Wednesday 13 June 2007

Non desideriis hominum sed voluntatis Dei?

At 6:42, someone who hides under the cloak of anonymity made the following comment on a post below:

Please keep up the fight against Lindsay, whoever you are.

The churches, the unions, the farmers and their country Tory mates, the Labour Councillors in Derwentside, the Independent Councillors throughout the constituency - it's become a sort of Jacobitism, with him as The MP Over The Water.

How long before he is The PM Over The Water? He must be stopped!


Well, this certainly makes a change from the usual band of hysterics who insist that my irrelevance and marginality must be proclaimed incessantly, at great length, and at the highest possible octane.

And I happen to know a certain amount about the recusant Catholics, Nonjurors, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, disaffected merchants, South Coast smugglers, and the rest of those who made up the complex network that was English Jacobitism, the subject of increasing academic attention, contrary to the "Whig interpretation of history" that our three Whig parties must no doubt presuppose, and contrary to the founding fantasies of Scottish and Irish separatism.

So, yes, very frequent and very fruitful contact is indeed maintained with all the considerably overlapping categories listed. And lest it be imagined that the comparison with Jacobitism is a comparison with an ever-doomed cause, Continental archives show that even Walpole and Malborough maintained contact, albeit at a certain remove, with the Jacobite court in exile, so plausible did its restoration seem at any point up to the 1750s. How this might compare with the present conduct, in this electronic age, of the great and good of "statism, syndicalism, nationalism and theoconservatism" in this country, on the Continent, in the Old Commonwealth, and in the United States, I couldn't possibly comment...

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