Author Archives: Ellen Hawley

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About Ellen Hawley

Fiction writer and blogger, living in Cornwall.

How natural do we want to be? It’s the news from Britain

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The Cumbria Nature Festival found itself in the awkward position of having to fend off prospective attendees who thought a nature festival was a naturists festival. 

What’s the difference? Naturist is a bit of linguistic trickery that keeps you from having to say nudist, a word that conjures up awkward images of nude people with–eek!–no clothes on. The word came into use sometime in the early 20th-century, when we don’t know who decided that a person without clothes might sound more respectable, or at least conjure up fewer images, if clothed people were reminded that being without clothing was natural.  

For whatever my opinion’s worth, I agree. It’s natural enough as long as it’s not, say, a chilly May evening, when I might change my mind. In warm weather, it’s not an issue I feel strongly about, although at my age I keep my clothes on in order not to frighten the neighbors.

To summarize, then: Naturists are people who like to run around without clothes. Naturalists are people who like to study nature. Humans are a strange species and English is a strange language, but I will defend it in a roundabout sort of way. I’ve picked up a bit of te reo Maori (the Maori language, she said showing off just a  bit), and one thing I’ve learned is that when you ask for the definition of a word, the answer’s likely to be, “It depends on the context.”  

Irrelevant photos: bluebells.

I grew up learning English, which doesn’t rely heavily on context, so I struggle with that. If I’d grown up learning Maori, it would seem natural. (No, not nude. Natural.) That’s not much of a defense of the logic of English but it’s the best I can do. I love it dearly but it’s a mess of a language.

In Cumbria, although the difference between naturists and naturalists doesn’t depend on the context. That’s baked into the language. What depends on context is the acceptability of showing up in the buff. This context demands clothing. 

In a Facebook post, festival organizers said, “After a recent enquiry we need to clarify – Cumbria Nature Festival is primarily aimed at NATURALISTS… not NATURISTS. Whilst we aim to be as inclusive as possible, and certainly do not judge anyone, we are aiming the event at wildlife enthusiasts. Please do dress appropriately.”

In other words, wear clothes. 

In case you’re not clear on this, We don’t judge anyone is a way of saying, Well, that’s weird.

The Nature Festival will gratefully refund the registration fee of anyone who’s not happy with a dress code that asks them to dress.

 

If we all have our clothes on, can we practice a few swearwords?

A group of academics from the University of Sheffield, led by Chris Montgomery and the art project Modern Toss, is collecting regional swearwords before the homogenization of the language wipes them out. They’re particularly interested in words that are recognized in one region and unknown outside it. They may reflect local history and the identity of their communities–or so the article I borrowed this from says. 

What have they got so far? Arl arse, from Liverpool. Bampot, from  Glasgow. Radgie bastard from the northeast of England.

They’d like us all to understand that the project isn’t about promoting offensive language, just about studying the language as it’s spoken. You’re invited to contribute a word but you have to promise not to enjoy it.

 

And since we’re talking about academic studies

This has nothing to do with Britain, but you know better than to think I’ll play by the rules: As part of a study of misinformation, a team of wiseacres from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, uploaded two studies of a nonexistent skin condition, bixonimania, to see if AI would read about the condition down and spit it back out as a serious medical diagnosis. The studies were attributed to a fake author, Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, whose fake photograph was created with–of course–AI.

Did the bots fall for it? Of course they did. Within weeks, the condition was loose in the world and before long it was being cited in peer-reviewed literature–in other words, serious scientific work–without anyone seeming to notice that the condition didn’t exist. Or that the mania part of its name came from the psychiatric field, which isn’t typical of skin conditions. Or that the author worked at a nonexistent university in a nonexistent city and that one acknowledgement thanks “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise.” Or that the papers were funded by “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This work is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad.”

Ah, you say, but how many people read to the end of an academic paper? Maybe we should cut them some slack. 

Nope, we shouldn’t. The body of the paper has a hint or two that a careful reader might notice. Things like, “This entire paper is made up,” and, “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group.”

It begins to look like nobody citing the paper bothered to read it. 

Meanwhile, out in what passes for the real world, various brands of AI said things like, “Bixonimania is indeed an intriguing and relatively rare condition,” and “Bixonimania is a condition caused by excessive exposure to blue light.” One advised people to visit an ophthalmologist. I’m sure at least one person did and I send my sympathies to the ophthalmologist. 

Those quotes were from 2024. By 2026 AI was wising up. Partly. Chat GPT called it “probably a made-up, fringe, or pseudoscientific label.” But a few days later, it said, “Bixonimania is a proposed new subtype of periorbital melanosis (dark circles around the eyes) thought to be associated with exposure to blue light from digital screens” and Microsoft Copilot said it “is not a widely recognized medical diagnosis yet, but several emerging papers and case reports discuss it as a benign, misdiagnosed condition linked to prolonged exposure to bluelight sources such as screens.”

 

How to greet a royal visitor

If you ever wanted to be at the head of the British royal family, this would be a good time to reconsider. The actual head of the family, best known as the king, drew a card out of the deck and it said, “Pay a state visit to Donald Trump.”

Sadly, this isn’t a game where you can bury your card at the bottom of the deck and draw another. Lo, even if you offer to skip seven turns for seven games and leave your heirs to deal with the results. 

But don’t spend all your time feeling sorry for Charles. Spare a bit of pity for some poor schmuck in Washington who was told to put up British flags around the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and ended up hoisting fifteen Australian flags. 

They’ve all been taken down and replaced. If you listen carefully, you can hear someone muttering that one foreign country looks pretty much like another so how’s any sane person be expected to tell them apart?

Rewriting history: King Harold, King Harald, and not-yet-king William

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Let’s re-write a bit of English history. Not because it doesn’t match our politics or the color of the couch but because some pesky historian’s gone and dug up new material, calling the old story into question. 

 

The old story

If your history lessons included the Battle of Hastings (mine didn’t), you’ll have a kneejerk reaction to the date 1066, when Harold, last of the Anglo-Saxon kings, lost his crown–not to mention his life–to William, first of the Norman kings.

The way you will have been taught the story is that before Harold fought William he marched his troops way the hell north to fight off an invasion by a different Harald, Harald of Norway. The different spellings almost help a person tell them apart but you can call the second one Harald Hardrada if that makes it easier.

Edward the Confessor, as seen in the Bayeux Tapestry. He’s smiling because he won’t be around when the shit starts to fly.. He’s not mentioned in the post, but he–or at least his death and his lack of a son–are the backstory to the Norman invasion.

The English Harold beat the Norwegian Harald and got a minute or two to pop champagne corks and celebrate before he had to march his troops back down the length of the country to fight off a second invasion, this one by the Normans. So off they slog to the south coast.

By the time they got there, Harold’s troops were tired, they were crabby, and energy drinks were centuries in the future. Not even tea was available. So they lost the battle. End of England as an Anglo-Saxon country. Beginning of Norman England.

You can call that march an impressive bit of generalship or you can call Harold a damn fool for fighting William before his men had time to rest. Historians have done both. 

Now, though, a new theory from historian Tom Licence offers to overturn the old one. It says Harold’s troops didn’t march at all. They sailed. 

 

They did what?

The Norman invasion was no sneak attack. Even in an era without Ring doorbells and without CCTV tucked into every holly bush, William couldn’t put his fleet together without half the known world knowing what he was up to. It was too big an operation. So Harold (that’s the English one) spent the summer waiting for him on the south coast, with both an army and a fleet of ships. And during all that time, nothing happened. In September, he had them pack it in and– 

Well, here’s where the old and the new theory divide. The old one holds that the ships sailed back to  their home ports. That’s based on a line in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the best reliable source from an era notably short on reliable sources. “After the fleet came home,” it says. 

If that means they went to their home ports, Harold would’ve been pretty well shipless when news came that Harald Hardrada–remember him?–was invading up north.

The Chronicle does refer to Harold–that’s the English Harold–having a fleet on the River Wharfe, which is south of York and roughly the right area for this fight, but it’s been widely understood to mean some force he’d thrown together in a hurry. It would’ve had to be. The fleet had gone home. So after the battle and in the absence of ships, the only way for Harold to get his troops south was a long, hurried march. 

 

The new theory

Licence argues that he had ships. A Chronicle entry from 1052 mentions the fleet going “homeward to London.” Home was London. Backing up the argument, two early accounts in Latin have Harold sending a fleet against William at Hastings. Historians of the long march school haven’t known what to do with them. 

None of the texts say Harold marched his troops. They also don’t say he sailed them. All they say is that he “moved” them. But they do say he sent ships–hundreds of them–against William. It’s tempting to take a leap–as Licence does–and decide that those were the ships Harold had up north, and that he might’ve added some captured Viking ships to his fleet, since 300 sailed to England and only 24 made it back to Norway. 

My math may be terrible but even I can spot a difference there. 

Given that in either version of the story Harold gets shot in the eye with an arrow and William becomes the new king, does it matter?

Yes. Also no. It probably matters most if you’re a historian. If the new theory convinces you, you’ll now be looking for other ways to explain why Harold lost to William once exhaustion and a lack of caffeine are ruled out. But it also matters if you want to think about the wrong answers you had to memorize in order to graduate from whatever you graduated from. Stuff like that can keep us humble. Or it can keep us smug. 

Your choice. 

 

And speaking of things my history textbooks left out

In 1816, the relatively young United States was worried about a British attack from across the Canadian border, so it built a fort on Lake Champlain.  A year or two later, somebody thought to do a new survey and the fort turned out to be entirely inside Canada.

Construction stopped, the site was abandoned, and the building materials were scavenged by people building homes. I can’t help thinking that fingers were pointed and blame was cast, quite possibly at the least responsible people.

Then in 1842 treaty gave the site and a few other bits and pieces to the US, which constructed a second fort on the first site and named it Fort Montgomery, after a Revolutionary War soldier who was killed during a 1775 invasion of Canada that I never heard of before today. The original fort was never named but is unofficially known as Fort Blunder.

Britain’s Suez moment

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When the US (and Israel, but it’s very much in parentheses here) dropped bombs on Iran and didn’t pull the victory it was expecting out of fate’s grab-bag, a number of British papers asked, Is this America’s Suez moment? I doubt US papers asked that, since (stereotype alert) Americans can’t be counted on to know what the hell the Suez Crisis was. Why should they? It was someone else’s crisis. it happened way back there in history, and we don’t do history in the US–at least not much and not well. 

Which is a shame, because it’s the kind of comparison that makes a person think about–oh, you know, the last gasp of a dying empire, an impaired head of state, that kind of thing. 

But don’t think about it too long, because whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. (If you’re old enough, you remember that from a poster on someone’s wall, and it seemed hopelessly profound.)

Of course, it’s entirely possible that even if the universe is unfolding as it should, that doesn’t mean it gives a rip about our welfare. We may turn out to be disposable.

Have I cheered you up yet? Good.Let’s talk about what a Suez moment consists of.

Irrelevant photo: Either an ornamental cherry (that’s my bet) or a plum tree (that’s from my phone’s plant identification app).

The Suez Crisis

In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal. It had been built in 1869, when Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire. Then in the late 19th century, the country–canal and all–came under British control and in 1914 became a protectorate, which is a politely uncolonial name for a colony. In 1922 it became independent, although British influence “remained significant,” as the BBC ever so diplomatically puts it, emanating the polite scent of eau de colony. 

That significant involvement explains the years of anti-British riots that followed, along with a coup and finally a new and uncolonized government. But we’ll skip all that–sorry; we’re in a hurry–and pick up again when the last British soldiers poured the sand out of their boots and left. Egypt was now not only independent, it wanted to nationalize that canal. It planned to pay for it, but still. 

Cue sounds of outrage, please, especially from Britain and France, who’d been running the canal.

While negotiations over the fate of the canal plodded on (negotiations are so boring), Britain, France, and Israel planned an invasion, then jumped from plan to practice. Israel invaded, giving Britain and France an excuse to invade and demand that both the Israeli and Egyptian troops step away from the canal. Aren’t Britain and France acting nobly and peacefully by protecting it? 

According to the plan, this would be enough to pull the US in. 

 

Meanwhile, in reality

From the start, the British were short on ships and landing craft, and when it added tanks to the invasion force it had to hire a commercial outfit to move them to the embarkation point because it didn’t have any whatever it took of its own. The National Army Museum calls the commercial outfit a removals firm–the kind of company you’d call if you were moving from, say, London to Birmingham and didn’t have room for all your stuff in your car, but instead of moving a couch, a bed, and a file cabinet, the armed forces were asking if the company could move a few tanks, please.  No, not many.  Just, you know, the normal amount.

Once it solved the tank problem, Britain had to change its landing point because it didn’t have enough landing craft, making it sound like they were short not just on equipment but on people who knew how to plan as well. 

In spite of all that, militarily speaking the invasion went well. Israel invaded, stopped short of the canal, and waited for the British and French to show up, which they did, breezing past the Egyptian troops.

It was on the diplomatic side that things fell apart. Instead of being pulled in, the US put its hands in its pockets and chewed bubble gum. For one thing, Eisenhower (remember him? US president back in the stone age?) had just denounced the Soviet Union for invading Hungary. Following that with an invasion of Egypt would be awkward. And for another thing he could see where the US getting involved in Egypt could draw in the Soviet Union, which would be dangerous. 

That left Britain nose to nose with some consequences it hadn’t expected. In a Gulf of Hormuz moment, Britain’s oil supply was stuck on the wrong side of the canal. Its financial system was stretched thin. When it asked the International Monetary Fund for a loan, the US refused unless it agreed to a ceasefire. The US also threatened to sell its sterling bond holdings, which could’ve devalued the pound and undermined Britain’s foreign exchange reserves.

If that wasn’t enough, public protests in Britain were large enough that the government couldn’t pretend not to see them.

Britain and France backed down. Israel went home. A ceasefire came into effect at the moment when November 6 became November 7 (the invasion had started on October 30) and the United Nations granted Egypt sovereignty over the canal.

It all proved that the UK could no longer play with the big kids–the US and the Soviet Union.

 

Who was in charge in Britain?

The prime minister who led Britain into and through this mess was the Conservative Anthony Eden. Eden had been in the background for years, waiting for his turn to be prime minister. (The English are big on waiting in line and taking their turn.) He was urbane and charming, according to the Financial Times. He’d been foreign secretary in three different decades, and he was Churchill’s acknowledged successor. The problem was that Churchill wasn’t in any hurry to see his successor success, and by the time he did, in 1955,  Eden’s health had gone sour and he was angry and unpredictable and drug-addled. He took barbiturates to help him sleep and  pethidine, a morphine derivative, only hours before cabinet meeting, then Drinamyl, a relative of amphetamine to pick him back up. 

Drinamyl’s side effects include impaired judgement and loss of “contact with  reality.” To use a medical term, he was a mess. 

But we were comparing the Suez Crisis with Operation Epic Fuckup. Since Donald Trump deals only in superlatives, we could argue–convincingly, I think–that he’s in worse shape than Eden was. As far as I know, he doesn’t need drugs, prescription or otherwise, to lose touch with reality. He can do that all by himself, and better than any human ever has. What’s more, no prime minister or president before him has ever tweeted a picture of himself as Jesus healing the sick. None of them ever accused the pope of being soft on crime. In fact, none of them ever thought the pope was in charge of fighting crime. 

If there’s an advantage to living in a country led by a drug addict, it’s that they can, at least in theory, stop using drugs. Someone whose loss of contact with reality is self-induced is less likely to return. 

 

Britain’s Suez moment

The Suez Crisis marked the end of Britain as an imperial power and as a player on the world stage. It also marked the end of Eden’s career. He was replaced by Harold Macmillan, who reduced the size and expense of Britain’s armed forces and ended National Service–what Americans would call the draft.

When those newspaper headlines I mentioned all those many paragraphs ago asked about the US’s Suez moment, I don’t think they were suggesting the Iraq War will necessarily bring Trump down. Not yet, anyway, if I read the tea leaves correctly. (Tea leaves are annoyingly hard to read, so don’t place any bets based on my predictions. Or if you do, don’t blame me if you get skunked.) They were talking about the kind of turning point where everyone notices that a major power is now playing in the safer corner of the playground, where the younger kids cluster together and hope the big kids don’t notice them.

Lettuce, sewage, and the far right: is Britain really broken?

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The far right likes to claim that Britain’s broken. To fix it, we need to go back to those glory days of empire, when black and brown people hadn’t been invented, when the working class was satisfactorily impoverished, when the world paid due homage to Britain’s et cetera and spectacularly so forth. As it still should.

Q: Is Britain really broken? 

A: Having spent 14 consecutive years as a Conservative Party plaything, it’s got a few dings and chips–they’re hard on their toys–but if you go online and buy a used country, you have to expect that. 

You’ll notice that when I said “14 consecutive years” that left out Margaret Thatcher, who not only carved her initials into her desk but into a lot of other people’s as well. The thing is, her term wasn’t part of that consecutive run, plus I didn’t live here then, so I wasn’t taking notes. I also left out Tony Blair because he was from the Labour Party, not the Conservatives, so he’d mess up my neat organizational strategy. If we’re being fair, though, which we’re clearly not, both belong on the list.

But back to our question: No, Britain’s not broken. It starts, even in the cold, and it’ll get you where you need to go. And back. Without a tow truck. Mostly. See above, though, for dings and chips. 

Irrelevant photo: Canada geese on the Bud Canal.

Still, it’s always more fun to write about what goes wrong than what goes right. Think about it. If nothing ever went wrong, you’d wipe out literature, comedy, and journalism. Sure, you’d still have shoe sizes and carrot sticks, but as a general rule keeping a focus on the negative is culturally uplifting. So if I focus on the negative bits from the news, it’s because it’s good for us. I’m keeping the culture alive.

Translation: the country isn’t ready for the scrapheap, but it could use some serious repair. Which it doesn’t seem to be getting. And the people who yell that it’s broken will only break more pieces. 

Any questions before I go on?

 

Sewage

England lives with the joys of privatized water companies, thanks to Maggie Thatcher. And not just privatized, but lightly regulated, because regulation is bad for us. You know: red tape, government stranglehold, all that stuff. So the water companies were going to more or less regulate themselves. 

How’s that worked? Well, last year England’s rivers and seas were the proud recipients of raw sewage on 291,492 occasions.

Would we prefer cooked sewage? 

I don’t care if we’re doing a lot of Q and A today, I’m not answering that question. I only used the phrase because when you write about sewage releases you somehow have to add “raw.” Always. It’s the same thing with death. In Britain, if you’re going to say someone died, you have to add “sadly.” Maybe that hints at a culture where people need repeated instruction on how to feel about a death. Or maybe it’s so listeners won’t think the speaker’s gloating. I don’t know. I’m an outsider here. All I can do is report. I can’t even come close to explaining.

In the interest of accuracy, though, I should add that this applies to newscasters. I can’t swear that it applies to all normal humans or to AI.

But back to raw sewage: Emergency dumping is allowed after (or maybe that’s during, or both) storms and heavy rain, but last year was a dry one, and parts of the country were in a full-on drought. Still dump sewage the water companies did.

All of this is a slow moving scandal, the kind that rolls on from year to year  causing outrage but not much change. Company execs get their bonuses in addition to their salaries. The government bans bonuses. The water companies call the money something else and it still ends up in executive pockets. That’s change that changes nothing. Stockholders make money. The companies rack up huge debts. People pay more for their water. 

Public calls to re-nationalize the companies get massive support and the government blushes becomingly and explains how difficult it would be to do that. Shareholders would have to be compensated. Debts would have to be paid off. Right-wing newspapers would have to be placated. Money would have to be invested in infrastructure, which has been ignored since the Bronze (or possibly Victorian, or Thatcherite) Age, and hey, it would all cost money. Better to stick with the devil we know, raw sewage and all.

Besides, nationalization isn’t a good look with the outfit we’re wearing today.

 

The rightwing fringe

How fares Britain’s rightwing fringe?

Oddly, thank you. First off, it’s not clear whether it’s the fringe or the rug at this point. It has a gift for unraveling things, so before long it’s hard to tell which one we’re looking at. Second, it’s fighting with itself. 

And here I used to think only the left did that. Thanks, guys, you restore my faith in humanity.

What am I talking about? The US-based Conservative Political Action Conference decided to hold a replica event in Britain. That makes a kind of sense. The US is full of replicas: an Eiffel Tower in Tennessee; another one in Texas; a third one in Michigan; three more in other states but I get  bored easily so let’s move on. A Parthenon in Tennessee. Venice’s Grand Canal in Nevada and London Bridge (real–dismantled, reassembled, and complete with water that’s not from the Thames and therefore may lack the verisimilitude of raw sewage) in Arizona. 

The last two attractions–both water-based–are in the desert. You know about deserts: places defined by a lack of water. But we don’t let either geography or reality get in our way back in my original home country. 

So if the US is a country that has no problem with replicas, why not make a model of a political conference that has a kind of logic (however batty) in the context in its native country and assemble it in a country where it has no roots or history?

And while we’re at it, why not ask that country’s shortest-serving prime minister, also known as Liz Truss, to host it? 

Why was she the shortest-serving? Because she crashed the economy in just 45 days and was once chased off stage by a picture of a head of lettuce. * 

And while we’re at it,  why shouldn’t she announce the replica event not in Britain, where it will be assembled, but in Texas? 

What’s the point of the conference? By way of a spokesperson, Truss has promised that she’ll be “bringing together conservatives from all parties” so she can save “woke” Britain from “terminal decline.” 

I don’t usually use quotation marks if I’m only borrowing a word or two–they’re pricey, those quotation marks, and there’ve been problems importing them ever since the Straits of Hormuz closed–but I want to make it clear that I’m not saying this stuff to make fun of her. She does that on her own. And to do her justice, Truss does know a fair bit about terminal decline. 

To date, both the old-guard Conservative Party and the fringier Reform UK have vocally made no plans to attend. So much for bringing all parties together. 

That won’t stop Truss. If she has to, she’ll hold the conference alone and represent that full spectrum of rightwing thought. 

“What I’m working on now is how do we build the infrastructure,” she said. “How do we build the equivalent of a Maga movement–a Mega movement. Make England great again.”

Notice the wording there, because it matters. That’s England. Meaning she doesn’t expect Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland–all part of the country she so briefly governed–to be great again. 

Were they once great? 

Dunno. You’ll have to ask Liz, who’ll probably tell you that MEGA works but MESNIWGA doesn’t have the same ring. She probably won’t tell you she just forgot about them.

You might also ask how many votes that slogan’s going to get her in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. But do not look at the lettuce behind the curtain. 

*

That mention (missed it? it was a few paragraphs back) of US politics gives me an excuse to talk more about US politics, which are quickly outrunning satire and landing deep inside the realm of nightmare and hallucination. But first, the opposite of a disclaimer: This comes from a reputable source, the New York Times. 

They not only didn’t run it on April Fool’s Day, the Independent reprinted it. On April 4.  So whatever practical jokes or hallucinations are involved, they’re not mine and they’re not the newspapers’.

Gregg Phillips is the head of the Office of Response and Recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA to its friends) and a Trump backer. The office he heads has more than 1,000 employees, a budget of nearly $300 million, and a central role in FEMA’s job of responding to hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and other disasters. He’s appeared on podcasts and social media talking about assorted conspiracy theories and using what’s described as violent language about Joe Biden. 

These days that barely gets you a mention, but what did get him a headline or two was when he went on a podcast and said that–let’s quote the Times here–“on two occasions, he had somehow found himself being moved, by forces beyond his control, dozens of miles from two different starting points in Georgia.

“‘Teleporting is no fun,’ he said.” 

Fun or not, he described it as a miracle performed by god. 

Are there miracles performed by other-than-god? I wouldn’t have thought so, but what do I know? 

Either way, the forces took him to a Waffle House–a 24-hour-a-day restaurant–in Rome, Georgia. And there was me thinking miracles had some sort of point to them. You know, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, not leading the well-fed to a breakfast that I can only assume he had to pay for himself since god, like the late queen, doesn’t carry money. 

But that’s me making assumptions again. 

The Times, with the journalistic equivalent of a straight face, interviewed Waffle House staff and customers.

Let’s quote the Times again. They do this better than I can: One server “said she was once punched in the face by a customer. She saw someone overdose in the bathroom. One night, a man took all the steak knives and threatened the staff with them.

“But she has never seen anyone teleport to the place. ‘I’ve seen it all . . . but I’ve never seen that.’”

And the customers? One said, “I can say I’ve been drunk and ended up in a Waffle House. Don’t know how I got there. But I was there.”

When you stop laughing, give a moment’s thought to the context here: what the Times calls “a growing trend among high-profile American conservatives to assert the physical presence of beings from the spiritual realm, or from provinces that are often reserved for science fiction novelists.”

If you have an umbrella, keep it close at hand, friends. It’s getting crazy out there.

 

But let’s go back to Britain . . .

for a different type of surreal politics. Britain’s electoral system creates a space for something called paper candidates–candidates whose names are on the ballot but who don’t campaign and don’t expect their party to campaign for them. They also don’t expect to win.

What’s the point? To quote a Green Party website, having a certain number of candidates makes the party “eligible to have a Party election broadcast on prime time television and to guarantee coverage in Regional broadcast news items.”

But this isn’t about the Greens, it’s about Reform UK, on the opposite end of the spectrum. Reform has been calling people who signed up to get email updates, asking if they’d be paper candidates. People they know so little about that they left messages for members of other parties and, most embarrassingly, for a Guardian journalist. The Guardian‘s on the other end of the political spectrum and guaranteed to (a) laugh its ass off and then (b) go public with the invitation.

Usually, the Guardian explained as it went public, parties ask “their own known members to stand without doing any campaigning – rather than approaching unknown members of the public through phone calls.”

The five main parties contending in the upcoming local elections–Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, Reform, and the Greens–are unusually close, meaning it’s not out of the question for a paper candidate to win. And to wake up the morning after the votes are counted with something considerably worse than a hangover.

——————-

* Why was I going on about lettuce when I wrote about Liz Truss? As’ Liz’s grasp on power became visibly shakier, some genius of a journalist set a live-cam on a head of lettuce wearing a blond wig to see if it would outlast Truss. It did. I don’t know if she even eats salad anymore. 

How to tell the dead from the living: it’s the news from Britain–and elsewhere

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The good thing about Notes not being a newspaper is that when I’m eight or ten months late with a news story I can shrug my shoulders and run it anyway. So here we go: shrug; run.

Back in August of 2025, the central leadership of the Reform UK Party imposed Sharon Carby on its Croydon branch as their candidate in the mayoral elections. According to the London Economic, she was accepted (or shrugged in–I wasn’t there, the article doesn’t say, and I haven’t seen the minutes) by a crowd numbering in the single figures. Possibly even in the high single figures. 

As a candidate, Carby had two things–

Let’s start that over. As a candidate, Carby had at least two things against her. One, she was from Bradford, which was and still is 241 miles away. Five days a week and that commute would kill you. Two, and more problematically, the commute didn’t stand a chance: she’d been dead for 6 months when she was nominated. 

Irrelevant photo: Swans on the Bude Canal

It’s not clear how long it took the party to notice that she was no longer breathing, but once they did they made the responsible move and advertised for a replacement candidate. They must not have found one, because when I looked up the list of candidates, Reform didn’t have anyone on the list.

Still, I can’t help imagining them going through the applicants and one of them saying to the others, “We’ve got a live one here.”

So what is Reform UK? It’s a new and (you might’ve figured this part out already) chaotic right-wing party held together with tape, chewing gum, and high-profile refugees from the Conservative Party. The Conservatives are sinking as rapidly as a small island nation, hence the flow of refugees. Reform’s also–or primarily–held together by grinning photos of its cigar-wielding founder.   

Reform’s politics are anti-refugee (except for those from the Conservative Party), pro-culture wars, pro-Trump, and anti-wasteful spending, although where it’s won local elections it’s had a hard time locating the waste it vowed to cut and the savings it was going to make have been even more elusive. They’ve been known (more than once) to raise the taxes they vowed to cut. They have breakthrough moments of open racism, then remember they’re not in office yet, slosh a bit of paint over them, and go back to their core message. If they end up in government, the joke will turn sour very fast, but in the meantime they’re a gift to satirists everywhere. It’s very much a one-personality party, and people who went to school with its Prime Personality have told the press that he was known for harassing Jewish and brown students and saying things like, “Hitler was right.” A little paint, though, and you’d hardly notice. 

More recently than eight or ten months ago, Reform suspended a candidate in Scotland when he turned out to have been “struck off as a company director.” To translate that, he was caught with his hand in a cookie jar containing Covid grants. Thousands of pounds transferred themselves mysteriously into his personal account.

Other candidates have made assorted islamophobic comments and wild claims about refugees. One mayoral candidate called members of a Jewish neighborhood watch group “Islamists on horseback” and sprayed other offensive and largely incoherent comments in assorted other directions. He’s been suspended.

It’s a funny thing, but antisemitism is politically toxic at the moment, but islamophobia isn’t, so the same people who would once have told you Jews are what’s wrong with your life and country now tell you that Muslims are. 

I’m Jewish, so don’t tell me I’m antisemitic for saying that. Believe me, if they get enough power, they’ll go after Jews as well.

And no, to the best of my knowledge the neighborhood watch group wasn’t using horses.

 

Lessons on telling the living from the dead

Not everyone has trouble telling the living from the dead. A newspaper clipping from the 1938 Oregonian resurfaced recently and has been making the rounds in assorted inappropriate places. It tells the tale of Charles Keville, who “walked into a temporary morgue and looked at a body that had been identified as his.

“‘Nope,’ he said. ‘That ain’t me,’ ” and out he walked.

He did not, to the best of my knowledge, go on to run for mayor. 

I have made no effort to find out if the article’s real. If it isn’t true, I don’t want to know. 

 

Why don’t I write about Keir Starmer?

What, the current prime minister? Because he bores me. Even when he makes me want to scream or throw things at the TV–and those are regular occurrences–he’s still boring. Making jokes about him is like throwing rocks at a ghost. The two objects–rock and prime minister–operate on different metaphysical planes. 

I’m not sure what metaphysical planes are exactly, but I do know that the laws of physics (or maybe that’s the laws of science fiction, or occult studies) won’t let them intersect.

Being rock-proof and joke-proof doesn’t make Starmer politically attackproof, however. His party (Labour) might’ve replaced him by now if he hadn’t purged it so thoroughly when he became its leader. It doesn’t have a lot of prime-ministerial replacement parts on hand anymore. The most likely remaining replacement part is trapped in Manchester’s mayoral office, where he’s not eligible to lead the party. You have to be a member of parliament to do that. When he tried to leave the mayor’s office and for an open parliamentary seat, Starmer locked him in Manchester and ate the key. 

A couple of other replacement parts are available but it’s not clear that they’re a good fit. They might clash with the wallpaper at 11 Downing Street, where prime ministers live if they don’t live at number 10. Let’s not get into that. What matters is that Boris Johnson famously redecorated it when he was in office, spending an obscene amount of money (that he eventually had to pay back) on wallpaper that you couldn’t pay me to stay in a room with. After he resigned, it was painted over and finally taken down when it began to peel. Its ghost, however, haunts the halls of both residences, so the next prime minister has to be able to live with that. 

That leaves Starmer ghosting on, not quite politically alive but not politically dead. 

In fact, both established parties, Labour and Conservative, are ghostly right now. The Conservatives, having proved their incompetence when they ran the country, came out of this last election looking like wool socks after a hot wash, and Labour came out with a huge majority in Parliament, which it’s used to demonstrate that it has no idea what to do next. It’s made up for that by borrowing anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Conservatives and Reform UK, which gained them no votes but alienated past supporters. It’s also done untold damage to immigrants’ lives, but hell, they were only immigrants, right? So who cares.

That leaves two upstart parties, Reform (we did that one) and the Greens, which has a new left populist leader and just picked up an MP in an election Labour should’ve won–and might’ve if its most promising candidate hadn’t been locked in Manchester.

And of course we have the Liberal Democrats, which isn’t a new party but–

Y’know, the clearest thing anyone’s said to me about the Lib Dems is that no one knows what they stand for. But they’ve picked up votes too. We’ve reached a point where not knowing what a party stands for looks appealing. A recent voter survey showed a lot of people picking their candidates according to who they most want to keep out of office, not who they want in.

 

One lone immigrant finds a welcome

In spite of the anti-immigrant furor on both sides of the Atlantic, a 2-year-old male fox slipped onto a cargo ship in Southampton–that’s in England; you’ll find it on the south end of the map–and disembarked in New York, where t was welcomed. Four government agencies went into high gear and not only got him safely off the ship but found him a temporary home at the Bronx Zoo. When last heard of, he was settled in and doing well. A few more agency-types were searching for a permanent home.

The moral of the story seems to be that if you really, truly need to move to another country, grow fur. 

 

Meta turns to AI and . . . 

This is irrelevant, but I love a good story about artificial intelligence fucking up, and if you’ve been around a while you know irrelevance is no problem here at Notes.

An engineer at Meta couldn’t solve a problem and turned to AI for a solution. The engineer followed its instructions and–wheee–caused a two-hour security breach. 

What kind of security breach? If anybody’s saying, they’re not telling me. Meta says user data wasn’t leaked. Meta says a human could’ve made the same mistake. Meta says we should go play outside and not bother the grownups when they’re busy making us safe.

It occurs to me that we’re living at a turning point in history and you’d think that would be interesting. Or terrifying. Or, well, you know, something. Not only is artificial intelligence on the verge of changing our lives in we’re-not-sure-what way, but we’re also seeing manic right-wing parties turning their rhetorical fire hoses on immigrants while responsible middle-of-the-road parties shut immigrants out because they’re afraid they’ll be tossed out of office if they don’t match or outdo the manic right wing. We’re watching–or turning away–while Israel starves Gaza and in Lebanon targets not just civilians but medics  specifically. We’re watching a doddering old man bomb the hell out of Iran and the world economy because the people who would stop him can’t and the people who just might be able to won’t try.

And so on and merrily so forth. I’ve been around a long time, my friends, and I’ll testify that this is not the usual state of things. It’s all coming unglued.

Meanwhile, most of us plod on, doing whatever it is we do with our lives, which in my case involves talking most mornings about how the dog’s walking (he has a bad back, so the conversation kind of makes sense), and whether the cats came for breakfast. You know, all the earthshaking stuff that, taken together, makes up a life. The sun rises. The sun sets. You’d hardly know anything’s changing except that prices keep going up and everything’s coming unglued. Other than that, though–

The Glorious Revolution, a couple of religions, and a warming pan

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Let’s start with a recap to make sure we know when we are. The Civil Wars are over (Parliament won). Charles I–he was king before the Civil Wars–is dead and Oliver Cromwell became the Non-King after him, but he’s dead too and (one of history’s minor details) Cromwell the Sequel (Oliver’s son) proved unconvincing, opening the way for Charles the Sequel (Charles II to his friends) to become king in 1660. So we’ve had regicide, civil war, more civil war, exile, hide and seek, and some time off to mow the lawn and drink lemonade.

Are we caught up? Good, because when we’re studying English history it’s important to pretend we care about the order of the kings and queens. It gives us–. Nah, let’s start that over: It gives one the illusion that one knows something, or at least it gives one the ability to make other people think one does, which is more important. If one can say all that in Latin–even agonizingly bad Latin; just ask Boris Johnson–one appears to know even more. But now that one has done the order-of-kings-and-some-lemonade bit, one can forget about it and get to the fun stuff.

Irrelevant photo: sunrise

The fun stuff

One is dropping into crazy times here, so for no apparent reason one will stay with the present tense.

Everyone in Britain suspects that Charles the Sequel is Catholic, but he keeps his opinions to himself so no one has proof. The Church of England is the official church–all that Puritan, ultra-Protestant stuff that happened in between the Charleses has been packed in a trunk and stashed in the attic where only some crazy aunt knows about it–and whether he believes what the Church of England teaches or not, he’s still its head. Which is pretty bizarre, if you think about it for too long, so let’s not.

Religious gatherings of more than five people are banned unless they’re Church of England-approved gatherings. And that ban doesn’t just cover Catholic gatherings, it also covers more Protestantly Protestant ones. No one’s forgotten that religious change isn’t about walking quietly past one church to go to another (or, gasp, to none at all) on a rainy Sunday morning. (I was going to write “sunny,” but this is England.) Religious change is about arrests, wars, hangings, burnings, torment, death, civil war—

Okay, you get the picture: People are on edge. Understandably. Then Charles’s brother James, who’s also Charles’s heir since Charles and his missus haven’t produced an heir in the form of their own tiny baby, converts to Catholicism. Openly.

Everyone is now on a sharper edge.

 

Conspiracies

Then in 1678, a Church of England clergyman, Titus Oates, announces that Catholics are plotting to assassinate Charles and put James on the throne. Cue hysterical reactions, please. Thirty-five people (give or take a few) are executed. After they’re completely and entirely dead, the case against them falls apart. Oates is sued for libel and loses. Later on, he’s convicted of perjury and pilloried, flogged, and jailed. After that, he’s un-jailed and given a pension, although he can’t be unflogged or unpilloried any more than the dead can be unexecuted. Then he becomes a Baptist. Then he’s expelled from the Baptist Church. Then he dies in obscurity.

No one yet knows what the official religion of Obscurity is.

To understand why people are willing to believe Oates’s accusations without examining them, consider the two Treaties of Dover that Charles signed. One is official and one is secret. The official one’s dull and we’ll skip it. In the secret one, he agrees to convert to Catholicism and to back (Catholic) France’s war against the (Protestant) Dutch. In return, France will provide him with enough money that he won’t have to deal with that pesky parliament.

It’s the sort of thing that erases the line between reason and paranoia, leaving people prey to crazed conspiracy theories, although in our enlightened age we struggle to understand how people could happen.

Charles converts to Catholicism on his deathbed, leaving the country to work out its own problems. He figures he’s going to heaven and has no further need for France’s support or Parliament’s or anyone else’s.

So let’s settle in with James the Sequel, who (do I have to remind you of everything?) is Charles the Sequel’s Catholic brother. You can call him James II if you prefer. Or, if you’re in Scotland, James VII, because the kings of England, at this point, are also the kings of Scotland but Scotland introduced the James brand long before England did and that gave them time to work in extra Jameses. Lots of extra Jameses. In fact, they invented the brand, so James has two numbers after his name, one for each country. On days when his ego’s particularly inflated, he adds them up and tells the mirror he’s James IX.

He’s also the king of Ireland, but Ireland doesn’t get consulted about this, or about which number it likes better.

If you think that’s complicated, imagine how you’d feel if I told you numbers worked differently in Scotland.

 

The proto-parties

James’s Parliament is divided into two loose groupings that haven’t condensed into parties yet. One is happy about him being king because after all he is the king and that makes everything okay. The other isn’t happy because he is the king and, look, he’s Catholic.

The two groupings call each other Whigs and Tories. Both words are insults.

Tory comes from Ireland and means outlaw, highwayman. It’s used to describe the Irish Catholics who’ve been kicked off their land by English settlers and end up living as outlaws because they need to eat and what else are they going to do? The word has overtones of Catholicism, so the non-Tories pick it up to insult the MPs who support James, even though the parliamentary Tories aren’t Catholic, they’re high-church Anglican conservatives.

It’s a bitter kind of joke, but it’s a bitter kind of time.

Does it seem like we’re always dropping in on bitter times? That’s when the interesting stuff happens. Have you noticed how interesting our own times are getting?

Yup, I’m scared too.

Whig comes from Scotland and originally means someone who drives his horses to Leith to buy corn. You can see the connection, right? Or it may mean that. It’s all a little murky and depends on what sources you consult. (Sorry, I’ve lost my links here, both the ones on the internet and the ones in my brain.) From driving horses to Leith, it comes to mean a cattle driver. Or in some tellings, a cattle thief. Then it becomes a less than complimentary name for a Scots Presbyterian, which is why it becomes the less than complimentary name for the group of more Protestantly Protestant MPs who wanted to keep James from becoming king on the grounds that (I know, I’m repeating myself but the issue loops through endlessly) he’s Catholic. The word whig is associated with religious nonconformity, rebellion, and MPs who think they have the power to deny an heir the throne.

 

Heirs Protestant and Catholic

Although by now it’s too late to deny James the throne. The kingly hind end is planted firmly on the fancy symbolic chair that everyone agrees only monarchs get to occupy. Uneasy as the Whigs are about that, they mostly just mutter under their breath. It could be worse: James doesn’t have a son and his heir is his grown daughter, who’s Protestant, so as soon as he dies a Protestant will be back on the throne. And another Protestant daughter waits in the wings in case Protestant Daughter One Point Oh! dies. So mutter, mutter, mutter, it’ll all be okay eventually.

Except that James does several things that increase the volume on the mutterbox. After he puts down a rebellion (Monmouth, and it’s interesting but we’re skipping it anyway), he refuses to disband the army that did the downputting. And not only do standing armies still make people nervous, if this army stays standing, James could fill it with Catholics.

Then he boots an assortment of powerful people out of office and brings Catholics into positions of power.

And in case that doesn’t turn the volume up high enough, he resurrects something called the Declaration of Indulgence, which–oh, never mind, you won’t remember it anyway and neither will I. It’s a step toward freedom of religion. That’s enough to work with.  

Is he a champion of religious tolerance or is he using tolerance to pave the way for a Catholic takeover that won’t be tolerant at all? No one really knows–including, quite possibly, the king himself, since so few things in politics go according to plan.

It all reaches a breaking point over two things: First, seven bishops refuse to have the Declaration of Indulgence read in their churches and James (tolerantly) has them arrested. Second and most outrageously, James becomes a father again. And the baby’s a boy. And a boy trumps a girl, even if he’s too young to eat solid food, so as soon as the kid’s genitalia have been verified and long before he’s old enough to discuss theology or gender reassignment or complain that he’s bored in church, he’s edged out his sisters.

This is the cue for conspiracy theorists to get to work: “No way is that baby the queen’s,” they say. “Some Jesuit smuggled him into her bedroom in a warming pan. “

The theory circulates widely. It’s easy to believe the worst of anyone just now.

What’s a warming pan? A metal pan filled with embers. You—or (what was I thinking?) a servant uses it to warm the bed. They aren’t part of the standard priestly equipment–even I know that–and I have my doubts about fitting a baby into one. But regardless of whether James produces his male heir from a warming pan or a queen, the introduction of this tiny proto-Catholic as the next in line to the throne is a step too far for the Whigs. Before the kid can say his first Hail Mary, six peers and a bishop write to William, the Prince of Orange and the husband of James the Sequel’s Protestant daughter and former heir, Mary.

“Come investigate this alleged baby,” they say. “He looks suspicious to us.”

 

The Glorious Revolution

So William comes for a visit, bringing with him upwards of 400 ships, 21,000 men (or 35,000, or 40,000, but let’s go with the lowest number so I don’t get accused of exaggerating), and an assortment of horses. Not to mention 600 ballerinas wearing shocking pink tutus and an uncounted number of sequins.*

It’s the ballerinas who do James in. He flees, tossing the great seal into the Thames on his way out of London, which is the kingly equivalent of eating your list of computer passwords. It should be enough to halt business for at least a while.

William has a claim on the throne in his own right, but he’s lower on the legitimate-heir list than his wife, and now that he’s in London this hurts his manly pride, which (I’ve been told) is a brittle thing and demands constant care. He doesn’t want to hang around the palace as a mere king-consort, sitting on a lower throne and being addressed as Mister Queen. It’s one thing for women to put up with that kind of thing, but a man?

Don’t be silly.

Cue a bit of arm wrestling with Parliament and next thing you know William and Mary are proclaimed joint king and queen, each in their own right. In return, though, they have to accept a Bill of Rights limiting the monarchy’s power. They can’t suspend laws that Parliament passes, raise an army during peacetime without its agreement, mess around with Parliamentary elections, inflict cruel or unusual punishments, deny Protestant subjects the right to bear arms “suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law,” punish MPs or members of the Lords for anything they say in debates, or smuggle babies into bedrooms in warming pans. Unless the babies have sworn their allegiance to the Protestant faith.

Parts of that will sound familiar to Americans. This is where we stole the wording from. But what’s most important here aren’t the particulars, it’s that the king and queen have been chosen by Parliament and have agreed to the limits Parliament put on their power.

The wrestling match between Parliament and the monarchy is over. Parliament’s won.

This is called the Glorious Revolution. Why? Because it’s not a revolution and because if you chose the right side back there at the beginning, you feel glorious.

 

* Okay, I invented the ballerinas. And the sequins, although (to my surprise) they did exist in the 17th century and were used on both men’s and women’s clothing. 

The Levellers, the New Model Army, and the Hot-Water Wash

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Welcome to England of 1645 and to the present tense, which in spite of all logic is going to apply to the past. We’re in the middle of the Civil Wars, which has glorious capital letters. Isn’t it just impressed with itself?

Parliament is at war with King Charles and has just substituted the New Model Army for the private armies its supporters raised and for the local Trained Bands, part-time, local militias that might or might not be willing to serve outside their home regions.

We’re back to irrelevant photos: It’s spring. Have a daffodil.

The New Model Army

What’s new about this army? Unlike the local militias, it’s full time. It’s professional. It can be sent anywhere in the country. Unlike private armies, it has a unified command and people will be promoted on the basis of their competence instead of their titles and status and money. And unlike both militias and private armies, if you wash it, even in the hottest water, it won’t shrink. It is truly a miraculous creation.

But there’s more. Its officers are barred from holding seats in either the Commons or the House of Lords, at least when it’s first formed. This keeps the aristocracy from leading it, since members of the Commons can resign their seats to become officers but members of the Lords remain lords no matter what they do. No one seems to have imagined that a person might un-lord himself. And if they can’t imagine it, they can’t do it. If a lord gets silly enough to claim he’s a commoner, all the other actors will say, “Oh, no you’re not,” and no matter how many times he says, “Oh, yes I am,” he won’t be.

That last joke only makes sense if you’ve seen a panto, a form of British theater where the only joke revolves around repetition of “Oh, no you’re not” and “Oh, yes I am.”

See how much you learn here?

Like most miracle products, though, once you look closely, the New Model Army has some problems. It’s made of a mix of volunteers and draftees; of veteran soldiers and terrified newbies; of deeply committed Puritans, assorted other religious dissenters, and (it includes draftees, remember) people who’ve spent their lives worshiping in the old ways and aren’t easy about all these changes. In other words, it’s stitched together from an assortment of all the scraps in England’s fabric shop.

Before long, some of the draftees desert. Some of the dissenters dissent. The wool and the lace are hard to stitch together. Neither of them goes well with hessian. Some of the dye runs. 

By the end of the First Civil War, the army’s fallen out of love with Parliament. If it ever was in love, which we haven’t actually established. The soldiers aren’t getting paid regularly, and that’s never a smart move; I mention that in case you happen to form an army yourself one day. Soldiers get grumpy when they’re not paid.

Parliament wants to either disband the army or march it off to Ireland, where the soldiers have as much chance of seeing their back pay as they have of becoming Pope–all of them at the same time, in their anti-Catholic multitudes. So no, the army isn’t about to do either of those things. Or at least the soldiers aren’t. The soldiers and their officers aren’t of one mind about this. Or much of anything else right now.

And if that’s not enough, Parliament, or part of it anyway, is leaning in the direction of restoring the king without increasing the country’s political or religious freedoms. The soldiers are starting to ask each other what they’ve been fighting for anyway.

So each regiment elects two agitators–yes, that’s what they‘re called–and they join the army’s senior officers in an Army Council, where they put together the army’s demands to Parliament. 

I’m simplifying. We’d be here all night if I didn’t and, apologies, I don’t have enough eggs on hand to make breakfast for all of us. Keep saying “Great sweep of history.” It’ll get you home in time to give the kitty a treat before bedtime.

 

The Putney Debates

What the agitators and the Army Council do, first in existing at all, second in sitting down to talk, and third in making demands of Parliament, is radical enough. This is an army, remember, and armies are built on hierarchies and orders and yes-sirs, not on discussing your purpose and goals and philosophy and then voting on whether your orders are worth carrying out. But the troops do more than discuss. They put together an even more radical set of demands for constitutional change. If it’s put into practice, it will seriously democratize the country.

Spoiler alert: That doesn’t happen.

While this intellectual brew is fermenting, the army’s moving toward London–not in any sort of a hurry, since Parliament’s captured the king and that’s kind of like a commercial in the middle of the TV show, so everyone’s wandered off to the kitchen to see how well the beer’s fermenting. Besides, there might be some popcorn left from last night. Then in late October and early November 1647, the army does an amazing thing: It stops to hold the Putney Debates, an argument over what kind of country they’re all fighting for. Some five hundred soldiers argue politics and philosophy with their officers.

The argument boils down to two positions, one held by the top-level leaders’ (called the Grandees) and the other, more radical one proposed by the Levellers and held by some hefty but unmeasurable number of soldiers.

What the Levellers propose is that all men get the right to vote–or almost all men. It depends on what source you read and when you tune in, since their ideas evolve. The idea that women should vote is as far out of reach as Instagram and the theory of relativity. They also call for freedom of religion—not just for their own religions but for everyone—for the opening up of enclosed land, for an end to conscription, and for an assortment of other political and economic changes, including equality before the law, an end to the censorship of books and newspapers, and no taxation of anyone earning less than £30 a year.

Since the participants have a sense that they’re making history, they’re kind enough to take notes for some (but unfortunately not all) of the debates. Let’s toss in a few quotes about whether people with no property, or not much property, should have a right to vote:

From the Grandees’ side: “I think that no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom, and in determining or choosing those that determine what laws we shall be ruled by here–no person hath a right to this, that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom. . . . First, the thing itself [a greatly expanded vote] were dangerous if it were settled to destroy property. But I say that the principle that leads to this is destructive to property; for by the same reason that you will alter this Constitution merely that there’s a greater Constitution by nature–by the same reason, by the law of nature, there is a greater liberty to the use of other men’s goods which that property bars you.” —Henry Ireton.

Do people really talk that way? Apparently. Can they follow each other through those convoluted sentences? They must, because they understand each other well enough to argue, and here’s the argument from the soldiers’ side:

“I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government.” —Thomas Rainsborough

“We have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen–and by the arguments urged there is none. There are many thousands of us soldiers that have ventured our lives; we have had little property in this kingdom as to our estates, yet we had a birthright. But it seems now except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right in this kingdom. I wonder we were so much deceived.” —Edward Sexby

For the Grandees, the idea that all men–or almost all men–should have the vote flirts with anarchy. For the Levellers, it’s essential.

Leveller leaders and Grandees negotiate, looking for something they can agree to present to Parliament.

They don’t find common ground and the Levellers walk out.

The Grandees demand an oath of loyalty from the soldiers, which means signing up to the Grandees’ alternative to the Levellers’ manifesto. Many sign–and it’s not irrelevant that they’ve been promised their back pay. Some refuse. Stones are thrown. Swords are drawn. Leaders of the radicals are arrested. One is executed on the spot. The agitators are surgically removed from the Army Council, which becomes a Council of Officers.

Mutinies continue for a while–over pay, over the Leveller manifesto, over orders to go to Ireland–but they’re isolated. The Grandees are back in control. But what’s happened can’t be un-happened. Ordinary people have thought the unthinkable and spoken those thoughts to each other and to the most powerful men in the country. That can’t help but percolate through the coming decades and centuries.

I know. That’s what always gets said about the losing side, especially by those of us who wear our political hearts on our left sleeves. It’s true that the Levellers’ demands come to nothing. Their voices are silenced. In the brutal calculations of power, they lose.

The odd thing is, though, that if you listen carefully you can hear the whisper of an echo of what they did, wrote, and said.

The point in the English Civil Wars when ordinary people got involved

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A fair number of this winter’s posts have been about the English Civil Wars and the economic shifts, uprisings, and political maneuvering that led up to them. But politics was still a game for the wealthy. (Gee, how things have changed.) Only substantial property owners could vote, never mind run for the House of Commons. So when ordinary people’s grievances broke into the open, they tended to take the form of riots or uprisings. 

Listen, when no other channels are open–

But we’ve reached the moment when those unruly common people started to push their way into the parliamentary process. We owe them our attention. 

 

Root and Branch Petition

Let’s start in the winter of 1640 – 1641, when a group of Londoners delivered the Root and Branch Petition to Parliament. It called for the Church of England’s bishops “with all their dependences, rootes and branches [to] be abolished.” And for the church to stop pushing out dissenting ministers and shed all the high-church ceremonies and iconography, which more Protestantly Protestants considered superstitious and very nearly–deep shudder here, please–Catholic. 

There was more to it than that, but you get the flavor: it was religious and it was also deeply political. You’d have been hard put to draw a line between the two back then. It was also radical, uncompromising stuff. Dangerous stuff. But it’s not the substance I want to talk about: the petition was the result of a well organized effort, and a substantial number of ordinary people were bold enough to put their names to it. That was also radical. The dissenting churches and gatherings would have provided a readymade network for this. 

The way history’s taught leaves us with the habit of following big-name players, the ones who make speeches, wield power, have money, and get their names in the history books. (The book I’m drawing on heavily, Fiery Sprits, by John Rees, has so many important names I’d need a card file to keep track of them all.) But a lot of history’s important work is done out of sight, by people whose names never get recorded or are quickly lost. In this period, those people might’ve delivered pamphlets, which were the hot new method of communication–the social media channel of their day. They might’ve carried copies of the petition to people they trusted. 

Oliver Cromwell, with thanks to Wikimedia Commons. If you look closely, I think you’ll see a bit of lace on his collar, but if you don’t you’ll still have to admit that he’s got one hell of a pair of eyebrows.

The estimates of how many people signed the Root and Branch Petition range from 10,000 to 20,000, and its presentation was backed by a demonstration of 5,000 people. Or 1,500. Or possibly a few hundred. Let’s not get lost in the numbers. What matters is that enough people showed up outside Parliament to give conservative MPs (that’s Members of Parliament; you’re welcome) the heebie jeebies. 

Heebie jeebies? They’re kind of like the fantods. The screaming meemies. The, um, state of being upset.

Before they settled into a long debate over the substance of the petitions, MPs argued over the substance of the people who signed it–whether they were “persons of quality and worth” or “mean” ones. Because one way to attack the petition was to say that people who had no business in politics (translation: people with no money; people MPs didn’t need to listen to) were sticking their noses where they didn’t belong. 

 

Strafford

A similar thing happened when MPs were maneuvering to have the king’s favorite, the Earl of Strafford, either executed or saved. From outside Parliament came a petition with 20,000 signatures not only calling for Strafford’s conviction but criticizing the government’s handling of finances and its conduct of the war du jour. A few days later, a crowd of 15,000 headed for Parliament, “weapons and battonones in their hands.” 

Treat that number as gently as you treat the spelling. They’re likely to change shape or leak at any moment.

According to an observer, “all the rabble cryed aloud with one voice Justice and Execution.” When the lords arrived in their coaches, the “rabble” formed a lane for the coaches to pass through, demanding justice and execution but also saying “they could scarce get bread to maintain their families.”

The demonstrations grew and were joined by what Rees calls “artisans and the poor, joining with the middling sort, armed with swords and clubs.”

Parliament voted to condemn Strafford and the king was rattled enough by all these nobodies showing up outside the halls of government that he not only consented to Strafford being executed but to a bill that said Parliament could only be dissolved by its own action, not by his, which was an important shift of power from king to Parliament. 

But that wasn’t the only shift: the political battle wasn’t being played out only between king and parliament anymore. A third player, the populace, including the people who had no vote, was now a third force. 

 

The Grand Remonstrance

This wasn’t a petition from outside Parliament, it was a document from the Commons addressed to the king, and it started out with the requisite groveling: “We, your most humble and obedient subjects, do with all faithfulness and humility, beseech your Majesty.” 

Ho hum, right? Nothing new until you get to the substance of the thing, which was a list of more than 200 abuses of power, including “a malignant and pernicious design of subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government.”

Ouch. But again, let’s not get lost in the substance, let’s focus on something more radical: the decision to publish it and circulate it to that rowdy populace we were talking about. They were playing to a new audience. 

Parliament, remember, was bitterly divided between the king’s supporters and opponents, and the king’s opponents were looking outside of Parliament to win the arguments and seem to have been in control of their involvement. Some MPs apparently sent out messages calling for men to assemble outside Parliament, armed with swords and staves.

From here on, demonstrations outside Parliament seem to become more common. One observer described them as “Great Numbers of People gathered together in a tumultuous, unusual, and disorderly Manner about the Houses of Parliament.” Another crowd is described as, “armed with swords and staves, as if they came to besiege the Parliament house.” 

 

London’s apprentices

After the king appointed the unpopular Thomas Lunsford as lieutenant of the Tower of London, London’s apprentices became visible as a political force. 

Why did anybody care about the tower? These days, it’s a tourist attraction. Back then, it was an arsenal, a garrison, and an important part of the king’s defenses. It was also a safe place for London’s merchants to stash their wealth and it was where the country’s coins were minted. So it mattered who was in charge.

The apprentices weren’t alone in their opposition, but they were young and they were strong, and let’s assume at least some of them were hot-headed. They had delivered a petition with 30,000 signatures. 

In London, a newsletter talked about getting weapons, muskets, powder, and shot. Rumors circulated that the apprentices were rising. Or were about to rise.

Charles–that’s the king; remember him?–dumped Lunsford. 

Everything settled down, right?

Wrong. More demonstrations happened outside Westminster–that’s where Parliament met–and the crowds were armed and formed lanes the MPs had to pass through.

Enough. You get the point. People locked outside of the workings of government were showing up at its door, bringing their anger, their opinions, and sometimes their weapons. And the change wasn’t just about where they showed up: they knew what the issues were and their demands were well focused.

We can attribute part of that to that hot new medium I mentioned: pamphlets, and maybe the occasional leaflet. Printing was the internet of its day. Or the Tiktok, the Instagram, the–I don’t know, choose your comparison. I’m too damn old to get that one right. The government had lost control of what could be printed and what was getting printed was setting people’s minds alight.

 

The Levellers and the army

We’ll skip a few protests here, along with several fights, a multitude of accusations, and a wheelbarrowful of quaint spellings. Where the story bumps up a notch is when the Levellers walk on stage.

The Levellers? They were a political movement–political parties hadn’t been invented yet–that preached equality, religious tolerance, and not quite universal suffrage but wildly expanded. They had the radical idea that the Commons was there to represent the people. All that would’ve been damn near unthinkable not long before and was still radical enough to scare the lace off the MPs’ collars, even that of many who opposed the king.

Any number of Levellers were imprisoned at various points. You wouldn’t become a Leveller on a lark or because it looked like a smart career move. This was dangerous stuff.

By this time, king and Parliament had gone to war with each other, Parliament had formed the New Model Army, and the Levellers were systematically distributing their publications among the soldiers. My best guess is that it took a wild-eyed radical to imagine that ordinary soldiers not only could think but would be eager to. 

The pamphlets found an eager audience. One disapproving writer estimated that 1 soldier in 20 had become a “hotheaded sectarie.” That doesn’t say that all hotheaded sectaries were Levellers, but since we’re not talking about a party with dues and membership cards, just a movement– Let’s just say that many of them would’ve been. 

 

Parliament loses its central spot

Parliament was now being pushed by outside forces, and the most important of those was the army. 

What did that mean in practical terms? Well, kids, when Parliament made moves in the direction of disbanding the army, which it hadn’t paid–that’s never a wise move–or in the direction of sending it to fight in Ireland under officers the soldiers didn’t accept, a petition circulated in the ranks, and when the officers of one regiment tried to suppress it they were shouted down. 

As the conflict between Parliament and its soldiers continued, the soldiers decided to elect two men from each troop, called agitators, to take the petition to Parliament. The position of agitator was a powerful one. When regiments marched toward the coast, where they were to set sail to Ireland, the agitators overrode the officers’ commands and recalled them. If a regiment didn’t like its officer, the soldiers swept him aside. If they didn’t like Parliament’s orders, they followed their own, which included taking the king prisoner. 

When a parliamentary commissioner told Cornet Geroge Joyce, the soldier leading the troop that took the king captive, “that he deserved’d to lose his Head for what he had done,” Joyce answered, “May it please your Majesty . . . let it be drawn to a Rendezvous [a meeting of the soldiers], let me appear there before them, and let the Question be put, whether they approve of my Action in removing His Majesty from Holmby, if three or four Parts of the Army do not approve what I have said, I will be content to to be hanged at the Head of the Army.” 

Parliament was no longer running the show, and it was no longer the forum where crucial decisions were made. It mattered enough for outside forces to fight over it, though. As a Royalist letter of intelligence put it, “all of them, especially the great Lords, doe feare the power of the Army.”

Or as a different letter had it, “The King . . . made a Parliament he could not rule, the Parliament raised an Army it could not rule, the Army made Agitators they cannot rule, and the Agitators are calling up the people whom they will be as little able to rule.”

So few things go the way you expect. But at least they didn’t start a war with Iran.

The opening moves in England’s conquest of Ireland

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If you like a good rebellion–and who doesn’t, from the comfort of a couch–the English Parliamentarians are a reminder of how murky history gets and why it’s not always wise to take sides. 

Let’s talk about the Parliamentarians, King Charles, and, gulp, Ireland. 

 

A rare relevant graphic: Diarmait mac Murchada, King of Leinster and the beginning of a lot of trouble. He may look like he has a broom over his shoulder but  it’s sure to be something highly symbolic.

A bit of Irish history

We’ll keep this to a minimum or I’ll never find my way back to our alleged topic. 

After the Normans conquered England, they looked across the water and noticed one more island sitting off to the west. And did nothing. Then in the twelfth century, Ireland’s high king deposed one of its local kings, Diarmait, and Diarmait turned to England’s Henry II for backing. 

Many a colonial conquest has started out that way. 

Henry encouraged him to hire some of the Norman knights who’d been kicking around after being on the losing end of fighting in Wales. (Unemployed knights could be a hazard, so I expect this suited everybody.) Diarmait offered to pay them not in cash but in Irish land, which is how the first of the English lords sank their roots into Irish soil. By 1175 they were powerful enough that the Irish kings had recognized the English king as an overlord, hoping he’d stop the Norman lords from taking any more Irish land. 

It didn’t work. Before long–measuring that in historical time–the Normans had imposed feudalism on eastern Ireland, the part they controlled. The lords had parceled out land to their knights and a country of clans and herding became a country of manors and peasants. They’d swept away Irish law in favor of Norman, and ditto the Irish version of Catholicism in favor of Roman–the flavor that suited the Normans’ tastes. 

Over time, they integrated to some extent, intermarrying and adopting the language, but they continued to be a group of their own. As one of them, Maurice fitzGerald, complained, “Just as we are English as far as the Irish are concerned, likewise to the English we are Irish and the inhabitants of this island and of the other assail us with an equal degree of hatred.” 

Another relevant graphic: Henry II, King of England, so it’s a fair bet that he’s not holding a mop to balance Diarmait’s broom but something else highly symbolic.

In “Controversy: Oliver Cromwell in Ireland,” Micheál Ó Siochrú says there were three different ethnic groups in Ireland during the 1640s: the native Irish, who were between 80 and 90 percent of the population; the “old English”–the descendants of the those Norman colonists; and a new wave of Protestant English settlers (plus some Scottish soldiers, administrators, etc.), who’d been coming over since early in the seventeenth century.

The first two groups were Catholic and the Protestants–obviously–weren’t, so we’re looking at ethnic divisions with religious and class overlays. 

And if that didn’t produce enough tension, since the 1550s Irish land had been handed to English-born Protestant officials and by the seventeenth century Protestant settlers were displacing native Catholics in large parts of the country. All the situation needed was for someone to light a cigarette and toss the still-lit match over their shoulder.

 

The Irish Rebellion

With that in place, we’ll skip a few years. In 1641, a rebellion (I should probably say “another rebellion”) broke out. The rebels weren’t hoping to break with England or the crown, only to end religious and political discrimination against Catholics. The plan was for the rebellion to put them in a strong negotiating position. England, though, read it as an uprising that needed to be crushed. 

The rebellion started with a small, not particularly well organized group of Catholic gentry and military officers, who tried to occupy Dublin Castle–and failed. It was the match I was talking about, though. Around the country, Catholics attacked Protestants. Protestants attacked Catholics. The colonial government attacked Catholics. Thousands of people died on both sides–by one estimate somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000, which is another way of saying that no one was counting.

As the uprising grew, the Catholic elite, who’d hoped for a polite, apartment-size rebellion, were horrified, and in an effort to take control they set up a government, which for a while held part of the country, while the royalists another held part, the Scots held a third bit, and the Parliamentarians (a.k.a. the English Protestants) held a fourth. 

Eleven years of war followed. 

Meanwhile, in England . . .

. . . news of Catholics slaughtering innocent Protestants circulated. In some tellings, more Protestants were slaughtered in Ireland than actually lived there. But you know how these things go: Popular news sheets featured the stories. Preachers thundered. Tables were thumped. Money was raised. The stories flew on the wings of outrage and people believed the most lurid of them. Why wouldn’t they? They fit so neatly with the English image of the Irish. And the waves of fIrish Protestants taking refuge in England added credibility to the stories. 

To be fair, there does seem to have been slaughter and I believe the first killings were of Protestants, but it didn’t match the lurid stories and soon the killing was on both sides.

As a side point, since I’ve mentioned the English image of the Irish, I’ve read an argument that it was during its occupation of Ireland that England first learned to portray a colonized people as ignorant, lazy, dumb, brutish, and any other negative adjective you want to tack onto the list. Ugly? You bet. Smelly? I haven’t seen it but I’m sure someone said so. 

Take the argument for what it’s worth. To me it has a convincing ring. You’ll find one colonized group after another portrayed that way.

But back to our story: All this was happening in 1641, which matters because it was when the king (Charles I; you’re welcome) and Parliament were arm wrestling over who was going to run the country and who was going to be merely decorative. One of the few things they’d have agreed on was that someone had to do something about those pesky Irish Catholics. They’d even have agreed that doing something involved sending an army. Where all that love and harmony broke down, though, was over who’d be in charge of the army, because whoever controlled that army– 

Yeah. They were bright enough to know the army equaled power. 

By 1642, king and Parliament were openly at war with each other, giving the Catholic forces in Ireland a bit of breathing space, which they used to form a united movement. Or at least a government that was more united than England’s. And than England’s armed forces in Ireland, which were split between king and Parliament, with some Scottish forces  and a settler army thrown in just to complicate the picture.

 

Financing the army

Where the story gets interesting–as in, I hadn’t known even a hint of this before–is when they got to the question of how to pay for the conquest of Ireland, because armies are expensive. Keep that in mind if someone offers you one. What Parliament did was basically to create a public-private partnership that parallelled Diarmait’s agreement with the knights he hired: People would lend money to the state and be paid in Irish land once it was conquered. Some 18% of the country’s profitable land, or 2.5 million acres, was promised. 

Whose land was it? Catholic land. Rebel land. That way Parliament could break the power of the Catholic landowners and pay off their investors all at once.

The investors were called the Irish Adventurers. 

A parallel bill to finance ships offered the reward of “all Ships, Goods, Monies, Plate, Pillage,and Spoil, which shall be seized or taken by any of the Persons by them employed by Force of Virtue of this ordinance.”

Basically, it was piracy. 

The adventurers included radicals from the Parliamentary party, rich City merchants who could invest £1,000, smaller investors who’d put in £25–a year’s pay for a tradesman. The investors also included a handful of men who went on to become Levellers–campaigners for equality, near-universal suffrage, and religious tolerance. I’d love to explain that but I can’t.

 

And then?

And then for a while nothing happened. There was this little business of the English Civil Wars going on and Ireland was off on the other side of the water. It was only once Charles was reliably dead and guaranteed not to cause any more trouble that Parliament picked up its quarrel with Ireland, sending its New Model Army, with Oliver Cromwell in command. His orders were to bring Ireland “to the obedience of the Parliament of England.”

Yes, it’s an odd thing how easily people who start out saying, We demand freedom, can turn around and say, You have to obey us, but turn around they did, using the 1641 Rebellion as a rallying cry: Those bloodthirsty Irish had, as Cromwell put it, had “imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood.”

There was more to it than that, though. It was also an economic necessity. The merchant adventurers had to be paid back. And Parliament’s army–the New Model Army–hadn’t been paid, in some cases in years. They had to be paid, and Parliament already had a model of how to use Irish land to pay English debts.

The war dragged on into 1651 and 1652, with the Catholic armies turning to guerrilla warfare and the New Model Army killing civilians, destroying food, and setting bubonic plague loose, although to be fair that last part wasn’t deliberate.

Ó Siochrú talks about it as a genocidal conflict “in which the people of Ireland–the civilian population–were deliberately targeted. People were driven out of their homes and killed, crops were destroyed, infrastructure was wrecked, and it really had an absolutely disastrous impact on the population of Ireland.” 

In Ireland, he says, the English “saw themselves as outside of the realms of civilised society and therefore the behaviour that could be justified in Ireland would never have been accepted in England, or indeed even in Scotland, and certainly not on the Continent.” Who won the war? You already know, right? The English eventually, and they reshaped Irish society to their own benefit, confiscating almost all Catholic-owned land and using it to pay off the investors (at least those who hadn’t sold their shares) as well as military veterans and Protestant supporters of Parliament. 

Catholic landowners who hadn’t supported the rebellion were compensated with some land west of the Shannon river but Catholic religious practices were banned in public, and priests executed. The Anglican Church was also forbidden, although for some reason the Quakers were tolerated.

The Parliament of Bats

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If you think politics were once sane and sensible, let’s take a quick dive into England in the fifteenth century. I don’t guarantee that things were either more horrific or more absurd back then than they are wherever you live with (I’m originally from the US, after all, which scores high on both scales right now), but a bit of history does keep us from thinking political idiocy’s a new invention.

The Duke of Gloucester, hanging his curtains. From Wikimedia Commons

The king, the uncles, the conflict

We’ll start with the king, since his personality, competence, hair style, and digestion were all political issues back then. Henry VI has gone down in history as a weak and unstable king, and we’re dropping in at a time when he’d been king for three years. You might think that would be long enough to get the hang of the job, but he was four years old and I’m no fan of monarchy but even I will forgive him for not being much use yet. 

While he played with his toys, two powerful men played with the country–and with the money and power it had to offer them: his uncle Humphrey, the duke of Gloucester, and Henry Beaufort, who was the chancellor, the bishop of Winchester, someone who could be counted on to lend money to the insolvent crown (at high interest rates), and uncle to the duke–who was, remember, uncle to the king.

England’s aristocracy would’ve fit in a fairly small laundry bag back then. And you know what some families are like: these two men didn’t play nicely together. They’d already had an armed fight on London Bridge. I mention that only to explain why, when Parliament was called into session in 1426, everyone expected a fight there too. Both men had power bases nearby, Humphrey in London itself and Beaufort in Southwark. So someone decided to avoid bloodshed by moving the meeting to Leicester–pronounced for no discernable reason, Lester.

Don’t get me started on English spelling or place names.

To keep the two sides from shedding blood, somebody pulled a 14th-century tradition out of a different, non-laundry bag. (England’s bag of arcane traditions is almost as big as its bag of arcane spellings.) Each Parliament had been opened back then with a proclamation banning swords, other weapons, and silly games.

Silly games? Yes, silly games. The good folk running the country had a habit of pulling men’s hoods off their shoulders, as any reasonable adult in a position of power would. 

But by now it was the 15th century, not the 14th, and people had grown up enough (and were grumpy enough) that no one expected games and the announcement was stripped down to a simple warning that “every man . . . should leave their weapons in their inns, that is to say their swords and shields, bows and arrows.” 

 

The bats

So what did everyone do? Left their swords and bows and arrows at their inns and armed themselves with bats–the wooden kind, not the avian. 

What were they doing with bats? No idea. As far as I can tell, people didn’t start playing cricket for another century, although an ancestor game, stoolball, was played in Essex, traditionally by milkmaids using their milking stools as wickets. Not, you’d think, the sort of game to attract a bunch of macho aristocrats.

Okay, I haven’t a clue why they had bats and I’m not sure anyone sensible will either. The country was full of local games. Whether Leicester was full of bats that the lords and Members of Parliament could appropriate I don’t know. Maybe a few good solid cudgels went down in history as bats because the scribe-of-the-day liked the sound of it. We’ll just have to squint and move on. The articles I’ve found somehow take it for granted that they had bats.

Don’t we all pack them when we travel?

The two sides brought their bats to Parliament. The next day they were told to leave their bats behind, so they brought stones–big ones–tucking them into their clothes, where no one would notice them.

How did both sides hit on the same strategy two days in a row? By hacking each other’s emails, of course. No other explanation is possible.

Eventually Beaufort and Humphrey spoke to Parliament, making their cases against each other and for themselves, and in the end Beaufort was made to step down as chancellor but by way of compensation was allowed to accept the Pope’s offer to make him a cardinal. The two men gritted their teeth and shook hands, no blood was shed, and the Parliament came to be known as the Parliament of Bats. 

And the king? Not long afterwards, he was knighted by a different uncle.