Tyburn, Rouen, Cowardice - Part VI
Hypothetical Case:
The country is in a high state of tension, from internal and external pressures fiscal and cultural together. Religious tolerance, class rivalries, international political influences and a lot of the same not dealt with adquately over the past several generations have brought the nation to a point where apparent prosperity glosses over vast inequities and simmering resentments, combined with a lot of apocalyptic gloom - very bad mixtures indeed.
In the midst of all this, a conspiracy to destroy the government, not a symbolic attack on empty buildings like the Reichstag fire (assuming that that was what it was, exploited, not a frame-up) but detonating a massive nitrate explosion while the representatives are in session, taking out the whole leadership at a blow like something out of Tom Clancy.
Now, imagine the plot is discovered before it can be pulled off - and the apparent ringleader is caught, alive.
Instead of turning out to be a foreigner from one of the ideological and economic rivals who have recently been at war with the country, the culprit, perhaps surprisingly, turns out to be a disaffected young man from a nice respectable upper-middle-class family, whose sentiments have turned to the marginalized groups and against the ethnic group he sees predominating politically - who has come to consider the establishment itself the most destructive force, and as a result went abroad and served in a foreign military, and now calls himself by a foreign name, and decided to strike at "the head of the snake" rather than working for change from outside, finding other potential uses for his military experience as a sapper.
You've got him. But are there any others involved? The sheer scale of the project, the volume of the explosives involved, argues yes. Quite possible foreign governments. This is a matter of utmost national security, stark and undisputable.
But torture is illegal in this country. What do you do?
--No, this isn't an unused script for 24. This is history, not speculation. I doubt very much that anyone today, assuming they've ever thought about it, would be surprised to find out that one "Guido" Fawkes was tortured before being executed in 1605. The Old Days &c, right?
But what I didn't know, until I stumbled across it doing research for the earlier instalments, was that, at that time, it was actually illegal for the British government to torture him. Routine torture, judicial torture, for the purposes of extracting information had at some point become illegal. (I'm not sure exactly when - as I've said, I'm not a CJ major, I didn't study this systematically, all I do know is that by the time John Gerard, SJ was caught and interrogated in 1594, overuse of the rack - something hard to hide with public executions, when the convicted were subsequently too crippled to climb onto the scaffold and stand unassisted - had resulted in a backlash of public opinion against racking, even of traitors, so the inventive civil servants had gone back to the less-destructive but essentially similar, if slower method of hanging suspects by the wrists and tying weights to their feet. "We're not racking them," they could say with perfect honesty.)
So James I had to write out an executive order allowing for progressive torture, which only got names out of Fawkes after he was told of the arrest of some his co-conspirators (already under suspicion due to things like who rented the building where the bomb was placed, who was known to be friends with whom, who had been spotted by Intel while traveling overseas, etc) following a shootout in which others were killed. In other words, ordinary, routine police work combined with dumb luck a) discovered the plot and b) discovered the plotters. Torture didn't save the head of state and representatives, it didn't reveal the ticking bomb in the basement, and it didn't catch the perps, either. (What was the dumb luck, you might ask? Namely, that some of the conspirators got qualms of conscience in re "collateral damage", and revealed the plot to the authorities in advance, thus they were already waiting to catch the guy who showed up to set off the fuse! Not exactly a resounding endorsment of the "Ticking Time Bomb" scenario.)
It also didn't solve the problems (any more than the subsequent execution of Fawkes and those of the conspiracy who didn't manage get to out of the country, and further crackdowns on Catholicism and freedom of association generally) that made a disgruntled upper-middle class kid who is friends with people whose religion is illegal, to the point of fines, imprisonment and execution, who resents the Scottish-based regime who have taken over the government and who aren't doing a good job with the fiscal problems or the social ones, to go overseas and join a jihad movement, then come back and take part in staging a coup, with the goal "That all and singular Abuses and Grievances within this Realm of England, should, for satisfying of the People, be reform'd."
It wasn't Fawkes who thought of it, moreover: this was far more than the half-assed "if we hit something that stands for the government, then The People will rise up and throw off their chains" idiocy of McVeigh and friends. The leaders of the plot were young British aristocrats, Robert Catesby, descended from one of Richard III's ministers ("The Cat") and Sir Everard Digby, who had been hopeful when James I was made king, and disillusioned when nothing changed for the better. Fawkes was crucial because of his experience undermining forts and dealing with large quantities of explosives in the Spanish army, but he wasn't the one with the inside and the political clout to form a new government with one of James' young daughters as figurehead, which was the plan. It didn't work, but the decline continued for another forty years.
The attitude that see, we need more repression, not less; less freedom of speech and religion, not more, people are trying to blow up the government, dammit! didn't exactly ensure security or a lasting peace for the country. A generation later, you got the Civil War, you got shifting alliances of socio-economic groups - irony of ironies, while the Gunpowder Plot was inspired in part by anti-Catholic policy, by the time that it was Cavaliers vs Roundheads, English Catholicism was on the government side, in a detente with the CoE against the religious radicals. (This sort of parallels the shift of some of the persecution-mentality Christian Militiamen sorts who were all black helicopters and guns when it was a Democratic presidency, but came around (not all) to believe that government was not after all the Great Satan, per se, when it was Bushco/Cheneyburton - "our sort of people, you know.") While Oliver Cromwell was the grandson of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's own Alberto Gonzales and a leading figure in the elevation of government power over religion private and personal, the whole catalyzing situation of the Oath which is at the center of A Man For All Seasons.
This led to James' son being himself executed - after suspending the legislative branches of government, invoking national emergency and martial law - for, yes, treason.
The fact that the winning side then managed to FUBAR things themselves and alienate sympathizers with their Christian Taliban behavior, and the subsequent backlash-against-the-backlash, and then the backlast against that, goes a long way towards explaining contemporary blase British attitudes towards heads of state and public displays of religion and regional nationalism. It may not be perfect, but at least they don't have the "Drive 70 - Freeze A Yankee" mentality of my childhood, nor the "Fuck The South" response to the same, nor - and we should recall that even here we have something to be grateful for - the constant clashes of the Basques, now that they have wised up over Northern Ireland. If the sectarian/class divisions and spirit had remained immutable from the late-renaissance/early modern era, it wouldn't just be IRA bombs, it would be a continual string of proto-McVeighs all over England.
It also helps to explain why, by the late 1700s, the more socially conscious and the more farsighted pragmatic politically alike would be dead set against any sort of church-state entanglement, and any sort of privileged sectarian divisions being enshrined in government. (And not just on the highest levels: Catesby had to make the choice between graduating from college and freedom of religion, when new loyalty oaths were required.) A couple hundred years of sporadic civil war and coups and coup attempts tend to give one a bit of perspective in re the intrinsic instability of such things. Just as New Englanders want no part of theocracy or puritanism these days, the Founding Fathers of America had already seen and lived it, and didn't like it.
But this is the idyll that those who think that we can become a Christian nation engaged in crusades abroad and purges at home with impunity are moving us ever closer to - they have not grasped that "for every action there is an opposite reaction" is not merely a description of physical movements. ("Whenever you advise a ruler in the Way, counsel him not to use force to conquer the universe. For this would only cause resistance.") Hurt people, and they may give way for a while; compress people too closely, and that which is pushed will eventually push back, with all the force that has been driven into it over time. You can only draw a bow back so far, and hold it for so long, before it goes SPROING one way or the other.
Or, as it was said thousands of years ago, sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Though I like the Tao's other take on it too:
When men lack a sense of awe, there will be disaster.
Do not intrude in their homes.
Do not harass them at work.
If you do not interfere, they will not weary of you.
Therefore the sage knows himself but makes no show;
Has self-respect but is not arrogant.
He lets go of that and chooses this.
(Zhang 72)
If Volokh and friends really think that the only problem with the death penalty's deterring effect, is that we haven't yet executed enough people - then I really think they need to make the acquaintance of a certain sharp-faced Lady of profligate affections... Notliterally, just in the legal literature of Revolutions.
--Yes, there will be one more chapter. Why diverge for an expedition into a ritualized yet overlooked bit of English history? Because of what the shocking revelation that state-sponsored torture was illegal except with an executive order by 1605. That fast, it went into disfavor - and at the same time, such public disfavor meant nothing, because there was always a loophole. People talked about compassion, just as much in 1605 as they do now. But "necessity" and "the common good" trump everything, and somehow they always coincide with "what the people currently in power want" - that is to say, what's politically correct. Which always has to do with money and earthly power.
The point of this is that, all that vaunted moral superiority people hold today over past generations and centuries (or other countries) is worthless.
Here is the opening of the article on the execution of the conspirators, from The Weekely Newes of Munday, 31st January, 1606:
NOT to aggravate the sorrow of the living in the shame of the dead, but to dissuade the idolatrously blind from seeking their own destruction, the following account is written of the carrage of the eight papists herein named, of their little show of sorrow, their usage in prison, and their obstinacy to their end. First for their offence--it is so odious in the ears of all human creatures that it could hardly be believed that so many monsters in nature should carry the shapes of men--murder! Oh! it is the crying sin of the world, and such an intended murder as, had it taken effect, would have made a world to cry; and, therefore, the horror thereof must needs be hateful to the whole world to hear it. My intent is chiefly to make report of the manner of their Execution: for after their apprehension in the country they were brought up to London upon teh appearance of their foul treason before his Majesties most honourable Council, they were, by their commandment, committed to his majesty's Tower of London, where they wanted nothing that, in the mercy of a Christian Prince, was thought fit, and indeed too good for so unchristian offenders.
It isn't that people were any more or less "nasty and brutal" back then - it's that they felt more threatened than we of the middle classes in the developed world did, and they just didn't face the cognitive dissonance of the gap between their moral principles and their deeds, or between making increasing numbers of activities and states of being, grounds for suspicion and arrest and punishment - in the name of safety. In their tharn state of mindless terror, they remain frozen while their own rights are taken along with those of terrorists, or lash out against enemies of the state generally, without realizing that when Dame Fortune turns her wheel again, these same restrictions will bind them, too--
Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights weren't written because the authors were head-in-the-clouds ivory tower types, convinced that everyone out there was nice and sweet. No, it's actually us, that segment of the population first to become "security moms" and dads, who have laboured longest under that delusion, and thus the easiest stampeded into the [Pat]Riot Act trap.
Just as when I was a kid, it was de riguer for books and teachers and classmates talking about leprosy in the old days to point out smugly how much more stupid and fearful and cruel people were back then - unlike us who know better and are more humane - and then for all this to fall apart in the 80s with the collective terror of AIDS (and how easily was that terror was exploited with misinformation and used in an attempt to sow homophobia, by the Hegemony.) Civil rights? Legal rights? Human rights? Hell with rights, sequester them, treat them as lepers, it's necessary for the safety of the majority-- I could die from this, dammit, don't you realize there's a plague on?
--Thus, one attack on US soil, and we're talking interment camps and needles under the nails while we turn a blind eye to rendition and official brutality so long as we can maintain official deniablity. To keep us safe from our enemies, we must make more of them.
And it doesn't work. It didn't work, not in the short term (unless your definition of "work" includes reigns of terror) and not in the long term. The Stewarts could tell you that, just like the Pahlavis and the Romanovs.
(Just how little do things change? "To further capitalise on the widespread sense of shock, the 'King's Book' - containing James's own account of what had happened, as well as the confessions of Fawkes and Thomas Wintour - was rushed through, appearing in late November."
Further References
BBC site on the Plot and the socio-political background
Original court documents of the Gunpowder Plot
Short profile of Guy "Guido" Fawkes, aka John Johnson.
Gunpowder Plot Society, with more original source materials and discussions of events (eg the newspaper article cited above)
The country is in a high state of tension, from internal and external pressures fiscal and cultural together. Religious tolerance, class rivalries, international political influences and a lot of the same not dealt with adquately over the past several generations have brought the nation to a point where apparent prosperity glosses over vast inequities and simmering resentments, combined with a lot of apocalyptic gloom - very bad mixtures indeed.
In the midst of all this, a conspiracy to destroy the government, not a symbolic attack on empty buildings like the Reichstag fire (assuming that that was what it was, exploited, not a frame-up) but detonating a massive nitrate explosion while the representatives are in session, taking out the whole leadership at a blow like something out of Tom Clancy.
Now, imagine the plot is discovered before it can be pulled off - and the apparent ringleader is caught, alive.
Instead of turning out to be a foreigner from one of the ideological and economic rivals who have recently been at war with the country, the culprit, perhaps surprisingly, turns out to be a disaffected young man from a nice respectable upper-middle-class family, whose sentiments have turned to the marginalized groups and against the ethnic group he sees predominating politically - who has come to consider the establishment itself the most destructive force, and as a result went abroad and served in a foreign military, and now calls himself by a foreign name, and decided to strike at "the head of the snake" rather than working for change from outside, finding other potential uses for his military experience as a sapper.
You've got him. But are there any others involved? The sheer scale of the project, the volume of the explosives involved, argues yes. Quite possible foreign governments. This is a matter of utmost national security, stark and undisputable.
But torture is illegal in this country. What do you do?
--No, this isn't an unused script for 24. This is history, not speculation. I doubt very much that anyone today, assuming they've ever thought about it, would be surprised to find out that one "Guido" Fawkes was tortured before being executed in 1605. The Old Days &c, right?
But what I didn't know, until I stumbled across it doing research for the earlier instalments, was that, at that time, it was actually illegal for the British government to torture him. Routine torture, judicial torture, for the purposes of extracting information had at some point become illegal. (I'm not sure exactly when - as I've said, I'm not a CJ major, I didn't study this systematically, all I do know is that by the time John Gerard, SJ was caught and interrogated in 1594, overuse of the rack - something hard to hide with public executions, when the convicted were subsequently too crippled to climb onto the scaffold and stand unassisted - had resulted in a backlash of public opinion against racking, even of traitors, so the inventive civil servants had gone back to the less-destructive but essentially similar, if slower method of hanging suspects by the wrists and tying weights to their feet. "We're not racking them," they could say with perfect honesty.)
So James I had to write out an executive order allowing for progressive torture, which only got names out of Fawkes after he was told of the arrest of some his co-conspirators (already under suspicion due to things like who rented the building where the bomb was placed, who was known to be friends with whom, who had been spotted by Intel while traveling overseas, etc) following a shootout in which others were killed. In other words, ordinary, routine police work combined with dumb luck a) discovered the plot and b) discovered the plotters. Torture didn't save the head of state and representatives, it didn't reveal the ticking bomb in the basement, and it didn't catch the perps, either. (What was the dumb luck, you might ask? Namely, that some of the conspirators got qualms of conscience in re "collateral damage", and revealed the plot to the authorities in advance, thus they were already waiting to catch the guy who showed up to set off the fuse! Not exactly a resounding endorsment of the "Ticking Time Bomb" scenario.)
It also didn't solve the problems (any more than the subsequent execution of Fawkes and those of the conspiracy who didn't manage get to out of the country, and further crackdowns on Catholicism and freedom of association generally) that made a disgruntled upper-middle class kid who is friends with people whose religion is illegal, to the point of fines, imprisonment and execution, who resents the Scottish-based regime who have taken over the government and who aren't doing a good job with the fiscal problems or the social ones, to go overseas and join a jihad movement, then come back and take part in staging a coup, with the goal "That all and singular Abuses and Grievances within this Realm of England, should, for satisfying of the People, be reform'd."
It wasn't Fawkes who thought of it, moreover: this was far more than the half-assed "if we hit something that stands for the government, then The People will rise up and throw off their chains" idiocy of McVeigh and friends. The leaders of the plot were young British aristocrats, Robert Catesby, descended from one of Richard III's ministers ("The Cat") and Sir Everard Digby, who had been hopeful when James I was made king, and disillusioned when nothing changed for the better. Fawkes was crucial because of his experience undermining forts and dealing with large quantities of explosives in the Spanish army, but he wasn't the one with the inside and the political clout to form a new government with one of James' young daughters as figurehead, which was the plan. It didn't work, but the decline continued for another forty years.
The attitude that see, we need more repression, not less; less freedom of speech and religion, not more, people are trying to blow up the government, dammit! didn't exactly ensure security or a lasting peace for the country. A generation later, you got the Civil War, you got shifting alliances of socio-economic groups - irony of ironies, while the Gunpowder Plot was inspired in part by anti-Catholic policy, by the time that it was Cavaliers vs Roundheads, English Catholicism was on the government side, in a detente with the CoE against the religious radicals. (This sort of parallels the shift of some of the persecution-mentality Christian Militiamen sorts who were all black helicopters and guns when it was a Democratic presidency, but came around (not all) to believe that government was not after all the Great Satan, per se, when it was Bushco/Cheneyburton - "our sort of people, you know.") While Oliver Cromwell was the grandson of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's own Alberto Gonzales and a leading figure in the elevation of government power over religion private and personal, the whole catalyzing situation of the Oath which is at the center of A Man For All Seasons.
This led to James' son being himself executed - after suspending the legislative branches of government, invoking national emergency and martial law - for, yes, treason.
The fact that the winning side then managed to FUBAR things themselves and alienate sympathizers with their Christian Taliban behavior, and the subsequent backlash-against-the-backlash, and then the backlast against that, goes a long way towards explaining contemporary blase British attitudes towards heads of state and public displays of religion and regional nationalism. It may not be perfect, but at least they don't have the "Drive 70 - Freeze A Yankee" mentality of my childhood, nor the "Fuck The South" response to the same, nor - and we should recall that even here we have something to be grateful for - the constant clashes of the Basques, now that they have wised up over Northern Ireland. If the sectarian/class divisions and spirit had remained immutable from the late-renaissance/early modern era, it wouldn't just be IRA bombs, it would be a continual string of proto-McVeighs all over England.
It also helps to explain why, by the late 1700s, the more socially conscious and the more farsighted pragmatic politically alike would be dead set against any sort of church-state entanglement, and any sort of privileged sectarian divisions being enshrined in government. (And not just on the highest levels: Catesby had to make the choice between graduating from college and freedom of religion, when new loyalty oaths were required.) A couple hundred years of sporadic civil war and coups and coup attempts tend to give one a bit of perspective in re the intrinsic instability of such things. Just as New Englanders want no part of theocracy or puritanism these days, the Founding Fathers of America had already seen and lived it, and didn't like it.
But this is the idyll that those who think that we can become a Christian nation engaged in crusades abroad and purges at home with impunity are moving us ever closer to - they have not grasped that "for every action there is an opposite reaction" is not merely a description of physical movements. ("Whenever you advise a ruler in the Way, counsel him not to use force to conquer the universe. For this would only cause resistance.") Hurt people, and they may give way for a while; compress people too closely, and that which is pushed will eventually push back, with all the force that has been driven into it over time. You can only draw a bow back so far, and hold it for so long, before it goes SPROING one way or the other.
Or, as it was said thousands of years ago, sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Though I like the Tao's other take on it too:
When men lack a sense of awe, there will be disaster.
Do not intrude in their homes.
Do not harass them at work.
If you do not interfere, they will not weary of you.
Therefore the sage knows himself but makes no show;
Has self-respect but is not arrogant.
He lets go of that and chooses this.
(Zhang 72)
If Volokh and friends really think that the only problem with the death penalty's deterring effect, is that we haven't yet executed enough people - then I really think they need to make the acquaintance of a certain sharp-faced Lady of profligate affections... Notliterally, just in the legal literature of Revolutions.
--Yes, there will be one more chapter. Why diverge for an expedition into a ritualized yet overlooked bit of English history? Because of what the shocking revelation that state-sponsored torture was illegal except with an executive order by 1605. That fast, it went into disfavor - and at the same time, such public disfavor meant nothing, because there was always a loophole. People talked about compassion, just as much in 1605 as they do now. But "necessity" and "the common good" trump everything, and somehow they always coincide with "what the people currently in power want" - that is to say, what's politically correct. Which always has to do with money and earthly power.
The point of this is that, all that vaunted moral superiority people hold today over past generations and centuries (or other countries) is worthless.
Here is the opening of the article on the execution of the conspirators, from The Weekely Newes of Munday, 31st January, 1606:
NOT to aggravate the sorrow of the living in the shame of the dead, but to dissuade the idolatrously blind from seeking their own destruction, the following account is written of the carrage of the eight papists herein named, of their little show of sorrow, their usage in prison, and their obstinacy to their end. First for their offence--it is so odious in the ears of all human creatures that it could hardly be believed that so many monsters in nature should carry the shapes of men--murder! Oh! it is the crying sin of the world, and such an intended murder as, had it taken effect, would have made a world to cry; and, therefore, the horror thereof must needs be hateful to the whole world to hear it. My intent is chiefly to make report of the manner of their Execution: for after their apprehension in the country they were brought up to London upon teh appearance of their foul treason before his Majesties most honourable Council, they were, by their commandment, committed to his majesty's Tower of London, where they wanted nothing that, in the mercy of a Christian Prince, was thought fit, and indeed too good for so unchristian offenders.
It isn't that people were any more or less "nasty and brutal" back then - it's that they felt more threatened than we of the middle classes in the developed world did, and they just didn't face the cognitive dissonance of the gap between their moral principles and their deeds, or between making increasing numbers of activities and states of being, grounds for suspicion and arrest and punishment - in the name of safety. In their tharn state of mindless terror, they remain frozen while their own rights are taken along with those of terrorists, or lash out against enemies of the state generally, without realizing that when Dame Fortune turns her wheel again, these same restrictions will bind them, too--
Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights weren't written because the authors were head-in-the-clouds ivory tower types, convinced that everyone out there was nice and sweet. No, it's actually us, that segment of the population first to become "security moms" and dads, who have laboured longest under that delusion, and thus the easiest stampeded into the [Pat]Riot Act trap.
Just as when I was a kid, it was de riguer for books and teachers and classmates talking about leprosy in the old days to point out smugly how much more stupid and fearful and cruel people were back then - unlike us who know better and are more humane - and then for all this to fall apart in the 80s with the collective terror of AIDS (and how easily was that terror was exploited with misinformation and used in an attempt to sow homophobia, by the Hegemony.) Civil rights? Legal rights? Human rights? Hell with rights, sequester them, treat them as lepers, it's necessary for the safety of the majority-- I could die from this, dammit, don't you realize there's a plague on?
--Thus, one attack on US soil, and we're talking interment camps and needles under the nails while we turn a blind eye to rendition and official brutality so long as we can maintain official deniablity. To keep us safe from our enemies, we must make more of them.
And it doesn't work. It didn't work, not in the short term (unless your definition of "work" includes reigns of terror) and not in the long term. The Stewarts could tell you that, just like the Pahlavis and the Romanovs.
(Just how little do things change? "To further capitalise on the widespread sense of shock, the 'King's Book' - containing James's own account of what had happened, as well as the confessions of Fawkes and Thomas Wintour - was rushed through, appearing in late November."
Further References
BBC site on the Plot and the socio-political background
Original court documents of the Gunpowder Plot
Short profile of Guy "Guido" Fawkes, aka John Johnson.
Gunpowder Plot Society, with more original source materials and discussions of events (eg the newspaper article cited above)