Chapo Trap House - Hell on Earth - Episode 9 Teaser

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

The 17th century lyin’ fake news media helps seal King Charles I’s fate. Subscribe today for access to the full episode and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/chapotraphouse

So Cromwell wheels the new model army up north and kicks Hamilton's ass at Preston in August 1648, ending this phase of the conflict. The King was again under parliamentary custody, but now the question of whether it was worth it or even possible to negotiate with this man became key. As Parliament began negotiations with Charles to return him to power with concessions, the new model army leadership decided they can no longer sanction the King's buffoonery. And on December 6th, 1648, Colonel Thomas Pride was ordered to forcibly prevent the entry of some 140 moderate MPs into Parliament, a number of whom were arrested and detained for several days. This left around 156 of the eligible 470 members of the House of Commons left serving in London, and this became known as the Rump Parliament. The edited Parliament, yes, to get to move things along. Now, by this point, it had become clear to the leaders of Parliament and the army that Charles could not be reasoned with. There was no path to an agreement that would enshrine the rights sought by Parliament while also ratifying Charles's supreme authority, supreme sovereignty. Among the greater public, Charles's authority and credibility had been destroyed by the publication of a 50 page pamphlet called the King's Cabinet Open.

See, that's a good title. Yeah, you get him with that. Yeah, they're learning this branding stuff because, you know, maybe a generation before it would be like notes from the duly revealed documents of the King, reveling in the profidity of his lies and most calamitous treasonous devil work that has been done on our behalf, you know, something like that. Now, the King's Cabinet Open, those printing presses are humming now. After the decisive royalist defeat at the Battle of Naseby in June 1645, Parliamentary forces had captured Charles's baggage train, which included his personal correspondence. These letters were filled with bitchy asides about his own advisors, groveling peons to his French Catholic wife, and most damningly of all offers to the rebellious Irish Catholic Confederation, which rules most of Ireland outside of Dublin in revolt, of religious offering them religious toleration in exchange for military support. That last was particularly inflaming because grisly and exaggerated press reports of Catholic atrocities committed against Scottish English settlers in Ireland had been key to rallying support for Parliament in the beginning of the war. One such report claimed that a hundred and fifty thousand Protestants were massacred at Ulster, which was greater than the number of Protestants on the entire island. This is a classic example of your lie in fake news media, right?

But those stories got people who were on the fence about taking up arms for Parliament willing to do it because they thought the alternative was not the King in power. It was a rampaging army of Catholic Irish heathens burning down your churches, and that's more playing into this. That's red scare basically about Catholicism going on, even though there aren't that many Catholics left many left, but they're over there in Ireland and they're seething and now they're in revolt. They run the country. They're making offers to the King of Spain to invade, and now the King is in cahoots with them. The King's Cabinet Open contained many of these letters along with damning annotations and juxtapositions with the King's contrary public statements. The publication of this pamphlet is part of a publishing explosion spurred by the collapse of royal censorship in England. There had been one newspaper in England before the war. By 1642, there were 60 debates over the King's rule and the nature of governance filled bookstalls in their thousands. This new public sphere kindled ideas that would have been literally unimaginable to previous generations of Englishmen.

For many of his subjects, Charles was no longer their King, but rather a man of blood, a biblical term for a specific villain who was a slayer of the innocent. Although no one in the leadership of the parliamentary side sought the death of the King, which would have thrown the British Isles into what a best few could contemplate, it became increasingly clear that Charles's continued refusal to recognize the Titanic changes that rocked his domain were an even greater threat to continued order. Purification requires sacrifice, and to purify a new church and a new form of government would require a blood sacrifice proportionate to the task. Matt, do you think that there is a single point of no return for killing the King? Or does it have to be all of these things? I think certainly once he invites the Scots in, you know that he's not going to stop. Yes.

You know that he will only buy time and that will only undermine your position. But again, as we were just talking about, you know, that is him learning to operate under this system. Yeah, even though the system that he has then learned to operate has then moved forward in another way. You can't know that in an unmanageable way, yes.