Onwards, Jeffersonian Jacobites?

The following is the most interesting feature of this:

- Thomas Jefferson no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins. Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment. Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson’s place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan [sic] theologian John Calvin and conservative British law scholar William Blackstone. Heavy emphasis is also to be placed on the founding fathers having been guided by strict Christian beliefs.

Causing The Western Confucian to point out:

I'm all for the inclusion of Messrs. Aquinas, Calvin and Blackstone as "intellectual forerunners" to our American tradition, but to rewrite history and purge Mr. Jefferson is as ludicrous as suggesting that "the founding fathers [were] guided by strict Christian beliefs." (The US Treaty with Tripoli, 1796-1797, signed by our second president, states that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.") This is simply rewriting history. Anti-Federalism has already been written out of American history, now Jeffersonianism is to suffer the same fate? Resist. "Onwards, Jeffersonian Jacobites!"

It would be interesting to know how many Americans have ever even heard of, never mind read, The Jefferson Bible, from which the Founding Father excised all reference to Christ's miracles, Resurrection or Divinity. But as for "Jeffersonian Jacobites", that is a whole other story. 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 that Methodism was initially an outgrowth of pre-Tractarian, often at least sentimentally Jacobite, High Churchmanship rather than of Evangelicalism, hence the above allegations. 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.