Prospects for Scottish Independence

On the day when Her Majesty the Queen became the first monarch to visit the site of the Battle of Culloden, a poll revealed that a majority of the Scottish people support a referendum on independence. The news is not quite as good as it seems, since only 42% of people agreed that ‘The Scottish government should negotiate a settlement with the government of the United Kingdom so that Scotland becomes an independent state.’ However, when the phrase was put more bluntly, ‘In a referendum on independence for Scotland, how would you vote?’ even fewer said that they would vote for independence. The wording of the questions is interesting – whereas the first question requires merely a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, the second requires the respondent to specify independence as their explicit will. Furthermore, the first question implies that independence will be a gradual process and it will be managed by the Scottish government. Yet the use of the phrase ‘Scottish government’ and the idea that it could negotiate a settlement with the United Kingdom government already suggests that the Scottish and UK government are potential equals – which, under current constitutional conditions, they most certainly are not. However, it is encouraging that Scots think of the Scottish government as potentially a real government, and, as Alex Salmond has pointed out, the polls show a ‘driection of travel’ towards independence and growing trust in devolved government.

Scottish independence, when it happens, must not be a revolutionary process or even have the feel of a revolution. Scotland’s independence is her constitutional right, taken from her in 1707; it should never be a crude ethnicist aspiration but instead the calm insistence that what is rightfully Scotland’s should be restored. I am surprised that there was not more controversy concerning the Queen’s visit to Culloden (I note that she wore dark blue – presumably not a conscious reference to the Hanoverian substitution of dark for light blue as the ‘royal’ blue to distinguish themselves from the Stuarts!), but it is a good thing that there was not. The restoration of Personal Union between England and Scotland in the person of the Queen is a crucial element in any future independence settlement – although if, as would be logical for an independent Scottish Parliament, all of the Acts of Succession as they apply to Scotland were ultimately to be repealed, it would not follow that the Prince of Wales would succeed the Queen as King of Scotland; consequently any Scottish Parliament serious about genuine independence would sound out the legitimate descendent of the Scottish kings.

David Cameron has very belatedly said that he will not interfere in Scottish devolution, but the Tory Party still has a long way to go before it throws off the Imperialist mantle of Unionism. Much of the fear of Scottish independence at Westminster seems to focus on the military dimension; the SNP has made clear its opposition to the renewal of Trident and the keeping of Britain’s so-called ‘nuclear deterrent’ in the Firth of Clyde. General Sir Mike Jackson’s comments on the issue highlight the worry there is at Westminster that it could become a divisive issue in Scotland. It is pleasing that the Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh has raised the profile of this issue, which has the potential to sway Scottish voters towards independence in a future referendum, just as the invasion of Iraq produced more support for ending the Union.

Disturbing Precedents

The deposition of the Speaker of the House of Commons ought to be a disturbing event to both conservatives and liberals alike. The Speaker, who represents the institution of Parliament itself, has been unseated by the Prime Minister, the leader of Her Majesty’s Government. Whether the Prime Minister directly deposed Michael Martin or did so indirectly by declining to lend him his support is inimportant; from a liberal point of view, the Prime Minister who in a constitutional monarchy exercises the Royal Prerogative has triumphed over Parliament – surely a shocking return to the days of Charles I for those who despise the notion of royal interference in Parliament. For conservatives, it is horrifying that the leader of the Government should triumph over Parliament. It has been said repeatedly that the institution of Parliament has been damaged by the expenses scandal, and that may be true, but the thought that the authority of Parliament should be subordinated to the Government so utterly is more unpleasant, and will have more lasting consequences, than any amount of ‘mortgage flipping’ by MPs.

The behaviour of MPs with regard to their expenses is, ultimately, a matter of their personal integrity, and it is deeply regrettable that the Palace of Westminster cannot operate like a ‘gentleman’s club’ – that is to say, on honour. Such a concept clearly no longer exists in politics. Short-sighted commentators are evidently delighted that MPs have forced Michael Martin to quit the Speaker’s Chair, acclaiming it as a revolutionary assertion of the power of the people. In reality it is an assertion of the power of MPs and political parties against Parliament – and primarily an assertion of the power of the government, which in spite of having its MPs discredited is now able to shunt the blame onto the Speaker’s shoulders. In this regard, the Archbishop of Glasgow’s comments on Michael Martin’s departure are the most sensible I have yet heard.

Constitutional iconoclasts, who would like to see the constitution demolished, are gleeful; everyone else should be saddened and concerned by this episode. In my own view the only acceptable solution to the expenses crisis would have been the dissolution of Parliament by the one person who does genuinely hold an authority that exceeds Parliament’s – the Queen. The expenses scandal has shown the members of Parliament to be flawed; ought we therefore to accept proposed changes from a Government composed of those same members? In the British constitution the only authority that exceeds that of Parliament is not the people’s but the monarch’s. If that principle is not maintained the constitution is heading for its latest disaster, and the subordination of Parliament of which Tony Blair could only dream will be achieved by accident by Gordon Brown.

On Evan Harris’ Succession Bill

As one might have expected, Evan Harris’ Succession Bill has slipped from public attention and perhaps deservedly so. A modern Succession Bill, unless it were explicitly couched in terms of a direct repeal of the Act of Settlement of 1701, would enshrine the right of Parliament to determine royal succession on dubious grounds of political correctness, even if it did have some positive consequences such as permitting those in the royal succession to marry Catholics. Far more important than the absurd question of whether a Catholic can be monarch (as raised, predictably, by the DUP’s Jeffrey Donaldson) is the question of whether Parliament has the right to determine the royal succession. The outcome of the Exclusion Crisis in 1678 proved that it does not, barring an illegal and unconstitutional revolution of government. If a Parliament derives its legitimacy from the monarch that calls it, as Jacobites must surely affirm, then it is absurd for that Parliament to determine the succession to the throne. That Parliament arrogates this prerogative is an evil springing from the Act of Settlement itself, and thus a new Succession Bill would confirm the injustice of 1701.

Evan Harris’ Bill did not propose that a Catholic can succeed to the throne and was, thus, toothless from the beginning. In order for such a change to occur, the Accession Declaration Act 1910 (successor to the stipulation of the 1688 Bill of Rights) would have to be repealed. The present text of the oath is:

I [monarch's name] do solemnly and sincerely in the presence of God profess, testify and declare that I am a faithful Protestant, and that I will, according to the true intent of the enactments which secure the Protestant succession to the Throne of my Realm, uphold and maintain the said enactments to the best of my powers according to law.

This text was adopted for the Coronation of George V in place of the renunciation of the Roman Catholic faith required of monarchs theretofore. In addition to this Act, the Act of Union of 1707 also contains a stipulation that the monarch must renounce Roman Catholicism. However, contrary to popular opinion it would not necessary for the Coronation Oath to be altered if a Catholic were to succeed:

Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?

This oath could, in theory, be sworn by a Catholic who, like James II, regarded his/her religion as a private matter and thus remained Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The oath contains no actual profession of Protestant faith.

It is interesting that one of the bars to a repeal of the Act of Settlement is the Act of Union 1707, and it is surprising that no SNP member in the Westminster Parliament asked why that Parliament should have the right to impose a monarch upon Scotland – that, for Scots, is surely the more pressing issue than issues of religion and gender.

Insofar as this Bill has drawn attention to the injustice of the exclusion of the rightful and senior line of Stuart-Savoy-Habsburg Lothringen-Wittelsbach (as it has in some parts of the media), Evan Harris deserves to be thanked. Yet it is extremely unlikely that anything will come of his efforts.

More immediately, one wonders whether a future King who is reputed by some to be a covert adherent of Greek Orthodoxy would be able to make the Accession Declaration…

Dissident Episcopalians in Britain

The dissident Episcopalians of the 18th century - objectors to the Act of Settlement and the post-revolutionary ecclesiastical polity in Scotland and England – included first the entire Scottish Episcopal Church, secondly the Non-Jurors and Non-Abjurors, and thirdly the Episcopal churches that developed as a result of schisms within the Non-Juring movement. The Scottish Episcopalians and Non-Jurors moved rapidly from being victims of circumstance and loyalty – cut off from the Church of England by their adherence to oaths made to James II – to an independent theological position articulated by George Hickes, Jeremy Collier and others.

There was undoubtedly a growing awareness in the Church of England of the late 17th century of the importance of linking England to the Church Catholick, and this was perhaps the ultimate outworking of James I’s eirenicism of the early years of the century. The Trial of the Seven Bishops in 1688 sensitised High Churchmen as never before to the danger posed by Roman Catholicism, but it was clear that a return to Titus Oates and a crude call of ‘No Popery!’ gratifying to the Nonconformist mob would never do. The way to defeat Roman Catholicism, for Jurors like Thomas Tenison as much as for Non-Jurors like Jeremy Collier, was to be Catholick in the true and original sense. These High Churchmen looked not to Rome but to Constantinople, in the somewhat naive belief that Greek Orthodoxy embodied the unspoilt Christianity of the early centuries.

A Greek church was established in Soho in 1677 but, predictably, it was the opposition of the notorious Whig Bishop of London, Henry Compton, that proved its downfall. The idea of a Greek College at Oxford was likewise mooted in that year - as much a ploy for the Church of England to exert influence over the Greeks as to receive instruction from them – and finally came to fruition under Benjamin Woodroffe in 1698 with the approval of the intruded Archbishop, Thomas Tenison. It would appear that the college’s closure in 1705 had more to do with the opposition of the Greek hierarchy to the morals of Oxford than Queen Anne’s Church of England.

However, the return of numerous Non-Jurors to the fold of the established church in 1702, with the accession of Queen Anne and the rise of the Tories, ensured that the great parting of the ways between the Jurors and Non-Jurors was, for the most part, delayed until 1714. It was then that such weighty figures as William Law come upon the scene, and in 1717 the division was truly set in stone by Benjamin Hoadly’s infamous Erastian sermon, the beginning of the Bangorian Controversy in which Non-Juring ideas of apostolic church government were stated and refined. The influence of the controversy was widespread among the Juring clergy as well; without it, it is unlikely that there would ever have been a ‘Holy Club’ of ‘Methodists’ at Oxford and the religious history of the 18th century would have been quite different.

The Non-Juring movement was far stronger as a stream of ideas than it was as a unified movement; juring clergy such as the Wesleys and John Hutchinson were deeply affected by the alternative Non-Juring High Churchmanship offered to the Latitudinarian complacency of the establishment, but the Non-Jurors themselves were divided, with Nathaniel Spinckes advocating a simple continuation of the Church of England as it was in 1688, following the Prayer Book of 1662, and Hickes and Collier proposing the restoration of usages from the Prayer Book of 1549 on account of their apostolic antiquity. This latter point – the preoccupation with supposedly authentic apostolic liturgical forms – eventually led to the creation of an independent Non-Juror liturgy in 1718 and later to the curious liturgical experimentation of Thomas Deacon.

Deacon began life as a mainstream Non-Juror in London, running a chapel in St. Dunstan’s Court. London in the early 18th century was littered with private Non-Juring chapels owned and operated by individual clergymen; Holy Trinity Chapel in Aldersgate Street seems to have been the first, followed by others run by Deacon, Roger Lawrence and Robert Orme. The Non-Juring Bishops, Hickes and Wagstaffe, ministered at these chapels as well. The chapels were obviously unregistered and illegal, and I am not sure whether anyone has investigated what their nature actually was – were they backrooms of domestic houses or properly funded structures?

Thomas Deacon soon appears in Manchester, which at the time had a strong High Church tradition centred upon the Collegiate Church (now Manchester Cathedral). The clergy and congregation of the Collegiate Church were openly Jacobite; unconstrained by a town charter, Manchester (’the largest village in England’, as it was called) was a haven for dissidents, so much so that the Whigs established a rival church, St. Ann’s, in 1712. However, Thomas Deacon had by this time moved so far from the 17th century Church of England that he led a congregation still more fervently Jacobite than that of the Collegiate Church and broke off ties with the mainstream Usager and Non-Usager parties of Non-Jurors.

In 1734 Deacon published his Book of Common Prayer or Clementine Liturgy, in many ways the culmination of the Non-Jurors’ interest in reconstructing primitive liturgies. The liturgy is still recognisable as that of the BCP of 1662, albeit with some changes of title (the Communion is now called ‘The Holy Liturgy,’ presumably under Orthodox influence). However, Deacon’s main concern seems to have been to fence the altar from Catechumens and those invalidly baptised (in his view) by Juring or Nonconformist ministers; his Prayer Book is peppered with dire warnings against those who trespass unworthily upon the mysteries. Doubtless Deacon thought that he followed the precedent of the Early Church in this, but he and other Non-Jurors by these attitudes condemned themselves to sectarianism and oblivion, leaving others – the Wesleys – to share the riches of their spiritual insights with the rest of humanity.

In 1745 the Jacobite army under the Prince Regent liberated Manchester and King James III was proclaimed at the market cross. Thomas Deacon sent both of his sons to serve as officers in the Manchester Regiment under Colonel Francis Towneley, which advanced with the Prince to Derby and was subsequently ordered to hold the garrison at Carlisle against the Hanoverians. The task was impossible, and in 1746 both of Thomas Deacon’s sons were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn for taking up arms against the Elector of Hanover.

Whatever his eccentricities, Deacon and his sons were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for the Stuart cause and the moral integrity of England, for many Non-Jurors treasured more than a mere abstract belief in the Divine Right of Kings. As articulated by Jeremy Collier, they believed that the collective perjury of the Church of England in 1689 and the disruption of the natural order occasioned by the deposition of the nation’s father would result in moral and social chaos – a view based upon the political theory of Sir Robert Filmer. Perhaps that chaos was not immediately evident, but Non-Jurors cannot have been unaware of the slow rot in the 18th century church as Latitudinarianism and apathy overwhelmed it.

By 1779 the last English Non-Juring Bishop was dead, and by 1819 the last English layman to have been baptised as a Non-Juror. By the late 18th century the English Non-Jurors were hopelessly fractured to the point of ridicule, but the Scottish Episcopal Church lived on and lent its apostolic succession to those members of the Church of England in the American colonies who requested a Bishop for a new church for a new independent state – the United States of America. The Episcopal Church in the USA was surely the apotheosis of dissenting Anglicanism, since unlike any model that had preceded it this church denied implicitly the headship of any monarch. Nevertheless, the wilderness in which Non-Jurors had lived since 1689, praying for a Catholic monarch who took little or no interest in them, perhaps prepared the American Episcopalians to accept the concept of a church without a notional Supreme Governor. It is worth asking whether the amonarchic American Episcopalianism ever had any ecclesiopolitical coherence, a deficiency that might go some way towards explaining its later vagaries.

Both the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Church in the USA responded enthusiastically to the Catholic Revival and the Oxford Movement, seeing in ritualism a confirmation of their own High Church heritage. However, the 19th century tendency to defer to Roman practice could not have been more different from the 18th century concern for primitive worship, and the wholesale adoption of the Catholic revival by the Scottish and American churches is in many ways a renunciation of their original character. Where Thomas Deacon would have condemned Roman Catholic liturgy as superstitious and asserted the authenticity of his own with supreme confidence, the churches of the 19th century endeavoured to remedy the guilt they felt at being separated from the Roman stream. It should be no surprise that the Scottish and American churches, with their dissenting origins, will always differ profoundly from the staid ’colonial’ churches that grew out of the Victorian Church of England.

Origines Britannicae

I have just finished reading Stephen Oppenheimer’s Origins of the British, a book I have been intending to read since I heard Daphne Nash-Briggs’ paper at the ‘Land of the Iceni’ conference, in which she drew on one of the ideas in Oppenheimer’s book (that English was spoken in eastern Britain in the Iron Age) to claim that Icenian coin legends represent a primitive form of English. I was unconvinced by her argument, but curious to see where she had got it from.

I lack the scientific knowledge to criticise any of Oppenheimer’s genetic conclusions but I imagine that many people will consider that his book ranges too widely beyond his own specialism of ‘palaeogenetics.’ He claims, for instance, that native rulers issued their own coinage under Roman rule (the only possible example of this is the Iceni Esuprasto unit and this is far from certain) and he treats the Tuatha De Danaan as an actual people who were worshippers of the ‘goddess Dana’ (the nominative is Danu), completely missing the point that the Tuatha De are the euhemerised gods of Iron Age Ireland. His knowledge of numismatics and mythology is, then, a little too weak for him to be taken seriously in those fields. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by his observation that Irish mythology, taken at face value, is more accurate than most of the history attempted in the last 200 years.

My chief interest, however, was in what Oppenheimer had to say about eastern Britain and about the English language. I acknowledge that the apparent ancient branching of English is interesting, yet the fact remains that Occam’s Razor applies when someone tries to claim that the people in a part of Britain whose Iron Age rulers had Brythonic names, whose rivers have Brythonic names, and whose towns in the Antonine Itinerary and Ravenna Cosmography have Brythonic names actually spoke English…at the very most, I would be prepared to consider the possibility that a Brythonic-speaking elite ruled an English-speaking people, but on the other hand rivers and towns tend not to be named or renamed successfully by elites, no matter how hard they might try. Furthermore, the Roman east of Britain shows cultural conitinuity with the west (and indeed with Gaul) in such matters as temple construction, and the fact that the people of eastern Britain are genetically a different set of settlers from those who came to live in the Brythonic-speaking west does not mean that Brythonic culture and language could not dominate them. It probably dominated them at a very early period. Indeed, in religious terms it appears that Brythonic Anglesey dominated not just Britain but Gaul as well.

I find Oppenheimer’s criticism of Gildas and his suggestion that Saxon settlers were already present in Britain in the third century much more convincing. The rapid assimilation of eastern Britain and East Anglia in particular into the Anglo-Saxon world is suggestive of this. Oppenheimer is puzzled by the lack of a Brythonic substratum for Anglo-Saxon given the Saxon absorption of indigenous inhabitants, but the same could be said for French; why are there so few Gaulish words in it, and why is there so little Germanic Frankish influence? Linguistics is full of oddities and it is perhaps best for a geneticist to avoid speculation.

The overall message of Oppenheimer’s book is that Europe has been, on the whole, genetically conservative since the Palaeolithic recolonisation of northern Europe 15,000 years ago. Oppenheimer makes interesting observations about cultural change that challenge the orthodoxy of ‘progress’ from Mesolithic hunter-gathering to Neolithic farming. In Ireland, for instance, we have a Mesolithic culture that chose to adopt cattle ranching and beakers some time before it fully embraced agriculture. Where cultural change was once seen as evidence of conquest or at least some abstract idea of progress, the genetic conservatism of Europe suggests that change was more a matter of prestige and immitation; presumably the elites of Mesolithic Ireland traded with their Neolithic neighbours and admired them – consequently they copied their practices and, in the course of time, a ‘tipping point’ was reached where there had been so much cultural alteration as a result of imitation that the old ways became untenable, and the Mesolithic culture of Ireland became Neolithic less as a product of ‘progress’ than as the outcome of progressive elite assimilation. The same process could be seen among the elites of Britain and France in the last 200 years – a constant desire by the British to emulate the French that filtered down from the upper to the middle and eventually to the working class.

The ‘Church Point’ and the anti-Erastian tendency in England

When the Non-Jurors declared their intention to uphold the doctrine of Divine Right and passive obedience by perpetuating a Church of England loyal to the Stuart succession they were making two ideological points, as was recognised at the time: the ‘State Point’ and the ‘Church Point.’ The State Point was the insistence that, by law, James II remained Supreme Governor of the Church of England, the same Supreme Governor to whom the clergy had made oaths of allegiance before God at the time of his accession. Of course, this position was not merely political as it was itself entangled with theology – most notably the doctrine that the King was answerable for his conduct to God alone, since God alone appointed him. From the first, the Non-Jurors wore the State Point lightly, and some were even somewhat embarassed by it. Few of the Non-Juring clergy took part in Jacobite plotting and many had nothing but contempt for active Jacobites. They were Jacobites per force, not Jacobites by choice, and many were out of sympathy with the political policies, and most certainly the religion of King James.

The Church Point, on the other hand, proved more lasting – partly because the Non-Jurors largely unwittingly tapped into a tendency that had long existed in the Church of England and would exist long after the Non-Jurors had faded into obscurity. Since its inception the Church of England had been held in tension between those who considered it an instrument of government and those who considered it above the authority of the state to command. This conflict first came to the fore in the clash between Queen Elizabeth and Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1577 when Grindal refused to suppress ‘prophesyings’ in the churches.

Whilst Grindal may have been motivated to resist the Queen by evangelical theology, the proposition that the Church of England was not a department of state was upheld in the next century by the Arminians, who in spite of the royal support they received from James I and Charles I were prepared to emphasise the power of the church over the King. They proved that the Church of England could endure without state support when the Prayer Book was suppressed during the Commonwealth. Indeed, it was at this time when Presbyterianism overran the Church of England as a worshipping body (the churchgoers of England, as it were) that ‘Anglicans’ first emerged – i.e. those who held to the theology and liturgy of the Prayer Book by conviction rather than by default. It is noteworthy that the founders of the Non-Juring movement had also been among the first who could reasonably be described as Anglicans, who had very often had to maintain their Anglicanism in exile on the Continent surrounded by Catholics during Cromwell’s tyranny.

It should be no surprise, then, that whilst the early Non-Jurors (particularly Sancroft) had great respect for the Canons, and even George Hickes and Thomas Wagstaffe were consecrated Bishops under an obscure statute of 1529, the later Non-Jurors did not consider themselves bound to the religious policy of a notional if non-existent Jacobite state. One of the first signs of this was Thomas Deacon’s 1718 revision of the Prayer Book and his inclusion of the Usages of the 1549 Prayer Book; this was followed by the consecration of non-territorial Bishops and Hickes’ resolute tracts on the dignity of the episcopal and sacerdotal orders; a clear attempt to separate the Non-Juring church from the state in theory as well as in practice.

It is possible that Hickes expected a restoration of James III and feared the imposition of Catholicism on the Church of England; consequently, he wanted to construct a watertight and distinctive Anglican theology that would withstand a repeat of James II’s policies. However, the nature of politics in England undoubtedly influenced the Non-Jurors too. With the death of James II in 1701 the monarch to whom the original oaths had been made was no more, and the accession of Queen Anne in 1702 dampened the force of the Non-Juring movement as many Tories flocked to show their loyalty to the Queen. Those who remained Non-Jurors and continued to worship outside of the state-sanctioned church needed a better reason than the legitimacy of James III, although this played its part. Therefore, they began to condemn the theology of the state church and by doing so located themselves within the anti-Erastian tradition and begat an entirely new strand to it.

It is a well known fact of 18th century ecclesiastical history (so far as 18th century ecclesiastical history is well known to anybody) that many clergy who were not Non-Jurors subscribed to the theological positions that Non-Juring authors put forward. This was partly because a band of ‘Laudians’ remained within the state church when the Non-Jurors began their dissent and partly because there was no necessary connection between High Church politics and High Church theology in the minds of many. The doctrine of Divine Right was so powerful in the reigns of James I and Charles I because those monarchs were Supreme Governors of a single state church that (in theory) comprehended all except Papists. The Christians of England and the Church of England were one. As soon as dissent was accepted even in principle (and whether it ought to be was the great battle of Charles II’s reign), the King became the Supreme Governor of a church, rather than the church, and thus the doctrine was doomed to wane.

If the doctrine waned, the sentiments that went with it did not. Samuel Wesley, the Rector of Epworth, took the oaths to William of Orange but retained his High Church principles, which were in turn transmitted to his famous sons. The record of John Wesley’s beliefs and practices at Oxford and at his disastrous mission in Savannah bears witness to the fact that he was mainly and almost solely influenced by Non-Juring and some Catholic literature – to the extent that the inhabitants of Savannah accused him of being a Catholic. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that Wesley ever discerned any political implications in his beliefs.

It is arguable that the latent High Church anti-Erastianism of Samuel Wesley (or perhaps Susanna Wesley) was what freed Wesley from the mediocrity of the state church to pursue his evangelical mission; and it is in Wesley that we may see the fruition both of Grindal’s evangelicalism and Hickes’ catholicism. In spite of the apolitical nature of the Methodist movement he founded (or perhaps because of it) Wesley was able to be the apparently self-contradictory product of both strands of English anti-Erastianism.

That John Wesley did exist and that he kept the evangelical and the High Church strands in creative tension proves, in my view, that the real tension in 18th century ecclesiastical politics and beyond was not between ‘High’ and ‘Low’ churchmen. These tended to coincide in many of their ecclesio-political convictions. Instead, I would argue that the real conflict within the Church of England since the Reformation has been between Erastians and anti-Erastians. The theological identity of those parties has been less important.

What this interpretation might have to teach us about contemporary issues in the relationship between church and state I shall have to leave for a later post.

Jacobite Journeys

This summer I had the opportunity to make one or two detours of Jacobite interest from a holiday whose main object was to see Hadrian’s Wall. Firstly, I was able to visit Carlisle whose Tullie House Museum features, as part of its timeline of the history of Carlisle, a section on the Prince Regent’s liberation of the city in 1745 and the subsequent siege by the Hanoverian army in 1746.

The Prince’s porringer (from which he ate porridge during his brief stay) has been preserved, but I was disappointed that Francis Towneley’s Manchester Regiment, who held Carlisle Castle to cover the Prince’s retreat from England in 1746, was not mentioned; rather, the display referred briefly to the French troops who held the Castle for King James and then passed on to the Castle’s use as a prison to incarcerate loyal Highlanders after Culloden.

The Castle itself has a floor devoted to an exhibition on the Jacobites, which features a large model of the city at the time of the siege. I was able to visit the tiny, windowless dungeon in which hundreds of Highlanders were crammed as prisoners without food or water and to see the stones from which they allegedly had to lick the dampness. The room is bitterly cold and even a 60 watt lightbulb somehow failed to dispel the gloom of the place, which feels as though it was deliberately constructed to sap hope from prisoners.

The Golden Lion public house at Corbridge claims to have been constructed from stones taken from Lord Derwentwater’s house after his execution, and I was pleased to see that the Northumbrian Jacobites had put up an explanatory notice by the bar.

I spent a day in Edinburgh in August (the first time I have been there for ten years) and I was determined to see the Honours of Scotland this time. The exhibition to which the Honours are the culmination is very old-fashioned insofar as it is based around traditional museum manikins rather than an audio-visual presentation, as at the Tower of London when I was last there. Overall I was most impressed with it, although it is a shame that one cannot get as close to the Scottish Crown Jewels as one can to England’s. The Crown of Scotland is surely one of the most beautiful in Europe, and it is a shame that the sceptre, used until the Act of Union to touch every act of the Scottish Parliament into law, has not had its traditional function revived by the present Parliament; doubtless that will have to wait for the repeal of the accursed Act.

I walked to the end of the Royal Mile to see the new Parliament building; I was not aware that on that very day, the SNP was defeating Labour in the first of the summer’s Scottish by-elections. I am no lover of contemporary buildings but the Scottish Parliament really is superb in its location opposite Holyrood Palace, which might be in remote country rather than the centre of a city, owing to the picturesque crag behind the Parliament house.

In the Great Kirk, once St. Giles’ Cathedral, I came across the tomb of Bonnie Dundee; someone had placed a sprig of heather in the hands of the sleeping effigy of John Graham.

Before leaving Edinburgh I came upon the church of Old St. Paul’s, the Victorian church that stands on the site of the wool store where Alexander Rose, the last Bishop of Edinburgh to have his cathedral at St. Giles, departed in 1689 with the loyal members of the congegation to set up an Episcopal church. Although the church is now indistinguishable from a Catholic church (such is the nature of the present Scottish Episcopal Church) it remains an atmospheric monument to the courage of Scottish Jacobites.

Finally, on a brief visit to Newcastle I caught sight of this plaque commemorating King Charles I’s incarceration in the city by the Scots:

Ireland: the problem of a post-Jacobite identity

I suspect it may well take an Englishman a lifetime fully to understand Irish history and Irish identity, and I make no claim to do so; yet I remain fascinated by Ireland’s resilience to the homogenising influence of Westminster over so many centuries that managed to enthrall the rest of the British Isles.

For me at least, one of the great puzzles of Irish identity is how Ireland has drifted away from Jacobitism and enunciated its right to independence in terms other than those of the 17th century. Part of the answer surely lies in the fact that mainstream Catholic Irish politics in the 16th and 17th centuries was never wholeheartedly royalist in the first place. The Tudors were never accepted and the ancient Kings maintained their courts well into the 17th century even though the policy of ‘Surrender and Re-Grant’ under James I had stripped them of their proper titles. Indeed, James I’s policy in Ireland was one of the less savoury episodes in that great monarch’s reign. There was no particular reason why the Stuarts should be accepted more readily in Ireland than the Tudors (albeit an ancestor of James I, Edward Bruce, had been the last man to hold the title of High King of Ireland in 1315), other than the potential the Stuarts demonstrated for pro-Catholic policies. The Catholic Confederacy was united not by a constitutional or ideological vision for Ireland but by a common faith; its support for Charles I was largely a matter of convenience. If the Confederacy did have a vision, it was presumably the restoration of the prestige of the demoted local Kings. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any overarching political vision other than the centralised rule of a monarch was conceivable to the Confederates.

A fundamental difference, then, between Irish and English royalism was the fact that Irish royalism was driven by a particular religious agenda. In England, by contrast, Churchmen and Catholics were prepared to share a single political and constitutional agenda. Many historians have commented that James II could have become the ruler of an independent Ireland (and thus a kingdom of his own) when he returned there in 1689 if he had not been determined to reclaim his English kingdom. Irish people have resented James’ campaign ever since, as it landed the Irish in a worse situation than they would have been if he had never made his attempt.

Nevertheless, Irish political sentiment remained determinedly Jacobite; Irish soldiers (the ‘Wild Geese’) fought in the service of France and Spain but still in the red coats of James’ army. The Duke of Berwick, James’ eldest illegitimate son and himself a Marshal of France took a personal interest in the Wild Geese, who continued to serve up to and beyond the French Revolution when a realistic policy of Jacobite restoration by force of arms had faded. At Culloden the Irish Piquets, volunteers from all of the Irish regiments in French service, stood against the Hanoverian cavalry when the Highlanders were fleeing, but this was the last overtly Jacobite military intervention by the Irish.

In the 1760s, when the ‘Voce Populi’ token was produced, all Irish opposition to English rule was Jacobite in form. However, the meaning of Jacobitism had, by the late 18th century, become attenuated to a convenient romantic veneer for radical as well as conservative movements; the Irish independence movement, always characterised by the marriage of social conservatism and political radicalism, is the child of this brand of Jacobitism. Had the American and French Revolutions not established a new republican ideology, it seems likely that Irish radicalism would have continued to be Jacobite in inspiration.

The very word ‘nationalism’ is in one sense at odds with Jacobite thinking; the Jacobite programme was never a nationalistic one (contrary to the image portrayed of Jacobitism, particularly in Scotland). Jacobitism is by its very nature a constitutional ideology that stresses the place of the King and the rightful succession. The aspect of Jacobitism that can easily be confused with nationalism, and out of which nationalism grew, is its emphasis on the separation of the Three Kingdoms (England, Scotland and Ireland) as independent countries. Yet for Jacobites the grounds for such separation were always constitutional and never ‘nationalistic’ in the sense in which the term was understood after World War One, i.e. based on linguistic and cultural revival and the notion of a people’s right to self-determination.

Jacobitism is not a democratic ideology; its adherence to the rightful line, notwithstanding public opinion to the contrary, is indeed entirely at odds with modern democratic thinking. The Irish Republic of 1919, by contrast, founded itself upon democratic principles, and it was on those principles that two wars, first the ‘Tan War’ with the British and then the Irish Civil War between Free Staters and those who upheld the Republic of 1919, were fought.

Despite the profound differences between Jacobite ideology and the ideology of Irish Republicanism, Irish nationalism owes a great deal to Jacobitism in a number of ways. In the first place, Irish nationalism might have had a narrow appeal to Catholic and Gaelic Irishmen, but in fact many of its original leaders were Protestants and some even members of the Ascendency who saw the patent constitutional injustice visited upon Ireland by the Act of Union of 1801. Furthermore, there had always been (since the Confederates) a strand of Irish nationalism that emphasised, not republican ideology, but self-government for Ireland under whatever dispensation was available, and it was this approach that the Free State government ultimately represented.

The enthusiasm of all Irish political parties (besides Sinn Féin) for the European Union is something that many in England fail to grasp, and it is usually interpreted unfairly as the consequence of the financial benefits Ireland has received from Europe. On a political level, however, the European Union gives Ireland an identity separate from its historic oppressor (England) as well as from the principal recipient of its emigrants (the USA). Furthermore, there is a long tradition of Irish Europeanism – one only has to look at the list of Irish generals who served most of the crowned heads of Europe at one time or another.

Whilst no Jacobite should deny that Ireland is a de jure monarchy, it is entirely unreasonable to ask the Irish people to give their allegiance to a de facto monarchy in a foreign country. For an Englishman, the consideration that the existence of the de facto Hanoverian-descended monarchy in the so-called ‘United Kingdom’ is the best preservative of what remains of the legitimate constitution of the English kingdom is a very good reason indeed to support that de facto monarchy over all other forms of government (excepting the unlikely restoration of the de jure monarch). However, whilst the Hanoverian monarchy has upheld certain important elements of the English constitution, that same monarchy has done untold damage to the ancient constitution and rights of the Irish people, by the Act of Union of 1801 and all that followed it. The 1937 constitution of Eire provides for a far preferable de facto government (which, since 1949, has defined itself as republican) to anything the Hanoverian monarchy might offer. Even the House of Stuart must bear the blame for exploiting and oppressing Ireland. 

Opposition to the Act of Succession on the rise…

Several papers report today that Tracy Anne McVeigh will not allow her son Matthew to swear the Scout’s oath ‘I promise to serve God and the Queen’ on the grounds that ‘the monarchy discriminates against Catholics’ on account of the terms of the Act of Settlement. Apart from the fact that it is not fair to blame an Act passed 300 years ago on the present monarchy, this somewhat incoherent protest of a Catholic against the Act of Settlement is promising but at the same time slightly worrying; will opposition to the Act, which is surely growing, manifest itself in terms of republicanism (the McVeighs want to swear an oath to ‘my country’)? Antipathy to the Act of Settlement is driven largely by those concerned with equality legislation rather than anyone with any real understanding of constitutional law, as Hazel Blears’ hasty backtracking on her announcement to repeal the Act of Settlement showed. A number of Catholics have also declared their opposition to it as well on the grounds that it discriminates against their faith (and Autumn Kelly’s renunciation of Catholicism before her marriage to Peter Phillips has ensured the Act stays in the limelight). However, the challenge posed to the Act of Union with Scotland by the rise of the SNP has left no-one in doubt that even ancient constitutional legislation can be tackled. Yet just as I wish that the issue of Scottish independence were treated as a constitutional rather than a nationalistic or economic issue, I wish that the Act of Settlement could be seen for what it is – an unconstitutional act that is wrong because it asserts the authority of Parliament to determine the royal succession, not because it violates equality legislation or ‘discriminates’ against a faith group.

Can Sinn Féin save Europe?

Sinn Féin, as the main promoter of the ‘No’ vote in the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, finds itself in the extraordinary position of being able to save not just Ireland but the entire European Union from the dangers of further integration if the ‘No’ vote triumphs. If rejected in Ireland the entire treaty will have to be trashed unless Fianna Fáil finds some ingenious and underhand way to implement it. Thus a party that was not so long ago a political pariah finds itself wielding extraordinary influence. It is a peculiar feature of Irish politics that a left wing party should take the role of opposing Europe, and a reminder of the inadequacy of both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael as successors to the great republican and nationalist parties of the past. In an ironic parallel another Irish party finds itself saving Gordon Brown’s government and thus holding the levers of power at Westminster; the DUPs nine MPs who swung the vote on 42 day detention in the Government’s favour. This has been a week for the Irish to flex their political muscles to decide the fates of others…