Where have all the English rebels gone?

With faith in our politicians and parliament at an all time low, Gerald Isaaman wonders what it will take for voters to be inspired by England’s dissident history

It is going to be an unprecedented election year. So who are you voting for? Or are you too cross to vote at all?

The questions are worth asking because, for the first time in my lifetime, the greed and lies of too many MPs has resulted in the democratic process – and the Mother of Parliaments – being held in such miserable contempt that fewer than 50 per cent of the population are expected to use their vote. 

It may be a fact that only 10 per cent of the voters take politics seriously. Yet the bankers and their bonuses, plus the bloody war in Afghanistan and a media that forever paints a negative picture, means that public opinion has reached its lowest and darkest level. 

So it seems unlikely, then, that the electorate will be swayed by the vapid rhetoric of politicians in a sterile party political system and flawed Parliament that is in obvious – and urgent – need of reform.

But it remains true that we resist the dismay and disenchantment and fight the gloom and doom that has descended upon us. And to do so you only have to read David Horspool’s brilliant book, The English Rebel, which comprehensively covers 1,000 years of trouble-making of those seeking a better life. And justice too. 

Horspool tells in dramatic detail of the courage, determination and toil of those who opposed  invaders, despotic kings and governments from England’s “fatal day” at the Battle of Hastings, through to when the English “doomed themselves and their country to slavery by giving” through taxation. 

All the rebels are there: from Hereward the Wake to the barons at Runnymede; from the Tolpuddle martyrs to the Levellers of the Civil War; from the Chartists to the Suffragettes; and from Michael Foot to the Poll Tax protesters who defeated Margaret Thatcher. 

There is no Robin Hood, alas, but it is an amazing legacy of the spirit of those who believe, no matter its inherent faults, that democracy has to be our standard bearer.

As the Chartist historian Malcolm Chase put it: “At the century’s turning there was an abiding sense that Chartism had been an epoch-defining movement. It had moved society closer to the recognition of a profound truth, that our essential humanity and dignity are protected and preserved only where government answers not merely to the propertied and wealthy but to all people.”

We may have gone backwards since then, the world becoming a more complex place as people’s demands reached levels the Chartists can never have imagined. Indeed, all those remarkable rebels and reformers of the past hardly benefited from their extraordinary endeavours.

With history now given a back seat in education, we need to restore our faith in the ability of people to change their circumstances. And David Horspool provides the perfect example. He suggests taking a rebels’ tour of London, starting in Stoke Newington, where one of the Angry Brigade was picked up in 1972. “Then you could head for Church Street, past Defoe Road, where Daniel Defoe, who fought with the rebel Duke of Monmouth in the last pitched battle on English soil, once lived.

“Somewhere on Church Street itself stood Wallingford House, where a clique of New Model Army officers led by Charles Fleetwood gathered to play the overthrow of Richard Cromwell, the unlucky heir to the reluctant revolutionary Oliver, who was flunking the Army’s idea of how the country should be run.

“From Stoke Newington, we could start to travel into central London, going past Highbury, where the medieval manor was ‘consigned to destruction in the ravening flames’ by Essex rebels in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. As we reached Clerkenwell, we would pass Spa Fields, where a meeting of parliamentary reformers turned into an insurrectionary riot in 1816; and Cold Bath Square, once Cold Bath Fields, where a policeman was killed in a rebellious demonstration after the ‘betrayal’ of the Great Reform Act in 1833.

“We could pause for a moment at Gray’s Inn, where Thomas Percy, one of the Gunpowder plotters of 1605, stayed in a local pub on the night before Guy Fawkes was discovered.”

It makes you wonder whether revolution is still in the air on the Northern Heights.

• The English Rebel. 
By David Horspool. 
Viking £25