David Cameron’s premiership is a shambles except for a few things that matter. I have an article in The Independent on Sunday that compares him to Henry V. Everyone on the defensive pro-European side of British politics was snooty about his saying No at last month’s Brussels. “It wasn’t a veto” must be one of the least effective political arguments of the season. It doesn’t matter: I think saying No to the fiscal union was right but, much more important, it was popular.
That was his Agincourt.
A colleague also drew my attention to Ian Mortimer’s excellent book, 1415: Henry V’s Year of Glory, which tells how England was emerging as a “nation” for the purposes of church government. “Traditionally the kingdoms of England and Scotland were regarded as part of the German nation,” he writes, but at the council of Pisa in 1409, the English had been recognised as a nation in their own right, alongside Spain, France, Germany and Italy. It was unclear, at the next ecclesiastical council at Constance in 1415, whether the decision at Pisa had been an aberration. The Italian papal notary found the argument tiresome, describing it as “some difficulties raised by the English nation”. But it mattered because it affected the voting, with each bloc of bishops and abbots having one vote per “nation”. Mortimer says that the English took the matter into their own hands by sitting independently, and Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor, thought it would help him, adding another vote to that of the Germans against the French and Italians.
Six centuries later the English nation is still raising “some difficulties”. And the papal notaries of today, the bureaucrats of the European Commission, are just as unaware that their religion of the euro is about to have a reformation.
Eagle Eye 