Anointed Monarchs versus the veiled republic of oligarchs

 This weblog began some years ago with an article on the importance of anointing in the English Coronation service.  The precedent is Biblical – just as the kings of Israel of times yore were anointed with oil, so too our kings and queens.  Soon another coronation will be upon us with the crowning of King Charles III.  This great celebration inevitably following upon the sad loss and national bereavement of our longest-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, whose coronation service formed the subject of the very first article on “A Voice From the Shires”.

With the falling asleep of Queen Elizabeth II and the imminent anointing and crowning of King Charles, it seemed a fitting moment to revisit the topic of monarchy.  One can see from the public reaction to the falling asleep of the abdicated king of Greece that monarchy holds a deep meaning for peoples even after official abolition – however much on paper the correct processes were followed to create a republic.

Monarchy is the most human of governmental institutions.  It is based both upon a connection with the transcendent and personal relationship.  It is the retold and accepted story of modern history that we shifted from monarchy, rule of the one, to democracy, rule of the people.  This is considered within our current paradigm to be a story of benign progress.  What our paradigm of thought fails to consider is that all that Weber categorised as the irrational and inexplicable is actually the most human aspect of our civilisation.  Within that seemingly irrational realm is faith, loyalty to an anointed monarch, folk culture, high culture – all that is not procedural or bureaucratic.  Most significantly a bureaucratic society cannot reach to or aspire to the transcendent.  The Transcendent is that which is beyond analysis and categorisation.  It is understood rather through tradition and revelation, without being contrary to logic – it is super-logical or over and above the rational.

History is only going in one direction because the oligarchies of the globe ensure it.  There is no natural law that means a breaking down of tradition and “modernisation” of systems is inevitable or better.  Only because he thinks within a limited paradigm can Sir (knighted by a monarch) Keir Starmer describe the House of Lords as “indefensible”.  What if we had permitted the restoration of the monarchy in Yugoslavia or Afghanistan?  Perhaps much bloodshed might have been averted because of the inspirational and unifying charism of monarchy.

In trying to get around this conundrum, this loss of the higher by reducing to the procedural, the English utilitarians thought they had an answer.  The liberal English journalist Walter Bagehot who wrote in the Nineteenth century for what today remains the voice of liberalism, the Economist newspaper, suggested the concept of the “veiled republic”.  He divided government into its efficient and dignified functions.  The efficient side of the constitution was the functional and bureaucratic part, which actually ran the country.  On the other side was the dignified part of the constitution, which included the monarchy, the ceremony, the ritual.  From his secular liberal perspective the dignified also had a function – to veil the English republic and to instil affection in British citizens for the apparent kingdom to which they felt they belonged.  While Bagehot believed utilitarianism worked, he acknowledged that it did not inspire or create affection in men’s hearts.

What though if we step outside the secular liberal paradigm and instead ask the question what if the coronation as a sacrament were a true sacrament?  And what if, instead of adopting a Protestant reductionism, we recognised the existence of an anointed monarch as an iconic participation in the divine rather than an idolatrous distraction from God?  Everything if perceived incorrectly can become an idol, but everything when viewed correctly points to God.

We would then be able to understand the power of Royalty as something real, not a deceptive veil pulled across the drab reality.  Ever since the Enlightenment the Western mind has been trained to imagine that there is something behind the tradition, something base and mechanical or an abuse of power.  We have become incapable of recognising that many parts of life are not a base trick, but instead point to a higher reality, something better, something even more true and something even more beautiful.

Of course the man who is crowned is a mere fallen mortal, but he participates through his holy and sacramental anointing in something higher than himself.  He is a bridge to the eternal.  This is why from the British monarch to the Emperors of the Byzantine Empire, there was something sacred about monarchy.  Before too in pagan times the Roman Emperor was actually recognised as a deity.  Christian faith put this right, placing the monarch in an anointed role, but no longer divine himself.

This is the reason for the Royal “we” as the monarch refers both to himself and the higher entity to which he belongs not from merit but through a sacrament of anointing.

From Weber to Bagehot an unremitting message is enforced.  Reality is reduced to the processes, the bureaucracy, but on the other side, everything that seems to participate in the good, the true and the beautiful is irrational and merely a veil across the base facts.

This though is not convincing if we step outside of the secular-liberal paradigm.  Anointed monarchy is personal not a rigid system.  Monarchy is a living and breathing institution, based not on abstract rules and processes, but personal relationship and history.  The Monarch is the father of the people, the government is based upon bloodline and the realm thereby is a family.

Such a system raises alarm bells for the modern secularist.  Comes to mind the arbitrary rule of a James II or Ivan Grozny.  And yet historians now seriously question the Whig account of James Stuart’s rule.  Religious toleration and resistance to a narrow-minded and Protestant oligarchy is perhaps a more accurate understanding.  Even in Russia there are moves afoot to rehabilitate Ivan the Terrible’s memory and some even call for his canonisation.  Unlike Henry VIII who stripped religion bare (to whom he is often compared) he was of real significance in achieving Moscow’s status as the Third Rome after the fall of Constantinople.

We must remember as the cliché goes, the victors write the history.  And those victors of the “Glorious Revolution” in England could have just as easily been the corrupt oligarchs of the Seventeenth Century, just as today traditional institutions are attacked by the men of Davos.

Two of the most arbitrary rulers were of course the first two Tudor kings, who attacked commonweal and Church.  While they were anointed and crowned correctly, Henry Tudor was an usurper and not only did he exhibit miserliness, but his line under his son and Thomas Cromwell would bring forward a modern and more bureaucratic system eliminating the age of chivalry last symbolised by Richard III and his gallant and brave falling at Bosworth.

The anointing might have taken place, but it was based upon lies and thereby we see the danger of illegitimate power.  Monarchy works because the fallen man participates in the meaning of his anointing and is able thereby to transcend his compromised nature.  He then rules as a father of his nation, just as Nicholas II was determined to do, even abdicating to protect his subjects and finally achieving martyrdom at the hands of the Bolsheviks.

And France too is evidence of what the removal of a Christian Monarch can unleash.  The horror of the guillotine and the cruel and inhuman suppression of the Royalist-peasant uprising in the Vendee are the result of revolution in the name of progress and reason.  The successful revolutionaries, it must be remembered, first attacked faith and even paraded a statue of the female personification of Reason in a horrible parody of the Mother of God.

From the Vendee to the modern Greek public there is a supra-rational recognition of a truth of the link between them and a ruler anointed through Christian ritual as part of a family that has a right to rule.  And very powerfully was this demonstrated by the many who filed past the coffin of the late Queen Elizabeth, lying in state in Westminster Hall.  This was of course inexplicable to the new elites in this country who are cosmopolitan people of nowhere.

Faith in the transcendental God is vital to good monarchy.  To go further faith in an Incarnate God facilitates and promotes true and good Monarchy  There is always the risk of a fallen monarch who no longer fulfils his telos.  The alternative though is a compromise with man’s fallenness – a bureaucratic system that always plans for the worst in human nature.  It protects us, but prevents us reaching the heights.  It no longer allows for aspiring to virtue, only mediocrity.

Fear of arbitrary government has led to a procedural and bureaucratic existence where Reason remains an idol hostile to loyalty, faith and a Christian teleology for the people.  Or perhaps a certain narrative of the dangers of arbitrary personal rule has been used and exploited for a power grab by the oligarchs from whom monarchs were supposed to protect their subjects.

PROGRESS - THE MODERN IDOLATRY

What is very interesting about the typical progressive is their dismissal of religious faith based upon personal revelation and inherited tradition as blind. The ideology of the progressive does not stand up to the sort of scrutiny to which traditional Christianity is continually subjected.  By that ideology I mean the unquestioned premise that the direction of history is towards a positive state and that the new is good by dint of being new.

Such an ideology can be traced back to the Victorian Positivists and further back to the Whiggery of Eighteenth Century England.  The Whigs won the battle of history and wrote history as though it had a providential direction towards the Hanoverian state.  This was taken up as a sort of pseudo-science and spawned the social Darwinism of Spencer, the Dialectical Materialism of Marx and Engels and the liberal assumption that society will become ever-more liberal and ever-more free.  The irony is that such philosophies of blind faith in blind progress have led to persecution, eugenics, concentration camps, class war, the GUlag and the destruction of freedom under the heel of the jack boot of the modern state.

It is to these dangerous roots that the modern Progressive consciously or unconsciously receives the succour for his ideology.  And the key point is that while religious faith is rejected as superstitious and as contradicted by empirical evidence, the Progressive himself places a blind faith in an ever-improving society as state power, censorship and bureaucracy increase, despite the overwhelming lesson of history that from Oliver Cromwell, through to Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler, the radical rejection of inherited society in favour of state-enforced progress has led to misery for countless millions.  From the French Terror to the millions dead in Ukraine from the collectivisation of farms, this blind and superstitious faith in progress has led to misery.

At root is the heresy often criticised by the late Seraphim Rose, the American convert from atheism to Eastern Orthodox Christianity - the heresy of Chiliasm.  That heresy was the belief that God's Kingdom could be created on earth, by political action.  Like so many heresies it moves away from orthodoxy by only the slightest degree, yet the consequences of the original error increase exponentially, so the last state is far worse than the first.  The second commandment of loving one's neighbour is distorted to create an ultimate solution for all our neighbours even at the expense of love of God.  The result has always been and always will be misery.  Utopia on this earth is impossible and to achieve it shows a lack of genuine faith and instead a dangerous blind faith in the inevitability of progress resulting from political action.

The answer to this serious error in Western thinking is to view society as being better or worse depending upon how much it participates in Truth.  This then removes the philosophical error of assuming history is going in one direction.  Further, rejecting this premise makes us aware of the danger of decline and decadence, and helps us to look for ways to maintain and achieve human flourishing through inherited wisdom.

Man lives a more flourishing life the closer he conforms to Truth, not as a result of being more modern or forward thinking.  This living life in a full and flourishing way can appear reactionary or old-fashioned - for example living life in the vocation of a husband and father or housewife and mother.  It can also be progressive, but not for the sake of being progressive.  William Wilberforce did not fight slavery through an appeal to abstract theory or the demands of progress; he fought and defeated slavery by an appeal to the internal and inherited traditions of Western civilisation - Christian values.  One might say Judaeo-Christian values when one thinks of the emphasis in the Old Testament on God freeing His people from slavery to a human master in the form of Pharaoh.

It is quite simply shallow to place one's faith in an ill-defined concept of progress.  We need to ask rather, does this social or political reform bring us closer to or further from the Truth?  An idea of progress for the sake of progress cannot help here.  We cannot know whether a change is for good or bad unless we turn to inherited tradition and personal faith (if these two work against each other something is very wrong with a civilisation and culture).

To give a specific example, there is a lot now said about the role of the male gender in a society.  The aggressive assaults upon our cultural understanding of what it is to be a male role model by the feminist ideologues has confused many.  They have conflated men when they fail, are violent, drunk or purposeless with the Gentleman.  The Gentleman is close to the Truth, tracing his antecedents in the idea of the Christian Knight, that civilised savage, courteous and true, yet strong and brave. To be fully-developed as a man is to look back to that inherited wisdom, which taught men to use their superior physical strength to defend the weak.  To avoid degenerating into a brute men should not be emasculated, but fulfil their potential as Gentlemen.  Here then we see that looking back enables us to reach closer to the Truth, as opposed to the confused situation resulting from progressive ideologies such as feminism.  When men behave as gentlemen it will be far more difficult for the Harvey Weinsteins of this world to misbehave - their behaviour would reveal them as cads because of the stark contrast with a social norm of chivalry. Our current progressive and socially-liberal milieu allowed cads and scoundrels to pass unnoticed for many years.

Progress as an idea is a false and shallow chimera.  It is superstition and nothingness.  It is far more irrational than faith placed in a personal God, discovered in personal revelation through the institution and inherited traditions of the Church. The progressive really should stop projecting their own flimsiness in their faith upon those who follow a deep, prescriptive and traditional religion.  The empirical evidence is clear, a belief in Utopia rather than Heaven has caused the greatest levels of misery in history, while those social reforms that have endured - equality under the law, the abolition of slavery, political freedom all rest upon an ancient and inherited notion of each man being made in the image of God.

A Tale of Two Revolutions

In January 1649 the House of Commons’ High Court of Justice convicted the nation’s King, Charles I of High Treason and sentenced him to death.  Around forty years later Charles’ son, James II was chased out of Britain and replaced by a new King, Willliam of Orange.  These two different revolutions speak volumes about what works in terms of political reform and what makes matters worse.

The excesses of Charles I were to be supplanted by the far-worse sanctimonious-oppression that was the Commonwealth.  A judgemental, puritanical view had been taken of the real world and found it wanting.  Its solution was to tear down institutions and attempt to replace them.  The experiment did not work because it failed to follow the grain of human nature and relied on ideology.

This nation’s second revolution four decades later was pragmatic and worked with the grain of human nature.  It maintained the institutions of state, but reformed them and rearranged them to be more in balance with each other.  In the first revolution of Oliver Cromwell, Parliament and the New Model Army, Monarchy and House of Lords were abolished.  Anglicans and Baptists persecuted.  Folk traditions were stamped out.  Rather than recognise that all human institutions are maintained by flawed humans, the Roundheads seemed to believe abolition of institutions would mean human flaws could be overcome.

Parliament had learnt the second time around in 1688 that the flaws lay with the men who held these institutions on trust, not the institutions themselves.  They therefore kept the monarchy but constrained the power of the individual who filled the office. 

The argument of this blog is that the institutions themselves are natural, right and indeed Providential.  The blogger argues further that all institutions of Western, Christian Europe that are prescriptive and longstanding are legitimate in their own right.  Monarchy, Parliament, Church, nation and family are gifts handed down to us.  If we attempt to straighten out Kant’s crooked timber of humanity by stripping away these institutions we will cause that timber to splinter and shatter.  Because of the crookedness of the timber the answer is piecemeal not radical reform.  That is the lesson of our nation’s two revolutions.

This principle can be applied to the local and the domestic too.  Many families have their problems undoubtedly, but the family itself is a valuable gift to be treasured.  It is completely mad to say that because some individuals are bad and ruin family life that this means family life is itself bad.  No, it is our own flawed nature that can prevent us from living family life to the full.

Because some men are bad husbands to their wives or are unfaithful, it does not follow that the tradition of Man and Wife should be abolished, as some radical feminists might argue.  The problems are specific to the individuals and do not lie in the institution of family itself.

The answer from government and law should be to protect the wife from being disadvantaged, but not to downgrade marriage itself.  The specific mischief should be addressed not the institution attacked.  In the same way our longstanding institutions such as the Monarchy should be valued not abolished.  Our current constitutional set up means no individual could now abuse the office for the purposes of arbitrary government as James II did.

This is the lesson of our history:  When we attempted to abolish the institutions in an attempt to create a utopia we were confronted with a dystopia, where the institutions that bind us together were no longer there to hold our society together.  When we instead reformed specific parts of the mechanism of government in the Glorious Revolution we created a lasting settlement centred on the continuing institutions of constitutional monarchy and the established church.  That is the tale of our two revolutions and it is unfortunate that the French copied and took to its extreme of terror our first revolution rather than our second revolution. 

  

Nostalgia is good - Progressives might not like it, but there was a lost golden age

The current political class is dominated by the ethics of vanity identified by Jesse Norman MP in his book on Edmund Burke MP as liberal individualism.  This liberal individualism permeates the thinking of the metropolitan class that has the time and money to govern the rest of us.  It is the nadir of a gradual decline in Western thinking that puts the material before the spiritual, the modern and novel before tradition, the atomised individual before society and science before religion.

On the Left we see this reductionist outlook represented in its disparaging of institutions that make up the fabric of our society, sneering at valuable institutions from monarchy to marriage.  If we are all individuals the Left says we should not be oppressed by conjugal vows or subject to a Queen.

Meanwhile the Right has forgotten its duty to conserve our institutions and has turned a legitimate institution, the market, into an idol. It regards market economics rather than values and norms of behaviour as explaining human actions.  Patriotism and faith are replaced by rational choice theory.

Things really seemed to go wrong after the wonderful scientific discoveries of men of faith such as Isaac Newton.  This great deepening of our understanding of the material world, which began as a wonder at Creation was turned into idolatry of science, where science was claimed as the explanation of all things and our institutions and traditions were only seen as valuable if they could be justified by scientific tests.

Not only was this so-called Enlightenment anti-religious it was also in a sense anti- human.  The one man who did most to pervert our new scientific understanding was that serpent in the garden of philosophy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  At university the blogger undertook a whole module on this leading thinker of the Enlightenment and discovered a misanthrope.  He seemed to regard human interaction as leading to a destructive amour propre.  For him the human institutions that bind generations together with their accumulated wisdom were forces of oppression.  He therefore detested the society Man had built up in the light of religious faith. 

The French revolution with its belief that Rationalism independent of tradition could explain everything followed, with Rousseau as its hero.  Since then this rationalist and materialistic outlook has continued to attack tradition and faith.  It has chipped away at our social bonds, questioned the norms of behaviour that make living together possible and indeed life enhancing.

Much is attributed to the Enlightenment from individual freedom to parliamentary democracy.  England gives the lie to this.  Much of what people give the Enlightenment credit for was already underway in these Islands before Rousseau and the others put pen to paper.  Religious pluralism came about following the new settlement of the Glorious Revolution (one hundred years before France committed regicide), but this was only implementing ideas that were gradually developing following the Restoration in 1660.  Charles II’s reign might have seen reversals in the journey towards religious pluralism, but a compromise was being worked out.  It was finally achieved with the accession of William III, but not by reverting to the narrow Puritanism of Cromwell and the Regicides.

A middle of the road solution was reached without reference to abstract theory.  In good Anglo-Saxon fashion a compromise was cobbled together that allowed people to worship God true to their own interpretation of the Bible, Parliament was given freedom from Royal Prerogative and the Whigs therefore got what they wanted.  It was a compromise that worked however because it realised men live by tradition and affections not rationalist theory.  So the settlement preserved the monarchy and indeed the pageantry of monarchy.  It preserved the House of Lords and it continued with the Church of England as an established church – so the Tory affection for tradition was acknowledged too.  It recognised that while we must be free we are also social creatures who need institutions and traditions.

 Over the Channel, when abstract principles were followed rather than the lessons from history, the Terror and the guillotine resulted.  That is not to say that only the French make such a mistake.   While atheism and materialism took power by force in 1789, in the United Kingdom its growing strength has been more insidious and by stealth.  “Clever” people no longer respect our traditions.  They act as though our institutions survive by some strange accident, some oversight when we were embarked on dismantling the structure of oppression while on the road to liberty.  What they do not realise is that true liberty depends on these institutions rather than the false freedom of liberal individualism which is to be lonely and weighed down by the material world.

So people are right when they look back nostalgically to better times, because as these abstract, rationalist ideas have gradually permeated our nation more and more we are constantly losing what is life enriching. 

As we approach Christmas however the whole country returns home, casting off abstract rationalism.  Family, tradition and the Christ Child are seen again for how central they really are to our lives.  It is a return to the Merry England of carolling and wassailing, Christmas pudding (banned by the Puritans), Father Christmas, hunting (banned by New Labour), hawking and feasting.

So our resistance to the liberal individualists with their economic theories and their scientific explanations of religion begins when we wish each other “Merry Christmas”.  Certainly if we start to wish each other “happy holidays” instead, we have given up the fight. 

No separation of powers please, we're British!

This blog will now make a bold and iconoclastic claim, which is that Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron Montesquieu, was wrong.  This Anglophile French aristocrat admiringly described our constitution as being based upon the principle of separation of powers (a concept that he defined).  I want to argue that it is not based on this principle; it is rather based upon parliamentary sovereignty and government by the Queen in Parliament.

The theory of separation of powers is that the system of government works more justly and efficaciously if the three branches are distinct institutions.  These three branches are the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.  In the United States, which relied on Montesquieu’s theory for its constitution, this principle is most clearly manifested.  In the U. S. the executive is a distinct office: the presidency.  The legislature is also distinct as the two houses of Congress and then the judiciary separate again, with the highest court being the Supreme Court.  If you are member of one you cannot be members of the other branches.

In the United Kingdom, however, our system is very different.  The ministers of the Queen, who exercise executive power of the Royal Prerogative are members of the legislature.  Recently, in adherence to Montesquieu’s theory, the Law Lords, our most senior judges were taken out of Parliament and a new American-style Supreme Court was created.

I believe that this reform to our judicial system was a mistake, because our system does not work as Montesquieu thought and we do not have the same system as America.  Rather than the Law Lords being an anomaly, the Supreme Court is now the anomaly in our constitution.  It brings with it new problems to which our constitution is not suited, such as activist judges who make the law.  This risks opening a can of worms as to whether our judges should be elected if they are making law.  That brings with it the issue of party politics creeping into justice.

The whole principle of our system of government depends on the unity of two institutions -–Monarchy (the executive and fount of justice) and Parliament (the legislature).  When these two institutions are in synthesis our system is stable.  Civil strife, whether between De Montfort and Henry III or Charles I and Oliver Cromwell occurs when these two ancient institutions are out of kilter.

Since William of Orange, stability has reigned and monarchy and parliament have been synthesised.  Thus while the Queen’s bishops, ministers and until very recently, judges sit in Parliament, the Royal Prerogative is exercised by ministers who are elected Members of Parliament.  And this system works, not because some founding fathers sat down and wrote out a constitution based on all their learning, but it works through organic evolution.

We have a system where ministers of the Crown are not disconnected from the man-on the-street and the local community.  This is because, even the Prime Minister still has constituency matters to attend to as an MP.  Ministers remain grounded and rooted in the country because they are not only appointed by the Queen (through the Prime Minister’s exercise of the Royal Prerogative), but are also elected by a local constituency.

For those overly squeamish about the Law Lords sitting in the upper house of Parliament, it should be remembered that by convention they did not vote on legislation, but their expertise was there for the upper house to call upon as it revised legislation.

Indeed convention is all-important in our unwritten constitution.  In law the Queen has the power to exercise her prerogative, by convention it is exercised by her first minister, who is an MP.

This Parliamentary system of constitutional monarchy works because it is flexible.  There is not the gridlock between executive and legislature found in the American system.  The trouble is that too many of our politicians remember vaguely from their PPE degrees that separation of powers was a Good Thing and therefore, ignoring the evidence of their eyes that our organic system works, they cannot resist tinkering.  That is why we have a downgraded Lord Chancellor and have expelled the Law Lords from Parliament. And we are worse off for it.

Reverting to the Whigs' History?

A Reversion to the Whig Historians and their View of Progress?

Michael Gove’s determination to restore history as the genuine teaching of our island story should be applauded.   In the teeth of resistance from left wing teachers who see controlling history as a means of preaching a politically correct outlook, he is fighting to ensure our next generation learns the narrative history that helps us understand who we are and invigorates patriotism.

The ideologues who resist this seem to think that the next generation will be inspired to virtue by having the guilt piled on about who they are.  Generations have been taught a distorted view of this nation as being an oppressive and imperialist force in the world.  To give the benefit of the doubt to the education establishment perhaps they believe that this will lead to future generations of virtuous citizens.  More likely it will lead to an embittered nation that sees itself as guilty without any values to live up to.

Far better to teach the truth – that Britain has been, for the most part, a force for good in the world.  When the facts, rather than politically correct interpretation, are taught then that conclusion will be difficult to resist.  Great Britain abolished slavery and the Royal Navy policed the seas to impose a ban on slave trading.  Great Britain defeated Nazism and the Kaiser, also saving Europe from Napoleon’s attempt to create one polity for the whole continent.

When we are taught what we have done in the world for good, this will act as an inspiration to true patriotism and as an inspiration to live up to those values.  It does not mean distorting the truth to give an overly rosy picture of our nation’s history, in the mould of some despotic regime.  Rather, it means teaching what actually happened rather than interpreting facts through the prism of a left-wing, semi-Marxist outlook that sees history as being the struggle for power between the oppressor and the oppressed.  Teach history as a narrative and that interpretation crumbles away.  This is why the Left wing ideologues fear Gove’s reforms for the teaching of history so much.

It is naïve though, to assume that even with the restoration of teaching history as a narrative all interpretation can be avoided.  The great temptation will be to adopt a Whiggish view of the inevitability of progress.  That would be a mistake and just as damaging as the Left Wing view of history now predominant in our nation’s schools.

If the history of our nation teaches us anything at all, it is that progress is not inevitable and history can take wrong turns and go down cul-de-sacs.  The Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell, when two great institutions, the Monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished is the most glaring example of this.  This was not progress, as demonstrated by the fact that both those institutions are still with us in the Twenty-First Century and certainly the former is held in higher respect by the public than the House of Commons of which Oliver Cromwell MP was a member.

Further the possibility of decline is demonstrated all around us:  Great Britain now is threatened with dissolution thanks to the mischief of Alex Salmond.  Its world stature has declined, its empire gone and its economy is smaller.  Mass immigration has taken its toll, diluting our common values and leading to the corrosive relativism of multiculturalism that only now the political class is waking up to.  Politicians are now more removed from the public than ever before, moving in a separate world, with different values and ideas from the people who vote them into power.  Progress is by no means inevitable and there is always a high risk of decline.

No, if history teaches us anything at all it is that when we looked back we took our greatest leaps forward.  The introduction of trial by jury under Henry II came from a looking back to Anglo-Saxon twelve thanes of the Wapentake.  The same king’s development of common law relied on case law, which looks to precedent, reinterpreting it for each new situation.  The Magna Carta was a reassertion of existing liberties and rights.  Parliament itself looked back to Anglo Saxon times.  Simon DeMontfort did not think he was innovating when he fought Parliament’s cause against Henry III, rather he thought he was fighting for ancient rights and privileges. 

It is worth mentioning though that unlike common law, dominated by precedent, only Parliament violates this principle of looking back because of its power to pass statutes, laws that can be entirely new and overrule common law.  Precedent and conventions dominate our constitution and our Parliamentarians would do well to respect precedent, rather than fall into the temptation of the novel and innovative.  With the power to pass Acts of Parliament it can be seen why the political class falls into this temptation.

Our rights and liberties rely on the past for their legitimacy.  We do not have to call on the flimsiness of abstract theory, with all the innate dangers that involves.  We have precedent and we can rely on it because as a nation we have on the whole avoided disruptive revolutions. 

With a legal system that relies on precedent and an island story that demonstrates that all our greatest moves forward were through looking back,  it seems that the Whiggish view of history, with its emphasis on the inevitability of progress will not stand up to the facts.  Rather, perhaps by restoring a narrative view of history we will see the development of a Tory view of history that emphasises change only working in the context of respect for the past.  Forgetting the past can lead the nation into error.

If history teaches us anything at all it is that we do best to learn from the past and not forget it.  That is why the teaching of history is so important.