By Eldred Lowden

“It may be some time before I return to my native land, but I shall always follow the fortunes of the British race and empire with profound interest, and if at any time in the future I can be found of service to his majesty in a private station, I shall not fail.”
– Edward VIII

It has only been in recent years that King Edward VIII, at the time of his death the Duke of Windsor, has become the proper foil for international Anglophiliac fixation on the Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In two popular film productions, the first the heralded The King’s Speech and later the mini-series The Crown, he is portrayed as egotistical, vacuous, aloof of the great crises of his day, and resentful of his family and the world for disrupting his warm romantic fantasies with the cold splash of political reality. He has been described as a life-long adolescent, a self-made cuckold who surrendered the throne of the mightest Empire in the world for a common Yank whore who appeared as a notch on the belts of men from Jaochim von Ribbentrop to a used car dealer from Mayfair. If Adolf Hitler is the Great Devil of the 20th century, Edward is the century’s Great Disappointment. It may be, however, that as his story is inevitably treated by the revising force of future historians, that he gains greater fame than infamy – though inevitably he will forever remain a conduit of regret and melancholy. In truth, he is in his behavior representative of the same Britain so many of his supporters despise and his detractors have come to love. He is, whether the rather wicked things said about his wife are true or slanderous, a man who favored the mundane over the sublime. He is the Last Englishman.

When Spengler spoke of Western civilization in its last stages, he returned repeatedly to the theme of his 1921 essay “Prussianism and Socialism”, in which he implies two faces to the inevitable Winter of Faustian man: the German future and the English. These are the only two Western peoples left with the mental and racial wherewithal to accomplish anything great in the final age. We do not need to guess at which path, dear reader, the West chose, insofar as it ever had a choice. It is in stark contrast to the International Yankee who is imagined as a departure from the natural inclinations and character of the Englishman, but even Andrew Fraser willingly admits that “WASPs are really the leaders in this loss of cultural identity. We were the people who really chose… to connect our identity not to our ethno-religious character, but to a State.” The great creeping vine that has come to cover Western civilization and choke out the Light is the Eternal Anglo, and his origins and life choices are not difficult to understand or to foresee when one has surveyed his history. The Cavalier could never triumph, nor the Confederate, nor the common folk of the Midlands against the forces they themselves had helped to birth in London and America.

Britain is probably the most diverse Japhethite nation in history, made up of dozens of different tribes of utterly different temperaments in a constant state of open feuding or shaky detente, ruled over by families who gain power by usurping and then exiling or slaughtering every scion, niece, nephew, and third cousin of their predecessors and maintain power by playing the warring factions of the nation off one another. The true character of these different tribal entities becomes clear with the peopling of the Americas (cf. David Hackett Fischer) but the feuds become crystalized and the national character settled with the Reformation (cf. Eamon Duffy) and the ongoing conflict among the three dominant groups – the WASP Progressive/International Yankee (“The Eternal Anglo”), the Saxon Cavalier/Southron, and the Gaelic/Scotch/Appalachian, in which the Eternal Anglo/Yankee is currently ascendant due to his membership in the financial and cultural alliance of Rootless Cosmopolitan Elites.

It is incredibly important to note here that using that phrase – Rootless Cosmpolitan Elite – we are not euphemistically referring to the Jews. It has been the error of European anti-Semites throughout modern history, and of the Dissident Right itself today, to deprive Japhethite elements of this international cabal of any agency, assigning the role of puppet-master and hypnotist to a caricature of the Jew. This is a dangerous error, for it neglects the powerful element of International Yankeedom in order to focus on what is merely the least scrupulous contingent of the Rootless Cosmopolitan Elite, namely secularized, politicized Jewry, particularly those involved in cultural creation and finance.

Christian readers will note immediately that the reference to the Synagogue of Satan by the Apostle would be redundant if it were to refer to the whole of world Jewry, which is undoubtedly in error for their rejection of Christ but does not, as a whole, serve the will of the Enemy of Mankind knowingly or willingly. Indeed, a Christian educated in his Faith has no choice but to accept that a sizable portion, perhaps even the great majority, of Jews are themselves victims of a far greater, darker, more unassailable power than we can imagine, whose aim is the destruction not merely of the children of Japheth, but of all Mankind down to the last wide-eyed, feeble-minded savage.

This is the first installment of a series of indeterminate number on the Eternal Anglo, derived from a more thoroughly cited form I will, when finished, seek to publish. It has, perhaps, suffered somewhat in being edited down to this state, but I must beg the reader’s indulgence, lacking the good Adam Smith’s skill in producing such exquisite work as to be equally suited to serial or monograph.

The Peopling of Britain

“The island Britain is 800 miles long, and 200 miles broad. And there are in the island five nations; English, Welsh (or British), Scottish, Pictish, and Latin. The first inhabitants were the Britons, who came from Armenia, and first peopled Britain southward.”
– “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, trans. Ingram/Giles

Alfred the Great lived some fifteen hundred years after the first of the Gallic Celts lept the Channel and set foot on the Isle of Britain, following their cousins who had conquered Ireland in the early centuries of the Bronze Age and made of themselves the stuff of the indigenous population whose identity persists in defining that nation to the present day. The story of the peopling of Britain he commissioned as part of his Great Chronicle began a long history of shifting populations, warring tribes, and confused cultures that his successors upon the throne would have to master and steer to their own success or destruction as rulers. Alfred himself was the descendant of invaders Cerdic and Cynric, founders of the realm of Wessex and famous opponents of the legendary Arthur; he counted among his siblings three other Kings of Wessex, a King of Kent, and a Queen of Mercia. His father, Aethelwulf, had fought off another body of invaders who would form a foundation of the English nation, the Viking raiders who had by the time of Aethulwulf’s death conquered almost a third of the isle of Britain, and a portion of Ireland as well. At the time of Aethulwulf’s death, the infamous warlord Ragnar Lodbrok was still terrorizing Northumbria and East Anglia, and his sons who would face stunning defeat at the Battle of Edington were just cutting their teeth on French monasteries and fortress towns. The Viking conflict had by the reign of Alfred (the victor at Edington) almost completely supplanted the age-old conflict between Briton and Saxon, which would remain at a simmer until the death of the last free Prince of Wales in 1282 and defeat of his army at the hands of Edward Mortimer, a Norman lord.

It was during the reign of Alfred that the Saxon was truly born: for it is the legend of Alfred, as much as Edward the Confessor or Harold Godwinsson, that would inform the basis of the Saxon spirit even into its eventual crystalization in the time of the Scots-born Charles I. It was likewise in this era that the Yankee first began to take twisted form, infesting the countryside with a foreign morality and sense of law free of Church or King, who likewise would find his final form in the darkened hearts of the Puritan regicides whose descendants today continue a rapacious campaign of proselytization and commerce directed at debasing and destroying all that is True, Beautiful, and Good. The Eternal Anglo meme describes this creature, though it is an unfortunate title that degrades the memory of the Angles whose children once struck the greatest Pope of Rome for their holy appearance, and whose people were wholly absorbed and destroyed by the Viking colonists of the Danelaw. The Eternal Anglo, or better put, the International Yankee, nevertheless exists – and is the draconic beast gnawing at the root of Western Civilization, fulfilling the Faustian destiny.

This shall at first appear a dichotomy, for we have as Americans been trained to imagine it thus, but our history reveals a far more complex picture; even at the time of the War between the States, General Samuel French of Gloucester County, NJ could describe the Yankee as a foreign element whose natural habitat was far to the north of his native fields and farms, settled in the land touched by a sinister spirit whose influence would drive the people of Salem Village into a frenzy and create the weird and macabre universe that tormented Lovecraft’s imagination. Yet French himself could not be considered a native Southron either, nor was he in his own day – like Pemberton, he instead occupied a sort of limbo that ought not to have been, belonging as he did to his own people, unique though in deep sympathy with the Southern cause due to their shared enemy in the totalizing ideology of the totalitarian Yankee. Pemberton and French, sons of the Mid-Atlantic, were grandsons of very different but equally British spirits, and great-grandsons of actual warring nations.

Christianity and the Formation of the English Character(s)

Alfred, as King of Wessex, ruled over a single, if somewhat more culturally and socially cohesive, tribal kingdom on the isle of Britain. To the north, Mercia had already begun its steep decline from the heights of Offa during Aethelwulf’s reign, and in the reigns of his three sons, of whom Alfred was the youngest, Wessex waxed as Mercia continued to wane. The Church, based in Wessex-controlled Kent, flourished under Alfred’s lettered and devout patronage, forming a permanent bond to the species of Englishman the God-fearing Saxon would become. The Kings of the Anglo-Saxons from Alfred’s House of Wessex would continue to provide this sponsorship to the Church, and the close relationship between Crown and Canterbury would become a fulcrum upon which the fortune of Christendom in England would rise and fall.

The peoples of England did not all receive Christ in the same way; among the establish Britons, the Church had a long history, established with the Edict of Milan in 313 and the survival of Roman institutions touched by Christianity well into the fifth century. The Anglo-Saxon conquest of the islands required fresh missions, but the soil was already tilled and fertile, fundamentally different than the woodlands and crags of Germania and Jutland. Charlemagne would have to beat Christianity into the continental Saxons; their insular kin received the Faith more readily, if not altogether enthusiastically. Pagan holdovers were fewer, and monastic learning more widespread. The dual strains of Celtic and English monasticism flourished during a time of peace preceding the rude awakening brought by the pagan Norsemen in the late 8th century. At Canterbury, a coalescing English people of Mercia, Wessex, Sussex, Essex, Kent, and Anglia made pilgrimage and devoted themselves to hero saints like S. Alban (more popular in the North, evidenced by S. Beda Venerabilis’ thorough treatment of his martyrdom contrasted with the Welsh-trained S. Gildas shorter consideration) and founding Fathers like S. Augustine and, later, S. Dunstan. Efforts by English historians to present Christianity as a religion of the high-born and learned have not found their conclusions borne out in documentary evidence. Peter Brown’s superb look at the Cult of the Saints in late antiquity reveals a broad agreement among all classes in their popular devotions, beliefs, and practices.

From the reign of Berhtwald in 695 to the reign of Edward the Confessor in the 1050s, the See of Canterbury was occupied exclusively by prelates of Saxon stock; only with the arrival of William the Bastard in 1066 could they be permanently unseated. Their legacy is three centuries of a decidedly Saxon, conciliar means of ecclesiastical rule, of primacy of Canterbury as First among Equals with London, York, Lincoln, and the lesser Sees, even as Norse influences corrupted York and the Sees of the Danelaw, sometimes redoubts of the Saxon, sometimes exclaves of the Dane. The Sarum Rite found its formation in this time, hearkening back to the Masses and Rites during the time of S. Gregory the Great, who had comissioned S. Augustine to bring Christ to the islands. When they were displaced by the Norman Archbishops, whose rule was more despotic, in imitation of the increasingly centralized approach to ecclesiastical rule found in Rome (an arguably necessary development following the chaos of the Byzantine Papacy and subsequent Pornocracy of the Theophylacts).

The Anglo-Saxon Archbishops of Canterbury worked in tandem with the Kings of the Anglo-Saxons, but maintained their independence of rule loyal to their Mother Church in Rome. English churchmen often positioned themselves in an Athanasian way, contra mundum and became the thorn in the side of many a ruler, petty and royal. This tendency to defy secular authority in favour of the Church is no doubt at the root of the legend of Thomas Becket being a Saxon “adopted”, as it were, into the court of Henry II – a complete fabrication, as Becket came from a long line of Normans and even maintained his parvenu Norman ways, entertaining guests with great feasts even during his tenure as Primate of all England. He could not, however, escape the spirit of his Cathedral, long bathed in the sweet incense of piety to Christ and His Holy Church. The policy of Rome may have changed, but the loyalty the See of Peter commanded in the Archbishops of Canterbury remained unchanged from the time of S. Augustine right up to the martyrdom of S. Thomas Becket and beyond. Becket, one of the Normans installed explicitly to reform the English Church and break it of its Celtic & Saxon ways, died defying the secular power of his erstwhile friend King Henry II, whose continental understanding of Crown and Crosier was the very height of Viking worldliness that would later ready the prickling ears of Englishmen to hear the Puritan calls of radical reform and the worldly personality of Calvinism. It would, ironically, also spawn another, unique defiance of the Crown in the form of the Magna Carta, a creation of Norman barons to weaken their Monarch and guarantee devolution of powers away from the consolidated authority of Alfred’s throne thereafter used in a Norman fashion.

The Normans themselves had learned Christianity and governance in a different school than the Saxons. Mercenaries from start to finish, they established themselves in northern France in a similar way to the manner of their cousins in the Danelaw. Here, they intermingled with the local Frankish population; by the time of Rollo, Christianity, already long established among Frank and Saxon alike, was quickly becoming the accepted faith of Norsemen, but the national character of each of these ethnic body varied greatly. He was baptised with his son the Longsword in 912, a very sensible decision that allowed him to lay legitimate claim to the newly created Dukedom of Normandy. His descendants would inherit his good business sense, establishing for themselves Kingdoms in Sicily and England in service of the highest bidder – who happened to be the Popes. William of England and Robert of Sicily established mutually beneficial relationships with Rome that would endure throughout most of their respective dynasties, though as with most mercenary bands, their patron could dictate outcomes but not methods and the Normans would enforce the increasingly consolidated Papal authority with violent conquest that sowed few seeds of contemporary resentment (they arguably left too few alive to be resentful), but would lend later Reformers and critics of the Papacy ample opportunity for good propaganda. The story of Norman Christianity is not all mercenary, business-minded diplomacy, however. Christian missionaries had long made efforts to establish a foothold in Scandinavia, and by the time of Rollo, the Church of Christ was by no means terra incognita. Norsemen had been choosing against Christianity for well over a century and a half already.

The Christianisation of Scandinavia follows a very different path than the Christianisation of England and the Franks. The baptism of Clovis was the formal adoption of a Roman mantle by the Frankish rulers of Gaul, not merely a legitimation of his reign, but a commitment to adopt Roman models of law, culture, and social hierarchy. England, too, seemed to “study” her way into the Faith, with the greatest sponsor of Church growth being the unusually erudite Alfred the Great. Christian universities appeared in England and France alike fairly early; Cathedrals and expansive monastery systems allowed for the growth of institutions dedicated solely to education and employment by the mind alone. Christianity was more unadulterated here, having baptised pagan praxis to a far greater extent than pagan belief, and the French and English readily receiving the institutional Church to replace a paganism largely devoid of a discernable hierarchy or common organization, in stark contrast to the deeply hierarchical Druids of the Celtic peoples or the immensely powerful tribal priests, seeresses, and shamans in Scandinavian heathenry. Among the Norse, the home-priest, the godar, never truly vanished, and pagan jewelry, popular among the vain Nordic race, was supplanted with outward signs of Christianity that adorned the body rather than just holy books and churches. Centuries later, Protestantism, with its devolved authority and iconoclasm, would flourish among those people whose ancestors had worn these simple cross pendants in place of their Mjollnirs and who worshipped places rather than idols of wood and stone, as their Germanic and Celtic counterparts had. These are the peoples whose blood flowed in Norman veins, a potent combination of rugged and heroic independence, keen commercial acumen, and the mercenary ruthlessness of a piratical race. It is impossible to understand the Normans unless one understands this cultural milieu.

The Politics (by Other Means) of the British Ruling Classes

The history of the British ruling class between the time of Alfred and the present is one of uninterrupted scheming, intrigue, bloodletting, and historical revisionism that would stir protests from an Egyptian Pharoah. From petty infighting to grand usurpations, the barons, nobles, and kings of England have a well-established tradition of base political cynicism even as they cultivated a cultural patrimony that was the rival of the continent – and, indeed, this well-established tradition bears more than a little blame for that dichotomy of British/Continental coming into being.

The Anglo-Saxons had long contested the rule of the island they inhabited, but for the most part, the Anglo-Saxon throne of Wessex was uncontested between Alfred the Great and the last “King of the English”, Aethelred Unraed. The very title promotes a sense of comity – you are not subject to such a king unless you are English. The adoption by Canute the Great of the title “King of all England” was probably less contentious than the means whereby he acquired the Crown, but it nevertheless marked a shift in the behavior of the ruling class that would become thoroughly solidified by, and perhaps unfairly ascribed directly to, the Norman conquerors who made it their avowed mission to deprive the native Saxon nobility of England, and later the Gaelic nobility of Ireland, of every real power they possessed, supplanting them with Normans and creating an enduring national myth of a native ethnic majority ruled by and deeply contrasted with a foreign minority who neither understand nor particularly care for the customs, beliefs, and lifeways of the native-born. The myth is no fiction: English history instead is dominated by the rule of upper classes of decidedly foreign stock, be it Norman, Dutch, or German, over an English nation of various tribal factions defined by varying temperament and geography.

The pattern of conquest followed by divestment and extermination repeats itself four times in the course of British history: first, the aforementioned Norman Conquest, which includes the bloody and traumatic Harrying of the North; second, the Anarchy, whereby the more thoroughly French, and more ruthless, Angevins supplant the Normans as rulers of England and become the Plantagenets; third, the War of the Roses, culiminating in the Tudor Period, a nearly uninterrupted stream of axe-happy, paranoid megalomaniacs who slaughter absolutely everyone they perceive as a threat to their rule from young children up to the old and frail Lady Margaret Pole, and which includes the total divestment of the monasteries and forced conversion of the English people to a uniquely worldly and political brand Protestantism; fourth, and finally, the Civil War and Glorious Revolution, a process that followed a brief period in which a morally ambiguous dynasty of Scotch dandies attempted to undo what the Tudors had done and found themselves exiled and their supporters massacred by the thousands in England, Scotland, and Ireland, ending with the final assertion of Parliament’s supreme right of rule and the end of an effective monarchy in the British Isles. The reign of Victoria, which itself saw a fifth remaking of England, was decidedly less bloody and chaotic, but nevertheless permanently upended the upper classes of great Britain and transformed the British Royal Family into one of the wealthiest single families in the entire realm, a consolation prize for their near complete neutering as a political force.

The final triumph of Parliamentarianism, mimicked in miniature by the triumph of Yankeeism across the pond, is the end result of an ongoing civil conflict that defined England from at least the Norman conquest, whereby the last vestiges of the Saxon, British, and Scotch personality were forced out of the halls of power in England by the totalizing Puritan/Yankee spirit which Spengler would identify as a properly English character in opposition to the Prussian. For his erudition, Spengler was unfortunately afflicted with a German distrust of perfidious Albion that perhaps blinded him to the complexities of the English national character; inasmuchas Europe might have chosen against what Alexander Dugin has called the Atlanticist powers as its future, England, too, might have chosen against the Parliamentarian Yankeedom that has come to make her the image-bearer of the WASP Progressive future we may yet all fall to.

Little has been said to this point of the Northumbrian, Welsh, and Scots elements of this bigger picture of English history. This is not because they occupy a lesser place, but because they have the disadvantage of being far removed from the three centres of power in early England, London, Canterbury, and Oxford, as well as the emergent cultural centre of Cambridge after 1209. They shall come to occupy a greater place in subsequent installments of this series, since they form the first bulwark to fall against the emergent International Yankee.