Here’s one I do like. On February 27, 1782, the British House of Commons voted to throw in the towel in the American Revolutionary War.
I like it partly because my sympathies are very much with the revolutionaries seeking to uphold their ancient British liberties, not with the King and his ministers trying to suppress them. And I like it partly because I can think of few greater affirmations of those liberties that, in such a difficult and embarrassing situation, it was the representatives of the British people who took the king by his frilly collar and said "Stop!" Once again, Parliament checked an expensive, oppressive hare-brained executive branch scheme which was, in large measure, the point of the British constitution essentially from Magna Carta onward.
This vote was no formality. Far from it. The King remained an important player in the British system even when he was obviously messing up badly. And despite the highly unfavourable state of the military effort in what had recently been the 13 Colonies after the crushing British defeat at Yorktown by a combined American-French force, the February 27 1782 vote was close, 234 to 215. And that narrow 19-vote margin was very important.
It set in motion a highly favourable chain of events leading to quick reconciliation between the former belligerents. Including that the American peace commissioners, the exalted trio of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay, proceeded to make a separate peace with Britain despite pledges to France, which had swooped on her old foe, not to do so.
Within an amazingly short period, and despite the stupid War of 1812, Britain and the United States were tacit allies in maintaining world order, an arrangement that persisted from the 1824 Monroe Doctrine with some bumps and bruises right down to their formal alliance in 1917. And while it took statesmanship to bring it about and maintain it, the structural basis was their shared devotion to liberty under law and to popular sovereignty. With, of course, the usual qualifications about unjust exclusion of some groups from the blessings of liberty, most spectacularly in the United States black slaves and then ex-slaves.
In the Capitol Rotunda in Washington there is a gold replica of Magna Carta that we were kindly permitted to film in 2015, given by the British Parliament in 1976 in powerful acknowledgement that two centuries earlier the greatest devotees of traditional freedom and the rights of the people had been on the west side of the Atlantic. But they were still strongly represented in Britain including in Parliament on that important date.
Liberty is often under siege. But where the roots are deep, it has enormous strength and manages to flourish despite and sometimes even during storms. Including Parliament yanking George III back to his so-called senses on behalf of ordinary Britons on February 27, 1782.
On this date back in 1616, February 26, the Catholic Church made its infamous effort to undo Joshua 10:12 and make the sun move in the sky. Or at least it ordered Galileo to shut up about the fact that it made far more sense to regard the Earth as in motion around a stationary sun. Confirming once again Robert Conquest’s 3rd Law of Politics: "The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies." Because to this day almost nothing seems to confirm the beliefs of anti-Catholics that the Church is repressive and obscurantist than this episode.
In my view the charge is not entirely fair. Even when it comes to science, the Catholic Church has very often taken very sensible views, in the spirit of Cesare Cardinal Baronio whose comment about the controversy was "The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." But this episode with Galileo is the one that sticks in the popular mind.
And for what? After silencing Galileo the Church went on to ban all books advocating the Copernican system as "altogether contrary to Holy Scripture". Galileo himself was unrepentant and despite formally accepting the 1616 decree went on to publish his devastating Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems which earned him a trial for heresy in 1633. And a conviction, and house arrest for the rest of his life.
The sun, you’ll notice, didn’t escape from the stationary position relative to our solar system to which Galileo had assigned it. (It is splitting hairs to argue today, as some do, that the Church was sort of right because the sun does move relative to other stars. The problem was declaring astronomy a branch of theology.)
A mere 122 years later, in 1758, the Church dropped the ban on heliocentric books without actually reversing the verdict against Galileo or allowing uncensored version of Copernicus’ key work De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium or Galileo’s Dialogue. Not until 1820 did the Church go "Ooops" for real and lift the ban on the two books, and a mere 15 years later a revised Index of Forbidden Books no longer listed them.
Eventually Pope John Paul II said it was a mistake to go after Galileo. But I am not sure the conviction for heresy was ever overturned. I mean, you don’t want to rush into things, right? Or rather, having rushed in, you don’t want to rush out just because the building is on fire or anything.
As I say, the Church has often done better on science than in this episode. But if you were in fact part of a cabal of its enemies secretly controlling its conduct, and desirous of discrediting it badly in a way that would last centuries, you’d do just about exactly what they did.
P.S. Conquest’s other two laws are "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best" and "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." The extent to which these also apply to the Roman Catholic Church is a matter for another day.