So you expect people who oppose North's government and its policies to be in that government? The original question was to name people who opposed its policies on the colonies.
Fair enough, although in that case I was communicating poorly since I never meant to suggest that nobody was opposed to the government or that nobody was sympathetic to the rebels and I'd been trying to convey that from the start.
My point is, what do the people opposed to a government have to do with the policy it will adopt, after that government's own policy has been vindicated by a victory?
I must admit its got so far back and I've been rather distracted so I can't remember what we were discussing here.
No problem.
I don't get you're point here? They were privileged economically but still British in the eyes of the government in London yes. You're the one who's been saying their been treated as inferior in some way to British citizens elsewhere?
I don't think they enjoyed less freedom of speech or religion, say, than an Englishman (which isn't necessarily a ringing endorsement); in some cases, I believe, they enjoyed more. I am saying that the empire in the Americas was designed to create profit for the homeland, which fit with the contemporary logic of mercantilism, and the Americans were an increasingly self-aware and independent-minded people who were asking why it shouldn't designed to create a profit for them.
And that led to a conflict in which Britain proved quite willing to use measures - military action to close down truculent ports - that certainly did go further than the nearest analogy in the homeland. That's the point: you wouldn't ever
have to use them in the homeland, because we weren't getting the raw end of mercantilism.
But having beaten this revolt, the measures I'm suggesting as possibilities - military presence, censorship, control of the press, control of arms, limitations on meeting and movement, a regime of the established church - all certainly have precedents back home. And the supposed similarity between English then and American puritans now was not lost on people in the Establishment
By origin and culture. Unless you think they were Tibetians?
But all the people I mentioned were European in origin: that the European powers uniformly acted like ginormous dicks towards Africans and native Americans goes without saying. True, a lot of them were Catholic, but not all. Non-comformists were, if you asked some people (a lot of the Scots officers in America, for instance), nearly as bad.
They were doing a lot better than the Catholics they were oppressing.
Bah. Oppressing who now? Stormont didn't start in 1649. I am of some Ulster Scots extraction myself, and I really wish people wouldn't talk such nonsense.
Ulster Presbyterians didn't like Catholicism. Presbyterians at this time generally didn't, before we start on the folk-memory of the Confederate War. That's an obvious fact. But where does oppression spring from? Presbyterians didn't run the state. Presbyterians didn't even own much of the land (less than Catholics, IIRC, although those figures might have come from later). The Ascendancy which owned and ran Ireland didn't like Presbyterians and the feeling was mutual.
For a lot of the time, Presbyterians were barred from public office, just like Catholics. Presbyterian marriage wasn't recognised by the state. Like Catholics, they had to pay the CoI tithe: ministers got a salary from the state (recognised as a necessary measure to keep them at least somewhat on-side) which made the burden less than the double-tithe of the Catholics, but it didn't mean Presbyterians didn't intensely resent having to pay for the CoI at all. And Presbyterians were, at the end of Ascendancy, not able to compete with Anglicans on equal terms in the Ulster flax trade thanks to their legal disabilities. No wonder, then, that there was such a substantial Presbyterian contingent in various movements aiming to overthrow the Ascendancy.
The period after the restoration saw a decline in the rule of law but this was reversed in the aftermath of 1688. Britain was still very backward by modern standards but it was far more modern in terms of citizen rights than any other major state.
What? James II was trying to get on top of his kingdoms' oligarchs - and one of his wicked devices was to
broaden the oligarchy by moving against the hegemony of the Establish Church. Sure, he didn't actually
like Dissenters one bit, but then neither did William III. If William III lived - reluctantly - with the Covenanter revolution, he at the same time cracked down on Ireland (he wasn't plain malevolent - his own preference would have been more conciliatory to Catholics - but he is the man at the start of Ascendancy).
'Citizen rights' don't come bundled in a package, and I don't see why Britain's particular don't-mess-with-the-oligarchy set was so much ahead of, say, the Netherlands, or all the wee little German states were these wasn't enough regime to go around oppressing anybody. Certainly the Bill of Rights never protected Highlanders from having their houses burned down for no reason, or ordinary Englishmen being transported for looking at the property of their betters in a significant way. It was after 1688 that the Bloody Code took off.
I think you're working from the assumption that there was some dark conspiracy and hence everything fits in with that. Do you know any actual evidence that the issue wasn't simply what the government said. That they wanted the colonies to make a contribution to their own defence?
I don't think there was a conspiracy, I think there was a widely-accepted idea of royal authority and mercantilist economics. There doesn't
need to be a conspiracy because the regime believed in colonies obeying the homeland, run for the profit of the homeland, which doesn't sound outlandish. It is, in fact, implied by the necessity of defending them in the first place.
I will schedule a leukie in the beukie when my knees feel less like falling off.
As I said elsewhere this was potentially as great a tragedy as the American rebellion itself. The excesses of the rebels and the threat posed to Britain, then the following events in France enabled reactionary elements to turn back reforms and delay matters in Britain for a couple of generations.
If you're going to say you see no concrete evidence for my opinion - and fair enough, I haven't produced any dates - then I must likewise question this. Reforms happened after the American Revolution, in some spheres and not others: Catholic Relief and the end of the punitive regime in the Highlands carried on. But who in the 1770s elite was all for giving the vote to the vulgar people?
Don't forget that until they decided on independence as an aim the rebels were the reactionaries, seeking to resists changes they didn't like.
Just like the men of '88, I suppose.