The U.K. may find that getting to Brexit was the easy part
Under Henry VIII, England crashed out of a European union created by the Roman Catholic Church. It took more than 175 years for the crisis that followed to be finally resolved.
Speaking before dawn on Dec. 13, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the previous day's election expressed the "irrefutable, irresistible, unarguable decision of the British people," giving him a "huge, stonking mandate" for his campaign pledge to "get Brexit done."
We might quibble: The Conservatives picked up only 44 percent of the votes, considerably less than the 52 percent for Brexit in the 2016 referendum. There was also a strong "Anyone but Corbyn" mood; many voters backed Johnson solely to keep out Labour's far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn. One newly elected Conservative member of Parliament admitted that "Anti-Corbyn sentiment was the biggest thing … Brexit would be number two." But in terms of parliamentary seats, Conservatives got the kind of triumph they have not enjoyed since the 1980s, and Labour the kind of tragedy it has not suffered since the 1930s. Sedgefield, the seat once held by Labour leader Tony Blair, returned a Tory to Parliament for the first time since 1931. Barring something utterly unforeseen, Britain will now leave the European Union in January.
Plenty of pundits have already weighed in on the electoral implications of Johnson's landslide, but fewer have addressed its strategic implications for the United Kingdom's position in the world. In part, I suspect, this is because there are few obvious analogies for the political crisis Brexit has precipitated, and, without historical comparison cases, forecasting too easily becomes guesswork. There is, though, one suggestive parallel for what Britain is going through. Extrapolating possible futures from an isolated analogy is open to obvious objections; however, it is surely better than working without comparisons of any kind – and it prompts some sobering thoughts.
The Original European Union
Historians sometimes call the Roman Empire the original European Union, which would make A.D. 410 (when the last Roman legions left the province of Britannia) the original Brexit. This is misleading, however, because the Roman Empire was utterly unlike the European Union. Rome was a classic imperial power, which conquered England and Wales violently in the years after A.D. 43. For centuries, Britannia was garrisoned by Continental troops (mostly from what are now Germany and France) and ruled by Italian officials. That is not how the European Union works.
There was, though, a European union long before the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1950. As the Roman Empire disintegrated in the fifth century, a new organization filled the void: the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike the empire, the church had no legions. But as Germanic warlords carved Western Europe into new, smaller kingdoms, Catholic bishops took over many of the jobs the empire had previously done.
The church offered warlords membership of what we might call a Catholic European Union – at a price. In return for accepting Christianity, pagan chiefs got legitimacy. Only a chief who was recognized by God could call himself a king. To become a king, a chief had to surrender some of his sovereignty to Rome, because only the church could say whom God favoured. The quid pro quo was that becoming a king elevated him above his merely chiefly rivals. He also gained access to the literate, educated men whom only the church could provide and without whom he could not administer taxation and run his state effectively. Some of his new wealth would inevitably pass into Italian hands, as his subjects gave property (and its tax revenues) to the church to buy God's favour. But in return for allowing that, kings got access to Continentwide networks of diplomacy and finance.
No one forced post-Roman chiefs to join this European Union, but, one after another, all decided that coming in was a better deal than staying out. The longer they stayed out, in fact, the worse that deal became. If everyone else was Christian, pagans were pariahs (rather like North Korea or Iran today), unable to contract diplomatic marriages or raise loans. The first English warlord signed up in 597, and by 650 almost all of England's petty would-be kings had followed suit.
Because this medieval European Union had no armies, its hard power was limited, but its soft power was enormous (after all, it controlled the fate of everyone's immortal soul). For eight centuries, from 700 through 1500, no European state could function outside the union. When England's King Henry II fell out with his Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1162, for instance, Becket hit back with an "interdict," officially cutting England off from God. There could be no church services, marriages or Christian burials (and therefore no legal inheritances). Infuriated, Henry cried out, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" – whereupon four of his barons murdered the archbishop. The pope then excommunicated Henry, relieving the English of any need to pay his taxes, fight in his wars or follow his laws. With his kingdom collapsing, Henry was only readmitted to civilized society after kneeling in penance at Becket's tomb and submitting to a mock whipping by monks (imagine if the modern European Union could impose this penance on wayward presidents and prime ministers). But Henry got off lightly: When his son John again confronted the pope, he, too, was excommunicated and ended up being bullied by his barons into signing the Magna Carta in 1215. For several years, England became a papal protectorate, run by Italian officials.
The original European Union's achievements were extraordinary. However, it had one huge problem. Its soft power depended on its leaders living in Christlike poverty, chastity and humility. Predictably, though, the more it succeeded, the less they did so, which undermined the European Union's soft power. This regularly generated challenges, the most serious being Martin Luther's in 1517. Luther made a theological argument, that believers could relate to God through faith alone, without the union's intercession, but it had massive political implications. If faith were enough, why did any king need the European Union's approval? Why should he not take his country back, ruling on his own authority and answering only to God?
This was the context for the original Brexit. Convinced that England's stability required him to divorce his Spanish wife, Henry VIII worked hard to accomplish this within the European Union's rules. But when popes played hardball, Henry allowed younger, more radical advisers (many of them influenced by Luther) to convince him that the issue here was simply one of sovereignty: Who rules, Rome or Westminster? After further political missteps, every bit as bad as those of the 2010s, England crashed out of the original European Union with no deal in 1534.
The Original Brexit
The early-1530s "Englexit" (to coin an unlovely term) is the only real parallel for the late-2010s Brexit. It suggests one big thing: that while getting out of a European Union is hard, staying out is harder.
In 2016, Brexiteers disingenuously claimed that after leaving the European Union, the United Kingdom would recoup $65 million per day, and part of the attraction of Englexit was that in real terms, Henry VIII could take back much more than that by nationalizing the original European Union's monasteries. But once this windfall was spent, the fact remained that England was small, poor and, thanks to Englexit, deeply divided and diplomatically isolated. After Henry died in 1547, his son Edward's advisers pushed to make Englexit harder, smashing up Catholic churches, but when Edward died six years later, his Catholic half-sister "Bloody Mary" reversed Englexit, married a Spanish prince and burned 300 Puritans at the stake. Mary died after just five years, whereupon Queen Elizabeth exited
The early-1530s "Englexit" (to coin an unlovely term) is the only real parallel for the late-2010s Brexit. It suggests one big thing: that while getting out of a European Union is hard, staying out is harder.
the European Union again, but more softly, trying to keep her options open. Through it all, Roman priests infiltrated England to stir up die-hard Catholic Remainers, while France and Spain, the Catholic great powers, offered tempting royal marriage partners.
When none of this worked, the European Union turned to Plan B. If Englexit could not be reversed, it must at least be made painful, to deter the numerous Exiteers in other member countries. In addition to trade embargoes, Catholics stirred up trouble in Ireland and Scotland. (The latter, however, backfired badly: Scotland went Protestant in 1559, turning Englexit into Brexit.) Most threatening of all, the pope encouraged Spain and France to invade, using force to impose a Catholic monarch.
England, of course, had options, too. Its best hope was to stay under the radar, since France and Spain both had bigger fish to fry than England's membership in the European Union. It also tried to play off the Continental powers, convincing each that it was a potential ally against the other. That strategy collapsed in 1562, though, when Exiteers in France set off a civil war, removing their country as a counterbalance to Spain.
With an invasion looking increasingly likely, England pursued a new strategy, building up a formidable fleet, both to defend its shores and to raid Spain's silver-producing American colonies. Spain finally attacked in 1588, having decided that it could not afford to let England assist a Dutch Protestant uprising, only for a combination of the English fleet and terrible luck to defeat it. This victory was a huge boost for hardcore Englexiteers, who, to Elizabeth's dismay, now demanded that she take the war to Europe, rolling back the Catholic European Union.
The strategic reality, though, was that England's position continued to worsen. Its rulers faced an impossible choice between pleasing hardcore Englexiteers at home by waging anti-Catholic wars they could not afford, and avoiding war by placating the European Union — but enraging the Englexiteers. Any misstep could be disastrous, and in 1642 a terrible civil war broke out between a softEnglexit king and his hard-Englexit Parliament. Parliament won, and beheaded the king, only to discover that most Englishmen still thought that only a properly anointed monarch could be a legitimate ruler. The monarchy was duly restored in 1660, but the strategic problems kept increasing. In addition to dealing with the Catholic powers, England now faced commercial and military rivalry with its fellow Protestants in the Netherlands. Pulled in every direction, Charles II concluded a secret treaty with France in 1670, agreeing (in return for a hefty bribe) not only to join Catholic France in its war against Protestant Holland but even also to use French troops to make England Catholic again.
Charles was probably just saying whatever it took to get French subsidies and had no intention of converting, but when his brother and heir James did convert in 1683 – and produced an heir of his own in 1688 – civil war loomed again. Instead, England got a Dutch-backed
invasion and coup, which succeeded where Spain had failed. James' solidly Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch (and even more solidly Protestant) husband William seized his throne.
William and Mary cut a deal with Parliament, agreeing to reign not as oldfashioned absolutist monarchs but as the "Crown in Parliament," a vaguely defined arrangement under which Parliament made the decisions but monarchs retained veto power. Politics remained bitterly partisan, but enough members of the elite got what they wanted that William and Mary could commit the country to a gruelling quarter-century of almost constant fighting against France.
By 1713, when these wars ended, the crisis created by Englexit had finally been resolved. There had been two main results. One was a series of English political revolutions, which subordinated the Crown to Parliament. We can safely say that when he set these events in motion in 1534, Henry VIII never envisaged the civil wars of 1642-51, the regicide of 1649, the invasion and coup of 1688 or the compromise with Parliament of 1689. All would have appalled him. The Presbyterian elders who took Scotland out of the original European Union in 1559, turning Englexit into Brexit, would have been equally appalled to know that their actions would end in Scotland's formal subordination to England in 1707. Had any of these actors owned a crystal ball, there surely would have been no 16th century Brexit.
The second big thing was a revolution within the Catholic European Union. The church's right to sit in judgment over kings had been eroding since the 15th century and collapsed in the 17th. The
Thirty Years' War of 1618-48, fought mostly to decide whether Central Europe would be Catholic or Protestant, killed one German in six. After that, few had much stomach for restoring the medieval European Union through violence. In 1689, England's rivalry with France was still largely an argument over Englexit, but by 1713, it was one about national interests, with religion reduced to a mere rallying cry. By then, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper joked, "There were a hundred thousand men ready to rise in arms against Popery, without knowing whether Popery were a man or a horse."
The Real Struggle
There are many obvious differences between the 16th-century Englexit and the 21st-century Brexit, but the similarities deserve some thought, too. The founders of the modern European Union knew this, and regularly spoke of medieval Catholicism as a model in the late 1940s, and to many today, the European idea has become an article of faith as irrefutable as the Nicene Creed. When 52 percent of British voters opted in 2016 to break this faith, their rejection of previously shared values and beliefs was as profoundly shocking to those who remained within the union as Henry VIII's break with Rome in 1534. Given that die-hard Remainers remained ready to die for the European Union for 150 years after 1534, we should hardly be surprised that their modern counterparts still hope to overturn the verdict of 2016; nor, given the willingness of Continental Protestants to resort to violence in the 16th century to emulate England's example, that the 21st-century European Union – like its predecessor – has reason to try to make Brexit as unattractive as possible.
Like post-1534 England, post-2016 Britain probably stands the best chance of minimizing its pain if it can make itself a lower priority than the European Union's other problems. Brussels might yet forgive and forget Britons' crimes in return for their help against military challenges from Russia and economic ones from the United States and China. Britain might even make a useful interlocutor between the European Union and the United States.
The biggest lesson of 1534, though, is the way that decisions made in Westminster – or, for that matter, popular mandates, no matter how stonking – at best change just one side of the strategic equation. It can take generations for the rest of the landscape to respond. In the original Brexit, 179 years had to pass before it became safe for Englishmen not to know whether Popery were a man or a horse.
This prompts me to risk a prediction. Getting Brexit done, which will have taken three and a half years by Jan. 31, 2020, when the United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union, has been a horrible experience. But that was the easy part. On Feb. 1, the real struggle begins.
Given that die-hard Remainers remained ready to die for the European Union for 150 years after 1534, we should hardly be surprised that their modern counterparts still hope to overturn the verdict of 2016.
Ian Morris is on the Board of Contributors of Stratfor. “The U.K. May Find That Getting to Brexit Was the Easy Part” is republished under content confederation between Financial Nigeria and Stratfor.