To do today, a cold bright day in Brooklyn: a brief scene (say, 1500 to 2000 words; 2x-3x the length of the Treasury-market columns I write for my real job) showing Cromwell and Kilmister at a gathering of the godly in the loomworks of Holyfen village, featuring preaching, prayer and Bible study led by the villager and perhaps Cromwell himself. It’s one of several framing scenes for the first novel supporting the content that’s on this site; takes place in late July, before Edmund reaches England and as Hampden begins to raise the Greencoats in Buckinghamshire. Cromwell was close to such a congregation during his St Ives period, after his conversion experience, and was said to have occasionally lead devotions.

One of my chief disappointments with what I’ve produced so far is the near-total absence of content showing Cromwell’s intense Puritanism, which with his English patriotism was the foundation of the man’s personality (not to mention the Ironsides and later the New Model). I’ll go further and argue that the distinctively English Independent Puritan reading of the Bible – which located the religious experience in the heart and soul of the individual believer, not corporate worship by the community – is the great intellectual achievement of the modern era. From these lonely “wrestlings with God” in the deep watches of the night came the idea of individual liberty as a gift endowed by the Creator, and not a “right” bestowed by the State or a community, and of government as a necessary evil whose sole purpose was to restrain assaults on that liberty.

Not saying this was realized during Cromwell’s lifetime, or was the policy of the Protectorate, but the seed took deep purchase in the hearts of Englishmen, not the least which those who would be Americans. John Adams knew. From David McCullough’s bio:

“At Edgehill, scene of the first great battle of the English civil war, and later at Worchester, the setting of Cromwell's final victory over Charles II [sic], in the year 1651, it was Adams' turn to be deeply moved. This was history he knew in detail. Here were ‘scenes where freemen had fought for their rights,"’he wrote in his diary. Finding some of the local residents sadly ignorant of the subject, he gave them an impromptu lecture.

“’And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for?’ he asked. ‘Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground,…All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year.’”

Americans, I’ll be so bold to suggest, may “get” Cromwell more than our English cousins… but that’s a post for another day.

In the meantime, a few links for you:

Rule of experts usually isn't, whether it's in matters of God or Gaia or the economy or health care.

And it's the right and duty of a free people to purge governments of same.

Not to mention one-trick ponies.

Book of the day: Witness Against the Beast, by EP Thompson, a great study of William Blake's Muggletonianism and the antinomian tendency in English Puritanism. I've pretty much resolved that I'm a antinomian.

Music of the day: Tom Petty's live anthology. Petty's the finest songwriter of his generation, way more so that that leather-lunged bombastotron from Jer-Z, and the Heartbreakers the best band (not an agglutination of Turnpike bar-band hacks, these righteous Southern boys, namely Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench). Petty's music has the effect on me as madelines on M. Swann -- it evokes a lot of wonderful memories of growing up in small-town Kentucky. Thanks, Tom and Mike and Benmont.