Recess Appointments

Heather Cox Richardson generally comes up with very pointed examples from history of people doing things wrong, and she may get to this, but has not yet as I type.

When I was in my teens I had a book by Charles Dickens called “A Child’s History of England.” It had been my mother’s, was leather bound and starting to fall apart (and got more so over time), but I loved it. The combination of actual history, combined with the unconcealed bias with which it was delivered, was irresistible to me. I no longer have it, but it is available free at Gutenberg to read or to download, and I went there to refresh my memory.

Trump**’s invocation of recess appointments, in order to make which he will have to call a recess, reminded me of when Dickens describes a dissolution of Parliament, particularly where he cites arrogance and flippancy on the part of the dissolver.  Dissolving a Parliament was a way that s monarch could get rid of a legislature whose work he did not like (I usually say “he or she” but no queen was brave enough or stupid enough to try it in the time period he covers.)  Trump** expects to accomplish something similar with recess appointments.

First, let me quote the second dissolution of Parliament by Oliver Cromwell.  He first dissolved the Parliament he inheriterd, and later called a second.  Dickens thought he did so in order for that Parliament to crown him.  It didn’t happen, and he dissolved it also.)   Since this is public domain, I’ll quote at some length:

Oliver went down to the House in his usual plain black dress, with his usual grey worsted stockings, but with an unusual party of soldiers behind him. These last he left in the lobby, and then went in and sat down. Presently he got up, made the Parliament a speech, told them that the Lord had done with them, stamped his foot and said, ‘You are no Parliament. Bring them in! Bring them in!’ At this signal the door flew open, and the soldiers appeared. ‘This is not honest,’ said Sir Harry Vane, one of the members. ‘Sir Harry Vane!’ cried Cromwell; ‘O, Sir Harry Vane! The Lord deliver me from Sir Harry Vane!’ Then he pointed out members one by one, and said this man was a drunkard, and that man a dissipated fellow, and that man a liar, and so on. Then he caused the Speaker to be walked out of his chair, told the guard to clear the House, called the mace upon the table—which is a sign that the House is sitting—‘a fool’s bauble,’ and said, ‘here, carry it away!’ Being obeyed in all these orders, he quietly locked the door, put the key in his pocket, walked back to Whitehall again, and told his friends, who were still assembled there, what he had done.

They formed a new Council of State after this extraordinary proceeding, and got a new Parliament together in their own way: which Oliver himself opened in a sort of sermon, and which he said was the beginning of a perfect heaven upon earth. In this Parliament there sat a well-known leather-seller, who had taken the singular name of Praise God Barebones, and from whom it was called, for a joke, Barebones’s Parliament, though its general name was the Little Parliament. As it soon appeared that it was not going to put Oliver in the first place, it turned out to be not at all like the beginning of heaven upon earth, and Oliver said it really was not to be borne with. So he cleared off that Parliament in much the same way as he had disposed of the other; and then the council of officers decided that he must be made the supreme authority of the kingdom, under the title of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. —

Altogether there are nine times where the word dissolve[s][d] is used in the book, and all refer to Parliament. Edward II was the first one – he dissolved Parliament to protect his gay lover, which did not end well for him – I think less because of the gayness than because the lover was a real jerk and rightly hated by everyone in the kingdom except the king, who died after torture in the Tower.

After that, they got through the whole Wars of the Roses and the Tudors without dissolving Parliament. It was Charles I who began the chain of dissolved Parliaments in the 17th Century = the first time to protect the Duke of Buckingham, who wa not anyone’s gay lover as far as we knoe – this was the same Buckingham who was assassinated by John Felton, as recounted in The Three Musketeers, though the reason and the circumstances in that book are pretty well pure fiction. The second time Charles I dissolved Parliament was pretty much a pure power grab, seasoned with payback for aome, two in particular who had tried to stop it.

Then came Cromwell, who was technically not a King, but was pretty well along in the process of becoming one. Dickens cuts him slack because he wasn’t officially a King, but I don’t – as a Christian Nationalist before it had a name, I find him worse than any king. The Lord did not deliver him from Sit Harry Vane, who outlived him, but was finished off by Charles II, who also did some dissolving.

It was not anti-Semitism (which existed – and has existed forever) but anti-Catholicism which led Charles II to dissolve parliament. A roundhead named Titus Oates, who has been compared to, and may have been an inspiration for, Joe McCarthy, gained a backing and would no doubt happily have killed the King’s brother and the queen, but didn’t get that far. He did get Parliament to bar the brother, later James II, from the succession, and that was when Charles II dissolved it in response. Later, he called a new Parliament, which he hoped would shoot down the Exclusion Act, which excluded Catholics from holding any public office, but instead they passed it, so he dissolved this one too.

It’s clear that the dissolution of a Parliament never did anyone’s legacy or memory any good.

Dickens was extremely opinionated, which comes through loud and clear. His facts are probably close enough to reality, but when he takes on people’s motives and the big picture of who was a good person or who was a bad person, I would not trust him for a second. But it does make for amusing reading. Should you decide to look it up, starting at the end and seing how suddenly he falls silent when the historical events begin to reach times when close relatives of the people involved are still alive, it is clear how suddenly he starts to speak no evil.