Part I. Chapter 8 from "Our Country, Then and Now"
[Serialization of selections from my book Our Country, Then and Now continues with the cooperation of my publisher, Clarity Press.]
Arguably the most important geopolitical event of the last 500 years has been the rise of the British Empire. This Empire was created through a series of deliberate choices made by the British nation starting during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603).
Our Country, Then and Now is a history of the US from the early 1600s until today. Due to the profound influence of Britain on the US during the entire period, particularly our War of Independence from Britain, it appeared necessary to stop about halfway through and recapitulate British history using broader strokes. Hence the writing of Chapter 8, “Rule Britannia.”
This recapitulation may also lead us to ask whether even today the US is free from the British Empire, which has led me to introduce in later writings the idea of the “Anglo-American-Zionist Empire,” which I believe we are now seeing in its final throes. “Anglo-” comes first in that designation.
Therefore, without further ado, here is Part 1 of “Rule Britannia.” Some minor editing is incorporated.
Why Study the British Empire?
The significant role of Britain in any account of US history is unavoidable, from the founding of the country right up to the present day.
The US was formed from thirteen British colonies running down the Atlantic Coast of North America from what is today Maine—then part of Massachusetts—to Georgia. The US fought two wars to secure its freedom from Britain: the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
In 1823, the US promulgated the Monroe Doctrine, declaring the Western Hemisphere to be off-limits to further European colonization, which obviously included Britain. This included a pledge by the US to stay out of European politics. That pledge has been forgotten. US meddling in European politics has been a major component of 20th century history, due in large part to British pressure to come to its rescue in its wars against Germany. On the other hand, during the American Civil War, the Confederacy tried but failed to gain Britain as an ally. [The effort ended with the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865.]
After the Civil War, the US saw heavy financial investment by the British, with the most prominent names being the Barings and the Rothschilds, with August Belmont serving as the US agent for the Rothschilds. Britain also successfully pressured the US to adopt the gold standard, though silver as currency never entirely went away.
The US continued to the end of the 19th century to pursue a foreign policy based on its own precedents and interests. Even then, the US was potentially a rival power to Britain, but never to the extent of France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Russia, and particularly Germany.
In 1914, World War I broke out. The Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire faced off against the Triple Entente, an alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia. Italy was lining up with Germany but switched sides. Britain was aided in the war by substantial numbers of troops from its Empire, especially from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, and some African colonies.
Britain and its allies came close to losing World War I, though Britain never admits this. They were rescued by the fact that in 1917, after three years of steadily eroding neutrality, the US sent its army overseas. The extent to which the US turned the tide in World War I war is debated to this day. But the fact remains that more than 140 years later, after revolting against Britain, the US stepped in as its savior. It is crucial to understand how and why that happened.
How, then, to approach a topic as large and complex as the British Empire?
Looking at this history, one of my main sources will be an Englishman and the other a German. I have already cited Niall Ferguson, author of Empire and other books, including histories of the Rothschilds, as a source in earlier chapters of this book. On the German side, my source is Ludwig Dehio.
Less well known than some other German historians, Dehio was an archivist in the Secret State Archives of the Weimar Republic from 1922 to 1933. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he left the government to become director of archives of the House of Hohenzollern, which was the German family of the deposed German Kaiser Wilhelm II, then living in exile in the Netherlands. Dehio was not a Nazi.
After World War II, Dehio emerged as editor-in-chief of the Historische Zeitschrift, a German historical journal, serving until he retired in 1956. Probably there was no person in post-war Germany with greater knowledge of European history. He published several books, including Germany and World Politics in the Twentieth Century and The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle. It’s the latter book, published in 1962, that is used here as a source, dealing as it does with the relationship from Elizabethan times through World War II between Great Britain and the Continental European nations.
Dehio considers the US an integral part of this history. He concluded in his post-World War II research that the wars among the nations of Europe over the past four centuries have destroyed the European system of states. The US has been the beneficiary.
Origins of Britain
The origins of the British nation are lost in the mists of time. After the glaciers retreated at the end of the Ice Age, the British Isles took shape and became subject to successive waves of immigration from across the English Channel and the North Sea. There was a long period of habitation by [migrants from Anatolia—modern Turkey] and by the Celtic peoples who migrated from central Europe, followed by the Romans who treated Britannia as an agricultural province and military outpost. The word “Britannia” is derived from “Pretannia,” used by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus for the Pretani people, believed then to live on the remote islands on the northwest fringe of Europe.
But what was called “England” came to be inhabited by West Germanic peoples known as the Anglo-Saxons, who first arrived in 449 AD. The Anglo-Saxons were subject to raids from the Vikings, another Germanic race. Then the Anglo-Saxons were conquered in 1066 by the French-speaking Normans, but these were also Germanic, having originated in Scandinavia before settling down in Northern France. The Normans spoke French and made the Anglo-Saxons a class of serfs while massacring the Anglo-Saxon nobility.
Thus Britain has deep Germanic roots, and even today has a royal house whose forebears arrived from Germany in modern times. The real name of the House of Windsor is the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. In conquering Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, in 1801 the British declared the existence of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The UK would come to rule over much of the world. [Some would say that at least financially, it still does.]
Elizabeth I and Her Spymaster
The story of modern Britain begins with Henry VIII (1491-1547), who threw off the influence of Papal Catholicism. His Protestant daughter, Elizabeth, ascended the English throne, and kept her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, locked up and facing execution. When the execution took place in 1587, Phillip II of Spain, ruler of the greatest empire in Europe, sent his Armada to invade England, with a view to killing its queen and stamping out the Protestant heresy.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 saved England. The English then decided once and for all that they could never allow themselves to be subject to invasion by another European power. This determination has been the centerpiece of Britain’s foreign policy to this day.
The chip on the British shoulder has remained rather large. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the ideal prophet for a nation whose psyche was based on “eat or be eaten,” “kill or be killed,” and “might makes right.” Or to a people whose confinement on an island with a relatively small population led to a) continuous emigration and b) the “science” of eugenics.[i]
England defeated the Spanish Armada with a fleet of highly maneuverable warships and privateers under Admiral Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham, and Sir Francis Drake, whose fleet was lurking in ambush at the mouth of the English Channel. Their deadly work of cutting the Spanish fleet to pieces was completed by violent storms that dashed the Spanish ships on the rocks as they circumnavigated the British Isles on their return home.
The British would not have been ready for the Spanish attack, were it not for an extensive network of spies, including double and triple agents, reinforced by intrigue and assassination. The network was run by Elizabeth’s principal secretary (an office that later became Secretary of State), Sir Francis Walsingham (1532-1590), known to history as Elizabeth’s “spymaster.”[ii]
Son of a well-connected London lawyer, whose admission to the gentry had been purchased from the Crown, Walsingham was a King’s College, Cambridge scholar, a Gray’s Inn lawyer, well-traveled on the Continent, and versed in ancient and modern languages. He was a Puritan and part of a Protestant intelligentsia that included his son-in-law, Sir Philip Sidney, the poet Edmund Spenser, and occultist John Dee, men with a mystical attachment to the destiny of England as a world power.
Dee wrote in his 1577 book The Brytish Monarchy:
“A petty Navy Royall of three score tall ships or more, but in case fewer…seemeth to be almost a mathematical demonstration, next under the merciful and mighty protection of God, for a feasible policy to bring and preserve this victorious British monarchy in a marvellous security. Whereupon the revenue of the Crown of England and wealth [of the] public will wonderfully increase and flourish; and then…sea forces anew to be increased proportionately. And so Fame, Renown, Estimation, and Love, and Fear of this Brytish Microcosmus all the whole of the great world over will be speedily and surely be settled.”[iii]
John Dee is said to have been the first to use the term “British Empire.” Fundamental to Dee’s prescription for the attainment of “fame, renown, estimation, love, and fear” was, of course, the violence of armed warfare—“three score tall ships or more.” Corollaries of armed warfare, all practiced then as now, are terrorism, assassination, aggression, assault, piracy, murder, and extortion. As an occultist and “conjurer” to the Queen, Dee claimed to receive his insights from the whispers of spirits. For, this he had a “spirit mirror” that he used with the aid of mediums.[iv] John Dee was thus “a man possessed.”
In combating Catholic plots to assassinate Elizabeth and place the Catholic Mary, the daughter of James V of Scotland, on the throne, Elizabeth’s principal adviser, William Cecil, 1st Baron Burleigh, with his main assistant, Walsingham, placed in motion England’s first major covert action around 1559. This involved secret payments to anti-Catholic Scottish rebels, authoring anonymous propaganda pamphlets, leaking disinformation to political figures, bribing or kidnapping foreign diplomats, and running a web of spies throughout Europe, including within the Vatican. Risky work: Spies would routinely be executed if discovered.
In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth and declared her deposed as queen. This made her and the land she ruled fair game. The last straw was Mary’s execution based on secret messages to and from supporters that Walsingham had ferreted out. These letters supposedly called for Elizabeth’s assassination. Aware that Phillip II and the Spanish had laid plans against England, Walsingham sent raiders to harass Spanish shipping, attack ports and coastal cities, and gather information about Spanish navel strength. Months before the Armada sailed, Walsingham possessed documents that listed every Spanish vessel, their size and location, and their carrying capacity of armed men.
Coming in Part 2: “The Privy Council,” “The European System of States,” “Holland’s Rise,” and “Louis XIV.”
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Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. Also see his Three Sages Substack and his American Geopolitical Institute articles at https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/.
“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also download the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.
Notes
[i] Today, of course, Britain is faced with the problem of mass immigration from its former colonies and other Middle Eastern and Asian nations.
[ii] Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage, Penguin Books, 2006.
[iii] Guido Giacomo Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich, Pluto Press, London & Ann Arbor, 2005, p. 1.
[iv] John Dee’s downfall came after his wife became pregnant in an “angel-sanctioned” wife-swapping escapade. He died in poverty, shunned by the court of King James I. His “spirit mirror” is in the British Museum. “Ten Facts You Might Not Know About John Dee,” <www.gethistory.co.uk>, March 10, 2020.
Featured image: A British Empire flag combining the arms of the dominions to represent their growing significance (Public Domain)
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