Boris is cavalier about Christmas, but he's a reluctant Roundhead

Alexis de Tocqueville, the historian and political philosopher, once wrote that: “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” Much has been made in the press of Boris Johnson finding himself smiling down from one of de Tocqueville’s “copies” when he became, with Oliver Cromwell, the second UK ruler supposedly to ban Christmas. (Though see Paul Lay’s refutation of that myth here.) But in temperament, style and politics, Johnson is far closer to King Charles I with his Royalist Cavaliers – while his adversary in arms Sir Keir Starmer, mirrors the more authoritarian, austere approach of Cromwell’s Parliamentarian Roundheads.

The contrast between Johnson and Cromwell’s shutting down of Christmas festivities is stark. One did it with the alacrity of religious zeal, the other with all the enthusiasm of the condemned going to the gallows. While Cromwell himself was not personally responsible for the ordinance in 1643 which railed against those “who have turned this feast, pretending the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights”, he was part of the Puritan faction that was. In the following year Christmas, Easter and Whitsun were banned outright. Johnson’s announcement could not have contained less zeal, as he mournfully announced: “It is with heavy heart we cannot continue with Christmas as planned.”

Perhaps it would be more fruitful to look at the parallels between Johnson and Charles I. Not only does Johnson closely conform to the modern meaning of the term “cavalier” – charismatic and flamboyant, but feckless, the parallels do not stop at personal characteristics. Charles I and Johnson both had problems with Parliament, and in particular proroguing (or suspending) it. 

Charles I saw Parliament as a troublesome irritation to which he occasionally referred, while his principal purpose was exercising his divine right to rule. Trouble had been brewing between Charles I and Parliament pretty well from the King’s accession in 1625. In 1629 Charles prorogued Parliament, not to call it again until 1640, when he needed it to give him money. The MPs were furious at being shut out for eleven years and with Charles’ authority ebbing away they were not reluctant to give voice to their grievances. 

On 3 January 1642, an exasperated King took the unprecedented step of taking a detachment of soldiers into the House of Commons to arrest five MPs. But the five had been warned and had fled. So when the King demanded to know their whereabouts from the Speaker, his reply spoke to Parliament’s new-found confidence in its authority: “May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here.” A disgruntled Charles left empty-handed and by the summer the country had been plunged into civil war. To this day the event is commemorated in the ritual marking the State Opening of Parliament, when the monarch’s representative – the Gentleman/Lady Usher of the Black Rod — has the doors of the House of Commons slammed in their face.

Boris Johnson also ran into trouble with a prorogation of parliament. A State Opening of Parliament was due on 14 October 2019 in the midst of the political turmoil surrounding preparations for the UK’s exit from the European Union. Johnson had been one of the leading advocates of the move and had become Prime Minister on 24 July 2019 to deliver it. Just over a month later, on 28 August 2019, he advised the Queen to prorogue Parliament, advice she was duty bound to accept. 

Those around Johnson argued that this was a purely administrative step, allowing him to get on with his principal purpose – getting Brexit done. Others saw it, certainly as an attempt to stop Parliament debating the UK’s exit, and possibly to avert it legislating to stop a no-deal Brexit. Legal challenges followed in a number of courts which ended in the Supreme Court on 24 September. People queued from 5:20am in pouring rain to hear the judgement. They were not disappointed. The eleven justices unanimously found “that the decision to advise Her Majesty to prorogue Parliament was …unlawful, void and of no effect”. Many were appalled that the Queen had been dragged into what was seen as a tawdry political manoeuvre and saw the hand of Johnson’s controversial adviser, Dominic Cummings, at work. 

Controversy also haunted Charles I’s advisers. The first was George Villiers, Earl of Buckingham, whose arrogance and tendency to use his position to enrich himself and his relatives made him so unpopular that, when he was murdered in 1628, there was widespread rejoicing. Then came William Laud, made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 as Charles I’s religious enforcer. His reforms provoked a furious response. The Scots were so outraged they sent an army to invade northern England and it occupied Newcastle and Durham.

But it is the poignant story of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, that echoes down the centuries. Charles had guaranteed Strafford royal protection when he called on him to resolve the crisis caused by the Scottish invasion but Strafford’s zeal in doing the King’s will left him hated. Knowing that angry mobs were baying for his blood, Strafford realised the greatest service he could do his King was to release him from his promise of protection and he wrote to the King doing so. Trumped-up treason charges failed, so Parliament simply brought a Bill of Attainder, effectively condemning him without trial. Charles dug his heels in but eventually and with great reluctance signed the death warrant saying “My Lord Strafford’s condition is happier than mine”. Strafford’s execution on 12 May 1641 was watched by a large and jubilant crowd. 

Laud, who had blessed Strafford on the scaffold, lasted a few years longer. There were petitions and pamphlets; the mob called for his blood and after treason charges again foundered, another Bill of Attainder was brought and he was beheaded on 10 January 1645. By that time Charles was close to losing the first English Civil War. Almost exactly four years later, having exhausted all military means to hang on to his realm, the King, too, went to the scaffold.

Dominic Cummings had ridden as high in Boris Johnson’s estimation and as low in the country’s as Buckingham, Strafford and Laud had before him. The story of his meteoric rise and spectacular fall is still very recent and hence better known. Johnson defended him when the press reported a Covid-19 regulation-busting drive to Durham, but a piece even appeared in a respected medical journal looking at how far the “Cummings effect” had undermined public confidence in measures to control the pandemic. The pre-dawn walk from Downing Street clutching a cardboard box of belongings is the modern defenestration. Cummings was luckier than his 17th-century predecessors. This time, it was only the story that died.

If Boris Johnson is, in fact, Charles I to Sir Keir Starmer’s Cromwell, that surely bodes well for the Labour Party. Charles I was the only English monarch in modern times to be executed by his “subjects”, while Cromwell went on to become Lord Protector, effectively absolute ruler, until his death in 1658. Unlike Charles I, Oliver Cromwell was included among the ten greatest Britons in a recent poll. 

Or does it? The British people soon grew tired of the experiment with republicanism after Charles I’s execution. Two years after Cromwell’s death, Charles I’s son was invited to return to England to become King Charles II, the monarchy restored. Within a year, on 30 January 1661, the twelfth anniversary of the execution of Charles I, and three years after Cromwell’s death, vengeful Royalists exhumed his body and “executed” it by hanging it at Tyburn. Featuring in one of de Tocqueville’s “copies” of historic times may be a case of “be careful what you wish for” for today’s politicians.

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