Invading Britain: Then and Now, It Always Comes Down to Treachery! Part 2

William Finck's program notes follow:

When the Jews were banished by Edward I, usury was banished along with them. I found the following excellent summary in a book of the Parliamentary debates of New Zealand for the year 1901, where there was a debate over the permittance of pawn shops:

The Anglo-Saxon laws against usury were also very severe. Edward the Confessor outlawed usurers and confiscated their property; and [300 years later] Edward the First took such stringent steps to put an end to what was considered a great evil that he hanged 280 Jews and banished another fifteen thousand in one year - in fact, the opposition of the Catholic and also the Reformed Church with regard to this matter was so strong that it was considered un-Christian to take interest for money lent; and the consequence was that a liberal interpretation was put upon the Mosaic law to which I have referred, and the business fell principally into the hands of the Jews. It was held that, while a Jew might not take interest from another Jew, he was at liberty to get all he could from a stranger. Well, the fifteen thousand Jews were banished in one year, and no Jews were allowed to return to England until the time of Cromwell. That shows the view taken in England at that time in regard to the practice. It was left to Henry the Eighth to be the first to legalise usury in England, and he fixed the rate at 10 per cent. But his son, Edward the Sixth, a few years afterwards, repealed it: he did not believe in it; but when Elizabeth, the virgin Queen, came to the throne, she revived the statute of her father. James the First reduced the rate of interest to 8 per cent., Cromwell to 6, and Anne to 5; and since then usury has continued to exist and flourish.

Henry the VIII was raising money for wars in Europe, and he was at first relying on benevolences and the taking of loans without intentions on paying them back to do so. Benevolences were the extorting of “free will offerings” by the king from his subjects.

Social History of England, Volume 3, pp. 348-349, on the transition from Henry VIII to Edward VI in 1547, where Edward VI was only 10 years old when he succeeded:

The incompetency and extravagance of the Government aggravated the national misery. The expenses of Henry's Court were four times as great in the last six months of his reign had been at the beginning. This was no doubt largely due to the rise in prices but we shall see that this rise was caused, in no small measure, by the policy of the Government. The royal debt was also a heavy burden, the rate of interest charged by the Flemish Jews being seldom less than twelve per cent. The death of Henry only increased the number of those whose extravagance had to be paid for by the nation. The leading members of Edward VI. 's Council, though differing on many points, agreed in regarding their trust as an opportunity enriching themselves. Their conduct was even more inexcusable than that of Henry himself, for they could see, on every side, the terrible results of the rapacity and extravagance of the late king's Government.

The chief cause, however, of the depression of trade and industry during the reigns of Edward VI and Mary was probably the continued debasement of the currency (pp. 171, 345). Henry VIII no doubt issued more base money than his successors, but Henry's debasements were mostly in the latter years of his reign, and did not produce their full consequences till it was almost ended. Edward's Council was equally greedy and unscrupulous. Its members talked of reforming the currency, but their acts belied their words. They issued even baser coins than those of the previous reign.

At this same time, Henry was expanding trade into the Mediterranean and the Levant, and English merchants were plying the waves in increasing numbers. Henry VIII was debasing the coin at home, and borrowing money from Flemish Jews at 12% or greater interest, all while the English sought more merchandise from abroad, and then Edward VI things got even worse.

Our point is to show that removing the Jews from England did not cure the English of the practices of the Jews. By the time of Henry VIII, many Englishmen had taken to usury, attempting to replace the Jews with themselves.

Taking loans from the Jews overseas, and not being able to tax the Jews, put the English kings at a greater disadvantage. Seeking merchandise from overseas with a debased currency would make matters even worse, unless English merchants were restricted to trade in barter – that was how Hitler maintained trade without Jewish usury bank. So while we cannot do a full study of this period of English history, the problems which led to the English Civil War and the period under Cromwell really began with Henry VIII, but can be traced back even earlier than him.

But Cromwell was no better. Cromwell had also borrowed heavily from the Jews of Holland to wage his own war against Charles I.

Cromwell lets the Jews back into England

Social History of England, Volume 4, p. 381:

[The authors recognize that some Jews had dwelt in England during the banishment, in a footnote: “The fact that a few Jews are known to have lived in England during the three hundred and sixty-five years between the formal expulsion of the race (1290) under Edward I. and their formal readmission under Cromwell (1655) has little bearing on our present subject, as they do not seem to have taken any prominent part in commerce.” But this is a downplay of what they were actually able to accomplish while in London, especially in the years leading up to the English Civil War and Cromwell, as we shall later see.]

The development of English commerce was, no doubt, assisted by the Jewish immigration. The permission to return given by Cromwell to this long-banished race may probably be connected with the general Judaic spirit of the Puritans. Oliver Cromwell himself said, “Great is my sympathy with this poor people whom God chose, and to whom He gave the law”: and it was probably a similar sympathy which prevented any serious opposition to their readmission into England. Some London merchants, indeed, protested, but they were moved more by commercial jealousy than by religious intolerance. The Hebrew immigration at this time consisted almost entirely of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, who had been driven from the lands of their adoption by the persecution of the Inquisition. Their estates had in many cases been confiscated, but they were on the whole, nevertheless, a wealthy body. Most of them had, in the first instance, settled in Holland or in Italy; and in these countries they had had ample opportunities of learning the newest and most perfect methods of conducting international trade, and of giving and receiving credit. Many of them, in fact, came directly from Amsterdam, which was by this time the commercial capital of Holland.

Manasseh Ben Israel was one of those Peninsular Jews who had settled in Amsterdam. He had distinguished him self as a teacher and as a student, but the confiscation of his paternal estates had driven him to abandon the pursuit of learning in favour of the career of a merchant and watchmaker. He then came over to England to intercede for the readmission of his co-religionists into the country. In his interview with Cromwell and the Privy Council, he laid great stress on the increase in English exports and imports which the settlement of Jews in London would probably produce. He explained the importance of the exchange and banking transactions they were now carrying on from Holland, and showed that the large capital committed to their care by Spanish and Portuguese Jews, who thus hoped to save it from the Inquisition, enabled them to lend out money at what was then considered the extraordinarily low rate of 5 per cent. These arguments must have been specially appreciated in a country whose merchants were at once envious of the low rate at which their Dutch rivals could borrow, and desirous of extending their trade into all parts of the world. The Privy Council was divided on the subject, but the judges decided that the law did not prohibit Jews from living in England, and Cromwell then gave the required permission on his own authority. It was at once taken advantage of by a number of well-to-do merchants, and these were soon followed by poorer Jews from Holland and Poland. The first settlers do not seem to have accorded so friendly a welcome to their poorer brethren as the generally philanthropic character of the race might have led us to expect. Charles II. was appealed to, on his restoration, to reverse the policy of Cromwell, but the “merry monarch " was too shrewd not to see that the presence of the Jews in England was stimulating English commerce. Moreover, he had himself during his exile borrowed largely from Dutch Jews, and he not only continued to tolerate their presence, but allowed them to open a synagogue in London in 1662.

This so-called Manasseh Ben Israel was really Manoel Dias Soeiro, but Jews in public liked to take Hebrew names so as to give the appearance that they were actually Israelites, and not liars. He was a Portuguese rabbi, kabbalist, writer, printer and publisher who supposedly founded the first Jewish printing press in Amsterdam, in 1626. The just-as-evil Baruch Spinoza was one of his students. He wrote that the Indians of the Andes in South America were the descendants of the so-called lost tribes of Israel, which is another incredible Jewish lie.

What the Social History of England glosses over is that this Jew did not just “come over to England”, but rather he was invited to England by Cromwell to speak at the Whitehall Conference debating the readmission of the Jews to England in December of 1655, two years after Cromwell was sworn in as “Lord Protector” of England. After 1655, Cromwell granted this Jew a pension at the expense of the English people! Fortunately, he did not live to collect on it, and this was probably only a manner in which Cromwell was paying this Jew back for connecting him to the Jewish moneylenders in Holland, as we shall see.

Cromwell was a Puritan, and all that Puritans really stood for was the idea that the reforms of the Church of England under Elizabeth I did not go far enough in removing Roman Catholic practices and doctrines. There were two types of Puritans, the separatists who sought to establish their own church, and those who would seek to continue to change the Anglican Church. Both types were among the New England colonists of this same period. Before the rebellion of Cromwell, there were actually many attempts to revise the English common prayer book and the Anglican Church, which never managed to satisfy both Anglican and Puritan.

Because the study of Bible and Biblical history had been more or less superintended by Jews since the persecutions of the Christians over three centuries destroyed early Christian scholarship, and Converso-Jews were at the fore of Roman Catholic Bible scholarship in Europe for several centuries before the Reformation, the Puritans and other protestants, especially Luther, never disputed the mistaken claim that the people known as Jews were the Israelites of the Bible. The Jews capitalized on this great lie of history throughout the Medieval period, and they continue to capitalize on it today. They benefit two-fold, because they can act like the anti-Christs that they are while at the same time they successfully pose as God's Chosen People. So Christians perceive that the devil is a messenger of light, just as Paul of Tarsus had warned.

Martin Luther was never able to correct his position on the Jews from an academic standpoint, yet he caught onto their treachery and advised that they should be banished from Christendom. Apparently his later writings never made it beyond the borders of Germany before the Jews were entrenched everywhere.

But this is the problem in truly assessing what was going on at this time: that all the histories and the troubles of the times were centered around the religious disputes of Catholics and Protestants, and there is little concern for the Jews and their motivations. Therefore the Jews are viewed by most historians as bystanders, innocent third parties in the wars between Christians, when in reality the money-lending of the Jews both enabled and decided the wars among Christians.

From this point, it is difficult not to turn to Jewish histories for more information on Jews of the period. Here, I will instead quote a few things from The Nameless War by Captain A. H. M. Ramsay, who was himself forced to resort to Jewish sources:

Edward I banished the Jews from England for many grave offences endangering the welfare of his realm and lieges, which were to a great extent indicated in the Statutes of Jewry, enacted by his Parliament in 1290, the Commons playing a prominent part.

The King of France very shortly followed suit, as did other Rulers in Christian Europe. So grave did the situation for the Jews in Europe become, that an urgent appeal for help and advice was addressed by them to the Sanhedrin, then located at Constantinople.

This appeal was sent over the signature of Chemor, Rabbi of Arles in Provence, on the 13th January, 1489. The reply came in November, 1489, which was issued over the signature of V.S.S. V.F.F. Prince of the Jews. It advised the Jews of Europe to adopt the tactics of the Trojan Horse; to make their sons Christian priests, lawyers, doctors, etc., and work to destroy the Christian structure from within.

The first notable repercussion to this advice occurred in Spain in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Many Jews were by then enrolled as Christians, but remaining secretly Jews were working to destroy the Christian church in Spain.

So grave became the menace finally, that the Inquisition was instituted in an endeavour to cleanse the country from these conspirators. Once again the Jews were compelled to commence an exodus from yet another country, whose hospitality they had abused.

Trekking eastwards, these Jews joined other Jewish communities in western Europe; considerable numbers flowed on to Holland and Switzerland.

From now on these two countries were to become active centres of Jewish intrigue. Jewry, however, has always needed a powerful seafaring nation to which to attach itself.

Great Britain, newly united under James I, was a rising naval power, which was already beginning to sway the four corners of the discovered world. Here also there existed a wonderful field for disruptive criticism; for although it was a Christian kingdom, yet it was one most sharply divided as between Protestant and Catholic.

A campaign for exploiting this division and fanning hatreds between the Christian communities was soon in process of organization. How well the Jews succeeded in this campaign in Britain may be judged from the fact that one of the earliest acts of 'their creature and hireling' Oliver Cromwell, after executing the King according to plan, was to allow the Jews free access to England once more.

…

This opposition faction became steadily more hostile to Charles and by the time that they were led by Pym and decided to impeach Strafford. "The King," writes Disraeli, "regarded this faction as his enemies"; and he states that the head of this faction was the Earl of Bedford. Walsh, the eminent Catholic historian, states that a Jew wine merchant named Roussel was the founder of this family in Tudor times.

With the impeachment and execution of Strafford, the powers behind the rising Calvinist, or Cohenist, Conspiracy began to reveal themselves, and their focus, the City of London.

At this time there suddenly began to appear from the City armed mobs of "Operatives" (the medieval equivalent for "workers" no doubt). Let me quote Disraeli: "They were said to amount to ten thousand ... with war-like weapons. It was a militia for insurgency at all seasons, and might be depended upon for any work of destruction at the cheapest rate ... as these sallied forth with daggers and bludgeons (from the city) the inference is obvious that this train of explosion must have been long laid."

It must indeed; and we must recollect here, that at this time Strafford was still unexecuted, and civil war in the minds of none but of those behind the scenes, who evidently had long since resolved upon and planned it.

These armed mobs of "workers" intimidated all and sundry, including both Houses of Parliament and the Palace at critical moments, exactly on the model employed later by the "Sacred Bands" and the "Marseillais" in the French Revolution.

Isaac Disraeli draws again and again startling parallels between this and the French Revolution; Notably in his passages on the Press, "no longer under restraint," and the deluge of revolutionary pamphlets and leaflets. "From 1640 to 1660," he writes, "about 30,000 appear to have started up." And later, "the collection of French revolutionary pamphlets now stands by the side of the French tracts of the age of Charles I, as abundant in number and as fierce in passion."

He goes on, "Whose hand behind the curtain played the strings ... could post up a correct list of 59 commoners, branding them with the odious title of 'Straffordians or betrayers of their country'."

Whose hand indeed? But Disraeli who knew so much, now discreetly draws a veil over that iron curtain; and it is left to us to complete the revelation.

To do so we must turn to such other works as the Jewish Encyclopedia, Sombart's work, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, and others. From these we learn that Cromwell, the chief figure of the revolution, was in close contact with the powerful Jew financiers in Holland; and was in fact paid large sums of money by Manasseh Ben Israel; whilst Fernandez Carvajal, "The Great Jew" as he was called, was the chief contractor of the New Model Army.

In The Jews in England we read:- "1643 brought a large contingent of Jews to England, their rallying point was the house of the Portuguese Ambassador De Souza, a Marano (secret Jew). Prominent among them was Fernandez Carvajal, a great financier and army contractor."

In January of the previous year, the attempted arrest of the five members had set in violent motion the armed gangs of "Operatives" already mentioned, from the city. Revolutionary pamphlets were broadcasted on this occasion, as Disraeli tells us: "Bearing the ominous insurrectionary cry of 'To your tents, O Israel'." Shortly after this the King and the Royal Family left the Palace of Whitehall. The five members with armed mobs and banners accompanying them, were given a triumphal return to Westminster. The stage was now set for the advent of Carvajal and his Jews and the rise of their creature Cromwell.

The scene now changes. The Civil War has taken its course. The year is 1647: Naseby has been won and lost. The King is virtually a prisoner, while treated as an honoured guest at Holmby House.

According to a letter published in 'Plain English'*** on 3rd September, 1921:-

"The Learned Elders have been in existence for a much longer period than they have perhaps suspected. My friend, Mr. L. D. van Valckert, of Amsterdam, has recently sent me a letter containing two extracts from the Synagogue at Mulheim. The volume in which they are contained was lost at some period during the Napoleonic Wars, and has recently come into Mr. van Valckert's possession. It is written in German, and contains extracts of letters sent and received by the authorities of the Mulheim Synagogue. The first entry he sends me is of a letter received:-

16th June, 1647. From O.C. (i.e. Oliver Cromwell), by Ebenezer Pratt.

In return for financial support will advocate admission of Jews to England: This however impossible while Charles living.

Charles cannot be executed without trial, adequate grounds for which do not at present exist. Therefore advise that Charles be assassinated, but will have nothing to do with arrangements for procuring an assassin, though willing to help in his escape.

In reply was dispatched the following:-

12th July, 1647. To O.C. by E. Pratt.

Will grant financial aid as soon as Charles removed and Jews admitted. Assassination too dangerous. Charles shall be given opportunity to escape: His recapture will make trial and execution possible. The support will be liberal, but useless to discuss terms until trial commences."

*** 'Plain English' was a weekly review published by the North British Publishing Co. and edited by the late Lord Alfred Douglas.

With this information now at our disposal, the subsequent moves on the part of the regicides stand out with a new clearness. On 4th June, 1647, Cornet Joyce, acting on secret orders from Cromwell himself, and, according to Disraeli, unknown even to General-in-Chief Fairfax, descended upon Holmby House with 500 picked revolutionary troopers, and seized the King. According to Disraeli, "The plan was arranged on May 30th at a secret meeting held at Cromwell's house, though later Cromwell pretending that it was without his concurrence."

This move coincided with a sudden development in the army; the rise of the 'Levelers" and "Rationalists." Their doctrines were those of the French revolutionaries; in fact, what we know today as Communism. These were the regicides, who four times "purged" Parliament, till there was left finally 50 members, Communist-like themselves, known later as the Rump.

To return to the letter from Mulheim Synagogue of the 12th June, 1647, and its cunning suggestion that attempted escape should be used as a pretext for execution. Just such an event took place, on 12th November of that year. Hollis and Ludlow consider the flight as a stratagem of Cromwell's. Isaac Disraeli states: "Contemporary historians have decided that the King from the day of his deportation from Holmby to his escape to the Isle of Wight was throughout the dupe of Cromwell."

Little more remains to be said. Cromwell had carried out the orders from the Synagogue, and now it only remained to stage the mock trial.

Maneuvering for position continued for some time. And it became apparent that the House of Commons, even in their partially "purged" condition, were in favour of coming to an agreement with the King. On 5th December, 1648, the House sat all night; and finally carried the question, "That the King's concessions were satisfactory to a settlement."

Should such agreement have been reached, of course, Cromwell would not have received the large sums of money which he was hoping to get from the Jews. He struck again. On the night of December 6th, Colonel Pryde, on his instructions, carried out the last and most famous "purge" of the House of Commons, known as "Pryde's Purge." On 4th January, the Communist remnant of 50 members, the Rump, invested themselves with "the supreme authority."

This leads right to the next figure we should discuss, and that is William III, another continental, who like William of Normandy had no real ties to the English people, but would use them as he ruled over them.