000 deaths. Typifying the bestiality of the emerging British Empire, was the phrase smugly coined by Robert Walpole, ``Every man has his price.''
We must not pay it.
