Bonnie Prince Charlie, Indeed

Saturday’s Daily Telegraph featured the “revelation” that the restoration of the House of Stuart would entail the accession to the throne of Francis II, Duke of Bavaria. Allegedly, this would be the consequence of the repeal the Act of Settlement. Of course, it would be no such thing. But the Act of Settlement, the repeal of which would by no means necessarily be any good thing at all, will have to wait for another time.

If Francis II is anything like his father, then he will go out of his way to discourage agitation in his cause by kookier elements of these rather kooky islands. They, after all, are not those currently pressing for the repeal of the Act of Settlement, whose real end is ecclesiastical disestablishment (extremely difficult to do in either England or Scotland) as the British State’s formal repudiation of its specifically Christian basis. There are things that could be just as disastrous in the present climate. But nothing could be more so.

The events of 1688 created deep and wide disaffection among Catholics, High Churchmen (who went on to beget first Methodists and then Anglo-Catholics), Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers and others. Whig grandees such as Walpole and Malborough felt it necessary to maintain continuous contact with the Stuart Court in Exile in order to protect Whig interests as and when, as was throughout the eighteenth century certainly no more ridiculous than the eventual success of all those London-based Eastern European governments in exile seemed right up until it actually happened.

Catholics (especially in Maryland), High Churchmen (who founded the Episcopal Church out of its staunchly Jacobite Scottish namesake), early Methodists, Congregationalists (especially in New England) and Quakers (especially in Pennsylvania, founded by a Jacobite émigré) all contributed very significantly to an American intellectual environment in which, long after the death of the serious Stuart cause as such with Cardinal York in 1807, the Hanoverian monarchy was regarded as fundamentally illegitimate.

And in Britain, Catholics, Methodists, Anglo-Catholics, Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers were mainstays of the campaign against the slave trade (headed up by a High Tory, not by a Whig “free”-trader), of Radical demands for a properly representative Parliament (again, it was Disreali, not Gladstone, who did eventually double the franchise), of the creation of the Labour Movement, and of opposition to the Boer and First World Wars. That Hanoverian Britain, her Empire and its capitalist ideology were profoundly wrong, not only in practice but in principle, was a family and community tradition an extremely long time a-dying.

If Francis II wants to make himself a focus for the recovery of that heritage on both sides of the Atlantic and throughout the Commonwealth, then very good luck indeed to him. I do not know how rich he is. But the Royal Family of Liechtenstein can afford to bankroll an International Institute of Philosophy, a major centre of phenomenological thought. So the nominally deposed, but I rather doubt anywhere near penniless, Royal Family of Bavaria, should have no trouble bankrolling some sort of coming together of the above forces. It could do a huge amount of good.

But then again, why should it be left to them to do it? Have we no one here at home in Anglophonia and the Commonwealth? Of course we have. Faced with the privations caused by the French Revolution (and I note, by the way, that wine from his Diocese of Frascati is becoming popular – does anyone know what it is like?), Cardinal York was able to fall back on an income from his cousins, the House of Hanover.

Similarly today, faced with the new slave trade of globalisation, with the re-restriction of the franchise and exclusion of the general public from the political process, with the restoration of a state of affairs such that the Labour Movement might as well never have existed, and with the neoconservative war agenda, step forward, Prince Charles.