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[tinyjo]

Things you learn while waiting for a long process to complete, number 1 in a series of, oh gosh, loads, probably.

Queen Elizabeth will surpass Queen Victoria as the UKs longest lived monarch on the shortest day this year, according to the Wikipedia article about Victoria (the article on Elizabeth confirms it).

Comments

Re: things you learn...

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Are you allowed to quote from that book for your essay?

Well, you could to add colour to the text but you'd have to be careful about which quotes you picked :)

I just got through revising this period, and although you do see some of the ideas and language of democracy to day emerging, you have to be quite careful about ascribing modern meanings to things that were said. For example, there was almost no support for a wider franchise amongst the parliamentarians. Also, the whole thing quickly degenerated into rule by the army after Prides Purge, partly because the politicians had not been keen to try & kill Charles, but rather to negotiate and get consessions from him for a constitutional monarchy of the sort that eventually emerged with the restoration.

Re: things you learn...

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

It's certainly a gross error to apply the values or meanings of the present day to the past: it is a far country, and they do things differently there. A wider franchise (as you say) wouldn't have had any chance of emerging in that society; one has to take "Parliamentary democracy" in a very different sense than one would take it today, you are quite right.

It's interesting to speculate, though, how much the dictatorship was mediated by Cromwell as an individual versus Cromwell as the tool of the rest of the army, and how Parliament was able to keep hold on the purse-strings after the dictatorship collapsed.

I think the evolution of modern Parliamentary processes (in contrast to other aspects of democracy) was hastened during this period, perhaps moreso than in any other. Just as the mechanisms of the European Commission have tremendous effects on Euro-democracy, so did the mechanisms of Parliament. And the example of both sets of leaders and followers - venial though many may have been - seem to me to have modern echoes, and to have given a number of different cultures (India, for example) an interesting set of patterns to discuss and to some extent emulate, when they wanted to initiate a regime change.