Sunday, January 25, 2004

This looks like a worthwhile publication: The Electric Review, a self-described high Tory review of politics, art and literature. We approve most heartily. I wish I had found this earlier, in fact. Here is a very interesting 2003 article on why Oliver Cromwell is loved by some conservatives. The author writes: The truth, whatever one thinks of it, is that Cromwell’s reign was nothing but an inglorious little coup d’etat, making no serious constitutional points and leaving little in its wake other than many thousands of cripples, a legacy of economic damage and a salutory if expensive horror of civil war. His decision to kill King Charles was as much an act of desperation as it was one of pique. The tribunal in front of which the King was tried had no legitimate authority, having been cobbled together out of stray members of the Rump Parliament and assorted hangers-on. And even if it had been better chosen, as the Earl of Northumberland rightly argued at the time, how on earth could a sovereign commit treason, when treason was defined as action taken against the sovereign? Charles’s subsequent trial was nothing but an early essay in that sad convention, the political show-trial, and his execution simply an assassination played out with all the tawdry trappings of bogus legality. Or to put it another way, to approve of Cromwell’s role in the killing of Charles I is to approve, tout court, of the arbitrary irruption of military force into normal political life. Whatever else this might be, it is not exactly redolent of Conservative principles. Neither were Cromwell’s assaults on an established and popular religion, nor his limited and half-hearted gestures at social levelling.

Here, here.

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