Downhill with the Tories

There’s a special kind of novel or film that I always think of as a ‘descent into hell’. It’s where a central character, or group of characters, is confronted by a series of decisions, each of which is more desperate than the one before, and each of which instead of rescuing them only sucks them more deeply into whatever fate they’re rushing towards, all the faster the harder they try to escape it. 

You know the kind I mean? 

I feel that’s where Britain is these days.

Look at our last four Prime Ministers: David Cameron; Teresa May; Boris Johnson; and now, not quite on the stage, but waiting to sweep onto it, Liz Truss.

Britain’s road to Hell is paved with Tory Prime Ministers

Talk about a downward slope. Another way of looking at that sequence is to add a few adjectives: Cameron, lazy and incompetent; May incompetent and uninspiring; Johnson, lazy, incompetent and corrupt; Truss, incompetent, ruthless and entirely disconnected from reality. I keep thinking “surely the Tories can’t come up with anyone worse than this character” and then, somehow, they do. It only leaves me wondering how bad the Prime Minister they foist on us has to be before Tory voters start to ask themselves, “are we actually voting for the right party?”

This got me thinking of a story I’ve always liked. It’s about Cornet George Joyce. 

Think way, way back, to the middle of the seventeenth century. England in those days had a ruler as hopeless and detached from reality as Liz Truss is today. He was King Charles I. With the same mentality as Cameron and Johnson, he believed it was quite simply his entitlement to have power, his and his alone, because he was king by divine right, having been chosen by God. And what greater entitlement is there than that?  

Today the God is Mammon, but the thinking's the same.

When King Charles started throwing his weight around, he quickly found himself up against his Parliamentarians, who were perfectly happy with monarchy, but preferred to think of Kings as leaders, working in partnership with Parliament. Things degenerated so far that Civil War broke out, the first of three of them, because why settle for one civil war if you can have a whole trio?

After he’d lost the first of those wars, Charles fell into the hands of Parliament who took him prisoner. Which doesn’t mean he was thrown into some noisome jail or anything. He was held at Holdenby (pronounced Home-bi) House which, as the name suggests, was a desirable residence offering fine living in the pleasant countryside of Northamptonshire. To give you an idea, these days it advertises itself as the ideal wedding venue.

Now, one of the things that had annoyed people about the King, was that he insisted that they all worship as Anglicans. This was a time when the faith you belonged to mattered much more than today, and the King knew that the only faith that had got things right was Anglicanism.

Most people also believed that God decided the outcome of important ventures, in particular wars. The victor had God on his side, they felt. Which was a bit awkward for the King, since he’d lost. I imagine he just put it down to God punishing him for some bad behaviour or other, and that all he needed to do was be better and try harder to win next time around. Hence the Second Civil War which wasn’t far off.

Parliament, of course, was over the moon. They’d won. So God was obviously on their side. Which was only as most Members of Parliament expected, since Parliament was dominated by Presbyterians, and they were just as convinced that they had it right as Charles was about Anglicans.

What’s more, they were as keen as he was to impose a single religion on everyone. They only disagreed on the flavour of Protestantism that everyone ought to adopt (Catholicism was right out of the question, of course). They just knew it was time for everyone to be Presbyterian and, as experience in Scotland and Massachusetts would also show, Presbyterians were firm believers in freedom of religion, just as long as they were the only ones enjoying it.

Now, here’s the problem.

While God may have chosen the victorious side, the instrument for that victory had been the Army. Probably the best army England ever produced. That’s the New Model Army that Parliament had somehow magicked out of nothing.

The thing about the New Model Army is that it included men of many different sects. Protestants, sure, but many different kinds of Protestants. Not all Anglicans, as the King favoured, nor all Presbyterians, as preferred by Parliament. There were Quakers there. Baptists. Anabaptists. And lots of others.

They’d done the fighting, they reckoned, and saw no reason why Parliament should trample on their religious rights. The leaders of the New Model Army began to think it was time to flex their own muscles a bit. In particular, they decided that, in the power play then starting, it might be better to have the captive king under their control rather than Parliament’s.

George Joyce
Later, when the former Cornet had made it to Colonel

That’s where Cornet George Joyce made his brief irruption onto the stage of history.

It was he who turned up at Holdenby House, tasked by the New Model Army to explain to the King that, with all due respect and everything, it was felt that it would be good to move him to a new place of custody where he could be looked after to the far higher standards provided by the Army rather than Parliament. 

A Cornet was the lowest rank of officer in the cavalry. No king, and least of all a king so sure of his own unrivalled authority, took orders from a Cornet.

“Where’s your commission?” asked the King.

Cornet Joyce looked over his shoulder, at the 500 cavalrymen behind him. “You need more commissions than that?”, he seemed to be saying.

Charles went along with him quietly.

Now, I don’t like military dictatorship, and the role of the New Model Army came far too close to military dictatorship for my taste. I also don’t like bullying and pointing 500 armed men at one man strikes me as pretty much a textbook case of bullying. But the Cornet and his cavalrymen were bullying a king, a man imbued by his own sense of entitlement and fully capable of behaving brutally towards anyone he perceived as an obstacle to his will.

Think Boris Johnson with a crown.

Got that nightmarish picture?

If bullying can ever be justified at all, it strikes me that it could hardly be directed at a more deserving character. More deserving, that is, than Charles I or any of Cameron, May, Johnson or Truss. Choose whichever you want. You won’t have picked anyone undeserving.

I’d love to see Cornet Joyce return in our days, to conduct these four gently to the exit, and Johnson at least, to the entrance of a gaol.

Why, Joyce could even repeat the words of his ultimate big boss in the Army, Oliver Cromwell, to some equally useless politicians of his own day:

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

Ah, well. One can always dream.