Magna Carta Two

Royalist Party

2009-04-12T18:30:32+02:00

William of Salisbury’s Letter to King Charles III

It was on May Day 1988 that a courier arrived at my lodgings on Stour Street in Canterbury and handed me a package containing two parchments under the seal of William of Salisbury. The first parchment was a letter addressed to King Charles III of England and the second was headed Programme of Governance. The identity of William of Salisbury was unknown so I placed the parchments in a bottom drawer intending to make a few discrete inquiries.

All this happened twenty years ago. I have taken out the two parchments from time to time and perused them with the firm intention of making a decision about what was to be done with them. But William of Salisbury had given me nothing by way of a hint to assist me. So after their perusal the two documents were returned to the bottom drawer. From here they have followed me around between England and Sweden and back…and on one occasion even went with me to Bretagne for the opinion of my good friend a peasant farmer in Mael-Pestivien…although in the event the subject was not broached.

Earlier this week both of my computers broke down leaving me twiddling my thumbs wondering what to do with myself. It was pouring with rain and the boat was leaking so I got to moving around some files and papers and chanced across the two parchments once again. This time I determined that something must be done with them. They will finally see the light of day. The Governance Manuscript will be made public shortly. Meanwhile here is the text of the letter William of Salisbury had addressed to King Charles III of England on May Day 1988.

Dear Charles...

In the first years of your reign, perhaps earlier, perhaps coincident with your coronation, the financial edifice upon which the prosperity of your realm now resides, will collapse thrusting your country and your subjects into chaos.

From this chaos will arise either a greater chaos allied with catastrophe, famine, plague and war or a revolution, from which some tyrant or a military junta will emerge. I wish you to have available a fourth option in addition to Chaos, Tyranny or Military Rule. The Royalist Party represents this fourth way; the truly radical way for a free people...the way of Aristocratic Populism.

Your first task will be to dissolve parliament and call a general election. The royalists will have ready a candidate to declare for you in each constituency. It is my hope that lords, bishops, mayors and those most respected in their local communities will join the royalist cause and volunteer for their country. This will not be the time for politics as usual. Exceptional wisdom will be called for.

Upon the election of a majority of royalist candidates to your lower house, you will make two announcements. First you will call upon a first lord of the treasury and a foreign secretary to serve with you in a cabinet.

Secondly you will announce the date of a second election to parliament and the manifesto of the royalists at that election. This will consist of just five words: 'We propose to abolish parliament'. The Royalist Manifesto for the first election is designed for a 5-year parliamentary term of transition. The programme could be carried out over a shorter period were you to deem this expedient.

The task of your Home Minister will be to implement the Royalist Manifesto and establish a culture of political independence throughout your realm ready to take upon itself the power returned to it from central government.

The task of your Foreign Minister will be to dispatch the wisest elders from your realm as ambassadors to foreign capitals to explain the Royalist Intentions and to appoint delegates to the various Hanseatic Royalist Confederations…for part of your royalist programme will be to establish our elected supporters among European Parliaments. That Power of Action and Being which is devolved must needs be balanced by other Power of Mind and Becoming that is dispersed about a wider perimeter.

Your task will be to carry out your Constitutional Duties; to support your Home & Foreign Ministers; to secure the loyalty of your men of arms; to exhort the highest virtues in your lords temporal in their administration of the king's justice; to direct your lords spiritual to works of charity and to the affairs of the human spirit; and to make ready your Privy Council for government upon the abolition of parliament.

You will carry upon your shoulders the heavy burden for engendering a sense of continuity and a mood of optimism among your subjects and an aura of competence and invincibility among those outside of your realm who might seek to exploit the turbulence of these troubled times.

Finally I would suggest that it is not necessary to await financial collapse or administrative chaos before implementing these proposals. Timing is of the essence. This only you should decide. We stand ready to do our duty and your bidding.

Your loyal and obedient subject.

William of Salisbury.

William of Salisbury’s Programme of Governance

One of Hilaire Belloc’s achievements was to add a new type to the popular concept of the Roman Catholic…one much more in the Irish than the Continental tradition…which is ironic given the Irish roots of Bernard Shaw’s Puritanism.

Before Belloc the Roman Catholic was synonymous with the Jesuit with its image of a sinister silent indoor figure in black forever intriguing against anyone and everything English.

This image lives on in much of the European debate…in part because it has lost none of its relevance…both on the side of the Europhiles who approve of the type and of the Eurosceptics who fear the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in all things English.

Hilaire Belloc showed the English the other side of the Roman Catholic coin…the burly man singing, shouting, arguing and drinking beer in the open air. His comic verses…particularly The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and More Beasts for Worse Children have encouraged adults and children from five generations to share laughter together.

Another irony is that the best book to read about the Roman Catholic Conspiracy behind the European Superstate is by a gentleman who goes by the name of Laughland. What would William of Salisbury have made of all this?

William of Salisbury left me with two manuscripts in the spring of 1988. The first was his Letter to King Charles III which I assumed was never sent…being more by way of an introduction to the second manuscript…the Programme of Governance. This second manuscript was in two parts headed National Programme and Local Programme.

In his letter William of Salisbury established a 5-year timeframe for the transfer of power from Central Government to Real Local Government in England.

At the end of five years Central Government would cease to exist. So the National Programme provides marching orders for The Five Transition Years. Afterwards the governance of these Offshore Islands of the North-Eastern Atlantic Ocean would be within the framework of the Local Programme.

William of Salisbury’s Local Programme consisted of eight points…clauses would be too grand a term as the plan was condensed into just One Hundred Words.

After each of the eight points William of Salisbury had written cryptically ‘see paper’…but failed to provide any hints as to whether such papers existed and if they did where they might be found.

I have concluded that his intention was for me to write these eight papers…something that I started in 2001 with a paper for the first Radical Consultation entitled The Wealth of Counties. Here are the eight points.

1. Right to the Seven Securities of Old Age;

2. Right to Celebrate at solstices & equinoxes;

3. Master Cowmen, Master Shepherds and Master Woodmen responsible to their guilds for the Welfare of Cows and Sheep and the Management of Woodlands in Rural Parishes;

4. Utilities Board to deliver Village and Urban Parish Self-Sufficiency in Water, Sewage, Rubbish, Heating and Electricity;

5. Bailiwick Bonds as the mechanism for Local Savings;

6. Agrarian Justice as the mechanism for Social Security;

7. Tithing…days per household per year…to meet Community, Harvest and Militia Duties;

8. Undwelled Farmland to be allotted to Foreigners.

This was all very fine…but for me just a trifle eerie, begging the question of coincidence of synchronicity.

Three dozen of my journals are in Jempson’s Store on the Old Winchelsea Road. Some notes scribbled in the back of one of them are entitled The Seven Securities of Old Age…not even my daughter has seen them. The complete essay had been worked out and could be written from them. Yet here was the name cropping up in a 1988 parchment from William of Salisbury.

Bailiwick Bonds are also something I have mentioned to just a few very close associates, although the name will be found in my 2006 blogs as a chapter heading for England’s Economic Politics for a New Century. But what I have written has yet to be placed in the Public Domain.

To the best of my knowledge I am the only modern Political Theorist to have noticed that Tom Paine’s Agrarian Justice offers an alternative approach to funding a Welfare State…through Inheritance Taxes. But at least England’s Landed Property has been available for downloading from the internet for a couple of years. Nonetheless here was the idea cropping up in a 1988 parchment from William of Salisbury.

One of my Cocktail Party Pieces…both here in Rye and in Sweden…is the origin of the name of the neighbouring parish of Rye Foreign. It goes back to the European Religious Wars of the sixteenth centuries when Catholics and Calvinists were slaughtering each other at every opportunity.

During one of these European Massacres a wave of Flemish Weavers landed as refugees along the Suffolk and Kent Coasts…my mother’s Land family among them. Rye was an important port town at the time. Many families landed here or came here from Faversham, Tenterden and Canterbury.

The Rye Town Fathers had the good sense to see the economic potential of these migrants and determined to make them welcome. They did so by ceding a number of acres of unoccupied land on the outskirts of their parish a day’s walk from the town. Here the Dutch Huguenots set up shop. Local Rye-ers referred to this collection of Huguenot Households as Rye Foreign.

This type of creative approach Sweden, Ireland and England…the only members of the European Union who have yet to close their doors to economic migrants from elsewhere in Europe...might consider for the 21st century.

William of Salisbury’s Transition Programme

I am now embarked upon the final third of my Blogging Odyssey. I have more to say about Global Warming and have yet to complete my blogging of the Anna Lindh Dossier. There are also more to be gleaned from earlier writings from The Canterbury Papers, The Wealth of Villagers, The Little EuroBook and England’s Economic Politics for A New Century. So I do not find myself short of non-fiction material.

However…unless events intervene…I also plan to introduce into this Shop Window of mine a number of Creative Writing Projects…The Return of the Ancient Mariner; The Little Prince; The Private Letters of Crocodile Uppsala; 2034; Creaky Tales and The King of Buen Consejo.

But William of Salisbury may yet take up much of my attention. The first of his two parchments…Letter to King Charles III…appeared in last Saturday’s Blog and his Eight Points Local Programme two days ago. But this local programme was the second and last part of his Second Parchment. The first part contained the Marching Orders for the Five Transition Years between the Election of the Royalist Party and the Abolition of Centralised Government.

The idea that a thousand years of English History can be turned upside down in 350-words may seem quite absurd. William of Salisbury would agree...as long as business carries on as usual. But this is a radical programme designed for a situation where business is anything but normal and the alternatives are Chaos, Tyranny or Military Rule.

Five years ago Kirkpatrick Sale predicted that we would be in just such a situation within 20 years. It is also 15 years since John Seymour conceived Retrieved From The Future set in Suffolk in the years after the Oil Tankers failed to arrive and England’s City Dwellers froze to death after two devastating winters. The War on Terror, Global Warming and the other products of the Fear Factories are distractions from Reality.

Western Europe and the USA are about to go the way of Eastern Europe…and to do so at the same speed. Collapse will not be gradual but sudden. We are living in a Golden Age which is rapidly drawing to a close. The only form of planning that makes any sense in times like these are plans for the reconstruction of Civilisation After The Crash. This is the message coming from John Seymour and Kirkpatrick Sale. William of Salisbury is a contributor to this debate.

One of the great Strengths of Diversity is Redundancy of Institutions. This is what the Uniformers & Harmonisers of the World fail to understand. England is blessed with three parallel Structures of Governance…Monarchy, Parliament and Church.

The collapse of Parliamentary Governance provides an opportunity for The Church or The Monarchy to take on the Power of Governance. William of Salisbury reasons that with Parliamentary Governance discredited the Sensible English Thing To Do will be for Charles Windsor and Rowan Williams to put their heads together. Their task…ahead of Crash…is to design the ways to bring the English people safely through the difficult times ahead.

Much of William of Salisbury’s 20-point Programme of Transition will be rightly seen as a savage assault against Private Banking and Big Business. This will come as no surprise to anyone with Historical Consciousness. These are the forces that have abetted the rise of Parliamentary Governance and instrumental in its fall. Even a cursory reading of the rise of the Property Owners’ & Merchants’ Parliament in the 17th Century will banish any doubts about this. Here is William of Salisbury’s 20-Point Transition Programme…the alternative to Chaos, Tyranny or Military Rule.

1. Issue a Guaranteed Income of £ 100 per person per week of public issue and establish a programme for Issuing Authority to be at Village and Urban Parish level by Year Five;

2. Establish Common Property Commission;

3. Establish Debt & Usury Commission;

4. Establish Trusts & Corporations Commission;

5. Establish Farm & Food Commission;

6. Repeal every Legislative Act of all Parliaments

7. Abolish all Rights other than Personal Property Rights and Common Law Rights;

8. Register all Private Property as Personal Property within 12 months;

9. Establish programme for election of Common Property, Debt & Usury and Equity Commissioners in each constituency after 12 months;

10. Establish programme for the reconstruction or abolition of all Corporations, Trusts and other Joint Private Enterprises by Year Five;

11. Increase bank deposit ratio to 20% and issue public money to replace private bank deposit money at 20% per year until 100% Money Economy by Year Five;

12. Abolish Central Government Taxation after 12 months;

13. Remove Central Government Control of Military Regiments after 12 months;

14. Common Property Commission to dispose of one fifth of Common Property to Competent Receivers each year and to be operating on a County basis by Year Five;

15. Establish Home & Rent Commission in each village and urban parish and transfer all un-dwelled residential dwellings to them as Competent Receivers from the Common Property, Debt & Usury and Equity Commissions after 12 months;

16. Issue Gold and Silver Coinage to replace the National Debt and introduce a Wealth Tax levied in a way that exempts nine out of ten households from taxation at all times;

17. Debt & Usury Commissioners to treat as ‘fully paid up’ all loans for which repayment has exceeded ‘principal plus thirty percent’ issuing public money to clear surplus indebtedness;

18. On reaching their 18th birthday each woman to be given a Home without Encumbrance from existing housing stock;

19. On reaching their 18th birthday each man to be given Five Acres and a Cow and freedom to build upon their land;

20. Establish a Royal Order of Master Gardeners.

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Knights of Gaia

2006-06-04T17:25:49+02:00

Organisation: None whatsoever
Rules: Each Knight makes up his or her own
People qualified to become Knights: Everyone, Anywhere
How to become a Knight: Make the vow aloud in front of at least one other person

The Vow

I declare that all life is sacred. I vow to dedicate my own life henceforth to defending, cherishing and protecting life on Earth. I hereby declare war on all enemies of life on Earth and I hereby vow to conduct an unremitting fight against them. I will behave with true knightly courtesy to all my sister and brother Knights and give them what aid and succour they need.

Policy

There will be no central organisation. Each local group of knights shall form their local community and arrange to meet locally at regular intervals to plan their campaigns against the enemies of life. It will be the duty of each group to ensure that any atrocity against life in its area be attacked and destroyed. The need to establish national journals of the Knights, or even a world one to keep Knights in touch with each other is evident.

First Published by John Seymour (2001, Fourth World Review Number 112)

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Magna Carta Clause 63 of 63

2006-06-04T16:03:37+02:00

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

Like the very first clause in Magna Carta the final clause seeks to make a clear distinction between the Earthly and eternal powers of the king and of the church respectively.

It is an attempt to place the Church and the State in the broader context of the governance of a realm that at the time numbered perhaps five or six million persons. The 63rd and final clause of Magna Carta goes like this:

‘It is accordingly our wish and command that the English Church shall be free and that men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fulness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever’.

Is this clause deserving of a place in Magna Carta II - the sequel? If you think it does then how should the clause be worded?

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Magna Carta Clause 1 of 63

2006-06-04T15:55:39+02:00

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

The first clause in Magna Carta concedes the freedom of the Church and its right to elect its own dignitaries without royal interference. This was a reflection of a dispute between King John and the Pope over Stephen Langton's election as Archbishop of Canterbury. It does not appear in the Articles of the Barons and it was a moot point whether to include it in the Magna Carta at all.

Here is the translated text of this clause from the British Library website.

‘First that we have granted to God and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired. That we wish this so to be observed, appears from the fact that of our own free will, before the outbreak of the present dispute between us and our barons, we granted and confirmed by charter the freedom of the Church's elections - a right reckoned to be of the greatest necessity and importance to it - and caused this to be confirmed by Pope Innocent III. This freedom we shall observe ourselves, and desire to be observed in good faith by our heirs in perpetuity.

Is this clause deserving of a place in Magna Carta II - the sequel? If you think it does then how should the clause be worded?

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Charter 2015

2006-06-04T15:52:08+02:00

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

After 800 years it is time for a sequel to Magna Carta…and it would be rather nice if Charles III, King of England, were on hand to sign it into English Law at Runnymede at the Summer Solstice of 2015…800 years on. At the Radical Consultation in Swindon a draft of the sequel Magna Carta II will be prepared for endorsement at the Final Plenary Session on Saturday 9th September 2006 and a Declaration of Intent produced for the Monday Press Conference 'Nine Eleven - Five Years On' .

Magna Carta II will be a People’s Charter. Each of the sixty three (unnumbered) clauses of Magna Carta I will be posted to this weblog site with a few remarks about the context of the original clause and its relevance to a 21st Century setting.

Each posting will be open for comment and anybody from anywhere may do so. In this way an Open Online Conference about a Local Neighbourhood Charter will be convened for three months in June, July and August 2006 leading up to the Radical Consultation in September.

The job of the conference participants on 7-9 September will be to sift through the internet postings and other comments and learned papers that have come in...by post, email or by hand...and agree the wording...or perhaps several alternative form of words...for the charter that will be put before the Final Plenary of the Third Radical Consultation on the afternoon of Saturday 9th September 2006 for enthusiastic endorsement.

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What Is Magna Carta

2006-06-04T15:38:59+02:00

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

The text of Magna Carta bears many traces of haste and is clearly the product of much bargaining and many hands. Most of its clauses deal with specific…and often long-standing…grievances rather than with general principles of law. Some of the grievances are self-explanatory but others can be understood only in the context of the feudal society in which they arose. Of a few clauses, the precise meaning is still a matter of argument.

Magna Carta attempted to do several things: to define the power of the monarch vis-à-vis the barons; to safeguard the powers of the Church and to codify some of the rights ordinary people enjoyed under Common Law. So it ended up setting down some basic ideas of liberty, democracy and constitutionalism. Many of these have tended to be taken for granted ever since. But for any renewal of theories of governance it represents quite a good departure point.

The document begins with a greeting from John, by the grace of God King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou, to his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justices, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants, and to all his officials and loyal subjects.

About two-thirds of the clauses of Magna Carta are concerned with matters of feudal governance and the misuse of their powers by royal officials. Many of these clauses can be adapted or updated to suit modern conditions. The scope for extortion and abuse in the feudal system…as in almost any system…was great so governance needed a light touch with rights, duties, rules and regulations applied benevolently.

Complaints about administration of The Good Old Law were rife long before King John came to the throne with abuses aggravated by the difficulty of obtaining redress. One of the things Magna Carta does is to set out the means for obtaining a fair hearing of complaints against the king and his agents…and against lesser feudal lords.

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Date of Magna Carta

2006-06-04T15:37:07+02:00

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

The day the English barons and King John signed the Magna Carta is often regarded as the first tentative step from absolute monarchy to government by the people. Nothing is ever this straightforward but in a recent poll by The Times newspaper a quarter of the five thousand people polled voted the Magna Carta as the most important milestone in English Constitutional history. The event took place at Runnymede an island in the River Thames on 15th June 1215.

But in the 18th century the Vatican started harmonising everyone’s calendar. There were sound reasons for this because the sun and moon were getting out of alignment. In England the loss of eleven days this entailed happened in September 1752 shifting Christmas to just 355 days after Christmas 1751. The complications rippled on for centuries.

In the Gregorian calendar the years 1800 and 1900 were no longer leap years but in the Julian calendar they were. This resulted in the difference between the two calendars increasing to 12 days after February 1800 and then to 13 days a century later. 2000 was a leap year in both calendars. So Old Christmas Eve that was on the 4th January in 1753 is now on 6th January every year and coincides with Twelfth Night.

Be that as it may one way or another in England eleven days have been lost since Magna Carta was signed in 1215. So to avoid confusion about the 800th anniversary in 2015 it makes sense to associate Magna Carta II with the Summer Solstice rather than with a specific date like the 15th or the 26th.

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The Royal Prerogative

2006-06-04T15:32:06+02:00

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

In England the royal prerogative is the way centralised Government bypasses Parliament. These princely prerogatives are what Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army left in the royal domain after grabbing the things that mattered for their Short, Long and Barebone Parliaments.

Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599 and was elected to represent Cambridge City in the Short Parliament of April 1640. He continued to serve in the Long Parliament convened in August 1640 and took a leading role in that parliament's refusal to bail out the bankrupt King Charles I, eventually stripping him of his power, taking control of fiscal policy and placing the army and navy under parliamentary control. Within two years a Civil War was waging throughout the land with families divided and royalist Cavaliers and parliamentarian Roundheads at daggers drawn.

Out of the skirmishing the Puritans emerged victorious, cut off the king's head and after an interlude with the Barebones Parliament appointed Cromwell as Lord Protector of England ruling with the help of a single-chamber parliament. It was not long before the expense of a standing army and the cost of the trade war with the Dutch brought Cromwell to his knees too. Nations need finance as well as firepower if they are to undertake glorious action. Cromwell died in 1658 and two years later the monarchy was restored.

The immediate legacy of the English Civil War was a constitution in which the King in Parliament was the glue that bound together the monarchy and the three branches of government: the legislature, the administration and the judiciary. Before the English Civil War the princes did not rule unfettered. There was a written constitution imposed by provincial barons on King John at Runnymede called Magna Carta. But mostly the princes were constrained by the unwritten Common Law and the rights derived from it upheld by a semi-independent judiciary’.

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