Crowning The American Republic

John writes:

Brian Palmer over at Slate recently pondered the issue of the persistence of monarchy in Europe. The occasion for Mr. Palmer's inquiry was the recent ascension of King Willem-Alexander to the Dutch throne. While Mr. Palmer does a good job giving a balanced treatment of the issue of monarchy in modern times, he does not specifically mention perhaps the best reason for keeping a monarch on the throne: a monarch is a standing contradiction to the principle of meritocracy.

Now, for many people this might be a prominent reason to oppose monarchy. What do monarchs do to deserve their thrones? Aren't they just there by dint of a lucky birth? Precisely! As David Lindsay has pointed out many times:

"Monarchy embodies the principle of sheer good fortune, of Divine Providence conferring responsibilities upon the more fortunate towards the less fortunate."

This is in direct contrast to the principle of meritocracy which has become so prominent lately. Supporters of meritocracy typically believe that brains and effort will produce a kind of natural elite comprised of the best people in a given society. Many on the Left support meritocracy as a way to eliminate unfair privileges and allow people from the bottom of society to rise to the top. The typical left-wing meritocrat seems to assume that our new whiz kid rulers will also have a social conscience and not lord it over those unfortunates who could not climb the ladder of success.

Unfortunately, recent history has shown the new elites to be even more arrogant than their toff predecessors. As the late Michael Young wrote of the new meritocratic elite:

"They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side."

Perhaps even worse is the impact the ideology of meritocracy has had on those left behind in the race of life. Again, Mr. Young said it best when he wrote:

"It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that."

Unsurprisingly, the United States, a country born out of rebellion against a monarchy, is perhaps, of all of the major industrialized countries, the most enamoured with meritocracy. Americans are more likely to view the poor as deserving their lot in life because of laziness or some other personality defect, while Europeans are more likely to view the poor as unlucky.

That being said, it is certainly true that the institution of monarchy is not perfect. In his Slate article, Brian Palmer mentions the defeat of the House of Savoy in the Italian constitutional referendum of 1946. The Savoyards not only ruined their reputation by allowing the rise of Mussolini (despite the fact that Il Duce and many other Fascists actually hated the monarchy), but, truth be told, the House of Savoy always lacked legitimacy among many Italians. While most Southern Italians voted in favor of monarchy in 1946, the 19th century witnessed a violent clash between the Piedmontese House of Savoy and pro-Bourbon loyalists in the old Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. One my family's favorite stories involves an ancestor who was hung for being a Bourbon loyalist insurgent.

Now, I don't personally harbor any loyalties towards the old House of Bourbon. The Norman Hauteville family is probably the most fondly remembered in Sicily and Southern Italy and my own family likes to claim descent from Norman adventurers, as dubious as it might be. I also concede that a monarchy would not be appropriate for the United States given its historical development and republican traditions. Yet I believe that the principle that the fortunate owe a duty towards those who are less fortunate is a solid one and should be stressed as much as possible in American political discourse, even if we do not have a monarch to embody that principle.

Since 1776 predates 1789, the American Republic is not a product of the Revolution, but nevertheless sits under a radically orthodox theological critique, most obviously by reference to pre-Revolutionary traditions of Catholic and Protestant republican thought, on the Catholic side perhaps Venetian, on the Protestant side perhaps Dutch, and on both sides perhaps at cantonal level in Switzerland, where it is possible that such thought might hold sway even now.

There simply were Protestant Dutch Republics before the Revolution. There simply was a Catholic Venetian Republic before the Revolution. There simply were, and there simply are, Protestant and Catholic cantons in Switzerland, predating the Revolution.

The literature must be there, for those who can read the languages sufficiently well. Furthermore, there is no shortage of Americans whose ancestors came from the Netherlands or from Italy, and there may well be many who assume from their surnames that their bloodline is German or Italian (or possibly French) when in fact it is Swiss.

It is time for a few of them to go looking for these things, with a view to applying them as the radically orthodox theological critique of that pre-Revolutionary creation, the American Republic. 

Within that wider context, 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 in North America.

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.

However, 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.

There was that Catholic enclave, Maryland. And there was Pennsylvania: almost, if almost, all of the Quakers were at least initially Jacobites, and William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four times between 1689 and 1691.

Many Baptists were also Jacobites, and the name, episcopal succession and several other features of the American 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.  

Early Methodists were regularly accused of Jacobitism. 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.

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.

So the redemption of the American republican experiment is clearly possible. But only by looking beyond the Founding Fathers and by submitting them, whatever the consequences, to what lies in that Great Beyond.