It’s been said about Oliver Cromwell, that regardless of your political or religious stance, for or against, if you look up “Oliver Cromwell” you will find what you are looking for.
The “Cromwell Interregnum” is defined as that period of five years, 1653 to 1658, when he suspended both Parliament and the Monarchy, and began redesigning a better functioning arrangement, but as a dictator, and with the approval of most of common English society outside of the political class.
All I am looking for here is a model of a similar way forward to reform America, also requiring no more than five (5) years, with which we can restore the basic structure, under law, so that the next generations will have something to build upon after we’re gone.
As things now stand it would take thirty-or-forty years, or even not at all, if we continue the in way America conducts it public business these days, where every move will be met by a series of lawsuits or procedural re-routes, including yes, these days, unpunished street destruction.
As things now stand, a majority, or for that matter, even a super-majority, would be unable to bring about real substantive, back-to-the-Foundation changes in any reasonable period of time. With 90% of the Left Democrats setting up roadblocks and resisting when not in power to actually destroy, witness the countless congressional hearings and two impeachments of the Trump years, to actual destruction as we are witnessing now, and with as much as 30% of the “establishment” Republicans waffling, the only people in America who actually want these major changes are in fact, The People, who haven’t actually had any real representation in government for three generations or more.
Simply put, there is not a process-as-usual way back, and, as just mentioned, “The People” already know this.
Oliver Cromwell can show us how.
In many ways, Oliver Cromwell was a thoroughly deplorable man. In the first instance, he was a Puritan, which was probably the most sanctimonious religious sect God ever planted on this earth, elements of which founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. While our Puritans were becoming unbearable to their New England neighbors, and so inhospitable to new immigrants coming through their ports, such as the Scotch-Irish, that they found a new port-of-entry at Philadelphia, by invitation of the Quakers…thus being able to serve as a major factor, as militias, of winning the Revolutionary War 75 years later, the Puritans in England were involved in their own civil war.
There were three between 1642 and 1651, between the forces of Parliament (“Roundheads” they were called) and the forces of the Stuart kings, Charles I and II, (Cavaliers they were called). The best general of the Parliamentary forces was Oliver Cromwell, as noted, also an insufferable Puritan.
With similar “The Lord, He sure do work in mysterious ways” symbolism, the same might be said of the English civil wars as what the Puritans “caused” in the American colonies. For as a practical battlefield strategist and tactition, by 1649 Cromwell believed the Parliament should end the excesses of the monarchy by writing laws that made the King subservient to Parliament. Since Charles I was an excessive-living royal, and refused, Cromwell then suggested that he should be executed (beheaded), and then re-arrange the legal relationship between Parliament and the Monarch, essentially that Parliament would outrank the King…which was unheard of in 17th Century Europe.
As fundamental changes go, you can’t get any more fundamental, and much of Parliament was reluctant to go along with such a plan. So Cromwell secured the Warrant to execute Charles with this document (below) in 1648 (18 years after the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded) by creating the Rump Parliament to replace the Long Parliament, which he purged. Slam dunk.
Try to think of this process in modern times.
Charles was then beheaded, very nobly I might add, unlike anything you could ever expect to see from any of the dozens-to-hundreds in our recent history today who would deserve a march up the gallows stairs themselves. He was then succeeded by his son, Charles II, who fared no better, so in 1651 Cromwell simply canceled Parliament, and in 1653 declared a “Commonwealth” only under the single rule of himself, Oliver Cromwell.
But only till he sorted things out.
He would only live to 1658, to be replaced by his son, who was just a glimmer of his old man, but in those 5 years, the primacy of the Church of England was ended and Protestantism made the ascendant power of Ireland (quite brutally, forever damning Cromwell in the eyes of Roman Catholics) but most of all, establishing the primacy of Parliament over the monarchy…only it would take another 30 years for it to become law. For after Cromwell died, the old Parliament invited back the Stuart Kings, King James, who some people where I grew up says who was the first to translate the Bible, but was generally a “Bad King” according to the English historians, Sellars and Yeatman, in 1930. So in 1688, it was King John’s daughter, Mary, who had married William of Orange, and they were was invited to take the Crown of England, only according to the model that Oliver Cromwell had established in 1653.
It was called The Glorious Revolution. And has done England well ever since, 337 years.
But because of his low-borness, he was a commoner, and his “unseemly” hatred for Irish Catholics, many of England’s finest historians hated him; men like David Hume, also a Scot, like Thomas Carlyle.
But Thomas Carlyle, in his Heroes and Hero-Worship, delivered as lectures in the 1840s, addressed the Hero as Divinity, as Prophet, as Poet, as Priest, as Man of Letters and finally, the Hero as King, in which he treated Cromwell as a hero, especially by comparison to Napoleon Bonaparte. Carlyle made several insightful comments, especially that when Cromwell was offered the title of king he refused it, accepting instead the title of “Protector” under the new Commonwealth scheme. Unlike Cromwell, Bonaparte, when faced with a bunch of mostly young, starry-eyed dreamers in France, who apparently didn’t know how to open a jar of mayonnaise, easily convinced himself that he could do it better and declared himself king, and later Emperor, and generally messed up European history and geography for close to 15 years.
I’ll stop here, and take up the action part of this suggestion in a Part II, for much like Cromwell’s time, there will be the air of civil war, or Wahr, as I like to call it, surrounding this election year, and maybe the next.
Some very important things are going to break in coming months. Things the Democrats and the Left don’t want to happen, but can’t prevent. A Cromwell “Protectorate” is just one of a few possibilities, but as long as Donald Trump is still healthy, and the action-wing of the US military is still on the side of the People, as well as the vast majority of our police, I think we are holding very good cards.
What we can do this election cycle is render the weenie-wing of the Republican Party impotent. As we are seeing rise up across the country, thanks to friends in northern Virginia, citizens are rising up to take back our schools the righteous way, and an avalanche may be building up that may make an “interregnum protectorate” or Cromwell dictatorship unnecessary…but only the People can develop ways to fix things better.
It will be the single voice of The People who will finally decide.
We have a lot of pieces that have yet to be fit into place, but the greatest win will be in letting the Democrats and weak-kneed Republicans know that no matter what they say or do, those things will be done. So it will much safer just to step aside.
The fundamentals have to be fixed quickly. Just like our Revolution, which took 5 years to set the fundamentals in place after we’d won that war, we have to be prepared. As long as he’s healthy, I hope Donald Trump’s willing to step in like Cromwell and do what needs to be done.
