It’s official, David Starkey says so: the old aristocracy, the one based on land and genealogy, is dead. The entitlement of the new ruling class to be gathered in Westminster Abbey last Friday is based on money alone. A public school education certainly helps, but lots of money will do, however you acquired it. Posh and Becks, Elton and David, they were all there. It is fitting that William’s dukedom is the very constituency that Oliver Cromwell represented: the English bourgeois revolution is at an end. It took three and a half centuries. We can only hope the next one will be quicker.
The class divide, of course, is intact as ever. And that’s why Tony and Gordon couldn’t be invited. Tony may have been in his element. He has the money. He had the right education. He dines with many of those who were present. But he crossed the line.
He may not have wanted to ban fox hunting. His policies may have served the interests of the wealthy just fine. But he batted for the wrong side.
Gordon is lucky. He won’t have minded. He feels at home on his side.
Poor old Tony. It must feel very lonely to be seen as a class traitor by both sides.
In sillier circles, the imposition of the greatest tyranny in English (never mind Irish) history is termed “the English Revolution”.
In fact, of course, it long preceded the emergence of any industrial proletariat and is wholly inexplicable in Marxist terms, just as is the very existence of any Marxist movement in, say, the Russia of 1917, or Albania, or China at least until very recent years, or Korea, or Vietnam, or Nepal, or Bengal, or Sri Lanka, or Ethiopia, or Zimbabwe, or Uganda, or Rwanda, or South Africa, or Cuba, or Peru, or Bolivia, or … well, make your own list. At their respective heights of Communism, certainly Spain, and arguably also Italy and even France, were standing contradictions of the whole theory.
If there is any truth at all in the Marxist analysis of history, then these things simply cannot be. I think we all know what follows from the fact that these things are.
But didn’t Charles I believe in the Divine Right of Kings? No, he did not. Or at least he certainly expressed no such view at his grotesque “trial” pursuant to a Bill of Attainder, and before eighty of his carefully selected parliamentary and military enemies under a second-rate lawyer, John Bradshaw, created “Lord President” because all the proper judges had fled London rather than have anything to do with the wretched proceedings.
There, Charles declared repeatedly that, by denying the authority of the “court” to try him, he was simply upholding the law as it then existed, including the liberties of the English people and the parliamentary institutions of the English State. No law permitted the trial of the monarch, he argued. On the contrary, the law of treason then in force provided for exactly the opposite, namely that any attack on the monarch’s person was itself an offence. Simply as a matter of fact, he was right.
And the subsequent behaviour of the Cromwellian regime fully vindicated him.