THE BOOK OF BLOODY
BRITS
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE BOOK OF THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN
King Charles makes a mistakeCromwell proves embarrassing
Chapter 15
It turned out that King Charles was so busy looking for Catholic Pretenders that he forgot to look for Protestant Revolutionaries,k
2Who therefore sneaked up on him from behind,
3lWhich wasn’t fair, of course,
4But worked pretty well.
5The Protestant Revolutionaries called themselves Puritans,
6And had a lot of peculiar ideas,
7mWhich they got from reading the Bible,
8nSomewhat too literally, the way the Brit nobles looked at it.
9For example, the Puritans believed that being well dressed was a kind of ovanity,
10And was therefore not permissible behavior for good Christians,
11Which threatened the whole Brit culture,
12Because if no one was well dressed, how could you tell who was well bred?
13pAnd if you couldn’t tell who was well bred, how could you figure out who had the divine right to be king?
14When the Brit nobles made this clever argument to qOliver Cromwell,
15Who was the leader of the Puritans,
16rsAnd therefore not very well bred,
17He agreed,
18Much to the surprise of the nobles,
19And came up with a totally unexpected solution,
20Which was to have no king at all.
21This thoroughly un-British viewpoint led to a twar,
22Naturally,
23Between the very well-dressed Brit nobles,
24Called Cavaliers,
25uBecause they looked so dashing on horseback,
26And the very poorly dressed Puritans,
27Called Roundheads,
28vBecause they had such bad haircuts.
29The disgraceful appearance of the Puritan troops was so distracting to the Cavaliers that they lost the war,
30Which doesn’t really count, of course,
31Owing to the peculiar Brit method of counting,
32Which involves inches, pounds, rods, acres, leagues, fortnights, and shillings,
33But never revolutions.
34Anyway,
35Cromwell immediately beheaded the aking,
36And then replaced the divine right of kings system of government with a new system called the divine right of Cromwell,
37Which was completely different, of course,
38Since under the divine right of Cromwell, there is no king with the power of life and death over his subjects,
39But a bProtector instead,
40Who has the power of life and death over his subjects,
41cBut wears no crown.
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Chapter 15 / 59