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All Lives Matter!

This is the message that has been thundered out from pulpits since Christianity began. It seems to me, seeing the multitude of placards in demonstrations on the television recently saying 'Black Lives Matter' that somewhere the black people have got it seriously wrong. To say that black lives matter is at least to imply that other lives – and there are many other skin colours – don't. It is a racist slogan, just as much as a placard saying 'White lives matter' would be; and one needn't wait long for the cries of rage from the many coloured people of the world if that message were to appear. To single out any skin colour is racist, and is something that we should have grown out of long ago. I often think that there is something especially divine in that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was born a Jew: not a blond, Nordic person nor a coal-black Ethiopean, but someone just sallow enough to be able to claim brotherhood with all men.

Slavery

Slavery has existed for a very long time, and it was, of course, accepted in the time of the Roman Empire. Our Lord, during the period of his incarnation, was therefore aware of it, and yet there is nowhere in the Bible any condemnation of slavery as an institution per se. I am therefore drawn to the conclusion that there is nothing immoral about the institution of slavery. In Englisc (Anglo-Saxon) times, slavery was also common, and accepted, although the church did attempt to mitigate its worst effects. Slavery was considered an inferior mode of existence, and was used as a legal penalty at that time. However the lot of a slave was not insupportable, and many slaves were probably content with their lot – after all they were guaranteed food and shelter, and all the effort of decision-making was taken away from them. It is a fact that many of the coloured slaves in the southern states of America were quite content to continue to work for their masters after emancipation, as the lot of those who were forcibly emancipated and suddenly left to find themselves a job and a home in what had suddenly become a hostile land was not an enviable one, and resulted in considerable hardship and poverty among the coloured people of America, which still resonate today.

The crux of the matter is surely not slavery itself, but the way in which a master treats his slaves. There are many folk today whose condition is little better than slavery, although they are paid (a minimal amount) and have a home (possibly of an inferior nature and rented). I would guess that some of the people in this situation would, if offered the opportunity to become slaves in Englisc England would seize it gladly. Monks and nuns, after all, offer themselves up voluntarily to God, giving up all their independence and placing themselves totally under the instructions of an abbot or abbess.

I therefore cannot accept the present horror expressed by most people at the condition of slavery, and the execration of otherwise good folk who owned slaves in the past. If they could be proved to be sadistic and tyrannical owners, I would of course revise my opinions. However even some of these men, who made their fortunes out of the slave trade from comfortable mansions in Bristol, for example, are surely not more guilty than the tribal rulers on the African coast, who made frequent raids on other tribes living in the hinterland, captured as many of them as they could, and then sold them to the slave-traders when their ships came. The prisons in which they kept these unfortunate slaves still exist in Benin, and yet neither the Nigerians nor their descendants seem to be reviled for this crime, which I should have thought that was worse than that of the slave-traders who bought them. Also I should have thought that the slaver captains who crushed as many slaves as possible – men, women and children – beneath the decks of their ships, knowing that a proportion of them would die before the voyage was completed, were far more sunk in sin than the unknowing profiters from the trade in England.

It seems to me that there is a great danger that the modern revilers of slavery are at risk of destroying our history, by whitewashing all traces of our past misdemeanours. If we are to learn from history, we need the history to be there to learn from. In the same way, the Anglican church needs to take a long hard look at its attitudes, and to do more to alleviate modern wage-slavery, not worry puritanically about the sins of the past.

Claustrophobia

Claustrophobia is the name given to a morbid dread of closed places. The name comes from the Latin claustrum added to the Greek word phobia. I was aware of it from a young age, as my mother suffered from it in a mild form. She could not bear to be in a room on her own with a closed door, and I was always careful to leave the door open when leaving her alone. This name is, of course, a bastard form and has been re-hashed by adding other suffixes, like arachnophobia meaning the fear of spiders and so on. Recently we have had another word foisted on us, Homophobia, which presumably means a morbid fear of homosexuals. By means of this, along with the new term 'hate crime', left-wing liberalism has attempted to create a new tyranny among normally law-abiding folk, by accusing anyone who is against the perversion of homosexuality of 'homophobia'. I have no dread of homosexuality: although I have always known it to be a sin; but not one to which I have ever been seriously tempted. However I am not a Puritan, and have no desire to persecute those who have fallen into this trap: rather they have my pity; and I have the greatest suspicion of the motives of the so-called liberals who have invented this chimera, along with so-called 'same-sex marriage', another contradiction in terms. I think it has come about because the modern English in particular seem to have the greatest difficulty in separating the sinner and the sin. The sin should be villified: the sinners should be pitied, and if possible rescued.

An even more insidious assertion that has been accepted by a gullible population is that homosexual behaviour is an in-born, pre-determined condition. There is no scientific evidence for this. Homosexuality is a learned behaviour, and is more in the nature of an addiction. Similar sexual behaviour at the opposite end of the spectrum is also displayed by some men, who seem to have the greatest difficulty in restraining themselves from taking every opportunity to have intercourse with any available woman, with or without her consent. This manifests itself in various ways, from out-and-out rape to the use of prostitutes and general abuse of women. This is quite rightly outlawed and in certain circumstances subject to prosecution. As with other addictions, it is self-fulfilling, and the more it is indulged the worse it gets. Society at present seems to be obsessed with sex, so it is hardly surprising that perverse forms of sexual indulgence should be given the oxygen of publicity.

The homosexual and lesbian brigade have now constituted themselves into a kind of third tribe. This tribe has an annual festival which is called 'pride', in which they all process through the streets and dance about in outlandish costumes. Pride is something which I have always been taught to believe to be a sin. These people have taken advantage of the institution of same-sex 'marriage' to create 'families' which can adopt children. Now I have no objection to two men, or two women, living together if they so desire. If this were a Christian country I would hope that they would not have the same tax concessions, mortgage rights etc. as are accorded to married couples; but in an increasingly secular world I suppose that this has to be. However I can imagine no more horrible fate for an infant than to be adopted by a homosexual couple and brought up to believe that this is the normal way of life. It must put an incredible strain on them when they go to school and find out that most other children have a mummy and a daddy, and they are somehow different. When they grow older and begin to develop sexual needs of their own this strain must be increased.

Our Lord, during his incarnation, was fond of children, and He liked to be thought of and addressed as Father. 'If anyone', he said, 'hurts one of the least of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone were hung about his neck, and he were cast into the midst of the sea.' I cannot help feeling that those who dreamt up the inhuman law that enables homosexuals to adopt children, and those who enforce it, have put themselves in danger of this punishment.

I Had a Dream

I had a dream, many years ago now, even before I discovered the Orthodox Church, that if I was ever lucky enough to come into possession of some enormous amount of money, I would like to buy a farm just big enough to be self-sufficient. The farm buildings would be dedicated to the foundation of a monastery: an old barn would be nice for creating an Englisc hall. The monastery chapel would be built from scratch by the original methods used to construct Englisc churches. In order that their services could be observed by outsiders without disturbance there would be a western gallery – a feature often found in Englisc churches – which could be approached by a staircase from the porch. I was thinking of members of the public, who might come to visit from historical interest, and maybe film companies would be interested, providing a useful source of income. The monastery would, of course, be of Western Rite and conduct all its services in Latin, and the monks would be real monks and live as far as possible as they would have lived in Englisc times.

I have never had enough money, and the funds raised by þa Engliscan Gesiþas, even when we were at our largest and hit 300 members, never amounted to the kind of sum that would be required, even if the Fellowship could be persuaded of the viability of the scheme. Since I have started the Guild of St Eadmund, of course, the project has faded in my mind, as our guild is nowhere near large enough yet to fund an enterprise of this sort, and is unlikely to grow to such a size in my lifetime (or even at all). However if anyone shares my dream, and can find a way of raising funds, or has a suitable farm that they no longer require, then please let me know!

The De-Normanization of England

A talk given by Eadmund on the occasion of the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Sandlake (Hastings) 1066–2016

While I was trying to organize this celebration in Sandlake, I approached St Mary's Church opposite the abbey and received a letter from a man styled ‘The Dean of Battle’ (the title makes one pause for a moment!) which ended ‘... Please bear in mind, however, that as an institution we were founded by King William I, to whom we give due honour.’

This caused me to wonder exactly what was the due honour that should be given to an illegitimate descendant of a foreign house, whose overweening ambition caused him to invent a spurious claim to the Englisc throne and then, in order to seize it, mobilize a brutal, mercenary army, drawn from the dregs of the soldiery of Europe on the promise of booty from what was then the richest and most civilized kingdom west of Constantinople or New Rome (Constantinople was then know to us as Micelgarð)? What honour should be given to this creature who, having seized this country, proceeded to flood it with lies to bolster his spurious claim, kill a large proportion of its citizens, drive a similarly large proportion overseas, terrorize those who remained, export its treasures, ruin its culture and impose a simulacrum of its religion to bewilder and confound the congregations of its originally right-believing church? This was certainly some achievement, but hardly, I think, one deserving of ‘honour’ in the sense in which the word is generally understood. Perhaps more appropriate appellations for King William would be ‘war criminal’, ‘gangster’, ‘psychopath’ and ‘con-man’? His death in agony, alone, abandoned by his so-called friends and family, in the ashes of yet another foreign city that he was subjecting to his lust for power, perhaps gives us a hint as to the ‘due honour’ that he was to receive hereafter.

We have today given due honour to King Harold Godwinesson, the last English king, and to all his companions who so nobly fought and died contesting William Bastard’s spurious claim. But an even greater gift to him surely would be to restore his kingdom to the happy and equitably governed place that it once was: to de-Normanize it and restore the Englisc-ness whose essence amazingly still exists in this island despite nearly a thousand years of sustained effort to eradicate it.

Incidentally, perhaps I should here correct the folk who assume that I am recommending a Luddite style return, an abandonment of all the material developments that make up modern life and a consequent existence in barns without proper plumbing: – nothing could be further from my mind. I do, however, recommend a radical change in our belief systems. It is true that this may also have an effect on our way of life, but I would suggest that any minor inconveniences that we may feel in body are paltry compared with the amazing effect that it would have on our souls.

However William the Bastard and so-called ‘Archbishop’ Anselm left us with a seemingly indelible legacy – a culture that accepts that might is right, and that everything in the cosmos can be known and ordered by the minds of men. Anything beyond what can be apprehended by our five senses may apparently be ignored. This culture, of course, is intolerable as it stands and a few men throughout the centuries who clung to the remnants of Orthodoxy that still remained here have made some effort to try and ameliorate it; but we still find ourselves to a certain extent fenced in by its limits. One of these fences is the ‘Crusader’ mentality that the British are somehow naturally better than anyone else, which has perhaps done most to blacken our name throughout the world. This arrogance was introduced by the Normans, and first practised on the Englisc. Then English people mistakenly imitated what had become the culture of their ‘betters’ and practised it on the Welsh, Scots and Irish. By the 1230s people who spoke a different language were considered to be outside even the rules of Christian warfare. English soldiers had turned head-hunters, and the English crown was paying a bounty of a shilling a head for all hostile Welshmen decapitated in the Marches. We have improved somewhat since those days, of course, but the rhyme Taffy was a Welshman, / Taffy was a thief; / Taffy came to my house and stole a piece of beef. / I went to Taffy's house, / Taffy was in bed: / so I took a big stick and knocked him on the head ... was well-known and often recited when I went to school in the early ’fifties. It is easy to see how this attitude became endemic, and has subsequently been practised on countless other peoples throughout the British Empire. It has no place in our native culture.

This arrogant assumption that the way in which one does things is the only way they ought to be done also spread to religion. It is demonstrated by the fact that Henry II was the first English king known to have legislated against heresy. A group of foreign weavers denounced at Oxford in the 1160s and declared heretical by the church authorities, were handed over to the King’s officers for punishment, branded on the face, and their houses and all their property ritually purified by burning. They themselves were expelled from the town to face starvation in the winter cold. After 1200 burning was to become the standard punishment for heresy. Previously it had been used to punish petty treason and the murder of a husband by his wife, and it is possible that the association between betrayal of one’s lord and the betrayal of the Lord God explains this close connection. However until the late fifteenth century England was so over-governed by the Norman forces of occupation that ‘heresy’ against the Norman Catholic way had little chance to take root, and there were few ‘holy bonfires’. These only broke out in the religious differences of the 16th century. Of course after the so-called ‘Reformation’ (known to right-believing folk as the ‘Deformation’) came the witch-hunts of the 17th century, proving that the Protestants were just as, if not more godless than their predecessors had been.

We have recently heard a great deal about Magna Carta in the media, owing to the occurrence of the anniversary of its first signing in 1215. The Great Charter is undoubtedly both the most familiar and the most misunderstood document in our history. It was not the first, or indeed the only document intended to limit the authority or freedom of action of the new tyrants imposed on us by the Norman Conquest. Moreover it was not the first to be issued by King John, who throughout his reign had offered charters of liberties to various franchise holders. Magna Carta, however, true to the typical mediæval preoccupation with the trees rather than the wood, was concerned with limitations on John's financial regime, and local matters such as the removal of fish weirs on the rivers Thames and Medway, and the banishment of various foreigners who had incurred serious dislike. Nevertheless it had a significant clause, number 61, according to which a committee of twenty-five barons was to be appointed to oversee the charter's implementation. Should the King in any way infringe the charter’s terms or fail to heed baronial warnings, then the twenty-five might rise against him and seize his resources, but short of causing him or his family physical injury. This was, of course, a mirror of the system that had been in operation in Englisc times, when the King's power was effectively limited by the Witan, which famously briefly exiled King Æthelræd II. However in 1215 it meant that a committee of twenty-five extremely angry and selfishly-motivated Norman barons would be interposed between God and His supposed vicar on earth.

It is hardly surprising that John instantly repudiated Magna Carta and the Pope, confronted by a document that threatened to institute rebellion as a constitutional instrument and to place limitations on supposedly God-given authority, not only annulled it, but ordered the suspension of Archbishop Stephen Langton, one of its architects, for failing to lend the King the unconditional support that was his due. Magna Carta was scrapped ignominiously within only three months of its issue, and might have disappeared into the rubbish bin of history. However later readers deliberately misrepresented it as being a defence of the ancient rights of the English people, and used it to defend claims of very new ‘rights’ that they had dreamt up for themselves, ultimately resulting in the martyrdom of King Charles I. This misrepresentation continues to this day, hence the recent fanfare in the media, accompanied by much repetition of the old propaganda that the Magna Carta is somehow a most valuable guarantee of English rights, whereas in fact the only rights it guarantees are those of the Norman barons.

When the Norman church closed the direct pathway to Almighty God, and the mediæval Gothic spires reached upwards in a vain attempt to re-establish a link with heaven, men now appealed to reason and common decency instead. After a long and painful birth beginning in Mediæval times, a fully-fledged modern version of democracy eventually appeared with the eventual emancipation of women after the First World War. Since then it has been exported like a disease, principally by America, with disastrous results. A system that it took the English nine hundred years to develop cannot be grafted onto peoples that do not even have a word for it in their language, let alone the sophistication to understand its finer points. Let nobody be under the illusion that it is the answer to all ills: the Germans democratically elected Hitler until he reached the point where he could turn and destroy the system that had brought him to power. The campaign of Donald Trump has uncomfortable echoes of his rise. Countries such as Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan show us what happens when democracy is unloosed on folk who are culturally unprepared for it and who have no opportunity of accessing the information necessary to make proper use of it.

Britain is now, thank God, in the process of leaving what started as a European free-trade area; but then metamorphosed from the Common Market to become the European Union, denying our sovereignty and sapping our independence. However our departure from it seems to me to have been for the wrong reasons: an outbreak of xenophobia (also a bequest from the Norman Conquest), rather than a genuine desire for independence. Not everyone is aware that anti-Semitism, a particular form of xenophobia, was not the product of Germany. It was born in Norwich in 1144, where rumour spread that a Christian boy called William, apprenticed to the skinner’s trade in the City of Norwich, had been lured into the house of a Norwich Jew (the Jews had been imported by the Normans, there were none in England before), where he was ritually tortured and crucified, his agony lasting from Tuesday in Holy Week until Good Friday. His body was then disposed of in woods to the south of the city, where it was discovered by a local forester, keen to ensure that nobody illegally gathered timber from the bishop’s wood. The Jews were accused in the bishop’s synod but bribed the local sheriff, John de Chesney, to grant them refuge in Norwich Castle (the Jews being, like the deer of the forest, under Royal protection). The body was dug up and reburied in the cathedral precincts, and lacking any saint of their own, the monks of Norwich tried to supply themselves with a potentially miracle-working cult. The chief guardian of the shrine, a man called Thomas of Monmouth, accused the Jews of a conspiracy that reached from one end of Europe to the other, controlled by a line of Jewish princes living in Narbonne in southern France, by whom the Jews were committed to the annual sacrifice of a Christian boy-child in deliberate and mocking emulation of the crucifixion of Christ. This ‘blood libel’ has since spread all over Europe, where it has surfaced in slightly different forms ever since and still fuels the persecution of Jews to this very day.

To regard foreigners with hatred and spit at them in the street is both impolite and self-defeating as well as being illegal; but the wholesale acceptance of their religious beliefs and way of life, raising those beliefs to the same level, or even a superior one, to our own, is surely also not the right way to proceed. Foreigners who come to live in our country are entitled to the privileges of guests, but they must surely recognize the responsibilities that follow from that. The immemorial customs of our religion and culture cannot be tailored to their convenience. Those who choose to retain their own customs must accept that this is the case and that they are swimming against the current of generally accepted behaviour, or else go and live elsewhere. One of the results of so-called Multiculturalism is a failure of ethnic minorities to adapt and integrate, resulting in a Ghetto mentality and the riles of independent communities that may actually threaten the integrity of the state.

Similarly the active, draconian persecution of folk who indulge in sexual perversions I believe to be obviously wrong; but surely we should not have to allow them license to parade their infirmities in public and to endure their carnival-style demonstrations, or prostitute our language to include same-sex relationships under the umbrella of marriage. This twisting of the language is something straight out of George Orwell’s nightmare view of 1984. Roman Catholic adoption agencies have been closed rather than accept same-sex couples as prospective adoptive parents and I am sure that there are many folk who no longer offer bed-and-breakfast for fear that they will be forced to let their rooms to homosexual couples. Nowadays anyone who stands up for their beliefs in this regard is accused of ‘homophobia’: itself a linguistic nonsense. ‘Phobia’ means ‘fear’. I for one am not fearful of homosexuals (I have an old friend who is one): I simply condemn their perversion. As a nation we appear to have lost, since the Norman Conquest, the ability to love the sinner whilst detesting the sin.

It has occurred to me that there is at present no political party that specifically represents Christians, perhaps because that definition has become a catchall term encompassing all claimants to the name, from the patrons of the puritanical chapel to the pomp of the high mass. Furthermore, it seems to me that since World War II we have lost not only a large proportion of the nominal church-goers that used to give us the, albeit mistaken, identity of a ‘Christian Country’; but also the basic knowledge of what real Christianity is and the judgement that should enable us to find the right path. In place of this the only guiding stars today appear to be ‘economic benefits’ and the ‘pursuit of happiness’. I remember as a child being told by my mother and grandmother that true happiness can only be found by making other people happy – a message that seems to have been forgotten even by the priests (and now priestesses) of the established church. The western break up of the church at the Reformation has led to a diaspora of different faiths or none that is spreading further and further from the truth, and therefore I feel that the title ‘Christian’, although tempting, would not in fact gain our cause anything.

In the United Kingdom we still have our Monarchy, albeit a poor, weak thing, hemmed about with constitutional barriers that appear to be strengthened almost daily. Every time a member of the Royal Family ventures to express an opinion or ask for information they are greeted with bared teeth and accused of meddling. Prince Charles was warned off recently for receiving ‘privileged’ information, notwithstanding the fact that he is heir to the throne, and therefore might be considered a safe repository for it. Despite centuries of creeping democracy, even the Witan have survived in the form of the Privy Council, although that also has now become a formal administrative body, largely superseded by the Cabinet.

Perhaps if the Parliamentarians continue to use their privileges to feather their own nests or further their own interests, and either be blind to or cynically disregard the wishes of the people, Parliament and politics will become even more discredited than they already are (if that is possible!), and folk will be open to another way. Perhaps we may once again see a land no more bedevilled by democratic and Parliamentary tyranny, ruled once again by an Orthodox King, advised by a Witan in touch with the people’s real needs, who will operate in our real interests, rather than those of industrialists, bureaucrats and the power-hungry manipulators of ochlocracy, as happens at present. Perhaps we may once again see a happy England: a federation of regions under a beneficent aristocracy guided by local councils, such as we had before the Norman Conquest.

I founded þa Engliscan Gesiþas in 1966, when I was a young man. In my naïveté I thought that the celebration of the anniversary of the Norman Conquest was as a result of simple ignorance and Norman propaganda, and that the amazing example of such folk as Holy Cuthbert, the Venerable Bede and our great King and Saint Ælfræd if known and publicized, would in themselves draw right-thinking folk to the cause. Then, ‘come the revolution’, there would be a body of folk well primed with what was ‘needful for all men to know’, and England would eventually be put back on the right track. I see now that I seriously underestimated the power of the forces of darkness. I was to see my companions infiltrated by pagans, overwhelmed by Neo-Nazis, and eventually make themselves into a limited company: a concept totally unknown to the pre-Conquest Englisc and diametrically opposed to the values that they stood for. What I had founded as a radical organization had become institutionalized and rendered itself unfit for purpose, being happy to look at the past like an exhibit in a museum cabinet, rather than see it as part of the present and to act on its lessons. A few years ago I was reluctantly compelled to abandon what had become ‘The English Companions’, and start again from scratch.

Now I have passed my three-score-years-and-ten, and am living, as it were, on borrowed time. I have tried to devise a new fellowship, to be known as The Guild of St Eadmund, with similar aims and ideals but avoiding some of the pitfalls that led to the collapse of the original purpose behind the founding of þa Engliscan Gesiþas. This may seem an idealistic, utopian dream; but I have recently seen Jeremy Corbyn’s policies referred to in exactly those terms, so perhaps mine, which at least have history behind them, may have some validity after all. Some may accuse me of escapism, in answer to which I would like to quote no less an authority than Professor J. R. R. Tolkien's Essay on Fairy Stories, published in 1947. He writes as follows:

‘... it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used ... In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by a sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer’s or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only onto Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation and Revolt.’

Thank you for listening.

Democracy – a failed experiment

(Originally published in Orthodox England.)

‘You have no rights, only privileges won for you by your ancestors.’

The late James I. A. Frazer, historian, teacher and author.

Democracy is something that most of use were taught to be proud of, and something that we have always accepted. It is only recently that I have begun to question it, and I have come to the conclusion that it is an experiment that has failed.

I was taught at school that the ancient Greeks invented democracy. In fact it was only introduced in its full and pure form in Athens, just one of the many city states that existed on the mainland in ancient Greece. It only worked at all because its franchise was quite small – only the citizens of Athens were able to vote: their wives, slaves and freed slaves were not – and even then the rate of its decision making was often painfully slow. It was suppressed finally along with the rise of Philip of Macedonia and the Empire of Alexander the Great. Among the other ancient city-states was Sparta, whose method of government if compared with modern systems would appear to have most in common with that of the Nazis! (1) This should have been a warning to the wise that not everything that came out of ancient Greece is good.

It is interesting to reflect that Macedonia, which gave rise to Philip and Alexander, reverted after their fall to a Monarchy where the King was not considered a god, like Alexander and the Egyptian pharaohs, but took his decisions together with a council of aristocrats in a similar manner to the Englisc.

The Roman Empire

By far the most common form of government in the world until recent times was Monarchy: a system that mirrors the rule of heaven, where God sits on high, worshipped by every power and principality. It was no accident that when Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, the system of government was not changed. The bad things: the overbearing arrogance of its officials and the circuses and selfishness of the aristocracy to which it gave rise, were excised and the New Roman Empire, purified and now based on sound and sure foundations, continued to exist for another millennium. It might have lasted longer had its western half not fallen into error. It actually had a vision of the universe as a sort of inverted cone, which was divided into clearly defined sections. Soaring at the top of the colossal sphere were God the Father, Christ His Son, the Holy Ghost and the Blessed Virgin; St John accompanied by the archangels, seraphs, cherubim and angels came next; beneath them were assembled the evangelists, the prophets, the fathers of the Church and the ranks of saintly men and women. Separated from these by the ether, the emperor stood at the summit of the terrestrial sphere, accompanied by the Patriarch, his family and courtiers, and so down the social scale. Tamara Talbot Rice writes: ‘... even though the Byzantines often acted with cruelty, harshness and meanness in both their private and their public affairs, Christian principles nevertheless remained all-important to them, and the respect with which they regarded the virtues on which Christianity was based was handed down from generation to generation to form the framework of Europe’s essentially Christian civilization.’ (2) John Julius Norwich sums up his history of the Constantinopolitan Empire with the words ‘... The Byzantines were a deeply religious society in which illiteracy – at least among the middle and upper classes – was virtually unknown, and in which one Emperor after another was renowned for his scholarship; a society which had with difficulty concealed its scorn for the leaders of the Crusades, who called themselves noblemen but could hardly write their own names.’ He continues by remarking on ‘the immeasurable cultural debt that the Western world owes to a civilization which alone preserved much of the heritage of the Greek and Latin antiquity, during those dark centuries when the lights of learning in the West were almost extinguished.’ (3)

The English Monarchy

When the Englisc first gained control of England in the fourth to fifth centuries, they simply took over a system of local administration that had been in existence for hundreds of years, and which had been left largely intact even by the pagan Romans who, as long as their taxes were paid, were not bothered about introducing anything new. The Romans were, after all, a colonial power, and as long as they raked off a large profit and much of the raw materials of the country, were not particularly bothered how it was produced. The English took over the country during the fifth century by wresting control of these small kingdoms from the Romano-British overlords, or in some cases simply filled the vacuum created by their departure. The local magistrate was simply replaced by a Thegn, who owed allegiance to the local Cyning, but the system over which he presided was basically the same as that which had been in existence since time immemorial. In the case of the larger kingdoms there was another administrative official: the Ealdormann, who was answerable to the Cyning for a division of the Cyningdom (4) called a Shire (5).

As the power of the Cyning grew, the Ealdormenn ecame a more important feature of the administration, and even became sort of mini-kings, to such an extent that Æthelræd Unræd (6) introduced scir-gerefan (7) to keep an eye on the Ealdormann and look after his interests in the Scira. After the Danish conquest of the kingdom by Cnut, the Ealdormenn came to be known as Earls (eorlas), a term which had hitherto only been in use in Englisc in the expression ‘eorl and ceorl’, signifying aristocrats and commoners.

The Cyninges council, which advised him on important matters of policy, was known as the Witan, which simply means ‘wise men’, and was made up of the Earls, Bishops, Abbots and various other great landowners of the kingdom. As the Cyning moved about the countryside, not all the counsellors would be available at any one time, so the individual constituents of the Witan varied a certain amount according to where it was summoned. As it was not a committee in the modern sense of the word, and was only convened to deal with matters of importance as they arose, this did not matter. If for example, the King required specialist advice on a particular problem, then a particular expert might be summoned to a particular Witenagemot. (8)

The Cyning governed his kingdom by means of writes. The Englisc word ‘gewrit’ simply means a letter, and the writ was a letter addressed to the Earl (or Earls), or the þegn of a particular manor, telling them of some requirement of alteration. The means by which writs could be conveyed across the country became pretty sophisticated by the eleventh century, and the Englisc government became the most advanced in Europe, with the exception of Constantinople, on which it was, of course, largely modelled.

The English Royal power also came to owe something to Constantinople in another way. Æþelberht Centrices Cyning, who had welcomed St Augustine, had quickly realized that churchmen, who could read and write, were an excellent means of recording and disseminating laws, and the laws of Kent are the first existing example of a written law-code. The cyningas and the church always worked very closely together, and when Eadgar Cyning came to the throne, St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, not only made him wait to be crowned until he attained the age of thirty (the canonical age at which priests were ordained) but also wrote a new coronation service, whose order still forms the basis of English coronation services. This not only affirmed the Cyninges temporal power, but also added a spiritual dimension to it. Like the Constantinopolitan Emperors, the Cyning of England became the anointed vice-gerent of God on earth.

However, although in theory, the Cyning now possessed absolute and even divine power, he would be exceptionally foolish to try to use it against the obvious good of his people. The Cyning would always consult his Witan before taking any major decision, if only to ensure that he had sufficient support among them to make his position tenable if the worst came to the worst. He was, to all intents and purposes, a primus inter pares, and it was unusual for even a bad Englisc Cyning to step seriously out of line. If he did then he could be deposed, as Æþelræd Unræd was for a time. In certain instances, such as that of Alfred Cyning, the folk revered him to such an extent that they continued to support him when he was forced out of office by a Danish raid, protecting him while he was conducting a guerrilla war against the Danes from a hiding place in the Somerset marshes, and flocking to his banner when he eventually challenger the Danish leader, and regained his authority.

Similarly the aristocrats who made up the Witan would not be well advised to act the tyrant at home, where they lived in the communities for which they were responsible, and were in constant contact with the most influential members of them. Everyone realized that certain unpopular chores had to be done, like work on bridges, local defence and the payment of taxes. The lord of the manor would tell his Gerefa (9) what was needed in that regard, and leave it to him to organize. The gerefa would call a folc-gemot (10) and the people would sort out in an equitable manner who would do what, what field allocation each would have, etc. This still goes on in Laxton, Nottinghamshire, where the original strip-farming system from time immemorial has, through an accident of history, survived into modern times. In the event of the Cyning dying or being killed, the Witan would meet and choose the most suitable surviving member of the Royal Family to be the next Cyning, the wishes of the deceased Cyning, if know, also being taken into account.

I am not going to say that this system was perfect or fool-proof: nothing devised by man can be; but it worked well enough until the Norman Conquest destroyed both the Cyning and most of the native aristocracy.

The Norman Conquest

The Norman Conquest was in effect a joint-stock operation. The men who accomplished it were not necessarily William’s own men (William would not have had nearly enough knights to conquer an English county, let alone England itself). They were recruited on the basis of substantial rewards of lands and loot should the invasion be successful – a powerful incentive to them to see that it was. (11)

So the most powerful and sophisticated state in Europe was carved up amongst a lot of illiterate thugs, whose only objective was to bleed the country dry. The wise and far-sighted rule of a benevolent and concerned father was superseded by the calculated cruelty of tyrants. The Normans proceeded not only to loot all of the moveable artwork and metalwork from the churches, but also taxed the people to the limit of what they could bear, and often beyond it. These taxes, as well as keeping the Norman barons at ease in their castles, also provided money for the Crusades, in which absentee monarchs (most notably Richard Cœur de Lion who, like many other Normans, never learned to speak English) besieged Constantinople and rampaged across the Holy Land, bringing death and destruction to friend and foe, innocent women and children alike.

King Ælfred had devised a very ingenious defensive system against the Vikings, by putting fortifications – a large bank and ditch – around each large town, precisely the right length so that the population of the town could defend it. The Normans, as foreign invaders, were forced to build stone castles adjacent to these towns, both to dominate the town and protect themselves from the townsfolk as much as a form of defence against any other foreign invader. This approach to defence is an example paralleled in every other aspect of English life after the conquest. Sir Walter Scott has demonstrated the way in which the Englisc continued to refer to cattle, pig and sheep meat, while the Normans, who mostly ate it, used the terms boeuf (beef), porc (pork) and mouton (mutton). In fact the Englisc language was banned from ‘polite’ conversation, which was conducted in Norman French for the next two hundred years after their conquest. Although Englisc, (gravely weakened and transformed into English), eventually won through, the social divisions remained.

There was also a very deep and lasting effect on law and land tenure. The Englisc had been moving towards feudalism, like the rest of Europe, but now the system was brutally formalized. All land, effectively having been confiscated by William, was then redistributed to his barons not as freehold, as had been done by the charters of the Englisc kings, but as leasehold. Every free English person was now reduced to serfdom, assigned as a slave to an estate, on which he had to work for the whole of his life. In spite of various peasants’ rebellions, this state of affairs was to last until outbreaks of Bubonic Plague, in the mid fourteenth century, killed a third of the population. This Act of God finally broke the bonds of the Englisc, allowing the workers to bargain with their lords for more wealth and hence more independence and led to the development of a middle class.

A Little Freedom can be a Dangerous Thing

The monarchy, such as it had become, was then wrested from this feuding crowd of Normans. Henry Tudur or Tudor was a Welshman whose ancestor had wormed his way into the Royal family, by marrying Henry V’s widow, Catherine, and fathering two half brothers to Henry VI. Following the murder of Henry VI and his son Edward in 1471, Henry Tudor became a figure of importance, for he was, as Edward IV [recte VII (12)] put it, ‘the only imp now left of Henry VI’s brood’. It was concern for his safety that led Jasper, Henry’s guardian, to take his 14-year-old nephew into exile in mainland Europe. Fourteen years later, Henry and Jasper sailed from the mouth of the Seine to Milford Haven, a voyage which led to Henry’s victory over the House of York at Bosworth and his coronation as Henry VII. Ironically he destroyed the best king that the Norman polluted Royal family had yet managed to produce: Richard III, who, far from being a bloody tyrant, had the most far-sighted policies yet seen.

Once on the throne, Henry broke the power of most of the Norman barons by swingeing taxation, and thus finally liberated the English. Although this resulted in an amazing effusion of literature, exploration and science, emancipation came too late. A vicious class system had been enforced for five hundred years, which still bedevils our society even today. Women, who had held an important place in Englisc society and had been able to own land and property in their own right, had been completely subdued: treated by the Normans as mere chattels, necessary for the purpose of breeding. Their liberation was only finally to be regained by the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882. Education was almost non-existent especially for the poor. (13) To a boorish aristocracy, education was considered unnecessary. Englisc society had been fatally damaged. Added to this the Tudor dynasty was no less cunning and grasping than its founder.

Because the delicate balance between the king, the aristocracy and the people had been upset, the rising middle classes, now finding their feet, began to demand more of what they conceived to be their ‘rights’. Clever and unscrupulous men put a spin in history, and tried to pretend that the Englisc state had been a democracy. In fact the so-called democracy that they lauded was not a democracy of the Greek kind, where every freeman had a direct input into the Government, but a representative democracy, where the people were to vote for a representative who would do the voting on their behalf. Magna Carta was made much of at this time, and the echoes of this still continue to the present day. In fact Magna Carta was a charter imposed by the Norman Barons on King John, the brother of the aforementioned Richard Cœur de Lion, who had been left in charge of the kingdom with instructions to gather as much revenue as possible to finance the Crusades, instructions that were enough to guarantee his unpopularity with the people at home, whatever the personal characteristics of the man involved. Magna Carta principally guarantees the rights of the Barons against the King and local courts against the Royal courts. It also mentions the rights of the freeman, but as the Norman Conquest had enslaved a large proportion of the population of England, they were still serfs and not free, so Magna Carta actually has nothing to do with them.

The King, at the time when this push for an entirely new system of government, masquerading as ancient rights, came to a head was Charles Stewart, whose great misfortune was that he took life very seriously. He had studied the monarchy and the Coronation Service, and realized that he had a God-given duty to guide his people in the way that they should go. Although he tried to rule without Parliament, during which time the country was better managed than it had been for years (even centuries), he was eventually forced to summon it again to raise some more revenue. This was before the Civil List had been invented, and far from being allowed to collect pocket money from the public purse, the Kings purse was the public purse: he was required to finance the whole of his government out of his own pocket. Parliament refused to allow him to raise any money unless he consented to an absurd limitation of his own prerogative, which he was, not unnaturally, loth to do, both because he considered it his God-given duty to resist, and also because if he allowed the Royal Prerogative to be eroded it would affect his successors. This led to the Great Rebellion that unfortunately achieved temporary success, and resulted in the martyrdom of the King and a subsequent dictatorship.

Dictatorship

The dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell has many things in common with the more recent dictatorships of Hitler (14), Mussolini and Stalin. The difference between a dictatorship and a monarchy is that a dictator is not willing to allow the previous systems of government to continue, and govern the country with a light hand, giving only an occasional touch on the reins from time to time. Dictators tend to have some kind of bee in their bonnet about how everyone should behave, and their rule is devoted to imposing this idea by force. With Hitler it was Nazism, with Mussolini it was Fascism, with Stalin it was Communism (or at least the twisted version of it that Stalin professed) and with Cromwell it was Puritanism. As most of the English by this time were already Protestant anyway, Cromwell, having carved a bloody path to power, merely contented himself with a period of very harsh rule, abolishing the time-honoured celebrations of Christmas, Easter, Mayday etc., and making the nation utterly miserable until he died. At home he largely managed to contain his propensity for massacres and bloodshed, releasing it onto the Irish Catholics instead.

The Arrival of the Modern English State

The modern English state really came into being in the reign of Charles II. The English aristocrats were only too glad to throw off the dictatorship of Cromwell, and were all for the return of the King, but they wanted to fence him about so that they could have the bulk of the power, while the monarch would continue to act as a figurehead. Charles II was restored to his father’s throne under severely limiting conditions, which eventually resulted in the curious compromise, where the nation is governed by Parliament, in which the Monarch makes a speech telling everyone what policies his Prime Minister, over whom he has no control and very little influence, has decided to carry out. The suffrage, at first extremely limited, was gradually extended during the eighteenth century, and the secret ballot, a prime requirement for democracy, was eventually introduced. The Second Reform Bill, passed as recently as 1867, extended the suffrage again. Universal suffrage, including women, did not come about until after the First World War. I am recording this to show that England only came around to the idea of democracy extremely slowly. As it is England that we are talking about, where the people, having been browbeaten for five centuries, are fairly tolerant, this political system has actually functioned for a long time. When seen from underneath it was, of course, largely the same government that it always had been. The local lord or squire still ran the show, and it was only in the corridors of power that there was any change. The suffrage was severely limited, only the ‘right’ people ever got to stand as candidates for parliament, and whoever they were, the local landowners were still largely able to modify their actions to prevent them from upsetting the applecart. Freedom of speech was guaranteed – after all it does no harm to allow a man to give voice to any kind of crackpot notion: it is when he has the means to act on his ideas that problems arise.

The French revolution was watched with horror by the countries round about, and the English were foremost in scotching that particular scorpion and restoring to the French their King. (Would that we had done a similar thing in Germany at the end of the First World War). Once again all the flaws of democracy were there and that time the English clearly saw them. We fought against the French plague tooth and nail, both in its first, virulent form, and then in its Napoleonic aftermath – democracy typically being followed by a dictatorship. Our greatest naval victory guaranteeing us dominance over the world’s seas for a hundred years, and our greatest victory on land at Waterloo in alliance with the Prussians, brought that unfortunate experiment to a happy conclusion.

The Rise of Modern Democracy

The First World War brought the English idyll to an end, and ushered in the time when England would be governed not by a small coterie of the brightest and best, but truly by representatives of the common people. Before the First World War the Prime Minister had governed the country with advice from the cabinet and the Monarch. After it a great swathe of the brightest and best of the people were dead, and the commonality were no longer willing to tolerate the government of the class that, rightly or wrongly, they blamed for the follies of the war. Women, who had been agitating for the vote before the war, eventually won it. The election of the first labour government sounded to death knell to the old ways.

The First World War was actually win by the entry into the field of the Americans. (15) The United States had been settled mostly by a hotch-potch of people of various ethnic origins, largely Europeans who had been forced to leave by poverty or by having ideas too radical to enable them to continue to live there, and the rest by a large slave population imported from Africa. It is therefore hardly surprising that they should have got the democracy bug in a big way, and to Woodrow Wilson belief in democracy was paramount. He was also sufficiently intolerant of other people’s ideas and sufficiently arrogant with regard to his own, that he insisted the Germany and Austria should have new, democratic constitutions. This revealed one of the fatal flaws of democracy. It is all right to have the people supreme as long as they make the right decisions. In the case of the Germans, defeated not by war but by mutinies and uprisings at home and with the Allies hounding them for reparations beyond anything they could reasonably be expected to afford, they decided that a corporal, wounded in the First World War, who had some pretty radical ideas, would be a good person to choose as leader (16). Adolf Hitler, of course, immediately led them into a Second World War even more devastating to their country (and to civilization in general) than the First had been.

Some of the Flaws of Democracy

The main problem with Democracy is that it is founded on an entirely and self-evidently false premise: that all men (17) are created equal. This is not to say that all men are not spiritually equal, and deserving of equal respect. A road-sweeper is as good and necessary a job as a brain surgeon, and each functions well in his own sphere. However no one would trust even the best road-sweeper with the government of a country, any more than one would expect a brain-surgeon to sweep the roads. However it gives the less well-endowed folk a vastly inflated (and false) idea of their own importance, and increases their sensitivity to what they think are their rights, similarly decreasing any idea that they might have about their responsibilities. (It is interesting to note that in a documentary on the terrible shooting of a group of Amish children in America, one of the policemen said that the Amish culture was totally different to that of the U.S.A. He said that the U.S. culture puts the individual at the top of the pile, the community second and institutions third; while the Amish put their bishops a the top of the pile, their community second, and the individual right at the bottom).

It is a self-evident fact that if people want to build a tower, it will not get done while they sit around and talk about it. What they need to do is to appoint a master builder to be in charge. He will then tell the quarrymen to gather up some stones, and appoint an expert quarryman to be in charge of that. He will the organize the delivery of the stones, and set skilled masons to carve them and set them up, one upon another. In no time the tower is up! A King is surely the expert in governing a country. He understands the many, complex threads that need to be pulled or tweaked in order to keep the country running in the right way. He guarantees stability, for when he dies, there will be someone else to continue, probably his son, who has already had half his life to watch and learn his father’s craft so that, when his time comes, he will be able to take the wheel and guide the ship of state as competently as ever. The English have bewildered themselves by having a democratic monarchy – i.e. a monarchy where the monarch has a constantly decreasing influence and where his so-called Prime Minister has almost dictatorial powers.

A good example of the gentle pulling of strings may be found in the person of Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. A simple man of austere habits, for all that he live in palaces, he juggled the affairs of his rambling, multi-ethnic states for half a century. Still mourned in Austria today, he took a keen interest in the affairs of his people. For example, if a clique of anti-Semites gained ascendancy in some corner of public life, he would simply move the leader to another post in a totally different area, and promote a Jew to replace him. By such means he kept his empire ticking over, an empire that in its time produced a significant crop of artists, musicians and scientists and whose capital was the artistic and cultural centre of Europe.

Since we are dealing with human beings, there will always be bad or just plain incompetent kings, just as there will always be bad or incompetent builders or plumbers; but it is not the system that is bad or incompetent, only the incumbent. The state should be sufficiently robust to weather the occasional bout of misrule, or in extreme conditions the bad ruler can be thrown out, and replaced by someone who seems better suited to the job.

What the modern democrats seem to want, however, is not someone who is an expert at Government. They want someone who has some crackpot notion or other, like Whiggism, Toryism, Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism, Nazism, Fascism, Social Democracy, Christian Democracy, Communism, Capitalism, Thatcherism, Blairism or any one of the thousand other fads that have plagued us since the beginning of the twentieth century when this democracy nonsense first became a serious contender for the government of the world. The result of this is that the arch-liberal, or conservative (or whatever) who catches the public’s fancy, is enable to gather about himself all the other like-minded people, and run the country for however long his term of office lasts. Most probably by the end of this time, the public is heartily fed up with the particular fad that the first man professed, so they elect another man with a different fad, and he starts to undo all that the previous man has done and put in his own ‘reforms’. As soon as these ‘reforms’ start bearing fruit, lo and behold the public becomes disenchanted once again, and at the next election demands someone different. The result is that half of the country is constantly undoing the building that the other half of the country is putting up.

The inherent instability is a destabilizing influence on the countries round about, because they think ‘Ah, Mr Socialist is in charge there at the moment, but there is an election coming up, and the chances are that Mr Capitalist is going to get in, so if we want to start our socialist revolution now would be a good time.’ A good example of this is the conflict in Gaza, carefully timed to take place while the U.S. were between presidents. The Israelis knew that Bush was basically on their side, but preoccupied with the impending changeover, whilst Obama, who was likely to be a moderating influence, was not able to do anything until he actually took power. This gave them the perfect opportunity to trash Gaza whilst the American back was turned. Had there been a King in America (a supposition so bizarre that one feels a little strange even suggesting the possibility) they would probably not have got away with it quite so easily.

Surely what we need is someone in power who will foster all the multiplicity of ideas, some good, some less so, but all of them worthy of consideration. One also has to consider the sizable minority of people who are effective disenfranchised by never voting for the winning candidate (18). The whole thing works by a kind of confidence trick – one’s belief in the system of democracy itself. If the candidate one voted for wins, then one can congratulate oneself with quiet pride on the fact, but if he loses one can reflect that at least the winner was put there by a majority vote. I shall be considering exactly what kind of majority vote that is in a few paragraph’s time, but to build on this idea for a moment, we don’t live in an actual democracy. The conditions in which we live are not even those of a monarchy, where the power is at least neutral; but more like those of a dictatorship, where we are forced to bow to the extreme opinions and actions of others with which we may be in wholehearted disagreement (19). The bombing of Yugoslavia and Iraq were not done at my behest (nor at the behest of a significant number of others), but because we live in a democracy we are tarnished with the stigma of having performed these acts, while the perpetrators of them take no responsibility and never have to carry the can when things go wrong. The worst that can happen to them is that they can be forced to resign: not necessarily a great calamity, as Peter Mandelson has demonstrated on no less than two occasions.

The establishments and tradition were once a great brake on the activities of the Prime Minister Dictators, but no longer. The Bishops, who once had a share of the power in the House of Lords, have now seen that power fade further until the possibility is that it will be abolished altogether. The result has been that they have watched homosexuality, which was always considered to be a perversion, elevated to a normal alternative state of being. The idea of same-sex marriage is a linguistic offence and a biological impossibility. The whole fabric of family life has been changed, willy-nilly, and those who wish to perpetuate the status quo, for example Catholic Adoption Societies, have been forced out of existence.

In England, having cast our vote for good or ill, we simply have to endure whatever happens, like it or not. Of course the government will pretend to listen to all the demonstrations and lobbyists, but one can be fairly confident that that is all they will do. They are in charge now: we have voted them in, and they will get on with their own policies in despite of us. If anything really serious comes up, on which we might reasonably hope and expect to have a say – for example the Lisbon Treaty – the Prime Minister simply signs it, without a referendum: the action, if I may say so, of a Dictator and not a Monarch. (20) No Monarch worth his salt would submit to the total erosion of his own sovereignty by a neighbouring dictatorial super-state.

This brings me to consider the knowledge and commitment necessary to be a democrat. Nowadays in England one can never relax, secure in the knowledge that the government is being carried on by wise and far-sighted men who will do all that they can to ensure that as far as they can reasonably be expected to foresee events will continue to run on an even keel. One has constantly to worry about green issues, campaign for the right to life (something that one could be pardoned for hoping would be enshrined in our constitution anyway), give support to the demonstration for peace in Iraq, or Israel or a dozen other places, and decide on the question of whether we should stay in the European Union. There are so many causes that one is hard put to it to know which and how many to support. One is often prevented by economics anyway, as each one demands a subscription for the printing of its leaflets, the canvassing of supporters etc. and the lobbying of M.P.s (whom we supposedly voted for in the first place). All of them can put up any number of experts with good reasons why their point of view should prevail, and you can be pretty sure that most of them have another organization (often the Government) that puts up equally compelling experts with equally compelling views in diametric opposition to them. It is not possible for the normal man in the street (even given that he has the enthusiasm) to devote enough time (or money) to all the organizations that he would like to support, or to have sufficient education in that particular field make a judgement on their particular point of view.

Many so-called experts have no qualifications at all in the field in which they choose to pontificate. The various protest movements will pick on anyone to champion their cause, if their celebrity status will guarantee them what they really want, which is attention. We find actors, who are doubtless brilliant at their particular craft, supporting all kinds of crank causes, about which they have nothing other than an opinion no better founded (and possibly worse) than anyone else’s.

Furthermore, any particular parliamentary candidate can be guaranteed to favour at least one cause to which one is in complete opposition. A black (21) man in America would have felt a certain compulsion to vote for Barak Obama, but if he were also a Roman Catholic or Orthodox he would have felt an equal compulsion not to, on pro-life issues. In America, I believe, they vote not only on candidates, but on various issues as well, taking democracy to extreme lengths – and more accurately mirroring the situation in ancient Athens. I would not be happy to vote on most of these, knowing that my ignorance on any of them is likely to be profound. Similarly I would not happily accept a result based on the combined ignorance of thousands of others.

The Americans seem to like their democracy, however, and presumably have a right to get on with it. Those who don’t like it presumably have the ultimate option of voting with their feet – or do they? The U.S. seem determined to export their democracy like some kind of modern plague, till it has become, willy-nilly, a one-size-fits-all solution for the rest of the world. It is incredible to me that a country that has got sufficient internal problems stemming ultimately from its system of government can nevertheless force it on other people, The Germans, Austrians, Iraquis and Afghanistanis – all have been forcibly converted. It is arguably a highly inefficient system of government for a nation like ours that has had hundreds of years to get used to it, and has not even been able to introduce it fully in a totally satisfactory way, so why the U.S. should think that Iraq and Afghanistan can manage it from scratch in no time at all I simply don’t know. (22)

Democracy has failed, and I for one would like to see the old England back – the England which had a native-born, Orthodox Christian King who really ruled (23): an England which neither interfered with other nations nor played lapdog to their rulers, in which so-called ‘Gay Rights’ were unknown, and in which Muslims and pagans, far from being kow-towed to at every opportunity, were recognized as enemies to peace (24). For the convinced anti-democrat there is one bright light on the horizon, however. In March 2003, the results of a national referendum showed that nearly two-thirds of Liechtenstein’s electorate agreed to vote in support of Prince Hans-Adam II’s proposal of a renewed constitution, which replace the version of 1921. The proposed constitution was criticized by many, including the Council of Europe, as expanding the powers of the monarchy, and the criticisms were accentuated by a threat by the ruling prince that if the constitution failed, he would, among other things, convert some of the royal property for commercial use (25). The U.S.A. does not have an embassy in Liechtenstein and it is Switzerland’s job to keep good relations between the U.S.A. and the tiny principality. Here’s hoping the Swiss do their job well, or Liechtenstein could wake up tomorrow finding itself underneath the next American bombing raid.

Notes

1) The Open Society and its enemies vol I: Karl Popper: Routledge and Keegan Paul 1945.

2) Everyday Life in Byzantium: Tamara Talbot Rice: B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1967.

3) Byzantium: The Decline and Fall: John Julius Norwich: Penguin.

4) ‘Cyning-dom’ literally the area that accepts the judgements of a Cyning.

5) Properly ‘Scir’, but pronounced similarly.

6) His soubriquet is usually mistranslated as ‘unready’. His name, Æþel-ræd actually means ‘noble-counsel’, and ‘Un-ræd’, which actually means ‘no-counsel’ or ‘bad-counsel’, was by way of being an Englisc joke.

7) The term scirgerefa gives rise to the modern word ‘Sheriff’, but the relationship is purely etymological.

8) Literally ‘meeting of the wise men’.

9) Gerefa = Steward. The prefix ge- was to add emphasis. It was eventually dropped to give our modern word ‘Reeve’.

10) Folcgemot = Folk-moot: a meeting of the people.

11) In spite of this incentive the invasion very nearly failed. If Harold Godwinesson’s men had not pursued the Norman faked flight, and Harold himself had not been mortally wounded in the Battle of Sandlake Hill, he would have succeeded in holding William within the Hastings peninsular, where William had already made himself very unpopular and used up all the provisions that his men had looted from the local farmers. William had no hope of reinforcements or re-supply, but Harold had, and when these arrived in a matter of days, it would have been a fairly simple matter to round up the Norman troops and drive them back into the sea.

12) The numbering of the Kings of England is mistakenly done from the Norman Conquest. There were three other Kings of England named Edward (Eadweard) before this time: Eadweard the Martyr; Eadweard Ironside; and Eadweard known as ‘the Confessor’, so three should be added to the number of all Edwards following the conquest.

13) The utopian ideal of King Ælfred that every free man in England should be taught to read and write in his own language was only to come to fruition with the Education Act of 1944.

14) Hitler was a devotee of Oliver Cromwell, and is supposed to have had his biography as bedside reading. The Gauleiter were the direct descendants of the Major Generals.

15) Without the American input it is possible that, with the Russians out of the conflict, the Germans might have won, or at least forced an Armistice on the Allies instead of the other way round. This might have been the saving of Germany, and the resulting map of Europe would have been extremely interesting.

16) It is not universally realized that Hitler achieved power by democratic means under the constitution of the Weimar republic. It was only after he became Chancellor that he altered the constitution to ensure that nobody else could be elected to that position. (It looks as if the U.S. should look to itself, or it could find itself with a President Trump, many of whose policies are extremely close to Hitler’s).

17) I use ‘men’ in the sense of all mankind, i.e. including women as well. This is the sense in which it always used to be understood, and I refuse to bow to the modern, politically correct ‘person’ foisted on us by the feminist lobby. It has almost reached the point where we have to say ‘hu-person’ instead of ‘hu-man’.

18) I have voted in every parliamentary election for the past forty years, and the candidate that I have voted for has never won. One could ask why, holding the views that I do, have I been so conscientious. The answer is that because I live in a so-called democracy, I need to participate. Someone wiser than I said that ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.’ One could say in reply that all my efforts have not achieved the desired effect. This is true, but in the perennial triumph of hope over experience, I still think that perhaps next time ...

19) The murder of seven million babies by abortion, a figure that continues to rise, both here and in the U.S.A, under the ‘democracy’ of Barak Obama and David Cameron, is one of the more important of these. The right to life from conception is not, it seems considered important even by the United Nations, which seems to have enshrined ‘rights’ as some kind of sacred mission.

20) Mr Blair actually promised us a referendum on the European Constitution, of which the Lisbon Treaty is the carbon copy by another name, but it did not happen – perhaps because the other two countries that were given a referendum voted against it. Mr Cameron has done the decent thing. Let us hope that this time we get the correct result.

21) I don’t know what the politically correct ‘in’ word is at the moment, ‘black’ or ‘coloured’ or the impossibly complex term ‘African-American’.

22) in Iraq and Afghanistan even the language is totally deficient to supply the ideas and concepts on which democracy is based. How can anyone attempt to enforce democracy on a people who have no idea what it is or what it means?

23) Ne wend þu þe no on þæs folces unræd & unryht gewil-on hiora spræce & geclysp-ofer þin ryht-& on þæs unwisestan lare-ne him ne geþafa. From the laws of King Ælfred. ‘Turn thou not thyself to the foolish counsel and unjust desire of the people, in their speech and cry, against thine own reason, and according to the teaching of the most unwise; neither allow thou of them.’

24) I am aware that there is a difference between Muslims who are not in any way terrorists and Jihadists. However all Muslims are brought up to the idea that it is legitimate to lie to people not of their religion. How, therefore, can we trust the assurances of the Muslims that they are not allied to the Jihadists?

25) Luxemburg, on the other hand, where democracy has obviously run mad, has just altered its constitution to enable the parliament to sideline its monarch and pass measures approving abortion, something that the Grand Duke refused to allow.