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These Times History Took a Turn for the Batty

Khalid Elhassan November 3, 2019 34 min

Colonel Thomas Rainsborough. Art dot Com

15. Americans Sailed Across the Atlantic to Fight Against England’s King

When England’s King Charles I and Parliament fought each other in the 1640s, Puritans were a key Parliamentarian constituency. At the time, Puritans happened to be pretty thick on the ground in New England. So in 1644, a Puritan colonel Thomas Rainsborough sailed across the Atlantic with a regiment of New Englanders to fight against Charles.

Presaging future events, the Americans proved radical, and pushed for universal male suffrage three centuries before it was actually granted in England. As Rainsborough put it: “I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.