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| Occidere Rex (To Kill a king) by Ernest Crofts |
Anthony
Mario Ludovici
MBE (1882 – 1971) can be described as a 'Nietzschean Tory'
(Ludovici was responsible on large part for the translation and
propagation of the German philosopher's work in the English speaking
world). In his 'Defence of Aristocracy' Ludovici argues that many
aspects modernity are dysgenic; that it has engendered a physical as
well as spiritual degeneration (recent discoveries such as those
regarding epigenetics may well bear out some of Ludovici's
assertions on this account). The aforementioned book, aside from
critques of the industrial revolution, liberalism, democracy (and
more eccentric passages warning of the harmful effects on the race of
putting hops in beer and drinking tea) contains a chapter on the English Civil War in which Ludovici argues that the
conflict was essentially a war between short term profit seeking,
bourgeois Puritans (“the tradesmen and grasping landed nobility”)
and those elements of the aristocracy and peasantry led by Charles I
who remained custodians of the land and the race; a war of trade versus
nobility; the Parliamentarian victory constituting a triumph of
dysgenic, capitalistic forces over those of “flourishing life”.
To the Englishman
of average culture, even when he is not biassed by any party or
religious feeling, Charles I is little more than a captivating figure
of misguided royalty, possessing a considerable measure of romantic
charm. With his long hair, his velvet suit, lace collar and
long-maned charger, it is his exterior, and, perhaps, his all too
violent death as well, that chiefly endears this unhappy monarch of
the seventeenth century to the sentimental Englishman. If, however,
you say to such an Englishman that there is much more than romantic
charm in Charles I's character and rule, he will immediately smile
upon you with indulgent incredulity, and regard you as a fanatic who
is suffering even more severely than he is himself from the
seductiveness of bygone dramas and their principal heroes. […]
Not
long ago, for instance, I had the honour of meeting a certain
gentleman who is well known in the literary world of London, and who,
moreover, enjoys the distinction of being at the head of one of our
greatest publishing firms. He informed me that he, too, was a convinced convert to this romantic cult of the most fascinating
figure of the seventeenth century, and smiled almost tearfully over
the thought that his son, in whom he had implanted a strong adoration
for our beheaded sovereign, had once solemnly raised his hat in the
presence of Charles I's golden'armour in the Tower of London.
Hoping, at the moment, that there was something more fundamental and
more solid in this gentleman's hero-worship than mere sentimentality
and the love of a picturesque prince, I suggested to him that there
were many rational and very sound reasons for his admiration. In an
instant the incredulous smile I had so often seen, and which I
confess I had half-dreaded on this occasion too, again spread over
the features, even of this hopeful fellow-worshipper, and I was
overcome with disappointment […]
His admiration of Charles I
was sartorial, romantic, sentimental, school-girlish—in fact, it
was merely a foolish and empty pose! Apparently it had never
occurred to him, despite his undoubted erudition and experience, to
ask himself whether, in an age which is in every respect the creation
of Charles I's maligners and murderers, a public school history class
were precisely the best place in which to hear the truth concerning
the Stuart King.
Seemingly, he had never inquired whether, at a time
when vulgarity, trade and hedonism are paramount, a sober judgment—
not to speak of a friendly one—could possibly be formed on this
vital question. Without hesitation, without a moment's doubt or
shrewd suspicion, this apparently sceptical person had accepted the
verdict of a most deceptive and unreliable age, age, concerning a man
who had so little in common with its principles, that in a hopeless
endeavour to oppose and defy them, he had heroically given up his
life.
And yet the evidence of this fact is accessible to all. The proof of it
can be read by everybody and anybody, at any hour, any day. Only a
bias that is friendly to the evils of this age, only a prepossession
in favour of our materialistic, mechanical, unscrupulous and supinely
irresponsible civilisation of "Progress," could so distort
the facts as to make Charles I appear as the felon, and the ignoble
band of grasping, bigoted and filthy-minded Puritans as the just
accusers, in this historical trial and tragedy. For in spite of all
that the school history book may say, Charles I fought for a cause
very much more vital and more fundamental than that of despotism. He
fought for the cause of flourishing life against the growing, but
already powerful forces of modern capitalistic trade, of democracy,
and of mere quantity as distinct from quality. He himself, the whole
of his government, and his lieutenants were inspired by the watchword "Respect the Burden." Their downfall can be ascribed to
the fact that they were no respecters of persons, that they upheld
the oppressed against their oppressors, and that they tried, wherever
possible, to arrest that vile greed of gain and accumulation, at the
mercy of which the lower classes were to be left for evermore, after
the opening of the Grand Rebellion. This is not fancy or
exaggeration; it is a plain statement of fact.
Charles I was
unfortunate in his predecessors, and still more unfortunate in his
contemporaries. We have seen that the upstart owners of the Church
lands, forced upon the country by that unscrupulous Bluebeard, Henry
VIII, had introduced a commercial spirit into the English soil. These
parvenus, the majority of whom had been obsequious sycophants in the
entourage of that most outrageous specimen of English royalty, were
now quite settled on their estates, and were running them on purely
mercenary lines with a view to reaping the maximum amount of gain
possible irrespective of the comfort or happiness of the inhabitants.
But there was also
another class, that of the successful tradesman, which was now
invading the rural districts and buying estates in all parts of the
country. This element tended only to intensify the commercial spirit
which was now spreading over the whole land and transforming its
customs just as much as its temper; while in the towns themselves a
great and powerful middle class was rising into prominence, thanks to
the fortunes which were constantly being amassed in home and over-sea
trade. The destructive influence which these changes brought to bear
upon the patriarchal relationship between the lower and the higher
orders—a relationship which, though it was never complete or hearty
and never worked smoothly, at least had qualities infinitely superior
to those of the new regime —this destructive influence, together
with the abolition of the monasteries, and that still more heinous
crime, the appropriation and confiscation of the Guild funds and
lands, gave rise to widespread discontent and considerable unrelieved
poverty. The fact that Henry VIII alone put 72,000 thieves to death
in his own reign, shows the extremes to which desperate indigence had
been driven even in his time. Edward VI and Elizabeth had infinite
trouble with the poor, and we have only to examine the numerous
statutes dealing with the problem of poverty, passed in the latter's
reign, in order to realise the extent to which the evil must have
been increasing.
I should like to
lay stress only upon the close connection which the commercial
element in the nation bore to Puritanism. In addition to the wealthy
tradesmen who had wandered into the country in search of a pastoral
and gentlemanly existence, and the large number of landowners, after
the style of Cromwell himself, whose Puritanism was almost a conscientious justification of their being in possession of lands
which had once belonged to the Holy Church, London, in which at that
time nearly the whole trade of the kingdom was concentrated, was
almost entirely Puritan; whilst practically the only two important
towns in the west which ultimately opposed Charles in the great
struggle, I refer to Bristol and Gloucester, were both likewise
strong in trade and in Puritanical opinions. It should also be
remembered that East Anglia, Kent and other southern counties, had
recently been overrun by Flemish refugees and French Huguenots, and
although many of these aliens were at first not necessarily extreme
Puritans, as tradesmen and manufacturers they threw in their lot with
the Puritan party against the King, and thereby revealed that their
sympathy with the religious views of the Parliamentary forces was
deeper than with those of the Cavaliers.
This relationship
of trade to religion was a most important factor in the struggle
between the King and his more powerful subjects. Even in our
analytical times it is difficult enough to find people who are
sufficiently honest to see clearly into the springs of their actions
and desires; but in those days, in which mankind was scarcely
conscious at all of the multiplicity of motives that may sometimes
conduce to bring about an action which has all the appearance of
having sprung from a single desire or aspiration, it was easy—nay,
almost inevitable—for the Puritan tradesmen to marshal all their
mercenary objections to Charles and his lieutenants' paternal and
protective government, his beneficent interference with trade, and
the check he put upon their rapacious oppression of the lower orders,
under two such high-sounding and empty terms as " Liberty "
and " No Popery." In this way they appropriated from the
start the two most deceptive and most attractive war-cries which
could possibly have been found, to appeal to the masses. And the fact
that, despite these seductively alluring devices upon their banner,
they failed to draw the non-commercial and poorer classes of the
community over to their side, only shows the extent to which Charles
I's rule must have endeared him to these portions of the population.
[...]
With the impudent
effrontery of extreme Protestants, these people who supposed that the
Almighty was always hobnobbing with them and standing perpetually at
their elbow, just as the Low Churchmen, Methodists and other
Nonconformists believe to-day, were not the sort of persons to
respect an earthly King, however great. They had harassed poor
Elizabeth, who detested them. But, not being strong enough during her
reign to defy her openly, they had contented themselves with creeping
into corners, allowing their resentment to ferment, and growling that
she was an " idle slut" and an " untamed heifer."[…]
The basis of the King's unpopularity among the rich and
powerful was, of course, in the first place, ostensibly of a
religious nature […] The true reason, the genuine, though often
unconscious, reason was neither a religious one, nor due to the fact
that the King's taxation was illegal or levied without the consent of
the Commons. An essential part of the real grievance was that the
weight of this taxation fell entirely upon the trading and wealthy
classes. It reduced the profits of the tradesman and took a
percentage from the incomes of the landed gentry. The taxes on food,
on the poor man's sustenance, were to be the innovation of a free
Parliament a few years later. But Charles was content to tax the
profits of trade, and, for the rest, to demand a contribution to the
expenses of government from the wealthy landed classes. The nobler
among Charles's wealthy subjects understood and accepted it. They saw
the King daily making sacrifices himself, in order to rule
beneficently. They knew that he had pledged the Crown jewels and
plate, and sold property to the City of London to the extent of £
120,000, at the very moment when he was appealing to the clergy to
help him, early in his reign. And they saw that he did not spend this
money in idle merriment or wasteful extravagance.
It is well known
that the Tudors were consistently opposed to the introduction of all
engines and machines which tended to prove injurious to
handicraftsmen, or to deteriorate the quality of the articles
produced. Edward VI and Elizabeth were both equally vigorous in
their attitude towards mechanical innovations […] The course which
these two monarchs had inaugurated, however, James and Charles
continued with even greater vigour. But, in the reigns of the last
two monarchs, the men who firmly believed that mechanical innovations
per se, quite irrespective of whether they improved or deteriorated
man, constituted " Progress," were beginning to lose
patience and to grow in number. They could no longer brook this
paternal control from on high. To them any thought of directing or
limiting the march of mechanical science amounted to intolerable
interference, insufferable tyranny. They scoffed when James I
prohibited the use of a machine for making needles; but they scoffed
still more when Charles reinforced the Tudor enactments, and also
upheld his father's attitude in this struggle against the besotting
machine. Their surprise, however, must have been great when the
noblest of the Stuarts, on June 15, 1634, not only issued a
proclamation against " that great annoyance of smoke which is so
obnoxious to our City of London," but also carried his concern
about the beauty and happiness of this city so far as actually to
recommend the use of a new and special furnace calculated to mitigate
the evil. Incidentally, it is obvious from this royal proclamation
that the great Stuart King was not blindly suspicious of innovations
as such; otherwise he would have looked askance even at a furnace
calculated to mitigate the evil of smoke [...]
But one does not
require to be a deep student of the vulgar and unthinking class of
mechanical innovators, to understand the kind of exasperation to
which such an attitude on the part of the ruler would soon give rise
in their ranks. Big-sounding, bombastic phrases, such as the "
Forward March of Humanity," " The Progress of the Race,"
welled up in their foolish and sentimental throats and caused them to
look with rankling indignation at that superb figure in lace and
velvet whose consummate taste preferred to cling devotedly to Beauty
rather than to their absurd and inhuman idea of advancement! There
was, however, a deeper and perhaps more unconscious hatred in Charles
I and his father against mechanical innovations than the mere hatred
of their threatened deterioration of both the handicraftsman and the
quality of the goods produced. There was the profound suspicion that
machinery implied expensive and elaborate installations which must
necessarily lead to the extinction of the poor home-worker, or even
of the artisan of moderate means, and the yielding up of his liberty,
his power and his gifts to a more unscrupulous and less desirable
taskmaster than the buying public, i. e. the capitalistic traders,
out for personal gain. For machinery and capitalism are plighted
mates and are necessarily allies. […]
In the Grand
Rebellion, therefore, we see the curious anomaly of a powerful
minority of agitators, supported by a large contingent of aliens,
landed upstarts, town tradesmen and thousands of deluded followers
fighting against the poorer people and the King, for the "liberties
of the people." Only unsuspecting spinsters or modern democrats,
however, could ever believe such a tale; and, when we know what
followed, when we read of the oppression and slavery to which the
victory of the Parliamentary party prepared the way; when, moreover,
we keep steadily before us the facts of Charles I's reign, we not
only suspect, we know, that there were other, more personal, less
disinterested and far less savoury motives behind the so-called
popular party, than a desire to vindicate the " liberties of the
people." The triumph of Parliament did not mean the triumph of
the liberties of the people. It meant the triumph of a new morality,
a new outlook on life, and a new understanding of what life was
worth. It meant the triumph of the morality of unrestricted
competition, of uncontrolled and unguided trade, and of a policy of
neglect in regard to all things that really mattered.
This was what the
Grand Rebellion achieved, and this, in the main, was the sole object
of the Grand Rebellion.
Excerpted from A Defence of Aristocracy: A Text-Book for Tories. London: Constable, 1915. Boston: Phillips, 1915
The Lost Philosopher: The Best of Anthony M. Ludovici
is available from Counter-Currents Publishing:
http://www.counter-currents.com/the-lost-philosopher/
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