Startlingly Radical Consequences

I have been asked about the other such to which I referred in my post yesterday about the Jacobite roots of the American Republic. Those others were, and are, a great deal closer to home.

To take up where we left off, 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 frequent allegations of Jacobitism against the early Methodists. Very many people conformed to the Established Church but either refused to take the Oath or declared that they would so refuse if called upon to take it. With its anti-Calvinist soteriology, it high sacramentalism and Eucharistic theology, and its hymnody based on the liturgical year, early Methodism appealed to them.

Wesley also supported, and corresponded with, William Wilberforce, even refusing tea because it was slave-grown. They wrote as one High Tory to another, for all Wilberforce’s Evangelicalism. Wilberforce was later a friend of Newman, whose Letter to the Duke of Norfolk constitutes the supreme Catholic contribution to the old Tory tradition of the English Confessional State, in the same era as Henry Edward Manning’s Catholic social activism, and the beginning of Catholic Social Teaching’s strong critique of both capitalism and Marxism.

Whiggery, by contrast, had produced a “free trade” even in “goods” that were human beings. The coalition against the slave trade contained no shortage of Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists or Quakers. 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. James Edward Oglethorpe, a Jacobite, opposed slavery in Georgia. Anti-slavery Southerners during the American Civil War were called “Tories”. Radical Liberals were anti-capitalist in their action against the opium dens, the unregulated drinking and gambling, and the compelling of people to work seven-day weeks that have all now returned to the British scene.

Catholics, Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers fought as one for the extension of the franchise and for other political reforms. It was Disreali, 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 preceding Whig oligarchy. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance 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 the Labour Movement.

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.

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, the view that there was ultimately something profoundly wrong about this country and her policies, both domestic and foreign, were distant echoes of an ancestral Jacobitism. Radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy. It still does.