One careless tap of a tobacco pipe. One tiny spark falling on the hay.
No one knows what set the stables in Newmarket ablaze – and ultimately, burned down the whole English country town – on a windy night in March 1683.
But we know that 66 thatched-roof buildings went up in flames, and that merry King Charles II (who loved the Newmarket horse races, and a Newmarket wench named Nell Gwynn) fled the smoldering hamlet in a right hurry.
He left a week ahead of his official schedule, and arrived back in London before anyone at his court expected him home… and before the Green Ribbon Club had a chance to put an arrow through his eye.
A secretive group of anti-monarchists who wore “bobs” of green ribbon as an identifying badge, the club had spent months planning the King’s murder (while tippling at the King’s Head Tavern in London, no less).
The plot hinged on Charles’ homeward route from Newmarket past a certain lonely castle in Hertfordshire. But the assassins hadn’t bargained on a fire changing the King’s travel plans.
Or on what happened next.
In a fascinating series of “butterfly effects,” the spark that lit the Newmarket fire brought us the Declaration of Independence… and, ultimately, America as we know it…
It was the uneasy aftermath of the 1642-1651 English Civil War – a conflict between the “parliamentarians,” who wanted a republic, and the “royalists,” who wanted to stick with the monarchy. (Long story short: eventually, they met in the middle and formed a parliamentary monarchy.)
But in the meantime, there was bloodshed. King Charles I lost his head, and his son, Charles II, fled to France at the end of the war. Dour puritan Oliver Cromwell (“Lord Protector”) took over the country and ran a rocky proto-republic for 11 years. After Cromwell died, young King Charles returned from exile and resumed the reins of government in 1660 – a period called the “Restoration.”
Charles loved feasts, fun, and frolicking with ladies – and was quick to re-institute horse racing as a national pastime. (Cromwell had outlawed it on the grounds of its not being a “useful” sport.) Charles’ friend Lord Rochester (while sharing mistresses with him) lampooned him in a good-natured poem:
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
A large faction of the British, however, weren’t happy with the Merry Monarch. The parliamentarians – who became known as Whigs – were still determined to end the monarchy once and for all and reboot the republic. Exiling the heir to the throne hadn’t worked, so in 1681, a radical Whig faction (the Green Ribbons) decided to kill him.
The Green Ribbons planned to lie in wait, with ammunition, at the Rye House, a solitary, moated castle that commanded a perfect view of Charles’ return route from Newmarket. A contemporary account noted the site’s fortress-like attributes: “Towards the garden it has high walls, so that twenty men might easily defend it against five hundred.”
Charles was scheduled to return from Newmarket on April 1. His younger brother James was with him at the races, so the conspirators could shoot two royal birds (code-named Blackbird and Goldfinch) with one crossbow.
But due to the fire killing his fun, Charles rode past the Rye House a week early, before the assassins even arrived. The ambush didn’t take place. The British monarchy remained intact (and still does to this day).
And a month or two later, Josiah Keeling, one of the minor players in the Rye House conspiracy, snitched on his fellow Green Ribbons.
That’s where John Locke… and, ultimately, the Declaration of Independence… came in.
Natural Rights, And Where We Get Them
The crackdown came swiftly. Keeling, who’d turned King’s evidence, escaped with his neck – but many of the other Green Ribbons weren’t so fortunate.
Eight conspirators were hanged, drawn, and quartered; four were beheaded or hanged; 11 were imprisoned, one tortured, and one cut his own throat while awaiting trial in the Tower of London.
Not surprisingly, a number of others fled England altogether… Among the refugees: Enlightenment writer, philosopher, and freedom-lover John Locke.
Locke is the father of what we call classical liberalism – not to be confused with the American “liberalism” of today. It’s the belief that humans have God-given rights – to life, freedom, religious expression, possessions, and self-defense – and that no earthly ruler can give or take these rights away. This fundamental liberty – not any sort of authoritarian, governmental control – is the basis for a functioning society. (If this sounds a lot like libertarianism to you, you’re on the right track.)
Locke had been mulling these revolutionary ideas for years – and growing more and more dissatisfied with England’s monarchy. Not surprisingly, he eventually got mixed up with the Rye House crowd.
No one knows exactly how much John Locke had to do with the plot to kill King Charles. But he was a known republican and an associate of the Green Ribbons. He was friendly with head conspirator Robert West – enough to arrange a place for West to stay at his own Oxford lodgings – and chummy with several of the lesser group members (including one of the men who was hanged, drawn, and quartered).
Locke was in plenty deep enough to worry. So he packed up his books and writing equipment and sailed for the Netherlands.
It was there – fed up with King Charles’ excesses, and with England’s interminable class and religious warfare – that he penned his Two Treatises on Government, the seminal work that directly inspired the Declaration of Independence and much of the way the Western world thinks today about government, freedom, law, and individual rights.
Locke’s concept of “natural rights” may sound familiar:
The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions…
That’s because Thomas Jefferson – a student of Locke who often quoted directly from the great thinker’s works – drew heavily on those concepts a little less than a century later in 1776, as he created our nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
John Locke wasn’t able to dismantle the English monarchy. But he laid the groundwork for the American republic… or, maybe, we should credit the careless pipe smoker who burned down Newmarket.
Locke’s Forgotten Right
Interestingly, Locke’s fundamental “natural rights” differ slightly – but crucially – from the version we see in the Declaration of Independence…
Woven throughout Locke’s Treatises, we see three God-given rights listed: rights to life, liberty, and property. Locke’s Second Treatise on Government makes man’s right to property clear:
Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.
Jefferson, following Locke, originally listed “life, liberty, and property” as the three fundamental natural rights of humankind while writing the Declaration of Independence.
But he eventually tweaked it to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” after a disagreement with Ben Franklin and John Adams – both staunch abolitionists who thought that Americans might assume “property” meant slave ownership.
Obviously, property has nothing to do with slavery, and everything to do with material wealth. Locke describes it as what comes from the work of your hands, and is thereby your own. In some ways, Locke’s – and Jefferson’s – original phrasing is even more powerful. “Happiness” isn’t concrete. “Property” is.
And (final draft or not)… the idea that we, as Americans, have a God-given “right to wealth” has been built into the very fabric of our nation from the beginning.
If you’ve read much history, you know that America was created by a select group of businessmen, who (thanks to their own hard work) were among the wealthiest people in the world. The country was never really ruled by a king. There was no “tribe” of Americans who settled here and fought to keep everyone else out of their territory. Instead, America was a nation created by an idea, an idea that drew people here from all over the world, from virtually all nations and all tribes.
The idea of America is that man was created by God and thus is equal to all other men and entitled to his liberty and therefore (as Locke and Jeffferson believed) his wealth.
That idea was carried forward by the industrial revolution that swept through both England and America from the 1750s onward, fueled by coal, which began to re- place timber as the dominant power source. Coal power, which contains 10 times more energy than timber of equal weight, led to countless innovations in machinery, engines, locomotives, and ships… and created fortunes unlike anything seen previously in human history.
