Anna Keay: belief

Transcript context

…Would there have been a way, without a crown, to have put a lid on all the religious disputes? Wouldn’t they have just simmered, led to more civil wars and some kind of consolidation into autocratic power? And in that sense, there is no counterfactual where the republic just keeps on running. Well, you could say that. But of course, there is a kind of counterfactual parallel because in what’s now the Netherlands — what was then called the United Provinces — there had been a revolution, sometimes called the Dutch Revolt, that had happened 100 years earlier in the 1560s, which had both rejected Catholicism and rejected monarchy. It became something that was governed by a series of states that had some institution called the States General where their representatives met. It wasn’t so much that religious turmoil and republicanism were irreconcilable, but in the case of England, the revolution — the throwing off the monarchy — didn’t have sufficient buy-in from the political nation, let alone the nation as a whole. It was really brought about by an army coup. I think that meant it was fragile. It was also linked to a strong view, held by a minority and very much represented in the army, that a very strictly Puritan regime was what was needed. I think that was incompatible with a peaceful set of circumstances because it wasn’t widespread enough. But you’re right, which is, these counterfactual avenues — they take you into so many other what-ifs that it becomes a bit fruitless after a while. An even simpler question: If the English Civil War of the 1640s wasn’t about having a republic, what exactly was it about? What’s the stupid answer to that question?…

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