12.24.04
Have a revolutionary Christmas
Not particularly seasonal thoughts, I know, but I’m sure you’re providing more than enough festive cheer for the both of us.
I was reading something this morning in which the author referred to the “English revolution of the seventeenth century and the French revolution of the eighteenth”.
I was struck first by the question, which English revolution? The dramatic, ultimately unsuccessful one or the largely political, highly successful one?
Second, why does nobody in this country refer to the ‘English Civil War’ (as if this weren’t a country already beset by them) as a revolution? I suspect it is part of the horrible embarrassment the English suffer on the subject of Cromwell, rather like the worse-than-ambivalence the French have towards Napoleon. Sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t Cromwell’s mania that put this country off the idea of revolution permanently.
Peter said,
December 24, 2004 at 5:54 pm
There was in fact an entity “Britain” in the seventeenth century, even if nobody except James VI aka I was the only person really believed in it. “The War of the Three Kingdoms” is a coignage to make the lesser breeds without the law feel more *part of things* somehow, less like an appendage. The whole show was kicked off by the Scots after all, admittedly by the most tiring sorts of Scots, not the sort of Scots we encourage in our Northern Arcadia beyond the Cairngorms, whence, in the expectation of snow at any moment, we salute you: Pax et salus Claviger praeclarus.