Friday, June 5, 2015

Common Sense, Part III: Plain Reasoning, contd.

Having pointed to some of the flaws inherent in the British monarchy as cause for concern to the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies, Paine transitioned in the second section of Common Sense to decrying monarchy itself as a form of government. This series of denunciations depicts Paine at perhaps his most radical as he gleefully dismissed the underpinnings of hereditary rule as unwise, unnatural, and unjust. This radicalism, rhetorically forceful though it was surely intended to be, remained couched in plain-spoken terms that were no doubt distinctly digestible by the average American colonist in the 1770s. Whereas Thomas Jefferson would later call for separation from Great Britain in the Declaration of Independence because the actions of Parliament and the Crown had violated the unspoken social contract between those entities and the citizens of the colonies, a claim fundamentally rooted in a philosophical abstraction, Paine endorsed independence because he believed that monarchy was quite simply a bad idea.

At its heart, Paine argued, hereditary rule was based on a fundamentally flawed assumption; namely that wisdom, nobility, or administrative acumen were inherited traits, and that fate did not sometimes reward a worthy and altruistic parent with an avaricious and unworthy child. “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings,” he wrote to that effect in the tenth paragraph of the second section, “is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” He provided no examples of what he was specifically referring to by this turn of phrase, perhaps counting them so numerous as to be common knowledge. A cursory glance at the annals of British kingship would seem to bear this out. Henry II (1154-1189), if not a good king then certainly an effective one, was followed by his sons Richard I (1189-199), the soldier-king who nearly drained England dry to pay for his wars, and John, (1199-1216) whose weak rule witness the beginning of the end of his father’s empire in France. An example slightly more contemporary to Pain and his readers is that of James I (1603-1625), who united the thrones of England and Scotland, and his son Charles I (1625-1649), whose disregard for Parliament led to the English Civil War (1642-1651) as well as his own execution. Doubtless unversed in the history of medieval England, most American colonists in the 1770s likely had some (albeit vague) knowledge of the monarchs of the House of Stuart (who ruled Britain from 1603 to 1714). Their alternating strength and ineptitude had serious consequences for the fortunes of Britain’s North American colonies, and the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution (1688-89) in particular loomed large in the American popular imagination.

Paine was doubtless attempting to play to the common understanding of the British monarchy that was held by the average, formally uneducated American with arguments such as these. To his benefit, the monarchs of the House of Stuart and the House of Hanover (1714-1901) had generally proven themselves to be somewhat less than virtuous and self-sacrificing. Yet Paine was not content merely to solicit agreement that the last century or so of English monarchy leading up to the 1770s had witnessed a downslope in quality. Rather, he was keen to point out to his readership that the very concept of monarchy was, and always had been, morally bankrupt. This he set out to do by using plain, at times even course or crude, language as a means of demystifying kingship and its various trappings. William I (1066-1087), commonly known as William the Conqueror, Paine accordingly described in the thirteenth paragraph as, “A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself as king of England against the consent of the natives.” It was, he continued, “a paltry rascally origin. It certainly hath no divinity in it.” This was essentially the crux of Paine’s argument against the supposed noble origins of kingship. Far from being divinely ordained by God, as many of them claimed, they were nothing more than the descendants of, “the principle ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtility (sic) obtained him the title of chief among plunderers” (paragraph twelve). There was nothing noble in celebrating the brutal rise of a particular tribe, Paine asserted, and much to be gained in casting off their legacy.

Not content with levelling a stinging indictment at the origins of monarchy, Paine went on in subsequent paragraphs of the second section of Common Sense to describe some of the ills that kingship continued to perpetuate as of the 1770s. The first, in the sixteenth paragraph, concerns the way kingship acts on the minds of kings themselves. Often the undisputed lord and master of the territory over which they rule, it would seem prudent that a monarch be well-educated, worldly, and cognizant of the concerns of his/her realm and its many inhabitants. The underlying logic of kingship, however, creates a barrier between a monarch and the rest of the world by declaring them to be of an ill-defined but immutably different quality than the great mass of humanity. “Men who look upon themselves born to reign,” Paine argued, “and others to obey, soon grown insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are easily poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large.” How could such a person be expected to govern justly, knowledgeably, or effectively when they are ignorant of the reality in which the majority of their subjects exist? How could they act compassionately or rule fairly when they have been taught from birth that they are intrinsically superior to the vast majority of their fellow man? In Paine’s estimation they could be expected to do neither, and were more often, “the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.”

“Another evil which attends hereditary succession,” as Paine put it in paragraph seventeen, is the manner in which formal authority is given over to appointed regents in instances of infant succession or eventual infirmity. Because, generally speaking, monarchy transfers from one individual to another instantly upon the death of the holder it is not uncommon for minors, or even newborn infants, to be crowned a king or queen. Such was the case, to take an example seemingly at random, with Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1567), who ascended the throne upon the death of her father James V (1512-1542) in 1542 at the venerable age of six days. In such instances a regent, often a surviving parent, family member, or leader of a council of nobles, is appointed (or appoints themselves) to oversee the administration of the realm and exercise formal power in the name of their infant charge. A similar situation could and did occur in instances when an elderly monarch becomes mentally or physically incapable of ruling or is otherwise absent from the realm. Paine’s objection to this revolved around the accordant responsibility attached to the office of regent and the ample opportunities for personal enrichment that abound under the cover of acting on behalf of a ruler incapable of acting for themselves. Were it not bad enough that hereditary succession often places near-absolute power in the hands of those not fitted for it, a regency could potentially open up the exercise of this power to, “every miscreant, who can tamper successfully with the follies of either age or infancy.” To return to a prior example, young Queen Mary soon found herself a pawn in the attempts of Scotland’s Catholic and Protestant political factions to secure their place via alliance with either France or England. Her regents, neither elected nor even “divinely appointed,” ruled with their own interests in mind. This Paine found particularly objectionable, and plainly declared as much.

The third, and what Paine claimed to be, “the most plausible plea” against hereditary monarchy, he unfolded in paragraph eighteen of the second section of Common Sense. Monarchy, he wrote, was often claimed to be a force for political stability, and in particular to act as a guard against the outbreak of potentially destructive civil wars. If true, this would certainly seem to be a point in its favor. Its various flaws notwithstanding, if monarchy were able to preserve the lives and property of its subjects indefinitely it would seem to warrant no small degree of consideration as a useful form of government. As it happened, however, “the whole history of England disowns the fact.” By Paine’s estimation, the thirty kings and two minors that reigned between 1066 and 1776 witnessed at least eight civil wars and more than twice that number of rebellions (including the American Revolution). A cursory evaluation of the history of England within the indicated period reveals a multitude of civil conflicts that were likely the basis of Paine’s declaration. These include, but are not limited to, the dynastic struggle known as the Anarchy (1135-1154), the Great Revolt (1173-74) between Henry II and his sons, the First and Second Barons’ War (1215-1217 and 1264-1267) between rebellious alliances of nobles and Kings John and Henry III, respectively, another dynastic conflict famously referred to as the War of the Roses (1455-1487), the popular revolt know as the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536-37) which resulted from Henry VIII’s desire to reform the English church, the English Civil War (1642-1651), and the Glorious Revolution (1688-89). Lacking sufficient evidence to conclude that the English monarchy was the direct cause of all of these disturbances, which Paine appeared to intimate, it would nonetheless seem fair to conclude that the mere fact of the Crown was manifestly incapable of preventing them.

In this, and the previous two arguments, Paine’s central thesis was relatively simple. Namely that hereditary monarchy, apart from having its basis in the perpetuation of a contest of strength and cunning that has little to do with the qualities of good government, continued to produce a numbers of ills in its present (i.e. 1770s) form that were easily observable and measurable by the average person. He endeavoured to prove this point, as he did throughout Common Sense, by deploying simple logic and relying on the existing assumptions of his audience. Monarchs were distant, Paine wrote, and had little knowledge of the way their subjects lived. Nobles were untrustworthy, he argued, and would leap at the opportunity to seize power upon the succession of an infant to the throne or the infirmity of a reigning monarch. Civil war was common in England, he asserted, and even provided a tally of just how many times the Crown had failed to preserve the peace of the realm and contributed to the destruction of lives and property nominally under its protection. Absent access to a detailed sociological survey of the political biases and historical memory of the average American colonist in the 1770s (would that such a thing existed), I have little trouble believing that they would have responded well to arguments whose core conceits were simple assertions such as these. 

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