The Early Days of a Better Nation

Posted 8:47 pm by Ken

Glorious Indeed

In the previous post I referred to the Iraq-based Iranian MEK and the KLA as 'jihadists'. A couple of emails have flooded in to call me on this. And yes, in this instance I can only put my hands up and say this was unjust and I retract it. Thre is plenty to be said against both organizations but calling them jihadists only confuses things.

Nicholas Whyte, a very intelligent guy and so influential that his name has been mentioned in conspiracy theories, has kindly overlooked my trespasses on his own patch and taken me to task for my historical references below:

I'm going to detach this completely from the context of present day argument because I think Ken's history is wrong (or, perhaps, I have failed to see the joke). I'm frankly surprised by his blithe acceptance of a) the 1688-92 revolution being a Good Thing and b) the "international conspiracy of religious and feudal reaction" which lasted "for centuries". I realise that this is because I come at this from an Irish Catholic perspective, from which the Penal Laws appear as a crucial instrument of suppression of the rights and powers of the majority of Ireland's inhabitants in order to entrench the power of a minority, with assistance from England. (And that's the moderate version; the more hard-line version would deny that there was any "real" Irish person who benefited from the Penal Laws at all.) I don't know much about Scotland at this period, so it may just be that Ken and I are talking past each other. But I've met enough otherwise sensible people from across the water who don't, for example, realise that Cromwell was a Bad Thing, that I think it's worth expanding on why I think Ken's history is wrong.

Let's indulge in a little counterfactual speculation. What if James II had not been overthrown? I carry no particular brief for him; he was obviously not the greatest king England (or Scotland, or Ireland) ever had, and was largely the architect of his own downfall; but before you start to rejoice at his overthrow, just bear in mind that the straw that broke the camel's back was his enactment of the Declaration of Indulgence - ie that Catholics and Dissenters should have the same civil rights as Anglicans. Shocking, eh? The argument at the time was that this was part of the slippery slope to a Catholic absolute monarchy, but really, any leftist should find this about as convincing as Pinochet's justification for overthrowing Allende in Chile in 1973. In fact, it's difficult to believe that a continuing Jacobite regime would have done anything other than summon a new Parliament, which would this time have had significant Catholic and Dissenter membership, ie been more representative of the people, and come to a modus vivendi between the three groups based on rights rather than repression. (See for a supporting argument the Catholic Encyclopedia's interesting nuances on the Revolution.)

Sure, under my scenario James would probably have continued to mismanage his politics, and may very well have ended up forced to abdicate later rather than sooner, if he didn't die first. But it is absurd to argue that that he could have reversed the Reformation, and I don't believe that was ever his plan. (if it had been, he certainly could not have kept the loyalty of invaluable aides like Samuel Pepys, who was a conforming Anglican and whose wife was a Huguenot refugee.)

I realise that part of the reason I don't see much worth celebrating in the events of 1689-92 is that the people who I did see celebrating it as I grew up gave me every reason to believe that I personally had lost rather than gained as a result. I think my views have now moderated, to the point where I can relatively calmly argue that it didn't make much difference, rather than that it was an actively Bad Thing. (My views on Cromwell, however, have not moderated.)

As for the "international conspiracy" lasting for centuries - well, when James lost the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, a Te Deum in thanks for William's victory was sung in Vienna and the Vatican was lit up in celebration, so it looks to me as if the agents of the international Catholic conspiracy won rather than lost the war! Especially since the French recognised James' overthrow as early as 1697; and I'll bow to any Scot's superior knowledge of the events of 1715 and 1745, but would be surprised to learn that an international conspiracy of feudal and religious reaction was the sole cause of conflict in either case. Certainly the British government doesn't seem to have thought so; the Penal Laws as applied - especially in England - were clearly designed more to entrench the monopoly on legitimacy of the Church of England than to root out loyalists of foreign powers.

No fair-minded person could dispute that in England the various laws against Catholics and Dissenters were prolonged by popular prejudice and Anglican interest well beyond any point where they could be justified by reasons of state; nor that they were an instrument of oppression against the majority population of Ireland. To say that they 'worked' in England wasn't on my part any considered historical judgement, merely to note that the auto-da-fe never became one of the crowd-pulling entertainments of London. Maybe they weren't needed. The Jacobite conspiracies were real and produced two uprisings. Possibly with a less severe repression against Catholicism the uprisings would have met with more success.

Nicholas makes two points which I hope he won't take offence if I call debating points. The first is that the immediate occasion of James II's overthrow was his Declaration of Indulgence. The second is that the Pope was on the same side as William of Orange. Now nobody, from Macaulay to the author of the Catholic Encyclopaedia article cited, allows that James was a sincere convert to toleration. He had been, right up until that point, a relentless persecutor of Presbyterians and other Dissenters. The Declaration of Indulgence was indisputably unconstitutional. James had no authority to annul laws, however odious, that had been passed by Parliament and accepted by the courts. It didn't take long for the Dissenters to be persuaded that the risks to them from an arbitrary Catholic monarchy far outweighed whatever temporary relief it might bestow. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was hot in the memory. (If, to take up the Allende analogy, the (counter-factual) constitutional Marxist president of a neighbouring state, say Argentina, had withdrawn previous solemn guarantees and used great violence against the Argentine middle classes, and Allende was in the meantime busy promoting hard-line revolutionaries to positions of power, Pinochet would have been even more widely hailed than he was.) Indulgence was a tactical manouevre, and as Macaulay shows it was recognised as such in widespread debate at the time.

My counter-factual speculation is this: If James II had succeeded in drawing Catholic and Dissenter into a pincer movement against the Established Church and the limits placed on the monarchy, it is doubtful to say the least that he would have established religious pluralism. (And, let me say again, the Catholic Encyclopaedia produces no supporting argument for this.) More likely there would have been a Catholic monarchy (now with a guaranteed succession) and a immense increase in Catholic power in the state. That after all had been his consistent course and aim. He had used his limited prerogative to place Catholics in every key position he could. What he would have done with an unlimited prerogative was expected to be more of the same. He might not have reversed the Reformation or even aimed to but there is no doubt at all that most of the population would have suspected him, with good reason, of such a design. James might well have had to rely on aid from France to hold power. A second Civil War seems a likely consequence. Defeat for the Protestant majority would have meant national subjugation; victory, a massacre and expulsion of Catholics. It is as well for England that it was spared either.

That the Pope celebrated William's victory at the Boyne may for a moment nonplus an opponent who has never heard of this (and we've all met them), but it won't wash as a serious historical argument. The Pope was allied with the other European powers, Catholic and Protestant, against the overweening ambition of France. That does not at all affect the point that William's victory advanced the Protestant interest, and that his defeat would have favoured the Catholic interest. The Orangemen are no more deluded on that than the Irish Catholics were who supported James.

Was the Glorious Revolution a Good Thing? I'll try to emulate Nicholas's candour and admit that I come to it from a perspective of having heard from childhood of the sufferings of the Covenanter martyrs, and later finding the same martyrs extolled in Marxist and Liberal histories. All the same, I find that I agree with the final 'nuance' of the Catholic Encyclopaedia:

But on the other hand we can now realize that the Revolution had the advantage of finally closing the long struggle between king and Parliament that had lasted for nearly a century, and of establishing general principles of religious toleration in which Catholics were bound sooner or later to be included.

These achievements seem glorious enough.

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