O LORD, our heavenly Father, who didst not punish us as our sins have deserved, but hast in the midst of judge­ment remembered mercy; We acknowledge it thine especial favour, that, though for our many and great provoca­tions, thou didst suffer thine anointed blessed King Charles the First (as on this day) to fall into the hands of violent and blood-thirsty men, and barbarously to be murdered by them, yet thou didst not leave us for ever, as sheep without a shepherd; but by thy gracious providence didst miracu­lously preserve the undoubted Heir of his Crowns, our then gracious Sovereign King Charles the Second, from his bloody enemies, hiding him under the shadow of thy wings, until their tyranny was overpast; and didst bring him back, in thy good appointed time, to sit upon the throne of his Father; and together with the Royal Family didst restore to us our ancient Government in Church and state. For these thy great and unspeakable mercies we render to thee our most humble and unfeigned thanks; beseeching thee, still to continue thy gracious protection over the whole Royal Family, and to grant to our gracious Sovereign King Francis, a long and happy Reign over us: So we that are thy people will give thee thanks for ever, and will alway be shewing forth thy praise from generation to gene­ration; through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. Amen.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is ready to change its description of Maurice Quentin de la Tour’s portrait of Prince Charles Edward Stuart on the basis of a revised opinion on the portrait by the distinguished Jacobite historian Edward Corp. In Corp’s view the picture is more likely to be a young Prince Henry Benedict Stuart, who if paintings are anything to go by seems to have been the more handsome of the two brothers, in spite of the popular image of Charles based on later, derivative and romanticised imagery. While many may remain infatuated with the near-victory of Charles in 1745, a more sober view of Jacobite history must see Henry Benedict as the more capable of the sons of James III. The tragedy of his life was the failure of his brother to produce a legitimate heir and his father’s decision to have him made a Cardinal, thus precluding the continuance of the House of Stuart after 1807. Henry was blighted, in other words, by his brother’s instability and deterioration after his flight from Scotland.

If the famous portrait is Henry Benedict, rather than Charles Edward, not everyone will be disappointed – in spite of his military near-success, Charles III was a moral failure in comparison with his saintly father and principled brother. Henry IX deserves the recognition that the re-designation of this painting may give him.

Today, St. Andrew’s Day, the Scottish Government launches its white paper on independence, setting out what an independent Scotland would look like. The reality, as many commentators have pointed out, is that independence is not likely in the short term given the SNP’s minority administration and the conspiracy of the other three parties against independence. If it is the case that the SNP merely wants to ‘raise the bar’ of expectations and force the other parties towards ‘Devolution Max,’ the granting of full fiscal powers to the Scottish Parliament, this is a clever strategy but it risks missing the point of independence in the first place. ‘Devolution Max’ would mean that Scotland is independent in every sense other than in the true constitutional sense; but the point of the struggle for Scottish independence throughout the centuries has been the contention that the ‘Rogues’ Parliament’ of 1707 had no right to approve the Act of Union in the first place. Intimately tied to this contention is the belief that the Scottish Parliament must have the right to determine the succession to the throne of Scotland independently from the English Parliament – it was fear that Scotland would exercise this right, after all, that led England to annexe Scotland in an unequal union in the first place.

‘Devolution Max’ would leave Scotland with no control of foreign affairs or defence; in other words, Scotland would be de facto independent but would be deprived of the symbols of sovereignty. Its men and women would be expected to fight and die under a foreign flag and Scotland would have no representation on the world stage. It may be that the SNP believes that these considerations will ultimately lead to full independence when people see that ‘Devolution Max’ is working well, but this seems a somewhat cynical and back-to-front approach. The argument for Scottish independence should start with the constitution and then move on to the practical benefits of independence for Scotland; first and foremost, independence is Scotland’s right.

The white paper will reiterate SNP policy that England and Scotland should remain in personal union; for this purpose the Westminster Parliament would have to pass a Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act analogous to that of 1927, since the Queen would have to be re-styled and so would the Westminster Parliament. Exactly what the Queen’s new style would be is unclear. She would presumably have to give up the title ‘Queen of the United Kingdom’ since the original sense of the United Kingdom was England, Scotland and Ireland post 1801. If both the Act of Union of 1801 and the Act of Union of 1707 were repealed the title would seem pointless, although since the Act of Union of 1801 has not been repealed with respect to the Six Counties one could make a tenuous constitutional argument for retaining that title – but the constitutional status of the north of Ireland is by no means clear and I doubt that anyone would want to hinge a constitutional argument upon them. The title ‘Queen of Great Britain’ could theoretically remain since it was first used by James I and VI in 1603 to mark the personal union of his two kingdoms – indeed, the title ‘King of Great Britain’ was also used by  the Jacobite kings as a short hand for ‘King of England and Scotland’. However, it is questionable whether two future constitutional monarchies – England and Scotland – would consider it acceptable for the monarch to unite the countries in one phrase in her title. They might insist on separate national titles since in a personal union, no such entity as ‘Great Britain’ would exist except in the person of the monarch. We are left, I think, with two possibilities:

Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Defender of the Faith

Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God Queen of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, Defender of the Faith

However, problems arise even for the second title since if England and Scotland are present in it as independent countries, it would seem strange for Northern Ireland to be present in the title as part of a fragmentary ‘United Kingdom of England and Northern Ireland’. Furthermore, given the present constitutional status of Wales as an entity in some sense separate from England, it would seem strange for Wales to make no appearance. Finally, a court in an independent Scotland could overturn the 1951 ruling that styles and titles are a matter of Royal Prerogative and advise the Queen to style herself Elizabeth I in Scotland, so that her title in Scotland could be:

Elizabeth I, by the Grace of God, Queen of Scotland

In other words, personal union with Scotland could undo the process of amalgamating royal titles that has been underway for several centuries, and could create incompatible royal titles that could only be used in one country at a time.

However, there are potential benefits to a personal union between England and Scotland in a constitutional monarchy, in the sense that the monarch will be freed from subservience to one government by the fact that she is subservient to another as well. Handled in the right way, this dual status of the monarchy could lead to greater royal freedom, in the sense that in a disagreement between England and Scotland it would not be feasible for either nation fully to control the monarch’s contribution.

Furthermore, few have realised that an independent Scotland would almost inevitably result in the disestablishment of that strange monster, the Church of Scotland. An independent Scottish Government would be unlikely to look with favour on the idea of an established church, especially given the growing population of Glasgow and its Catholic majority.

Presumably because he could not think of anything else headline-grabbing to discuss with Commonwealth leaders in Trinidad, Gordon Brown has seized on Evan Harris’s suggestion from earlier in the year that the Acts of Settlement and Succession should be revised to permit Catholics and first-born princesses to succeed to the throne. All of the Commonwealth realms would have to agree to this, and it is by no means certain that they will do so – some because they are republican by instinct and would shy away from the headlines that a succession bill would create in their own country, some because they do not share Gordon Brown’s concern for political correctness and some because they will not want their legislative agenda to be driven by Britain.

The repeal of these acts would, of course, be a positive step in itself, but I am concerned that the motivation for this is the wrong one. The move to allow an elder princess to succeed before her younger brother is a sting in the tail of an otherwise good proposal as it could potentially create a constitutional crisis in the future, with conservatives supporting the succession of a male over a female as happened in Spain at the start of the Carlist Wars.

Evan Harris is right that the Acts of Settlement and Succession are the discrimination at the heart of our constitution, but what he and Gordon Brown fail to acknowledge is that a 17th century constitutional injustice is not remedied by a 21st century sticking plaster. In order to undo the injustice completely, there would have to be an acknowledgement that the Revolution of 1688 was illegal and that boths acts were passed under an usurped power. Gordon Brown knows this and for this reason the legislation will not and cannot be retrospective; it does not acknowledge the past injustice suffered by the House of Stuart by being excluded from the succession, nor does it acknowledge the legitimate right of the House of Wittelsbach.

Arms of the House of Aberffraw, senior line descendents of the House of Cunedda

In 1283, when Edward I defeated Llewellyn the Last, the Principality of Wales (Llewelyn’s lands in Gwynedd and those of his native vassals) came under the rule of the English king by the Statute of Rhuddlan. In other words, the title of Prince of Wales was merged in the English Crown but not abolished, since it was granted by Edward I to his son. The Principality of Wales remained a distinct entity, a right of the English crown, administered by the Council of Wales. The Council’s continuing existence until its abolition after the Revolution in 1689 indicates that the ‘Principality of Wales’ can be spoken of until that point, and for Jacobites the abolition of the Council and, implicitly, the Principality of Wales as a distinct entity from England by a revolutionary government cannot be regarded as legitimate. It is incorrect to see Henry VIII’s series of acts to harmonise English and Welsh law between 1535 and 1542 as Acts of Union in the same sense as the Acts of Union of 1707 and 1801; they were designed to incorporate the March of Wales more fully into England and their effect on the Principality was incidental. To all intents and purposes, in spite of the imposition of county administration on the Welsh and the acts of Henry VIII, the Principality of Wales continued to exist as a theoretical entity until the Revolution.

Numerous Welsh aristocrats, many descended from the old native nobility, showed great loyalty to the House of Stuart and Wales was a hotbed of Jacobitism. Most famously, Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, 3rd Baronet, decided not to raise a Welsh force to join with the Prince Regent when he entered England in 1745. Had he done so, the retreat from Derby might never have taken place and George of Hanover might have been overthrown. Sir Watkin was the son of Jane Thelwall, great-granddaughter of Sir John Wynn, 1st Baronet of Gwydir, who was the descendent of Owain Glyndwr (last native Prince of Wales) and Head of the House of Aberffraw.

The Houses of Cunedda, Aberffraw and Dinefwr

In around 440AD, if the ancient Welsh genealogies are to be believed, Cunedda Wledig, a descendent of Roman or Romano-British war leaders in the ‘Old North’ came from the Kingdom of Gododdin (near Edinburgh) to the land of the Venedoti, Gwynedd. The straggling dynasty that Cunedda established and that bore his name provided the kings of both Gwynedd and Deheubarth.

Rhodri Mawr (c. 820-878), was one of the few kings of the House of Cunedda to unite Wales but the traditional principle of partition required him to divide his kingdom between his sons. Rhodri’s eldest son Anarawd ap Rhodri established the senior House of Aberffraw, which ruled Gwynedd and then all Wales until the defeat of Llewellyn the Last (1223-83). Rhodri’s grandson Hywel Dda (880-950) established the Kingdom of Deheubarth. However, the Kingdoms of Wales were united in the Principality of Wales, ruled by the House of Aberffraw, in the 1160s.

Owain Glyndwr, the last native Prince of Wales (who asserted his sovereignty by summoning a Parliament at Machynlleth) apparently died without issue. At this point the position of head of the House of Aberffraw reverted to Robert, eldest son of Maredudd ap Hywel of Tywyn, who became the progenitor of the Wynns of Gwydir, the last of whom was Sir John Wynn, 5th Baronet, who died in 1719. Sir John died without issue but Jane Thelwall, descendent of a daughter of the 1st Baronet, continued the line into the Williams-Wynn family. On this interpretation of the descent of the House of Aberffraw, the present head of the House is the descendent of Jane Thelwall, Sir David Watkin Williams-Wynn, 11th Baronet of Bodelwyddan (b. 1940).

Arms of the Williams-Wynn Baronets, descendents of the House of Aberffraw through Sir John Wynn, 1st Baronet and Jane Thelwall

The Kings of Deheubarth, the junior descendents of Rhodri Mawr, also have descendents today. Rhys ap Gruffydd, King of Deheubarth (1132-97) had a daughter Gwenllian (d. 1236) who married Edynfed Fychan, Seneschal of Gwynedd, who was the ancestor of Owain Tewdyr who apparently married Catherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V. His second son by Catherine, Edmund Tudor, 1st Duke of Richmond, married Lady Margaret Beaufort, making him the progenitor of the Tudor dynasty. When Elizabeth died in 1603, the last of the direct Tudor line, the Tudor succession reverted to the descendents of Margaret, eldest daughter of Henry VII, who had married James IV of Scotland and was the grandmother of Mary, Queen of Scots and great-grandmother of James VI of Scotland, the first Stuart to rule England.

Arms of Owain Tewdyr, descendent of the House of Dinefwr (Kings of Deheubarth)

If the House of Tudor is taken to represent the legitimate descent of the House of Dinefwr, the successor of the House of Tudor (Franz von Wittelsbach) is the head of the House of Dinefwr.

Wales’ Constitutional Status

It is clear that, for Jacobites, the Principality of Wales exists as a separate entity from England, administered by the Council of Wales. What is less clear is whether the English Crown ever had the right to annexe the Principality to itself. Aside from questions concerning the legitimacy of the Plantagenets as rulers of England (let alone Wales), the legitimacy of the Statute of Rhuddlan is doubtful. If the Statute of Rhuddlan were to be repealed it would leave Jane Thelwall’s successor as Prince of Wales and, presumably, legitimate the acts of Owain Glyndwr as Prince of Wales, most notably his summoning of a Parliament. This would require a Parliament to be established for Wales.

It may be that Jacobite legitimism requires one, in all honesty, to disregard the Statute of Rhuddlan. In the absence of this solution and, bearing in mind the present King’s descent from Hywel Dda and the Stuart monarchs’ implicit recognition of the Statute of Rhuddlan, it seems that a Jacobite must at the very least support Welsh devolution and the Welsh Assembly as an approximation to the legal and constitutional recognition of the Principality of Wales.

In this regard it is interesting that, when the Welsh Assembly requested armorial bearings the College of Arms responded in 2008 by producing a new badge for Wales. This is the arms of the Princes of Wales surmounted by St. Edward’s Crown (rather than the Prince of Wales’ coronet, as in the arms of Charles, Prince of Wales). The use of St. Edward’s Crown symbolises the sovereignty of the Queen of England rather than the Prince of Wales (who has no actual sovereignty over Wales), and the placing of the Crown over the arms of Llewellyn would heraldically indicate that these are the arms of the Queen in right of Prince of Wales (compare the use of St. Edward’s Crown in the arms of the Isle of Man). Whilst a coat of arms can scarcely be accounted a constitutional change, the use of these arms on Welsh Assembly measures is equivalent to the use of the royal arms on Acts of the Westminster Parliament, thereby suggesting that Wales is a distinct constitutional entity from England.

The Royal Badge of Wales, symbolising the royal authority of the Welsh Assembly

A fascinating discussion here!  I’m not sure I buy it all, whether as an Irishman, an Indigenous person (whether of North America or of Ireland/Europe), or a half-baked Red Tory … even an Orthodox Christian … but intriguing reading and thinking.  I may have to re-read it.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

The Battle of Sole Bay (28th March 1672)

From A. S. Harvey, Ballads, Song and Rhymes of East Anglia (1936), pp. 29-31

One day as I was sitting still

Upon the side of Dunwich hill,

And looking on the ocean,

By chance I saw De Ruyter’s fleet

With royal James’s squadron meet;

In sooth, it was a noble treat

To see that brave commotion.

I cannot stay to name the names

Of all the ships that fought with James,

Their number or their tonnage;

But this I say, the noble host

Right gallantly did take its post,

And covered all the hollow coast

From Walberswyck to Dunwich.

The French, who should have joined the Duke,

Full far astern did lag and look,

Although their hulls were lighter;

But nobly faced the Duke of York,

(Though some may wink and some may talk)

Right stoutly did his vessel stalk

To buffet with De Ruyter.

Well might you hear their guns, I guess

From Sizewell Gap to Easton Ness,

The show was rare and sightly;

They battled without let or stay

Until the evening of that day,

’Twas then the Dutchmen ran away,

The Duke had beat them tightly.

Of all the battles gained at sea

This was the rarest victory

Since Phillip’s grand armada;

I will not name the rebel Blake,

He fought for Whore-son Cromwell’s sake,

And yet was forced three days to take

To quell the Dutch bravado.

So now we’ve seen them take to flight,

This way and that, where’er they might,

To windward or to le’ward;

Here’s to King Charles and here’s to James,

And here’s to all the captains’ names,

And here’s to all the Suffolk dames,

And here’s the house of Stuart!

Wendy Alexander’s sudden change of heart on the issue of a referendum on Scottish independence is likely to be a cunning attempt to hijack the referendum in order to pose a frightening question to the Scottish people. Realising that Labour is losing the argument in Scotland, Alexander is attempting to portray the SNP as sluggish in its referendum plans. I imagine that most people in Scotland will see through yet another flimsy attempt to shore up the rotting Act of Union. The phrasing of the referendum question is crucial; the Labour Party and other Unionists must not be allowed to portray the cause of independence as a nationalist or ethnic issue.

The argument advanced by Unionists against independence are beginning to sound worryingly like the arguments used by the British government to secure Dominion status within the British Empire for the Irish Free State, or indeed the arguments used to justify punitive action against the Highlands in 1746; the protection of commerce and trade. With any luck, such arguments are now wearing thin with the Scottish people.

Two issues related to the royal succession have surfaced in the media recently – first, the abolition of male primogeniture and secondly the ban on Catholics in the line of succession.

The abolition of male primogeniture seems, in 21st century eyes, an entirely reasonable measure. However, before jumping to the conclusion that the exclusion of first-born females is an injustice it is worth considering the reasons male primogeniture exists in the first place. It is not an equality issue; English succession law has clearly acknowledged, at least since the reign of Mary, that a woman can succeed to the throne. The Empress Matilda contended for the throne on the understanding that England lay outside the scope of the Salic Law that dominated much of Europe. Matilda had a better right to the throne than Stephen because she was the heir of Henry I’s body, and thus took precedence over a male cousin; furthermore, it was Matilda who initiated a new dynasty when her son Henry of Anjou succeeded rather than Stephen’s son William of Blois. The reason why the female issue of a king did not succeed before a male issue was not sexism (the view that women made weaker monarchs, or some such) but dynastic and genealogical concerns. The right to kingship must be as unambiguous as possible; this could be guaranteed (theoretically) through inheritance in the female line but historically it is through inheritance in the male line. This means that a daughter who is the only issue of a male line will continue that male line (e.g. Margaret of Scotland continued the House of Wessex). The one thing that is not possible is for succession to be in both the male and the female lines; if a female heir took precedence, each male heir would produce rival lines. One only has to consider the Carlist Wars in 19th century Spain to see the problems that a change to succession law can cause.

Of course, in a world of constitutional monarchy none of this matters. And it is only because this does not matter that a change in the law is contemplated. If the monarch had power the identity of the monarch would matter; and consequently the dynastic succession would matter.

It has been widely reported (e.g. The Daily Telegraph, 10th April) that a repeal of that part of the Act of Succession that bans a Catholic from a place in the line of succession could lead to the succession of the de jure King, Franz of Bavaria. Sadly, this seems unlikely. Succession legislation has traditionally been couched in terms of succession from a specified ancestor; for instance, the Act of Succession itself defined the ‘legitimate’ royal house as that which descended from Sophia of the Palatinate. If succession legislation were left open to retrospective application then numerous spurious claims could be made. The best new Act of Succession would define the royal house as the senior descendents of James I; this would be the Wittelsbachs, where the Windsors are the junior descendents (being descended from Elizabeth of Bohemia). However, I suspect that in reality the new Act of Succession will permit Catholic descendents of Elizabeth II to succeed, and thus will not herald a Jacobite springtime…

This is the letter I wrote to The Daily Telegraph on the issue:

Sir,

Male primogeniture in the succession to the English crown is not, and never has been, an issue of equality and it is ignorant of politicians to believe it is. The reason for male primogeniture is a dynastic, not a sexist one. It has been established since the reign of Mary Tudor that a woman can be Queen; in the 12th century a civil war between Stephen and Matilda was fought over this issue, and it was Henry of Anjou, Matilda’s son, who became king after Stephen’s death. However, succession to the throne cannot be ambiguous and must, therefore, be through either the male or the female line. If it is through a mixture of the two, rival lines could be created in every generation. Admittedly, in a constitutional monarchy the likelihood of pretenders and usurpers is slim, but the monarchy remains part of the British constitution and consequently the identity of the monarch must be clear.

The Jacobite

Devil Water by Anya Seton

They say the devil’s water, it ain’t so sweet
You don’t have to drink right now
But you can dip your feet
Every once in a little while

“When You Were Young” by The Killers

Devil Water tells the story of Charles Radclyffe and his daughter by a secret marriage, Jenny. Charles is the youngest brother of James Radclyffe, the 3rd Earl of Derwentwater (I love saying and reading that name – I don’t know why). Shortly after Charles meets and becomes intimate with Jenny’s mother, Meg Snowden, James returns to England after living abroad with the Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart. James adores his cousin James and longs for the day when James is formally recognized as the King of England. He quickly becomes Charles’ mentor effortlessly converted Charles as a Jacobitism. Jenny was conceived before James’ return. Her family on her mother’s side forced Charles into a marriage on fear of death. Despite this, he fell in love with Jenny the first time he saw her. It pained him more than he imagined when he was not allowed to be with his family.

It wasn’t until the failed Jacobite Rebellion of 1715 that Jenny reenters his life. While preparing for the rebellion, Charles convinces Meg, his secret bride, to allow him to raise her in a manner more befitting Jenny’s station as a Radclyffe. While imprisoned and waiting death for high treason, he convinces Elizabeth Lee, and old flame, to take Jenny in and raise her in London. She is well liked and well cared for in the Lee household. She is thankful for the them and is blessed with a friend in Evelyn Byrd, the daughter of William Byrd of Virginia. Still, Jenny never feels as though she belongs anywhere. Even when Charles returns to take her to the continent to live with his new family, Jenny feels like an outsider. The only person with whom she feels at home is Rob Wilson, a young man who helped her family in Northumberland. When Rob is transported to Virginia for a criminal act he committed in order to save her life, Jenny jumps at the chance to travel with Evelyn to the Colonies.

Until picking up this novel, I knew almost nothing about the Jacobites or the political climate in England that created that rift. The most compelling portions of this novel revolved around James Radclyffe and his participation in The Fifteen. His decision to take up his sword and fight when he felt certain it would mean his own demise was powerful. Although he sensed the weakness in his cousin, he fought for the Stuarts and for his faith. His dedication, loyalty, and faith in both God and man makes him a strong character. It is easy to understand how his wife could fall apart after his execution.

I sincerely doubt that Brandon Flowers or any other member of The Killers has read Devil Water, but it was very interesting to revisit this song while I was reading this book. Jenny has a constant desire for a sense of home. A sense she only really had when she was a young girl in Northumberland. She finds some peace with Rob Wilson, but she is not complete without her father. This fight costs her dearly and the reader feels this as well. Because Rob and Charles are an ocean and an ideology apart, Jenny is never complete. Her romance with Rob never has the passion that was present another of Seton’s novels, The Winthrop Woman. This bothered me while reading the novel. It wasn’t until I sat down to write this review that it occurred to me that this distance between Rob and Jenny made sense. It’s not that the author could have made their relationship more compelling and did not. It’s that Jenny’s two halves could never be happily reconciled with one another.

Jenny is an unconventional heroine. She cannot escape her fate, but she faces life bravely and never loses her dignity. Perhaps this is the greatest gift she ever received from her father. I highly recommend this novel and plan to read all of Seton’s work.

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To buy this novel, click here.

          

There are more sites of Jacobite interest in Rome than in any other European city, although on my recent visit there I saw only one or two of them. The Venerable English College remains a den of Jacobite sympathy – or at least it was a few years ago when I last visited, albeit the seminarian who showed me around this time gave me a blank look when I pointed out the portrait of Henry IX. I photographed this portrait and the arms of King Henry, for whom Pius VII made an exception when he prohibited the display of coronets on Cardinals’ coats of arms.In St. Peter’s I paid homage to the monument to the Stuart kings and the monument to Queen Clementina; later I passed the tomb of James III in the crypt (he seems to be the only non-Pope buried down there) but I was unable to photograph it. It is a fittingly distinguished burial place, although I should still prefer him to be in Westminster Abbey…

Another aim I had in Rome was to track down any remains of the Church of St. Edmund on Campo dei Fiori, recorded by J. B. Mackinlay in 1893 as having been founded either in 1300 or 1350 by a Mr and Mrs Whyte as the chapel of a hostel for English pilgrims; it was absorbed into the Hospital of the Most Holy Trinity and St. Thomas of Canterbury (now the English College) in 1463 (hence the appearance of Edmund in the Hospital seal and later in the Martyrs’ Picture) but a pediment bearing the Plantagenet arms survived near the Church of the Genoese and the Church of St. Cecilia until about 1888 if Mackinlay is to be believed. Unfortunately, there do not appear to be any churches now on Campo dei Fiori at all – the nearest is St. Bridget of Sweden on Piazza Farnese.

The Horrid Thirtieth returns again, once a day of national repentance and Tory pride, now unmarked by anyone except the Society of King Charles the Martyr. A recent glance at a 1734 Book of Common Prayer revealed that the service for the 30th January remained, as did the Gunpowder Plot service albeit unhappily joined to a commemoration of the landing of the Prince of Orange on the same day as the ‘Deliverer from Popery.’ In fact, I am not sure when the service for the 30th ceased to be appended to the Prayer Book, although I have no doubt that by 1734 it was rarely used. By 1858, when Lord Stanhope petitioned for its removal, it was doubtless the sole preserve of pretentious Tractarians. The last great flowering of the 30th as a day of Tory political theatre was surely the reign of Queen Anne, when members of the ‘October Clubs’ maintained the Divine Right of Kings in a vain attempt to stave off the abomination of a Hanoverian succession.

The question of what King Charles represented, and why a feast day was initiated in his honour, is an important one insofar as the celebration of his feast day today can all too easily become no more than a legitimist or Anglo-Catholic festival. The extent to which Anglo-Catholics can claim any inheritance from the seventeenth century I discussed in an earlier post. Certainly, the petititions for the prayers of King Charles (who was never known as St. Charles, incidentally) were never part of the official liturgy. Furthermore, it would be a travesty for the 30th January to have merely a cosmetic religious significance – a way of giving honour to legitimism and not to God.

Charles I was a Protestant through and through; it was on this fact that he fought the Civil War, resenting the implication that his court and his religious policy was infected with ‘popery.’ Charles’ belief was that the episcopal order was Scriptural, and that it best effected the godly order of the English nation. As such, he differed in no way from Elizabeth in his religious policy. Charles was martyred not for ‘Popish prelacy’ as his enemies would no doubt have claimed, but for the episcopal order as established by Scripture, as the preface to the 1559 Prayer Book makes clear. Charles understood better than anyone that the Church of England was imperfect and needed reform; perhaps his reform moved too quickly and antagonised too many, but he lived and breathed the eirenic world of early 17th century utopian Protestantism, which had emerged from the hostile reaction of the 16th century and now longed for the re-union of Christendom in a new culture of freedom. This was his father’s dream and yet for Charles’ sons such a vision would be inaccessible, prompting their eventual conversion to Catholicism (although James II never forsook the dream of toleration).

When Charles’ commemoration was included in the Prayer Book in 1660 it was after careful theological consideration. The commemoration of martyrs with feasts was recognised by antiquaries as a custom of great antiquity in the Church, going back to the apostolic period, and therefore the fact that Charles had been a martyr eased his passage into the Prayer Book. Furthermore, in a national church as the Church of England then was, the only figure who could command universal reverence (and who was effectively uncontroversial) was the King who was Supreme Governor. Consequently, as King and Martyr Charles could be commemorated without theological issues arising (the apostles whoe feasts occurred in the Prayer Book were martyrs, too) and without overt political controversy.

The Horrid Thirtieth is a day on which we remember the challenge posed to the apostolic constitution of the Church of England by the tyranny of Parliament, and inevitably our thoughts are also drawn to the more subtle dismantlement of the Church of England’s integrity in 1688. Charles was the Church of England’s first martyr; by the end of the century there was no Church of England left for which to die.

O LORD, our heavenly Father, who didst not punish us as our sins have deserved, but hast in the midst of judge­ment remembered mercy; We acknowledge it thine especial favour, that, though for our many and great provoca­tions, thou didst suffer thine anointed blessed King Charles the First (as on this day) to fall into the hands of violent and blood-thirsty men, and barbarously to be murdered by them, yet thou didst not leave us for ever, as sheep without a shepherd; but by thy gracious providence didst miracu­lously preserve the undoubted Heir of his Crowns, our then gracious Sovereign King Charles the Second, from his bloody enemies, hiding him under the shadow of thy wings, until their tyranny was overpast; and didst bring him back, in thy good appointed time, to sit upon the throne of his Father; and together with the Royal Family didst restore to us our ancient Government in Church and state. For these thy great and unspeakable mercies we render to thee our most humble and unfeigned thanks; beseeching thee, still to continue thy gracious protection over the whole Royal Family, and to grant to our gracious Sovereign a long and happy Reign over us: So we that are thy people will give thee thanks for ever, and will alway be shewing forth thy praise from generation to gene­ration; through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. Amen.

A few days ago I visited the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Fressingfield in order to view the tomb of William Sancroft. He is buried outside the north side of the chancel, in death as in life refusing to enter a church whose prayers for a usurping tyrant he considered sinful. Thus the last Archbishop of the true Church of England lies in the humble country churchyard of the church in which he was baptised.

The suggestion of Murdo Fraser, the Deputy Leader of the Scottish Tories, that the United Kingdom should become a ‘federal’ state seems to have caused great concern to David Cameron, who has jumped to the defence of the Union. The Scottish Tories are supposed to be ‘too close’ to the SNP. If only we could believe that were true! Fraser’s federalism sounds pretty crass but at least it is better than the unthinking, dogmatic Unionism one sees in Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

So many Tories in England are opposed to the Union because they are possessed of a ‘coarse, narrow nationalism’ (as David Cameron said today) that rests on a dislike of the Scots and a ‘little England’ mentality. Unfortunately, that ‘nationalistic’ agenda also prevents them forming an alliance with anyone else, non-English, who opposes the Union. None of this foolishness would exist if only opposition to the Union were on constitutional, rather than quasi-nationalistic grounds. The intrusion of nationalism always gives so much ammunition to Unionists, who cannot after all defend a Union that, on any reading of history, was formed without the consent of the people with no other purpose than to prevent a Stuart succession north of the border – so the Unionists are forced to resort to ad hominem attacks on those opposed to the Union, which sadly is not always a difficult task to accomplish.

On a related note, all parties now seem united on the issue of removing the infamous third verse, with its reference to Marshal Wade and rebellious Scots, from the national anthem. What most have failed to realise is that the words of the first verse were stolen from the Jacobites, and are first recorded on a Jacobite glass discovered at Oxburgh Hall.

The Anglican tradition is an elusive concept, fought over by many competing interests. However, I would contend that the fact the very soul of Anglicanism can now be fought over is an inheritance of the weakness of the Church of England in the 1830s that allowed it to be overwhelmed first by the theology of the Oxford Movement and then by liberalism. Of course, that weakness was itself the outcome of 150 years of stagnation and fossilisation since the Revolution. Before the 1830s, Anglicans might not have been able to say what the faith of the Church of England was, but I doubt very much that any of them would have defined it in a way congenial to either Anglo-Catholics or liberals. The faith of the Church of England between 1688 and 1830 was an evangelical and reformed faith, intellectually and morally disembowelled by the Enlightenment. Until the appearance of the Wesleys in the 1750s (for whom the Church of England was in any case not ready), the only Anglicans who stood against the vacuity of the Established Church were the Non-Jurors. This is an important point missed by commentators on Anglican identity such as Richard Turnbull, who in his otherwise excellent book Anglican and Evangelical? fails to recognise the significance of the Non-Jurors.

The internal disputes that tormented the Non-Jurors – first the usage vs. non-usage debate over the use of the 1549 Prayer Book and then the Bangorian Controversy spilling over into the juring Church – have been seen by too many historians as evidence for the weakness of the Non-Jurors as a movement. In the long view of history, however, it is perhaps more accurate to see them as the only important doctrinal and canonical disputes within Anglicanism in the first three quarters of the 18th century, and as such an indication that theology still mattered to the Non-Jurors where it had ceased to matter to the Latitudinarians who occupied the bench of the Lords Spiritual. In other words, the Non-Jurors were not an eccentric strand of 18th century Anglicanism – they were 18th century Anglicanism at a time when other Anglicans had lost any sense of identity. Like Anglicans at any time of history, the Non-Jurors were divided – and this, too, is a point sometimes missed by historians, who are too ready to imbibe the myth perpetuated by Anglo-Catholics that the Non-Jurors were a proto-Anglo-Catholic movement. Anglo-Catholics are understandably anxious to establish a lineage pre-Pusey, but their ownership of the Non-Jurors, like their ownership of the Caroline divines, is on shaky ground.

Hickes, especially in his posthumous work, was certainly heading towards a strongly Catholic position on the ministerial priesthood. However, whilst he may have been the key figure in the movement, Hickes was not the only one. Nathaniel Spinckes opposed the ‘usages’ of the 1549 Prayer Book – which, most controversially, included prayer for the dead – on Protestant grounds. The Non-Jurors were no less Protestant as a body, and no more ‘Catholic’, than their brethren in the established church. However, the Non-Jurors did develop certain distinctive ideas and practices whose influence was lasting.

After the ordination of Hickes as Suffragan Bishop of Thetford and Thomas Wagstaffe as Bishop of Ipswich, the second generation of Non-Juring bishops did not take territorial titles. They were ‘bishops at large’ rather like the Catholic Vicars Apostolic of the period. Hickes’ maintenance of the sacredness of the episcopal order had, ironically, resulted in a significant innovation to the episcopacy; not since the days of Celtic Christianity had Britain seen bishops without sees. It was Hickes’ profound conviction that the episcopal order had the authority of Scripture behind it – and the Bangorian Controversy began when Benjamin Hoadly challenged Hickes in the most radical way by denying that Scripture licensed any form of church government. For very different reasons, Hoadly was taking up the view of earlier Puritans who had advocated the abolition of episcopacy in the Church of England on the grounds that it was unscriptural. The difference now was that Hoadly – a territorial bishop – was maintaining the unscriptural character of the episcopacy against Non-Jurors without territorial bishops. The old Puritan objection to ‘prelacy,’ that the cathedral foundations simply perpetuated Popish practice, lost its force against the Non-Jurors, who no longer enjoyed the privileges of the established church that had always tempted insincerity for the sake of advancement. The Non-Jurors maintained episcopacy for its own sake as the apostolic form of church government.

This, then, was a major heritage of the Non-Jurors – the maintenance of episcopacy not as a political but as a theological position, the separation of episcopal church governance from territorial jurisdiction and a rediscovery of the true role of a bishop.

The Non-Jurors have been seen as intolerant, insofar as their origin lay in Sancroft and the Seven Bishops’ rejection of James’ Declaration of Indulgence. However, the evidence suggests that the Bishops were in favour of tolerance as a principle but opposed to toleration as a method. In other words, Sancroft would rather have seen comprehension of dissenters (of the sort attempted under William in 1689) than open toleration. He was right, perhaps, in seeing James’ concept of toleration as one primarily focussed on Catholic emancipation; he was also right to see that the only way in which Catholics could take part in English political life was through universal toleration, since given the presuppositions of Catholic ecclesiology, the comprehension of Catholics was plainly impossible. In the case of the dissenters, it was obstacles such as the surplice and the sign of the cross in baptism that stood in the way of comprehension – not a fundamental questioning that the Church of England was the true church of Christ. The Prayer Book project of 1689 was, then, an enterprise in line with rather than anathema to the principles of the early Non-Jurors. Historians are right to see it as the last attempt to make the Church of England a truly national church. With the abandonment of Prayer Book revision came the implicit acknowledgement that a return to James’ policy of toleration was the only way in which to keep the nation together; thus we have the Toleration Act of 1689, albeit excluding Catholics.

The idea of England as a Christian nation united by faith was an aspiration shared, albeit in different ways, by Puritans and Catholics. For the Catholics, the aim was the re-conversion of England and her re-incorporation into Christendom. For the Puritans, it was the aim of creating a new Jerusalem, a godly nation. In 1689 the Church of England decisively abandoned the vision that had been cherished by so many of its first founders, and thus the insincere ‘conformity’ of the 18th century was initiated.

The Non-Jurors are a difficult body to pin down, in doctrine or practice; their influence spread beyond the confines of their own movement, as demonstrated by Wesley’s admiration for William Law. However, it is fair to say that as the Church of England entered one of its darkest periods, the Non-Jurors represented a vital, if polemical Anglicanism.

Historians have generally seen the Non-Jurors as no more than the ideological successors of the Tories of 1687 who refused to read James II’s Declaration of Indulgence in the churches. They were conservative Anglicans who would not brook James’ plans for toleration – and, indeed, feared toleration more than Popery. But is this fair? Perhaps Sancroft, Lloyd and the original Non-Juring bishops can be characterised in this way. For them, dissent was always the real enemy that threatened the established church. However, the next generation of Non-Jurors – Hickes, Spincke, Collier and the rest – had to find for themselves an identity other than the simple battle of church vs. dissent of the reign of Charles II. It is true that the Non-Jurors remained deeply suspicious of dissenters – after all, the dissenters entered into dialogue with William of Orange about revisions to the Prayer Book in 1689, and later reached an accommodation with him that secured the Toleration Act of 1699. Furthermore, at the court of St. Germain the Non-Jurors were forced to leave cheek-by-jowl with Catholics and thus developed a greater understanding of the workings of Rome at first hand, removed from English propaganda.

The Non-Jurors were sympathetic to Catholicism and the writings of George Hickes, in particular, reveal an appreciation of Catholic spirituality comparable to Wesley’s enthusiasm for certain Catholic writers. Fénélon, the spiritual director of James III, was later admired by many English Protestants. Hickes was adamant that the vast majority of Catholics were sincere Christians who had inherited unfortunate superstitions; only a minority, in his view, made use of scholastic arguments to defend those superstitions. The Non-Jurors naturally came under fire for ‘popery’ – in the first place they supported the succession of a Catholic King and in the second they eschewed the anti-Catholic rhetoric still so common among English Protestants. However, the Non-Jurors reacted to this criticism by ensuring they clearly identified themselves as Protestants, however eirenic towards Catholics.

James II’s concept of religious toleration, treasured by his son James III as an inheritance no less important than his father’s Catholic faith, was the single hope on which the Non-Jurors pinned their existence in a post-restoration settlement. They did not share the belief of the majority of English Protestants brought up on the image of 1688 as the ‘Protestant Revolution’ that James had always intended to impose Catholicism on England. The second generation of Non-Jurors were firm believers, therefore, in toleration, not unyielding churchmen like Sancroft. The Non-Jurors’ triumph came, in one way, with the conversion of Charles III in 1753 in the hope that a Protestant Stuart prince would be more acceptable to the English people. However, this somewhat insincere event, although it gave a boost to the Non-Juring church so long neglected by the King, should not be seen as the Non-Jurors’ greatest achievement.

The Non-Jurors represented an Anglicanism uncompromised by the Latitudinarianism of the Williamite clergy – characters such as Tenison and Stillingfleet. In the process of forging their identity, the Non-Jurors returned to the great churchmen of the Jacobean period in which the Anglican church had established itself as a reformed yet Arminian faith that treasured its connection to a pre-Reformation past. The words of James I to Parliament on 9th November 1605 in the midst of bloody reprisals against the English Catholic community sum up the King’s real attitude to Catholics, albeit ignored by many of his ‘Puritan’ advisors:

“Many honest men blinded peradventure with some opinions of Popery, as if they be not sound in the questions of the Real Presence, or in the number of the Sacraments, or some such School-question: yet do they either not know, or at least not believe all the true grounds of Popery, which is indeed the Mystery of Iniquity. And therefore do we justly confess, that many Papists, especially our forefathers, laying their only trust upon Christ and his Merits at their last breath, may be, and often times are saved; detesting in that point, and thinking the cruelty of Puritans worthy of fire, that will admit no salvation to any Papist.”

James I’s hatred of Puritans was always greater than his hatred of Catholics, although his reasons were political as much as theological – he had no desire to offend other princes, and indeed cultivated the peace of Europe. Unless Anglicanism was a religion capable of sustaining that policy it was without worth. The reality of James I’s convictions is all the more apparent when one considers how willing he was to consider Catholic brides for his son.

One hundred years later George Hickes echoed James’ words, and indeed went further, in his preface to Devotions in the Ancient Way of Offices (1701):

“There are some among the learned, as well as among the more common sort, that are subject to such prejudices against the Church of Rome, they are apt to think there are no true fruits of piety among those of that communion, not any helps to heaven can come from thence. But these persons should consider, that there are three sorts of men in that Church, who are not so accountable for the errors, and corruptions thereof. Some through the powerful influence of education, and the invincible, or almost invincible ignorance that attends it, do not discern the great faults of their Church, and God being merciful to such men’s mistakes, gives them His Holy Spirit, by the assistance whereof they bring forth the fruits of true piety; and among these we find many persons eminent for humility, purity, charity, devotion, gentleness, self-denial and resignation, and other Christian graces, and where we find men in dangerous communions, so secured against the dangers of them, by the special favour of God, we ought to magnify his goodness, and their example ought to provoke us to emulation, and to imitate the patterns they set us in good works.

“Some there are again, who knowing the controverted doctrines, and practices of their Church, and the heavy charges we justly lay upon them, yet through the modesty, and humility of their tempers, joyn’d with a credulous charity, and great admiration they have for that Church, upon the account of some glaring, but accidental advantages, which other Churches want, they are unwilling to enter into a thorough examination of the points in controversie, thinking it the safest way to make no strict researches, but deny their understandings in some things, as they do their wills in others, in submission to the Church’s authority, and to believe, as she doth.

“Others there are in the third place, who, though they are convinced of the dangerous errors both in doctrine, and practice of their Church, that it ought to reform from them, yet think it better to bewail them in private, and daily praying for a Reformation, to bear with them till the happy time when the Church shall reform itself in peace, and with security to the succession, and authority of the priesthood, the government, discipline and patrimony of the Church, and the just exercise of all her spiritual powers and rights. Great numbers of such well disposed men are, and always have been in the Church of Rome, since it needed to be reformed, and the Christian world is beholden to many of them, for their admirable works, which we are to embrace with all respect to their persons, and memories, and thankfulness to God, who gave them such excellent gifts. These men are none of those, who send us in the lump to Hell, as heretics, though they think us not reformed in that happy manner, that in love to the Church of God, and compassion to us, some of them seem heartily to wish. One of them writing of us not long since, said, we are rather to be called Non-Catholics, than heretics; and though these men do not come over to us, but think it best to abide in that communion, from which we had great reason to reform, yet, it would not only be great weakness, but peevishness, and want of Christian candour for us to refuse to pay that honour to their persons, or memories, which is due unto them, upon the account of their singular gifts, or not give their excellent writings that acceptance they deserve, especially when they are reformed.”

James I had the genuine desire to unify Christendom; he desired a ‘peaceful’ reformation of the Church of Rome that would allow it, like the Church of England, to retain its authority and prestige whilst purging itself of superstition. He saw Calvinism as being every bit as dangerous as Catholicism to England – and thus England’s first Scottish King, himself raised as a Calvinist, brought greather perspective to England’s unique position as a ‘catholic and reformed’ nation than Elizabeth had ever been able to do. Indeed, Charles I and Charles II can be accused of having gone too far to protect England against dissent, and it was only James II who finally understood that toleration was a threat neither to England nor to true religion. The ideological journey of the House of Stuart has been seen as an ever more ‘Catholic’ trajectory – but it may instead be viewed as a steady movement towards the idea of toleration; set back, indeed, by the Civil War but finally realised by James II and upheld by his successors James III and Charles III.

This half term I made a brief visit to Wales and Shropshire. Although the holiday was rather haphazard with regard to the historical significance of the places visited, I nevertheless did my best to seek out the strange and obscure detritus of the past. For the first night I stayed in Shrewsbury, and paid my respects to some of the local aristocracy at W—— Hall close by. I also visited Pradoe House, seat of the Kenyons. Sadly, neither family has any Jacobite connections and both arrived in the locality as recently as the 18th century. In Shrewsbury itself I had very little time, but I did manage to inspect a curious stone, allegedly a Saxon tombstone fragment, displayed on the wall of the Lion Hotel. I am reliably informed, however, that the letter forms are unlikely to be older than the 12th century.

My main purpose for staying in Shrewsbury, however, was to see Wroxeter – Viroconium Cornoviorum, Britain’s best preserved Roman city. The preservation of Viroconium has been greatly aided by the fact that, unusually, nothing was built on top of it – although it was only a few days ago that I visited another completely abandoned Roman town at Venta Icenorum (Caistor St. Edmund). Viroconium is essentially just the bath house, but that is impressive enough. I was pleased that the booklet on the site dwelt on the end of Viroconium, which had a sub-Roman life right into the 6th century as an ‘Arthurian’ city – the tomb of one of whose leaders, Cunorix, survives. In some ways, I should love to see Venta Icenorum excavated and preserved as Viroconium is – but on the other hand, every archaeologist knows that the best way to conserve a site is often to bury it again, and it is only because a decision was made to leave Viriconium open to the elements was made at an early date that it remains in that state.

After Viroconium, I headed into Wales and stayed the second night in Dolgellau. Although the church of St. Mary was rebuilt in 1716, the tomb of Meurig ap Ynyr Fychan (d. 1350), ostensibly a quizzling who aided the English in their occupation, was moved into the new church. It is in an impressive state of preservation. Apart from this effigy, Dolgellau’s most interesting artefact is the plaster coat of arms (pictured above) on the wall of ‘Y Sospan’ restaurant – which was once the court and gaol house. It is dated 1606 and is a peculiar variant of the royal arms. There is no crown, and the supporters are a crowned lion and a dragon (i.e. the Tudor supporters rather than the Stuart lion and unicorn). The arms of England and France are present in the achievement, but the Prince of Wales feathers are there too. Heraldically, the arms are thoroughly anomalous – were they the work of some provincial artist with no sense of protocol, and if so, to what extent do they reflect the nature of Stuart authority in Wales?

On the way back from Dolgellau I stopped at Llangollen, whose church of St. Collen was sadly closed. The story of St. Collen (who beheaded a giantess, apparently) made me aware of the terrible poverty imposed on Welsh Christianity by the total absence of history suffered as a result of English destruction of chronicles. At least, there seems to be no other explanation for why so few primary sources for early Welsh history survive. Virtually every church in Wales has its own individual saint – but because the lives of these saints did not survive, the people were forced to turn to the tallest tales (doubtless aided by the Celtic love of tall tales) in order to give an account of these saints. Wales and its culture cannot be understood unless as a persecuted culture under colonial rule – no tombstone I encountered in the churchyards I visited pre-dated 1709. Wales fascinates me precisely because it is so unlike England – with the exception of very early tombs like that of Meurig, the Welsh go uncommemorated and the only monuments that survive from the earliest times are those of the English-speaking elites.