Brexit is not unprecedented

On Thursday, June 5, 1975, whilst a student of history at Edinburgh University, I was one of the 17,378,581 enlightened souls who voted yes to sustain the United Kingdom's continued membership of the Common Market and of the European Communities (the precursor of today's European Union).

Four decades later , on another Thursday, June 23, 2016, the people of the UK, in another referendum, voted in favour of leaving the European Union. Brexit carried the day.

As a confirmed Australian by now the details of Brexit – the options, the timing, the technicalities, the politics – are beyond me. Its intricacies involve a distant land of which I am not a citizen.

Pro-Brexit demonstrators outside the Houses of Parliament in London.Credit:AP

And yet for any student of history the whole thing is compelling.

Because Brexit is very much a matter of history repeating herself on a grand scale. To find something comparable happening in Britain we have to go back almost half a millennium when the country, beginning with the Tudor dynasty, similarly abruptly exited from Europe.

This Tudor version of Brexit went by the name of the English Reformation.

The Reformation in England, like Brexit, was entwined with the question of national sovereignty.

The Church in 1509, when Henry VIII's reign started, was integral to the life of most people in England. And yet it also was part of a far wider body, with final decisions being made by the Pope advised by clerical bureaucrats in Rome.

Henry VIII was haunted by England's dynastic wars of the previous century. He yearned to have a strong male heir. Sadly this was a key performance indicator that his consort Catherine of Aragon could not meet. But an annulment was impossible because Rome, influenced by the queen's family, stood in the way.

A wilful Henry split with the continent to divorce his consort. He renounced the Pope's authority and declared himself to be the Supreme Head of the Church in England. Henceforth England only had one sovereign. It was treacherous and indeed blasphemous to suggest otherwise.

Henry VIII was behind another split with the continent centuries ago.

But things got messy. Henry was schismatic but he was not a heretic. He wanted to remain a Catholic while replacing the Pope.

This was a tricky balance though. The Reformation, like Brexit, stirred up passions which were hard to control from above. It could not be confined to jurisdictional matters. It was driven by spiritual zeal.

The next seven monarchs after Henry were bedevilled by the rival pulls of Protestantism and a revived Catholicism. Henry VIII's act of surgical separation was followed by painful complications. His son Edward VI opted for militant Protestantism. Edward's sister Mary I reimposed the link with Rome. Their sister Elizabeth I, a pragmatist, sought a middle way.

Elizabeth's creaky compromise collapsed under her successors. James I faced growing discontent from Protestants now known as Puritans. They ended up beheading his son Charles I and set up a republic in anticipation of the return of Christ.

Fear of such extremism led to the restoration of Charles II. His reign was dominated by an anti-Puritan reaction. This culminated when his brother James, a Catholic convert, became king. Parliament deposed him in 1688, whereupon a century and a half of instability ended with a grubby deal. A Church of England dominated by centrists and conformists was established by law. Both Catholics and Puritans were excluded from the public sphere.

The neutered state of its established religion sealed the nation's exit from the continent. The Catholic parts of Europe – notably Spain, France and Italy – were now equated with backwardness and oppression while the rejection of Puritanism was fatal to a closer communion with the Lutheran and Calvinist intelligentsia of northern Europe. England became a world unto itself.

Brexit's victory expresses this stubborn sense of individuality. It is truly ingrained, but worrying nonetheless.

At present in the Brexit era there is no settled majority to underpin a future stable relationship with the EU or to decide what course next to follow such as whether to hold a second referendum.

Students of history have no idea as to what will actually happen. But they do know that Brexit is not unprecedented. A similar shuddering rejection of Europe occurred a mere 500 years ago. Deep passions were unleashed. The resulting disruption took more than a century and a half to run its destructive course.

At the start of 2019 I can only hope that the land of my father's birth is not doomed, because of Brexit, to emulate in even a small way this chronicle of dysfunction.

Stephen Holt is a Canberra writer.

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