1688 And All That

Daniel Hannan and Gerald Warner are in dispute as to the definition and merits of Whiggery.

The Whig Revolution of 1688 led to very deep and very wide disaffection among Catholics, the High Churchmen who later produced first Methodism and then Anglo-Catholicism, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others. Within those subcultures, long after the death of the Stuart cause as such with Cardinal York in 1807, there persisted a feeling that Hanoverian Britain, her Empire, and that Empire’s capitalist ideology were less than fully legitimate. This was to have startlingly radical consequences.

New England and other Congregationalists, Maryland and other Catholics, and Pennsylvanian and other Quakers contributed to an American intellectual culture in which the Hanoverian monarchy came to be seen as disposable, to say the least. America has always proved very fertile ground for Baptists and Methodists. The Episcopal Church there derives from the staunchly Jacobite Episcopal Church in Scotland. James Edward Oglethorpe, a Jacobite, opposed slavery in Georgia. Anti-slavery Southerners during the Civil War were called "Tories".

Likewise, our own William Wilberforce was a Tory. And the coalition against the slave trade contained no shortage of Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists or Quakers, just like the "Tory" coalition against slavery in America. Yet the slave trade was integral to the Whig Empire’s capitalist ideology. If slavery were wrong, then something was wrong at a far deeper level.

Catholics, Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers fought as one for the extension of the franchise and for other political reforms. It was Disraeli, a Tory, who doubled the franchise in response to that agitation. To demand or deliver such change called seriously into question the legitimacy of the pre-reform situation, the Whig oligarchy.

It almost impossible to overstate the importance to the emergence and development of the Labour Movement 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.

And Quakerism and Methodism 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. Above all in Wales, Quakers and Methodists had very recently stood shoulder to shoulder with Baptists and Congregationalists against the Boer War. Those Baptists had included David Lloyd George.

So there we have it. It would be wrong to describe either the Stuarts or their later supporters as princely absolutists. But it still seems odd to think that an ancestral loyalty to them produced the American Republic, the opposition to slavery both there and in the British Empire, the British transition to parliamentary democracy, the Labour Movement, and the opposition to the Boer and First World Wars. Yet such is in fact the case.