King Charles II's "absolute monarchy" - the Publishing of Power, and the Writing of Resistance.

Our children loved to watch Horrible Histories on BBC. This clip was one they really loved, and which our Charlie memorised and liked to recite. Entertaining certainly, but it masks who King Charles II really was.

He, and his brother the Duke of York, the future King James II, had been at war with Scottish Presbyterian Covenanter civilians since Charles was crowned in 1661. Battles and persecutions ensued. Charles 'prorogued' Parliament on 27 May 1679 and less than a month later on 22 June 1679 at Bothwell Brig south of Glasgow, 5000 troops were sent in to rout 6000 Presbyterian civilians. Charles prorogued Parliament again and again in the 1680s.

Just like in Scotland, the army was sent to break up open air religious services known as 'conventicles' in south west England, at places like Bristol and Salisbury. 'Whigs' in England began to protest, with localised riots and by raising petitions which were denounced by Charles II and his Lord Chief Justice as 'seditious'.

A goldsmith from Taunton in Somerset, Thomas Dare, personally confronted Charles II in London with a petition from the people - Dare was arrested for "seditious words" and sent back to Taunton for trial in April 1680. He was fined £500 and was given a three year suspended sentence. The specific words that he had dared utter were that "the King's subjects had but two ways, one by petition, the other by armes".

The crown and state against the people...
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In the "west" we like to think that we have rights, which are in some way protected in law.  This idea has been handed down to us, culturally and philosophically, through the centuries and it's now our presumed default - it's the water in which we swim. Like David Foster Wallace's proverbial fish, we're not even aware that the water is there. But this was not always the case.

King Charles II loved the idea that kings not only had privilege, but total domination, that they were in every way superior to the people, and were above the reach of common law. 

In 1680 he, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, published a manuscript text which had been written during the reign of his late (executed) father, King Charles I. The author was the late Sir Robert Filmer (1588-1653), and it was entitled Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (text online here).

In his opening salvo, Filmer utterly rejects an idea that we take for granted:

Mankind is naturally endowed and born with Freedom from all Subjection, and at liberty to chose what Form of Government it please: And that the Power which any one Man hath over others, was at first bestowed according to the discretion of the Multitude.

Filmer believed that "in a monarchy the king must of necessity be above the laws". This is the basis of "absolute monarchy', and potentially tyranny.

Filmer raged against the "Reformed Church", "Papists", "Jesuits", "zealous favourers of the Geneva Discipline". He cited John Calvin and George Buchanan, and "R. Dolman" who was a pseudonym of Robert Parsons (1546-1610) who had authored A treatise of three conversions of England from paganism to Christian religion (online here). 

With Filmer resurrected, various Whigs then retaliated in print, with ideas of democracy and liberty which would echo across the Atlantic almost 100 years later – they were James Tyrrell, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke.

More to follow... 

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PS: The 1689 Bill of Rights put an end to such abuses - "the pretended Power of Suspending of Laws or the Execution of Laws by Regal Authority without Consent of Parliament is illegal."

• English Radical Whigs: Natural Law and Natural Rights by Michael Zuckert, University of Notre Dame (2011) is online here

• Presbyterianism in Devon and Cornwall in the seventeenth century thesis by Rev. J.T. Gillespie of Plymouth (1943) is online here.