Trump as England’s Oliver Cromwell, or “Lord Protector”

The government of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging.

I. That the supreme legislative authority of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging, shall be and reside in one person, and the people assembled in Parliament; the style of which shall be the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

II. That the exercise of the chief magistracy and the administration of the government over the said countries and dominions, and the people thereof, shall be in the Lord Protector, assisted with a council, the number whereof shall not exceed twenty-one, nor be less than thirteen.

III.  That all writs, processes, commissions, patents, grants, and other things, which now run in the name and style of the keepers of the liberty of England by authority of Parliament, shall run in the name and style of the Lord Protector, from whom, for the future, shall be derived all magistracy and honours in these three nations; and have  the power of pardons (except in the case of murders and treason) and benefit all forfeitures for the public use; and shall govern the said countries and dominions in all things by the advice of the council, and according to these presents and the laws.

IV. That the Lord Protector, the Parliament sitting, shall dispose and order the militia and forces, both by sea and land, for the peace and good of the three nations, by consent of Parliament; and the Lord Protector, with the advice and consent of the major part of the council, shall dispose and order the militia for the ends aforesaid in the intervals of Parliament.

V. That the Lord Protector, by the advice aforesaid, shall direct in all things concerning the keeping and holding of good correspondency with foreign kings, princes, and states; and also, with the consent of the major part of the council, have the power of war and peace.

The Instruments of Government (December 16, 1653)[1]

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[1] “The Instruments of Government” in Samuel Rawson Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1628-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889 [Franklin Classics  Reprint]), p. 314.

Milton on the power of “Kings”

For in raising the power of kings immeasurably above the laws, by the same means you remind almost all nations of their slavery, which they had not suspected.  You also drive them more violently into suddenly shaking off  that sluggishness in which they idly used to dream they were free men, by reminding them of something they didn’t realize: that they were the slaves of kings.  And they will judge the power of kings to be the less bearable to them the more successfully you persuade them that such unlimited power grew not as the result of their own sufferance of it, but that it originated from the beginning with its present nature and extent just because of the right of kings.  So you and this defence of yours, whether you convince the people or whether you don’t, will needs be destructive, deadly and accursed for all kings hereafter.  For if you convince the people that the right of kings is all-powerful, they will no longer bear a monarchy; if you do not convince them, they will not endure kings who obtain such illegal power as if it were their right.

Milton, A Defence of the People of England (1651)[1]

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[1] John Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, tr. Claire Gruzelier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 129.  Note: A Defence of the People of England was originally published in Latin as Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio two years after the execution of King Charles I which was on January 30, 1649.  The above selection appears at the beginning of Chapter IV.

Native Born Son (or, arctic memoirs with a paradigm). A Book Review.

Hidden in an attic in the village of Canton, just north of Port Hope, Ontario, lay for many years the dusty journals of J. David Ford, born in the eastern arctic in 1910.  Recently discovered and edited by Marnie Bickle, a family relative, Native Born Son (2018) chronicles Ford’s youthful adventures as a member of a long line of fur traders living among the Inuit at the north end of Hudson Bay – namely Coats Island and Southampton Island. The stories include, as well, high school at St. John’s, Newfoundland, but more dramatically the journey on land, snow, ice and sometimes water to obtain foodstuffs, after the annual supply ship failed to arrive, blocked by ice, circa 1930.

Full disclosure: as it turns out, Ford was husband to my own grade 9 Geography teacher, though I did not learn this until after purchasing the book.  We all knew her as “granny Ford” (it was her last year of teaching) at Port Hope High School.  Little did we know that Ruth and David Ford corresponded with each other over the course of WWII, and upon his return from overseas - when they married and built a home together - he dealt with “shell shock” for the remainder of his life, such was the difficult transition from the arctic to the theatres of war.

But anyone wanting to discover the hardship of Canada’s nomadic north well before the era of snowmobiles and – now – climate change and would benefit from reading this book. Consider the following sample passage.

When the igloos were ready, we beat the snow from our frosted parkas and crawled in through the snow house door on hands and knees.  We felt some warmth immediately.  A caribou tallow candle was lit; then we prepared a feast of beans and pemmican made from seal and caribou meat, raisins, salt and pepper.  We had tea and bannock that had been fry-baked in seal oil.  The bannock was very easy to eat and seldom froze in spite of the -60 [degrees] F weather.[1]

Who builds igloos today?  Ford articulates how wooden structures, such as the HBC store or his home, would be completely lined with blocks of snow for insulating purposes.  Given the current melting of the permafrost, much that Ford describes in his journals has disappeared, known to perhaps a few Inuit elders today, if any.  Reading Native Born Son recovers knowledge of the past but unfortunately does not restore some of the most important elements (aside from the human) – the need for snow and ice.

The journals are lively, but at a sublime level they are also suggestive of a new (but still ancient) paradigm – one that admires (or feels closely connected to) Indigenous and Inuit ways.  Ford’s life in the arctic straddles two different cultures, but he is almost totally immersed, communicating in their language and respected by all generations. Today numbers of people want to replace the prevailing model of man’s power over nature and its resources as the accepted modus vivendi. Reading the memoir invites us to consider a more sustainable example of cohabiting with nature, valued by this growing minority to be the way of the future.  Thus, parenthetically-speaking, it should not come as a surprise, for example, that some in the Green Party now want Jody Wilson-Raybould to lead them, given that Elizabeth May has stepped down. 

This paradigm shift reflects the degree to which we have experienced (for lack of a better term) a kind of ‘Indigenous revival’ in recent years, compensation in part for Canada’s original sins at Residential Schools.  Ford himself was raised a Christian, yet he defended the Inuit absence of a religion (leading them in prayer only once when the risks faced by the group were particularly high).  In broader terms, while the Lord’s Prayer is now absent from our classroom rituals, it has been replaced by regular public acknowledgements by “settlers” gathered on unceded Indigenous territory.  Northrup Frye’s The Great Code (1982), which examined the Bible’s lasting influence on imaginative literature in the West, has been supplanted by John Ralston Saul’s work, A Fair Country (2008), which alleges that Canadians are more métis than European in origin, a questionable claim.[2]  It is worth surmising, however, that we seem to be developing a new kind of secular code, and Native Born Son belongs to the literature which unearths and esteems Indigenous ways – and European man’s cooperation with its wisdom.

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[1] J. David Ford, Native Born Son: The Journals of J. David Ford, ed. Marnie Hare Bickle (Cobourg, ON: Blue Denim Press, 2018), p. 200.

[2] See my book review of A Fair Country posted to this blog site.