THE ENGLISH REBEL – wherefore art thou in this our time of need?

Yesterday I said…

anyone who bothers to look at the real, everyday history of the English working class will find a tradition to be – dare I say it… – proud of.

And lo and behold today The Witanagemot Club have linked to a review (in the Financial Times of all places) of a new book by David Horspool entitled ‘The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking from the Normans to the Nineties.‘

Jackie Wullschlager’s full review can be found here, but I found the following to be of particular significance…

History belongs to the victors – or as Sir John Harington put it in 1618: “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? / For if it prosper none dare call it treason”. Rebels who fail tend not to build the monuments – castles, palaces, civic squares – that are our visible heritage. Yet, says David Horspool in this vivid, lucid chronicle, rebels have shaped England’s character as incontrovertibly and effectively as the monarchs and law-givers they challenged.

Beginning with the Norman conquest and closing with Arthur Scargill, Horspool argues in The English Rebel that England’s role as coloniser – of its own island, then its archipelago, eventually of a third of the world – shrouds the significance of the rebel tradition at home. Anglo-Saxon uprisings led by “woodsmen” who attacked Norman strongholds, then melted into forests and marshes, belong to a lineage running from the Robin Hood myth to today’s eco-warriors. Five centuries before America’s Bill of Rights, English barons forced King John to accept the Magna Carta, sowing the seeds of constitutional reform. Generations ahead of the French Revolution, the English executed Charles I in favour of a radical government.

Most revolts were short-lived, though their inspiration could last much longer. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher outmanoeuvred the miners but was brought down by protests against a “community charge” – an issue acquiring political resonance when recast as a “Poll Tax”, a byword for injustice during the Peasants’ Revolt 600 years earlier. That earlier revolt arose from successful reactions by the knights of Edward III against demands to supplement the royal coffers; Horspool shows how, repeatedly, when groups higher up the social ladder reaped rewards from limited rebellions, they exposed those beneath them to greater depredations, as well as passing on examples of violent resistance. So revolt became a crucial undercurrent in the slow progress towards parliamentary democracy.

England’s rebels are illuminating, Horspool says, in the context of today’s “search for English identity, for what makes the English different … addressed with increasing urgency as Scottish, Welsh and Irish identity becomes ever more defined… A book about the Irish, Scottish or Indian rebel would tap into a well-recognised tradition”.

I have a deeply held belief that the Liberties of England are an ancient and ongoing project that has yet – if ever – to reach full fruition. As well as ‘revolt’ being ‘a crucial undercurrent in the slow progress towards parliamentary democracy‘ I think it still has an important part to play in the next phase of English politics. Indeed, in an age of uncertainty, would it be too much to hope that the English Rebel still walks among us?

The English Rebel

Review by Jackie Wullschlager

Published: August 10 2009 05:49 | Last updated: August 10 2009 05:49

// 0){if (nl.getElementsByTagName(“p”).length>= paraNum){nl.insertBefore(tb,nl.getElementsByTagName(“p”)[paraNum]);}else {if (nl.getElementsByTagName(“p”).length == 3){nl.insertBefore(tb,nl.getElementsByTagName(“p”)[2]);}else {nl.insertBefore(tb,nl.getElementsByTagName(“p”)[0]);}}}}
// ]]>The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking, from the Normans to the Nineties
By David Horspool
Viking £25, 432 pages