Enclosure For Empire: Witchcraft, Freemasonry and Oliver Cromwell
https://tlio.org.uk/enclosure-for-empire-witchcraft-freemasonry-and-oliver-cromwell/
The ‘Bankrupt Brewer of Huntingdon’, and Solomon’s Temple: an untold story of the English Civil War
https://politicsthisweek.wordpress.com/2022/06/23/not-the-bcfm-politics-show-presented-by-tony-gosling-94/
Tony Gosling, STROUD 22Jun22 – Certain facts about the origins of the 1642-49 English Civil war have been established by historians and University departments over the centuries. Central are the grievances over Charles’s arbitrary rule and ‘three monopolies’ of church, printing and trade, that so stifled enterprise and free thought.
But what if there were a ‘third factor’, carefully concealed by wealthy merchants who were on the cusp of exploiting the New World? ‘Dark forces’ with a hidden agenda sniffed at by establishment historians then and now, because to raise it might threaten their reputations, their careers? Just such a possibility has in fact been creeping out, ‘given legs’ since WWII, in the works of Christopher Hill, Henry Brailsford, Pauline Gregg, John Robinson, Stephen Knight and Martin Short.
These writers represent two new perspectives on the seventeenth century battle between the feudal and merchant classes in England that was to have enormous repercussions across the world, not least of which was laying the foundatons for the acquisition of the biggest empire the world has ever seen.
Hill and Brailsford writing and researching in the 1956s and 1970s represent the post-war socialist culture finding its feet and reinterpreting social history, much research from original writings being made public for the first time. Their books tease out the social struggles and aspirations of the vast majority of England’s illiterate poor who had no voice yet were seeing their rights to land and livelihood and freedom of worship being corralled as they were made destitute by eviction and rabid anti-Catholicism.
In the 1970s and 80s insiders were saying Freemasonry was becoming less Christian, more sinister. Darker leaders were allegedly creeping in and whistleblowers began to speak out. These disclosures fell on fertile soil because publishing and broadcasting was in the middle of taboo-breaking couple of decades. Stephen Knight and Martin Short were writing in the 1980s about Freemasonry, complex deceptions and links into all aspects of power, at the highest offices of state and the criminal justice system were exposed.
Before tackling Freemasonry head on, Knight’s 1976 book ‘Jack the Ripper the Final Solution’ suggested prostitutes deaths had been ordered by the royal family after they received blackmail threats. The eldest son of king Edward VII, heir to the throne Prince Albert Victor, had been experimenting with prostitutes as a teenager, given one a child and married her under a pseudonym.
Due to the Masonic nature of the cover-up, Knight became a focus for 1970/80s Masons, disgruntled over more recent injustices within the craft. In 1984 the product of that research ‘The Brotherhood’ was published but Stephen Knight died shortly afterwards in 1985 aged 34. Journalist Martin Short was handed several boxes of unread correspondence Knight had received from readers and published his own, bigger, sequel ‘Inside The Brotherhood, Further Secrets of the Freemasons’ in 1989.
Freemasonry being a re-branding of the banned medieval Knights Templar cult is probably best detailed in John Robinson’s book ‘Born In Blood’ (1989). During the same period of relative press freedom Christian converts from secret black and white witch covens reported identical wording in the oaths of Masonic initiation rituals: promises of secrecy on pain of death, even methods of execution of ‘offenders’.
The Vatican’s inability, or unwillingness, to try accusations of witchcraft had been one of the many reformation grievances. As Henry VIII finally wrenched English Christendom away from Rome in December 1633, over the marriage to Anne Boleyn, the English church began a popularisation and freeing-up of Christian doctrine and practice which included dealing much more directly with accusations of witchcraft.
This took place over the century or so between the reformation and English civil war as a spiritual battle raged to deal with evidence of divination and sorcery which the Vatican had swept under the carpet. This extension of the crown’s judicial powers also provided ‘cover’ for Thomas Cromwell’s hostile takeover of the monasteries, and execution of several abbots, to which the king owed vast sums of money.
A look beyond the turbulent John Dee’s empire plan, Witch trials and Enclosure does seem to confirm this interpretation of secret societies in a kind of spiritual battle behind the scenes for legislative influence which will benefit them, running up to the power to hire and fire the monarch......
