Over The Water?

The spectacle of the unkempt Boris Johnson reminds us of the five men alive who had led their parties to overall majorities at General Elections. President Johnson, anyone? President Major? President Blair? President Cameron? President Starmer? There would have to be a nomination process, so candidates would certainly require nomination by one tenth of the House of Commons, 65 MPs, and very probably by one fifth of that House, 130 MPs. In the wildly unlikely event of more than two candidates, then the House would whittle them down to the two who would then be presented to the electorate. Almost certainly, only two parties are ever going to have 65 MPs. Certainly, only two are ever going to have 130. In practice, they would probably arrange to alternate the Presidency between them.

Same as it ever was. Well may Rupert Lowe charge £2500 per annum for membership of his Cromwell Club. Anticipating the bourgeois capitalist revolutions of 1688, 1776 and 1789, the regime that executed Charles I also persecuted the Levellers and the Diggers for their appeals to “the Ancient Constitution” and to “time out of mind”. In 1661, the corpse of Oliver Cromwell was dug up, tried, convicted and hanged. Today, his statue appears to guard the entrance to Parliament. But as Alex Nunns, the Labour Left’s preeminent present chronicler of itself, once said to me, “John Lilburne himself would pull down the statue of Cromwell, if he were not 350 years dead.” The proposal to erect it nearly brought down the Liberal Government of the day. It went up only because the Liberal Unionists decided that making a point against the Irish Nationalists was even more important than making a pro-Tory one. So they voted for it against the ferocious opposition both of the Irish Nationalists and of their own Tory allies. It is pointedly not inside the Palace of Westminster, and not a penny of public money was spent on putting it up even where it is. In fact, it exists only because of a donation by the Liberal former Prime Minister, Lord Roseberry. He then gave an address at its unveiling. But almost no one knew that that was why he was the speaker. His donation had had to be made anonymously. Yet the Whig oligarchy has prevailed to the point that the next King will be a half-Spencer, continuing the highly profitable Malthusian mission of his father and grandfather.

The former Princess Diana died when she was 36. Princess Beatrice is already older than that, and Princess Eugenie will attain that age next month. They are grown women. Yet it would be a nonsense to cut their father, and thus them and their children, out of the line of succession. That it was determined by Parliament is no longer going to convince very many people, to whom it was either hereditary or it was not. If merit or popularity entered into it, then why have a monarchy at all? There are those who have been saying that for quite some time. The Whig Revolution of 1688 led to very deep and very wide disaffection among Catholics, High Churchmen, 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, imported and at least initially controlled from William of Orange’s Netherlands, were less than fully legitimate. That was to have startlingly radical consequences.

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. They often ended up either in the West Indies or in North America. 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. Many Baptists were also Jacobites, while 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.

Most or all of the Quakers were at least initially Jacobites. William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four times between 1689 and 1691. My university contemporary Edward Dutton has just published a book blaming the Quakers for everything that his Far Right audience hated, and that is an awful lot. Dutton once tried to seduce me after Mass, so I know his little secret. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda. In 2018, Dutton secured the publication of this masterpiece in Evolutionary Psychological Science. On the Editorial Board of that is Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and ornament of the Epstein Files. Noam Chomsky is a complete outlier both in those Files and on the Left, whereas Jeffrey Epstein, Pinker, Dutton and Batterjee constitute an Axis of Evil with anyone who cited any of them.

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. Wesley also supported, and corresponded with, William Wilberforce, even refusing tea because it was slave-grown; indeed, Wesley’s last letter was to Wilberforce. They wrote as one High Tory to another. Wilberforce was later a friend of Saint John Henry 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 opposition to opium dens, to unregulated drinking and gambling, and to the compelling of people to work seven-day weeks, all of which have returned as features of 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 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 preceding Whig oligarchy.

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of Catholicism, of the Anglo-Catholicism that High Churchmanship mostly 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 which had a following among Anglo-Catholics of either of what were then the more extreme kinds, “English Use” and “Western Use”. Each of those 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 Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists, including Lloyd George, against the Boer War. 

The campaign against the slave trade, the use of State action against social evils, the extension of the franchise, the creation of the Labour Movement, and the opposition to the Boer and First World Wars, all arose out of disaffection with Whiggery, with the Whigs’ imported capitalist system, with their imported dynasty, and with that system’s and that dynasty’s Empire. A disaffection on the part of, among others, Catholics, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, and High Churchmen, and thus first Methodists and then also Anglo-Catholics, as well as Scottish and therefore also American Episcopalians. Behind those great movements for social justice and for peace was a sense that the present British State was itself somehow less than fully legitimate, a distant echo 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.