By 1642, King Charles I of England had ruled by himself 11 years, the very definition of an autocrat. Flaunting norms, he ruled by executive orders while he rejected mounting demands for him to call elections for Parliament. But when his pet projects and high life style exhausted the treasury, he had no choice: "No taxation without representation" was already an English tradition, and only the House of Commons could raise taxes. Charles reluctantly acceded to elections for a new Parliament. When his opponents won a majority, he ordered another round of elections. Voters named more opponents to this second Parliament than to the first. The House of Commons immediately took to voting on resolutions taking Charles to task for abuse of power.
The King marched on Parliament with soldiers at his side. Stunned by this breach of tradition, his subjects bowed to His Majesty, until Charles ordered his soldiers to arrest leading lawmakers. There were gasps and vocal protest. The leaders, warned in advance, had gone into hiding. Charles, aware that he'd made a royal blunder, said lamely, "I see that the birds have flown," and went home. Parliament, now more unified against him than before, continued their business with renewed vigor.
This past week, our President urged supporters to prevent the normal processes of our representative democracy. When he saw the resulting destruction and the revulsion that he had caused, he lost his head. On screen, he mixed messages: "go home," "have peace," "these people are evil," and, in a lame conclusion, "We love you; you're very special." Congress went on to certify the election, much of the President's support having evaporated. Cabinet officials, corporate allies, and Republican legislators abandoned him over the next couple of days. A laughing seventh grader told me, "Twitter put Trump in 'time out.'"
[Images: Above, painting of Parliament, formerly kneeling, rising up against Charles I, by Charles West Cope from 1866. Then, the President's supporters crashed through gates and glass doors and entered the House of Representatives, shouting threats to Vice President Mike Pence and legislators. "The birds had flown."]
The ascent of Parliament in 1642 didn't have a happy ending. Civil war followed. The supreme victor was Oliver Cromwell, head of a Puritan faction in Parliament. He decapitated Charles, expelled his opponents from the House of Commons and, in mirror-image of Charles I's "personal rule," ruled with a rubber-stamp Parliament for 11 more years.
Still, in the long run, 1642 established the principle enshrined in our founding documents of 1776 and 1789: the "rule of law," meaning rulers must obey the rules. That includes those who make the rules and those who enforce them: none have absolute power over any other person, nor absolute impunity. So, too, the voting majority may have their way, but they're limited by the laws that protect the minority's inalienable rights and their voice.
When the majority becomes the minority, they can be secure within the same framework, so long as we all play by the rules and accept the judgments of the referees. That's the lesson of 1642, followed by the other, darker lesson: when one side stops abiding by the rules, the other side can feel entitled to do the same.
Let's hold the line in 2021.
[I used to teach the English Civil War to 8th Graders from Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples. That was over 30 years ago, but his vivid writing lives in my memory. I may have appropriated some of his language in my account.]
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