Horrible history

The following from Nosemonkey's Eutopia, a sometimes sensible blog, made me cringe this morning: 

At its heart, the English Civil War laid down the concept of the rule of law.[1] This was such a good principle that pretty much the entire world runs on it now, in one form or another. The idea that no one should be above the law was the first principle of the emancipation of the people.[2] Without this fundamental concept, the subsequent developments in Western ideas of liberty and democracy (primarily via the French and American Revolutions, both partially inspired by aspects of England’s Civil War rhetoric)[3] could never have progressed – for without the rule of law, we are nothing.[4] We survive merely upon the whim of others.[5] All we have and all we are can be taken away in an instant, and there is nothing we can do about it.

1. Oh for heaven's sake - the concept of the rule of law is as old as human association. Hammurabi was the first known codifier of existing laws, about 3,500 years before the English Civil War.
2. Sigh. Emancipation from what? Were the English slaves before the Civil War? Did most of them have the vote after it? The principle at stake was sovereignty, a concept I would have expected a europhile to have studied very carefully.
3. The American revolutionaries did indeed recycle the rhetoric of the English Civil War and the outcome of their rebellion was an essentially conservative polity. The French revolution produced something entirely different - a populist, totalitarian democracy that soon collapsed into dictatorship.
4. So much for natural rights; and English Common Law as well - all hail European Statute Law.
5. Oh dear - come back Thomas Hobbes, all is forgiven.