That which multiple thousands of British stock sacrificed their lives to protect, the freedom and sovereignty of the United Kingdom, has been taken by stealth, subterfuge and outright deceit from the British peoples. Dec. 1, 2009, will be recorded as the day that the Queen of England officially became a vassal of the seventh resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire.

Although an Antipodean by birth, my own heritage is British to the core. Two generations of my forebears fought on foreign soil as members of the imperial forces of the British Empire for freedom from tyranny during the first half of the 20th century. The Scottish clan from which my patriarchal forebears hail have a military history that bespeaks resistance to tyranny from Waterloo to the Alamo. It thus goes powerfully against the grain to witness the day that tyranny is imposed by subterfuge on the mother nation that spawned the drive to institutionalize freedom in the constitutions of all true Western democracies: mother England, seat of the Crown of the United Kingdom.

The last time Britain was invaded by an aggressor was by the Normans, who, under William the Conqueror, overcame the Saxons at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Six centuries later there followed the “peaceful invasion” of William iii of Orange when Parliament invited him to cross the English Channel in 1688 and take possession of the British throne from the Catholic convert James ii. Until a few decades ago, British national sovereignty, the freedoms enshrined in Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Common Law and the Act of Settlement granting assurance that no representative of Rome would ever again sit on the throne, were jealously guarded and defended by the British peoples.

That all began to change when Prime Minister Edward Heath lied to the British public—claiming that the nation joining the European Community would never endanger British sovereignty—and led them by the nose into the European Community quagmire in 1973.

Less than four decades later, on Dec. 1, 2009, British sovereignty was yielded up to a foreign imperial power, without so much as a whimper from the mother of all parliaments. Yielded up to an imperialist, Roman Catholic-majority regime, called the European Union, which some of the most astute of observers have described as “the most undemocratic of institutions.” The EU has won Britain without a cannon being fired or any blood being shed. Britain has simply capitulated in abject surrender to the modern outgrowth of what Otto von Habsburg termed a European Union with the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire. That is a heritage that represents the very antithesis of all that free Britain has stood for.

During the past 35 years, the British public have been fooled, bullied, cajoled and tricked into signing their basic freedoms away, treaty by treaty. Their elected representatives have finally endorsed a document that will enslave the peoples of the United Kingdom as lackeys to the perpetrators of the very tyranny their forefathers fought so gallantly and consistently to protect the nation from, over the past millennium.

As of Dec. 1, 2009, the British people are no longer subjects of the Crown. They are citizens of the European Union. The monarch is now subject to the rule of the elites ensconced in Brussels, Berlin and Rome. Their immediate promise is a new wave of taxes. Ahead is an era of economic stagnation and depression, with resultant political and social instability, and, most insidious of all, a period of religious oppression.

Symbolically that coming religious oppression will be signaled by the triumphant entry in 2010 of the Vatican head of state, by invitation of the British government, to the very heart of London, to the very seat of the ancient British Crown. It will be the first official state visit of a Roman pontiff to British shores.

Three hundred and twenty years ago, the British Parliament invited a Protestant prince from the Netherlands to sail to Britain and receive the Crown, transferred from the deposed Catholic James ii, to guarantee that Rome would never again rule over Britons. Next year, the emissary of Rome, Pope Benedict xvi, will fly to London, be entertained and accommodated at Buckingham Palace, and celebrate the beatification of the modern patriarch of British Catholics, Cardinal John Henry Newman, on British soil.

How the wheel has turned!

Yet, for Britain, to paraphrase its most famous son, Sir Winston Churchill, “this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” The end of Britain as a sovereign nation was prophesied by Herbert Armstrong over 60 years ago. More importantly, he also prophesied its new beginning!

Right now Britain drastically needs hope, REAL hope and confidence in a future that will be unsurpassably better than anything it enjoyed at the very peak of empire. That glorious future is portrayed in our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy. If ever there was a time to read that book, and for every true Briton to be inspired by the great hope that is expressed within its pages, that time is NOW!