In my latest National Post column I ask how we can be so confused about something as simple as human rights.

You’re not really supposed to remember all the details, are you? In Josephine Tey’s excellent The Daughter of Time the protagonist reflects at one point that things like Alfred and the Cakes, Canute and the Tides (the real story where he “rebuked his courtiers on the shore”), Nelson on the Victory were what people remembered from history “when tonnage and poundage, and ship money, and Laud’s Liturgy, and the Rye House Plot, and the Triennial Acts, and all the long muddle of schism and shindy, treaty and treason, had faded from their consciousness.” And the Ordinances of 1311 weren’t even on that list.

So let’s just fess up here. I’ve been writing and filming on liberty, on Magna Carta and all that, on our Constitution, and I hadn’t even heard of them. But in a strange and not totally self-serving way it proves my point.

You see, they were a set of rules imposed on the feckless King Edward II on October 11, 1311 to make him smarten up, be less arbitrary and be less spendthrift. And the reason it’s hard to keep track of it all is that so much of this happens in English and then British and then Anglosphere history, as opposed to its glaring absence elsewhere.

In this case the hapless Edward, soon to lose the pivotal battle of Bannockburn further disgracing himself and strengthening Parliament, was obliged to accept a restatement and reimposition of the Provisions of Oxford and of Westminster imposed on his hapless grandfather Henry III. But with an added twist, a new concern with reforming chaotic fiscal procedures and in particular redirecting revenues from the king’s personal control to the “exchequer” or Ministry of Finance in embryo. (Called the exchequer from the use of a checkered cloth to do the sums, a far less quaint and irrational procedure than it sounds once you realize they were working with Roman numerals… which is itself admittedly both quaint and irrational now that I come to write it down.)

In short, more formal procedure subject to scrutiny, less arbitrary authority. Again. And again. And again. Kings come and go (including in Edward’s case being deposed in 1327 with the enthusiastic support of his own wife for being both tyrannical and ineffective although I suppose if you’re going to have the former it’s better to have the latter). So indeed do dynasties. But popular control of the executive branch just keeps getting stronger regardless of the vicissitudes of politics, civil wars and temporary setbacks.

Uh, at least into our own day. Still some work to do there. So while we don’t have to memorize every dang Provision and Ordinance, we should remember why there were so many of them: the restless desire of the ambitious to secure unchecked power, and the unwavering determination of the people not to let them.

“Thus it came to him merely to run away was folly, since he could not run away from himself.”

Sinclair Lewis Babbitt

https://youtu.be/90xSx7LwSKY The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Ask the Professor, October 11, 2016"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/October/Ask_Professor_57.mp3[/podcast]

On October 10, back in 1580, a force of Papal soldiers landed at Smerwick in Ireland to foment rebellion against the English. Which is, again, just about exactly the sort of thing I think the Papacy should not do.

For one thing, it didn’t work. It was part of a tangled set of uprisings against English rule in Ireland called the Desmond Rebellions. The papal force was quickly trapped, forced to surrender, and massacred by English soldiers including Sir Walter Raleigh.

The massacre brings to mind the important qualification that English rule in Ireland was remarkably malevolent given their general record elsewhere. I cannot say that I blame the Irish for rising up since they were being denied the rights guaranteed by Magna Carta. (Or for thinking Ard na Caithne was a nicer name for the place than Smerwick, if it comes to that.) And I do not condemn the rebels, or their helpers, for not weighing the odds too carefully before doing what they thought was right.

I also concede that the Tudor break with Rome was an ugly business motivated by lust and dynastic greed rather than genuine religious fervor. I also grant that genuine religious fervor if misplaced can be very nasty indeed. But I can see why some Catholics would very much regret what had happened and want to fix it.

None of these considerations excuse the Papacy sending an army to mix together English colonial policy and religious quarrels. Indeed, it’s remarkable how much good came out of the bad beginning of the Anglican Church, including the longstanding Anglosphere identification of free-will Protestantism with liberty against tyrannical Catholicism.

I know and respect Catholics who insist the association is accidental and incomplete (including that the England that produced Magna Carta was Catholic, as was the Wessex of Alfred the Great). But it is a fact that from the Spanish Armada down to the French Revolution, the great threat to liberty was absolute monarchs professing Catholicism and in unwholesomely close league with a Church that was far too entwined in secular matters to attend to its spiritual duties properly. Need I mention Armand Jean du Plessis, the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, Chief Minister to Louis XIII, geopolitical schemer and man of dubious fidelity to Catholic theology?

Furthermore, and worse, if the Papacy wanted Catholicism to receive a respectful hearing in England, including at least tolerance of its practices, it would be hard to think of a worse policy than continually fomenting sedition and even sometimes lending troops to it.

As a footnote, Raleigh was later tried on largely political grounds, mostly unfairly, and imprisoned for many years before being executed. But one of the charges brought against him was his involvement in the 1580 massacre and his defence, that he was just following orders, was rejected.

“For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.” Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams, 28 October 1813

October 9 is a good day if you’re Rhode Island. For on this date in 1635 Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

OK, so that too could stand a little clarification, especially as most readers probably aren’t Rhode Island. See, Williams was a Puritan preacher who left England early in the runup to the English Civil War, in late 1629, having been ordained in the Anglican Church but rejecting Archbishop Laud’s High Church views and ultimately the Church itself.

So he went to Massachusetts and was welcomed although he quickly raised eyebrows by insisting the local Boston church was not properly “separated” from the corrupt Church of England. He was more welcome in Salem and then Plymouth but Boston pursued him with a baleful eye.

It got more baleful as Williams increasingly insisted that the state should not enforce religious doctrine. Conscience, he said, was between man and God not man and Caesar. This shocked the Puritans, but in many ways they were hoist on their own petard since they had rejected the established church and with it the authority of the state to set religions doctrine only to have these views thrown back at them by this smart-aleck (who incidentally was apprenticed under the great jurist Sir Edward Coke and at some point tutored poet John Milton in Dutch in return for a refresher course in Hebrew which is not something most people can say).

Also, Williams became friendly with some of the aboriginal inhabitants and began to develop seriously unconventional views on the practice of showing up, saying oh look, there’s nobody here, ignoring the Indians going um yeah actually we’re here, this is our home, and just stuffing it into the king’s sack. So basically the Puritans were constantly getting on their high horse about everything and everybody and then he got on his even higher one about them with good cause.

In such a situation there’s clearly only one thing to do. And it’s not admit you were wrong. It’s haul the guy into court, try him for sedition and heresy, convict him and on Oct. 9 1635 order him to git out of Dodge. Actually they said look, you’re sick, winter’s coming on, take a break, shut up and clear out in the spring. But as you probably realize, Williams wasn’t a shutupy kind of guy, so they decided to chuck him out into the snow and discovered he’d already gone there himself.

After wintering with some Wampanaogs, Williams in the spring took the radical steps of buying land from Wampanaog Sachem Massasoit, creating his own colony of Providence, and establishing a government that actually rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s, and a church that was happy to have it do so.

Eventually the threat from Massachusetts became so severe that Williams went back to England and got himself a charter for what would eventually become Rhode Island or, more formally, “the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” (yes, that is still its name). And he continued to make trouble, opposing slavery and reasoning his way around to adult baptism and free will (also anathema to the Puritans, though why they thought you should do anything I have never understood) and founded the First Baptist Church in America.

He was a troublesome man. I imagine he was by turns charming and infuriating. But he did show the way that ideas have a way of taking on a life of their own, and especially in America being taken to their logical conclusion no matter how uneasy it may make people.

Rhode Island is not a major state and never has been. And yet in many ways Roger Williams’ stamp on America was larger and more permanent than the people who indignantly threw him out back on that chilly Oct. 9.

“When children ask inconvenient questions it is the custom to say to them, ‘When you are older you will understand,’ a reply, generally speaking, justifying parricide. But the answer is not merely irritating; it is generally, I am sorry to say, a lie. The questions asked by children, as a rule, are questions that do not depend upon any matter of age: they are simple and unanswerable questions. When we grow up we rise superior to them, not by answering them, but merely by giving up. Logically, the parents ought only to say, ‘When you are older, you will not want to understand’ though it may certainly be said that if the first version of the reply would justify parricide on the part of the child the second version might justify suicide on his part.”

G.K. Chesterton, “The Abyss”