Kings, Parliaments and Presidents

 

Alfred The Great 

This post is about the development of the English Constitution, in the context of the long arguments over the role of the Crown. I am focusing on the current of history here, the currents and not the tides, skimming over details in an attempt to see the bigger picture. Most people see the pivotal event as Magna Carta. I disagree, but to avoid extending this post, I have described why and the medieval mayhem that followed it in more detail here: Link.Magna Carta & The Greatest Knight

Theoretically, an early English Monarch was responsible for the collective well-being of the Kingdom and its people. In practice this was usually shaped and compromised by personal greed and ambition, it didn’t involve very many of the people but required collaboration with the powerful aristocracy. To rule, you needed to communicate. In Saxon times, this was achieved by having an itinerant royal court, shuffling around (and living off) the local warlords. This could turn into political whack-a-mole when their interests diverged.

The Witan

As mini-kingdoms coagulated into what became England, that arrangement became increasingly impractical So, rather than the King visiting the Warlords, the Warlords (and other notables) were summoned to meet the King in a ‘Witan’. This arrangement could include a surprisingly wide variety of participants and was common enough in Europe. After the Norman invasion in 1066, King William (Bill the Bastard, as I like to think of him) used a similar but more selective oligarchical forum named the Great Council.

William ran a tight ship. The Monarchs that followed him did not. It didn't help that the rules for succession to the throne were often unclear. There were constant disputes over who wore the crown or controlled the income from the land rather than over points of constitutional principle. It was easier to murder your opponent than argue the finer theoretical niceties of governance. Think 'Succession' in armour, and not so sweet.

King John tomb. Worcester Cathedral

By the time John 1^st inherited the throne of England some 130 years after the death of King William, there were many longstanding disputes between Monarchs and the Barons, patched up with ‘agreements’ of various kinds. The Monarchs needed resources, money and manpower, to fight their wars. The Barons had all those and were disposed to be helpful when it was for the common good or their own potential enrichment and saw the benefit in having someone in overall control, even if they didn't like or respect them.

The next part of the story is recounted in more detail in the post I linked in the opening paragraph. It is important, but perhaps not to the overall story here or for the reasons you probably think! So, if you have already read that, just scroll down to where I get stuck into the tribulations of King Henry III.

John's predecessors had accumulated, through marriage and conquest and, with the help of his Barons, the lordship of an extensive swathe of what is now France. Many of those Barons were gifted parts of it in reward. Unsurprisingly, the French wanted these back and during the early 1200s, John had effectively gambled and lost the lot, mainly through political and military incompetence.

Battle of Bouvines. Lost by John. 

The tensions here are obvious. The Barons had lost many of their French lands and emptied their pockets to support the inept attempt to protect them by a King who they certainly did not like or respect and who had a tendency to extract their resources to pursue personal aspirations and grudges. In doing so he had paid scant heed to the unwritten 'ancient customs and laws' of governance.

At this point, John could simply have thrown his hands up, pleaded mea culpa (he could probably speak Latin) and tried to live out his reign in peace. But no! He wanted a second shot at recovering his lost lands.

At this point the Barons brewed a revolt. One notion focused on the possibility of replacing John with another King, and a touted candidate was Louis, the charming son of the King of France. Hence, to Runnymede in 1215, where the Barons marked John's card in an attempt to settle their grievances before resorting to force.

Runnymede

John was cornered. His agreement to the Barons’ terms took the form of a Charter. Tradition had it that the Great Council was consulted when the King needed support, and John had egregiously failed to do so. Now, crossing his fingers behind his back, he agreed that everything would be as it was before, and would no longer tax them without discussion and consent.

Being a rat, John promptly reneged. Cue invasion by Louis with the support of the majority of the Barons. Initially, this ‘away team’ did well, but what was left of the home team staged a remarkable comeback, largely thanks to their star player and the hardest nut on the field, William the Marshall.

John didn’t see out the whole fiasco, but at least managed to die a timely death and was succeeded in 1216 by his nine-year-old son Henry. 

Henry was to reign for 56 years. He was affable, godly and charitable if you weren’t Jewish. He issued a new and improved Magna Carta, made a peace of sorts with Louis and the French, and tossed a few sprats to the peasantry. Sadly, he was also high-handed, incompetent, unwise in the company he kept, had some truly bonkers ideas for imperial expansion and, above all, was equally obsessed with recovering the dynastic lands in France. Yet another expensive invasion of France ended in a debacle.

Baronial tolerance was stretched beyond breaking point. By now, William the Marshall was long dead and gone, but his second son Richard wasn’t, and in 1232 duly led a rebellion. So, so many rebellions; these are Plantagenets, after all. Think 'Game of Thrones'. 

It failed, and somewhere along the tortured timeline, Richard died from unnatural causes. Thereafter, Henry didn’t often bother to consult with the Barons, who were still cheesed off by his strategic blunders, poor choice of allies and continual increasing demands for money.

There followed a showdown, possibly orchestrated by Henry’s missus, Eleanor of Provence. It had two outcomes. Firstly, while Magna Carta and previous agreements aimed to restrain the King, now the Barons wanted to change his role from being, in effect, the owner of the company, to something akin to just the Chairman of the Board, a first among equals. Secondly, they cajoled him into another agreement, the Provisions of Oxford, which again confirmed the primacy of the common law but added some genuinely popular reforms to the justice system. This was done at the behest of the Barons, even though it also constrained them. Yet again, it lacked detail and any means of enforcement. (Note also that this was agreed at a ‘Parliament’ rather than a Great Council. The terminology had moved on).

Groundhog Day! 

Maybe I could just repeat John’s episode and just change the names. Henry reneged, and in 1258 the Barons rebelled. Again, a Knight emerged from the mist as a power in the land but this time unencumbered by loyalty to the Monarch. Simon De Montfort, Earl of Leicester, had been involved in the Oxford Parliament. I never met him, so asked AI, who, given its seeming omnipotence, probably did. In summary, it said he was a skilled soldier, principled, keen on reform and justice, and an ambitious, haughty, uncompromising zealot.

De Montfort 

Proper books told me that his rebellion started very well. In a battle at Lewes in Sussex, De Montfort defeated and captured Henry and his son Edward and imprisoned them in his castle at Kenilworth. In the following year, he led the creation of a constitution based upon consulting and involving a wider spread of people in decision-making, but restricting the noble's judicial role and turning the King into effectively a figurehead. Think of it as Oxford+. If this sounds familiar, it should. De Montfort, the arrogant Frenchman, is credited as one of the fathers of the English Parliamentary system.

Kenilworth Castle today 

Initially the Barons appear to have been in an altruistic mood and in particular credit must be given to a man called Hugh Bigod who made a real effort to make the justice system fairer to (nearly) all. That came at the expense of their powers over judicial matters in their own dominions.

Sadly, it didn’t turn out well. Edward escaped from Kenilworth Caste and took up arms against De Montfort and the reformers. Many of the Barons joined him, having had second thoughts about the potential self-imposed erosion of their authority. Even Hugh Bigod changed sides. King Louis also lent Edward a hand, naturally thinking that Kings were generally a 'nice thing to have'.

Civil war followed, with much of the population seemingly taking the view that the reforms offered weren’t worth the chaos and grief. Eventually, De Montfort was outnumbered, cornered, comprehensively defeated, and literally sliced and diced. Don't go looking for a tomb.

De Montfort, Decapitated.

We have reached 1265. Henry, released from imprisonment by Edward, reversed the changes and tried to return to Kingly business as usual. The road to parliamentary democracy had many potholes, but some of the legacy of Oxford Provisions survived, embodied in the ‘Statute of Marlborough', which was passed at a Parliament a few years later. Four of them are still in force today and are Britain's oldest surviving laws. They mostly deal (in Latin!) with obscure issues relating to the recovery of damages outside of the legal system.

The Statute of Marlborough

The arguments continued about the boundaries of the King's powers and authority, and the codification of civil government continued for almost four hundred years.

Two stand-out events were Henry’s son’s agreement (without undue duress) to something akin to the governance arrangements originally proposed by De Montfort. Much later, in 1628, a Petition of Right dealt with arbitrary imprisonment and taxation and aimed at Charles 1^st. The major difference here was that Charles subscribed to the notion that kings ruled by divine right and there was a perception in Protestant England that he wanted to restore the Catholic Church. God was frequently asked for advice on that, but never responded. A third, drawn out and longer-term change was the growing parliamentary distinction between the Lords and the Commons, with the former having more clout for quite a while.

The Petition of Right

The arguments between Charles and Parliament continued until 1642, when…..

Groundhog Day rolled around again and the war that followed was proportionately the most bloody in our history.

The usual medieval vibe saw unwanted Kings slain in battle or quietly and entertainingly done away with, and quickly replaced. But this time, when Charles I took on Parliament, he had the benefit of a full legal(ish) trial before they chopped his head off. The Parliamentarians, Roundheads, Republicans, call them what you want, were left with a gap and no guidance from experience on how to fill it.

Charles II loses his head, 

Those religious issues queered the pitch. It was agreed by most that there was no room for Catholics, but there were various flavours of Protestantism in play, ranging from the relatively emollient through the socially radical to the apocalyptic. One particular split was between the victorious army and the newly empowered Parliament. I will not waste space here on the debates over the structure of the government of the Republic simply because it didn’t last long. Like most revolutionaries, they were sure that they were on the side of right but disagreed on what 'right' was. One salient and unresolved issue stands out for me; who was entitled to a say in it?

In 1647 (i.e. over 400 years after Magna Carta), the interested parties met to debate governance in St Mary's Church beside the Thames in Putney. If you are interested. I think Wikipedia did a good job on the summary. Link :

The Putney Debates

A radical ’Leveller’, Thomas Rainsborough, argued eloquently that the suffrage should be as wide as possible, saying, “for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he”. (I don’t think he mentioned ‘she’). You might think that on this occasion he was on the right the side of history, but the predominant view at the time was that subscribed to by their powerful and respected leader Thomas Cromwell, namely that only people who owned property or merchants of standing, had a big enough stake in the fortunes of the country to deserve a vote. Unsurprisingly he, and many of his pals and allies, were landowners.

It all came to nothing anyway. At one point, Cromwell had been offered the chance to become a King, but turned it down, becoming a 'Lord Protector' instead, an idea going back to the original concept of kingship. The idea of a 'President' as ruler seems to have been a later American innovation.  After he died the republic lost its direction and amid the chaos of competing factions, the country yearned for its Monarchical comfort blanket. In 1660, Charles' son, also Charles, was recalled from exile, albeit with conditions aimed at securing Parliament's role and which provided a pitch on which the contest between the Crown and parliament, could be re-joined.  

The Restoration of Charles II 

In what follows, a guiding rule for Kings was not to flirt with the Catholics. Charles II and his brother and successor, James II, ignored this. Both married Catholics who were seen as cuckoos in the nest. To add to it, Charles proved an inefficient manager of fires and plagues, and James was another autocrat who tried to sideline Parliament, which by that time comprised a diverse range of landowners, merchants and other powerful people and not just the Lords.

James had his daughter, Mary, brought up as an Anglican, probably in an attempt to cool the political temperature. She married the impeccably Protestant William of Orange who, as Stadtholder, was the 'Chairman of the Board' in the Netherlands. This William saw the political and martial advantage in taking over in England when he was also at war with the French. (Them again! And 'Orange' is in France. It's confusing). Conveniently, many influential characters in England wanted James and the Catholics out of their hair so, in 1688, they ‘invited’ William to invade in what our histories choose to refer to as the ‘Glorious Revolution’. James fled ignominiously.

No doubt that William of Orange was welcomed by many and soon afterwards he was crowned King, but it was made clear to him that in the circumstances he was not being given a free rein. A ‘Bill of Rights’ built on the loo roll of previous Charters confirmed and improved on Parliament’s discretion in matters including agreeing taxes and free elections. It didn't go too far though, the suffrage still excluded the oiks without land or property and, of course, women. 

I hope you have got the drift. Power was gradually flowing from the Monarch to Parliament with the latter defining the role of the former rather than the reverse. The Bill of Rights confirmed a that the role would of the English monarch would be defined by the constitution. Thereafter, progress would be marked by the refinement of the system and not the principle. 

This pattern of change continued in the following century, which saw the union with Scotland, the increasing centralisation of power in London and the emergence of the role of a first among equals in Parliament, which much later became the 'Prime Minister'. Critically, the franchise was slowly widened beyond property-owning men. Popular opinion mattered more and, up to a point, could be bought, and for a while, elections became increasingly riotous.

Elections. Georgian style.

The quiet acceptance of all this was perhaps best embodied in two Monarchical comments. When the Americans were trying to throw off taxes and rules laid down by the Parliament in the 1770s, they looked to George III for support. He declined to give it, saying that he was in effect bound by the authority of Parliament in the matter. In London in the 1830s another King, William, IV, commented on his role: 'I have my view of things, and I tell them to my ministers. If they do not adopt them, I cannot help it. I have done my duty.'

We should not think that, under the leadership of the Monarch and / or Parliament, the population were quiescent. However for a long time, the flow of information around the country and between classes of people was limited by distance and expense as well as political interest. Change began in the 1600s with the advent of printed news and the growth of 'Coffee Houses', and there was certainly hot debate about constitutional matters during the Republic.

One consequence of all this was that after all of the debates about governance during the previous 700 years and at the end of the century following the 'Glorious Revolution' came the American Constitution. Written in 1787, it drew considerably on the political thinking of the time with the philosopher John Locke and the appropriately named radical Thomas Paine both influences alongside the French thinkers of the day. Thomas Jefferson had portraits of both in his house at Monticello in Virginia and as far as I am aware, neither was used as a dartboard.

The considerable links between the Founding Fathers and the Fatherland (!) are often unacknowledged. Many of them spent time in London in the mid 1700s. Most famously, Benjamin Franklin has been described by the Smithsonian Magazine as ‘one-fifth revolutionary, four-fifths London intellectual’ . He was a long-time resident of Craven Street near Trafalgar Square. John Adams lived in Mayfair for several years and Jefferson stayed there. Odd fact. Since then, English English has changed more than American English, so the London accents they heard then were probably more akin to American accents today, than to modern English.

Why did the role of the Monarch not disappear altogether? Who knows? Maybe the travails of the short-lived Republic or the murderous French Revolution gave republicanism a bad name? Perhaps it is because the Monarchy has successfully adapted to the role of opening hospitals, shaking hands with tyrants, military cosplay and generally not being politicians. I might be a republican in spirit and view titles and civic gongs with contempt, but I favour this de-fanged Monarchy simply because I dread to think who might be chosen as President in a country that elected Boris Johnson.

Maybe this post will be read by some Americans. Maybe not. Their story is a continuation of ours in some respects, modified by lessons from experience elsewhere. For instance, the way their constitution handles the original distinction between the executive and the legislature differed from ours and has diverged even more over time. 

Some differences are subtle and unresolved at the time. For instance, a 'representative' assembly can be one in which the views of individuals and groups are represented, or one which broadly mirrors the make up of society as a whole. The latter was a view expressed in England at the time, while the former is closer to the argument of the Founding Fathers and is probably more common now. Few would still argue that our Parliamentarians mirror the society they represent, they are mostly better off and better educated. 

Acute readers might detect a parliamentary bias in my perspective, in the 1700s I would have been a Whig, but they might also care to reflect that it took England and latterly Britain close on a millennium and two bloody revolutions to realise that an unfettered executive is a dangerous and undemocratic beast. Yet they have elected a man who wants to be King. What have they done!? And where will it end? I think history might be whispering the answer.

If you are interested in seeing some of the places referred to, you could visit:

Many of those pre-Norman English Monarchs were reputedly crowned on the 'Coronation Stone' or 'King's Stone' which gave Kingston upon Thames its name. It can still be found there but is, unsurprisingly, just a stone on a plinth! 

The Coronation Stone 

William the Marshall lies in the atmospheric Temple Church, in the legal precinct of the Middle Temple, between the Thames and Fleet Street. His bomb damaged effigy is probably a likeness. 

Temple Church 

The castle at Lewes, built in William the Conqueror's time and used by Henry III before his defeat the eponymous battle. Lewes is a beautiful old town in the South Downs and was also a home to Thomas Paine. 

Lewes Castle 

I referred to Runnymede in my post on Magna Carta. Personally, I don't think it worth a visit, but many do. 

Kenilworth Castle is as depicted earlier. Impressive, but do they think that De Montfort would have mown the lawns? It lies near Warwick Castle which is itself is worth a visit, especially if you are a fan of medieval jousting. (An occasional event). 

Warwick Castle 

Charles II and his head were detached outside Banqueting House on Whitehall in London. It is the only remaining part of the Royal Palace at Whitehall, is well preserved and is usually (but not at March '25) open to visitors.  

Banqueting House

St Mary's Church in Putney is still there, next to the river clipper pier at Putney and free to visit. It has been partly rebuilt, but the tower was there when Rainsborough made his  speech. 

St Mary's Putney. Then.  

St Mary's Putney. Now.  

Benjamin Franklin's home was nearby, in Craven Street next to Charing Cross Station. It is still there and open to the public, but unprepossessing. 

William Penn was English by birth and upbringing. He was granted what became the Province of Pennsylvania by King Charles II, in settlement of debts. His views were set out in 1687 in his book "The Excellent Priviledge of Liberty and Property Being the Birth-right of the Free-born Subjects of England". It included the first full copy of Magna Carta in America. 

For statues and monuments of to dodgy Monarchs generally, see my series of posts under the heading 'Irreverent London' here: Link