Independence or Oppression by China or a New Hansa?

The visit to China by UK Finance Minister Osborne and the Mayor of London Johnson, highlights the stark choices facing democrats and believers in individual liberty who populate both the East and West coastal regions of the North Atlantic ocean and its islands.

The Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, read here, the spark for which was a religious matter, was more likely a punitive venture by the dying Hanseatic League into the home territories of the adventurers and seafarers, who along with their colleagues from Brittany, Gascony/SW France; the Basque Country and Navarre were challenging their hegemony and the rights of Spain to keep the New World trade all to itself. The British Crown and City Corporation seem to have then been under Hanseatic  control, which was not broken until the reign of Elizabeth I, and the establishment of the Exeter Guild of Merchant Adventurers, in the earliest years of her reign; read here in pdf.

Will Britain fight the growing world trade power of China from within the EU, so remaining  under similar non-democratic control as applies in China itself?  Or can we once again cast aside the shackles of continental hegemony and unite with the heirs of such Merchant Adventurers everywhere, new enemies of despotic collectivism, often still living along  both coastal reigions of the North Atlantic, while restoring where necessary, our own sovereign democracy. That, IMHO is the issue of our times!

Book Launch Museum Night La Rochelle

I will be spending this weekend in the very historic port city of La Rochelle where the bi-lingual book on the Hanseatic League will be launched this evening, fittingly at the Protestant Museum.

On that topic and the celebrations by the British Monarchy yesterday, with lunch for the crowned heads of other states at Windsor Castle, and a similar event at Buckingham Palace last evening hosted by Prince Charles, I again query why the actual day of the sixtieth anniversary of her accession to the throne the Queen (or Palace) chose to celebrate such an important British event, at the sole surviving Hanseatic building in the UK in Kings Lynn? (Hansa rights in Kings Lynn were part of the peace treaty terms granted by England's Kings brought on by the defeat resulting from our weakness due to their family quarrels in France).

If any blog readers know of an official explanation, perhaps they would provide it in the comments section to this post, or email me if they prefer it to remain private - martin.coleatgmail.com

Blogging will resume on Monday.

The Second Elizabethan Age and the Demise of Britain.

News of the death of King George VI, arrived in the dining hall of Copplestone House School, Budleigh Salterton in Devonshire by word of mouth of a young pupil who had sneaked home at lunchtime to feed her cat. It was transmitted from the rear of the hall to the top table where dined the staff, by word of mouth, its progress being traceable by each recipient's tears.

The announcement when made by the Headmistress to the still uninformed majority of the almost entirely female school body,was met by a cacophony of wailing that left me with a confused grasp of what had occurred, believing only that the unfortunate girl's cat had died.

It was not until I returned home that evening that I learnt the King was dead. The immediate subsequent effect on my life as I recall was practically zero, mainly centred upon the need to remember to sing "Queen" instead of "King" during the national anthem, with which I had only recently become familiar, in those days through fairly frequent association and repetition.

Later I attended the Queen's Coronation, and much later still, stood with my daughter on the route for the Golden Jubilee procession, returning to London from Switzerland especially so to do.

The second Elizabethan age has figured large in my life. Few can surely doubt that the Britain into which I was born, no longer exists. Are we today still a parliamentary democracy ruled through parliament in a constitutional democracy? Much of the apparent control seems to come from abroad, with little input from those we assume to be in charge! Has this been a consequence of the deliberate mendacity of successive leaders of different political parties in recent years or something more contrived?

The noted historian Professor Norman Davies, in his recent book "Vanished Kingdoms", illustrates the combining of the houses of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha with that of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg accomplished by the marriage of the then Princess Elizabeth with the man we have come to know as Prince Philip.

The couple were in attendance at church in Sandringham yesterday, both clearly in robust health. Curiously it has today been decided that they will visit the Kontor at King's Lynn to celebrate the diamond jubilee of Her Majesty's accession to the throne of England, Scotland and various Commonwealth countries.

On 12th January this year I blogged on Orphans of Liberty here, and on Ironies Too, here, (with more illustrations and links) on the New Hansa.

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Hanseatic Warehouse

Hanseatic Warehouse

Located on St Margaret's Lane, the Hanseatic Warehouse (52.7512°N 0.3946°E) is the only surviving Hansa building in England. It was constructed in 1475 as part of the Treaty of Utrecht allowing Hansa to establish a trading depot in Lynn for the first time. It was used as such until 1751, by which time the river had receded. It was then sold to Lynn merchant Edward Everard for £800. He added the Georgian town house at the East side of the building which is now known as St. Margaret's House (and Grade I listed^[28]), after the nearby church.
In 1971 it was renovated as part of a preservation project and converted into offices by the Norfolk County Council. It is currently used by the council for various functions, including weddings, as it houses Lynn's register office.
The building is also known as the Kontor.^[29]

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The plaque pictured below (also taken from Wikipedia) is at Cannon Street Station, also highlights some little known facts about the original Hansa's role in the City of London:

Link to a readable version on Wikipedia:

Inter alia it reads "To celebrate sixty years of peace between the peoples of Britain and Germany.
TO COMMEMERATE six hundred years during which some 400 Hanseatic merchants inhabited peaceably in the City of London from the XIII the to the XIX th centuries a German self-governing enclave on this site known as the Steelyard, Stilliarde or "Stalhof"
 

This posting was first published to Orphans of Liberty

The New Hansa

There have been a series of interviews lately whereby the nightly news programme, Jeff Randall Live has been introducing the nation to some of the Germans who now are on the ground running many of our companies here in the UK, rather than as many of their compatriots, who have the same task back in Germany, but operate via the EU in Brussels. They were Volker Beckers of Npower, Torsten Muller-Otvos of Rolls Royce, Doktor Klaus Peter Fouquet of Bosch,

Roger Helmer MEP (still) has chosen to draw attention to this phenonema in a less striking or high profile way by blogging on the topic, and naming it lebensraum, a difficult foreign concept for non-German speakers to grasp the precise connotation.

I have recently been drawing attention on this blog to the activities of the Hanseatic League in the Middle Ages, and have been ruminating and researching what seems to be a New Hansa, perhaps a better and more familiar phrase for we English.

The Anglo-Hanseatic War ran from 1470 to 1475, see here, during which German vessels ravaged the towns of England's North Sea coast, taking prisoners which they hung from the masts of their ships. One such ship was the Peter von Danzig. Certainly, of course, as in all things of the Middle Ages, there would clearly have been atrocities and huge injustices on either side. The Treaty of Utrecht saw peace and England cede control of part of London to German occupation which lasted well into (and on the East Coast beyond) the first Elizabethan era. The trade monopoly of the Hanseatic League was not broken until brave Elizabethan marine adventurers found their way to Russia  as the Company of Merchant Adventurers which became the Muscovy Company.

There is already a supposed tourist promotion organisation calling itself The New Hansa, with links to the EU Council of Europe and associations with UNESCO; none of which takes me far from what I suspect are the true motives of such a group, as witnessed by events across Europe at the present time. This new Hanse's leaflet (here in pdf,) concludes with the following statement of its objectives:

This new HANSE has set itself the task of keeping alive
the Hanseatic spirit of a common way of life and culture in
these towns and cities. By maintaining traditions and a
lively exchange between the member towns and cities, the
HANSE aims to contribute to the economic, cultural, social
and political unity of Europe

Understanding the spirit of the original Hanse is best done by reading of their history in Bergen. Pages 237 to 243 of the Google Book linked here will give a good start.

Does Europe want poltical unity led by Germany? Be in no doubt, that is exactly where we are headed!

Now also on Orphans of Liberty