THE RHETORIC OF REBELLIOUS REPUBLICANISM: A HISTORY OF THE ILLEGAL COLONIAL OVERTHROW OF THE BRITISH CROWN

Abstract

This paper focuses upon the Conference themes of nationalist identity and globalisation by scrutinising the oratory employed in three chronologically successive “declarations of independence” which seek to persuade an adversarial international audience of the justice of their country’s rebellion from the English monarchy. The English Civil War in the seventeenth-century resulted in the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and the establishment of the Commonwealth of England, a hugely controversial regicidal act that was defended in print two weeks later by the famous poet and polemicist John Milton in The tenure of kings and magistrates. Secondly, towards the end of the eighteenth-century the burgeoning American colony declared the first ever unilateral Declaration of independence (UDI) from the English Crown in 1776 in a famously eloquent document. Central to its justificatory argument is the promulgation of Natural Law that persuades the reader of the justice of the American cause. Finally, I shall consider the only other successful UDI from English colonial rule, that of Rhodesia in 1965. The Rhodesian Proclamation was immediately recognised as modelled on its American predecessor, but the failure of this country’s illegal bid for independence is mirrored in the rhetorical frigidity and barrenness of the document.