Wat Tyler’s men in 1381 marched on London to demand the abolition of serfdom and the repeal of the poll tax. They did not want revolution; they wanted the king to be good. The Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 was 30,000 northerners marching under the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ to protest Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries – it was not a rebellion against the Crown but a petition to it, in arms, to reconsider. The Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549 involved Cornish and Devon men refusing the new Protestant liturgy, and dying in considerable numbers for the right to pray as their fathers had. The Covenanters of Scotland fought not for novelty but for a particular understanding of the proper ordering of church and state. The Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685 was a Protestant constitutional protest dressed as a dynastic claim. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, that driest and most English of upheavals, resulted not in a republic but in a constitutional settlement – William III was invited in from the Netherlands not to overthrow the monarchy but to regularise it, to make parliament sovereign without making it supreme over everything that mattered to ordinary people. Each of these movements sought not the destruction of the existing order but its correction, its return to a lost and better version of itself.
The Chartists sit squarely in this tradition. What they wanted was not new. The rights they demanded had a genealogy that stretched back through Thomas Paine to the Levellers to the barons at Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was sealed. Each generation of the English popular movement has had to rediscover that the constitutional ground gained by one era tends, mysteriously, to be lost by the next, that the establishment has an almost geological patience in the slow work of reclaiming power from the people who briefly forced it to concede.
Should freedom lovers be concerned about this?
https://roadmap-for-modern-digital-government.campaign.gov.uk/digital-id-consultation/
The government want to “consult” us about something that they know from previous attempts is not wanted.
Didn’t all the rebellions mentioned end in brutal massacres for the people involved and very little change at the state level? For sure the ones with ordinary people. The Glorious Revolution was about the elites who didn’t like a catholic monarch and the Magna Carta, although a very important document, was largely about retaining the Baron’s power than some sort of “power to the people”. “Power to the people” is that last thing the barons wanted.
If I remember correctly, Watt Tyler was hung, drawn and quartered at Smithfield, and the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace were treated with the usual gentleness and kindness we have come to associate with Henry VIII. For example, Margaret Stafford whose involvement was at best peripheral, was burned at the stake. And she was not offered the dignity of strangulation before the fire, she endured the full measure of it. BTW she got this punishment because the Tudors thought it terribly undignified that a woman’s nakedness should be exposed during the standard hanging. drawing and quartering. Which I think was jolly decent of them. I’m sure that avoiding that sort of embarrassment was primary in Margaret’s mind as the flames licked up her body.
In some sense these rebellions are the story of the development of a constitutional monarchy, but I think the English Civil War is a good pattern to look at. Brutal massacres in battle, and replacement of one tyrant with another. And only when the tyrant’s son was too weak to rule did things change marginally for the better. In some sense the fact that Richard Cromwell was so weak is the reason Britain is as it is today. A lot of the course of a nation’s progress is dependent on pure, dumb luck.
These revolutions are so costly because those against whom they are fought are implacable, they are defending their livelihoods and their power. They might not burn you at the stake but do not doubt the are any less vicious, cruel and relentless.
Fraser Orr, 1607 hrs local:
Just noting that here in the United States it is “Patriots’ Day”. April 19, 1775 British troops and Colonial Militia fought at Concord Bridge and Lexington Green with the result that Royalist forces retreated back to Boston. But IMHO the key point was at a place called Meriam’s Corner on the route back. There local civilians spontaneously, under arms, arrived in numbers and turned the retreat into a route.
Mere attempts to petition for change don’t seem to be effective. The American version seems to have had a greater effect. At the very least, those wanting change best not be helpless against force applied by those in power.
Subotai Bahadur