Accession : "He Has..." - A Tale of Two Conspiracy Theories

Accession : "He Has... , He Has... , He Has..." 

- A Tale of Two Conspiracy Theories

An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown

English Bill of Rights 1689

Whereas the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons assembled at Westminster, lawfully, fully and freely representing all the estates of the people of this realm, did upon the thirteenth day of February in the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred eighty-eight [old style date] present unto their Majesties, then called and known by the names and style of William and Mary, prince and princess of Orange, being present in their proper persons, a certain declaration in writing made by the said Lords and Commons in the words following, viz.:

Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom; 

• By assuming and exercising a power of dispensing with and suspending of laws and the execution of laws without consent of Parliament;

• By committing and prosecuting divers worthy prelates for humbly petitioning to be excused from concurring to the said assumed power;

• By issuing and causing to be executed a commission under the great seal for erecting a court called the Court of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes;

• By levying money for and to the use of the Crown by pretence of prerogative for other time and in other manner than the same was granted by Parliament;

• By raising and keeping a standing army within this kingdom in time of peace without consent of Parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to law;

• By causing several good subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when papists were both armed and employed contrary to law;

• By violating the freedom of election of members to serve in Parliament;

• By prosecutions in the Court of King's Bench for matters and causes cognizable only in Parliament, and by divers other arbitrary and illegal courses;

• And whereas of late years partial corrupt and unqualified persons have been returned and served on juries in trials, and particularly divers jurors in trials for high treason which were not freeholders;

• And excessive bail hath been required of persons committed in criminal cases to elude the benefit of the laws made for the liberty of the subjects;

• And excessive fines have been imposed;

• And illegal and cruel punishments inflicted;

• And several grants and promises made of fines and forfeitures before any conviction or judgment against the persons upon whom the same were to be levied;

All which are utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes and freedom of this realm;

And whereas the said late King James the Second having abdicated the government and the throne being thereby vacant, his Highness the prince of Orange (whom it hath pleased Almighty God to make the glorious instrument of delivering this kingdom from popery and arbitrary power) did (by the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and divers principal persons of the Commons) cause letters to be written to the Lords Spiritual and Temporal being Protestants, and other letters to the several counties, cities, universities, boroughs and cinque ports, for the choosing of such persons to represent them as were of right to be sent to Parliament, to meet and sit at Westminster upon the two and twentieth day of January in this year one thousand six hundred eighty and eight [old style date], in order to such an establishment as that their religion, laws and liberties might not again be in danger of being subverted, upon which letters elections having been accordingly made; 

And thereupon the said Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons, pursuant to their respective letters and elections, being now assembled in a full and free representative of this nation, taking into their most serious consideration the best means for attaining the ends aforesaid, do in the first place (as their ancestors in like case have usually done) for the vindicating and asserting their ancient rights and liberties declare 

That the pretended power of suspending the laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal;

That the pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution of laws by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal;

That the commission for erecting the late Court of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes, and all other commissions and courts of like nature, are illegal and pernicious;

That levying money for or to the use of the Crown by pretence of prerogative, without grant of Parliament, for longer time, or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal;

That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal;

That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law;

That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;

That election of members of Parliament ought to be free;

That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;

That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;

That jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders;

That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void;

And that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the laws, Parliaments ought to be held frequently.

And they do claim, demand and insist upon all and singular the premises as their undoubted rights and liberties, and that no declarations, judgments, doings or proceedings to the prejudice of the people in any of the said premises ought in any wise to be drawn hereafter into consequence or example; to which demand of their rights they are particularly encouraged by the declaration of his Highness the prince of Orange as being the only means for obtaining a full redress and remedy therein. Having therefore an entire confidence that his said Highness the prince of Orange will perfect the deliverance so far advanced by him, and will still preserve them from the violation of their rights which they have here asserted, and from all other attempts upon their religion, rights and liberties, the said Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons assembled at Westminster do resolve that William and Mary, prince and princess of Orange, be and be declared king and queen of England, France and Ireland and the dominions thereunto belonging, to hold the crown and royal dignity of the said kingdoms and dominions to them, the said prince and princess, during their lives and the life of the survivor to them, and that the sole and full exercise of the regal power be only in and executed by the said prince of Orange in the names of the said prince and princess during their joint lives, and after their deceases the said crown and royal dignity of the same kingdoms and dominions to be to the heirs of the body of the said princess, and for default of such issue to the Princess Anne of Denmark and the heirs of her body, and for default of such issue to the heirs of the body of the said prince of Orange. And the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons do pray the said prince and princess to accept the same accordingly. 

And that the oaths hereafter mentioned be taken by all persons of whom the oaths have allegiance and supremacy might be required by law, instead of them; and that the said oaths of allegiance and supremacy be abrogated.

I, A.B., do sincerely promise and swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to their Majesties King William and Queen Mary. So help me God. 

I, A.B., do swear that I do from my heart abhor, detest and abjure as impious and heretical this damnable doctrine and position, that princes excommunicated or deprived by the Pope or any authority of the see of Rome may be deposed or murdered by their subjects or any other whatsoever. And I do declare that no foreign prince, person, prelate, state or potentate hath or ought to have any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority, ecclesiastical or spiritual, within this realm. So help me God.

Upon which their said Majesties did accept the crown and royal dignity of the kingdoms of England, France and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging, according to the resolution and desire of the said Lords and Commons contained in the said declaration. And thereupon their Majesties were pleased that the said Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons, being the two Houses of Parliament, should continue to sit, and with their Majesties' royal concurrence make effectual provision for the settlement of the religion, laws and liberties of this kingdom, so that the same for the future might not be in danger again of being subverted, to which the said Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons did agree, and proceed to act accordingly.

Now in pursuance of the premises the said Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons in Parliament assembled, for the ratifying, confirming and establishing the said declaration and the articles, clauses, matters and things therein contained by the force of law made in due form by authority of Parliament, do pray that it may be declared and enacted that all and singular the rights and liberties asserted and claimed in the said declaration are the true, ancient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom, and so shall be esteemed, allowed, adjudged, deemed and taken to be; and that all and every the particulars aforesaid shall be firmly and strictly holden and observed as they are expressed in the said declaration, and all officers and ministers whatsoever shall serve their Majesties and their successors according to the same in all time to come. And the said Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons, seriously considering how it hath pleased Almighty God in his marvellous providence and merciful goodness to this nation to provide and preserve their said Majesties' royal persons most happily to reign over us upon the throne of their ancestors, for which they render unto him from the bottom of their hearts their humblest thanks and praises, do truly, firmly, assuredly and in the sincerity of their hearts think, and do hereby recognize, acknowledge and declare, that King James the Second having abdicated the government, and their Majesties having accepted the crown and royal dignity as aforesaid, their said Majesties did become, were, are and of right ought to be by the laws of this realm our sovereign liege lord and lady, king and queen of England, France and Ireland and the dominions thereunto belonging, in and to whose princely persons the royal state, crown and dignity of the said realms with all honours, styles, titles, regalities, prerogatives, powers, jurisdictions and authorities to the same belonging and appertaining are most fully, rightfully and entirely invested and incorporated, united and annexed. And for preventing all questions and divisions in this realm by reason of any pretended titles to the crown, and for preserving a certainty in the succession thereof, in and upon which the unity, peace, tranquility and safety of this nation doth under God wholly consist and depend, the said Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons do beseech their Majesties that it may be enacted, established and declared, that the crown and regal government of the said kingdoms and dominions, with all and singular the premises thereunto belonging and appertaining, shall be and continue to their said Majesties and the survivor of them during their lives and the life of the survivor of them, and that the entire, perfect and full exercise of the regal power and government be only in and executed by his Majesty in the names of both their Majesties during their joint lives; and after their deceases the said crown and premises shall be and remain to the heirs of the body of her Majesty, and for default of such issue to her Royal Highness the Princess Anne of Denmark and the heirs of the body of his said Majesty; and thereunto the said Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons do in the name of all the people aforesaid most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities for ever, and do faithfully promise that they will stand to, maintain and defend their said Majesties, and also the limitation and succession of the crown herein specified and contained, to the utmost of their powers with their lives and estates against all persons whatsoever that shall attempt anything to the contrary. And whereas it hath been found by experience that it is inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom to be governed by a popish prince, or by any king or queen marrying a papist, the said Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons do further pray that it may be enacted, that all and every person and persons that is, are or shall be reconciled to or shall hold communion with the see or Church of Rome, or shall profess the popish religion, or shall marry a papist, shall be excluded and be for ever incapable to inherit, possess or enjoy the crown and government of this realm and Ireland and the dominions thereunto belonging or any part of the same, or to have, use or exercise any regal power, authority or jurisdiction within the same; and in all and every such case or cases the people of these realms shall be and are hereby absolved of their allegiance; and the said crown and government shall from time to time descend to and be enjoyed by such person or persons being Protestants as should have inherited and enjoyed the same in case the said person or persons so reconciled, holding communion or professing or marrying as aforesaid were naturally dead; and that every king and queen of this realm who at any time hereafter shall come to and succeed in the imperial crown of this kingdom shall on the first day of the meeting of the first Parliament next after his or her coming to the crown, sitting in his or her throne in the House of Peers in the presence of the Lords and Commons therein assembled, or at his or her coronation before such person or persons who shall administer the coronation oath to him or her at the time of his or her taking the said oath (which shall first happen), make, subscribe and audibly repeat the declaration mentioned in the statute made in the thirtieth year of the reign of King Charles the Second entitled, _An Act for the more effectual preserving the king's person and government by disabling papists from sitting in either House of Parliament._ But if it shall happen that such king or queen upon his or her succession to the crown of this realm shall be under the age of twelve years, then every such king or queen shall make, subscribe and audibly repeat the same declaration at his or her coronation or the first day of the meeting of the first Parliament as aforesaid which shall first happen after such king or queen shall have attained the said age of twelve years. All which their Majesties are contented and pleased shall be declared, enacted and established by authority of this present Parliament, and shall stand, remain and be the law of this realm for ever; and the same are by their said Majesties, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons in Parliament assembled and by the authority of the same, declared, enacted and established accordingly.

II. And be it further declared and enacted by the authority aforesaid, that from and after this present session of Parliament no dispensation by _non obstante_ of or to any statute or any part thereof shall be allowed, but that the same shall be held void and of no effect, except a dispensation be allowed of in such statute, and except in such cases as shall be specially provided for by one or more bill or bills to be passed during this present session of Parliament. 

III. Provided that no charter or grant or pardon granted before the three and twentieth day of October in the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred eighty-nine shall be any ways impeached or invalidated by this Act, but that the same shall be and remain of the same force and effect in law and no other than as if this Act had never been made.

Avalon Project - Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. 

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. 

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. 

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

• He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

• He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

• He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only.

• He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

• He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people.

• He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining, in the mean time, exposed to all the dangers of invasions from without and convulsions within.

• He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

• He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

• He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

• He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

• He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.

• He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power.

• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

• For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;

• For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states;

• For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;

• For imposing taxes on us without our consent;

• For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury;

• For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses;

• For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies;

• For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments;

• For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

• He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

• He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

• He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

• He has constrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

• He has excited domestic insurrection among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in our attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them, from time to time, of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity; and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. 

[Signed by]  JOHN HANCOCK[President] 

New Hampshire 
JOSIAH BARTLETT, 
WM. WHIPPLE, 
MATTHEW THORNTON.

Massachusetts Bay
SAML. ADAMS,
JOHN ADAMS,
ROBT. TREAT PAINE,
ELBRIDGE GERRY

Rhode Island
STEP. HOPKINS,
WILLIAM ELLERY.

Connecticut
ROGER SHERMAN, 
SAM'EL HUNTINGTON, 
WM. WILLIAMS, 
OLIVER WOLCOTT.

New York
WM. FLOYD, 
PHIL. LIVINGSTON, 
FRANS. LEWIS, 
LEWIS MORRIS.

New Jersey
RICHD. STOCKTON, 
JNO. WITHERSPOON, 
FRAS. HOPKINSON, 
JOHN HART, 
ABRA. CLARK.

Pennsylvania
ROBT. MORRIS
BENJAMIN RUSH,
BENJA. FRANKLIN,
JOHN MORTON,
GEO. CLYMER,
JAS. SMITH,
GEO. TAYLOR,
JAMES WILSON,
GEO. ROSS.

Delaware 
CAESAR RODNEY, 
GEO. READ, 
THO. M'KEAN.

Maryland
SAMUEL CHASE,
WM. PACA,
THOS. STONE,
CHARLES CARROLL of Carrollton.

Virginia
GEORGE WYTHE,
RICHARD HENRY LEE,
TH. JEFFERSON,
BENJA. HARRISON,
THS. NELSON, JR.,
FRANCIS LIGHTFOOT LEE,
CARTER BRAXTON.

North Carolina
WM. HOOPER,
JOSEPH HEWES,
JOHN PENN.

South Carolina
EDWARD RUTLEDGE,
THOS. HAYWARD, JUNR.,
THOMAS LYNCH, JUNR.,
ARTHUR MIDDLETON.

Georgia
BUTTON GWINNETT,
LYMAN HALL,
GEO. WALTON.

NOTE.-Mr. Ferdinand Jefferson, Keeper of the Rolls in the Department of State, at Washington, says: " The names of the signers are spelt above as in the facsimile of the original, but the punctuation of them is not always the same; neither do the names of the States appear in the facsimile of the original. The names of the signers of each State are grouped together in the facsimile of the original, except the name of Matthew Thornton, which follows that of Oliver Wolcott."-Revised Statutes of the United States, 2d edition, 1878, p. 6.

Source: Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States. Government Printing Office, 1927.  House Document No. 398.  Selected, Arranged and Indexed by Charles C. Tansill

Martin Luther Hated the Righteousness of God

Catholics don't believe Man is saved through Faith alone. 

Catholics believe that Faith has to be joined with Good Works.

Martin Luther Hated the Righteousness of God (But Loved Poo)

"One ought to fast, watch, and labor to the extent that such activities are needed to harness the body’s desires and longings; however, those who presume that they are justified by works pay no attention to the need for self-discipline but see the works themselves as the way to righteousness. They believe that if they do a great number of impressive works all will be well and righteousness will be the result. Sometimes this is pursued with such zeal that they become mentally unstable and their bodies are sapped of all strength. Such disastrous consequences demonstrate that the belief that we are justified and saved by works without faith is extremely foolish."

"All the passages in the Holy Scriptures that mention assistance are they that do away with "free-will", and these are countless...For grace is needed, and the help of grace is given, because "free-will" can do nothing."

"I frankly confess that, for myself, even if it could be, I should not want "free-will" to be given me, nor anything to be left in my own hands to enable me to endeavour after salvation; not merely because in face of so many dangers, and adversities and assaults of devils, I could not stand my ground ; but because even were there no dangers. I should still be forced to labour with no guarantee of success.¦ But now that God has taken my salvation out of the control of my own will, and put it under the control of His, and promised to save me, not according to my working or running, but according to His own grace and mercy, I have the comfortable certainty that He is faithful and will not lie to me, and that He is also great and powerful, so that no devils or opposition can break Him or pluck me from Him. Furthermore, I have the comfortable certainty that I please God, not by reason of the merit of my works, but by reason of His merciful favour promised to me; so that, if I work too little, or badly, He does not impute it to me, but with fatherly compassion pardons me and makes me better. This is the glorying of all the saints in their God.

- Martin Luther

So what [else] did Luther actually say? As an example, in 1542, Luther is reported to have described his depression as such: “I am ripe shit, so is the world a great wide asshole; eventually we will part.”

To say he was preoccupied would be putting it mildly. In 1531, in discussing an illustrative conversation he had with the Devil (which took place on a toilet), Luther said, “I am cleansing my bowels and worshipping God Almighty; You deserve what descends and God what ascends.”

So great was his love for pooing that he claimed one of his most significant revelations came while he was on the pot. In attempting to understand Romans 1:17, the realization that salvation came through faith rather than through his effort struck him, and as he later claimed, “Here I felt that I was altogether born again, and had entered Paradise itself through open gates.”

In his defense, the idea of the Devil loitering in toilets and it being his “playground,” was a common one. So, it makes a weird sort of sense that Luther would, as he put it, “chase him [Satan] away with a fart,” or write to him, “Dear Devil . . . I have shat in my pants and breeches; hang them on your neck and wipe your mouth with them.”

More than just bizarre diary entries, it has been argued that the Devil in these writings often served as a stand-in for many of Luther’s enemies, and that Luther’s followers were aware of this and applauded him for his bravery and strength.

Not everyone was impressed with Luther’s vulgarity, however. The English Catholic, Thomas More (1478-1535) (Henry VIII had his head cut off on July 6), called Luther a “buffoon . . . [who will] carry nothing in his mouth other than cesspools, sewers, latrines, shit and dung . . . .”

But Luther was undeterred and toward the end of his life, penned what was essentially an open letter to Pope Paul III in 1545 called Against the Papacy in Rome Founded by the Devil, in which Luther pulled out all the stops. Saving some of his best for last, Luther described the practice of indulgences as “an utter shitting,” and went on to claim that the “dearest little ass-pope” not only worshiped Satan, but “also lick[ed his] behind.”[8] (Licking someone’s butt at this time being somewhat equivalent to the modern expression “kiss-ass.”) He also said the Pope farted so loudly and powerfully, that “it is a wonder that it did not tear his hole and belly apart.”

First to understand the background to the story that Luther recalls,  Luther used to hate Romans 1:17. He struggled with this verse in particular, and the phrase 'God's righteousness' in particular, because he always read it in the sense which it was preached by the Catholic theologians at the time. At that time this verse was understood as the "formal or active righteousness" with which "God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner." In other words, Luther while believing in God and having some faith in Christ struggled with Romans 1:17 before his 'confidence burst' and his faith began to posses him more violently. This is why Romans 1:17 is brought up in his recollections but actually plays little part in his explaining his actual beliefs later on. This he did, regarding justification by faith, most fully in his lectures on Galatians, although Romans as a whole still held an important place as well.

His experience or turning point in breaking through on his understanding of Romans 1:17 is referred to as his 'Tower Experience' because  it occurred in the tower of the Black Cloister in Wittenberg (later Luther’s home) at an undetermined date between 1508 and 1518.

Luther, before overcoming his doubts about Romans 1:17, used to think 'God's  righteousness' in the gospel 'was revealed', not in giving perfect righteousness freely to sinners forever apart from the fact they were sinners, but in punishing sinners and rewarding the righteous.  Luther, originally as a monk, viewed the gospel as an extension of the law, not a way to find freedom from its curse. Only later did he discover that a person is saved by faith, without works of the law entering into the equation.  He always saw that faith produced many works, but not allowing those works to take part in the subject of justification, where we 'passively receive' righteousness as a gift, apart from our own merit, was something he learned later on. I think the Romans 1:17 'tower experience' that he had was probably during his lectures on Romans which began in the year 1516.

Before this experience He says he had faith but it was not clear yet:

For a long time I went astray [in the monastery] and didn’t know what I was about. To be sure, I knew something, but I didn’t know what it was until I came to the text in Romans 1 [:17], ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’ That text helped me. There I saw what righteousness Paul was talking about.82 Earlier in the text I read ‘righteousness.’ I related the abstract [‘righteousness’] with the concrete [‘the righteous One’] and became sure of my cause. I learned to distinguish between the righteousness of the law and the righteousness of the gospel. I lacked nothing before this except that I made no distinction between the law and the gospel. I regarded both as the same thing and held that there was no difference between Christ and Moses except the times in which they lived and their degrees of perfection. But when I discovered the proper distinction—namely, that the law is one thing and the gospel is another—I made myself free.” (Luther's Works, Volume 54, P442).

 In 1545, he describes his own experience at greater length. He seems to take a longer view if it, like a growing faith and struggle that begins by referring to his days as a monk, his weak faith in his earlier days as a Biblical Professor and finally his overwhelming sense of what Romans 1:17 really meant. He recalled these experiences  when describing the events that occurred in the year 1519 when he got into trouble with the Pope. To understand at what point in his thinking 1519 occurs it is helpful to know that Luther first lectured on Romans at around the year 1516, he also lectured a preliminary version of Galatians and Hebrews shortly after this time. However, he did not lecture on Galatians, formally, in the format in which they were published, until around 1531. It took around 16 years for his faith to really explode in the form of Galatians, long after he had kicked the hornets nest in Rome.

In fact, this gripping realization of justification by faith made him revisit his old lectures and begin to rewrite them as early as 1519. It is just before this time that he made his breakthrough in the 'tower experience'. Removing his misunderstanding of that verse, his faith seems to have broke into a full confidence and the verse that used to trouble him became an anchor that symbolized his overwhelming conviction that began slowly years before and grew more and more years later. Here we find he began to revise his work on the Psalms in 1519 and his breakthrough over his doubts about Romans Chapter 1:17 that had 'stood in his way' until this point.

Meanwhile, I had already during that year returned to interpret the Psalter anew. I had confidence in the fact that I was more skilful, after I had lectured in the university on St. Paul’s epistles to the Romans, to the Galatians, and the one to the Hebrews. I had indeed been captivated with an extraordinary ardor for understanding Paul in the Epistle to the Romans. But up till then it was not the cold blood about the heart,but a single word in Chapter 1[:17], “In it the righteousness of God is revealed,” that had stood in my way. For I hated that word “righteousness of God,” which, according to the use and custom of all the teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically regarding the formal or active righteousness, as they called it, with which God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner. 

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God, and said, “As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the decalogue, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath!” Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at that place, most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.  (Luther's Works, Volume 34, P336-337).

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’ ” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. Thereupon I ran through the Scriptures from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.  (Luther's Works, Volume 34, P336-337).

He continues to explain the effects of his experience about Romans 1:17 and how he later found additional support through Augustine. He  already had his doctorate in theology in October 19, 1512 and may seem strange that he did not encounter Augustine's work on the subject until years later, but it is a very specific one which Luther mentions, called 'The Spirit and the Letter.' 

And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word “righteousness of God.” Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise. Later I read Augustine’s The Spirit and the Letter, where contrary to hope I found that he, too, interpreted God’s righteousness in a similar way, as the righteousness with which God clothes us when he justifies us. Although this was heretofore said imperfectly and he did not explain all things concerning imputation clearly, it nevertheless was pleasing that God’s righteousness with which we are justified was taught. Armed more fully with these thoughts, I began a second time to interpret the Psalter. And the work would have grown into a large commentary, if I had not again been compelled to leave the work begun, because Emperor Charles V in the following year convened the diet at Worms.49. (Luther's Works, Volume 34, P336-337).

The truth is although Romans was the place where he made his initial breakthrough it was not the place where his faith finally rested on. For this we must turn to Galatians.  In fact Luther hardly has any comments at all under Chapter 1:7 in his works on Romans, but in every verse of Galatians, Luther uses as one more opportunity to pound and pound away at the doctrine that changed his life forever. No bible commentary on any book in the Bible since can pretend in any way to have had the same impact on the world.

As a result of the revolutionary changes in Luther and his dramatic growing faith is there is a problem with Luther's Works in that he had to re-write many things and where the need was not urgent he seems to have left them as they were.  Romans is a little thin on doctrine compared to Galatians, as he wrote it years before, it is also was not needing much revision, so Luther probably found most of it still acceptable to him even under his enlarged views years later. 

His commentary on Galatians was when he was crystal clear in 1531 and he does not seem to have had enough time to fully rewrite everything before to measure up to his final stage of assurance and knowledge.  Therefore regarding the timing of his understanding of the doctrine that in many ways resulted in the Protestant church, I would say that his faith was crystallized around 1517 with Romans and from there it grew until it exploded with Galatians in 1531.  He seems to have hung his faith not on Romans at all by this point. Galatians was his eventual favorite work and the essential Luther.

For anyone interested in reading Luther, He wrote his works on Genesis after Galatians so they are not in any need up of updating at all and are a good place to start after Galatians. Some of his earlier works however must be viewed and even possibly corrected by comparing them to Galatians. 

After all his years Luther clearly favored his writing on Galatians above all else. I am sure he would have instantly agreed to the burning of all his books if he might keep his work on Galatians. It is here where you find Luther's views in the doctrine of salvation by faith, apart from works. One can't understand Luther at all without reading it. Anyone who has read it will understand why. I challenge anyone interested in Luther to read his work on Galatians in order to begin to understand him.

Luther described his relation to the epistle in more vivid terms. “The Epistle to the Galatians,” he once said at table, “is my epistle, to which I am betrothed. It is my Katie von Bora.”  (Luther's Works, Volume 26, Introduction)

Accession : The Coup d'etat of 1688 (and All That)

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.

"By the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Stadholther of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau, Defender of the Faith, etc."

If you crown him, let me prophesy:

The blood of English shall manure the ground,
And future ages groan for this foul act;
Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels,
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound;
Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny
Shall here inhabit, and this land be call'd
The field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls.
O, if you raise this house against this house,
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursed earth.
Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,
Lest child, child's children, cry against you woe!

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord:
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel: then, if angels fight,

Weak men must fall, for Heaven still guards the right.

HIST-251: Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts

Chapter 1. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 [00:00:00]

Professor Keith Wrightson: Okay. Let's get started.

When I was at school we were often told that one of the great things about British history was that the country had never been successfully invaded by a foreign power since 1066 when William the Conqueror and the Normans conquered the Saxon kingdom, and this was part of the national story as we got it. There was a great deal of emphasis upon successfully resisting foreign powers, the Spanish Armada, Napoleon, Hitler, whatever. 

So no successful foreign invasion since 1066, and this makes a good story, but unfortunately it's not actually true. 

Britain was very successfully invaded in November 1688 by a largely Dutch army under William of Orange, Stadtholder of the Netherlands.

But that of course didn't count. The whole events of 1688 had been successfully repackaged as the essential prelude to the English Revolution Part Two, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, taken in the classic Whig interpretation of national history as a fundamental watershed. 

Before 1688, the country had been beset with chronic political instability and indeed social conflict. 1688 cleared the way. It cleared the way for the establishment of a stable constitutional monarchy; cleared the way for political liberty. It cleared the way for religious toleration and cultural pluralism, the triumph of Whig principles in that respect; and security of property and growing economic opulence and the formation of the United Kingdom by the Union of England and Scotland, and finally the successful assertion of national power internationally and the growth of an overseas empire.

Well, these are some of the key elements classically stressed from the eighteenth century onwards in Whig historiography. It's a bit of a myth; a particular, rather self-serving, interpretation of the national past with a strong ideological message about what it is to be British. But like all historiographical myths of that kind it did have a kernel of truth, even if it airbrushed out an awful lot of the real complexities of the story and tended to represent as being almost inevitable a set of outcomes which were in fact far more complex, far more hesitant, far more messy than was usually recognized. But still, be that as it may, these are the processes that we need to consider in the final days of this course.

Well, as you'll remember, by 1688 King James II had succeeded in undermining the initial strength of his position when he came to the crown by utterly alienating what's usually referred to as the Tory Anglican majority in the political nation, people upon whom Charles II had counted when he faced down the Whig opposition in the Exclusion Crisis of 1678 to '81. And, at the same time as he alienated those people, James had failed to win the trust and support of the Protestant dissenters, [and] the low church Anglicans who had been the backbone of the Whig and exclusionist cause. The extent of this general alienation from the King and his policies was of course revealed in the fact that some of the leaders of the political nation were willing to actively support intervention by a foreign power in 1688, indeed to invite it in their famous letter to William III. And even more, including James II's own army, were willing at least to acquiesce in the face of William's intervention. 

They sat on their hands.

To this extent one could say that the Revolution of 1688 was in different ways both a Whig and a Tory revolution. It was in part an elite coup d'etat; it was in part a country revolution. It merged a range of political opinion in opposition to James, in opposition to the specter of "popery and arbitrary power." And the political settlement as it emerged reflected that composite character of the Revolution. On the 22nd of January 1689, a Convention Parliament met to begin working out the settlement. It had, it's estimated, 319 members of broadly Whig sympathy and 232 of broadly Tory sympathy plus the House of Lords, but the debates as they went on seemed to have become largely dominated by those of the middle ground who managed to hold the minorities of extremists of both political persuasions in check. It seems to have been one of those rare but instructive situations in history when the center is tough and holds firm.

The Convention's formal definition of the situation reflected that. It resolved — and I'm quoting — it resolved almost unanimously that, "King James II, having attempted to subvert the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the contract between king and people and by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws and having withdrawn himself out of this kingdom has abdicated the government and that the throne is thereby vacant."

That's what they resolved, and note carefully in those words; it's another masterpiece of ambiguity comparable to the communion service in the Anglican Prayer Book of 1559, which you'll remember. They say that James broke the contract between king and people. 

That's Whig ideology, the notion of a contract. But he also withdrew himself and abdicated, so he hadn't actually been deposed for his offenses. That's an appeal to Tory sympathy. They didn't believe in resistance to a divinely appointed and anointed king; so he'd abdicated. As for the Jesuits and so forth, well, everyone could agree on that. 

And in all of this of course the status of the baby Prince James was conveniently forgotten.

Chapter 2. Settlement

Now this kind of interpret-it-your-own-way attitude also suffused a lot of the rest of the settlement as it unfolded in 1689 and 1690. William was not content to be simply a regent, but he and Mary shared the crown until her death in 1694. He was king in effect but he wasn't an elected king. He held the crown in right of his wife who was a legitimate Stuart heir, the Protestant daughter of James II by his first marriage. And it was agreed that Mary's youngest sister, Princess Anne, would be the next heir, ahead of any children that William and Mary themselves might have. 

Again, all very odd.

The Convention also drew up a Declaration of Rights later passed into law as the Bill of Rights. It was clear on some matters which found almost universal assent, but it was also cautious and ambiguous in other respects. The power of the monarch, for example, to suspend the laws was declared to be illegal but the dispensing power of the monarch, the traditional dispensing power, was illegal "only as it hath been exercised of late," i.e., as it had been exercised by James II. Parliaments should be called frequently and should be freely elected, but as yet there were no specific measures to ensure that that would happen. Roman Catholics were to be excluded from the crown, but as yet there was no specific provision to ensure that that would be the case. And, above all, the status of the whole document was rather obscure. It looked rather like a contract with the new monarchs, but in fact the offer of the crown to William and Mary was not made conditional upon accepting it. The offer of the crown was actually made on the 13th of February before the Declaration of Rights had been presented to William and Mary, and they hadn't formally accepted it before they were proclaimed monarchs the next day.

So 1689 saw a series of measures intended to advance the transfer of power to William and Mary and that was rapidly consolidated with other acts of Parliament which again reflect the coalition of interests involved in the Revolution. They passed a Mutiny Act. That laid down that no standing army would be permitted in peace time unless authorized by Parliament. They voted income to the crown by taxation but the sums which were voted were well known to be inadequate for even peacetime administration, let alone war time, and so Parliament would always be needed in order to grant additional necessary supply. They passed a Toleration Act. Protestant dissenters were allowed to worship publicly, and by the end of 1690 some 9,000 dissenting meeting houses had been opened, but they were still not accorded full civil rights. The Church of England remained the legally established church, the Test Acts were still there to exclude nonmembers of the Church of England from holding public office. But Protestant dissenters were allowed to worship openly and meanwhile Roman Catholics, Unitarians and Jews were permitted to worship in private. They were tolerated, officially.

Altogether the settlement of 1688 and '9 constituted a kind of pragmatic compromise designed, obviously enough, to appeal to as many people as possible and to alienate as few as possible from the Revolutionary Settlement. John Morrill has put it well, he calls it "a centrist compromise and a constitutional blur." And as with the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 it was full of inconsistencies and it remained to be seen just how they would work it out in practice, how it would be worked out by political groups who had somewhat different interpretations of just what it actually meant.

But worked out it was. And in the course of the next twenty-five years or so that involved a significant refashioning of the state as a result, and the emergence by 1714 of a British state of a shape and structure which no one had quite anticipated in 1688.

Chapter 3. War

Well, that British state was shaped partly by political principles. It was shaped partly by political and religious prejudices, and partly also by the constraining force of immediate circumstances. And of those circumstances the dominant circumstance was war. The modern British state, it could be said, was forged under the stresses of war.

William of Orange hadn't intervened in 1688 out of his deep personal concern for England's religion and liberties. His intervention was part and parcel of his life's mission of containing the threatened hegemony of the French monarchy of Louis XIV and in particular the threat it posed to his own country, the Netherlands. And the price of William's intervention was war. War first of all to defend the Revolutionary Settlement against Jacobite risings — Jacobites being supporters of James — Jacobite risings in Scotland in 1689 to '90, then to oust James II from Ireland where he'd landed with an army in 1689 to '91, culminating in the Battle of the Boyne at which James was defeated and fled back to France. Then war in the Netherlands against Louis XIV between 1688 and 1697 to contain the French who were James' principal supporters, and then again after William III's death in 1702 renewed war between 1702 and 1713 to defeat the renewed menace of French hegemony, which included French recognition of the claims of James II's son. James had died in 1701. His son and heir, James III, to those who supported him, was known as "The Pretender" to the crowns of England and Scotland; thirteen years old when his father died.

So then between 1688 and 1713 we have a whole generation of major wars being fought on land and sea, mostly against the French. Given its commitment to the Revolution, the political nation represented in Parliament was willing, though very reluctant, to recognize the need for these wars. But at the same time Parliament was acutely sensitive to the danger that they might lead to a buildup of royal power which might threaten its own position, might raise again that specter of arbitrary power. Out of the interaction of that necessity to fight the wars and that anxiety about where they might lead, there eventually emerged what was, on the one hand, a far more powerful state apparatus — it's been described famously by John Brewer as the "fiscal military state" which emerges at this time — and yet, on the other hand, it was a more powerful state apparatus which remained very firmly under parliamentary control. The key to the whole process, as you'll be aware, was finance, but to understand that we have to step back first a little bit in time and look at what's known as the 'Financial Revolution'.

Chapter 4. The Financial Revolution 

Now, as you know, by the standards of the day England was a relatively rich country by the late seventeenth century and getting richer. Earlier in the century, however, governments had rarely succeeded in tapping that wealth effectively for their own purposes. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and the so-called Financial Revolution saw a transformation of the 'fiscal capacity' of the state, that is its ability to raise money for its purposes, and consequently a transformation of its capacity for effective action. And this was the outcome of developments which, in the words of one recent historian of the Financial Revolution, "transformed the willingness, rather than the ability, of the English people to pay high taxes, lend large sums, and above all repose great trust in the financial institutions of their parliamentary government." That's Henry Roseveare I'm quoting.

Parliamentary government and the trust which it could inspire was perhaps indeed the key to this whole development. Under Charles II, Parliament's ultimate control of the public purse was of course not in doubt but, as you know, suspicion of the crown's policies could mean that Parliament was unwilling to grant supply. Indeed, in 1672 the situation in royal finances had become so bad, the crown became so overstretched as a debtor, that it led to what's known as the 'Stop of the Exchequer' in which Charles II postponed repayments of his debts to private lenders. Many London bankers were completely ruined as a result. It was a very severe blow to the crown's credit and its ability to raise money.

Well after 1688 that kind of situation was transformed, transformed in less than ten years, in the face of the need to raise money for the wars fought to defend the Revolutionary Settlement. It's a long and complex story, but the essence of it all was quite nicely contained in a statement made by Lord Macaulay in his history of all this written back in 1848. Macaulay wrote, "from a period of immemorial antiquity it has been the practice of every English government to contract debts. What the Revolution introduced was the practice of honestly paying them back." Parliament was now fully in control not only of grant of supply but of its expenditure. Annual estimates were made of need. Supply was voted. The accounts were audited by parliamentary commissioners. Revenue was now regarded as the public revenue rather than the monarch's revenue. And from 1698 even the ordinary day-to-day expenses of the crown were controlled by an annual grant, the so-called 'Civil List', the money paid for running the day-to-day business of the monarchy, as still happens.

Parliament sanctioned a whole series of devices to raise money for the war. In 1690, it voted a Land Tax, a quite heavy tax on landowners which brought in a reliable annual income. Loans were raised on the security of parliamentary taxation. Longer term borrowing was achieved by means of the sale of annuities to the public with the regular payment of those annuities secured by parliamentary taxation. They tried out lotteries as a way of raising money, again with Parliament's sanction. In 1694, the Bank of England was chartered. Lenders were brought to subscribe to a 1.2 million pound loan with the interest and the eventual repayment of the capital guaranteed from taxation. The Bank of England was not a central bank in the modern sense, but it was a vehicle devised to raise money for the needs of the state. There was also the development of a market in various forms of state securities, these new state securities which were being issued. They could be sold on to third parties and it was at the core of the emergence of dealings in stocks, the beginnings of the London Stock Exchange.

All of this was initiated in a piecemeal and a rather improvised manner, year by year they dreamed up something new as a way of raising the money they needed. But gradually by the early eighteenth century it had coalesced into a system, and fundamental to the whole emerging edifice was an effective tax system which made possible the servicing of a growing public debt. Initially the Land Tax, quite heavy, about 20% on landed income in the richest counties, and then increasingly the use of the Excise, which was indirect taxes collected by a growing corpus of public officials, Excise Men as they were known. And as this system developed there was a growth of confidence in the financial probity and reliability of the state, and that growing confidence transformed people's willingness to lend their money to the government. Public revenues increased massively. By 1700, it's been estimated that about 9% of national income was being taken in taxation, and by the same year about a third of the revenue raised by the state was being used to fund the debts.

By 1714, the national debt had risen to 48 million pounds, a massive sum by the standards of the day, most of it funded by parliamentary pledges to pay the interest and eventually the principal. In 1717, after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, a variety of sinking funds were established to pay off parts of the debt, but it was generally recognized that a public debt of some size, reliably serviced in the way I've described, would be a permanent fact of life thereafter. In short, what they'd done in the Financial Revolution was to create, gradually, a stable system of public credit based upon parliamentary taxation and with it a regime which has been described as having "the political support, the administrative capacity and the fiscal base required to accumulate and service a perpetual national debt."

So in the years after 1688 the fiscal capacity of the state was rapidly and massively transformed. John Brewer calls this a "fiscal military state" because so much of the enhanced public revenue was spent on war. Military expenditure as a proportion of national income was about 2% at the death of Charles II in 1685. By 1700 it was 4%, in 1710 at the height of the War of the Spanish Succession it peaked at over 14%, and then it settled down after peace came in 1714 at about 5% even in peace time, mostly as a result of the regular expenditure which was maintaining the Royal Navy as a permanent military presence.

Now all of this could have been potentially destabilizing, and there were times in the 1690s as they went from year to year trying to raise money that the whole thing sometimes teetered on the edge of potential collapse. There was a real risk in 1696 that they wouldn't be able to raise enough money, for example, to pay the army. But they managed to sustain it. They improvised their way through and eventually, as I said, it coalesced into a system which provided the underpinning for the emergence of England as a significant military power, a significant world power.

But if Parliament was willing to provide the resources which made possible that kind of growth in the power of the state, Parliament also exacted a price. It exacted a price politically. As John Brewer shows, the prevalent suspicion of central government amongst parliamentarians meant that they exerted themselves to try to shape this emergent state apparatus in ways that would accord with their own preferences, their so-called country attitudes, their suspicion of central government. The need for annual parliamentary supply meant that Parliament became a permanent part of the government of the country. They had to have parliamentary sessions every single year. No one had anticipated that. It just happened; it was necessary.

The money which was granted to the government by these parliaments was very carefully monitored according to the system of 'appropriation', the principle of 'appropriation'. That's to say parliamentary grants could be used only for the purposes for which they had been granted. Therefore, policy had to be in accord with Parliament's wishes, to meet Parliament's approval. Royal ministers might be chosen by the crown but, again, they needed to be men who could command the support of a majority in the House of Commons. If they had no majority in the House of Commons, they were unable to achieve anything, they were unable to get the supply that they needed. And in other more specific ways, as Brewer puts it, "fiscal control put the bite into the bark of country politics."

Sometimes they would tack on to revenue bills a Place Act. That was an act which attempted to exclude government officials from the House of Commons in order to preserve the independence of Parliament. In 1694, William III was forced to accept a new and strengthened Triennial Act, under which Parliament should be not only called every three years but should not sit longer than three years without new elections. So they had to have elections every three years, a very significant curtailment of the royal prerogative to call and then to dissolve Parliament when the king chose. William resisted it strongly but he had to give way in the end.

By 1700, the relationship between the ministers in the royal government, those who sat in the Cabinet, and Parliament, had become the crucial axis of political life. And the struggle of those ministers to establish and to maintain a working majority in Parliament, above all in the House of Commons, was giving rise to an increasingly vigorous brand of organized party politics in Parliament. The old abusive labels, Whig and Tory, which, as you know, had first appeared to hurl against your enemies in the Exclusion Crisis, these were now revived and perpetuated to describe different groupings, groupings which had different interpretations of the meaning of the Revolution and differences of view about how the Revolutionary Settlement should be developed.

By 1700, the Whigs and the Tories were fairly organized groups: they had their own favorite meeting places in London, they had their own newspapers, they had their own national followings. The adversarial politics of Whigs and Tories influenced political life at the level of the city, at the level of county politics. It erupted periodically in the vigorous contests of the many general elections which were held between 1695 and 1715. There were ten general elections in those years in which it's estimated something like a quarter of the adult male population exercised their votes and the election campaigns were full of competing — of competition — for seats in which the Whigs and Tories organized their supporters. These alignments were even such that in the city of York, where they had assembly rooms where polite society met to hold balls and other occasions, concerts and so forth, there was one assembly room for the Whigs and one for the Tories.

But if Whigs and Tories fought furiously for dominance in both Parliament and in local politics, there were also vital areas in which they were fundamentally at one, and that was revealed in 1701 when the death of Princess Anne's only child, the ultimate heir to the throne, called into question the future succession of the crown. This precipitated the so-called Act of Settlement of 1701. It's known as the Act of Settlement but the actual title of the act is quite significant. It was actually called "An Act for the Further Limitation of the Crown and Better Securing the Rights of the Subject". This act, which obtained support from both sides politically, passed over fifty-seven possible claimants to the crown on the grounds that they were Roman Catholics and it fixed the succession on the Electress Sophia of Hanover, ruler of a small north German principality who was descended from King James I. 

Sophia of Hanover and her heirs were chosen as the nearest Protestant successors. 

The Act also required that future monarchs should be communicants of the 

Church of England; 

It forbade their marriage to Roman Catholics; 

It restricted the movements of the monarch outside the kingdom, they could not leave the kingdom without permission; 

and, in addition, it made royal privy councilors more accountable to Parliament, restricted the election of placemen from the government to the House of Commons, and declared that, in future, judges in the law courts should enjoy their tenure during good behavior and not merely at the will of the monarch. 

So a specific contingency, the problem over the succession, gave rise to a far-reaching set of statutory restrictions on the crown's actions which found widespread support.

In sum then, by the time Queen Anne came to the throne in 1702 with the prospect of the future Hanoverian succession, which actually eventually took place in 1714 when Electress Sophia's son, George, became king,, with all of that it can be said that some of the fundamental political issues which had so disturbed the seventeenth century were close to being resolved, with general acceptance of those resolutions. The issue of the security of the Protestant religion and of the toleration of religious dissenters had been resolved. The issue of Parliament's role and its permanence in the constitution had been resolved. The issue of the royal prerogative in matters of state and how far it could be controlled or reduced. The problem of effective government finance. The problem of how to contain differences of political principle without those partisan differences leading to the breakdown of government or to civil war had been resolved with party politics. The structures and practices of the English state had been refashioned in a manner which both enhanced the power of the state and at the same time contained the power of the state in ways which would be conducive to safeguarding the liberties of the subject.

Chapter 5. Scotland

Well, one final element remains. From 1707, this emergent state was not just an English but a British state, with the constitutional union in May 1707 of England and Scotland. Ireland remained technically a separate kingdom until 1801, though one ruled by a Protestant landed elite.

Now in Scotland much of the kingdom, particularly lowland Scotland and some parts of the Highlands, those parts of the western Highlands of Scotland which were dominated by the Clan Campbell who were both Protestants and Whigs in politics, much of Scotland then had welcomed the Revolution of 1688. And rebellions by some of the Jacobite clans of highland Scotland were swiftly put down in 1690. But in the years that followed, if the 1690s witnessed a kind of resurgence of Scotland's political independence it was also a profoundly traumatic decade for the Scots.

Scotland remained a relatively poor country; magnificent landscape but somewhat barren. It was largely a subsistence economy in the rural areas and it was a very fragile one. 

In 1695 to '99, Scotland suffered dreadful famine known as the "ill Years of King William." 

It's possible that as much as 13% of the population of Scotland died in those years and indeed much more in the most marginal highland areas. 

In the highland Aberdeenshire up here, the highland areas of northeastern Scotland, it's estimated that perhaps a third of the population died in the 1690s. 

Scotland had relatively little manufacturing industry. It was little developed. The most important sector was the manufacture of linen on Tayside up here and over near Glasgow in the west, and this was an industry which was principally dependent upon selling that linen to English markets.

Overseas trade was also relatively limited. Scotland was excluded from England's colonial trade as a separate kingdom, and efforts made by some Scots in the 1690s to try to establish a colonial foothold of their own, when they attempted to establish a colony in Panama, the Darien scheme in 1695 to '99, unfortunately those efforts proved to be a disastrous failure. Not least because the English government refused to help a venture which antagonized Spain by attempting to establish a Scottish colonial presence in territories regarded as part of the Spanish empire. Well, all of these unhappy events provided the political and economic context of the Union of 1707.

The Scots were extremely conscious, of course, of their distinctive national identity and history. They were anxious to preserve their national integrity.

In the 1690s, the Scottish Parliament was enjoying a greater independence from the crown than it had ever done so hitherto. 

But economically the most dynamic sectors of the Scottish economy were heavily dependent upon England and some Scots were also attracted to the possibility of obtaining greater access to English markets and participation as equals in English colonial trade. Meanwhile, the English government was interested in a closer union with Scotland for quite different reasons, for largely political reasons.

In 1701, when the Act of Settlement was passed fixing the succession in the Hanoverian line, the Scottish Parliament did not at first follow England's lead in recognizing the Hanoverian succession. This raised, in the early years of the eighteenth century, a potentially dangerous situation. 

What if the Scottish Parliament decided to recognize a Stuart succession, decided to vest their crown in the old line, the Stuart line, after Queen Anne's death?

If that happened it could potentially provide a major security risk. 

It could return to a situation in which the two kingdoms, which had been joined only in the person of their monarchs, might fully separate. 

That might pose a new threat to England from the North, especially if the Scots had a Stuart crown allied to the French.

The English government therefore began to put on pressure for a union which would remove that threat and they were willing to use economic leverage to try to do so. In 1705, the English parliament passed the Alien Acts, which excluded the Scots from English markets unless they commenced negotiations for a possible union. And, on the other hand, it held out the prospect of economic advantages for Scotland if they were willing to do so. Now in Scotland the issue was very passionately debated both in Parliament and in the streets of Edinburgh, but in those debates the economic advantages of union soon came well to the fore. As one opponent of the union, Alexander Fletcher of Saltoun, put it, the economic issues were "the bait that covers the hook." And, in the event, that carried the day with those of the Scottish elite in Scotland's Parliament who ended up making the decision.

In 1707, after protracted negotiations a Treaty of Union was at last agreed. There would be a single United Kingdom of Great Britain with a single flag, the "Union Jack." You'll see, lovingly drawn on the bottom of your handout, the St. George flag of England, the St. Andrew's flag of Scotland, and how they merged together into the Union Jack, a flag now familiar to us on the tops of mini-cars and on swimming costumes. [Laughter] 

The Hanoverian succession to the united throne was recognized. The Scots would join a single parliament for the United Kingdom meeting in Westminster. Sixteen members would be sent to the House of Lords, forty-five to the House of Commons, in rough proportion to population. 

The Scottish legal system, however, would retain its full jurisdictional independence. The Scottish church, the Kirk, would also retain its independence as a Presbyterian church.

But fifteen of the twenty-five articles of the Treaty of Union concerned economic arrangements. The Scots would be granted full access to English trade. Lower taxes would be levied in Scotland, because of the relative economic poverty of Scotland as compared to England. Scotland's industries would be protected. Substantial compensation would be paid to those Scots who had lost heavily through their investment in the Darien adventure of the 1690s. 

And so on the first of May, 1707, Scotland's Parliament dissolved itself, not to meet again until the year 1999 when it was reinstated as part of the current constitutional reconfiguration of the United Kingdom. 

So the Union had taken place.

Was it, one might ask, a union of absorption, a union in which Scotland was to be dominated by England, a union of absorption, or was it to be a union of fusion, one of cooperation rather than domination? Many Scots at the time feared that it would be the former. In the long run I think it turned out to be more the latter. Scots certainly proved to have a quite disproportionately large role, almost from the beginning of the Union, in the running of the British Empire for example. But in the early eighteenth century it was not yet quite either. England was not actually much interested in dominating Scotland beyond the question of security, and indeed Scottish affairs remained largely in the hands of Scots themselves. Conversely, it took a while before Scotland was able to fully exploit the economic advantages of Union, though by the 1750s they were indeed doing so very successfully. The emergence of Glasgow as one of the major Atlantic ports is one of the biggest success stories of that part of the Union.

The Union then, one could say, confirmed neither the fears nor initially the full hopes of the Scots who had agreed to it. But from the English point of view it had resolved a pressing security problem and it completed the refashioning of the state which had been introduced by the Revolution of 1688. 

Culturally, there was an England and a Scotland and a Wales, as there still is, but politically by 1714 there was what Jonathan Swift described as that "crazy double-bottomed realm Great Britain."

And crazy it was in many ways; a monarchy which was actually run by a Parliament, truly a monarchical republic, in which The King after 1701 actually had fewer powers than were later granted to Presidents of the United States. 

A confessional state and yet a confessional state which actually had two established religions, 

The Church of England in England, 

The Presbyterian Church of Scotland in Scotland, 

and which, by 1714, was headed by a "King" who was actually a German Lutheran, 

but was an Anglican when he was in England 

and 

a Presbyterian when he was in Scotland, 

and meanwhile practicing greater religious freedom than was tolerated by any other state save the Netherlands. 

An offshore island deeply hostile to foreign involvement, deeply hostile to militarism, and yet which was playing a key role in destroying the threat of Louis XIV's monarchy and which had emerged as a great military power.

It was all very confusing, but there it was. They had finally muddled through to something that worked.

Okay. And we all lived happily ever after. [Laughter]

Right. Next time I'll have a short lecture as a kind of windup and then talk in some detail about the examination and what to expect when the examination comes. The examination's going to be held here on the 16th at 2 p.m., remember.

[end of transcript]

God forbid!

Worst in this royal presence may I speak,

Yet best beseeming me to speak the truth.

Would God that any in this noble presence

Were enough noble to be upright judge

Of noble Richard! then true noblesse would

Learn him forbearance from so foul a wrong.

What subject can give sentence on his king?

And who sits here that is not Richard's subject?

Thieves are not judged but they are by to hear,

Although apparent guilt be seen in them;

And shall the figure of God's majesty,

His captain, steward, deputy-elect,

Anointed, crowned, planted many years,

Be judged by subject and inferior breath,

And he himself not present? O, forfend it, God,

That in a Christian climate souls refined

Should show so heinous, black, obscene a deed!

I speak to subjects, and a subject speaks,

Stirr'd up by God, thus boldly for his King:

My Lord of Hereford here, whom you call king,

Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford's king:

And if you crown him, let me prophesy:

The blood of English shall manure the ground,

And future ages groan for this foul act;

Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels,

And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars

Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound;

Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny

Shall here inhabit, and this land be call'd

The field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls.

O, if you raise this house against this house,

It will the woefullest division prove

That ever fell upon this cursed earth.

Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,

Lest child, child's children, cry against you woe!

Schiller Institute 1994-Palmerston Zoo conference-G. Lowry --Venice Takeover of 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.