Absolute Certainty

I’m reading a novel by Robert Harris called Act Of Oblivion. It’s about a manhunt for two of the Regicides (the men responsible for bringing about the death of King Charles the First, during the time of Oliver Cromwell) in the seventeenth century. Very good it is too. My knowledge of history is fairly non-existent, and these kind of novels are a good way for me to chop away a tiny chip of ignorance.

Cromwell, as you’ll no doubt know, was a Protestant, who stood against the Catholic royalty. Both of these factions were convinced that their particular form of Christianity was right, and both of them were very comfortable with the idea of killing and often horribly torturing the “enemy”.

Anyhow, a particular sentence at the end of one chapter struck me deeply. With sadness mainly, because of the truth it contained, both about those times and about our modern age.

Ned is one of the Regicides, hiding in America, and living a very difficult life of ongoing vagrancy for years, because of his involvement in the death of the King. He had been there at the demise of Charles Stuart. And he had heard about the murder of some of his fellow Regicides once the royal throne had been reestablished. In his last years he starts to write down his memoirs, and recalls that the King, just like Ned’s colleagues, the Kings enemies, had all died very bravely -

”It was only then that it occurred to Ned that the King had died exactly as the Regicides had many years later - in the Absolute Certainty that he was right”.

My own observation is that when large swathes of people choose to believe in the righteousness of their tribe, and their tribe only, then, just like Ned, we are living in dangerous times.