Spencerism: The Whig Jacobitism

The Duchess of Cornwall is not to attend the Diana Memorial Service, reportedly because “pro-Diana groups” had been planning to pelt her with eggs. Who are these “pro-Diana groups”? Presumably, they are made of persons disgusted that a daughter of one of the grandest dynasties in English history was treated as they believe her to have been by those jumped up, immigrant parvenus and nouveux riches, the Battenburgs and Saxe-Coburg-Gothas.

Be in no doubt, that is how the Royal Family is viewed by the great noble houses of England and Scotland, including the Spencers, and including Diana when she was alive. At the top of the class system, which anti-monarchists are often stupid enough to believe could be abolished along with the monarchy, are those houses, and not the lot that they regard as nothing more than an unfortunate political necessity, owing its very position to them, and indeed kept solvent by the Spencers for much of the eighteenth century.

For the Spencers were staunch Whigs, periodically emerging, as the present Earl Spencer puts it, to demand that slavery be abolished or that the franchise be extended to the emerging middle class, and then disappearing back to their landed estates for another couple of generations. Yet, just as most Tories eventually balked at full on Jacobitism, so these Whigs seem to balk at what they see as a reigning house of lower-middle-class Germans. Ideology and identity are complicated things, after all.

The dim (or, for few, not so dim) memory of the Stuarts among the Tories has become the very bright memory of Diana among the Whigs, i.e., the economically neoliberal (and therefore geopolitically neoconservative) ruling class now encompassing, as much as anything else, those in control of all three political parties. They are all for the principle of parliamentary, which would now effectively mean popular, choice of the monarch, just so long as that choice was in favour of a proper toff of unimpeachable Englishness, such as a member of the Noble House of Spencer.

In that sense, Spencerism is the new Jacobitism, according to which the throne’s legitimate occupant, at least once the present monarch dies, is the legitimate heir of Diana as identified by popular acclaim (itself, of course, massively media-influenced). In other words, Prince William. Who will, of course, become King eventually, resolving the dispute. But throughout his father’s reign, and indeed even before it begins, expect the Spencerists to bang on, and on, and on about its illegitimacy, and of course to form an entire subculture which will have as great (though nowhere near as subterranean) an influence as that of the Jacobites had. Indeed, both the emergence of that subculture, and that banging on itself, are already very well-advanced.