First in seventeenth-century England then in the eighteenth-century France that looked to that precedent (and after which, the rest really is history), gentry-cum-mercantile republican absolutism was simply an inversion of princely absolutism, an Early Modern aberration originating with Jean Bodin.
But what of the creation of a gentry-cum-mercantile republic in the former American Colonies? Did it, too, ultimately derive from reaction against the Stuarts in these islands, inverting their newfangled ideology against them? Or did it, perhaps, derive from loyalty to them, which regarded the Hanoverian monarchy as illegitimate? The latter strikes me as perfectly possible.
Pretty much anyone who can tick either White British or White Irish has Huguenot ancestry. Yet consider that far more Jacobites went into exile from these islands than Huguenots sought refuge here. The Jacobites founded the Russian Navy of Peter the Great. They maintained a network of merchants in the ports circling the Continent. Their banking dynasties had branches in several great European cities. They introduced much new science and technology to their host-countries. They dominated the Swedish East India and Madagascar Companies. They fought with the French in India. And very many of them ended up either in the West Indies or, crucially for the present purpose, in North America. Might those last have been at least a background influence on the eventual repudiation of George III?
At first sight, New York seems the most obvious place to look for them, being named after its initial proprietor as a colony, the future James VII and II. The Highlanders in North Carolina spoke Gaelic into the 1890s, but it must be said that in vain had the rebellious legislature there issued a Manifesto in that language a century earlier: like many people of directly Scots rather than of Scots-Irish origin or descent, they remained resolutely loyal to the Crown during the Revolutionary War.
However, there are at least three other distinct possibilities. First, there were many Jacobite Congregationalists, such as Edward Roberts, the exiled James’s emissary to the anti-Williamite Dutch republics, and Edward Nosworthy, a gentleman of his Privy Council both before and after 1688. Secondly, there was of course that Catholic enclave, the Maryland colony. And thirdly, there was Pennsylvania: the Quakers were almost (if almost) all at least initially Jacobites, and William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four times between 1689 and 1691.
Whether any of these factors played any part in the emergence of anti-Hanoverian ideology, sentiment and ultimately action in America, I do not know, although I should love to find out. And I must say that I should find it very difficult to believe otherwise.
Modern Americans might further consider that many Baptists were also Jacobites, that early Methodists were regularly accused of Jacobitism, and that the name, episcopal succession and several other features of their own Episcopal Church derive, not from the Church of England, but from the staunchly Jacobite Episcopal Church in Scotland, which provided the American Colonies with a bishop (Samuel Seabury) in defiance of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian monarchy to which it was attached.
Add in that John Wesley himself had been a High Church missionary in America (and Methodism was initially an outgrowth of pre-Tractarian, often at least sentimentally Jacobite, High Churchmanship rather than of Evangelicalism, hence the above allegations), and all sorts of, so to speak, connections start to spring to mind.
Not least, it almost impossible to overstate the impact of Catholicism, of the Anglo-Catholicism that High Churchmanship almost entirely became at least to some extent, of the Baptist and Reformed (including Congregational) traditions, and, above all, of Methodism, to the emergence and development of our own Labour Movement, with its successful righting of numerous socio-economic wrongs and its consequent successful prevention of a Communist revolution in this, one of the two countries that Marx himself held most likely to have one. Its conquest and subjugation by unrepentant Marxists who have pulled up those roots has more than coincided with its abandonment of any struggle against those wrongs, to put it no more strongly than that.
Quakerism and Methodism (especially the Primitive and Independent varieties) were in the forefront of opposition to the First World War, which also produced the Guild of the Pope’s Peace, and had a following among Anglo-Catholics of either of what were then the more extreme kinds, “English Use” and “Western Use”, each of which included Jacobites among, admittedly, its many eccentrics. Above all in Wales (where Catholic sentiment was still widely expressed in the old tongue well into the eighteenth century), Quakers and Methodists had very recently stood shoulder to shoulder with Baptists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists against the Boer War. Those Baptists had included one David Lloyd George.
Could it be that behind these great movements for social justice and for peace was still a sense that the present British State (not any, but the one then in existence) was itself still somehow less than fully legitimate? In other words, and without in any way suggesting that the young Lloyd George, or Keir Hardie, or whoever, had any specific desire to restore the Stuarts, could the view that there was ultimately something profoundly wrong about this country and her policies, both domestic and foreign, have been distant echoes of an ancestral Jacobitism? After all, a section of Carlism, an intellectually related loyalty to a biologically related House, became, and remains, a mainstay of the Spanish Left.
Once again, I do not know, although I should love to find out.
And once again, I must say that I should find it very difficult to believe otherwise.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Is this the PhD topic for which you have been searching?
ReplyDeleteEnglish Use and Western Use Anglo-Catholic circles both included Jacobites and Communists side by side. That is just one way of illustrating why I really do think that you are onto something here.
The events of 1688 created a very widespread feeling that the State had become illegitimate, and that feeling was passed down in various communities right into the twentienth century. Those communities produced and nurtured the Radical, Labour and peace movements, as you say.
And then there is America, as you also say. After all, that Revolution predated the French one by 13 years.
Yes, you really, really are onto something here. You should consider very seriously turning this into a PhD.
As the young people say, LOL.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, I haven't really been looking for a PhD thesis. To be honest, it would take me so long to write all this up part-time and make a living that half of it would out of date by the time that I finished the other half.
That said, there are probably two books in here, one on America and the other on Britain, which in either order could do for a PhD and a post-doc. But I have no money, which takes care of that.
Conrad Noel himself once sacked his curate for voting Labour instead of Communist. But association with him was subsequently one of the reasons given for the expulsion of the Trots from the CPGB. Was the Western Use Communist and the English Use Trotskyist, one wonders?
Certainly, both were Jacobite, in that, as with Communists or Trostskyists, avowed Jacobites were almost immeasurably more numerous in such circles than in the population at large.
There were huge numbers of Nonjurors who attended the Established Church but either refused to take the Oath or said that they would so refuse if asked to take it.
ReplyDeleteConsidering the Wesleys' High Church roots and High Tory politics, might their appeal have been to that subculture? Might that have been why the early Methodists were accused of Jacobitism?
Very possibly. I assume that this has been done for publication purposes; it seems a bit obvious not to have been. Does anyone know where?
ReplyDeleteOf course, both John Wesley's decidedly anti-Calvinist soteriology and his high sacramental (and especially Eucharistic) theology, both of which find expression in Charles Wesley's hymns (themselves very largely based on the liturgical year - we are all about to sing one of them), were, and are, expressions of the old High Church tradition.
It was High Toryism that caused John Wesley to correspond with William Wilberforce and to refuse tea because it was slave-grown (but he wasn't a teetotaler - that came later in Methodist and, by then, wider Evangelical history). It was also Wiberforce's own political position, for all his Evangelicalism. Whereas Whiggery begat "free trade", even if the goods in question were human beings.
The anti-slavery movement as, at least in part, an expression of (that early, not even residually) Jacobite doubts about the rightness of things in Hanoverian Britain and her Empire? Well, it certainly had plenty of Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers, as well as the early Methodists. So I suppose that it is more than possible.
The nearest thing to a Jacobite network in Scotland today is semi-clandestine unbending Unionism. The blog is required reading several times each week.
ReplyDeleteIt is partly hardline Tory in the late twentienth century sense. And it is partly Hard Left. But it is also partly a tendency towards "economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative British and Commonwealth patriotism".
Like the English Jacobites with their recusants, their Nonjurors and their Disenters, we include Catholics, those who have been put out of sorts by the liberalisation of the Episcopal Church, and traditional Presbyterians.
Our day will come.
"It is partly hardline Tory in the late twentienth century sense. And it is partly Hard Left. But it is also partly a tendency towards "economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative British and Commonwealth patriotism"."
ReplyDeleteAll three of those make it part of at least UK-wide tendencies, of course. However, though I say so myself, it is the last that is most dispossessed, and in that sense most like Jacobitism.
"Like the English Jacobites with their recusants, their Nonjurors and their Disenters, we include Catholics, those who have been put out of sorts by the liberalisation of the Episcopal Church, and traditional Presbyterians."
Not to mention the South Coast smugglers, or the Tory gentlemen bankrupted by the Whigs, among many others, I'm sure.
"Our day will come."
I sincerely hope so.
Although the Jacobites were as wrong that Parliament could not depose as the monarch as the Cromwellians had been that it could try and execute him, nevertheless their day very nearly did come, several time.
Albeit through intermediaries, Whig grandees such as Walpole and Malborough maintained constant communication with the Court in Exile, just in case, in order to protect Whig interests should the day ever come.
People right up the late Eighties thought that those Eastern European "governments in exile" in London were splitting in the wind. They didn't think that a very short time afterwards.
"The Jacobites founded the Russian Navy of Peter the Great. They maintained a network of merchants in the ports circling the Continent. Their banking dynasties had branches in several great European cities. They introduced much new science and technology to their host-countries. They dominated the Swedish East India and Madagascar Companies. They fought with the French in India. And very many of them ended up either in the West Indies or, crucially for the present purpose, in North America."
ReplyDeleteHope for us all when we have to quit these islands, too?
Carl, Jacobitism was itself a Unionist movement, of course.
Funny that you should say that...
ReplyDelete"Hope for us all when we have to quit these islands, too"?
ReplyDeleteOr
"Carl, Jacobitism was itself a Unionist movement, of course"?