John Somers wrote ‘…if once arbitrary government be introduced upon the Principles of Passive Obedience, Peoples Miseries are endless; there is no Prospect or Hopes of Redress; Every Age will add new Oppressions, and new Burdens to a People already exhausted’. A warning unheeded, come to pass.
The quote above is lifted from article 117 of the pamphlet ‘The Judgement of Whole Kingdoms and Nations’ co-authored by Daniel Defoe, he of Crusoe fame, and John Dunton. The pamphlet was written to counter the Jacobite’s, who sought to restore James II to the throne and reverse the Glorious Revolution, or Great Reset, of 1688. John Somers, much like the American Revolutionaries, a century later, did not undertake the business of fomenting a coup lightly, as he himself writes in article 187;
‘Whosoever, either Ruler, or Subject, by Force goes about to invade the Rights of either Prince, or People, and lays the Foundation for over-turning the Constitution, and Frame of any just Government, he is guilty of the greatest Crime, I think a Man is capable of, being to answer for all those Mischiefs of Blood, Rapine and Desolation, which the breaking to pieces of Governments brings on a Country; and he who does it is justly to be accounted one who resists the Ordinance of God, and the common Enemy and Pest of Mankind’
Very much as Cromwell, who famously vacillated over what to do with Charles 1st and was subsequently tormented by the act of regicide to the end of his life, the pamphlet expresses a degree of torment across the 191 separate articles that seek to vindicate what was, in essence, a coup. And the pamphlet is a tour de force, so much so that its printer declares on its opening page that it ‘…is to be kept in all Families, that their Childrens Children may know the Birth-right, Liberty & Property belonging to an English-man.” I wonder, how many of you here, reading this now, have this set upon your bookshelf? My copy was dispatched from the United States, where it was sold with the epithet that, ‘This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.’
That the Americans place such a store of value upon this work, co-authored by the same man who co-wrote the original Bill of Rights, incidentally, repeated in article 83 of the pamphlet, is of little surprise as the US constitution is very much modelled upon it. And herein lies the pamphlets deep value, it is the expert upon whom we can rely when we wish to more fully understand our own constitution and why the Glorious Revolution is first and foremost the Great Reset as he himself states (@146) of the coup, that it is “…by this revolution [that] the Body of the People of England are restored to their ancient Right, and the Government re-established upon its primitive and original Foundation, and the pretended divine Right of Succession is now vanished.”
So why is this the great reset and why is it also the last? Article 149 states it clearly.
“There can be no Proofs made of a Divine Appointment of Kings, or of any other Governours, or Forms of Government”
Henceforth, we the people, make it up. Whether Monarchy, Republic, Top-Down, Bottom-up, Democratic, Communism, Anarchy, Whatever… So long as it does what it’s meant to;
“Government in general, as ordained and instituted by God, is circumscribed and limited by him to be exercised according to the Laws of Nature, in subserviency to his own Glory, and the Benefit of Mankind.” (Article 1)
And of course, why would we have it any differently? As stated clearly in Article 3;
“We must suppose all Mankind to have been infatuated, if they should have submitted themselves to the Jurisdiction of one who have no antecedent Right to command them, meerly in order to their being in a worse Condition that they previously were”.
To paraphrase; Government is to benefit us or otherwise we’re nuts. Likewise, “the whole Power of the King of England is to do Good and not to do Hurt; nor can he do any thing as a King but what he can legally do”. (Article 6). John here is invoking the 1615 Case of Proclamations, he is a lawyer after all, and stating that which was well understood at the time, that we are all equal under the law and in elevating one amongst us to the position of King, we are simply electing the King as our first amongst equals and;
“All that they [the King] had therefore was from the people that elected them. Twas impossible for them to confer any thing upon those from whom they received all they had; or for the people to give power to kings if they had it not in themselves; which power universally residing in every one, is that which we call liberty. When god gave liberty to his people to make a king he did neither constitute or elect any till they desired it, nor commanded them to do it themselves but left it to their own free will whether they would have a king or no king.” Article 41
We the people, cannot confer that which we do not possess: Arbitrary authority, the imposition of will over compact. So the true great reset was that which acknowledged that it is only ever the people who come together and form government under contract to the people who are master and whose sole reason is to be for the benefit of those same people. That they may cause no harm as “….They are to govern for the good of those over whom they come to be established…. And everyone being equally master of his own property and liberty… follows that those… cloathed with magistracy can lay claim to no more authority of the liberty or pretend to no more right in and over the property of that body politic that what the community have conferred upon them” and that those who “refuses to govern [for] the protection and benefit of the community, ceases to answer the ends unto which magistracy was instituted and for which rectoral authority is established over and among Men”. Article 1.
And so, our Bill of Rights, the contract to govern, what say of it the man who wrote it;
“Tis plain from what hath been said [the BoR], that all government, authority and magistracy proceeds from the people.” Article 84.
If anyone should doubt that the Bill of Rights asserts the supremacy of the People over their King and by implication, Government, then I should like to know what the opening sentence to Article 84 quoted above could possibly mean when it follows directly on from Article 83, the Bill of Rights itself. The contract which establishes Government by and for the benefit of the people and that they may do no harm as these are the “…tyes by which Princes stand confined and … Hedges by which the reserved Rights, Privileges and Properties of the subjects are fenced about.” Article 3.
So what then, when our Princes over turn the Constitution and seek to dissolve those tyes by which they are confined, overthrow those hedges which protect us all from harm and make us slaves? Well then “neither are, nor can be Traytors who endeavour to preserve and maintain the Constitution; but they are the Traytors who design and pursue the Subversion of it”. Article 4
We are indeed a long way from Kansas. And so that final bulwark, the birth-right; Our Law, the remedy, “for where the Will governs and not the Law, there he is no longer King”. Article 76 which is preceded by Article 74 in which it is plainly stated that “subjects… are born to inherit and enjoy the laws of this realm… so every man have an equal benefit of law… therefore called the Common Right and is a greater inheritance to every man that that which descends to him as heir, from his parents. Because thereby {is he] protected from injury and wrong, This common right is called the law of the subject and the judges are sworn to execute justice according to the law and custom of England”.
As “No civil government is lawful but what is founded upon compact and agreement between those chosen to govern and them who condescended to be governed” (art. 3) so it is that when those chosen to govern traduce that compact and claim that which is not theirs then we the people must rely upon our law, our birth-right, to preserve and maintain the compact, our constitution for “the safety of the people is the supreme law” (art. 9) and it is our Laws that are the “great inheritances of every subject and the inheritance of inheritance without which inheritance we have no inheritance”. (art. 74)