This day, three hundred and sixty-three years past, was a dark day in English history – the regicide and martyrdom, at the hands of an illegal and unconstitutional kangaroo court, of King Charles I, the only person ever to be sainted by the Church of England. King Charles made a number of enemies in his support for such clergymen as Richard Montagu, who attacked the anti-humanist doctrinal excesses of the non-Conformists of his time (including the ideas that the mass of humanity was predestined for eternal torment whilst only a select few were assured places in heaven), as well as William Laud, who was a persistent and outspoken advocate on behalf of the legal and economic rights of tenant and smallholding farmers, against the arrogant and inhumane practice of enclosure. Though his enemies attacked King Charles as an overbearing absolutist, the point should be made very clearly that each of his actions – including the invocation of the feudal privileges of the monarch to the service and financial support of the landed classes – was very much in line with the constitutional balance between the rights of Parliament and the privileges of the monarch. Indeed, when Charles was defeated and dragged before the ‘court’ which ultimately took his life, his own defence was perfectly aligned with the principles of constitutional government, as David Lindsay notes here:
But didn’t Charles I believe in the Divine Right of Kings? No, he did not. Or at least he certainly expressed no such view at his grotesque “trial” pursuant to a Bill of Attainder, and before 80 of his carefully selected parliamentary and military enemies under a second-rate lawyer, John Bradshaw, created “Lord President” because all the proper judges had fled London rather than have anything to do with the wretched proceedings.
There, Charles declared repeatedly that, by denying the authority of the “court” to try him, he was simply upholding the law as it then existed, including the liberties of the English people and the parliamentary institutions of the English State. No law permitted the trial of the monarch, he argued. On the contrary, the law of treason then in force provided for exactly the opposite, namely that any attack on the monarch’s person was itself an offence. Simply as a matter of fact, he was right.
And the subsequent behaviour of the Cromwellian regime fully vindicated him.
And this pattern has held true for many a regime which followed. The ideological heirs of the roundhead landlords and merchants who ended up executing the sainted king – these Parliamentarians who would not put up with a king who exercised his traditional prerogatives to marry a faithful Catholic wife, to appoint sensible bishops and to tax the wealthy, but who welcomed an unbridled dictator in his stead – did not express any qualms about upholding oppressive and dictatorial regimes in Africa or Latin America or Asia, so long as those regimes posed no threat to their continued economic and political hegemony. King Charles I as a saint of the English Church could very well be the patron in Heaven of such constitutionally legitimate leaders as Mohammad Mosaddegh and Salvador Allende, and of such faithful reformers as have had to struggle against the dictatorial regimes which replaced them, without partaking of the militarist and materialist ideology which painted itself as the only alternative.
Blessed Charles, please continue to pray for us now.
Cromwell still gets a surprisingly good press these days but I think that, slowly but surely, people are starting to view him in a more critical light.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how my home country would have turned out had Charles prevailed-- would we still have had a constitutional monarchy or would we have gone down the more continental Absolutist route?
Great post. I think I mentioned this before, but why do so many self-proclaimed monarchists support libertarian capitalism? What happens when the monarch interferes with the free market, for example, by issuing a decree that limits working hours? I guess you kill him or her and replace them with a military dictatorship. Ah, the Invisible Hand at work!
ReplyDeleteCzarny: Thanks for stopping by again! It is an interesting question. Charles I was certainly anti-Habsburg (or rather, anti-Spanish Habsburg) because of the 1623 plot to keep him hostage and control England's foreign policy; and the Habsburgs were one of the key players in the Partitions of the Lublin state. Subsequent administrations (including the Restoration government) were too hamstrung by Parliament's religious politics to be of any great use to the Polish state. Still, as with any historical 'what if', it's generally only an interesting mental exercise.
ReplyDeleteJohn: Thanks, and welcome back! As for why so many monarchists have such a fetish for neoliberalism or Austrian economics (à la Hans-Hermann Hoppe), I find myself in the same boat as you. It is not comprehensible to me. These materialistic political-economic theories have been proven to wreak (literal) bloody havoc upon the sorts of organic communities and traditions which make reference to transcendent values (as even the constitutional monarchies did). It seems to me the same kind of bizarre phenomenon as the self-professed Christians in the US who heap praises upon the legacy of Ayn Rand (a staunch and bitter opponent of Christianity, classical and otherwise).
First in seventeenth-century England and then in the eighteenth-century France that looked to that precedent, gentry-cum-mercantile republican absolutism was an inversion of Jean Bodin’s princely absolutism, itself an Early Modern aberration. But what of the creation of a gentry-cum-mercantile republic in the former American Colonies? Did it, too, ultimately derive from reaction against the Stuarts, inverting their newfangled ideology against them? No, it ultimately derived from loyalty to them, a loyalty which regarded the Hanoverian monarchy as illegitimate.
ReplyDeleteFar 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. The Highlanders in North Carolina spoke Gaelic into the 1890s, but in vain had the rebellious legislature there issued a manifesto in that language a century earlier: like many people of directly Scots rather than of Scots-Irish origin or descent, they remained loyal to the Crown during the Revolutionary War.
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.
Paleoconservatives who would rightly locate the great American experiment within a wider British tradition need to recognise that that tradition encompasses the campaign against the slave trade, the Radical and Tory 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 arising 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 Catholics, High Churchmen (and thus first Methodists and then also Anglo-Catholics, as well as Scottish and therefore also American Episcopalians), Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, David! Yes, the Midland and Mid-Atlantic loyalties to the Crown were indeed the strongest, and one can see traces of those loyalties even today. However, I suspect that the palaeoconservatives are fighting something of an uphill battle here, since even though we do have these very strong ties to the Jacobite tradition, the heirs of that tradition have done some very deliberate forgetting. What we should see as a result of loyalty to this tradition is a very broad-based, very deliberately anti-Whiggish (but pro-smallholder, pro-labour, communitarian and anti-war) form of politics in the vein of Wendell Berry. This politics has very much in common with the Radical and Tory use of state action (particularly at the local level) against social, economic and spiritual evils. One need only point for some evidence of such to the local- and county-level anti-usury ordinances which began appearing in Ohio and Maryland in the wake of the financial crisis (which were sadly overturned by the state-level Supreme Courts).
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, though, what we have to face in many areas of the American South is a highly regimented, ultra-Whiggish, deregulationist politic which appeals for its legitimacy to an invented national or crudely-constructed ethnic identity. I hope that Wendell Berry's communitarianism has enough intrinsic appeal that it can provide a viable counter-politic.
Looking forward to reading more from your blog, David!
Best,
M
Well done,
ReplyDeleteAs for monarchists supporting libertarian capitalism, maybe I can shed a little light. I see this myself on other blogs, reading how self-proclaimed monarchists fully support capitalism or even neoliberalism. From my understanding this blind uncritical support is really a reaction against socialism, which really has shown hostility towards monarchy in history (usually socialists throughout history advocate abolishing monarchy or reducing the crown's power). In short, other monarchists align with capitalism and neoliberalism because they think that it is supportive of "property rights" and protection from socialism. Unfortunately, the feeling is not mutual; plutocrats only support monarchy when the crown does as they wish. If the neoliberal monarchists have the ultra-capitalist system they want, the crown will be but a figurehead to corporate leaders.
I really don't believe that monarchists have any real allies in the economic scene.
Welcome again, CA Constantian, and many thanks for the comment; your perspective on this is certainly edifying!
ReplyDeleteCertainly, when one notes the track record of Marxism regarding monarchs, there is not much to be proud of. One may argue whether or not the Romanovs 'had it coming', if you will pardon the vulgarism, but the Maoist attitude toward what remained of the infinitely more egalitarian and 'limited' Qing in the Republican and early Communist periods leaves much to be desired. Little wonder that so many monarchists fear socialism, particularly when even we revisionists, reformists and non-Marxist socialists do little to actively distinguish ourselves from such excesses.
But you are certainly right that the opposite extreme to which many monarchists flee is equally hostile to monarchical institutions. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think we could use a good, healthy dose of Richard Oastler these days (or Canadian Red Toryism) in order to show that the opposition of propertied and of labour interests is not inevitable, and that there can be a more just alternative to capitalism that at the same time recognises and admires authority which is in some way legitimated by (and thus accountable to) something outside itself.
Thanks again, CA Constantian!
Best,
M