And just as calm was restored, yet another witch was arrested, in October: Andrew Man, apparently a wandering magician from Rathven, who could cure sick animals and people using skills given to him by “the people of the hills”.

Andrew does not fit our stereotype of the witch. For one thing, he is a man. For another, unlike the blank-faced and completely innocent victims of the Salem witch trials, Andrew did believe himself capable of using powerful magic. According to his testimony, he was the lover of the Queen of the Fairies, and had gotten many children with her. He was also helped by a supernatural entity called Christsunday, and had seen the king that died at Flodden (James IV) and Thomas the Rhymer with the fairies, along with other dead people.

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By Diane Purkiss

The material in Andrew’s confession includes the tips of some huge story icebergs. Perhaps most interesting is the forgotten culture of Gaelic-speaking regions of Scotland. In Aberdeenshire, the Highlands meet the Lowlands, and it was there that Christianity alternated between assimilating with the Gaelic paganism that preceded it, and clashing savagely with it. The fairy Otherworld lay alongside the everyday world, and it was both dangerous and exciting; its moral neutrality was intolerable to a Christian theology that emphasised life as a war between evil versus good. The witch trials of the sixteenth century were another Christian attempt to purge the last vestiges of Gaelic paganism from rural Aberdeenshire.

For Andrew Man, there was a fairy underworld, physically below the world of men, and culturally subordinated or even repressed or forgotten. Andrew and other magic users were left to carry the traces of this underworld to the surface. In the harsh light of resurgent Scottish Calvinism, such stories were of course misinterpreted as tales of demons. But in the twenty-first century, we are relatively familiar with the idea of the Queen of the Fairies, thanks to us fantasy literature. The very strange figure to us is Christsunday.

Christsunday is a curious name. Perhaps it was meant to be read as Christian at first glance, but the entity in question could hardly be mistaken for a Christian one. From Andrew, we learn that Christsunday is a stag some of the time — a stag that bursts up out of the snow. In Gaelic writings, deer are often able to pass from this world into the Otherworld, and to guide mortals across that border. Figures who rise from below are associated not only with the fairy realm, but with a particular idea about fairies: that they are linked to the dead who die before their time (like James IV and Thomas the Rymer.)

This movement of the Otherworld — from perpetually at the margins of human life, fitfully accessible to those with guidance, to a dark underworld inhabited by the dead — lightly Christianises the Gaelic Otherworld and assimilates it to an afterlife of punishment for sin. These dead figures can be understood by pious Christians as in hell or Purgatory, even though in pagan Gaelic tradition they are in neither.

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Anne Boleyn: whore, witch or Cinderella?

By Suzannah Lipscomb

This kind of partial Christianisation was common in cultures that abruptly met medieval Catholicism in its evangelical form. New world cultures are full of figures like Christsunday: Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, is an ideal example. The word saint is a Christian cover hurled over what is very plainly an Aztec goddess: Mictēcacihuātl, the “Lady of the Dead”, who ruled Mictlan, the last layer of the underworld. Similar processes occur in both Hoodoo and Voudoun, and also in fully creolised religions like Santería.

But just as the modern Catholic Church condemns the votaries of Santa Muerte, so both the Presbyterian Kirk and the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church sought to condemn those who told tales about such hybrid figures in sixteenth-century Scotland.

Nevertheless, even as local folklore cloaked itself with Christian imagery to protect itself, Christianity appropriated local imagery to make itself more influential. For Andrew Man and most of his countryfolk — for pagans throughout what is now Britain — the solar year still dominated understandings of the supernatural. (If you strip the word Christ off the name Christsunday, you are left with Sunday — or SUN-day.) Medieval Catholicism made a reasonable fist of appropriating this, converting the figure of Sol Invictus, the unconquered Sun, into the figure of the risen Christ.

As long as the agricultural year dominated human experience, the seasons of the sun mattered profoundly; the yearly growth cycles of crops kept representatives of solar triumph in circulation, even if they had once been owned by the Romans and were always disowned by pure Christians. The compromise arrived at in medieval Christianity was, however, unacceptable to reformed Protestantism: it was the pagan elements absorbed by Christianity that ardent Protestants sought to destroy.

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Identity politics is Christianity without redemption

By Antonia Senior

And it was this, ultimately, that condemned Andrew Man to death in 1597. There has long been a connection suggested between a tentatively identified Gaelic stag-god, sometimes called Cernunnos, and Dīs Pater, a Roman lord of the underworld. Andrew himself would not have known these names, but it is likely that some of his interrogators would have been able to make the link. Certainly, Scotland’s James VI made any number of such connections in his book Daemonologie, published the same decade as Andrew’s trial.

For a Christian courtroom, the idea of a dark world beneath, from which people might frequently emerge — an underworld dominated by a highly sexual queen — could not be made to harmonise consistently with any Christian idea of a wholly spiritual resurrection. It may have felt uncomfortably close to a medieval story of the birth of Christ from his human mother’s flesh. Such adjacencies killed Andrew because they could not be tolerated.

We use the words witch hunt now quite lightly, to mean job losses at the very worst. But in 1597 it meant the loss of everything. Liberty, and life. Among many losses are lost records: we have only fragmentary material on any of the Aberdeenshire trials, and for some we have no records at all. That is as the prosecution wished. The last thing the record offers on the Aberdeenshire witch panic is a series of chilling payments for the materials of execution: 20 pieces of peat, four tar barrels, a length of rope to tie the victims to the stake, along with their stories that might unsettle the prevailing religious powers.

It’s worth remembering how these identities were forgotten. It was no accident; they were deliberately destroyed, burned to the bone. It is not insignificant that the last linguistic traces of Highland Gaelic paganism are about to disappear with Scottish Gaelic. In England, witches were not burned, but hanged as felons. In Scotland, they were first strangled to death, and then the body consumed by fire in a ritual designed to ensure that they were gone completely, gone for good. Such extirpation suggests an uneasy sense that stories like these might still emerge out of the Gaelic underworld, bringing with them a horde of restless dead rebels — who might threaten current governance in the way that the Aberdeenshire witches terrified the ruling class.

There was no such plot; in reality, British civil servants had mis-read the EU document in question. But that didn’t matter. It enabled Johnson to stand up for freedom of choice — consumer choice — and to make that unbridled consumer choice look English, as opposed to silly bureaucratic rules, which came to look European, stuffy, and uptight. He probably also knew that prawn cocktail crisps were a slap in the face for the metropolitan elite who would — and did, reliably — sneer at prawn cocktails, let alone their reincarnation as a snack food.

By championing them, and looking very like a man who enjoyed them, Boris Johnson made himself a member of a class — indeed, he almost created the class he came to exemplify. The class in question has acquired an abusive name, and it’s not coincidental that it is the name of a food.

For his foes, Boris Johnson is a gammon, and gammon is a contentious word for the visible class of people characterised not only by being members of the white Anglo-Saxon race, but also by their entitlement, sentimental self-pity, xenophobia, English (not British) patriotism, and, above all, by their constant tendency to fly into a rage that leaves them scarlet in the face. Johnson, apoplectic at the thought of losing prawn crisps, made himself gammon-in-chief. Gammon is the antithesis of a health food, strong in flavour and salt and fat. Gammon is also, relatively, a cheap food. It’s the kind of food that used to leaven a diet mostly composed of tasteless carbohydrates like potato or boiled grains.

Prawn cocktail crisps, unlike gammon, are an ersatz imitation of something you might order in a restaurant. Admittedly, public schoolboys have always eaten more than their fair share of junk food, and there may actually be a natural bond between the working classes and the upper classes: both dislike the interfering, puritanical middle-class who are always trying to curtail other people’s pleasures “for their own good”.

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Look what happens when you ignore Parliament

By Diane Purkiss

Johnson’s prawn cocktail crisps campaign was also the beginning of the campaign of restorative nostalgia that has brought him to Downing Street. In her new book, Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum pinpoints restorative nostalgia as central to the appeal of the new nationalist right in Poland, Spain and Hungary, and also in the United Kingdom. Drawing on the work of Svetlana Boym, Appelbaum explains that restorative nostalgics do not want to contemplate or learn from the past; they want “the cartoon version of history, and they want to live in it, right now”.

Their narrative goes like this: the nation is no longer great because someone has attacked us, undermined us, sapped our strength. Someone — the immigrants, the foreigners, the elites, or indeed the EU — has perverted the course of history and reduced the nation to a shadow of its former self. The essential identity that it once had has been taken away. This, this election, this referendum, is the last chance to save the country — therefore, it doesn’t matter what lies are told. “The European Union wants to kill our cuppa,” said one Facebook advert during the referendum campaign, in keeping with Johnson’s own hit parade of “Threat to British pink sausages” or “EC cheese row takes the biscuit.” It is essential to restorative nostalgia that it should be constantly enraged by a non-existent threat to a fictional national distinctiveness.

Yet this meticulously created identity has been brought to the brink of collapse by Johnson’s view of food in the light of his new obesity strategy, a strategy that appears to include banning junk-food advertising before 9pm, adding calorie counts to menus, and ensuring easier and greater access to NHS weight-loss programmes. His sudden zeal for weight loss is widely portrayed by his erstwhile supporters not as a rational political choice, but as an emotional response born of fear, even panic; in short, his experience as a Covid-19 victim.

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Will Brexit leave us dining on rat poo?

By tom chivers

This new war is understood as a sign of weakness: “the weight thing has really spooked him,” said a friend. There’s something in this — it is the kind of jumping to conclusions on insufficient data that has characterised the government’s response to the pandemic, since the link between severe Covid-19 requiring hospitalisation and obesity is more a hypothesis than a proven truth, a point Dominic Lawson makes in The Sunday Times. However, like others, he directs most of his criticism at Johnson for his U-turn on government advice, aligning the new campaign with previous Labour governments. Gordon Brown, he recalls, tried to ban Bogofs (“Buy One, Get One Free”) in 2008, but “it didn’t happen then and it won’t now”. Lawson also points out that Johnson once scoffed at what he saw as the “nanny state”, ridiculing veganism as a crime against cheese-lovers and promising that Brexit would not interrupt supply lines of Mars Bars and crisps.

Johnson was also volubly sceptical about David Cameron’s anti-obesity campaign. The Daily Mail concurred: “Boris is becoming the new Ed Miliband.” (Much more to the taste of the Mail is “McDonald’s for breakfast… and Nando’s for dinner!: Diners celebrate Rishi’s Eat Out To Help Out.) In 2006 Johnson told the Conservative Party Conference: “If I was in charge, I would get rid of Jamie Oliver and tell people to eat what they like.” Backing “pie-pushing mums”, he told the conference that there was “too much pressure” on children to eat healthily: “I say let people eat what they like. Why shouldn’t they push pies through railings?”

From early in his political career, Johnson set out his stall as a man who loves food but doesn’t care what it is. In 2008, he revealed to the Observer that his favourite breakfast was cold spaghetti or leftover birthday cake, though he would make do with a slice of toast and marmalade if necessary. Ingenuously, he said: “I don’t snack apart from a few chocolate croissants mid-morning to keep the wolf from the door.” He must have known that these were fire-eating words. However, and disarmingly, he may have meant them; he went on to say: “I think all food is delicious. I just can’t understand why people go on and on about it, especially restaurant critics. I mean, food is good, isn’t it?” Just what his followers want to hear.

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There is something very strange about this account — its complete indifference to choice or quality or even thought. It’s as if eating pleasure depends on never discriminating, as if the only good eating is led entirely by appetite. Is this even remotely plausible? Or is it an uncomfortable image of the people that Johnson believes are hanging on his words? It is commonplace for the ruling class to see the people below them as undiscriminating bellies or mouths, gobbling down whatever rubbish is put in front of them by manufacturers.

Perhaps Johnson himself no longer knows — if he ever did — whether he really likes prawn cocktail crisps or whether it’s what he expects his popular audience to like. He liked what they represent: the idea of eating at random, eating without rules, without an inner censorious voice. And yet he is now in danger of becoming that censor.

Perhaps Johnson thinks he can now rein in that unbridled eating — his own, or that of other prawn cocktail crisp fanciers — by pointing out what everyone has known from the beginning, that this kind of eating is digging your grave with your teeth.

Middle-class used to be about having some disposable income after you had paid basic bills, including rent and food. But in the current circumstances, the term is so heavily blurred by the many and varied attacks on its members that it can mean any group that the writer dislikes. Here is an example of the kind of attack to which I refer. It happens to come from The Daily Telegraph:

“They [Remain supporters] are discombobulated by the fact that those who make £30,000 a year selling double glazing technically belong to the same sect as those who make £30,000 editing poetry books; and that Oxford graduates are theoretically condemned to the same social strata as those brandishing a degree from Oxford Brookes.”

The fundamental argument is that only snobbery can lead to a different political decision regarding membership of the EU. We also learn that “Many voted Brexit precisely to disorientate and dislodge the old elites and to allow ordinary people a greater democratic say and real democratic clout.”

If I were to ask the writer who the old elites are, I would probably sound like one of them; indeed, Remain insistence on detailed reasons to Leave has become itself a sign of entitlement, as has any wish to stage a debate. Such friendly non-elite folk as the TV historian David Starkey lambast ‘the Establishment’ — of which he is not a member, apparently — as treasonous for negotiating on behalf of the EU.

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Does class still count?

By James Bloodworth

And it’s not just the Right. On the Left, The Canary is home to thousands of attacks on the elitism, centrism and middlingness of the BBC, like this one:

“During BBC Question Time on 12 September, host Fiona Bruce’s mask slipped for one revealing moment… it demonstrated a light-hearted, good-natured playfulness between the BBC host and her Conservative minister panellist.”

They are all in it together. Like many articles on the Canary site, the piece is mostly composed of tweets by Labour politicians and Labour Party members. The Right dislike the BBC too, and for the same reason:

“Andrew Neil… has complained that the corporation’s comedy output is too left wing… self satisfied, self adulatory, unchallenged left-wing propaganda.”

Many who have attempted to analyse the reason for the divisions in developed economies have blamed the middle classes. For instance, David Goodhart’s analysis of the Brexit vote as a conflict between the somewheres and the anywheres insists that the anywheres are part of a techno-elite equally happy in any city — rather like the urban elite defined by Christophe Guilluy in his analysis of the gilets jaunes. Guilluy writes that “a new bourgeoisie, secure in its gentrified redoubts” has left behind the ordinary citizen. He also uses the term bobo — bohemian bourgeois — coined by David Brooks in 2000.

Among synonyms for bobo, Wikipedia lists champagne socialist, hipster, liberal elite, and metropolitan elite. All are terms of abuse rather than analysis, so it is unclear who Guilluy means. And then comes the slippage: Guilluy uses the phrase “the upper class” as though it meant the same as the bobo class and the new bourgeoisie, since all of them, according to him, see globalisation as an opportunity; then in another paragraph, these individuals have become “executives” and then “the corporate upper-class”, growing richer at the expense of an unidentified majority. They are “the wealthiest”.

It is this slippage – from bourgeois to elite to establishment to globalisation – that has become fundamental to the populist policies of the Trump and Johnson regimes, and also of their opponents on the far left. But the whole structure relies on the unexamined conflation of the CEO of, say, Uber (who makes $6.4 million a year) with a head teacher or a systems analyst. While the former could be understood in good old-fashioned Marxist terms as taking more than a fair share, the others are just as dependent on a salary of dwindling value as any policeman or ambulance driver. Hollowing out the middle as a repeated rhetorical move is the reason that the politics of both Left and Right are becoming ever more extreme, and ever more resistant to even the suggestion of compromise. Compromise is now repeatedly represented as betrayal; differences of opinion are figured as treachery.

The many are now committed to the removal of the institutions that promote the cause of “the elite”. Such institutions are resisting the will of the people, resisting their rights. It follows that “the people” is a category that excludes members of “the elite”; judges, civil servants, students, parliamentarians, and academics are not “the people” and nor are they part of “the many”. Instead, they are part of the few. This group of non-persons may now include in some contexts doctors, lawyers, and anybody in the arts.

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By Graeme Archer

It is worth reminding ourselves that at least these groups are not actually disappearing, or not yet, but they did disappear in Ukraine in the 1920s, in Poland in late 1939, in Chile in the 1980s. But that literal disappearance was preceded by a figurative blanking, a series of routine attacks on the prestige and credibility of the organisations they represented.

Unfortunate, too, is the assumption that working for a globalised company makes you an enthusiast for globalisation and therefore non-aligned to a country or land. Ironically, Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentary general Henry Ireton argued exactly that about everybody who was not rich enough for the then strenuous franchise test for the House of Commons: that they did not have a stake in the country and could move abroad if the laws became displeasing or disadvantageous.

Obviously, this is conceptually completely cracked when contemplating Cromwell and Ireton’s agricultural labourer contemporaries. But it is really just as ridiculous when contemplating the average lawyer — or teacher or doctor for that matter.

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My social mobility shame

By DARREN 'LOKI' MCGARVEY

Historians usually say, glibly, that liberal democracy requires the middle classes to survive, and it is well understood that their economic destruction through the hyperinflation experienced in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s was one of the reasons for the rise of fascism. In Britain, the middle classes have not had to face this level of economic woe – yet; the collapsing pound and stalling of the property market are not the brightest of signs.

There has, however, been an equal loss of cultural capital, and soft power. The populist consensus across the Conservative party relies heavily on the fact that nobody thinks of themselves as an oligarch, and everybody can be relied on to see themselves as clinging on precariously. One reason for that, of course, is the tireless efforts of the press to stir dread, including fear of weather events and of rising knife crime. One of the deepest ironies of the referendum campaign was these same newspapers use of the phrase “project fear” to describe the political tactics of their opponents.

In exactly these ways, the many genuine threats to middle-class well-being and security can be further deployed against them. One characteristic form of this is the ironic pity piece in which some unfortunate professional working couple are lured into describing how difficult it is to live on £120,000 a year, so that they can be jeered at by those struggling on far less. It’s a modern pillory.

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The closed world of the 'enlightened' middle class

By James Bloodworth

Successive attacks on the middle classes are attacks on representative democracy itself. The current government stance on Parliament and politicians is not very different from Jeremy Corbyn’s contempt for Blairites. Judges are traitors. Lawyers are liars. Scientists fake results. Academics have all caved cravenly to social justice warriors. Objectivity is so impossible to imagine that one of the words we use to describe it — disinterested — has all but disappeared except as a synonym for boredom. These circumstances have created the opportunity for the political chaos we have now seen. If we want to survive it, we need to make sure that the centre can hold.

I propose an alternative definition of middle-class that should prevent the misuses and disavowals we see in the public sphere: those who pay income tax. Fewer than three-fifths of the adult population have high enough incomes to pay any income tax at all. I also propose an alternative definition of upper-middle-class: those who pay higher rate tax, around 15% in 2017. I propose this because it’s free from ideological freight.

If we can keep a more clear-sighted view of the income of the groups under discussion, then perhaps we have a chance of inoculating ourselves against the more specious claims and counter-claims of our modern populists.

Or more accurately, that was what Kerr claimed. The deadlock could have been resolved by the half Senate election proposed by Whitlam, to which Kerr had already agreed. Why, then, did Kerr go on to dismiss the government?

When the House of Representatives, Australia’s lower house and the equivalent of the House of Commons in Britain, met in the afternoon, the new caretaker Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, was defeated in a confidence vote. At the same time, the Senate finally passed the budget that it had blocked. The Speaker of the House of Representatives went to Government House to tell the Governor-General of the no confidence vote in Fraser. Kerr refused to see him or receive the motion of no confidence.

It was this, more than the initial dismissal of the government, that rejected the democratic role of the House of Representatives. Whitlam had joked in the past that if push came to shove it would be a race to see whether he or Kerr could get to the phone and call Buckingham Palace first. In talks with Kerr during the crisis, the Palace offered to delay Kerr’s recall (to Britain) to help the Governor-General sack Whitlam before Whitlam could sack him. The Palace didn’t counsel Kerr to consult with Whitlam, nor contact Whitlam. As the monarch’s representative in Australia, Kerr was using the monarchy’s reserve powers to dismiss the elected government, and appears to have been supported by the monarch’s advisers in doing so.

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By Diane Purkiss

There is an uncanny likeness between the situation in Australia in 1975 and the British situation in 2019. The Australian Labor Party had been out of government for 30 years, and when elected in 1972 succeeded in passing a radical programme of legislation which included free healthcare for all, the abolition of capital punishment, and free university education. It also substantially altered Australian foreign policy goals, in part in response to Britain’s decision to join the European Common Market. The Whitlam government approached China as a natural trading partner and to seek to grow its trade in the Pacific region.

All this seems sensible now, but it followed upon decades of conservative government by the Liberal Party and their leader Robert Gordon Menzies, whose position was sustained by relentless anti-Communist scare stories, leading to the involvement of Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War. During Menzies’ rule, Britain used Australia as a nuclear test site, while the United States sited critical bases at Pine Gap and North West Cape, without the consent of the Australian Parliament.

Whitlam’s efforts at reform were overshadowed by the oil crisis, petrol shortages, inflation, and surging unemployment. The Australian middle classes blamed Whitlam and his spending policies and he also came under relentless attack from the Australian press, owned by powerful media tycoons who had no reason to support his economic policies. Conservatives disliked and feared his foreign policy, believing that he was literally in league with Communists. As a result, his majority was slashed to wafer thinness in the general election of 1974, and was reduced even further in the Senate by the – illegitimate – appointment of a non-Labor replacement when an Australian Labor Party senator died.

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The declining economic situation meant that the leader of the Liberal opposition, Malcolm Fraser, could present himself as acting on behalf of the Australian people in bringing down an unpopular government, even if it was one elected only twelve months earlier. The Liberals also strove to undermine Whitlam’s authority by portraying him as a member of an urban elite that looked down on ordinary Australians, despite the fact that it was Fraser who came from what Australians call the squattocracy (graziers and landowners).

Whitlam was Australian’s Neil Kinnock, risking his own political career to try to reframe the Australian Labor Party’s appeal outside the traditional working classes. However, the public mood turned against him, and in the general election which followed his dismissal, Fraser’s claim to represent the “will of the people” was vindicated in a landslide victory.

However, few constitutional analysts would say that the result was uncontroversial. The role of the Governor-General in dismissing the Whitlam government has never been entirely forgotten in Australia, and the monarchy’s authority has yet to recover.

The Westminster system always depended on an unwritten code of behaviour which is  premised not on law but on gentlemanly honour. From time to time, members of every political class have decided not to behave like gentlemen. The most obvious example, much bandied about recently, is Charles I and his period of personal rule.

From 1628, Charles decided to govern without Parliament. He did this because he knew that any Parliament would be critical of his policy decisions and also of his close advisers. However, the justification he offered was that the monarch’s power derived from God rather than from Parliament.

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Britain needs its politicians to put principle first

By Robert Wilton

There is an uncomfortable analogy with the Boris Johnson’s insistence that his actions are justified because he – rather than Parliament – represents the will of the people. Like Johnson, Charles sought to set aside the sovereignty of Parliament in favour of another source of sovereignty that he could portray as allied with his own political goals. Providing he refrains from raising troops, invading the House to arrest dissidents, or attempting to increase the taxation of his subjects in condign fashion, England may still avoid the spectacle of a bloody Civil War culminating in the execution of an over-mighty executive.

Like Charles I, and like Malcolm Fraser, Johnson wants to see his power and authority coming from somewhere other than his ability to command a majority in the House of Commons. In premising his election campaign on the suggestion that MPs are the elite, overprivileged, the Prime Minister is not saying anything new; the parliaments of the 17th-century were elected solely by the prosperous, the top 5%. But they were supported by people who hadn’t been able to vote for them precisely because those people understood that the alternative was tyranny by one man and his supporters.

It’s very likely that both the electorate and MPs will not be forgiving indefinitely, just as Australia did not forgive Malcolm Fraser, discarding him in landslide numbers for Australian Labor Party leader Bob Hawke in 1983.

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How cavalier is Boris?

By Giles Fraser

The stable democracy that has ensured British prosperity for the past 300 years is predicated on an elaborate series of checks and balances, which are being systematically dismantled to force through a single policy that has itself been more divisive than any in living memory. At the very moment where those checks and balances are most needed, they are seen as an impediment because they exist to impede divisive actions.

The Prime Minister has made no bones about his attitude to the Commons, and his supporters in the popular press have sought to condemn a judiciary trying to maintain impartiality, along with a Speaker of the House trying to maintain the sovereignty of the Commons, solely and simply on the grounds that those people impede the drive to implement Brexit.

Some would say that the Australian constitution recovered from the constitutional crisis of 1975; in a referendum, the Australian people voted against abandoning the monarchy for an elected president – in part because many still adhered to the theory that the Governor-General and not the Prime Minister or the House of Representatives had correctly represented the will of the people in 1975, and they were especially reluctant to give the House of Representatives the power to choose the head of state.

But trust in politicians, never very strong, was further impaired by a rash of conspiracy theories that are still believed by many Australians.

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By Polly Mackenzie

The best-known example is that Whitlam was overthrown by the CIA, just as Allende had been in Chile, because his novel approach to foreign policy threatened US domination of the Pacific. Some weak evidence has emerged to support this theory, but nothing conclusive has ever been adduced. Nonetheless, it is referenced in popular culture, including Midnight Oil’s song “The Power and the Passion”, and the myth helped the Labor Party sweep to its landslide victory in 1983.

Fraser’s reputation never fully recovered. Johnson would do well to learn that the lesson of history suggests that tearing a hole through the law never ultimately benefits the wise.

Sir Thomas More: “What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

– Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

Indeed, Campion was considered so dangerous that Elizabeth I’s government was willing to rip a hole through the law to ensure his defeat, a tear that was never fully mended. He so terrified the authorities that the divisions he caused can be felt still; nor is it an exaggeration to say that the hunt for Campion and the profound paranoia it provoked is one of the reasons Ireland is still divided.

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By Diane Purkiss

The fugitive was a staggeringly successful man whose achievements were built entirely on education. The son of a printer, he came from the artisan middle class, the same class that produced the great writers of the Elizabethan Renaissance, including, of course, William Shakespeare. Like them, Campion lived by his wits. He won scholarships to attend Oxford University, and there he was offered a fellowship at the newly built St John’s College.

During the 1566 Oxford state visit, before royal dignitaries and university academics, Campion impressed the young Queen Elizabeth with his debating skills, and the Earl of Leicester told the ambitious young man: “the Queen and I will provide for the future”.

Yet, like John Henry Newman centuries later, he threw away his academic career because he could no longer accept the authority of the Church of England; he left, first for Ireland, then for reconciliation with the Catholic Church in France, and training for the priesthood with the jesuits in Rome.

We find it hard to understand religion as a motive in 2019, even though we know intellectually that it is still vital to many. One way of parsing Campion’s momentous decision is to see it as a matter of personal integrity; it is very hard to consent to something that you believe is being foisted on you by authority, when your consent is motivated by nothing except fear of that authority.

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Boudica is firing up a new generation

By Bidisha

Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy conflated the monarchic with religious authority, and was to cause trouble for the next 200 years. By the time of Campion’s conversion, Catholics in England faced intense pressure, and most historians would now argue that the Elizabethan regime was only slightly less inclined to persecution than that of Mary Tudor.

The 1559 Act of Uniformity had abolished Mass and restored the 1549 second Protestant prayerbook as the only permissible form of worship. Accurately described as “the religion of nobody imposed upon everybody”, it made no pretence of religious pluralism. There was one religion. One.

To Catholics, the Protestant prayer book was almost blasphemous; to Protestants, the Catholic Mass was fake. There was no middle ground. Parishes were required to destroy all remnants of Catholic piety: stained glass, statues, paintings, illustrated prayer books and Bibles, crucifixes. The now-bare parish churches might also be surrounded by the ruins of what had once been the monasteries.

When Campion first arrived in Oxford, the city was damaged by the depredation of abbeys which had been central to the provision of learning, including the once-vast Osney Abbey. Duke Humfrey’s library, built by Henry V’s cultured younger brother over a century earlier and by far Oxford’s greatest collection of literature, had been despoiled by Edward VI’s commissioners who had destroyed every book bar two. The carnage here, and across the country, was vast, and nobody knows or will ever know what was lost.

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Why you should read more history

By Tom Chivers

The gentry who supplied members of Parliament had every incentive to support the Protestant regime. After all, most had been enriched by monastic lands. Under the new queen, this class – represented in government by the Cecil family – sought to tighten its grip on any remaining Catholics. In 1563, Parliament further extended the Oath of Supremacy to everyone in holy orders, lawyers, MPs, schoolmasters, and all university graduates.

Refusal to take the oath a second time was punishable by death. Catholic books printed in Europe cited numerous petty examples of penalties imposed on the faithful: death for bringing in a crucifix to church; death for bringing in “a silly pair of beads” or a medal, or a devotional Agnus Dei. This was conscious government policy; Machiavellian, if you like.

Another young man from the same class as Campion became his shadow, literally and figuratively. This was Anthony Munday, dramatist and spy. Also the son of a bookseller, Munday made his way to Rome, from where he reported in a series of pamphlets on the secrets of the English College, intended to horrify readers back home. “We might judge Rome to be hell itself”, he claimed in one such booklet.

The elect Protestant nation was massively expanding its spy network, and the English College at Rome, like other continental seminaries, was awash with agents pretending to be Catholic sympathisers. Many came from grammar schools, from the same rising class as Campion, and had been intended for the Elizabethan church.

Over the course of the 1580s Munday doubled down, going from betraying those who saw him as a friend to working as an intelligencer for Richard Topcliffe. Topcliffe, a well-to-do gentleman best known for keeping a private rack in his front room for use on any Catholics who fell into his hands without a warrant, exemplified the abeyance of any normality in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign.

But it was the perceived threat of Edmund Campion that led to the creation of the spy network.

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The Privy Council letter of 1 December 1580 stating that the queen intended to “make some example of [Jesuits] by punishment, to the terror of others”, the Proclamation of 10 January 1581, ordering the arrest of Jesuits, and the statute which made it treason to convert the queen’s subjects to “the Romish religion”: together these amounted to a declaration of war on the Jesuit mission.

Campion returned to England knowing that he was probably going to his death, in May 1580. He was there primarily to administer the sacraments to the Catholic faithful, and an underlying agenda was the reconversion of other laypeople to Catholicism. There was no indication that he had any intention of rebelling or of carrying out any violence against the Queen.

Campion could be a formidable enemy. On 27 June 1581 printed copies of his Rationes Decem – arguments against the validity of the Anglican Church – were secretly spread over the benches of the Oxford University church of St Mary, before the convocation at which student supplicants for degrees were required to defend their theses.

However, the Elizabethan security state caught up with him eventually, aided by one of their many pseudo-Catholic spies. The informant, a man called George Eliot, had served in a number of Catholic households by befriending the female servants, and was said to be a convicted rapist and murderer who had bargained his way out of jail by promising to inform on his former Catholic acquaintances.

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Once Campion was seized his case became more than just an ordinary trial but about government display of power. Forced to ride through London, his hands were tied and his feet bound under his horse’s belly, while on his hat was the inscription “THE SEDITIOUS JESUIT”. When he arrived at the Tower he was at first placed in the “Little Ease”, where a prisoner could neither stand nor lie stretched out. The Privy Council ordered that if he refused to answer he should be racked.

Sir Edward Coke, solicitor general, declared torture “directly against the common laws of England”, but it was officially used from 1540 to 1640, and 81 warrants for torture were issued by the Privy Council, 53 during the reign of Elizabeth. Torture was not practised as systematically as it was on the continent – witches, for example, were not in general subjected to torture in England – but the very fact that it was sanctioned by the Privy Council was bound to have an effect, and it is usual for the use of torture to spread once it has been legitimised.

In Campion’s case, four torture warrants were issued, and he was treated with particular violence, so that “he did hang by his arms and feet only” on the rack. When required to raise his hand at his arraignment to take the oath, he was unable to lift his arm, and those present noted his bandaged hands, concluding that nails had been thrust between his fingernails and the flesh. Topcliffe had not yet created his favourite method of torture, which was hanging a prisoner by the hands in gauntlets or manacles, an agonisingly painful procedure and one that left no marks. It may be, however, that he was inspired to do so by the obvious visibility of Campion’s torture on his body.

Not only was the law on torture reformulated, but the interrogation and questions to which Campion was subjected were too, and here the key point was the one termed the “bloody question”, devised by Burghley: which side would the defendant support if Catholic armies landed in England? The question was not intended to elicit useful information, but to be unanswerable. It was designed to trap Catholics, to prove that they were not persecuted solely for religious matters. Campion was duly convicted.

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It was cold and rainy on 1 December 1582, but there were people lining the streets all the way from the Tower, and at Tyburn a crowd that stretched further than the eye could see as Edmund Campion and two other priests were drawn on hurdles to die. The state’s effort to control the situation began to go wrong when Campion mounted the scaffold, and the hangman placed the noose around his neck.

The condemned turned to the immense crowd and began to preach, reminding everybody involved that they stood within the sight of God; God’s eye trumped the eye of the state. Campion kept on praying, for “Elizabeth your Queen and my Queen, unto whom I wish a long quiet reign, with all prosperity”. The crowd wailed and groaned as Campion’s body dropped into the empty air. The executioner tried to cut the rope so that he could butcher Campion while he was still alive, but Lord Charles Howard, with drawn sword, drove him back. Campion was hanged till he was dead, and only then disembowelled and quartered.

Elizabeth’s claim that she had no wish to open windows into men’s souls was disingenuous. It is a peculiarity of Catholicism that it requires public rites of worship, and cannot be practised alone and in secret. As the remaining Catholics’ ability to practise their religion at all was increasingly a hanging matter both for them and for the priests who administered the sacraments, it became more or less inevitable for their opinions to harden against the regime that sought to entrap and beleaguer them.

At the same time, the regime’s increasing intolerance motivated Catholic powers to intervene on behalf of English Catholics, entrenching the positions of both sides. Eventually something in the region of 350 individuals were executed, and a mindset created that led to the deaths of many more, including those who perished in prison, the many accused under the witchcraft statutes and those who died fighting for the Catholic Stuart kings.

If the Jesuit mission had lacked Campion’s celebrity leadership, it might be that the Elizabethan government might not have panicked. They were, after all, frighteningly certain that they held the moral high ground, and also very sure of themselves intellectually. But the fact that a man they themselves believed to be brilliant had converted to Catholicism and was willing to defend it against any Protestant called that certainty into question.

It followed that in order to prove themselves the elect nation, they had to weaponise their own Protestantism, succeed against the Irish and against residual Catholics in England, wipe out all traces of this stubbornly defiant national past. It’s possible that without Campion, Elizabeth’s relative leniency might have continued for longer, and therefore there might have been no rebellion in Ireland, no Elizabethan Secret Service, and perhaps no gunpowder plot.

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It’s arguable that even the Civil War might have been delayed. But as it was, Campion terrified the government, and that terror led to long-term consequences for all the British kingdoms. This weaponised split in the body politic led to the English Civil War, with its six-figure death toll, and to Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland, and then to the Exclusion Crisis, the Battle of the Boyne, the Jacobite uprisings and the Gordon riots.

Nor is this history irrelevant to the current divisions in the United Kingdom.

The two ideas of nationhood espoused by Brexiteers and Remainers also continue a tradition, with Brexiteers reflecting the beliefs of the Elizabethan state in their insistence that patriotism involves separation from other powers and authorities. Their idea that England is an elect nation with a special destiny is also the direct outcome of the propaganda and legislation created by their Elizabethan forebears.

Remainers, on the other hand, have a more porous and an arguably humbler vision for the nation state as one among many such entities. That division arising from the first Elizabethan age has in many ways come to mark the divisions in English society still present more than four centuries later.

The reason was simple: they understood that Parliament was trying its best to check the swelling power of an over-mighty executive that was ignoring not only Parliament and the gentleman who sat in it, but the ordinary people in the street as well.

In 1641, that overmighty executive was the monarch, Charles I, and his court, a court that included the Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, who had imposed very unpopular reforms on a reluctant Church of England with the king’s support.

Ecclesiastical reform doesn’t make the political pulse race in 2019. Perhaps Brexit will be as incomprehensible to our great-grandchildren. But the nation was as passionately and bitterly divided over religion as it now is over the European Union. This was not only a matter of faith; it was also a matter of identity.

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Like some members of the current executive, Charles I claimed that his position was the traditional one, that he was defending the Church of England and the historical constitution of the three kingdoms. Parliament was deemed an obstacle because it wouldn’t give him his own way. Parliament, though, was simply doing its job of reviewing legislation and restraining recklessness.

Charles reacted to Parliament’s criticisms by refusing to summon it and trying to rule the country alone – the personal rule, something of a figleaf term to cover what was really a power grab by an absolutist monarch – a policy that led him into increasingly unjust and resented taxation policies that directly affected the gentleman landowners who made up the vast majority of members of Parliament. And for which he paid dear.

This complex history illustrates the sophistication of the Westminster system. Like all successful democratic systems, the Westminster system is dependent on a series of checks and balances. Central to these is Parliament’s role in reviewing the legislation put before it by the executive – currently the Prime Minister and Cabinet, previously the monarch. In such reviews, it acts as representative of constituencies, well understood as having diverse and sometimes conflicting interests.

The Westminster system was brutally revised by the shooting war that followed. Ironically, the king’s power grab led to the rule of half the country directly by Parliament, and that in turn led people who were willing to die to defend the principle of parliamentary sovereignty to ask whether that sovereignty itself needed some examination and improvement.

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This in turn led to one of the most important events in English history, the Putney House debates. These were a series of discussions within the Army held on 28 October 1647 concerning the make-up of a new and more just system of government for England.

The name of Colonel Thomas Rainborough is not well known, but it was he who took up the theme of why ordinary men without a vote had shed their blood for Parliament: “I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while?  He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave.” The army commander and Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton responded as follows:

“I will tell you what the soldier of the kingdom hath fought for. First, the danger that we stood in was that one’s man’s will must be a law…”

But Rainborough replied:

“Really I think 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, and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.”

This is a ringing endorsement of franchise independent of property, and an illustration of the way Parliamentary democracy was believed to work at the time when people were willing to die for it. The individual voter, by voting in parliamentary elections, ceded sovereignty to their Member of Parliament to act on their behalf, voluntarily putting themselves under the government.

To overturn this today, by claiming that the 2016 referendum returned the favour by ceding parliamentary sovereignty to the voters is a dangerous fiction. It is a fiction because the legislation said no such thing; it is dangerous because it threatens to overturn the Westminster system in favour of the rule of an overmighty executive claiming to be acting on the people’s behalf.

Presumably, Theresa May is not planning to raise her standard in Nottingham; she’s learned that much from history. But she has raised her standard for acting outside the Westminster system in the interests of those who voted Leave. To complicate matters, though, more than six million people have signed a petition demanding that the Government revoke article 50, and hundreds of thousands marched in central London for a second referendum. The Government, though, claims this does not compromise its efforts to represent “the people” against Parliament.

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By Peter Franklin

It is and always has been entirely open to the people to petition Parliament, as well as to lobby their MPs, and they did so frequently during the English Civil War. The most famous petitioners were women; first came the women’s peace protesters, followed by the Leveller women. On both occasions, they were derided by their opponents as whores who had been inveigled by men.

A group of women wearing white ribbons gathered outside the House of Commons in August 1643 to demand that Parliament make peace with the King, presenting the house formally with a signed petition. One newspaper called them “whores, bawds… beggar women and the very scum of the suburbs, besides a number of Irish women.” (Those damned foreigners.) Parliament paid them no real attention, in part because it believed that they had been organised by a conspiracy of royalists or Catholics or Irish Catholics; conspiracy thinking was rife during the period. They were sent home, to ‘meddle’ with their ‘huswifery’.

It was the same story with the Leveller women’s petition. In April 1649 a group of them declared:

“That we have an equal share and interest with men in the common-wealth, and it cannot be laid waste (as now it is) and not we be the greatest & most helpless sufferers therein.”

They also demanded the release of the recently arrested authors of a pamphlet that supported universal male suffrage.

Despite efforts to connect women’s protests with the idea of “the world turned upside down”, petitions like this were highly conventional. Usually, women whose husbands had been imprisoned and especially those whose relatives had been condemned to death would address their petitions to the monarch; with Charles’s authority in abeyance, these women addressed their grievances to the Commons.

Petitioners have brought great changes, not by terrifying or threatening MPs, but by peaceful mass demonstrations. Such petitions are the usual way for people under the Westminster system to make it clear that in their minds, the government is in danger of betraying their trust. Governments that take no notice usually face a backlash, as both the Long Parliament and Charles I can attest.

When it came to a shooting war, one Civil War battle was amusingly characterised by both sides having the same war cry: “God with us!” In the same way, all sides in the Brexit debate claim to be trying to save democracy. All sides claim to be representing the will of the people. The problem is that the nation is now so deeply divided – and not in ways that can be represented by the division in the Commons into two parties, government and opposition – that claims to “represent the people” leave other people feeling unrepresented.

This illustrates the failings of populism; anyone can claim that they have the will of the people behind them. MPs, however, are supposed to be willing to put aside the interest of party – and let’s recall that parties came relatively late to the Westminster system and were themselves the result of a particular political crisis over Charles II’s successor  –  in order to arrive at the best  decision for the country.

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Bring on the People's Peers

By Richard Askwith

In his history of his own times, far better known to 17^th-century MPs than it is now, the fourth century BC writer Xenophon tells the story of the way the democracy condemned military commanders in the Navy who had successfully defeated a Spartan fleet, but had not returned to pick up survivors of the battle. He says the crowd in the assembly was whipped up to a fury by one of the rowers who had survived the battle. A few brave people spoke against condemning the admirals to death, but then, Xenophon says, a shout went up “that it was intolerable for the people not to be given what they wanted”. The admirals are duly executed en masse. After Athens is conquered by Sparta, the mass trial is used as a precedent by the 30 tyrants for further mass executions.

Brexit seems to some like justice, others like democracy in action in its purest form. What our 17^th-century ancestors knew much better than us is that populism invariably opens the door to tyranny in the long- and medium-term, however good the justification for its inauguration. The Westminster system, like every other long-lasting modern democracy was built to prevent tyranny. We are now in danger of opening the door to it.

Yet a glance at the history of Speakers of the House of Commons shows that being the most treacherous ever is quite a big ask: they have, after all, been associated with regicide, rebellion, insurgency, and defiance of the monarch.

Speakers, it turns out, are not dull functionaries or bland chair people. Instead, they are colourful political players who as often as not are willing to invent or tweak the rules to support or undermine whatever political side seems to them in the best interests of the country – or in their own best interests. Neutral doesn’t come in to it.

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Take William Lenthall, for example, Speaker from 1640 until 1660. Lenthall was in the awkward position of being Speaker of the House of Commons just as its conflict with King Charles I reached such a pitch that the English Civil War would ensue.

In theory, the Speaker’s role was to carry news about legislation from the Commons to the monarch. However, Lenthall, a puritan, saw the Commons as able to repel “invaders of the church and commonwealth” (Catholics) and thus free the king “from the interpretation of misdoing”. This was a sturdy attempt at impartiality, but Lenthall was soon under fire for being biased.

On 9 January 1641 Sir Henry Mildmay blamed him for letting too many speak during a debate, and on 9 March he was accused of partiality in a squabble between members. But the real challenge came when on 4 January 1642 when King Charles attempted to arrest five members of the Commons and one of the Lords, entering the House of Commons in search of them. Of course, he found that the birds had flown. Quickly, Lenthall fell to his knees before his king and said:

“May it please your majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here; and humbly beg your majesty’s pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this is to what your majesty is pleased to demand of me.”

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This courageous and clever response combined a defence of the Commons with deference to the King – but Lenthall was also making it clear that he was not going to give away the whereabouts of the men the monarch sought.

He held on to his difficult task as parliament became the executive ruler of the country (having executed the King). Like the current Speaker, Lenthall had to resist popular pressure. In the summer of 1647 he was impeded by a London crowd that included apprentices and disbanded soldiers. Lenthall announced that votes in the Commons had been forced, making them void in his judgement: the crowd, he claimed, had “jostle[d], pull[ed] and hale[d] the Speaker all the way he went down to his coach”.

Lenthall – through deft political manoeuvring in first supporting the idea of a Cromwellian monarchy and then being one of the founders of the Restoration of Charles II – managed to garner a peerage and considerable wealth despite his critics. Whether Bercow receives the same honour remains to be seen, but there is speculation that his perceived anti-government bias could make him the first Speaker in 230 years not to be offered a position in the House of Lords.

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Other Speakers have suffered worse fates. Thomas Thorpe, for example, a Speaker during the Wars of the Roses, was strongly Lancastrian. Speaker for just one year from 1453 to 1454, he had an adventurous life. In 1450 he was denounced by Kentish rebels as a supporter of the Duke of Suffolk. When the court confronted the Duke of York at St Albans on 22 May, Thorpe – along with the Duke of Somerset – was said to have failed to prevent the battle because he intercepted conciliatory messages from the Duke to King Henry. Thorpe was among those subsequently accused of having fled the field, leaving his armour behind like a coward.

Captured in 1460 after the Battle of Northampton and brought back to London as a prisoner he escaped, but was recaptured. Sent to the Tower, he then escaped a second time. But on 17 February 1461 he was caught by a London mob in Harringay and lynched by beheading.

As well as the animosity of the crowd, Speakers could also face the rage of the monarch, since it was their responsibility to deliver the bad news that the Commons had not liked his or her proposals.

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The first Speaker, Sir Peter de la Mare (1376), was imprisoned as a result of his work. Presiding over the Good Parliament of the same year, it was his support for a coalition of interest groups excluded by the corrupt regime of King Edward III that got him into trouble – the king and his courtiers took against his efforts to inform them about disenfranchised merchants and dodgy deals favouring the King’s mistress. Sir Thomas More, Speaker in 1523, was executed in 1535 for refusing to swear the oath declaring Henry VIII to be the head of the church.

And then there is Edmond Dudley, whose nominal crime was that during the last illness of Henry VII he had ordered his friends to assemble in arms in case the King died, but who was actually hated for his corrupt financial wheeling and dealing. Along with another former Speaker, Sir Richard Empson, Dudley was executed on 17 August 1510 on Tower Hill. (His son was also executed for treason after his attempt to install Lady Jane Grey on the throne.)

Speakers, then, have never been grey functionaries, but protagonists with their own agendas and interests. In this sense, John Bercow is not destroying one of the great traditions of the eccentric House of Commons. Instead, he is doing exactly what his illustrious predecessors did. If our Speakers ever do become the kind of completely impartial functionaries that some newspapers appear to seek, our country will be much the poorer for it.