“Rudolf, the mad alchemist king of Bohemia, spent most of his life trying to turn base metals into gold. Even he had a sane moment, though, when he asked his famulus: ‘Tell me, if we succeed, will gold still be worth anything?’ It’s a question diploma factories rarely ask.”

George Jonas in National Post May 7, 2015

In my latest National Post commentary, I give credit where credit is due.

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