Separation of Church and State: Part 6 - Great Britain

As we saw in Part 5, the Reformation movement rapidly spread across the whole of Europe and had a profound effect on every nation that it touched. But the peculiarity of the British dynamic was in how three nations (Scotland, England and Wales) could occupy the same archipelago under the reign of the same sovereign, while subject to two different Parliaments and encompassing two quite different Reformed traditions. And as always, tradition was the crux of the problem, because Christianity was often nowhere to be seen, having been subsumed by political interests to justify secular objectives. And how? - Because once again, men chose to ignore the divine wisdom of God’s admonition to maintain the Separation of Church and State.

And still religion and politics remained inseparably intertwined as Roman Catholics continued to suffered repression and disadvantage at the hands of James’ Protestant State. So much so that a group of Catholic Restorationists conspired to assassinate the king at the State Opening of Parliament on the 5^th of November 1605. Now known as the Gunpowder Plot because of its modus operandi which was to load the cellars beneath the Houses of Parliament with barrels of gunpowder, the fuses for these were to be lit by one Guido Fawkes, the name assumed by a York-born Catholic mercenary.

It is almost certain that the entire scheme was the brainchild of a government agent provocateur and was uncovered with bizarre alacrity whereupon the whole group of conspirators were horribly dispatched for High Treason. Nor has it ever been forgotten but is annually commemorated throughout Britain with firework displays and bonfires every 5^th of November since, when British children are still taught this commemorative ditty:

'Remember, remember the Fifth of November;

Gun powder, treason and plot.

I see no reason why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.’

As for James, he was an adequate enough king although an unprepossessing bisexual who shared his mother’s penchant for pretty young men and was possibly even a misogynist, judging from appetite for witch-burning. Nevertheless he has gone down as probably the most cited monarch in British history. Because King James VI and I was none other than the eponymous sovereign who commissioned the translation and publication of the Authorised or King James Version of the Holy Bible. But then, Moses, King David and the Apostle Paul were all murderers who together wrote a huge portion of the Bible, so why might not God promulgate his Word at the hands of a homosexual?

When James died he was succeeded by his son Charles I, an Anglican whose queen Anne of Denmark was a devout Roman Catholic. Like Henry VIII before him, Charles was the second son and not had not been intended to take the throne. However, when his brother Henry died of typhoid all that changed and Charles tragic reign began in 1625. I say tragic because Charles was an uneasy Anglican with Catholic proclivities which we would call High Church. He who also believed vehemently in already ebbing doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings which is basically the belief that kings are appointed by God and so solely answerable to him and not to any Parliament. It was a belief destined to bring Charles directly into conflict with his own subjects.

In the meantime, although Great Britain had one sovereign she still had two Parliaments - in Westminster and in Edinburgh. And things in Scotland were becoming restive. And would you believe the reason was religion.

Although Charles was titular Head of the Church of England, he was unhappy with the Church of England he was the head of. By now the reformation was leading some in the Anglican Church closer to Calvinism, whereas Charles’s personal proclivities leaned very much towards a more sacramental rite. However, Scotland had embraced Calvinist Presbyterianism with fervent enthusiasm under the direction of John Knox, and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland was not in the least inclined to welcome Charles’s vision of Christianity, and especially his imposition of bishops.

In 1638 the whole of Scotland rose against Charles to sign the National Covenant, a document in which the whole nation swore allegiance to God. Even those who disagreed with it and signed against their personal inclinations took it seriously because no-one enters a covenant with God lightly.

The Covenanters as they were known, were now on a collision course with the king. And so began a bloody epoch in Scottish history during which the nation came close to deposing their king and embarking on a form of fledgling democracy but, too far ahead of its time, it ultimately failed. Nevertheless, one serious consequence that ensued was the initiation of events that would trigger the English Civil War and the rise of Oliver Cromwell.

When that bloody conflict began, English Royalist and Parliamentary forces were pretty evenly matched and a stalemate gradually developed whereupon Cromwell asked the Scots Parliament to send an army to assist the king‘s opponents. They did so, after securing an alliance with the English Parliament when both Houses of Scotland’s Parliament and her Commissioners signed the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643, which was soon thereafter ratified at Westminster.

As a result the tide began to swing in favour of the Roundheads which proved a pivotal point in history because while the League was a military alliance, the Covenant was a religious pledge and, in an astonishing reversal of the king’s demand that the Church of Scotland bow to an Episcopal clergy, the Church of England very nearly became Presbyterian.

The English Civil War was actually a misnomer and actually a series of three wider conflicts involving not only English Royalists and Roundheads, but Scots and Irish elements as well, and a conflict moreover, in which duplicity was rife on all sides.

At one point Charles surrendered to the Scottish Presbyterian Army who handed him over to their English Parliamentary allies who imprisoned him. During his confinement however, Charles negotiated with the Scots to whom he gave his assurance to establish a Presbyterian Church in England, which sufficiently satisfied Scotland’s nobles, although not the common Covenanters, to agree to support Charles and invade England. This they did, and were heavily defeated.

Hitherto, even England’s Parliamentarians were willing to extend Charles the benefit of the doubt and allow him to remain as king in a reduced constitutional capacity, but after he fomented further war whilst in custody following his surrender, they deemed him so dishonourable that they indicted him for treason, on which charge he was duly convicted and subsequently beheaded on the 30th of January 1649.

Cromwell was not happy with the Scots for supporting Charles, nor were the Scots at all pleased that England’s Parliament had executed their king, and Cromwell ended up having to send an occupying force of 10,000 English troops to pacify a recalcitrant Scotland. The whole thing was a dreadful mess which had cost countless thousands of lives and all started because King Charles I had tried to impose an Episcopalian Church on a Presbyterian Scotland.

Cromwell was eventually made Lord Protector of the English Commonwealth, effectively its dictator, and king in all but name. And during his tenure, among other things, the celebration of Christmas was banned.

In Scotland, Charles II had already been proclaimed king and crowned at Scone in 1649 but was not invited back to England until after Cromwell’s death in 1658. Two years later Charles returned to reclaim his throne and Britain became a monarchy again.

Charles II learned many lessons from his father’s example, not least of which being the folly of antagonising the English Parliament. However, he not pursued the re-establishment of the Church of England but still hankered for the Episcopal reform of the Scottish Church, which brought him into renewed conflict with his Scottish subjects. And again like his father, Charles leaned heavily towards the Catholic faith, even to the extent of making secret alliance with Catholic France who, in return for a generous pension from Louis XIV, he promised to assist in their conflict against Protestant Holland.

In so doing Charles took an enormous risk which if discovered could have resulted in his suffering his late father’s fate. Instead, Charles died in 1685, converting to Catholicism on his deathbed, and being without issue, was immediately succeeded by his younger brother the Duke of York who became James II.

James II is famous for two reasons. Firstly, he is the Duke that New York is named after. Secondly, he was Britain’s last Catholic monarch.

Like his father before him, James believed in the Divine Right of Kings and was not temperamentally amenable to negotiating with Parliament, and quickly adopted an imperious and autocratic style of government.

His style was instinctively repressive and he favoured Catholics whom he placed in every available office at every opportunity, much to the chagrin of his subjects who by now were mostly Protestant.

He was nonetheless tolerated initially by a populace still in guilt for having executed his father and because, it was reasoned, he was getting on in years with no male issue, so once he was gone the succession would fall to his Protestant daughter Mary and that would be the end of the Catholic Stuart line. Then James’s wife produced a son.

Now all bets were off and both Parliaments looked to James’s daughter Mary and her Dutch husband Prince William of Orange with a view to regime change. William duly obliged and invaded England in the bloodless Glorious Revolution of 1688, which invasion was later spun as William’s arrival at Parliament‘s invitation.

James panicked and fled to France from where he made an abortive backdoor attempt to retake his throne in 1690, at the Battle of the Boyne, after which defeat he never returned to Britain again.

Normally a king or queen rules alone, when they are described as regnant, while any spouse is described as consort. In such circumstances it is usually the king who is regnant and his queen, consort. A notable exception to this rule was Queen Victoria who reigned as Queen regnant while her German husband Albert was Prince Consort. William III and Mary II however, were jointly regnant and during their reign signed England’s Bill of Rights, heralding the introduction of fledgling democratic reform.

After Mary died in 1694, William acquired sole sovereignty until his own death from septicaemia in 1702. This followed a fractured clavicle resulting from a fall when his horse tripped on a molehill, which led to the Jacobite toast, ‘To the little gentleman in velvet’. The Jacobites were so called from their allegiance to James Stuart, whose name in Latin is Jacobus.

Before he died however, William saw one resoundingly significant piece of legislation enacted: the Act of Settlement of 1701, which to this day provides that no Roman Catholic may ascend to the British throne.

William was succeeded by his sister-in-law Anne, who herself died without surviving issue despite many failed pregnancies. And with her death in 1714 ended the Protestant Stuart succession. Before she died however, Anne manoeuvred the Union of Parliaments which effectively ended Scotland’s political independence to this day, although some limited powers were devolved by Westminster to the new Scottish Parliament in 1999.

Following the death of Queen Anne the Elector of Hanover became King George I. His claim through his marriage to Sophia, the granddaughter of James I, might have been considered tenuous, and certainly there were over fifty other claimants with closer links to the throne. However, they were Roman Catholics and therefore disqualified by the Act of Settlement.

As might be imagined, this was not situation many Jacobite supporters considered satisfactory and the Catholic descendants of the Stuart dynasty found a deal of support when they attempted to retake the British throne in the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745. However, these failed and Britain’s throne remained firmly under the Protestant posteriors of the House of Hanover, whose first four sovereigns were imaginatively named George I, George II, George III and George IV. But it is upon the reign of George III, between 1760 and 1820, that we now turn our focus, because George III was the last British king of America.

The Britain of George III, from which the Thirteen Colonies seceded to establish the United States of America, was a very different country from that inherited by his grandfather George I, because the 18^th Century was a time of seminal change.

Building on the victories of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Parliament was moving ever closer to democracy, while the new ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment were spreading across the whole of Europe, just as the Industrial Revolution was beginning to make Great Britain the richest nation on earth.

Ideas of freedom that were considered flights of fancy elsewhere were seen as ultimately attainable in a Britain whose Parliamentary government and constitutional liberties were regarded with admiration by such men as Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. This perception is probably the reason why Britain largely escaped the violent revolution sweeping across France and Europe.

Certainly, the Britain of the late 18^th Century was no paragon of freedom and democracy by modern standards, but judged by the standards of its day, the liberties enjoyed by the average Briton were incomparably greater than those of the citizens of any other great nation. And those freedoms largely extended to her colonies, including the Thirteen States of North America.