Thoughts for Today

Does that mean that (dare I ask) Charles is king?

 

Yes Mex.

 

Fook.

 

It is indeed so Mex. This is automatic from the moment she departed her body. He is now styled as King Charles the third - the first lost his head, the second hid up oak trees and the third talks to tomato plants. So when the PM now goes on regular visits to Buckingham Palace it will be Liss Truss and Charles - the Queen's last great service to Britain was in timing her death to ensure that Bojo would not be doing an public speaking in this case.

 

DOes it mean we get to change the national anthem too? That'd be a silver lining I guess, as not really a fan of it.

 

I had to learn the new word in the national anthem when I was at school.

 

Much as I hate disagreeing with you Cologne, it was Charles the !st who hid in an oak tree before he was executed by someone who history has shown was a stain on our history

Charles the 2nd was the Reformation king who undid al the harm that Cromwell inflicted on Britain

 

It's only the English who argue about things like 'who hid up an oak tree and when' According to any records of the matter it was the second Charles after the battle of Worcester in 1652. Also the character of Oliver Cromwell you have portrayed is a debatable one - however, now is not the time for that debate just to say that without the legacy of Cromwell we may not have a parliamentary democracy now. No point in us debating things which happened over 400 years ago there are enough nasty things going on now to occupy us.

 

Charles I wanted to return England to being a pimple on the backside of the Holy Roman Empire, undoing all that Elizabeth I, in particular, had achieved. He had to go. Not dissimilar to those involved in the failed Gunpowder plot (something we don't celebrate nearly enough in my view) of 1605 against James VI, Charles I father.
Cromwell was a bit of a sour puss despite his rightful victory. He was a Puritan, he cancelled Christmas (why can't I get Alan Rickman's Sherrif of Nottingham out of my head?!), and I would contend that his religious fervour and the European wars which followed that line and led to the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
I have absolutely no problem with Charles III being King. I think the monarchy needs modernisation but as you rightly say that is a discussion for later.

 

In my head I knew King Charles the second had not hidden in a tree from Cromwell so I looked it up

It was in fact Charles Prince of Wales at the head of a Scottish Army trying to reclaim the English/Scottish Crown, that battle was lost and he did hide in a tree but not as the King. Can we call that an honourable draw

Game of thrones is based on the Wars of the Roses with a bit of the English Civil War but it has to include dragons etc to make it more interesting than our actually history

When Cromwell died he was invited back as King Charles 11 and he became the renaissance king

Cromwell did modernise the English army in the way it was formed and commanded and he did reform Parliament but he sucked the life out of the English people who welcomed Charles 11 with open arms

The real updating of Parliament came with George 111 and the appointment of a Prime Minister and the final upgrade was after the Crimean War with the formation of the Civil Service to actually run the country and collect taxes in an organised way

I am not a Royalist who lines the streets of London but I do believe our system of Constitutional Monarchy with an Elected Government is still the best when you see what has happened in the last century where the Royal Families have been overthrown and replace with Dictatorships

We may not always get what we individually want with our elected Governments but we have the opportunity to change them every five years

I also do not think the American way of Voting in a Government and the President separately really works out to the benefit of the people as in Obama a Democrat trying to rule America with a Republican Government

Hope I have not bored you all to death

 

I have to say Duggie that I'm not that much interested in who hid up oak trees 400 years ago ! In Royalist terms he was actually King because they regard the Cromwellian period as an interregnum. Whether Cromwell sucked the life out of the English people we will never know - or whether the people really wanted the return of the monarchy - we do know that the royalists were prepared to pay great sums of money encouraging public celebrations at the restoration and if the English see the chance of free beer and mead then they will jump at it - then as now. Another historical fact is that Charles was not invited back to succeed Oliver Cromwell but rather his son Richard who was then head of state. Oliver died 2 years earlier in 1658 - and had previously not been seen in parliament since 1656, having no real power after this date. Anyway giving good and bad marks out to historical characters is like playing tricks on the dead - they are no longer around to argue their case. My problem with the monarchy is not based on them alone but rather that they stand at the apex of a pyramid collectively called the hereditary aristocracy - if you look at how much land they still own in the UK - based on some land grab hundreds of years ago. I like the idea of the old saxons - ie. attaching some adjective to their monarchs - such as Harold the Witless or Ethelred the Unready (it tells us something about them) - but later they became so innocuous that we have to give them numbers in order to remember them. Actually the Saxons elected their monarchs - the idea of a purely hereditary aristocracy being a purely norman thing which was pushed down the throats of the Saxons all them years ago. The only principle with raking all that up now is that such a high percentage of our land is still in the hands of descendents of Norman robbers from a thousand years ago - otherwise it would be purely historical.

 

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I am going cruising this week and was thinking of getting some sea sickness pills

 

Millican? I love Spice Millican.

 

I liked his brother too

 

The oldest and ugliest of the Spice Girls?

 

The jury is still out…

 

I don’t know who the **** this is - please, please tell me this is parody.

 

Phew! The worrying thing is, I thought it might be real.