honorentheos wrote: ↑Wed Jun 29, 2022 10:25 pm
My original reference was to Charles I's attempts to impose a particular religious prerogative in a time when the Catholic/Anglican/Protestant debates were hot and getting hotter. How much might one assign what occurred to religious differences compared to the resistance to royal rule is no small debate. We are, in some ways, indebted to that religious conflicts for our democracy. There in lies the irony where those like the subject of the opening post would have a new war of bishops fought with AR-15s.
I'd say that a better comparison was with the activities of Charles' I son, the Duke of York and later James II who succeeded his brother Charles II in February 1685 and reigned to 1688, after which he fled for refuge to the court of Louis XIV of France.
Although Charles II had converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed, his brother James had been an enthusiastic and openly practising Roman Catholic all his life. Strangely, despite the obvious dangers that his accession to the throne posed to the religious settlement of the Church of England, many of its members who believed in the divine right of kings to rule felt that they had no alternative to accepting his rule, even in the knowledge that he was very likely to attack the powers and even the very existence of their church - which he then proceeded systematically to do. After a few years of his policies, which included the claim by him that he had the power to suspend any law that obstructed him in his purpose of allowing Roman Catholics a prominent role in the state, and the displacement of many protestants from high office, including posts in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, opposition rose to a point where James fled from England, dropping the Great Seal of the Kingdom into the Thames, by which act he intended to paralyse the operations of government in his absence, and effectively render it impossible to maintain civil order.
For many of those who had previously felt bound to support James as King, his flight and the mode of it constituted an effective abdication from the Kingship, and they felt free to accept James's replacement in 1689 by the Protestant Prince of Orange, married to James's elder daughter Mary, herself raised as a Protestant. But there was a substantial group, including Protestant clergy, who felt unable to abandon their sworn allegiance to James, and accepted poverty and disfavour as a result.
I don't know what kind of analogy this might have to the current program of certain extreme conservative Evangelicals to establish themselves as a religious government contrary to the Constitution, or who the US equivalents of James II or William III might be ...