Politics of the United Kingdom

"We may be proud that England is the ancient country of Parliaments. With scarcely any intervening period, Parliaments have met constantly for 600 years, and there was something of a Parliament before the Conquest. England is the mother of Parliaments."

"Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament."

"The power of discretionary disqualification by one law of Parliament, and the necessity of paying every debt of the Civil List by another law of Parliament, if suffered to pass unnoticed, must establish such a fund of rewards and terrors as will make Parliament the best appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was invented by the wit of man."

"The unique continuity of the British parliamentary system has provided an unparalleled stage for political theatre over the past two hundred years. During the two centuries which separate the age of William Pitt from the age of Gordon Brown the conduct of politics has been transformed almost beyond recognition. The electorate has grown from a few thousand well-born men to include the entire adult population - forty-five million men and women at the last election. Debate that was once conducted in elaborately rhetorical speeches, often lasting several hours, in the chamber of the House of Commons is now concentrated into thirty-second soundbites on television, replayed infinitely on the internet. Governments come and go, parties rise and decline, the issues and ideologies which form the content of political controversy change over time - liberty or order; the prerogatives of the Crown or the House of Lords; tariffs or free trade; capitalism or socialism (or the particular balance between the two); above all, peace or war and the morality and cost of foreign interventions, whether in colonial America, continental Europe or the Middle East. Yet through all these changes of style and substance, the rivalry of ambitious individuals competing for the highest offices - the same offices, for the most part - has remained a constant, and the conduct of politicians merely adapts to different contexts. There is in every age a small number of dominating personalities who embody the contending philosophies of the moment; the clashing egos and human strengths and weaknesses of these key individuals shape the arguments and determine the historical outcome. These are the leaders who define their age."

"I may confess, however, that I do not feel quite like a fish out of water in a legislative assembly where English is spoken. I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my father's house to believe in democracy. "Trust the people." That was his message. I used to see him cheered at meetings and in the streets by crowds of workingmen way back in those aristocratic Victorian days when as Disraeli said "the world was for the few, and for the very few." Therefore I have been in full harmony all my life with the tides which have flowed on both sides of the Atlantic against privilege and monopoly and I have steered confidently towards the Gettysburg ideal of government of the people, by the people, for the people."

"I have only two or three sentences to add. They will convey to the House my deep gratitude to this House of Commons, which has proved itself the strongest foundation for waging war that has ever been seen in the whole of our long history. We have all of us made our mistakes, but the strength of the Parliamentary institution has been shown to enable it at the same moment to preserve all the title-deeds of democracy while waging war in the most stern and protracted form. I wish to give my hearty thanks to men of all Parties, to everyone in every part of the House where they sit, for the way in which the liveliness of Parliamentary institutions has been maintained under the fire of the enemy, and for the way in which we have been able to persevere-and we could have persevered much longer if need had been-till all the objectives which we set before us for the procuring of the unlimited and unconditional surrender of the enemy had been achieved. I recollect well at the end of the last war, more than a quarter of a century ago, that the House, when it heard the long list of the surrender terms, the armistice terms, which had been imposed upon the Germans, did not feel inclined for debate or business, but desired to offer thanks to Almighty God, to the Great Power which seems to shape and design the fortunes of nations and the destiny of man; and I therefore beg, Sir, with your permission to move: That this House do now attend at the Church of St. Margaret, Westminster, to give humble and reverent thanks to Almighty God for our deliverance from the threat of German domination."

"Hogwarts gone wrong."

"The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty means neither more nor less than this, namely, that Parliament thus defined has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament."

"The true hero of the ‘long’ revolution was neither William nor the Whigs; it was the institution of Parliament itself. Throughout the 17th century, Parliament never quite lost its nerve – except perhaps under Cromwell. Sitting at Westminster, it was the unchallenged forum of the nation. Through each crisis, it gave monarchy every chance to save itself. Its membership may have been undemocratic, but its dross of bishops and aristocrats was leavened by new men and new interests. Neither mobs in the street nor rebellions in the provinces ever seized the initiative. The British people were not revolutionized. The events of 1688 did not widen the parliamentary franchise or extend constituency representation. But they were a step in the long road to democracy. As such, they were, as Cromwell would have said, a cruel necessity."

"Agnes Moorhouse: Would you want to spend your life packed in with 600 other desperate, squawking, smelly creatures, unable to breath fresh air, unable to move, unable to stretch, unable to think?"

"Sir Humphrey: Certainly not, that's why I never stood for Parliament."

"Congress] is not the British Parliament, and I hope it never will become the British Parliament... Are we going to bring the president in here and have a question period like the prime minister has in Great Britain?"

"When trade is at stake, it is your last entrenchment; you must defend it, or perish...Sir, Spain knows the consequence of a war in America; whoever gains, it must prove fatal to her...is this any longer a nation? Is this any longer an English Parliament, if with more ships in your harbours than in all the navies of Europe; with above two millions of people in your American colonies, you will bear to hear of the expediency of receiving from Spain an insecure, unsatisfactory, dishonourable Convention?"

"There are many things a parliament cannot do. It cannot make itself executive, nor dispose of offices which belong to the crown. It cannot take any man's property, even that of the meanest cottager, as in the case of enclosures, without his being heard."

"The British people know that, given strong leadership, time and a little bit of hope, the forces of good ultimately rally and triumph over evil. Here among you is the cradle of self-government, the Mother of Parliaments. Here is the enduring greatness of the British contribution to mankind, the great civilized ideas: individual liberty, representative government, and the rule of law under God."

"The House of Commons is called the Lower House, in twenty Acts of Parliament; but what are twenty Acts of Parliament amongst Friends?"

"The objection to judicial interference in politics is that it undermines the democratic legitimacy of public decision making. The problem that we have here is that the government itself has sought to undermine the democratic legitimacy of public decision making by dispensing with a central feature of our constitution, namely that ministers are answerable to parliament. What the Supreme Court has done is to invent a brand new rule, that is undoubtedly controversial, a brand new constitutional rule, the effect of which is to reinstate parliament at the heart of the decision-making process. And that is not undermining democracy at all, nor is it a coup, it is simply replacing what ought to have happened by convention, by law, in circumstances where the government has tried to kick away the conventions."

"The King governs by Law. Let us look back to the evils we had, in order to prevent more. There was loan, and ship-money, and extremes begat extremes. The House would then give no money. Let the King rely upon the Parliament; we have settled the Crown and the Government. 'Tis strange that we have sat so many years, and given so much money, and are still called upon for Supply. The Lords may give Supply with their own money, but we give the peoples; we are their proxies. The King takes his measures by the Parliament, and he doubts not but that all the Commons will supply for the Government; but giving at this rate that we have done, we shall be "a branch of the revenue." They will "anticipate" us too. But, let the officers say what they will, we will not make these mismanagements the King's error. 'Tis better it should fall upon us than the King. We give public money, and must see that it goes to public use. Tell your money, fix it to public ends, and take order against occasions of this nature for the future. We cannot live at the expence of Spain, that has the Indies; or France, who has so many millions of revenue. Let us look to our Government, Fleet, and Trade. 'Tis the advice that the oldest Parliament-man among you can give you; and so, God bless you!"

"This Court is a standing Court, and the law doth adjourn it from time to time: but a Parliament is a new Court, they appear, and are always summoned by new writs."

"The Crown used to call a Parliament annually, but there was not an annual election. These words, annuo parliamento, relate to the time of their meeting, and not their election."

"To one who marvelled what should be the reason that Acts and Statutes are continually made at every Parliament, without intermission, and without end, a wise man made a good and short answer, both which are well composed in verse: "Quseritur, ut crescunt tot magna volumina legis? In promptu causa est, crescit in orbe dolus.""

"There is no providence or wisdom of man, nor of any council of men that can foresee and provide for all events and variety of cases, that will or may arise upon the making of a new law."

"The causes of the multiplicity of the English laws are, the extent of the country which they govern; the commerce and refinement of its inhabitants; but above all, the liberty and property of the subject."

"Lex Parliamenti is to be regarded as the law of the realm; but, supposing it to be a particular law, yet if a question arise determinable in the King's Bench, the King's Bench ought to determine it.— Bridgman, C.J., Binion v. Evelin (1662), Dyer, 60; Carth. 137; 1 Show. 99."

"If a man be committed by Parliament, and the Parliament is prorogued, the King's Bench will grant a habeas corpus. The common law then does not take notice of any such law of Parliament to determine inheritance originally. If there is any such, it ought either to be by act of Parliament, and there is no such act; or it ought to be by custom, and no more is there any such custom."

"This Court (Lords House of Parliament), which ought to be an example to all other Courts, will ever hold in the highest reverence the indulgent character of British justice."

"We cannot hear the integrity and wisdom of Parliament questioned in this Court."

"The House of Commons are a great branch of the Constitution, and are chose by ourselves, and are our trustees; and it cannot be supposed, nor ought to be presumed, that they will exceed their bounds, or do anything amiss . . . this is a very foreign supposition, and what ought not to be said by any Englishman."

"Every facility ought undoubtedly to be given to all persons applying to either House of Parliament or to any Court of Justice for the redress of any alleged grievance."

"The House of Commons are the representatives of the people."

"It would look very strange, when the Commons of England are so fond of their right of sending representatives to Parliament, that it should be in the power of a sheriff, or other officer, to deprive them of that right, and yet that they should have no remedy; it is a thing to be admired at by all mankind."

"I disclaim the power of legislation which is asserted to exist in this Court, and I say that, if such a right is to be created, it must be created by the Legislature properly so called."

"It is the province of the statesman and not the lawyer to discuss, and of the legislature to determine, what is the best for the public good, and to provide for it by proper enactments. It is the province of the Judge to expound the law only—the written from the statute, the unwritten or common law from the decisions of our predecessors and of our existing Courts—from the text-writers of acknowledged authority, and upon the principles to be clearly deduced from them by sound reason and just inference—not to speculate upon what is the best, in his opinion, for the advantage of the community."

"If the legislature have not gone far enough, it is for them, not for us, to remedy the defect."

"It is for the legislature to alter the law if Parliament in its wisdom thinks an alteration desirable."

"To abolish a well-established rule of law because it is a bad rule, is the business of the legislature."

"What the legislature has not expressly enacted, the Judges ought not to presume that it intended."

"The decisions of the House of Lords are binding on me and upon all the Courts except itself."

"By the Constitution of this United Kingdom, the House of Lords is the Court of Appeal in the last resort, and its decisions are authoritative and conclusive declarations of the existing state of the law, and are binding upon itself when sitting judicially, as much as upon all inferior tribunals. The observations made by members of the House, whether law members or lay members, beyond the ratio decidendi which is propounded and acted upon in giving judgment, although they may be entitled to respect, are only to be followed in as far as they may be considered agreeable to sound reason and to prior authorities. But the doctrine on which the judgment of the House is founded must be universally taken for law, and can only be altered by Act of Parliament. So it is, even where the House gives judgment in conformity to its rule of procedure, that where there is an equality of votes, semper presumitur pro negante."

"The English Civil War occupies a strange niche in contemporary memory. To all official appearances, no episode of the country’s modern past is so parenthetical. Leaving no reputable trace in common traditions or public institutions, it looks in established retrospect like a blackout in the growth of the collective psyche. Our only republic remains under ban, a historical freak. Rosebery could raise a statue to Cromwell outside Parliament: eighty years later, Benn could not even get him onto a postage stamp, at a time when Rosa Luxemburg adorned ordinary West German mail. Such treatment, it might be argued, is not without all justice. For in a comparative perspective, did not the English Civil War – however traumatic at the time – prove in the end to be the least significant of the political upheavals that accompanied the birth of the leading nation-states of the capitalist world? Set beside the Dutch Revolt, America’s War for Independence, the French Revolution, Italy’s Risorgimento, the unification of Germany, let alone the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the overthrow of the English monarchy seems of a different order: not a modern starting point of institutional development, more an exotic intermission. If this is so, however, there remains a paradox. For what would be the most barren convulsion has produced the most fertile literature. The volume of modern writing on the French Revolution – the only possible rival – is larger than on the English. But intellectually it is thinner."

"A born soldier of humble origins, Cromwell's military record in the Civil Wars was second to none. His 'reign' as Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658 has marked him for later generations as either a visionary political figure or a loathsome tyrant, and both cases are equally arguable; his religious bigotry, and the bitter fruit it bore in Ireland, are sadly beyond dispute. He remains secure in his reputation as one of the most extraordnary Englishmen who ever lived."

"The issues raised in the historic conflict between Charles I, resting his claim to govern Britain on the divine right of kings, and Parliament - representing, however imperfectly, a demand for the wider sharing of power - concerned the use and abuse of state power, the right of the governed to a say in their government, and the nature of political freedom. The Levellers grew out of this conflict. They represented the aspirations of working people who suffered under the persecution of kings, landowners and the priestly class, and they spoke for those who experienced the hardships of poverty and deprivation. They developed and campaigned, first with Cromwell and then against him, for a political and constitutional settlement of the civil war which would embody principles of political freedom, anticipating by a century and a half the ideas of the American and French revolutions."

"On 4 January 1642, accompanied by courtiers and royal guards with their swords drawn, the king marched into the House of Commons to arrest Pym and four other parliamentary leaders on a charge of high treason. Commandeering the speaker's chair, his eyes surveying the membership, he called out Pym's name, then Holles's, but there was no response. The five MPs had got wind of their imminent arrest and fled. The king, exasperated, asked the speaker, William Lenthall, where they had gone. He replied with a ringing assertion of parliamentary privilege: "May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak in this place, but as this House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here." In the short term, Charles was humiliated, forced to leave in a huff amid shouts of "privilege, privilege!" by his defiant Commons. In the long run, it was clear that there could be no peace, let alone cooperation, between king and parliament. Nor did he feel safe in the Puritan-controlled metropolis. In February he put the queen on a ship bound for the continent and then fled with the court to York."

"By this stage, military action of some kind between king and Parliament was inevitable. That is not to say that either wanted war. Centuries of belief in the Great Chain of Being and monarchy were difficult to break. But now, with rebellion in Scotland and Ireland fueling military solutions in England, no one knew how to make peace. Each side armed itself, either in reaction to the violence abroad or out of fear of violence at home. Each could only view the other's posture of "self-defense" as threatening war. In March, Parliament, fearing a popish plot, passed a Militia Ordinance and, acting on it without royal consent, seized all the garrisons it could and egan t raise troops. In June, the king began to do the same, resorting to raising forces through a Medieval precedent, the Commissions of Disarray. This presented local leaders with a difficult choice- whose order to obey? Finally, on August 22, 1642, King Charles raised the royal standard- tantamount to a declaration of hostilities- at Nottingham. The English Civil War had begun."

"Cromwell's charge at Naseby determined the Civil War. When the grim Ironsides rode down the more splendid cavalry that mustered under the royal standard, they destroyed Charles's last chance of keeping the open field. Thenceforth, all he could do was to move about amongst his strongholds, the reduction of which was the only work that remained to be accomplished by the victorious army of the parliament. One after another, some by storm and some by famine, garrisoned cities, towns, and fortified mansions fell into the hands of Fairfax and Cromwell, and as the year 1645 approached its termination, the parliamentary forces began to hem in the king's last place of retreat, the loyal and beautiful Oxford, the capital of the Cavaliers. The Roundheads were first discerned from the old tower of Oxford Castle, crowning the heights at a distance from the city. They soon approached nearer, commanding every road, and seizing every defensible point; but it was not until Fairfax had cleared the West, and driven the Prince of Wales to Scilly, that he returned northward with the main body of his troops, and prepared to invest Oxford in due form."

"The question then arose- What was the king to do? His friends, even the most sanguine, deemed his cause irretrievably lost. Without money, his supporters ruined by the sacrifices they had already made, his garrisons compelled to plunder as their only means of support, and the country consequently universally disaffected towards the royal cause, it was impossible that the king could carry on the contest any longer. What then was he to do? He had now tried almost all possible courses. He had endeavoured to govern with a parliament, and had failed. He had striven to do so without a parliament: in that also he had failed. Again, he had been induced to call a parliament by which he had been driven into concessions, but they were made grudgingly, in bad faith, and with the clear intention of being resumed as soon as possible: in this course he had also failed. Lastly, he had appealed to the final arbiter of national disputes, and again the result had been adverse to his hopes. His subjects, esteemed the most loyal people in Europe, had met him, front to front, in the open field. His choicest troops, commanded by some of the bravest of the English nobility, had been beaten in many successive engagements, and, finally, had been cut to pieces and utterly destroyed. What now remained for him to do? Peace, upon the best terms that could be obtained, was the ardent longing of every one. The staunchest Cavaliers saw that submission was a bitter but unavoidable necessity. The victorious party must have its way. The cause had been decided in their favor. The losers must submit."

"Such was the feeling and the reasoning of the Cavaliers, but not of the king. Submission was a thing to which Charles could never be brought. It was his candid avowal with respect to his own character, that he could never yield in a good cause; which every man thinks his own cause to be. True, it was no longer possible for him to gain his ends by active measures; but he had not ceased to be a power in the State. If he could not govern, he might prevent his enemies from doing so. The weary and exhausted country could have no peace without him. If those who were opposed to him desired tranquility, they must have it upon his terms. He was beaten, vanquished, ruined, but no earthly power could induce him to sacrifice his royal dignity by yielding the principal points which were in dispute."

"He believed that the machine of government could not act without him; that if he could only keep the public affairs long enough in the condition of dead-lock to which they were reduced, his enemies would be wearied, or would be forced by the people, into yielding to his terms. His mind was as full as ever of the most exalted notions of the sacred and indefeasible character of his royal authority. All who opposed him were, in his estimation, wicked rebel whom God would judge. It was his place to govern, and that of his people to submit. His sins of misgovernment never occurred to him. Regret that for many years his course of action had been totally wanting in the kingly virtues of justice and fair dealing never entered his mind. It never troubled him that he had sought to govern in defiance of his own concessions, in opposition to the even then acknowledged principles of the constitution, and in breach of his coronation oath. The only things which grieved him were his concessions to the popular fury which himself had roused. While such was Charles' state of mind, peace was out of the question. On the side of parliament, it was clearly seen that when a king sets up his standard against his people, he must conquer or submit; and that if, having failed to conquer, he refuses to submit, he must be deposed. To have yielded to him on the ultimate points of the contest, would have been to have relinquished the fruits of the warfare in which parliament had been victorious. What then was to be done? Simply to follow him through a succession of messages and answers, until it became apparent to the people that the country must be governed without him. That was the course for parliament, but what remained for the king? Nothing but to fall back upon his old course of intrigue."

"Without much talent for intrigue, or even much dexterity in its practice, Charles had great fondness for being engaged in it. In all difficulties it was his resource, and at the time with which we are dealing he was fanatically sanguine that some one or other of his little subtle stratagems would ultimately succeed. We are accustomed to associate the notion of fanaticism with the opposite party only. They concluded that the cause of the parliament was righteous and favored by God because it was successful. Every one sees this to have been a dangerous judging of the ways of Providence from partial results. We can all join in condemning conclusions so presumptuous and so illogical. But the same reasoning was equally rife at Oxford as at Westminster. Charles attributed his want of success in the war to God's anger against him for his concurrence in the death of Stafford. He confidently anticipated the approach of a time when he should have drained the cup of vengeance. Mercy would then, he presumed, take the place of justice, and the storm of heavenly wrath, transferred from him, would fall heavily on the heads of his enemies. To help on the ends of Providence, to expedite, as he supposed, the coming of that happy day, and to gain time until it shoud dawn, were the objects of the many intrigues in which he was involved during the year 1646."

"During the Civil War the naval contribution to the parliamentary cause was secondary. The victory was decided on land. The fact that Parliament had control of the navy was nonetheless vital in making victory possible. If the king had retained control of the fleet the royalists could have blockaded London, and the resulting economic dislocation might have generated enough popular pressure to force Parliament into peace on almost any terms. During the war, the Navy's undramatic work in protecting commerce kept up the level of customs revenues and helped finance the war effort. The navy was an effective deterrent to any foreign monarch tempted to send help to Charles. It assisted land campaigns by transporting supplies and reinforcements and by providing mobile artillery. It played an important role in maintaining the outposts at Hull and Plymouth and contributed to the capture of Bristol and Newcastle. The earl of Warwick, as Lord High Admiral, and his vice-admiral and successor William Batten provided vigorous and effective leadership."

"During the interregnum the navy's role was far more spectacular. The rulers of continental Europe were horrified by the execution of the king in January 1649 and all repudiated the new Commonwealth. The navy was thus needed to protect England from possible invasion and to force foreign powers to recognize the new regime. Over the next eleven years, it was almost continuously in action, both defensive and offensive."

"In July 1642 Charles I's splendid navy defected to Parliament without firing a shot. Throughout the First English Civil War, the king thus faced the humiliation of fighting his own 'royal' navy. Far more was at stake, of course, than injured pride. As Clarendon observed, the loss of the fleet was 'of unspeakable ill consequence to the king's affairs', and dealt a devastating blow to his chances of winning the war. While command of the navy could never guarantee victory, without it Parliament would have faced almost certain and rapid defeat."

"Winning control of the navy in 1642 represented a financial as well as military coup for Parliament. It ensured that in the struggle ahead the commercial life of the capital retained some degree of normality and that customs revenues flowed into parliamentary not royal coffers. Had Charles retained control of the fleet and a major port, the course of events would have been very different. He would then have been able to bring in munitions and supplies from the continent without obstruction. More importantly, a blockade of the Thames, cutting off London's food and fuel supplies and strangling its economic life, would have triggered mass demonstrations by the hungry and unemployed, and intense pressure from the merchant community. In all probability, Parliament would have been forced to sue for peace on almost any terms the king cared to offer."

"Inevitably naval operations diverted enormous sums that could have been poured into the war effort on land. But such calculations miss the point, for without maritime trade would have been helpless against the massed privateers, and it is not hard to discern a doomsday scenario. Parliament would have lost a significant part of its income without a stable maritime trade to generate customs revenues. Even more important, the crippling of London's commerce would have brought tens of thousands of hungry and angry citizens onto the streets. In those circumstances, parliamentary leaders would have had little choice but to settle for whatever terms Charles might offer. Much the same applies to the military situation. In the absence of a parliamentary fleet, continental powers would certainly have poured far more arms and ammunition into the royalist war effort. It is quite likely too that Parliament would have lost all control in Ireland, and certain that after the cessation in 1643 many thousand more troops would have crossed the Irish Sea to join the king. They would have placed Charles in a much stronger military position in 1643-4, and it is conceivable that they might have proved decisive before the Scots' intervention in 1644 restored the balance."

"The navy's greatest contribution, then, lay in defining the terms of the land war in Parliament's favor. It sustained Parliament's economic position and revenues while cutting off the king's main lines of supply. As in the two World Wars of the twentieth century, naval preponderance was essential to avoid defeat, and a precondition for the victory that only land forces could deliver. Modern civil war historians have tended to marginalize the navy's contribution. Perhaps one should reflect on the fact that the parliamentary leaders, however desperate for cash, were never attracted by the option of keeping the navy in the harbor to save money. They recognized that it would be a false and perhaps fatal economy."

"The parliamentary navy had played a significant, if secondary, part in the civil wars; the civil wars played a still more significant part in the navy's history, accelerating its evolution and fitting it for the primary role it was to play in the imperial ages ahead."

"Princes are not bound to give an account of their actions but to God alone."

"Thus goaded, Charles, accompanied by three or four hundred swordsmen- "Cavaliers" we may now call them- went down to the House of Commons. It was January 4, 1642. Never before had a king set foot in the Chamber. When his officers knocked at the door and it was known that he had come in person members of all parties looked upon each other in amazement. His followers beset the doors. All rose at his entry. The Speaker, William Lenthall, quitted his chair and knelt before him. The King, seating himself in the chair, after professing his goodwill to the House, demanded the surrender of indicted Members- Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hazelrigg, and Strode. But a treacherous message from a lady of the Queen's Bedchamber had given Pym a timely warning. The accused Members had already embarked at Westminster steps and were safe amid the train bands and magistrates of the City. Speaker Lenthall could give no information. "I have only eyes to see and ears to hear as the House may direct," he pleaded. The King, already conscious of his mistake, cast his eyes around the quivering assembly. "I see that the birds are flown," he said lamely, and after some civil reassurances, he departed at the head of his disappointed, growling adherents. But as he left the Chamber a low, long murmur of "Privilege" pursued him. To this day the Members for the City take their places on the Treasury bench at the opening of a session, in perpetual acknowledgment of the services rendered by the City in protecting the Five."

"Upon this episode the wrath of London became uncontrollable. The infuriated mobs who thronged the streets and bellowed outside the palace caused Charles and his Court to escape from the capital to Hampton Court. He never saw London again except to suffer trial and death. Within a week of his intrusion into the House the five Members were escorted back to Parliament from the City. Their progress was triumphal. Over two thousand armed men accompanied them up the river, and on either bank large forces, each with eight pieces of cannon, marched abreast of the flotilla. Henceforth London was irretrievably lost to the King. By stages, he withdrew to Newmarket, to Nottingham, and to York. Here he waited during the early months of 1642, while the tireless antagonisms which rent England slowly built him an authority and an armed force. There were now two centers of government. Pym, the Puritans, and what was left of the Parliament ruled with dictatorial power in London in the King's name. The King, around whom there gathered many of the finest elements in Old England, freed from the bullying of the London mob, became once again a prince with sovereign rights. About the two centers there slowly assembled the troops and resources for the waging of civil war."

"The King's large plan for 1643 had failed. Nevertheless, the campaign had been very favorable to him. He had gained control of a great part of England. His troops were still, on the whole, better fighting men than the Roundheads. Much ground lost at the beginning of the war had been recovered. A drift of desertion to the royal camp had begun. All could see how even were the forces which rent the kingdom. On both sides, men's thoughts turned to peace. Not so the thoughts of Pym; he looked to the Scots; by substantial money payments he induced a Scots army of not less than eleven thousand men to intervene. He led Parliament on September 25 into signing a Solemn League and Covenant among themselves and with the Scots to wage war with untiring zeal. It was a military alliance expressed in terms of a religious manifesto. Then on December 8 Pym died, uncheered by success, but wearied by misfortune. He had neglected his private affairs in the public cause, and his estate would have been bankrupt had not Parliament, as some expression of their grief and gratitude, paid his debts. He remains the most famous of the old Parliamentarians and the man who more than any other saved England from absolute monarchy and set her on the path she has since pursued."

"Marston Moor was the largest and also the bloodiest battle of the war. Little quarter was given and there were four thousand slain. Newcastle's "white-coats" fought to the death, and fell where they stood. They had boasted that they would dye these white coats with the blood of the foe. They were indeed reddened, but with their own blood. Night alone ended the pursuit. A disaster of the first magnitude had smitten the King's cause. His Northern army was shattered and the whole of the North was lost. The prestige of Rupert's cavalry was broken. The Marquis, brokenhearted, fled into exile. Rupert, whom nothing could appal, gathered up the remnants of his army and led them safely south to Shrewsbury."

"Cromwell rode in from the Army to his duties as a Member of Parliament. His differences with the Scots and his opposition to Presbyterian uniformity were already swaying Roundhead politics. He now made a vehement and organised attack on the conduct of the war, and its mismanagement by lukewarm generals of noble rank, namely Essex and Manchester. Essex was discredited enough after Lostwithiel, but Cromwell also charged Manchester with losing the second Battle of Newbury by sloth and want of zeal. He himself was avid for the power and command which he was sure he could wield; but he proceeded astutely. While he urged the complete reconstitution of the Parliamentarian Army upon a New Model similar to his own in the Eastern Counties, his friends in the House of Commons proposed a so-called "Self-Denying Ordinance," which would exclude members of either House from military employment. The handful of lords who still remained at Westminster realised well enough that this was an attack on their prominence in the conduct of the war, if not on their social order. But there were such compelling military reasons in favour of the measure that neither they nor the Scots, who already dreaded Cromwell, could prevent its being carried. Essex and Manchester, who had fought the king from the beginning of the quarrel, who had raised regiments and served the Parliamentary cause in all fidelity, were discarded. They pass altogether from the story."

"During the winter months the Army was reconstituted in accordance with Cromwell's ideas. The old personally raised regiments of the Parliamentary nobles were broken up ad their officers and men incorporated in entirely new formations. These, the New Model, comprised eleven regiments of horse, each six hundred strong, twelve regiments of foot, twenty-two hundred strong, and a thousand dragoons, in all twenty-two thousand men. Compulsion was freely used to fill the ranks. In one district of Sussex the three conscriptions of April, July, and September 1645 yielded a total of 149 men. A hundred and thirty-four guards were needed to escort them to the colours. At the King's headquarters it was thought that these measures would demoralise the Parliamentary troops; and no doubt at first this was so. But the Roundhead faction now had a symmetrical military organisation led by men who had risen in the field and had no other standing but their military record and religious zeal. Sir Thomas Fairfax was appointed Command-in-Chief. Cromwell, as Member for Cambridge, was at first debarred from serving. However, it soon appeared that his Self-denying Ordinance applied only to his rivals. The urgency of the new campaign and military discontents which he alone could quell forced even the reluctant Lords to make an exception in his favour. In June 1645 he was appointed General of the Horse, and was thus the only man who combined high military command with an outstanding Parliamentary position. From this moment he became the dominant figure in both spheres."

"The Story of the Second English Civil War is short and simple. King, Lords and Commons, landlords, merchants, the City and the countryside, bishops and presbyters, the Scottish army, the Welsh people, and the English Fleet, all now turned against the New Model Army. The Army beat the lot."

"By the end of 1648 it was all over. Cromwell was Dictator. The Royalists were crushed; Parliament was a tool; the Constitution was a figment; the Scots were rebuffed, the Welsh back in their mountains; the Fleet was reorganized, London overawed. King Charles, at Carisbrooke Castle, where the donkey treads the water wheel, was left to pay the bill. It was mortal."

"We must not be led by Victorian writers into regarding this triumph of the Ironsides and of Cromwell as a kind of victory for democracy and the Parliamentary system over Divine Right and Old World dreams. It was the triumph of some twenty thousand resolute, ruthless, disciplined, military fanatics over all that England has ever willed or wished. Long years and unceasing irritations were required to reverse it. Thus the struggle, in which we have in these days so much sympathy and part, begun to bring about a constitutional and limited monarchy, had led only to the autocracy of the sword. The harsh, erratic, lightning-charged being, whose erratic, opportunist, self-centred course is laid bare upon the annals, was now master, and the next twelve years are the record of his well-meant, puzzling plungings and surgings."

"County studies have succeeded in proving that there was no self-sufficient impetus to rebellion (let alone revolution) within the English counties. The English Civil War, we can then see, was the result of a "domino effect" produced by successful rebellions in Scotland and Ireland."

"Final evidence of the extent to which an identity of interest was assumed between the court and Catholicism can be seen in a common reaction to the Irish rebellion. Edward Hyde, Edmund Ludlow and Robert Baillie each, and from very different standpoints, recorded the country's immediate conviction that the Queen certainly, and the King possibly, had encouraged the massacre. Such suspicions made trust between the King and his subjects impossible and without trust no compromise in the constitutional crisis was feasible... the "popish plot" panics between 1640 and 1642 heightened the general sense of crisis, making large numbers of the common population feel personally threatened and in danger. Even where it did not directly affect the course of events anti-Catholicism increased tension, creating suspicion and fear, and so helped drive the situation on to conflict. For many contemporary writers the essence of the conflict was in fact a collision between true religion and popery: here, for them, was the reality underlying disagreement between King and Parliament."

"I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it."

"Cruel necessity."

"I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that you call a Gentleman and is nothing else."

"A few honest men are better than numbers."

"God made them as stubble to our swords."

"This is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood."

"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

"What really weakened the royalist war-effort was the fact that the conflict had a greater impact on its territories than on those of Parliament and thus the financial machinery could not be managed properly. In particular, the war impinged closely on some of its most prosperous areas, creating a general sense of insecurity there and affecting the amount of revenue received. This, in turn, necessitated the introduction of various expedients to obtain money and essential supplies, including special levies, free quarter, and requisitioning. As final defeat stared them in the face, royalist units engaged in ever more self-destructive activity just to keep themselves alive. They started a vicious circle by robbing their own shires. Looting engendered hatred from civilians; it also rendered the countryside incapable of paying the tax upon which the soldiers' pay depended; this in turn drove the soldiers to more frantic looting. As long as the royalists had an army it could be used to coerce the population but the catastrophe of Naseby in June 1645 took away even this."

"A quick victory offered Charles the best chance of winning the war. In the autumn of 1642 he had an opportunity to do so but failed for reasons that were not primarily due to deficiencies in supply. There certainly were shortcomings in this area but Parliament had its own problems too. The longer the war went on, the more likely it became that Parliament, with its commercial and economic superiority, would win. The royalists did make good use of the facilities at their disposal and focused their efforts on the production of war matériel. They exploited their natural resources, developed existing industries, and founded new ones where necessary. However, their workshops, mills, and furnaces could not produce enough goods to meet the demands of their armies, forcing the king to reply increasingly upon imports."

"Before Charles I's experiment in the 1630s, war was not so much inevitable as totally improbable; and the failure of Charles's government was not rendered "inevitable" by deep divisions in society or inherited stresses in the constitution, but was conditioned by the inability of the king and his ministers to operate any political system."

"The history of England between 1603 and 1640 is not the history of a growing disease in the body politic, but of conflict – some of it healthy, some morbid – within a setting of agreed essentials: or rather it was this until the impatient attempt at a drastic solution on the king's behalf persuaded his opponents that the essentials were no longer agreed. Thus the prehistory of the civil war should certainly be read as the breakdown of a system of government. But it did not break down because it had been unworkable from the first... It broke down because the early Stuart governments could not manage or persuade, because they were incompetent, sometimes corrupt, and frequently just ignorant of what was going on or needed doing."

"We need to see the sixteenth-century in terms of its own experience, not as the prehistory of a later revolution. We need to regard even the reigns of the early Stuarts without the conviction that the only thing of moment in their history is the ultimate breakdown of government which we know was to come. If thereafter we want to investigate the causes of the civil war, we need to remember that no revolution of the size claimed for this one ever so readily stopped short and reversed itself."

"If we are to get further, we need at this present no essays on the causes of the civil war, but studies of the political behaviour of all sorts of men in all sorts of institutions, unaffected by the historian's foreknowledge of the later event. In that way we may ultimately perhaps arrive at an explanation of the mid-seventeenth-century breakdown, but it will be less well tailored, less readily reduced to a list of preconditions, precipitants and triggers, less satisfactory to theorists of revolution. On the other hand, it might be real."

"By 1628 Charles and Laud had destroyed the religious unity of England, which many gentry saw as the foundation of monarchy, liberty and law. The eventual outcome of the division created by the promotion of Arminianism in the 1620s was the division Pym created in 1641 by his attempt to use parliament as an instrument to ward off popish conspiracy. In this sense religious issues provided the fundamental cause of the civil war."

"The national debate about the Church was crucial to the process by which the political nation was becoming divided, the process which brought the emergence of two parties at Westminster and made civil war a possibility. This debate mattered so deeply to so many people that there was no question of its being halted."

"The heart of the parliamentarian ideology was the connection in men's minds between the struggle against popery and the preservation of true religion... We can only understand the zeal of the parliamentarians at the start of the war if we appreciate the frustration many of them felt at the bizarre appearance of a Church half reformed, the inspiration afforded by the vision of a new Jerusalem and the shock created by the king's assault in the previous decade on the mainstream of moderate Puritan evangelicalism... What was really at stake at the deepest level of this crisis was not the issue of the militia or appointment of councillors, the immediate expressions of political distrust, but the future of the Church."

"The Puritan core of the parliamentary party could not abandon their belief in the supremacy of truth and that belief had become incompatible with the Foxeian tradition of obedience to the godly prince. Thus anti-Catholicism was turned against the court and even the monarch and the force of it carried men into rebellion. It was the king therefore who had opened the way for the call to apocalyptic warfare that thundered from the London pulpits in 1642 and who had forced a section of the gentry into an unnatural alliance with radical Puritans from further down the social scale."

"There is a real sense in which the English civil war was a war of religion."

"In the wreck of the royal cause we may pause for a moment which brings out in relief the best temper of both sides. Cromwell, who was sweeping over the Southern counties to trample out the last trace of resistance, "spent much time with God in prayer before the storm" of Basing House, where the Marquis of Winchester had held stoutly out through the war for the king. The storm ended its resistance, and the brave old Royalist was brought in a prisoner with his house flaming around him. He "broke out," reports a Puritan bystander, and said, 'that if the King had no more ground in England but Basing House, he would adveture it as he did, and so maintain it to the uttermost,' comforting himself in this matter 'that Basing House was called Loyalty.'" Of such loyalty as this Charles was utterly unworthy. The seizure of his papers at Naseby had hardly disclosed his earlier intrigues with the Irish Catholics when the Parliament was able to reveal to England a fresh treaty with them, which purchased o longer their neutrality, but their aid, by the simple concession of every demand they had made. The shame was without profit, for whatever aid Ireland might have given came too late to be of service. The spring of 1646 saw the few troops who still clung to Charles surrounded and routed at Stow. "You have done your work now," their leader, Sir Jacob Astley, said bitterly to his conquerors, "and may go to play, unless you fall out among yourselves.""

"With the close of the Civil War we enter on a time of confused struggles, a time tedious and uninteresting in its outer details, but of higher interest than even the war itself in its bearing on our history. Modern England, the England among whose thoughts and sentiments we actually live, began, however dimly and darkly, with the triumph at Naseby. Old things passed silently away. When Astley gave up his sword the "work" of the generations which had struggled for Protestantism against Catholicism, for public liberty against absolute rule, in his own emphatic phrase, was "done." So far as these contests were concerned, however the later Stuarts might strive to revive them, England could safely "go to play." English religion was never to be more in danger. English liberty was never to be really in peril from the efforts of kings after a personal rule. Whatever reaction might come about, it would never bring into question the great constitutional results that the Long Parliament had wrought. But with the end of this older work a new work began. The constitutional and ecclesiastical problems which still in one shape or another beset us started to the front as subjects of national debate in the years between the close of the Civil War and the death of the King. The great parties which have ever since divided the social, the political, and the religious life of England, whether as Independents and Presbyterians, as Whigs and Tores, as Conservatives and Liberals, sprang into organized existence in the contest between the Army and the Parliament. Then for the first time began a struggle which is far from having ended yet, the struggle between political tradition and political progress, between the principle of religious conformity and the principle of religious freedom."

"The vexed question of the effectiveness of artillery in the Civil War is not a simple matter to answer. The utility of guns during a siege was indisputable but the effectiveness of artillery depended as much on the skills of the gunners and the placing of the guns as it did on the reluctance of the target units to endure their fire. The ability to use guns in new ways was only in part understood in the Civil War and thereafter the use of artillery changed very little at least until the Napoleonic Wars. The Duke of Cumberland could be seen aligning his guns between his units in the front line at the Battle of Culloden. Incremental changes in the use and preparation of artillery can be seen, but not until the latter half of the 18th century did its use become much more mobile. Although there had been refinements in the use and production of artillery, the gun barrels that were used in the Crimean War were still smooth bore muzzle-loading guns that would not have appeared alien to the members of the artillery train of the 1640s and 50s."

"Historians are in general agreement that Charles I was a lamentable failure as a monarch and by 1640 he had alienated most of his subjects. While far from being a stupid man, Charles was temperamentally authoritarian, holding to an exalted notion of the nature of kingship as God-given and denying opposition any legitimacy. Cold and aloof, he lacked basic political skills and judgment and came increasingly to be seen as untrustworthy. He made concessions with the greatest of reluctance, and sought to reverse them later, and gained a well-deserved reputation for deviousness by negotiating with opponents while, at the same time, planning to use force against them. He pursued unpopular policies, none more so than his disastrous religious policy, and he was personally responsible for the decision to impose the Scottish prayer book which set the whole chain of events that would eventually lead to civil war in motion. Yet the entire responsibility for the conflict cannot be laid at Charles' door even though he had an important part to play in making it possible."

"There would have been no civil war without the creation of a party around the king and it is allegiance to the royalist party that first requires explanation. The royalist party was not principally composed of defenders of arbitrary royal government and long-established ministers and servants of the crown. Crucial to the formation of a viable party was the support of political moderates, such as Culpeper, Hyde and Falkland, who revered the ancient constitution and defended the rue of law with as much enthusiasm as their parliamentarian counterparts. They had been among the principal critics of the abuses of the personal rule and the ministers responsible, and had supported the Long Parliament's initial reform programme. They believed in regular parliaments, taxation by consent and the abolition of prerogative courts. They were consistently maintaining their commitment to the rule of law when they later opposed parliament's innovatory measures, especially legislation by ordinance without the king's consent."

"How far social and economic factors shaped party allegiance is a much more contentious question which revisionist historians tend to treat dismissively. It is true that there has been no convincing class-conflict analysis of the rival parties. Peers, gentry, merchants and the middle and lower ranks of society can be found in significant numbers, and with equivalent degrees of commitment, on both sides. However, local studies have concluded that, away from the south-east and eastern England, a much higher proportion of the landowning elite of peers and gentry became royalists than parliamentarians. In London too the fertile ranks of the wealthy and traditionally powerful were especially powerful territory for royalism, although the party also had definite popular roots as well, and the same pattern may obtain in other cities and large towns."

"An attempt to relate party allegiance to agricultural regions (with royalism the pattern in settled arable regions and parliamentarianism in wood-pasture areas) has only been partially successful, with the obvious objection that the royalism of northern England and Wales fails to conform to this model. There is much more force in the argument that a 'moral panic' triggered by the fear of popular unrest and disorder, and a growing belief that traditional authority and privilege were being undermined, led large numbers of the elite to rally to the king as a symbol of order and orthodoxy. A marked increase in the number of agrarian riots in the early 1640s, large-scale demonstrations in the capital and popular pressures on parliament, disturbances in churches as Laudian innovations were reversed, attacks on well-born papists and malignants by their social inferiors, subversive pamphlets and sermons as censorship collapsed, and the activities of sectaries all combined to convince some royalists, understandably but mistakenly, that their world was about to be turned upside-down."

"Most parliamentarians in 1642 were not supporters of a party that was intent on wresting power from the king and vesting it in parliament. They still hoped for an eventual political settlement that would retain all the essential features of the ancient constitution, including a critical role for the monarchy. As yet no principled defense of resistance to a monarch who would not agree to such a settlement had been developed. Parliamentarians prepared to fight their king hiding behind the fiction that they were engaged in self-defence against royalist aggression (for whic 'evil counselors' rather than the king himself were responsible) or, in the doctrine of the king's two bodies, that they were upholding the authority of the king while fighting against his person."

"[T]he Question in dispute between the King's Party and us being, as I apprehended, Whether the King should govern as a God by his Will, and the Nation be governed by Force like Beasts: or whether the People should be governed by Laws made by themselves, and live under a Government derived from their own Consent."

"In the early part of 1642 only two small minorities saw a resort to force as either necessary or inevitable. There were a few wholehearted royalists who for some time had been telling the king that if he did not show a willingness to defend his rights by force he would never be able to stop the steady erosion of his power; and there were a few radical puritans who were ready to resort to force to bring about sweeping changes in the government and doctrine of the church. But the vast majority of the two Houses of Parliament, of the nobility and gentry in general, of the government officers, of the lawyers, of the mayors and aldermen of the towns, of the leading merchants, in other words, the great bulk of the governing classes, still deplored the thought of resolving the disagreement by force, and still hoped for and expected agreement between the king, Lords and Commons."

"Yet they were steadily being divided into two parties during 1642; parliamentarians, who distrusted the king and demanded more restrictions on his power, at least for a time until they could trust him with greater power again; and royalists, who were unhappy about reducing the power of the crown too much, and longed to be able to trust the king. This was not a division over religious or political ends. Thus men from the same social background and with the same economic interests, with similar political and religious ideas, found themselves in opposite parties, for the decision they had to take in 1642 was not a decision about the best form of government for the church or for the state, nor about the changes in the social or the economic order, but simply whether or not to trust Charles I."

"Many of those who distrusted the king and regarded his obstinacy as the only obstacle to agreement consented to the raising of an army under the command of the Earl of Essex because they thought that a show of force would make the king more reasonable. They believed that no more than a show of force would be necessary because the king appeared to have few supporters and small means to raise an army; he would not be able to fight and would be obliged to negotiate. But the king proved to have more supporters and greater resources than at first appeared. For many were willing to trust him now that he seemed almost powerless. They did not wish to see him forced into an abject surrender which would permanently weaken the crown. They supported him because they thought that when parliament saw that he had the means to fight it would moderate its demands and reach an agreement without bloodshed. So by the end of summer 1642 there were two armies on foot in England, and the country found that it had drifted into a civil war that few wanted to fight."

"Distrust was the main obstacle to agreement between king and parliament, but it might not have been an insurmountable obstacle without the conjuncture of other factors, which involved the lower classes in the crisis and drove a deeper wedge into the ruling class. These other factors were the fear of papists, the sharp decline of trade and industry, and an upsurge of class-feeling and class-hostility."

"This diplomatic revolution, part of the growing bureaucratization of government, was complemented by a revolution in political ideas that we can measure in the changing use of the term “state.” In the fourteenth century the Latin term status (and vernacular equivalents such as estat or state) was mainly used with reference to the standing of rulers themselves, much as we would today use the term “status.” Thus the chronicler Jean Froissart, describing King Edward III entertaining foreign dignitaries in 1327, recorded that his queen “was to be seen there in an estat of great nobility.” Gradually, however, usage was extended to include the institutions of government. In the works of Machiavelli, written in the 1510s, lo stato becomes an independent agent, separate from those who happen to be its rulers. In a similar vein, Thomas Starkey, the English political commentator of the 1530s, claimed that the “office and duty” of rulers was to “maintain the state established in the country” over which they ruled. The thrust of such arguments was to limit the power of kings by postulating their higher obligation to the common good. In radical hands this implied that subjects had the right to overthrow tyrannical rulers, which is what happened in the English civil wars of the 1640s and Europe’s bitter wars of religion. Responding to this crisis of governance,Thomas Hobbes moved the debate to a different level, defining the state as “an artificial man” abstractly encapsulating the whole populace, who enjoys absolute sovereignty (his “artificial soul . . . giving life and motion to the body”) which is exercised in practice through a sovereign ruler. This gradual but dramatic word shift, from the medieval state of princes to the person of the Hobbesian state, was hugely important for political thought. It also reinforced the decline of dynastic summitry: diplomacy, like governance, was no longer regarded as the sole prerogative of princes."

"In 1603 King James VI of Scotland succeeded the childless Queen Elizabeth I on the throne of England as James I. Thereafter, although frequently professing an intimate attachment to their ancient kingdom, both he and his son King Charles I, who succeeded him in 1625, regarded themselves first and foremost as English monarchs. Scotland nevertheless still retained its own parliament, referred to as the Estates, and therefore its own quite separate system of government. Unfortunately, moves initiated by Charles I in 1633 with the aim of bringing both the Scottish church and legal system into line with English practice proved to be a disastrous mistake. In 17th century Britain religion and politics were still inextricably linked, and the monarchy's temporal and religious prerogatives were both the subject of passionate debate among the influential classes. Less than a century beforehand the struggle between Roman Catholic and Protestant had seen religious martyrs burned alive at the stake; and despite Elizabeth's generally successful establishment of the Anglican Protestant church of England created by her father Henry VIII, both her reign and that of James I were intermittently troubled by Roman Catholic conspiracies."

"In England a strong dissenting or low-church movement (the Puritans) was hostile to what it saw as Charles' ambiguity towards Catholicism (his queen was a French Catholic), and suspicions of his rumored future plans for meddling with the Protestant settlement. Simultaneously, on the political front, resentment was growing in both England and Scotland towards the King's autocratic style of rule, which tended to unite very diverse groups in at least temporary opposition to Charles, whatever their fundamental views of the monarchy itself. On his part, Charles was continually frustrated by the grudging and conditional grants of funds controlled by the English Parliament which was increasingly conscious of its own constitutional powers, and of which some influential members were leaders of the Puritan religious movement."

"In the summer of 1642 the First Civil War between King and Parliament had broken out in England. Initially both sides were confident of victory, but after the first campaigns ended in stalemate they began looking for allies. The Scots government was willing to assist the English Parliamentarians, and even before a formal treaty was signed the raising of troops got underway."

"It is fairly easy to conjure up in the imagination a picture of the New Model Army as a Bible-reading, Psalm-singing soldiery which forsook shops and fields for pikes and muskets in support of the Parliamentary cause. Such intimations of piety are born out to some extent in the writings of the chaplains of the New Model. Indeed, for Cromwell and the Army chaplains the Civil War was primarily a religious struggle. "Religion was not the thing at first contested for," said Cromwell, "but God brought it to that issue at last; and gave it unto us by redundancy, and at last it proved that which was most dear to us." Not only were the issues religious ones, but from the point of view of the chaplains the soldiers were religious also."

"Despite these views it is doubtful that the rank and file of the New Model Army were as deeply imbued with religious ideas as the chaplains contended. Two cogent arguments to this effect may be cited: the use of impressment in addition to voluntary enlistment, and the plundering of churches. The second argument is not unanswerable; the desecration of churches as was actually defended by chaplain Robert Ram as being essentially an expression of intolerance toward Anglicanism- i.e., toward superstition and idolatry- growing out of an ardent desire for more simplified ecclesiastical forms. The impressment argument is much stronger. Five Parliamentary ordinances from February to June, 1645, dealt with the impressment of men for the Parliamentary forces. On 12 May the Venetian ambassador commented that the violence and force used by Parliament to compel men to serve in the Army was "cooling off" the favor of the common people. Peters, while making no claims for their religiosity, noted how serviceable the worst of the impressed men had been under the example of the other soldiers. General Fairfax observed that good soldiers had come out of the King's Army after the surrender of the Royalist garrisons. Good impressed soldiers, although not by definition irreligious, could hardly have been inspired by the same religious zeal, at least to begin with, which had prompted others to volunteer."

"Most of the Army preachers believed that the New Model was an army of saints who were possessed by the Holy Spirit and were thus assured of their own salvation- to the point of believing that they were victorious in battle because God had been in the midst of them. "If God be for us," ran the text from Romans 8:31, "who can be against us?""

"William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle (1592-1676) commanded the Royalists in northern England, and during 1643 made heavy work of defeating a small parliamentarian army. In 1644 he faced the invading Scots, and his tardiness in joining Prince Rupert before Marston Moor may have cost the Royalists victory. After the battle he fled to the Continent, where he wrote a book on horsemanship which remains his chief claim to fame."

"Prince Rupert was more than an inspiring leader; despite his youth he had wide experience of continental warfare, and was a keen student of military theory. His daring and skill gave victory to the Royalist horse in most of the early battles of the Civil Wars."

"When a civil war began in the 1640s between the King's forces and the Parliamentary forces, many English religious dissenters joined the anti-royalists. At this time, Virginia's royal governor, William Berkeley, reacted by arbitrarily condemning all Virginia dissenters as similar being seditious anti-royalists; some Tidewater dissenters were banished from Virginia at this time, while others simply moved farther up the James River to areas (in present-day Hanover County) north and west of its fall-line. Some of these "uprooted and transplanted" Piedmont dissenters became the ancestors of the Presbyterian congregation that would later be formed at Hampden-Sydney, Virginia."

"Both of the colony's principal dissenters- the English Puritans and the Scots-Irish- proudly considered themselves to be ecclesiastical rebels after the fashion of John Calvin (ca. 1514-1571), and patriotic rebels after the fashion of two of England's celebrated 17th century martyr heroes: (1) the politician-soldier John Hampden (1594-1643), who had challenged both the King's arbitrary taxes and his bullying army, and (2) the political philosopher Algernon Sydney (1622-1683), who had challenged in books and speeches the King's self-proclaimed "divine right" in his every declaration. Hampden, a cousin of Oliver Cromwell, had been killed in an opening battle of England's mid-century civil war, and Sydney had been executed after the Crown had returned to power following eleven years of Oliver Cromwell's [blessedly-short] Puritan rule of grim and cheerless peace."

"You have satisfaction in your conscience that you are in the right; that the king ought not to grant what is required of him; and so you do your duty and your business together: but for my part, I do not like the quarrel, and do heartily wish that the king would yield and consent to what they desire; so that my conscience is only concerned in honour and in gratitude to follow my master. I have eaten his bread, and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him; and choose rather to lose my life (which I am sure I shall do) to preserve and defend those things which are against my conscience to preserve and defend: for I will deal freely with you, I have no reverence for the bishops, for whom this quarrel subsists."

"It is strange to note how we have insensibly slid into this beginning of a civil war by one unexpected accident after another, as waves of the sea, which have brought us thus far; and we scarce know how, but from paper combats, by declarations, remonstrances, protestations, votes, messages, answers, and replies, we are now come to the question of raising forces, and naming a general and officers of an army... The sum of the progress of civil war is the rage of fire and sword, and (which is worse) of brutish men. What the issue of it will be, no man alive can tell, probably few of us now here may live to see the end of it."

"I wish the observation of the duke de Rohan in his interest of Christendom may prove a caution, not a prophecy. He saith of England, that it is a great creature, which cannot be destroyed but by its own hand. And there is not a more likely hand than that of civil war to do it. The issue of all war is like a cast at dice, none can tell upon what square the alea belli will light. The best issue that can be expected of a civil war, ubi victor flet, et victus perit: which of these will be our portion is uncertain, and the choice should be avoided. Yet, sir, when I have said this, I am not for a tame resignation of our religion, lives, and liberties into the hands of our adversaries, who seek to devour us. Nor do I think it inconsistent with your great wisdom, to prepare for a just and necessary defence of them."

"The rate of cannon-fire was very slow. The process of sponging-out and reloading was deliberate and complex. Powder was kept in small budge barrels near the guns, which were fired by the application of linstock to the touch-hole. The risk of premature explosions was very great, and it is doubtful whether it was possible to fire more than one round every three minutes. By the time of Waterloo it was possible, using grapeshot, to get off as many as three rounds a minute for short periods. With grape-shot the recoil was reduced and it was not necessary to run the guns up between rounds. But by 1815 all sorts of improvements had been made, with guns lightened and means of traction improved."

"The musket in common use was a heavy matchlock, which even a trained soldier could not hope to fire more than once a minute. Though it might kill or main at 200 yards it was not likely to hit the target at a range of more than 50 yards. The reason for this inaccuracy was that the bullet did not fit the smooth-bore barrel at all tightly, and therefore, when propelled towards the target, it tended to wander. The disadvantages of match were all too obvious: by night it could betray the position of the musketeers, and in foul weather it simply went out."

"One comes across another form of musket during this period: an early flintlock known as the 'snaphance' or 'firelock.' It was comparatively rare, and soldiers so armed were usually employed to guard the train of artillery. There was less chance of unfortunate accidents if its escort consisted of men armed with flintlocks rather than with matchlocks."

"Sir Thomas Fairfax, later Third Baron Fairfax of Cameron (1612-71), served at the siege of Bois-le-Duc (1629) and in the First Scots War. From 1642 to 1646 he was the life and soul of his father's small force which kept up the unequal struggle with Newcastle's Northern Army until it was destroyed at Marston Moor. His tactical skill and gallant leadership as well as his victories at Wakefield (21 May 1643), and Nantwich (25 January 1644) led to his selection as commander of the New Model Army, whose victories at Naseby, Langport, Torrington and elsewhere put an end to the First Civil War. Fairfax, a taciturn man, was no politician, and power gradually passed to his second-in-command, Oliver Cromwell. His wife's sympathies were Royalist and he played no part in the trial of Charles I."

"Artillery had proved its worth in battles as well as in sieges as early as the middle of the fifteenth century; it was decisive at Castillon as at Constantinople. But its progress had been slow, and, at the time of the civil wars, many of its characteristics were still unsatisfactory. Ranges were short, rates of fire slow, equipment heavy and means of traction uneconomical. Nevertheless, both round-shot and case-shot were damaging missiles, which could score heavily on a troop of horse or a stand of pikes, whilst for siege work the big guns were invaluable."

"England in August 1642 was in the midst of harvest, the fields covered in shocks of corn or standing golden brown ready for the sickle. But the time had come for another and bitter harvest. The long months of move and counter move between King Charles and his Parliament were over, culminating with the monarch's leading armed men into the House of Commons to arrest five members, only to find his birds flown. Now, with the raising of the royal standard at Nottingham on 22 August, the country lay under the shadow of fratricidal Civil War."

"The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings."

"God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of Himself; and is alone in and unto Himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which He hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting His own glory in, by, unto, and upon them."

"Q. What is the chief end of man? A. Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever."

"Q. What is God? A. God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth."

"Q. What is sin? A. Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God."

"Slavery did not end with abolition in the 19th century. Instead, it changed its forms and continues to harm people in every country in the world. Whether they are women forced into prostitution, men forced to work in agriculture or construction, children in sweatshops or girls forced to marry older men, their lives are controlled by their exploiters, they no longer have a free choice and they have to do as they’re told. They are in slavery. Today slavery is less about people literally owning other people – although that still exists – but more about being exploited and completely controlled by someone else, without being able to leave. [...] Many people think that slavery happens only overseas, in developing countries. In fact, no country is free from modern slavery, even Britain. The Government estimates that there are tens of thousands people in modern slavery in the UK."

"We [UKIP] seek an amicable divorce from the European Union and its replacement with a genuine free-trade agreement, which is what my parents' generation thought we’d signed up for in the first place."

"We no longer enjoy the same liberties Americans do. We don't have a constitution. We don't have a First Amendment. What we have, and what the whole of Europe has, is the Lisbon Treaty, a kind of top-down constitution that has been imposed on us against our will. And, unlike the American Constitution which empowers the people, the European constitution dis-empowers the people, and empowers the un-elected bureaucrats and career politicians for whose sole benefit it was created."

"Once again, I challenge the Prime Minister to have an open debate with me on why he believes we must stay part of this failing, corrupt EU. The future of our nation is at stake. Mr Cameron, you have my phone number."

"[Brexit] is stupidity for a country with 53 percent of its exports going to the Continent and to the rest of Europe. It’s even so stupid that Britain’s best friends, the U.S., don’t understand it all."

"[An in/out referendum is] going to put Britain through years of uncertainty, and take a huge gamble with our economy."

"Years of uncertainty caused by a future EU referendum would hit jobs and growth and this is not in the national interest"

"I am ready to campaign with all my heart and soul to keep Britain inside a reformed European Union"

"Let me be clear. Leaving Europe would threaten our economic and our national security."

"[Britain would be] freer, fairer and better off outside the EU"

"The EU offers our small businesses and tourism sector huge opportunities, I can't understand why anyone would want to shut those opportunities down"

"My judgment is that remaining a member of the European Union means we will be more secure from crime and terrorism."

"The Leavers​ don't seem to have much clue about what is to happen afterwards. Curious, considering so many of them have spent their adult lives agitating for this moment. Their approach appears to be a version of Napoleon's battle strategy: 'On se dégage, et puis on voit.' What exactly is Out supposed to entail? How do they picture Britain's relationship with the EU, and with the rest of the world, after they’ve secured a vote for Exit on 23 June?"

"The Labour Party is about as united as it possibly can be in asking people to Remain"

"As a historian I fear Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also Western political civilisation in its entirety"

"Every family knows that a divorce is traumatic for everyone. Everyone in the EU, but especially the Brits themselves, would lose out economically [if Britain left the EU]."

"The British people have voted to leave the European Union and their will must be respected"

"Brexit means Brexit, and we're going to make a success of it."

"The referendum is not binding."

"Yes, on November 8, you Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows get to go and blow up the whole goddamn system because it's your right. Trump's election is going to be the biggest "fuck you" ever recorded in human history and it will feel good — for a day. Maybe a week. Possibly a month. And then, like the Brits, who wanted to send a message, so they voted to leave Europe, only to find out that if you vote to leave Europe, you actually have to leave Europe. And now they regret it. All the Ohioans, Pennsylvanians, Michiganders, and Wisconsinites of Middle England, right, they all voted to leave and now they regret it. And over 4 million of them signed a petition to have a do-over, they want another election, but it's not going to happen. Because you used the ballot as an anger management tool. And now you're fucked. And the rest of Europe. They're like, "Bye Felicia!" So when the rightfully angry people of Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin find out after a few months in office that President Trump wasn't going to do a damn thing for them, it will be too late to do anything about it."

"Being a member of EU comes with rights and benefits. Third countries (non members as the UK will be after Brexit) can never have the same rights and benefits since they are not subject to the same obligations. The single market and its four freedoms (which includes freedom of movement) are indivisible. Cherry picking is not an option."

"I wish the result had gone the other way. I campaigned passionately for that. But as democrats our party has to accept that result and it follows that the prime minister should not be blocked from starting the Article 50 negotiations."

"Any [Brexit] deal is bound to be full of compromises which one group or another in Parliament finds difficult to stomach."

"Our laws will then be made in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast and interpreted not by judges in Luxembourg but by judges across the United Kingdom"

"Your Prime Minister, your MP, Theresa May, called this election about Brexit. Have we heard from her what she plans to do about Brexit? No. This is mad. On Thursday, you are going to be faced with Prime Minister May, or Prime Minister Corbyn, against twenty-seven prime ministers from the European Union. It will be a shitshow."

"There are two kinds of European nations. There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations."

"No deal is better than a bad deal"

"Since the Brexit negotiations begun there's a third emotion I've been feeling - embarrassment. Embarrassment at our country's leaders. Embarrassment for Great Britain."

"As Europe struggled to recover from recession, in 2015 the British prime minister David Cameron tossed Brussels a grenade. He said he would hold a referendum on the UK’s continued EU membership the following year. The torch of British Euroscepticism had passed from left to right. It was now Conservatives rather than Labour who were most anti-European. Cameron’s attempts to appease his ‘leave’ voters by negotiating reforms to the EU were dismissed by the ever cautious Merkel and, in June 2016, to Cameron’s surprise and dismay, the British electorate voted narrowly to leave the EU. The vote was taken as binding by the government. The date decided by Parliament for departure was March 2019."

"Britain’s departure could not lightly be dismissed. Its economy was second only to Germany’s in size, and contributed twenty per cent of the EU budget. The UK might long have been half-hearted in its commitment to European union, but now it was not alone. A Pew survey in mid-2016 was one of many showing disapproval of the EU as high in Germany and the Netherlands as in Britain, and higher in France and Spain. Few governments dared imitate Britain and hold an open vote on continued membership. Union might be popular but the EU was not."

"Brexit has been pushed by certain people who predicted easy solutions. Brexit has shown us one thing - and I fully respect British sovereignty in saying this - it has demonstrated that those who said you can easily do without Europe, that it will all go very well, that it is easy and there will be lots of money, are liars. This is all the more true because they left the next day, so they didn't have to manage it."

"Crashing out of Europe with no deal risks being a national disaster."

"Brexit was not our choice, it is the choice of the UK. Our proposal tries to help the UK in managing the negative fallout of Brexit in Northern Ireland in a way that respects the territorial integrity of the UK."

"For me, getting a good Brexit is about securing the freedoms and opportunities to plough our own furrow whilst enjoying a relationship of co-operation and trade with mainland Europe."

"Therefore now in the national interest we have got to come together and secure a compromise. If we can't do that, well yes, we have to go back to the people."

"Britain is basically Pompeii if Pompeii had voted for the volcano."

"You cannot drag out Brexit for a decade."

"We've got to a stage where we feel that any deal is so controversial and may well be so far from what people voted for when they voted to leave, that we think that it is probably appropriate… that we say to the people, 'Is this what you wanted?' We just want to check. Because if it isn't, then let's stay."

"I want us to leave the European Union, I think we should have left on the 29th of March but we've got these elections and I think it's really important that there's a good vote for ... people who do want to leave."

"It is my honestly held view that Parliament will not be able to get a deal on Brexit and therefore the only choice, reluctantly, is to ask the people to take another look at it."

"If the UK doesn’t pay what is due, the EU will not negotiate a trade deal."

"I'm against any form of Brexit, I want to stop Brexit, but in particular a no-deal Brexit I think will be catastrophic for our economy, society, for a long time to come"

"The more divergence there is, the more distant the partnership has to be. Without an extension of the transition period beyond 2020, you cannot expect to agree on every single aspect of our new partnership. Without the freedom of movement of people, you cannot have the free movement of capital, goods and services. Without a level playing field on environment, labour, taxation and state aid, you cannot have highest-quality access to the world’s largest single market."

"There is no need to give in on fish to complete a Free Trade Agreement. The UK must be firm - no more concessions. An FTA is in the EU's interest so dig in."

"Thank you, goodbye, and good riddance."

"So this is it, the final chapter, the end of the road. A 47-year political experiment that the British frankly have never been very happy with. My mother and father signed up to a common market, not to a political union, flags, anthems, presidents, and now you even want your own army. For me, it has been 27 years of campaigning and over 20 years here in this parliament. I’m not particularly happy with the agreement we’re being asked to vote on tonight. But Boris has been remarkably bold in the last few months… he’s promised us there will be no level playing field, and on that basis, I wish him every success in the next round of negotiations, I really do."

"What happens at 11pm this Friday the 31st of January 2020 marks the point of no return. Once we’ve left, we’re never coming back and the rest frankly is detail. We’re going, and we will be gone. And that should be the summit of my own political ambitions. I walked in here, you all thought it was terribly funny but you stopped laughing in 2016. But my view of Europe has changed since I joined. In 2005, I saw the constitution that had been drafted… and saw it rejected by the French in a referendum. I saw it rejected by the Dutch in a referendum. And I saw you, in these institutions, ignore them. [You brought it back] as the Lisbon treaty, and boast you could ram it through without there being referendums. Well, the Irish did have a vote and did say no, and were forced to vote again. You’re very good at making people to vote again, but what we’ve proved is the British are too big to bully, thank goodness. So I became an outright opponent of the whole European project. I want Brexit to start a debate across the whole of Europe. What do we want from Europe? If we want trade, friendship cooperation, reciprocity, we don’t need a European Commission, we don’t need a European court. We don’t need these institutions and all of this power. And I can promise you, both in UKIP and in the Brexit party, we love Europe. We just hate the European Union."

"I hope this begins the end of this project. It is a bad project. It isn’t just undemocratic, it is antidemocratic. It puts in that front row, it gives people power without unaccountability. People who cannot be held to account by the electorate and that is an unacceptable structure."

"There is a historic battle going on across the west, in Europe, America, and elsewhere. It is globalism against populism. And you may loathe populism, but I’ll tell you a funny thing. It is becoming very popular! And it has great benefits. No more financial contributions, no more European Courts of Justice. No more European Common Fisheries Policy, no more being talked down to. No more being bullied, no more Guy Verhofstadt! What’s not to like. I know you’re going to miss us, I know you want to ban our national flags, but we’re going to wave you goodbye, and we’ll look forward in the future to working with you as a sovereign nation… [Farage is cut off by the chair]"

"In Britain, hard-right revisionism packed itself into the single, self-destructive nuclear option of Brexit. From the 2000s, anti-Europeanism was pursued with skill and determination by the upstart UKIP party (founded 1993) and among Conservatives by the old, unreconciled, Britain-first rump, perhaps a third of the parliamentary party. Shaken by diplomatic failures with his European partners and spooked by the rise of British anti-Europeanism, David Cameron, who was prime minister from 2010 to 2016, called a referendum on British membership of the EU, which he expected to win. On narrowly losing, rather than play for time a shaken Cameron announced within hours that “the instruction” of “the people” should be “delivered.” He resigned, leaving to his successors, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, an anti-liberal, populist discourse of people against elites, democracy against parliament, which May nibbled at and Johnson swallowed whole."

"The rebellion against membership of the European Union, culminating in the British ‘Brexit’ referendum on 23 June 2016, represents a new highwater mark for anxious and distrustful popular sentiment. A little more than seventy years after the war against extreme nationalism appeared won, a small but clear majority of those who chose to vote essentially reaffirmed the near-absolute primacy of nationalism over internationalism, reversing the political direction in which the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe had appeared to be travelling since 1945. In the United States, a phrase with dubious historical pedigree, ‘America First’, has become current once more. What we are living through is not, of course, precisely a repeat of the 1930s. However, the study of the 1930s reminds us of the dangers of crass inequality, of international ‘beggar-my-neighbour’ competition, of the capacity of marginalized social groups for extreme violence based on the scapegoating of minorities, and of the many other consequences that flow from irresponsible and often sadly misjudged notions of national self-interest."

"Scotland will be back soon, Europe. Keep the light on."

"Also, would a referendum settle this issue (Repeal of ) once and for all? May I remind Members and the PSP what happened in the UK with Brexit. Both sides campaigned vigorously and bitterly. It created and entrenched polarised identities. [...] In the process, the credibility of the British government was severely damaged. Indeed, it has yet to recover."

"British democracy approves the principles of movable party heads and unwaggable national tails."

"I know about your [[Politics of the United Kingdom|[British] system of democracy]], but in that system the workers 'hold keys of straw', as an expression of ours puts it. It is democracy for the capitalists, for the lords, but not for the workers. When we win we shall establish democracy, but not like that democracy of yours."

"Decades, if not centuries are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits [for democracy]. In Britain, the road [to democratic government] took seven centuries to traverse."

"A subject of Frederick the Great of Prussia, who had strayed into the middle of a Westminster election in 1782, thus describes what he saw and felt there... It is true that if the good man had witnessed an election at an average English borough, or had ascertained that Manchester and Birmingham were unrepresented, he might have felt less enraptured. Nevertheless, he had seen something great, which had then no parallel in France, Spain, Italy or in his own country, something which, for all its absurdities, was of the heart of England."

"Overall, the picture that emerges from British political history is clear. Beginning in 1832, when Britain was governed by the relatively rich, primarily rural aristocracy, strategic concessions were made during an eighty-six-year period to adult men. These concessions were aimed at incorporating the previously disenfranchised into politics because the alternative was seen to be social unrest, chaos, and possibly revolution. The concessions were gradual because, in 1832, social peace could be purchased by buying off the middle classes. Moreover, the effect of the concessions was diluted by the specific details of political institutions, particularly the continuing unrepresentative nature of the House of Lords. Although challenged during the 1832 reforms, the House of Lords provided an important bulwark for the wealthy against the potential of radical reforms emanating from a democratized House of Commons. This was so at least until just before the First World War, when the showdown with Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government over the introduction of elements of a welfare state led to substantial limitations of the power of the Lords. After 1832, as the working classes reorganized through the Chartist movement and later the trade unions, further concessions had to be made. The Great War and the fallout from it sealed the final offer of full democracy. Although the pressure of the disenfranchised was more influential in some reforms than others, and other factors undoubtedly played a role, the threat of social disorder was the driving force behind the creation of democracy in Britain. The emergence of democracy in Britain and its subsequent consolidation took place in a society that had long shed nearly all the remnants of medieval organization and that had successfully resisted the threat of absolutism. They also took place in the context of rapid industrialization, urbanization, expansion of the factory system, rising inequality, and – in the period after the Repeal of the Corn Laws – rapid globalization of the economy."

"Britain is blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous."

"British democracy approves the principles of movable party heads and unwaggable national tails."

"This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII."

"What I have in common with the right hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan) is that, undeniably, our generation came into Parliament because we were determined to prevent what happened in the 1930s from occurring again and to prevent a breakdown in the social structure and the political institutions that led to the rise of authoritarianism in Europe and finally to the Second World War. That was our determination, and for 25 years, from 1950 to 1975, the people we represented had a better standard of living, bigger and better homes, better education, a better Health Service, better roads and better transport and were able to enjoy holidays such as they had not envisaged before."

"I know about your [British] system of democracy, but in that system the workers 'hold keys of straw', as an expression of ours puts it. It is democracy for the capitalists, for the lords, but not for the workers. When we win we shall establish democracy, but not like that democracy of yours."

"Decades, if not centuries are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits [for democracy]. In Britain, the road to [democratic government] took seven centuries to traverse."

"There has been no impropriety between myself and Miss Keeler"

"My life has been cursed by sex I didn't particularly want. Jack Profumo was all over me and there wasn’t much I could do about it. He was a much older man, not someone I wanted to be with, it just happened. Jack had power too and that was part of it for me. Jack Profumo was seriously out of line in his behaviour with me. I was young but he was the one who didn’t know any better. He’d been taught that he could take anything he wanted."

"It is really more than I can stand – the horror, day after day at the court and in the streets. It is not only fear, it is a wish not to let them get me. I would rather get myself. I do hope I have not let people down too much"

"A conscientious, constitutional monarch is a strong element of stability and continuity in our Constitution."

"[T]he sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights—the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn."

"There has been a King of the English ever since the ninth or tenth century; no other Monarchy in Europe (except the lands of our Scandinavian kingsfolk and except the Crown of St. Stephen) can boast of anything like an equal antiquity."

"The Crown of Great Britain cannot, in my opinion, be too magnificent. Let us see some great public works set on foot; let it never be said, that the Commons of Great Britain failed in what they owe to the first Crown in the world. Looking up to royalty, I do say, it is the oldest and one of the best parts of our constitution. I wish it should look like royalty; that it should look like a King; like a King of Great Britain."

"It is typical of the English that, retaining what was a good in the past, but reconstruing it—reconstruing the past itself if necessary—they have clung to the monarchy, and have maintained it down to the present, while changing its import and robbing it of the power to do harm. It is typical of them that from their 17th-century revolution itself and from the very experiment of an interregnum, they learned that there was still a subtle utility in kingship and they determined to reconstitute their traditions again, lest they should throw away the good with the bad. In all this there is something more profound than a mere sentimental unwillingness to part with a piece of ancient pageantry—a mere disinclination to sacrifice the ornament of a royal court. Here we have a token of that alliance of Englishmen with their history which has prevented the uprooting of things that have been organic to the development of the country; which has enriched our institutions with echoes and overtones; and which has proved—against the presumption and recklessness of blind revolutionary overthrows—the happier form of co-operation with Providence."

"Since the [[Glorious Revolution|settlement of [the] Constitution]], now nearly two centuries ago, England has never experienced a revolution, though there is no country in which there has been so continuous and such considerable change. How is this? Because the wisdom of your forefathers placed the prize of supreme power without the sphere of human passions. Whatever the struggle of parties, whatever the strife of factions, whatever the excitement and exaltation of the public mind, there has always been something in this country round which all classes and parties could rally, representing the majesty of the law, the administration of justice, and involving, at the same time, the security for every man's rights and the fountain of honour."

"Gentlemen, the influence of the Crown is not confined merely to political affairs. England is a domestic country. Here the home is revered and the hearth is sacred. The nation is represented by a family—the Royal Family; and if that family is educated with a sense of responsibility and a sentiment of public duty, it is difficult to exaggerate the salutary influence they may exercise over a nation. It is not merely an influence upon manners; it is not merely that they are a model for refinement and for good taste—they affect the heart as well as the intelligence of the people, and in the hour of public adversity, or in the anxious conjuncture of public affairs, the nation rallies round the Family and the Throne, and its spirit is animated and sustained by the expression of public affection."

"The sovereign is the highest height of the system; is, in that system, like Jupiter among the Roman gods, first without a second... It is the wisdom of the British Constitution to lodge the personality of its chief so high that none shall under any circumstances be tempted to vie, or to dream of vying, with it."

"This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII."

"Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king."

"The British Monarchy is the most ancient in Christendom. Its glory has in no wise worn thin with age. As a pageant it still takes the roughness of this world with splendour and romance. Moreover, Kings and their ways, their personal characters and private lives, as well as their public relations with the State, are, and always have been, of inexhaustible interest. Pope says: "Oh, 'tis the sweetest of all earthly things/To gaze on Princes and to talk of Kings.""

"An impressive sense of antiquity and continuity of the Monarchy, as well as its stability, in its relations with the Legislature, is imparted by these ceremonies of the opening of Parliament and the giving of the Royal Assent. They are indeed rooted in the historic past. In form and substance the opening of Parliament is exactly the same in the twentieth century as it was in the sixteenth, despite all the incursions of the modern spirit since then. The King is now, as he was then, the central figure. He keeps his State in Parliament unaffected by political changes and innovations. From him emanates all the splendour of the spectacle, and all the power and authority it suggests. The Monarchy still has its purple, its Crown and sceptre. Changeless amid time's changes the Monarchy would appear to be; affording in that respect a striking contrast with Parliament which is peculiarly susceptible to change... But the Monarchy remains the same—an impressive symbol of Government, its continuity and authority."

"Many of what we think of as age-old symbols and ceremonies are often newly minted, as each age looks through the past and finds what suits its present needs. In 1953, all around the world those who had televisions watched, with awe and fascination, the ancient coronation rituals—the monarch’s ride through London in the gilded state coach, the solemn procession into Westminster Abbey, the music, the decorations, the Archbishop of Canterbury in his magnificent robes, the elaborate ceremony of crowning. As a schoolchild in Canada, I was given a booklet that explained it all. What most of us did not know was that much of what we watched with such respect was a creation of the nineteenth century. Earlier coronations had been slipshod, even embarrassing affairs. When a hugely fat George IV was crowned in 1821, his estranged Queen Caroline hammered on the door. At Queen Victoria's coronation in 1837, the clergy stumbled through the service and the Archbishop of Canterbury had trouble with the ring, which was much too big for her finger. By the end of the century, the monarchy was more important as the symbol of a much more powerful Britain. Royal occasions became grander and were much better rehearsed. New ones were added: David Lloyd George, the radical prime minister from Wales, found it useful to have a formal ceremony within the ancient walls of Caernarfon Castle to install the later Edward VIII as Prince of Wales."

"[T]o the mass of the nation it is the venerability and continuity of our monarchy that gives it so strong and wide a sentimental appeal."

"There exists in human nature a liking for the dramatic and a love of display. Pageantry ministers to these inclinations. The sovereign thereby acquires an aura of grandeur and, as Professor Black has remarked, "it nullifies in the ordinary subject his feeling of smallness". It gives to royalty a glamour which as individuals they may not possess. The masses, not being really interested in abstract political theories, prefer to personify authority and to be more impressed by individuals seeming to perform interesting actions, than by institutions, organisations, and groups who perform what may appear to be uninteresting actions. Any good journalist, any advertising agent, is aware that the attention of the public is more readily aroused by personalities than it is by objects. It is the intense and yet glamorous personification of royalty that gives it a grace far deeper and wider than any President could acquire."

"The sovereign, being accepted by her peoples as an example and symbol of the State and being by her title head of the Church and and defender of the faith, must, if she is to maintain the mystery so essential to the survival of monarchy, adopt and practise the highest moral code. In days of modern publicity it would not be possible for any monarch to retain among his subjects that sense of awe unless he were to practise the highest personal rectitude. The sovereign and the royal family are expected in their private lives to be patterns of perfect domesticity. The British public would today not tolerate self-indulgence such as that of George IV and flatter themselves that the sovereign and her family are stained-glass saints, shining as examples, and offering themselves as scapegoats for all the squalid sins of their people. It would be a shock to the British people if their scapegoat let them down."

"Too much publicity will stain the mystery, even the dignity of the Crown. Too little publicity will be regarded as undemocratic and will render the gulf that yawns between the Sovereign and the ordinary subject an unfortunate barrier rather than a necessity of segregation. The real personality of monarchs is seldom revealed to their peoples until many years after their deaths. Few British subjects are aware that Queen Elizabeth II is a woman of exceptionally strong character and high intelligence. They realise that she and her husband are hard-working and possess a Coburg sense of duty. But they have little idea of what they are really like... All we can hope is that the Queen will seize every opportunity to share the interests of the common people, their sorrows and their laughter, and realise that she remains Bretwalda of the English and must seek to represent, to symbolise, to enhance, to elevate and to integrate the finest elements in the national character."

"Commonwealth schoolchildren are often taught one of the key events in British history with the help of a mnemonic: "King Henry the Eighth, to six wives he was wedded: One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded." Beheaded! In 1536 Henry had his wife Anne Boleyn decapitated on trumped-up charges of adultery and treason because she gave him a son that did not survive, and he had become attracted to one of her ladies-in-waiting. Two wives later he suspected Catherine Howard of adultery and sent her to the ax as well. (Tourists visiting the Tower of London can see the chopping block for themselves.) Henry was clearly the jealous type: he also had an old boyfriend of Catherine’s drawn and quartered, which is to say hanged by the neck, taken down while still alive, disemboweled, castrated, decapitated, and cut into four. The throne passed to Henry’s son Edward, then to Henry’s daughter Mary, and then to another daughter, Elizabeth. “Bloody Mary” did not get her nickname by putting tomato juice in her vodka but by having three hundred religious dissenters burned at the stake. And both sisters kept up the family tradition for how to resolve domestic squabbles: Mary imprisoned Elizabeth and presided over the execution of their cousin, Lady Jane Grey, and Elizabeth executed another cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth also had 123 priests drawn and quartered, and had other enemies tortured with bone-crushing manacles, another attraction on display in the Tower. Today the British royal family is excoriated for shortcomings ranging from rudeness to infidelity. You’d think people would give them credit for not having had a single relative decapitated, nor a single rival drawn and quartered."

"One thing above all they assuredly would not forget; Lancastrian or Yorkist, squire or lord, priest or layman; they would point to the kingship of England, and its emblems everywhere visible. The immemorial arms, gules, three leopards or, though quartered late with France, azure, three fleurs de lis argent; and older still, the crown itself and that sceptred awe, in which Saint Edward the Englishman still seemed to sit in his own chair to claim the allegiance of all the English. Symbol, yet source of power; person of flesh and blood, yet incarnation of an idea; the kingship would have seemed to them, as it seems to us, to express the qualities that are peculiarly England's. The unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it; the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries."

"When we speak of the pride and self-confidence of our nation, the Crown—the Monarchy—is absolutely central; nor do I know how better one would gauge the state of this nation's psychological health, of its national morale, than by its attitude towards its greatest, its unique, institution... Of all the sources of true and proper pride to a British person none is greater than the common possession of the Crown. I use the word "possession" advisedly, in its full and most literal sense. Because our Crown is the product of the history of this nation, because it grows like an oak in the soil of these islands, it is therefore the personal possession of every citizen and subject, however humble, however poor. It is a total misconception...to suppose that there is anything of class, anything which is restrictive or destricted, about the Crown. Whatever may be said of any other institution, the Crown is the common, precious and hereditary jewel of all British subjects and of all the people of this country. To approach that common possession, that symbol and personification, with the attitude, "How ungenerous can we be? How little can we contrive to spend upon it? How much can we clip?"—not of its magnificence, for it has ever been the pride of English greatness not to be magnificent through lavishness, but in more fundamental ways—"How much can we restrict the outward signs and manifestations of what the Crown is to this country?" is a sign that we are still divorced from the pride and self-confidence without which a nation cannot face the world and without which this nation cannot learn to face the world again."

"The monarchy has this great advantage, that it provides us with a symbol to which we can all look, whether overseas or at home, the visible embodiment of the unity of our peoples and form of society — a head which is at the same time separate from the centre of real political power."

"The monarchy serves the indispensable purpose of giving us continuity and at the same time flexibility: whatever the changes and chances of politics, there is a figure to which we can look, and that applies both at home and within the Commonwealth overseas. It is probable that no other constitutional form would fulfill that purpose anything like so well: it has shown a really remarkable flexibility and capacity for adaptation. In that sense the monarchy may be truly described as a democratic monarchy, an institution which is a help to the smooth and efficient working of democracy, and not a hindrance."

"The irony of England is that it was monarchical power that helped drive the shift away from early democracy, and so modern democracy incorporates an element of autocracy. It is for this reason that once Parliament became supreme after 1688, William Blackstone, the famous jurist, would write that it had “absolute despotic power.” While England initiated the development of modern democracy, it was slow to advance the process further. Even after what is commonly known as the “Great Reform Act” of 1832, only a tiny fraction of the total population could vote. Here we face a puzzle: while seventeenth-century English radicals like the Levellers first conceived of universal male suffrage as a way to govern a society, their ideas would first be implemented in North America and not in England. Though we often think of 1776 or 1787 as the beginning of American democracy, from the seventeenth century a very broad suffrage—for free white males— became the norm in England’s North American colonies."

"Instead of a little power, occasionally exercised at the expense of great unpopularity, the Monarch, by retiring from politics, acquired an immense popularity outside, and retained important influence behind the scenes. The new popularity of the Monarch was proved at the Jubilees of Victoria and of George V. The new English Democracy is in love with the Crown. Radicalism, founded by Tom Paine in the days of George III, had had strong Republican tendencies, but they had withered away as the Crown retired from politics. The modern Labour Party has no quarrel with the English Monarchy. The symbolic importance of the Monarch has greatly increased even in our own day. The Crown is the one symbol that all classes and parties can without reservation accept."

"The reason Thatcher was attractive was that she in many ways was a classical liberal who had allied herself with the Tory establishment. But when I saw authentic Toryism up close, when I taught at Peterhouse, I had very little affinity with it. I mean, if it means anything it means a reverence for the organic institutions of the English constitution, and I’ve never had any very strong commitment to those. In fact, they are patently obsolescent."

"This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII."

"Overall, the picture that emerges from British political history is clear. Beginning in 1832, when Britain was governed by the relatively rich, primarily rural aristocracy, strategic concessions were made during an eighty-six-year period to adult men. These concessions were aimed at incorporating the previously disenfranchised into politics because the alternative was seen to be social unrest, chaos, and possibly revolution. The concessions were gradual because, in 1832, social peace could be purchased by buying off the middle classes. Moreover, the effect of the concessions was diluted by the specific details of political institutions, particularly the continuing unrepresentative nature of the House of Lords. Although challenged during the 1832 reforms, the House of Lords provided an important bulwark for the wealthy against the potential of radical reforms emanating from a democratized House of Commons. This was so at least until just before the First World War, when the showdown with Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government over the introduction of elements of a welfare state led to substantial limitations of the power of the Lords. After 1832, as the working classes reorganized through the Chartist movement and later the trade unions, further concessions had to be made. The Great War and the fallout from it sealed the final offer of full democracy. Although the pressure of the disenfranchised was more influential in some reforms than others, and other factors undoubtedly played a role, the threat of social disorder was the driving force behind the creation of democracy in Britain. The emergence of democracy in Britain and its subsequent consolidation took place in a society that had long shed nearly all the remnants of medieval organization and that had successfully resisted the threat of absolutism. They also took place in the context of rapid industrialization, urbanization, expansion of the factory system, rising inequality, and – in the period after the Repeal of the Corn Laws – rapid globalization of the economy."

"Fairly well, but it is like talking to a lot of tombstones."

"By the Constitution of this United Kingdom, the House of Lords is the Court of Appeal in the last resort, and its decisions are authoritative and conclusive declarations of the existing state of the law, and are binding upon itself when sitting judicially, as much as upon all inferior tribunals. The observations made by members of the House, whether law members or lay members, beyond the ratio decidendi which is propounded and acted upon in giving judgment, although they may be entitled to respect, are only to be followed in as far as they may be considered agreeable to sound reason and to prior authorities. But the doctrine on which the judgment of the House is founded must be universally taken for law, and can only be altered by Act of Parliament. So it is, even where the House gives judgment in conformity to its rule of procedure, that where there is an equality of votes, semper presumitur pro negante."

"Why should five hundred or six hundred titled persons govern us, and why should their children govern our children for ever? I invite a reply from the apologists and the admirers of the House of Lords. I invite them to show any ground of reason, or of logic, or of expediency or practical common sense in defence of the institution which has taken the predominant part during the last few days in the politics of our country. There is no defence, and there is no answer, except that the House of Lords...has survived out of the past. It is a lingering relic of a feudal order. It is the remains, the solitary reminder of a state of things and of a balance of forces which has wholly passed away. I challenge the defenders, the backers, and the instigators of the House of Lords—I challenge them to justify and defend before the electors of the country the character and composition of the hereditary assembly."

"The House of Lords, in rejecting the Budget which provides for the national expenditure of the year, are refusing, for the first time since the great Rebellion, aids and supplies to the Crown, and by that fact and by their intrusion upon finance they commit an act of violence against the British Constitution. There is no precedent of any kind for the rejection of a Budget Bill by the House of Lords in all the long annals of the British Parliament, or, before that, in the still more venerable annals of the English Parliament. The custom of centuries forbids their intrusion upon finance."

"The House of Lords have only been tolerated all these years because they were thought to be in a comatose condition which preceded dissolution. They have got to dissolution now. That this body, utterly unrepresentative, utterly unreformed, should come forward and claim the right to make and unmake Governments, should lay one greedy paw on the prerogatives of the sovereign and another upon the established and most fundamental privileges of the House of Commons is a spectacle which a year ago no one would have believed could happen; which fifty years ago no Peer would have dared suggest; and which two hundred years ago would not have been discussed in the amiable though active manner of a political campaign, but would have been settled by charges of cavalry and the steady advance of iron-clad pikemen."

"I’m all for abolishing the House of Lords myself, personally. I think it’s totally past its sell-by date as an institution. The fact that we still have nearly a hundred members of the House of Lords who are hereditary peers, who are, by definition, all men, I find extraordinary."

"The question will be asked, "Should 500 men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, override the judgment...of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country?""

"You must handle [the House of Lords] a little more firmly, and the time has come for unflinching and resolute action. For my part, I would not remain a member of a Liberal Cabinet one hour unless I knew that the Cabinet had determined not to hold office after the next General Election unless full powers are accorded to it which would enable it to place on the Statute Book of the realm a measure which will ensure that the House of Commons in future can carry, not merely Tory Bills, as it does now, but Liberal and progressive measures in the course of a single Parliament either with or without the sanction of the House of Lords."

"But they have not rejected the Budget; they have only referred it to the people. On what principle do they refer Bills to the people? I remember the election of 1900, when a most powerful member of the Tory Cabinet said that the Nonconformists could vote with absolute safety for the Government, because no question in which they were interested would be raised. In two years there was a Bill destroying the School Boards. There was a Bill which drove Nonconformists into the most passionate opposition. What did the House of Lords do? Did they refer it to the people? Oh no, there was a vast difference between protecting the ground landlords in towns and protecting the village Dissenter. After all, the village Dissenter is too low down in the social scale for such exalted patronage, so he was left to the mercy of a Tory House of Commons without any of this high and powerful protection. Well, the Dissenters, despised as they may be, once upon a time taught a lesson to the House of Lords, and ere another year has passed they will be able to say, "Here endeth the second lesson" ."

"What has happened to the monastery? There it was planted in the hills, not merely looking after the spiritual needs of the people, but also their temporal needs... They have all gone. One of these parishes I find to-day with a tithe, and probably the land was owned by gentlemen who, when I was down there twenty years ago, was the anti-disestablishment candidate for that district. What is the good of talking about it? Whoever else has got a right to complain of Parliament not being authorised to deal with this trust; the present Establishment has no right, and the present House of Lords has no right. Property which was used for the sick, for the lame, for the poor, and for education, where has it gone to? ...[T]he bulk of it went to the founders of great families. It is one of the most disgraceful and discreditable records in the history of this country."

"The fact that the House of Lords has many irrational features is not, in itself, fatal in British eyes for we have a capacity for making the irrational work, and if a thing works, we tend to like it, or at any rate to put up with it."

"The decisions of the House of Lords are binding on me and upon all the Courts except itself."

"I earnestly hope that the House of Lords will always continue to justify your confidence; that it will conscientiously and firmly fulfil the duties for which I think it is eminently fitted, and which are to represent the permanent and enduring wishes of the nation as opposed to the casual impulses which some passing victory at the polls may in some circumstances have given to the decisions of the other House."

"My Lords, if I know anything of the constitutional value of this House, it is to interpose a salutary obstacle to rash and inconsiderate legislation—it is to protect the people from the consequences of their own imprudence. It never has been the course of this House to resist a continued and deliberately formed public opinion; your Lordships always have bowed, and always will bow, to the expression of such an opinion; but it is yours to check hasty legislation, leading to irreparable evils; and it is yours—though the Constitution can hardly have been deemed to have provided for such a contingency—to protect the people, not against their own hasty judgments, but against the treachery of those whom they have chosen to be their representatives."

"I didn't realise how absolutely useless they [the House of Lords] are. There they are, they just go along to collect £15,000 a year... They've got no guts. They should be defending Britain against the transfer of power to Maastricht and our loss of sovereignty and our loss of identity... If they were bigger men, they would take the risk. Actually, I think they are quite useless and they ought to be abolished. They are no good at all."

"The King governs by Law. Let us look back to the evils we had, in order to prevent more. There was loan, and ship-money, and extremes begat extremes. The House would then give no money. Let the King rely upon the Parliament; we have settled the Crown and the Government. 'Tis strange that we have sat so many years, and given so much money, and are still called upon for Supply. The Lords may give Supply with their own money, but we give the peoples; we are their proxies. The King takes his measures by the Parliament, and he doubts not but that all the Commons will supply for the Government; but giving at this rate that we have done, we shall be "a branch of the revenue." They will "anticipate" us too. But, let the officers say what they will, we will not make these mismanagements the King's error. 'Tis better it should fall upon us than the King. We give public money, and must see that it goes to public use. Tell your money, fix it to public ends, and take order against occasions of this nature for the future. We cannot live at the expence of Spain, that has the Indies; or France, who has so many millions of revenue. Let us look to our Government, Fleet, and Trade. 'Tis the advice that the oldest Parliament-man among you can give you; and so, God bless you!"