Revolutions in the West

By Geoffrey Gibson

Five revolutions made the modern West.The English have an unchallenged genius for deniable, incremental change, in a constitution which they built up over a thousand years or so, but even they had two authentic revolutions, one in 1641 and one in 1689, and they had a gruesome civil war in between. Additionally, we shall look at the American War of Independence (starting in 1776), the French Revolution (starting in 1789) and the Russian Revolution (starting in 1917).
The recurring theme is the willingness of those who get into a club to slam the door in the faces of those coming after them. People who think that the glimmer called the Arab Spring can be dealt with inside, say, five generations may wish to reflect on the English experience, or the Russian, or even the agony of France for the century after 1789, or the guilt of the United States before it was purged by its Civil War.
This book first looks at the old regimes before each revolution, the crises in those regimes, and then looks separately at the five overthrows. The book looks at the terror in two of them, and draws conclusions about revolutions elsewhere. The fourth volume of A History of the West. 74,000 words fully annotated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Geoffrey Gibson
• Release date: Jun 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310298189

Geoffrey Gibson

Geoffrey Gibson is an Australian writer living with the Wolf - his dog - in a kind of rural peace one hour out of Melbourne, the home of his football team, the Melbourne Storm. He has practised law as either a member of the Bar or a major international law firm. He has presided over at least one statutory tribunal for nearly thirty years and he has conducted arbitrations or mediations in Australia and the U S. He has published five books before on the theory and practice of the law, A Journalist's Companion to Australian Law (Melbourne University Press); The Arbitrator's Companion (Federation Press); Law for Directors (Federation Press); The Making of a Lawyer (What They Didn't Teach You at Law School) (Hardie Grant); and The Common Law - A History (Australian Scholarly Publishing)). He is now focussing on writing in general history, philosophy, and literature, fields that he was trained in and that he has pursued over very many Summer Schools at Cambridge, Harvard, and Oxford universities. His twelve eBooks so far published include five volumes of A History of the West - The Ancient West; The Medieval West; The West Awakes; Revolutions in the West; and Twentieth Century West; Confessions of a Babyboomer; Confessions of a Barrister; Parallel Trials, Socrates and Jesus; The English Difference, The Tablets of their Laws; The German Nexus, The Germans in English History; The Humility of Knowledge, Five Geniuses and God; and Windows on Shakespeare. The photo is not great, but at least the Wolf comes out OK.

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REVOLUTIONS IN THE WEST

VOLUME IV

OF

A HISTORY OF THE WEST

By Geoffrey Gibson

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Published by:

Geoffrey Gibson at Smashwords

Copyright (c) 2014 by Geoffrey Gibson

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IN MEMORY OF K A

A revolution is not a dinner party. (Mao Zedong)

CONTENTS

Prologue

1. Rules of Engagement

2. Old regimes

3. Crises

4. Overthrow

5. 1641

6. 1688

7. 1776

8. 1789

9. 1917

10. Terror

11. New Regime

Epilogue

PROLOGUE

The history of our law is a record of how we try to control violence and to contain power. People want to be free while trying to preserve themselves from violence. To do this, they need rules and people to enforce the rules. We call the first law, and the second government.

We take three sentiments for granted. (They are axiomatic – we do not require proof of them.) Sane people do not like violence. People want to be free. Every person can be corrupted by power. The first object of our government is therefore to control violence; the first interest of its citizens is therefore to control the way in which those in government exercise their powers.

In seeking to balance these wishes and fears, there is another proposition that we take for granted. It is as much an instinctive impulse as a moral obligation derived from thinking about it. We believe in fairness (or justice) which means that like cases should be treated alike. Our belief in that impulse underlies or underwrites all our efforts to regulate our dealings with others. You do not have to go to Aristotle to find it. Just look at what happens if you give two children presents at Christmas and one present is bigger or better than the other, or if you give a dog a biscuit each time he shakes hands, and then you hit him the next time.

In what we are pleased to call the western world, most would say that the basis of all our endeavours to form laws to deal with our wants and fears is what we call the rule of law. The rule of law has at least two parts, and a third in those countries that we say are common law countries. (These differences will be discussed in the next chapter.)The first part is that we are ruled by law, not people. That is why we speak of the rule of law. There is no arbitrary power. The king does not rule because he is king, but because of and subject to the law. When Henry IV died, his son, the incoming Henry V, felt the need the reassure his subjects:

Brothers, you mix your sadness with your fear.

This is the English, not the Turkish court.

(Henry IV, Part 2, 5.2,47-8)

The king may have been different, but the law was not.

The second part is that people are equal before the law: all people and groups of people are equally subject to the law. There are no ‘class’ exemptions or privileges.

This book is about five revolutions. The English Revolution of 1641 (or, depending on where you come from the Great Rebellion, or the Puritan Revolution), the Glorious Revolution (1689), the American Revolution (1776), the French Revolution (1789) and the Russian Revolution (1917). Each of those revolutions has thrown light on our idea of the rule of law – as often as not by violating it. But if you go back to what we said at the start about controlling violence and containing power, and reflect that a revolution involves a change of power by the use or threat of force or violence, you will at once see the levels of risk involved in this sort of constitutional growth – if, indeed, growth is what you get at the end of the process.

At the time that they experienced the revolutions here discussed, England and what we now call the United States had been moving towards government under the rule of law. France had not moved as far, and Russia had barely moved at all. At least until 1905 the Tsar of Russia was as absolute as any ruler of Turkey had been. At the time the Bastille fell the French people were subject to cruel and outmoded inequalities that gave rise to an unanswerable sense of unfairness and outrage. The same can be said of Russia at the time of the October revolution.

There is one difference between what we might call the British revolutions and the others. It comes from a part of their history that the English do not call a revolution and a settlement that they are reluctant to describe as an agreement – Magna Carta. It came more than four hundred years before any of the events here described. And three centuries after Magna Carta, the English went through another huge reallocation of power in a revolution that is known as the Reformation.

Another difference is that those effecting the first three revolutions aimed at re arranging the furniture: the French and the Russians were intent on blowing up the whole mansion. The first part – demolition – was easy. But the next part – construction – was not so easy. The French and the Russians did not have a clear view of what they wanted and, more importantly, they did not have the political experience to make and implement a working constitution. These men were as much qualified to bring a new born baby into the world as a new born nation. Additionally, the Russians wanted to install a whole new form of economic management which had not been tried before, as well as a whole new system of government.

It is not surprising, then, that those two revolutions led to chaos and terror, made so much worse – so much more violent – by the justified anger of people looking back over centuries of oppression, inequality and plain hunger.

As between a director and a company, a doctor and a patient, a schoolteacher and a student, or a stockbroker and a client, there is, or ought to be, a relationship of trust and confidence. The director, doctor, schoolteacher or stockbroker is a kind of trustee – they hold their position on trust because their beneficiary – the company, the patient, the student or the client – puts their confidence in the trustee. If the beneficiary loses confidence in the trustee, the relationship becomes unworkable, and something has to be done. There is no point in the trustees’ complaining that the beneficiary got their facts wrong, or that they are acting unreasonably. If the beneficiary says, in good faith, ‘I no longer trust you as my trustee’ then something has to be done. As the great poet and apologist for liberty John Milton said – and it was no coincidence that he said it in 1649 – ‘And this ofttimes with express warning, that if the king or magistrate proved unfaithful to his trust, the people would be disengaged.’

The parties are only concerned with a loss of trust, and if a court might find that there had been a breach of trust, that might have some other consequences, but it cannot help to mend the breakdown. No court will order parties to continue to work together where an essential part of the relationship has gone.

For the most part, and putting to one side legal and constitutional issues, the relationship between the king and subjects before each of the five revolutions that we are considering was one involving trust and confidence. When such a relationship breaks down –as it plainly did in each of our five cases – there are broadly three possible avenues of response open to the beneficiary (the people) against the trustee (the king). They can decide to stick with the king, presumably on something like the saying that it is better to stick with the devil you know. They can try to negotiate the terms of new relationship with the king to reduce his powers and his capacity to hurt his subjects by abusing those powers and breaching his trust. Or the people can get rid of the king by some kind of deposition or by his death.

The people decided against the first option in each of our five revolutions. In the Puritan Revolution they went for the limitation of powers option which they secured by lawful means, but the king refused to accept the new dispensation and civil war followed. When the king lost that war, option three became almost inevitable and by death. In the Glorious Revolution, the people went for a combination of options two and three – they effectively forced the king to abandon the crown, and they entered into new terms of arrangement with his successor. That king was nominated by him and he was put under terms defined in a statute. In the American Revolution, the people went straight for the third option because they were terminating the relationship. The French tried option two, but when the king breached his trust even more badly by trying to leave the kingdom, option three, in its terminal form, became very hard to avoid. It is hard to apply the analysis to the Tsar because his rule was so absolute that it seems idle to speak of trust or confidence on either side. If you did apply the analysis, the Russians tried option two with the February revolution but the death of the Tsar now seems to have been inevitable from the time that the Bolsheviks (or Communists) seized power in the October Revolution.

There are three reasons why a comparative look at these five revolutions may help us.

We might better understand each revolution if we see it beside the others, and specialisation in history studies tends to preclude such an attempt. Take just two examples. Revolutions, like tangos, require two parties. How important were the parts played by Charles I, James II, Louis XIV and Nicolas II? The first two might reasonably be said to have started revolutions by acting as agents provocateur, and the second two were just unable to stop them. The two Stuart kings suffered a mighty political disability – they could not negotiate. They were so spoiled and cloistered that they could not understand why they were offending their subjects. And they were insufferably self-righteous.

We are talking of men and women. Kings and queens in those days thought that they were more than human. They were wrong. They were desperately human, or, as Shakespeare said, in a different context, ‘desperately mortal’. Here is one example of the human shortcomings of James II as a Stuart king. He felt guilty about keeping mistresses. His brother, then of course the king, laughed at the ugliness of one, Catharine Sedley, and said that she had been ‘given to him by his priest for penance.’ Miss Sedley did not help. She wondered why James was so hot for her. ‘It cannot be my beauty, for he must see that I have none; and it cannot be my wit, for he has not enough to know that I have any.’ Nor did the Church help. When Bishop Burnet reproached the king on the conflict between his carnal appetites and his religious aspirations, his Majesty made a lunge for the ultimate indulgence: ‘If a man is religious, need he become a saint?’

Well, what about the other side, the revolutionaries? The two best known are the two most controversial, Robespierre and Lenin. They claimed to be, in differing degrees, the champions and the leaders of the poor, those at the bottom of what had been the feudal pyramid, some of whom were those people that the French called the sans-culottes, and the people that the Russian intelligentsia of a certain political caste called the proletariat. Neither Robespierre nor Lenin came from that type of people, or anything like it. Each came from a respectable family that we would refer to as middle class. Each became a lawyer and was about as far as you could get from the workers without becoming an entrepreneur or going into the aristocracy or the church. Championing what some call the masses, Robespierre and Lenin were involved in terrorist acts – implementing a policy of terror   which led to so many deaths that their conduct finally came to sicken those in whose name the terror was said to be inflicted. Was the problem of both Robespierre and Lenin that they were never really a member of the group that they claimed to lead and represent, and that they therefore felt the need to suppress humanity – their own and others – in order to keep face with the faithful? Did they really believe that when their personal rule was terminated the ‘masses’ would be ready, willing and able to govern the nation in their stead? Was it fashionable for les paysans to go to work in the fields with powdered hair and sky-blue frockcoat, or for labourers to turn up at the factory with tracts on Marxist dialectics in their overalls? Will we ever see a labourer or a rural worker as the President of France or Russia?

The second reason for a book like this at this time is that two books published in 2010 throw new light on the human misery caused by totalitarian regimes – and God, or Providence, is no respecter of Left or Right. If we put to one side the horrors of the English civil war, or the war crimes of Cromwell in Ireland, one extract from Carlyle’s The French Revolution will do to link the horrors of those times to our own: ‘One other thing, or rather two other things, we will still mention, and no more: the blond perukes; the Tannery at Meudon. Great talkers of these Perruques Blondes: O reader, they are made from the Heads of Guillotined Women; the locks of a Duchess, in this way, may come to cover the scalp of a cordwainer, her blonde German Frankism his black Gaelic poll, if it be bald. Or they may be work affectionately, as relics, rendering one suspect? Citizens use them, not without mockery; of a rather cannibal sort. …. Still deeper into one’s heart goes that Tannery at Meudon; … "There was a tannery of Human Skins; such of the Guillotine as seem worthy flaying: of which perfectly good wash-leather was made; for bleaches and other uses. The skin of the men, he remarks, was superior in toughness (consistance) and quality of shamoy; that of the women was good for almost nothing, being so soft in texture …." Alas, then, is man’s civilisation only a wrappage, through which the savage nature in him can still burst, infernal as ever? Nature still makes him: and has an Infernal in her as well as a Celestial.’

Another reason to look at these revolutions now is that the Middle East is the home of all major threats to world peace and a great part of the oil of the world. There is hardly one safe, stable regime that is responsible to and for all of its citizens. Two or three collapsed a few years ago in the space of weeks to general but far from universal rejoicing. It will take generations at least, and probably centuries, for these places to work themselves out. It took the English more than a thousand years to work out their system and in doing so, they had tamed their Church. The Americans and French both got off to false starts. The European examples give only limited light. We will consider some implications in the Epilogue.

There is something to be said for the proposition that the history of the French Revolution should only be written by someone who is French, has known oppression, and has known hunger. There is also something to be said for hearing what an outsider sees – it is often different from what the insider sees – but the other factors should not be discounted.

These revolutions did not respond to forces that came from Mars. They responded to wrongs committed in the face of those seeking to make the revolutions. Like most people who read this book, I have never been at risk, at least in my own country, of arbitrary arrest, torture, or imprisonment without trial. I have never feared dying of starvation. I have never been a working man dispatched to the army indefinitely to fight Napoleon because he served a dinner plate out of order on one occasion (as Prince Kuryagin did in War and Peace). I have never been a young woman readying for her wedding night and worrying if my Lord will claim his droit de seigneur. I have never seen members of my village lined up in a straight line on the edge of a ditch – that they had had to dig - so that as many as possible could be dispatched with one bullet by the Secret Police death squad because my government, as well as bankrupting the nation, wanted to murder millions of its inhabitants.

This gap in our experience needs to be remembered by those who are comfortable in their swank suburban fastness and who wish to pass judgment on what we may see as excesses in the final blow-ups in these revolutions. The oppression did not just come from the throne. It came from every step on the ladder – like in a bad army or navy, where it just gets passed down from rung to rung. The worst offenders in the eyes of many in England and Scotland were the bishops – they were agents of power, and not just church power; their sins against religion were almost secondary. It is right and natural that all agents of power are looked as being suspect, but all agents of power then were looked on with fear and, often as not, with loathing. The force of that fear and loathing will condition the reaction.

Finally, I wish to offer my tribute to the memory of a lady who published under the name of Miss C.V. Wedgwood, who was entitled at her death to be addressed as Dame (Cicely) Veronica Wedgwood. Miss Wedgwood consistently wrote history, including a history of the English Revolution, that was lucid, crisp, enlightening, dry and – yes – modest. Her writing is still so good to read. She said that Charles I ‘was of the intractable stuff of which martyrs are made’. Later she said that the king ‘acted with majestic indifference to common reality’. So did James II. If you add that James I and Charles II acted with majestic indifference to common morality, you have a picture of the tragedy that engulfed the House of Stuart, but which has led to a kind of parliamentary democracy that has been a light unto the nations. (As we will see, Louis XIV and Nicholas II were guilty only of indifference to reality.)

In her introduction to The King’s Peace, 1637-1641, Miss Wedgwood said: ‘The behaviour of men as individuals is more interesting to me than their behaviour as groups or classes….This book is not a defence of one side or the other, not an economic analysis, not a social study, it is an attempt to understand how these men felt and why, in their estimation, they acted as they did.’ In my view we degrade men and women when we refer to them solely as members of a class.

In her introduction to The King’s War, 1641-1647, Miss Wedgwood explained why she rejected as a model for her account of the English Civil War ‘a lucid simplification of the Civil War’s significant incidents dramatically lighted’. That seems to me to be a good model to try to follow in giving an account of these five revolutions.

CHAPTER 1

Terms of Engagement

Man is immortal; his salvation comes later; the state has no immortality; its salvation is now or never.’ (Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu.)

‘No man, who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself ….It follows, that to say kings are accountable to none but God is the overturning of all law and government.’ (John Milton, The Tenure of Kings. (1649))

If you had been talking to someone near Paris or London at about the time of the Battle of Hastings, and she had said to you that the earth was round, you may have thought that she was mad. But if you had told her that she was not allowed to say that because the middle ages had not yet finished, she would not have known what you were talking about. She would have thought that you were mad. The term ‘middle ages’ had not yet been invented. How could it have been? They had an idea then of the ancient world, but they did not know that we would apply the term ‘the modern world’ to a period coming after them. Nor do we know what people might call the period of time that may elapse after us.

More to our point, there never was any such thing as ‘the middle ages’. Those words form a label that we