Sunday, August 19, 2012

120819-FN3:NorthBriton 45

       
John Wilkes was a low-minded politician and scurrilous publisher of a rag known as the North Briton.  It was  against the law to insult the monarch, but in issue No. 45, he indirectly attacked the King by libelling the King’s minister.


Wilkes as viewed by Hogarth

Outraged, George II had the North Briton’s offices smashed into under a general warrant.  A general warrant was something of a contradiction in terms since it “warranted” a search and seizure anywhere, anytime of anything and anyone.


Rioting for Free Speech

Wilkes, who was something of a populist demagogue stirred up popular fury on both sides of the Atlantic.  Rioting crowds in London manhandled the mistooken Austrian ambassador and pained “45” on the soles of shoes.  The Colony of Maryland sent 45 hogsheads of tobacco to Wilkes. 

The case dragged on for a decade, but the ultimate result was that the use of general warrants was disallowed and that warrants had to be based on probable cause specifying the places to be searched and the items to be seized.

.



120819-FN2:GloriousRevolution

         
In so providing, the Bill of Rights emphasized the bearing of arms as an individual prerogative divorced from any collective duty.  Given that societies were becoming more regulated and more characterized by divisions of labor, the provision stands as something of an anomaly.  The historical context explains the shift.

In 1660, Charles II was restored to the British throne after a decade of Purtian rule. Of  a“merrie” disposition, Charles was at first indifferent to the equal restoration of Anglicanism as the “established” religion. (Statutes of Clarendon (1661 1665).)  Later in his reign, however, he removed legal discriminations against Catholicism and, upon his death without issue, James II assumed the throne. 



James II

While Charles II may have been secretly Catholic he took pains to appear neutral and famously kept both a Protestant and a Catholic whore.  James II was frankly Catholic and kept no whores.  There ensued both a hot and cold war between James II and his Protestant subjects.  After repressing a Protestant revolt, James enlarged his standing army and thus reinforced, began a policy of de facto tolerance of Catholics.   This brought him into de jure conflict with a Protestant Parliament.  In defense of  what we would call religious freedom, James asserted the right to overrule Parliament and, in 1688, promulgated the Declaration of Indulgence giving Catholic and Dissenters political rights. 

Protestant England grit its teeth and withheld from rebellion.  James’ only issue was Mary, who was safely Protestant.  Alas, in 1688, James gave birth to a son whom we vowed to raise as a Catholic.  The dye was cast at the baptismal fount and Protestant England revolted.  The Glorious Revolution dethroned James, enthroned Mary and her Dutch husband William, re-established the Church of England and relegated Catholics to the back of the bus for another 250 years.

The reign of James the Second epitomizes the equivocal nature of tyranny. To some, he was a champion of religous freedom.  To others, he was the enemy of representative democracy.  He was, in fact, both.  But whether or not one agrees with his specific policies,  he was indisputably a tyrant - that is, one who seeks to rule in excess of his appointed jurisdiction.

For 135 years, what was to become the united kingdoms of Great Britain had struggled politically and militarily to reach an accomodation between Catholicism and Calvinism, between mercantile Town and agricultural Country, between modern absolutism and medieval autonomies.  The modulated balance between these oppositions is known in English history as “The Settlement”.  It was all a little bit of everything stitched together under a tissue of rhetoric and illogic.

While never doing anything quite completely “illegal,” James was undermining a consensus which had taken several beheadings and a civil war to achieve.  The Glorious Revolution of 1688 sent James packing and restored the balance.

But restoring the balance was not something that could be achieved politically, precisely because under James II’s “over-rulings” politics had broken down.  Thus, whereas in 1081 the principle purpose of owning a weapon was tied to defence against foreign aggression in 1688 it became tied as well to the goal of  preventing domestic tyranny.

It is a pity that Americans are by and large so unaware of English history, because the American insurrectionists always maintained that they were simply claiming their rights as Englishmen  and it can fairly be said that the U.S. Constitution of 1789 is, in its fundamental contours, a restatement of the The Settlement of 1689.

Because the Colonies were founded by an outlflow of Dissenters and Catholics, the Constitution added the salient distinction of the First Amendment’s anti establishment clause; otherwise the Constitutuion simply dressed up the English statu quo ante in republican garb governed by an indirectly elected president with precisely the powers of a constitutional monarch for a term.

.

120819-FN1:KrumperSystem

         

In 1806, at the Battle of Jena, Napoleonic French forces defeated Fredrick the Great’s fabled Army and reduced Prussia to a vassal state.  Then, as a century later, the French sought to disarm Prussia reducing the size of its allowable army.  In response, independence minded reformers sought to liberalize Prussian society and at the same time throw off the French yoke.

Scharnhorst

On the military side, Count Gerhard von Scharnhorst, democratized the army allowing free men of all classes into the Officer Corps.  To circumvent the French restrictions, he established the Krumper System under which free peasants and burghers would serve 60 days stints and be discharged back home along with their rifle, to remain on call for that day when the national hue and cry would be raised.

In tandem  Friederich Jahn, the founder of modern gymnstatics, conceived the idea of restoring the spirits of his countrymen through the development of their physical and moral powers. “Young gymnasts were taught to regard themselves as members of a kind of guild for the emancipation of their fatherland.” (Wiki). His motto was “Live Hardy, Pious, Cheerful, and Free.”

Jahn

In 1813 Jahn joined students, academics, writers and others in forming the Lutzow Freikorps which joined the mobilization against the French.  That same year, Scharnhorst died of wounds he received in the battle of Lützen.  Napoleon’s defeat was really the work of the Russians, but the Krumper System made sure he returned all the way to Paris.

.