My Duty To God And The Queen

A small boy just outside Glasgow is refusing to make his Cub Scout Promise because he is a Catholic and can therefore never be the monarch to whom he is expected to pledge allegiance. Well, I do not know what or who is compelling him to join the Cubs, but there we are. I can never be in the WI, but who is trying to make me? Welcome to the real world, dear boy.

Now, since we are talking about the West of Scotland, the “republicanism” of whoever has put this things into this little boy’s head (there were plenty of Catholic Cubs and Scouts in my day) might very well be neither British nor Scottish “republicanism” as such, although it might be. But there is a wider issue here: because of the Act of Settlement, those who are properly called anti-monarchists (the United Kingdom, like every Commonwealth Realm, is already a res publica) think that they are onto a winner with Catholics. And far too many Catholics seem willing to take the bait.

In point of fact, the Catholic Church has never much liked republics in the ordinary sense of the word, and has always much preferred monarchies. Since the French Revolution, when She became positively allied to the British and several other Protestant monarchies, the distaste has been a visceral loathing, fully reciprocated. Republics, in the ordinary sense of the word, characteristically hate the Catholic Church.

So, where She has to put with them, she goes out of their way to insist that they be organised according to rival, profoundly Catholic monarchist traditions in every matter except the formal Headship of State. To cite an oft-overlooked example, the Catholic Church as such never favoured (indeed, strongly opposed) the secession of any part of Ireland from the United Kingdom, and Her influence in the Irish Republic until recent years was in every possible way contrary to what that Republic itself officially stood, and stands, for. In the United States, the Church even went to the length, in the form of parts of the paleoconservative movement, of inventing and propagating a sort of Americanised pastiche of European Catholic monarchism.

At the end of the day, while preserving the ultimate right of Parliament (within which final power has progressively transferred to the House of Commons, which has itself come to be elected by universal adult suffrage) to determine the succession to the Throne, the ordinary operation of the monarchical system also preserves within our constitutional arrangements a direct role for the God Who is active in His world.

Just as those who want to disestablish the Church of England do not want it in order to be good or even nice to Catholics, but rather in order that the State might formally repudiate Christianity as its basis, so those who wish to sow among Catholics discontent with the monarchy have as their ultimate objective, not the opening up of the Throne to Catholics, but the closing off of the Constitution to God.

As for the Act of Settlement, it is good for us Catholics. It reminds us that we are different, and it does us the courtesy of taking our beliefs seriously by identifying them as a real challenge.

I question the viability of a Catholic community which devotes any great energy to the question of ascending the Throne while the born sleep in cardboard boxes on the streets and the pre-born are ripped from their mothers’ wombs to be discarded as surgical waste. Far from being a term of abuse, the word “Papist” is in fact the name under which the English Martyrs gave their lives, and expresses the cause for which they did so, making it a badge of honour, to be worn with pride.

And yet, and yet, and yet...

The Established status of the Church of England was already a century and a half old at the time of the Act of Settlement, and is wholly unconnected to it. Anyway, in the 1990s, the Courts ruled that that status entailed what everyone had always known to be the case: that the doctrine of the Church of England – “the reformed Protestant religion as by law established in the Realm of England” – is whatever Parliament says it is at any given time, be that the ordination of women (as was the matter in question), or reincarnation, or the infallibility of Papal definitions ex cathedra, or anything else at all. All that it is necessary for a monarch to do in order to uphold this “religion” is to grant Royal Assent to Ecclesiastical Measures just as if they were any other Bills passed by Parliament.

Those who would most resist any change to the Act of Settlement are those who insist that the Church of England is confessionally Calvinistic as a first principle rather than, as is in fact the case, only until such time as Parliament sees fit to repeal or replace the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, and not a moment longer. Such people are mostly not in England (where they are mostly not members of the Church of England), but in Scotland (where the monarch is required, in ecclesiastical terms, to do nothing more than preserve a Presbyterian pattern of polity) and in Northern Ireland (where, as in Wales, the monarch has no formal ecclesiastical function whatever).

However, it is in Northern Ireland that a large Catholic community, by far the single largest religious body (as the Catholic Church also is, narrowly or otherwise, in each of England, Scotland and Wales), is crying out to be bound more closely to the British State, with which certainly a very large proportion of its members, and possibly the majority, identifies very strongly. In view of what the Coronation Oath actually means, then let the Act of Settlement be repealed if that would help that binding, long complete and unthought about everywhere else in the United Kingdom (even, it seems, on Merseyside and in the West of Scotland).

What was established in 1688, with strong Papal support, was in fact the Catholic principle previously given practical effect in 1399 in England, and even more ingrained in Scotland, as against both Gallican princely absolutism and its metamorphosis into the theory whereby the new gentry-cum-mercantile republic was sovereign even over the Prince.

English Jacobitism, in particular, was what would now be called an Anglican, rather than a Catholic, phenomenon, when it was not just a ragbag of everyone (Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, smugglers, the lot) opposed to the Whig hegemony. Catholics hardly featured, since they simply did not share the underlying philosophical and theological assumptions; rather, they fully accepted Parliament’s right to determine the succession to the Throne, even when it was inconvenient to themselves.

Each of the Commonwealth Realms is a linear inheritor of that age-old tradition, which is the peaceable alternative both to the bloodletting anti-republican pseudo-monarchism coming down from Buridan through the French Counter-Revolution, and to the bloodletting anti-monarchist pseudo-republicanism against which it came to react, historical aberrations both.

The Parliament of each Commonwealth Realm therefore has the absolute right to determine the succession to its own Throne; but they mercifully choose to exercise this right in unison, and may that ever remain the case. (It is perfectly illiterate to suggest that the repeal of the Act of Settlement would revive any Stuart claim to the Throne.) So, again, if the repeal of the Act of Settlement helped to keep even one country in this family, then, in view of the above, by all means let it be repealed, though only by unanimous consent among all the Commonwealth Realms, since its continuation would also be a price well worth paying in order to preserve the unity of our family.