Jacobitism in Britain and the United States, 1880–1910 9780228014959

Table of contents :
Cover
JACOBITISM IN BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES, 1880–1910
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface: Why Care about the Victorian Jacobites?
Introduction Jacobitism in the Age of Victoria
1 Legitimacy and Obedience: The Ideas behind Jacobite Resurgence
2 “Now the Moon Is Blighted”: The Victorian Jacobite World
3 “Authority Has a Divine Sanction”: The Early Years of the White Rose in Britain
4 “God Save Queen Mary”: The High Tide of Victorian Jacobitism
5 “Up with the Standard”: The White Rose Comes to America
6 “The Heresy of Popular Sovereignty”: Ralph Adams Cram and the Royal Standard
7 “The Persistence of Loyalty to Tradition”: The Decline and Fall of Victorian Jacobitism
Conclusion “The Fault of the Years”: The Significance of the Victorian Jacobites
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Acknowledgments

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jacobitism in britain and the united states, 1880–1910

mcgill-queen’s transatlantic studies Series editors: Robert Hendershot and Steve Marsh The McGill-Queen’s Transatlantic Studies series, in partnership with the Transatlantic Studies Association, provides a focal point for scholarship examining and interrogating the rich cultural, political, social, and economic connections between nations, organizations, and networks that border the Atlantic Ocean. The series combines traditional disciplinary studies with innovative interdisciplinary work, stimulating debate about and engagement with a field of transatlantic studies broadly defined to capture a breadth and richness of scholarship. Books in the series focus on but are not limited to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, normally falling within the subfields of history, economics, politics and international relations, literature, and cultural studies. 1 Not Like Home American Visitors to Britain in the 1950s Michael John Law 2 Transatlantic Upper Canada Portraits in Literature, Land, and British-Indigenous Relations Kevin Hutchings 3 Greatness and Decline National Identity and British Foreign Policy Srdjan Vucetic 4 Portrait of an English Migration North Yorkshire People in North America William E. Van Vugt 5 Canada in nato, 1949–2019 Joseph T. Jockel and Joel J. Sokolsky 6 Jacobitism in Britain and the United States, 1880–1910 Michael J. Connolly

preface

Jacobitism in Britain and the United States, 1880–1910

michael j. connolly

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 isbn 978-0-2280-1401-0 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-1495-9 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-1496-6 (epub) Legal deposit first quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Jacobitism in Britain and the United States, 1880-1910 / Michael J. Connolly. Names: Connolly, Michael J., 1971– author. Series: McGill-Queen's transatlantic studies ; 6. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen's transatlantic studies ; 6 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220407126 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220407150 | isbn 9780228014010 (cloth) | isbn 9780228014959 (epdf) | isbn 9780228014966 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Jacobites—History—19th century. | lcsh: Jacobites—History— 20th century. | lcsh: Great Britain—History—Victoria, 1837-1901. | lcsh: United States—History—19th century. Classification: lcc da813 .c66 2023 | ddc 941.081—dc23 This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon

Contents

Preface: Why Care about the Victorian Jacobites? vii Introduction Jacobitism in the Age of Victoria 3 1 Legitimacy and Obedience: The Ideas behind Jacobite Resurgence 9 2 “Now the Moon Is Blighted”: The Victorian Jacobite World 31 3 “Authority Has a Divine Sanction”: The Early Years of the White Rose in Britain 49 4 “God Save Queen Mary”: The High Tide of Victorian Jacobitism 68 5 “Up with the Standard”: The White Rose Comes to America 84 6 “The Heresy of Popular Sovereignty”: Ralph Adams Cram and the Royal Standard 101 7 “The Persistence of Loyalty to Tradition”: The Decline and Fall of Victorian Jacobitism 123 Conclusion “The Fault of the Years”: The Significance of the Victorian Jacobites 139 Notes 145 Index 159

Preface

why care about victorian jacobites? In January 2018 at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in Washington, dc, my wife, Mary Beth, and I enjoyed dinner at a Connecticut Avenue restaurant with Albert and Beth Zambone, close friends for many years. Mary Beth and I, as well as Albert, attended the Catholic University of America (cua) in dc for graduate school and Beth is a talented editor, so when the conversation turned to our current projects our chat became lively with interest. Albert was building his history podcast – now the very popular Historically Thinking (I highly recommend it) – and finishing his biography of the American Revolutionary War general Daniel Morgan, which was subsequently published with acclaim, Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life (also highly recommended). When asked about my latest endeavour, I explained eagerly, “I’m working on a book about British, American, and Canadian Jacobites in the late nineteenth century, most of them committed monarchists and critics of democracy, lots of writers and artists, one of whom was the architect who helped design the West Point Chapel. I think they are a lot more important and interesting than people realize.” Albert turned to me with a wry smile and replied, “How precious!” Albert and I are still friends and I still believe that Victorian Jacobites hold greater significance than historians have hitherto believed, as the publication of this book testifies. My former professor at cua, the Paulist priest Father Paul Robichaud, csp, used to tell students, “Historians write the books they wanted to read in the first place.” That partly explains my initia-

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tive in writing this book. In Van Wyck Brooks’ classic two-volume narrative on the rise and fall of literary New England in the nineteenth century, The Flowing of New England and New England: Indian Summer, he mentions how a younger generation of New England writers and artists became disillusioned with the political corruption, oligarchic domination, and cultural shallowness of late Victorian America. They looked at the sunny days of the antebellum American Renaissance of Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville with growing gloom, Brooks wrote. Henceforth, at least, for twenty years, the chief pursuit of the Yankee authors, and most American authors concerned with New England – was the game of pulling skeletons out of the cupboards. There were plenty of skeletons in them to pull, for no one had ever done justice to the fund of evil that lurked in the soul of the region. The Yankee mind was beginning to pay for its somewhat cocky optimism, and even for Emerson’s noble ignoring of pain. It had perhaps too easy a victory over a virgin world of nature, where every prospect pleased and man was good; and its energy reverted now to an earlier Calvinistic view that narrowed and all but closed the eye of the needle. New England was searching its conscience, an unlovely task, but one that it had to perform. Brooks, however, had scorn for these ungrateful heirs of Emerson, calling them the “Epigoni.” New England “had to dree its weird,” he declared uncharitably; “It had to pass through the valley of the shadow.”1 In their self-explorations, some New Englanders rejected democracy and capitalism and “conceived a monarchist movement, a royalist movement, in which ‘King Charles his gentlemen,’ figured largely” and opened a branch of the Jacobite Order of the White Rose (owr) in Boston. “They offered expiation on the feast of St Charles, drank seditious toasts on all occasions and even corresponded with Queen Mary of Bavaria and also Don Carlos of Spain, the Legitimist sovereigns,” Brooks wrote. Here, his ruminations largely ceased and my searches for additional information on a nineteenth-century American Jacobite movement produced only occasional mentions in various biographies and histories. Once I began digging, however, a fascinating story began to emerge full of controversies on both sides of the Atlantic, interesting personalities such as the Marquis de Ruvigny, Ralph Adams Cram, and Father Thomas R. Nichol, and debate

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over ideas like liberty, authority, and equality that continue to our own day. What began as a satisfaction of curiosity ended in a much larger study. This book is the result of not finding the one I wanted to read in the first place.2 The word “Jacobite” is less well known than its rival, “Jacobin.” Jacobins were violent radicals of the French Revolution, armed with a volume of Rousseau in one hand and the cord to the guillotine in the other. Their members, like Robespierre and Danton, hated monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church and supported a secular, egalitarian, and republican France and early forms of socialism. By contrast, Jacobites take their name from the Latin for “James,” or “Jacobus,” meaning “followers of James,” and they grew out of opposition to the deposition of the last Stuart king in 1688, King James II. This “Glorious Revolution” installed the more reliably Protestant monarchs William and Mary of Orange on the throne and, in the lore of post-1688 histories, preserved the traditional rights of Englishmen from the encroachments of an aspiring absolute monarch. Jacobites supported the cause of King James II, seeing the Revolution as the deposition of a good king who believed in religious toleration of Catholics and dissenters and who dealt more amicably with the realms of Scotland and Ireland. They saw 1688 as a break with legitimate rule, whereby kings and queens thereafter became de facto rulers of Great Britain (rule by the power of occupation) rather than de jure ones (rule by the authority of God, law, and succession). The miseries of Great Britain in the wake of 1688 were due to this illegitimate detour from the path of rightful kingship. In the eighteenth century, Jacobite unhappiness worked its way into the politics of the emerging Tory Party and occasionally broke out into rebellion. The most famous of these was the rising of 1745, in which Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie,” the grandson of King James II) led a Jacobite army into England, reaching within 120 miles of London before retreating back into Scotland and losing badly at the Battle of Culloden. The Bonnie Prince then fled to the Continent, eventually dying in Rome in 1788. When Charles’ brother Henry – a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church – died in 1807, the direct line of Stuart heirs to the British throne ended and with it the Jacobite cause. But by the 1880s, as an aging Queen Victoria continued to reign and Britain dealt with religious turmoil, discontent over industrial abuses, rambunctious mass democracy and socialism, and the percep-

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tion of cultural rot, Jacobitism returned in force as a movement for reform. These new Jacobites (sometimes called neo-Jacobites) rejuvenated the old cause of legitimate monarchy, claiming that the Stuart line was not dead but continued through King Charles I’s daughter Henrietta. This meant that the de jure monarch was not Queen Victoria but the German Queen Mary of Bavaria. They also extended this “legitimist” critique to other European nations and worked to reseat legitimate monarchs in France and Spain. In addition, this new Victorian Jacobitism used the movement to launch a broader criticism of the religious, cultural, and political problems of late nineteenthcentury Great Britain. It was not a mass movement. Its adherents were a coterie of the British elite: aristocracy, Anglican and Catholic clerics, devoted Scottish, Irish, and Cornish nationalists, and cultural leaders including writers, poets, painters, and sculptors. They published journals and articles, wrote alternative narratives of British history, commented on current events, protested and ran candidates for Parliament, commemorated Stuart monarchs, held public memorials at statues and battlefields, and earned enough public notoriety to annoy Queen Victoria herself. The Jacobite movement spread to the United States and Canada, as well. In the 1890s, the same disaffection that rattled Victorians shook North American religious and cultural elites, and Jacobite organizations emerged in American East Coast cities. North American Jacobites condemned the environmental and human cost of the factory system, the corruption of democratic politics, and the cultural shallowness and artificiality of the Victorian age. Some even joined in the legitimist critique of power: that the problems of the age originated in the illegitimacy of de facto regimes. The movement was particularly strong in Boston and New York City and its leadership drew from Eastern elites – a rising New Hampshire architect, a Canadian Anglican missionary priest and teacher, a Maryland-born Episcopalian prelate, a wealthy art-collecting Boston socialite, an Episcopalian pastor from an old Knickerbocker family. Like their British counterparts, they wrote and published, evangelized from pulpits, commemorated Stuart holy days, communicated and coordinated with their British and European brethren, and faced prodigious scorn for their work. American commentators decried the Jacobite cause as un-American. Why should we care about a movement of unhappy elites in the late nineteenth century whose issues and convictions seem so foreign to our own? We should interrogate their foreignness. Their oddity

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should catch our eye and push us to ask questions because they do not fit the received narratives of Anglo-American/Canadian history, the happy story of authority giving way to liberty, community receding before individualism, and limitations disintegrating under pressure from self-determination. This is the Whiggish tale of liberation as an unalloyed good and of traditional religious and cultural constraints as obstacles to the fulfillment of dreams. Yet the Jacobites and other commentators objected to this narrative and saw history as the record not of progress but of decline. Men without limits were devils, not angels. Their historical narrative, delegitimized by victorious liberals as inhumane or unpatriotic, was a Mephistophelian story of misery, meaninglessness, and dislocation amid celebrations of emancipation from restraint. In our own day, when the basic assumptions of Western life regarding progress, democracy, liberty, the individual, and the state are being re-examined, we should also inquire on the historical narrative that accompanies those assumptions. This is why we should care about who the Jacobites were and what they said. The case of Jacobitism in the United States is a particularly interesting one. In 1955, historian Louis Hartz in his Liberal Tradition in America suggested that the reason the United States had never had a robust socialist movement akin to that in Europe, which won elections and formed governments, nor had a European-style conservatism favourable to hierarchy and social order, was because it had always been liberal. Hartz, himself a socialist, wrote this as a lament because movements without native roots have a weaker claim to affection. Historical precedent lends legitimacy. In the years since, the Liberal Tradition has been routinely critiqued from the Left. “Moral economy” historians, for example, worked assiduously in the 1970s and 1980s to show how pre-industrial nineteenth-century America lived a life of mutual non-acquisitive exchange. They may have lacked the name “socialist,” but they lived all the communal virtues and therefore demonstrated a native socialist tradition. Historical precedent thus established, socialism could thrive in the United States too. The Jacobites also show Hartz’s error regarding European conservatism. True, American conservatives frequently adopted liberalism’s ode to freedom from constraint, particularly when it came to business and entrepreneurship; thereby, the Gilded Age “robber barons,” anti– New Deal Liberty League industrialists, and Reagan-era Wall Street sharps become heroes in the American conservative canon. Yet, a nonliberal conservatism advocating the naturalness and desirability of

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social hierarchy and critical of expanding democracy, equality, and liberty thrived in the United States. It has been written out of the historical narrative, either ignored completely or discounted as representing various cranks “on the wrong side of history.” The location of many naysayers, the antebellum “Old South,” has been used to discount their critiques since it is enveloped in the institution of slavery – and rightly so. Southern slaveholders were among the most liberal actors in the country. In the South, capital owned a significant portion of labour and was dependent upon an international economy of free trade. Capital was more powerful in the Old South than in any part of the country. As a practical matter, the antebellum South is a poor place to look for non-liberal American conservatism. New England represents a far richer option, and it was no coincidence that American Jacobitism found its home there. It was ripe with thinkers and writers with little patience for the liberalism of textile businessmen or Transcendental intellectuals. New England was an ideologically diverse region, brimming with radicals and conservatives alike. For every Theodore Parker there was a Moses Stuart, a Horace Bushnell, and a James Henry Hopkins; for every William Lloyd Garrison there was a Timothy Dwight, a Daniel Webster, a Rufus Choate, and an Orestes Brownson; for every John Greenleaf Whittier there was a Nathaniel Hawthorne, a James Russell Lowell, a Barrett Wendell, and a Henry Adams. Understanding New England is not just reading Thoreau’s Walden and magnifying his ideas across the whole region. New England was a good deal more complex and supplied America with a bevy of important non-liberal conservatives who believed American history was not the pursuit of an egalitarian democratic “more perfect union” but the emergence of an ugly disordered imperfect one. New England was a Jacobite enclave. Ralph Adams Cram was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, Father Nichol is buried in Portsmouth, and the most vibrant Anglo-Catholic Jacobite parish in America was on Beacon Hill in Boston. Therefore, this book marks the intersection of several interests: unanswered questions about Victorian Jacobites and their world, the contest between historical narratives of democracy, equality, and liberty, and the existence of a non-liberal conservative tradition in America based primarily in New England. The Victorian Jacobites mattered, and this book seeks to place them into the conversation about what caused Western fin-de-siècle religious, cultural, political, and economic angst in the decades before World War I.

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Many people assisted me in researching this book and the oftenchallenging chase for sources. Holly Barclay at the Trinity School Library in Port Hope, Ontario, provided me with photographs and valuable correspondence on Father Robert Thomas Nichol. Sylvia Lassam, the Rolph-Bell Archivist at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, also sent valuable biographical information on Father Nichol, as well as his residences, drawn from alumni material. The life of Nichol was further revealed with the help of James Moske at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives in New York City, who forwarded pertinent biographical details and correspondence drawn from Nichol’s personnel file. Thomas Hardiman of the Portsmouth (nh) Athenaeum went to extraordinary lengths to locate the grave of Father Nichol, contacting a neighbour to the Carey estate and requesting she photograph the headstone for me at the private family graveyard. Tracking down his grave marks one of the most satisfying bits of historical detective work I have ever done, and I am indebted to Mr Hardiman for sending that photo. The head of Digital Programs at the Boston Athenaeum, Patricia M. Boulos, scanned Ralph Adams Cram and Order of the White Rose material that helped me understand how the owr worked in America. Angus Wark and Joanna Wilson at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh tracked down the only extant copy of the Royal Standard and graciously scanned and copied pages for me. This book could not have been written without the hard work of all these researchers, librarians, and archivists. Closer to home, the librarians at the Purdue University Northwest (pnw) library in Westville, Indiana – Tricia Jauquet, Susan Anderson, and Elizabeth Bunton – helped me acquire numerous books and sources on the Jacobites. My colleagues in the pnw history and philosophy department endured years of chatter about Victorian Jacobites with encouragement and helpful advice. In particular, I thank Janusz Duzinkiewicz, Kenneth Kincaid, Michael Lynn, James Pula, and Kathleen Tobin for their feedback and counsel. Lastly, I thank my wife, Mary Beth Connolly, for her patience in reading countless versions of the manuscript and offering helpful suggestions for clarity and improvement, as well as my parents, Michael and Dianne Connolly, who heard about this project over too many summers and Christmas holidays. It is finished and I love you all dearly.

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Introduction

JACOBITISM IN BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES ,

1880–1910

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Free Women in the Pampas

1928

INTRODUCTION

Jacobitism in the Age of Victoria

On a cold, windy January evening in 1897, parishioners and visitors packed Philadelphia’s Episcopal Church of the Evangelists for a unique ceremony. Curiosity was high and latecomers could not enter, as the doors were closed to prevent dangerous overcrowding. At eight o’clock, after the singing of vespers, a solemn procession of elegantly gowned clerics moved toward a red-curtained shroud above the west entrance. At the appointed moment, Bishop Leighton Coleman of Delaware pulled the curtain cord to reveal a massive, life-size painting, over six feet high, of King Charles I of England, whom Anglo-Catholics like Coleman revered as a martyr and saint. The painting was so large, in fact, that it covered part of the rose window below which it hung. Bishop William Stevens Perry of Iowa then delivered a homily lauding the late king as a martyr for his faith and a founding father of what would become the United States. King Charles had granted the charters of Virginia, Maryland, and New England, after all, and rather than being an enemy of American liberties and toleration, had laid the foundations of American political order. The ceremony and Perry’s words brought condemnation down on the Episcopal Church in the coming days, as an endorsement of anti-American religious and political authoritarianism that had been rejected by the revolutions of 1688 and 1776. The King Charles portrait controversy came during a surge of Jacobitism in both the United Kingdom and the United States, when all things Stuart were promoted in contrast to democratic, materialist, and culturally barbaric Victorian Britain and Gilded Age Republican America. Between the 1880s and 1910s, Jacobite organizations popped up first in Britain and then spread to the United States,

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engaging in scholarly studies, publication of magazines and journals, public demonstrations, Anglo-Catholic masses to fallen Stuarts, decoration and adoration of Stuart statues and tombs, commemorations on battlefields, and occasionally more threatening actions. In an era of larger and louder protest movements, like Socialism, Anarchism, Nihilism, Populism, and Progressivism – all opposed to the same Gilded Age abuses as Jacobitism – Anglo-American Jacobites get little attention and, when they do, are seldom taken seriously. But in England, Jacobite organizations boasted hundreds of members (including many leading artists and writers) and gained the worried attention of Parliament and the angry notice of Britons rallying around the elderly Victoria and her heir Prince Edward. In America, Jacobitism drew heavily from the cultural and clerical elite in New York and Boston, controlled important Anglo-Catholic parishes on the East Coast, and earned scorn from leading newspapers and church leaders who saw in them the harbinger of national decline. In their magazines such as the Royalist, the Jacobite, and the Royal Standard, among others, Jacobites launched an incisive attack on nineteenth-century political corruption and industrial abuse, akin to other reform movements of the day. Additionally, they represented an Anglo-American political strain that, drawing from the history, ideas, and traditions of both nations, opposed liberalism, individualism, and universal democracy. Today, when observations on the self-destructiveness and teleological emptiness of Western liberal modernity are re-emerging, it is helpful to recall that those observations are not new but in fact part of a lineage with deep AngloAmerican roots. Historians have not treated fin-de-siècle Jacobitism with kindness. In uk histories it is generally viewed as a period peculiarity and hallmark of Scottish nationalism, particularly in Murray Pittock’s Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s and The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to Present. In American histories, however, it is ignored, mentioned in passing, or regarded as silliness. The “relentlessly republican” Van Wyck Brooks, in his New England Indian Summer, sarcastically dismissed the movement as the effort of a dying Boston aristocracy to reject their ancestors. “In their revolt from democracy and realism, their desire to expunge all remnants of the Puritan past, they conceived a monarchist movement, a royalist movement,” Brooks observed. “They never saw a purple king but always hoped to see one, for the kings they

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contemplated were purple indeed, and far from the ‘business kings’ of the age they lived in.” In his magisterial study of anti-modernism, No Place of Grace, T. Jackson Lears mentioned the Jacobitism of men like Boston Anglo-Catholic architect Ralph Adams Cram – regarded by historians as the premier American Jacobite – as “playing at royalism.” It was the pastime of young wealthy men, which faded with time, to be replaced by medievalism and a love of the feudal; if trifling, however, “royalist antics underscored the elitist implications of American Anglo-Catholicism.”1 Michael D. Clark’s study The American Discovery of Tradition devotes an entire chapter to Cram but only a few pages to his leadership of the American branch of the Jacobite group, the Order of the White Rose. David Weir devotes valuable space connecting American Jacobitism to the broader Decadent movement and takes Jacobitism seriously as a movement that combined with Gothicism into historical reactionism: “The Boston decadents took their medievalism much more literally and entertained ideas of monarchy as a serious solution to the material and political ills of late nineteenth century America.” Yet Jacobitism remained one star among many in Boston’s cultural constellation. Although Peter W. Williams delves into Cram’s neoGothic proclivities, he attributes little role to Jacobitism in his study of Episcopalian culture, Religion, Art, and Money, other than portraying it as being in delicate balance with Cram’s older New England colonial family connections. Williams calls it a “whimsical celebration” and, combined with Cram’s New Hampshire origins, “an eclectic flirtation with incompatible ideologies.”2 The most serious attempt to understand American Jacobitism was made by Cram’s biographer, Douglass Shand-Tucci. His definitive two-volume study of the “besotted royalist” architect portrayed the “White Rose” as a reflection of Boston’s oft-homosexual bohemian aesthete culture in the 1890s and an extension of earlier young elite groups in the “Athens of America,” like the Visionists and “Pewter Mugs.” For Shand-Tucci, the “Order” was “aesthete Jacobite flummery.” His biography of Jacobite patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, The Art of Scandal, explained the “Order” as “made up of rather militant high church Episcopalians fueled by an ardent anti-Puritanism that was more and more politically charged in the changing Boston of the fin-de-siècle.”3 It is easy to poke fun at these Jacobites, taking oaths to the Stuarts, appealing to Mary of Bavaria to claim the British throne, convening

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secret meetings and dressing in regalia, and delivering lectures to the faithful on the virtues of divine-right monarchy. Yet Anglo-American Jacobitism of the late nineteenth century was a serious political and cultural movement – “dead earnest,” according to the New York Times – intent on reforming the abuses of the Victorian Age. In their values, the Jacobites both reflected contemporary 1890s concerns and harkened forward to the anxieties of the coming century and beyond. They believed that a political regime based on consent, rather than the divine, invited corruption and base materialism; if a state is only legitimate when its sovereignty is chosen by individuals, then all choices boil down to individual material self-interest, and newly enfranchised voters were unschooled and incapable of understanding nuanced public issues. These new voters looked at the political process as a game of power and wealth and threw their support to whichever party promised to enrichen them more. This, combined with party bosses and plutocrats who guided government in directions lucrative to themselves, too, gave America the Gilded Age and Britain the Victorian era, which Jacobites regarded as degenerate and decadent epochs. Democracy inevitably led to oligarchies and degraded the quality of leadership, Jacobites insisted. They also abhorred how industrialism (abetted by a government controlled by industry) fouled the natural environment, destroyed integral communities and towns, abused workers, and replaced property-owning independent families with wage-dependent ones.4 The terms Jacobites always used were “legitimate,” “legitimacy,” and “legitimist,” connecting with Legitimist movements agitating for the restoration of rightful kings and queens. Politics suffered from a crisis of legitimacy, as usurpers occupied thrones around the world and so-called democracies held power through fraud and purchased elections. Jacobites engaged with political philosophy going back centuries over what made for legitimate government, why governments should be obeyed or disobeyed, and why monarchy was best. In addition, they believed there was something fundamentally inauthentic, invalid, and illegitimate about late Victorian life, its politics, its economy, and its culture. Craftsmanship gave way to cheap massproduced goods and ugly, cluttered homes whose knickknacks cloaked shoddy building and garish decoration. Cram called homes built between 1830 and 1880 “the black fifty years of American architecture … the product was vulgar, self-satisfied and pretentious,

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instinct with frontier ideology and as rampantly individualistic as the society it so admirably expressed.” In this environment, Americans and British felt adrift and rootless. It is hardly a surprise that major Jacobites became renowned genealogists, helping establish political and well as personal legitimacy in an urban, industrial, impersonal world and giving people a past. The world was out of sorts and the Jacobites aimed to right it. “Our modern life is lacking in color, is destitute of contrast and variety, is desperately drab, is irritatingly ugly and is so hideously probable,” wrote the AngloCanadian Walter Blackburn Harte in 1894. We should “thank Heaven that the monotonous drab of our day is relieved here and there with a few patches of such fine old glowing revolutionary Toryism – for it is the Tory who is the revolutionary in our society.”5 The first chapter in this book briefly outlines the primary thinkers and ideas with whom Victorian Jacobites engaged – St Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Thomas Cajetan, Francisco Suarez, St Robert Bellarmine, King James I, Sir Robert Filmer, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke – and the concepts of natural law, legitimacy, authority, power, obedience, and revolt that framed their understanding. Chapter 2 discusses the religious, political, economic, and cultural context of the 1880s and 1890s in which a revived Jacobitism emerged – the same world as Socialism, Progressivism, and Populism – and explains the religious divisions within Anglicanism, the attraction of the Roman Catholic Church, the anti-modernism movement, the rising tide of nineteenth-century democracy and radical politics, and the effects of industrialism. Chapter 3 brings the British Jacobite story to 1892, including the Order of the White Rose and the London Jacobite Exhibition of 1889, the difficulties of maintaining the movement against robust hostility and internal conflict, the theory and practice of Jacobitism, and the clash at Westminster Cathedral. Chapter 4 details Jacobitism at its height in 1890s Great Britain, its honouring of the Stuart legacy, its clash with Cromwell afficionados, and the movement’s commentary on the issues of the day, including America’s war with Spain, the Boer War, and Queen Victoria’s death. Chapter 5 shifts to North America, the formal organization of an American Jacobite movement, the movement’s major personalities such as New England architect Ralph Adams Cram and Canadian Anglican priest Robert Thomas Nichol, and the Philadelphia controversy over King Charles I’s portrait. Chapter 6 assesses the importance of Cram to American

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Jacobitism and examines publication of the Royal Standard. Chapter 7 chronicles Jacobite decline between 1902 and World War I and follows the primary Jacobites on both sides of the Atlantic until their deaths. The book’s conclusion assesses the movement’s significance in the era and places it within the broader transatlantic conversation about the tribulations of liberalism then and today.

1928

1 Legitimacy and Obedience: The Ideas behind Jacobite Resurgence

The past tormented Anglo-American Jacobites in the age of Victoria. The Order of the White Rose statement of principles condemned the murder of King Charles I and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as “national crimes.” Standing before a raucously unfriendly crowd of Cambridge students in 1891, a Jacobite leader declared 1688 an illegitimate rebellion that led to the socialism and political corruption sinking Victorian Britain. A few years later, the Jacobite organizer Marquis de Ruvigny wrote in the British magazine Nineteenth Century that 1688 and the Act of Settlement “was in no sense a vote representative of the will of the people.” Dutch soldiers installed William and Mary and terrorized London to “overawe” Stuart loyalists. In America, architect Ralph Adams Cram professed that a white rose symbolized not only loyalty to the Stuarts but also “all loyalty of heart, all personal faithfulness and devotion.” We are descendants of the “fifteen” and the “forty-five,” he proclaimed. For Victorian Jacobites, the historical narrative since the seventeenth century was not one of the inevitable progress of liberty and equality but one of the usurpation of legitimate authority, the triumph of bad ideas, and national decline. The sun had been setting on the British Empire since 1688. This narrative of decline involved the interlocking of ideas (obedience and revolt, divine right and social contract, monarchy and republicanism) and the events they animated (the English Civil War and the 1688 “Glorious Revolution”). Tying together ideas and events was the theme of legitimacy. What is legitimate government? When is obedience demanded? When is revolt legitimate? Where does authority come from and is there a difference between authority and power? What is the best form of government? The roots of these disputes date

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back to the medieval Scholastic synthesis on human anthropology, legitimate government, and natural law formulated by St Thomas Aquinas and later refined by the Dominican philosopher Cardinal Thomas Cajetan and the sixteenth-century Jesuits Francisco Suarez and St Robert Bellarmine, among others. Seeing that Catholic Scholastic philosophy authorized disobedience to temporal rulers and even tyrannicide in some cases, and that Puritan writers backed parliamentary power against the throne, Protestant thinkers such as Sir Robert Filmer, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke struggled to create a counter-philosophy – based in divine right, the Leviathan state, and contractual society, respectively – that ensured stable government free from the hands of Rome and restless Puritans. Although the “Glorious Revolution” and the failed Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 signalled triumphant contractualism, Victorian Jacobites reopened the debate upon the grounds of Filmer and especially Hobbes and then tilted toward Rome when faced with the incongruity of divine right in the age of Victoria, Edward, and hostile secular republics. Consistent throughout, however, was a critique of the nature of authority, liberty, and democracy.

st thomas aquinas and the common good The political and social philosophy rejected by Protestant writers during the Stuart dynasties of James I (1603–25), Charles I (1625– 49), Charles II (1660–85), and James II (1685–88) was Roman Catholic Scholasticism developed in large part by St Thomas Aquinas in the fourteenth century. Combining Aristotelian insights with Catholic theology, Aquinas composed an astounding systematic theology ranging from cosmology and metaphysics to logic and ethics to political philosophy. Thomism was a comprehensive accounting of reality and was comprehensible via Aquinas’ belief (channelled through Aristotle) that human reason could understand the universal order of God and act upon that knowledge to avoid sin and live a virtuous life. In this, Thomistic philosophy was ultimately optimistic about the human potential to live good lives in flourishing communities. For Aquinas, all of existence was ordered by a hierarchy of law: divine law at the top, natural law reflecting divine law and governing God’s creation next, and at the bottom the civil law of states govern-

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ing human communities. Just as the Trinity was three natures in one, so too was law three types, each reflective in hierarchy of that above it. The natural law that governed physical reality demonstrated that all things act for an end (telos), including humans. When a flower’s roots extend for moisture and the plant bends toward the sun, it is acting for its end to be a healthy flower, growing, blooming, and eventually dying. Humans also have an end and the action and fulfillment of that end – when humans are acting most fully human, in other words – leads to human flourishing and is called happiness. The realization of that end (happiness) is understood using reason, that power that distinguishes humans from other elements of creation, and is acted upon by human free will. Reason is not limitless in vision, but it can understand the order of creation and reveal those actions that make humans most fully human (the virtues) or more like animals (vices). This is the foundation of morality, living an ordered life of virtue and thereby acting most fully human. As one later commentator described it, the “ultimate external criterion of morality is the good of order apprehended by reason.”1 Reason understands the unity of human happiness in achieving its end, Aquinas explained, but it also recognizes that acting as solitary beings is both unnatural and inefficacious. Humans are born into the natural society of the family, which helps realize happiness, but that is not enough. Communities and civil societies are necessary for human flourishing. Humans cannot live alone and reach their natural end, and the existence of society in history is evidence it serves some human need. In addition, humans have the social faculty of language and communication, and no ability exists in vain without an end or purpose. Humans have eyes because there is something to see, ears because there is something to hear, reason because there is something to understand, and speech because there is something to say to someone other than ourselves. Therefore, our very nature is social and assists us to our end. We use reason to understand the reality and the necessity of order in achieving happiness, and the fullness of that order can only be achieved in society. The most perfect social order is that which is ordered toward human happiness as found in natural law understood by reason. In acting to do so, it promotes the good of all members, which is to say, the common good. With the power of reason to apprehend the natural law and the free will to act upon that knowledge, humans have choices. Free will

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necessitates the formation of governments because sometimes, despite the potential to choose virtue, people do not. Civil society creates governments based upon the moral order of natural law and, in maintaining and promoting that order, governments are owed obedience by citizens. Governments then legislate laws governing the external lives of its members, thereby creating a political environment allowing for and encouraging human flourishing. Aquinas was not suggesting absolutism. Governmental power only extends so far as it preserves the action of right reason and the use of free will. It creates the ground for good choices by reflecting the natural law (itself reflecting divine law), the reality of moral order as discoverable by reason, and the objectivity of human happiness. Accompanying government’s temporal power was the church and its spiritual power in educating, protecting, and (if necessary) coercing the baptized to live lives of reason and order. None of this necessitates a certain kind of government, although in theory Aquinas believed that monarchy was best because of its unitary nature, reflecting the unity of the Good: The more effective a government is in promoting unity in peace, the more useful it will be. We say more useful, because it leads more directly to its end. But it is evident that that which is itself one can promote unity better than that which is a plurality, just as the most effective cause of heat is that which is in itself hot. Therefore government by one person is better than by many … [I]t is evident that many persons cannot preserve the unity of a group if they generally disagree. Some agreement among them is necessary for them to govern at all. A number of men could not move a ship in one direction unless they worked together in some way. But a number of people are said to be united to the extent that they come closer to unity. It is better therefore for one person to rule than for many to try to achieve unity. As the Dominican Thomist philosopher Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange phrased it, “Therefore, that which of itself is one can be a cause of unity better than the many that stand in need of being united.” Aquinas also suggested that while monarchy was best, a mixed regime that incorporated elements of aristocracy and democracy would be useful in wholly temporal matters. Nonetheless, democracy was the worst of possible regimes and could work (directing citizens toward

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lives of virtue) only under very peculiar circumstances. “This regime is suitable only for perfect people already capable of directing themselves, virtuous and competent enough to express themselves as is fitting concerning the very complicated problems on which the life of a great people depends,” Garrigou-Lagrange wrote.2 Ideally, these governments are not usurpers that acquired power via coup, conquest, or some other unorthodox method as opposed to traditional means like succession or election. Yet even a usurping government should not be overthrown, if doing so would upset good order, civilly, socially, and individually. Legitimate governments are those which maintain public order and allow people to live moral, that is most human, lives. Sometimes overthrowing even bad governments leads to ills worse than the original disease. There are grounds for disobedience if civil laws run contrary to divine law and by extension the natural law, however. Aquinas observed that obedience is always qualified and applies to the body and not the soul, to the exterior and not the interior of human lives: Man is bound to obey his fellow-man in things that have to be done externally by means of the body: and yet, since by nature all men are equal, he is not bound to obey another man in matters touching the nature of the body, for instance in those relating to the support of his body or the begetting of his children. Wherefore servants are not bound to obey their masters, nor children their parents, in the question of contracting marriage or of remaining in the state of virginity or the like. But in matters concerning the disposal of actions and human affairs, a subject is bound to obey his superior within the sphere of his authority; for instance a soldier must obey his general in matters relating to war, a servant his master in matters touching the execution of the duties of his service, a son his father in matters relating to the conduct of his life and the care of the household; and so forth … Man is subject to God simply as regards all things, both internal and external, wherefore he is bound to obey Him in all things. On the other hand, inferiors are not subject to their superiors in all things, but only in certain things and in a particular way, in respect of which the superior stands between God and his subjects, whereas in respect of other matters the subject is immediately under God, by Whom he is taught either by the natural or by the written law.

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When governments legislate contrary to divine and natural law, obedience to authority is thereby lifted (again, with the qualification of not doing greater harm). In other words, Aquinas outlines the grounds of legitimate revolt.3 Legitimate resistance emanates from the moral licitness of selfdefence. Individuals may defend themselves morally when under attack from an aggressor, if the defence is proportional to the attack. “The act of self-defense may have two effects, one is the saving of one’s life, the other is the slaying of the aggressor,” Aquinas counsels. “Therefore this act, since one’s intention is to save one’s own life, is not unlawful, seeing that it is natural to everything to keep itself in ‘being,’ as far as possible.” Just as humans have a right to self-defence (emanating from duty to self), so too do polities under threat from rulers legislating contrary to natural law. But the grounds for action are narrow and resemble a kind of just war theory: that violations of natural law and the common good are egregious, that all other means of redress are exhausted and there are reasonable chances of success, and that there is consensus that resistance is necessary. If resistance does not meet these criteria, resistance is sedition: A tyrannical government is not just, because it is directed, not to the common good, but to the private good of the ruler, as the Philosopher states (Polit. iii, 5; Ethic. viii, 10). Consequently there is no sedition in disturbing a government of this kind, unless indeed the tyrant’s rule be disturbed so inordinately, that his subjects suffer greater harm from the consequent disturbance than from the tyrant’s government. Indeed it is the tyrant rather that is guilty of sedition, since he encourages discord and sedition among his subjects, that he may lord over them more securely; for this is tyranny, being conducive to the private good of the ruler, and to the injury of the multitude. Aquinas leaves ample room for further development on legitimate governments and justified disobedience. In the sixteenth century, Thomist philosophers like the Dominican Cardinal Thomas Cajetan and the Jesuits Francisco Suarez and St Robert Bellarmine dispelled some uncertainties. As will be seen, Victorian Jacobites drew from these thinkers in their understanding of legitimacy, authority, and obedience.4

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legitimacy and obedience in cajetan, suarez, and bellarmine St Thomas wrote systematic theology for a unitary Western Christendom. By the sixteenth century, the Reformation and rising European nationalism had sundered that union and pushed theologians to clarify church authority in the face of powerful nation-states suspicious of Rome. The church insisted it held moral authority over Catholic states and its baptized citizens by way of the “two swords”: the spiritual authority of the church and the temporal authority of civil states. Many kings pushed back, insisting on unitary state power free from any church influence. In response, Catholic theologians detailed the respective powers of each. Among these was Cardinal Thomas Cajetan, an Italian Dominican theologian best known for his 1518 confrontation with Martin Luther that led to the German monk’s excommunication. In his commentary on St Thomas’ Summa Theologica, Cajetan analogized the relationship between temporal and spiritual power as like that between the body and soul: “The secular power is subject to the spiritual power as the body to the soul. And thus judgment is not usurped if a spiritual prelate involves himself in temporal matters so far as concerns those matters in which the secular power is subject to the spiritual, or which are granted to the spiritual power by the secular power.” Just as the soul directs the body, is the soul’s physical form, and “is for the sake of the soul,” so too can the spiritual authority of the church direct and shape temporal power, but only in those things that belong to the soul. “It is clear that the spiritual power, of its very nature, commands the secular power to the spiritual end: for these are the things in which the secular power is subject to the spiritual.” Cajetan carefully observed that the church should give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. There is a separation of authority. In civil matters one ought rather to obey the governor of the city, and in military matters the general of the army, than the bishop, who should not concern himself with these things except in their order to spiritual things, just as with other temporal matters. But if it should happen that something of these temporal things occurs to the detriment of spiritual salvation, the prelate, administering of these things through prohibitions or precepts for the

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sake of spiritual salvation, does not move the sickle unto another’s crop, but makes use of his own authority: for as regards these things, all secular powers are subject to the spiritual power. If a temporal ruler legislates contrary to natural law, popes and prelates can prohibit obedience or issue counter-commands to the baptized. Legitimacy ceases when humans are directed away from their natural ends.5 The Spanish Jesuit theologian Francisco Suarez confirmed Cajetan’s judgments. The civil law of temporal authority must be ordered to align with natural law (“that form of law which dwells within the human mind, in order that the righteous may be distinguished from the evil … on it rests the capacity of discriminating between the righteous and the evil in the rational nature”), and both to divine law, to be legitimate. Government and law are requirements of the natural law and necessary for realizing the common good: For that necessity is founded on the fact that man is a social animal, requiring by his very nature a civil life and intercourse with other men; therefore, it is necessary that he should live rightly, not only as a private person, but also as a part of a community; and this is a matter which depends to a large extent upon the laws of the individual community. It is furthermore necessary that each person should take counsel not only for himself, but also for others, preserving peace and justice, a condition that could not be brought about in the absence of appropriate laws. Again, it is necessary that those points which relate to the common good of men, or of the state, should be accorded particular care and observance; yet, men as individuals have difficulty in ascertaining what is expedient for the common good, and moreover, rarely strive for that good as a primary object; so that, in consequence, there was a necessity for human laws that would have regard for the common good by pointing out what should be done for its sake and by compelling the performance of such acts. Individuals have free will, but the dictates of right reason understanding natural law give no one the authority to rule over others. This absence means communities can innovate any form of government they wish, so long as it legislates in accordance with natural law and fits with their history and character. Governmental forms with no

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cultural roots in a community will be inefficacious in legislating morally. Therefore, as constructions of the communities they govern, governments are based in consent.6 Suarez was, however, not making a social contract argument like that found later in John Locke. Whereas Locke focused on the means of government to protect the right to pursue a variety of human ends, Suarez’s consent of the governed is full of moral content, moral obligations, and unified human ends as discoverable by reason and acted upon by will. People contrive governments and consent to them in relation to their effectiveness in directing humans to their natural end. Promotion and protection of the common good is the foundation of legitimate government.7 Upon his definition of consent Suarez bases his theory of temporal and spiritual power. Like Cajetan, he believes that while the spiritual is superior to the temporal, church and state collaborate. The same soul-body division abides – the church possesses guardianship over the soul, the responsibility to educate the baptized, and the authority to coerce those who stray back to what philosopher Thomas Pink calls “their shared rational nature.” The state protects the body from self-harm and the harm of others and coerces scofflaws into obedience with civil law. When the state governs contrary to natural law (or impinges on spiritual authority), what it legislates ceases to be law: With respect to civil laws, while these do not per se serve such an end, they are nevertheless subordinate to it, and consequently should not be incompatible therewith; if they are incompatible, they cannot be just; and in this sense, civil laws should be in harmony with religion … This proportion [to the natural law] must consist in nothing more nor less than the quality of not deviating from the precepts and rules of the law of nature; since a human lawgiver ought to conduct himself in his legislative acts as a disciple of natural law (so to speak), and ought to prescribe those things which are in harmony with its teaching. In such cases, laws actively contravene God, and the church can instruct the baptized to withdraw their allegiances and to disobey. “Injustice of this sort is to be found only in laws laid down by men; but one must obey God rather than men.” But disobedience necessitates a high bar; anything less than complete certitude that legislation violates natural law means citizens should err on the side of obedi-

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ence, for without obedience Catholics “become legal culprits in the sight of God.”8 Suarez chastised kings who believed they had power over church and state, as they willfully exceeded their proper authority. There are many kingdoms; there is only one pope and one church, and both could call out violators and bend them back into alignment with proper temporal authority and natural law. “There does reside in the Pope coercive power over temporal princes who are incorrigibly wicked, and especially over schismatics and stubborn heretics,” Suarez insisted. To protect the baptized from erring kings, coercion could take a host of forms, from excommunication to releasing citizens from obedience to deposition from the throne, “if necessity so demands.”9 Kings were not immune from punishment because of their exalted position. All were equal in the eyes of God and responsible for upholding natural law: Such sovereigns are as truly the sheep of Peter as are all other [members of the flock]; neither does their temporal dignity nor their temporal power render them immune from the force of the said papal power, nor exempt from liability to the punishment in question, inasmuch as one cannot infer from the words of Christ, nor from any other basic principle, nor by any process of reasoning, that there resides in them such liberty, or rather, such licence to sin. On the contrary, it is far more essential that the Church should possess the said power for the coercion of such princes, than that it should possess the same power for the coercion of their subjects. This is, indeed, the case because in the first place, the princes themselves are the more apt to err, and the more difficult to correct once they have fallen into error, in that they are more free. And, in the second place, the sins of princes – especially those sins which are opposed to the faith and to religion – are more pernicious [than the sins of other Christians]; for princes easily lead their subjects to imitate them, whether by their [bare] example, or by favours and promises, or even by threats and intimidation. Suarez then turned to the narrow grounds of whether wicked kings could be legitimately deposed, or even killed by capital punishment or assassination in the absence of other recourses. Assassination by

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private individuals out of revenge had no moral basis and was “altogether false and heretical, because the power of avenging or punishing offences resides, not in private individuals, but in their superior or in the whole of a perfect community.” Every throne in the world would be beset by assassins nursing endless grievances otherwise.10 But if deposing a wicked king was a matter of self-defence, there could be grounds for acting. Deposition would be wrong in most cases – in defence of personal property, for example – “unless we assume that the king is actually attacking the state, with the unjust intention of destroying it and slaughtering the citizens, or that some similar situation exists. Under such circumstances, it will assuredly be permissible to resist the prince, even by slaying him if defence cannot be achieved in any other fashion.” It must always be a last resort where all other methods are exhausted, the removal absolutely “necessary to the liberty of the kingdom,” and no greater evil to the state will follow the deed – “that there is no fear lest the state suffer, in consequence of the slaying of the tyrant, the same ills as those which it endures under his sway, or ills even more grave.” But in certain circumstances it would be legitimate, for example, if a king was pronounced guilty of heinous crimes by a legally constituted court or royal crimes caused the community to withdraw the aforementioned consent of the governed.11 The Italian Jesuit theologian St Robert Bellarmine also employed the soul-body distinction and the church’s indirect spiritual power (indirecta potestas) in temporal matters. “The spiritual or ecclesiastical commonwealth and the temporal or political commonwealth are both two and one; two parts, one total, just as the spirit and the flesh joined together at the same time constitute one man,” Bellarmine explained. Government is natural to humans and, as such, states have a large degree of authority in law and policy, independent of the church, even if directed by non-Christian rulers and “wicked men.” But states too often interpret the distinction as complete separation, which manifests itself in different dangerous errors. Kings attempt to stretch temporal authority into church matters, as teachers of the faith and appointers of clergy to church positions, and act like a latter-day Tiberius denying the authority of Peter. “Spiritual matters are not arranged for the sake of the temporal and the authority to dispose of spiritual matters for the sake of the temporal is not a true authority but an abuse of authority and a perverting of the order,” Bellarmine wrote, “and it cannot be possible that the abuse of authority or per-

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verting of the order is necessary to any commonwealth.” At the other extreme, kings only care for the commonwealth to the exclusion and separation of the church from temporal matters; the commonwealth becomes “free” but licentious as a result of spiritual desolation. The church enjoys the spiritual authority of shepherding souls and states have no jurisdiction over conscience or the soul, nor the ability to “inflict a spiritual punishment.” When the souls of the baptized are harmed by states, the pope can release them of their obedience through the church’s indirect authority over temporal matters.12

the absolutism of king james i The principal reason Suarez and Bellarmine clarified the church’s spiritual authority against temporal claims was bitter contention with King James I of England and the Oath of Allegiance he required of Catholics in response to the Gunpowder Plot, a failed 1605 attempt by English Catholics to assassinate him. Pope Sixtus V ordered English Catholics to refuse the oath and this clash inaugurated a prolonged nasty pamphlet war between King James I, the pope, and Catholic theologians on the relative authority of the spiritual and temporal spheres and the boundaries of legitimacy and obedience. King James I countered Suarez and Bellarmine with an argument from scripture and history rather than Aquinas and the natural law tradition. The king believed popes had no power over the church across national borders, but to deny Rome’s power to depose monarchs only limited its temporal, not spiritual, authority. In temporal affairs, Rome could not determine legitimacy, and the king’s judgment was absolute and undivided. He was God’s representative on earth and answerable only to God. King James I made the case for divine right: The State of Monarchie is the supremest thing vpon earth: For Kings are not onely gods Lieutenants vpon earth, and sit vpon gods throne, but euen by god himself they are called gods … Kings are iustly called gods, for that they exercise a manner of resemblance of Diuine power vpon earth: For if you wil consider the Attributes to God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a King. God hath power to create, or destroy, make, or vnmake at his pleasure, to giue life, or send death, or iudge all, and to bee iudged nor accomptable to none: To raise low things, and to make high things low at his pleasure, and to God are both soule

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and body due. And the like power haue Kings: they make and vnmake their subjects: they haue power of raising, and casting downe: of life, and of death: Iudges ouer all their subiects and in all causes, and yet accomptable to none but God onely. The king always wielded power within the confines of the civil law as he understood and enforced it, of course. England possessed a common-law tradition but it held no supremacy or authority over the king. That was presumption, assuming powers not granted. Much as a people held no check on God’s authority, they held none against kings either – “it is presumption and high contempt in a Subject, to dispute what a King can doe, or say that a King cannot doe this, or that; but rest in that which is the Kings reuealed will in his Law.” Consent of the governed did not determine legitimacy.13 Yet, kings felt the weight of two obligations: one to God as His representative, the other to his people to rule justly. Understanding this last duty separated noble kings from tyrants. Good kings grieved at their people’s suffering. “And as that King is miserable (how rich soeuer he bee) that raines ouer a poore people, (for the hearts and riches of the people, are the Kings greatest treasure).” These obligations held kings in line, thus making agitation and disorder unnecessary. “Yet a good king will not onely delight to rule his subjects by the lawe, but euen will conforme himself in his owne actions thervnto, alwaies keeping that ground, that the health of the common-wealth be his chief lawe.” Notably, King James I, along with Aquinas, Suarez, and Bellarmine, defined tyranny alike – rulers who followed private goods ahead of the common good – but while the theologians appealed to right reason and natural law for recourse, the English king bade subjects to avoid rebellion in all cases. To say otherwise was impious and a recipe for permanent revolution. If the laws became truly wretched, they could refuse to obey and be ready to pay a high price for disobedience and “shamelesse presumption.” Punishment of the tyrant will come from God, not man.14

sir robert filmer and the theory of divine right The greatest of divine-right thinkers was the wealthy English lawyer Sir Robert Filmer, whose close ties to the Anglican Church and King Charles I led to his imprisonment after the English Civil War. In

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Patriarcha, he legitimates monarchy through the succession of family patriarchs as described in the Bible. Humans are not born free, endowed with natural liberty, but born to families who structure and determine their lives. Fathers direct family life as domestic monarchs and then pass on that authority to sons and their families. The state, as an agglomeration of families, is an extension and model of the family, with the king as the nation’s strict and dutiful father. Thus, as Adam was the first human father, he was also the first monarch and marked the beginning of inherited kingship. “This lordship which Adam by creation had over the whole world, and by right descending from him the patriarchs did enjoy,” Filmer wrote, “was as large and ample as the absolutest dominion of any monarch which hath been since the creation.” The fact that a fully accurate lineage cannot be firmly established is beside the point. Adam shows that legitimate government is based on succession (however that is determined) and that rulers have absolute power granted by God. Like King James I, Filmer believed consent had no biblical basis and was unnatural. The Fall from the Garden necessitated strong royal authority to limit the disorderly potential of liberty and humanity’s perpetual lust for power. Rebellion against kings, therefore, was rebellion against God and could never be excused.15 Much of Filmer’s patriarchal theory boiled down to a lack of trust in human reason. Whereas Suarez and Bellarmine believed reason and will could discover God’s natural order, Filmer mistrusted reason and thus referenced the Bible for guidance. “Filmer suggests that without the sustaining logic of patriarchalism and a full-blown scriptural account of the workings of the world,” historian Lee Ward writes, “natural reason can never penetrate the cacophony and clamor of political life to reach a core of intelligibility.” The Catholic theologians believed that right-reasoning subjects could create whatever government they choose that preserves natural law and aligns with their national character. Protestants like Filmer asserted that most men cannot reason rightly and weighty monarchical power is necessary, like that of a father educating his children.16 Filmer misunderstood Suarez and Bellarmine’s definition of tyranny, however, believing they based tyrannical illegitimacy in its lack of consent. But the two theologians said no such thing. Tyranny is wrong not because it violates consent but because it violates the natural law upon which true consent is based. “Contrary to what we would expect given Filmer’s emphasis on Bellarmine’s argument for

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the consensual origins of government,” Ward notes, “the Jesuit does not understand despotism as a violation of consent so much as a violation of the classical and Thomistic injunction in support of rule directed to the right end, namely, the common good.” For Catholics, consent was not a popular sovereignty carte blanche for humans to do whatever they pleased but a call to recognize the moral unity that lay beneath legitimate consent. Filmer saw no such qualification and attacked their apparent contractual ideas for undermining the divine origins of legitimate authority. Interestingly, Victorian Jacobites would also have problems with the divine-right theorist Filmer, opting instead for the pessimistic contractualism of Thomas Hobbes.17

thomas hobbes and leviathan Context impacts ideas, as Catholic theologians reacted against the Reformation and King James I and Filmer against papal interference in English political life. When the English Civil War rolled devastatingly across Britain and King Charles I lost his head, ideas on legitimacy and obedience shifted once more, this time to the authoritarianism of Thomas Hobbes. The son of a vicar, brilliant scholar of Latin and Greek, and tutor to the future King Charles II, Hobbes wrote his famous Leviathan (1651) to reconceptualize human nature and the origins of government. In it, he managed to infuriate everyone. Republicans found it anti-democratic, royalists detested its undermining of divine right, and clergy decried its atheism. Hobbes begins with individuals, rather than families or communities. Human nature is selfish, acquisitive, and hungry for power. We strive fervently for that which makes us happy (what he calls “felicity”) and desperately avoid that which makes us miserable or frightens us, particularly death. “Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter,” Hobbes writes. “The cause thereof is that the object of man’s desire is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time, but to assure forever the way of his future desire.” Even when we act kindly to others, philosopher Edwin W. Curley writes on Hobbes’ description of individuals, there are self-centred motives behind it: “Hobbes does not deny the existence of benevolent or conscientious actions, and he probably does not think that they always have an ulterior motive, though he is apt to see self-interest in any act of charity. But he certainly thinks that disinterested benevolence and action for

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the sake of duty are uncommon enough that political theory should not take much account of them.” Therefore, the summum bonum is always the happiness of the individual. This attraction-aversion dynamic forms the basis of morality, a utilitarian and subjective standard in which the useful, which assists us in gaining happiness, is good and its inverse is evil. As an individual’s happiness changes over time and happiness varies among individuals, life becomes an ongoing and endlessly varied hunt rather than the unified telos of the good of the Scholastics.18 The only way to gain that which makes us happy is by acquiring and using power. This means violence as people compete with one another for their respective felicities. This is the origin of Hobbes’ famous “war of all against all” (Bellum omnium contra omnes), in which the chase for power to acquire happiness leads to lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In this war and absence of a common constraining power, “nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where there is no law, no injustice.” There is no certainty in a chaotic world.19 Eventually, individuals realize disorder is destructive and unnecessary and agree to forgo unlimited liberty to act in their own interest and create a commonwealth to restore order, avoid quick death, and secure any chance to gain happiness more successfully. Thus, the creation of a common power by social contract – be it in one leader or an assembly – is an act of self-preservation and the laws that allow for the orderly pursuit of happiness establish justice. Governments and law are contrivances and “artificial chains” to restrain disorderly individuals from doing as they please. They also ensconce contracts as the ideal basis of human arrangements, political or economic. Indeed, contracts are the basis of justice: Before the names of just and unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power to compel men equally to the performance of their covenants, by the terror of some punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their covenant, and to make good that propriety which by mutual contract men acquire, in recompense of the universal right they abandon; and such power there is none before the erection of a commonwealth … [W]here there is no commonwealth, there nothing is unjust. So that the nature of justice consisteth in keeping of valid covenants;

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but the validity of covenants begins not but with the constitution of a civil power sufficient to compel men to keep them; and then it is also that propriety begins. Since the objects we pursue to fulfill our happiness are usually material goods, preserving the sanctity of contracts also has an economic impact in encouraging the growth of industry and trade. “Hobbes constructs his political ethics for modern, urban, commercial communities,” philosopher Harry W. Schneider noted about Hobbes’ important economic impact. “He constructed a vivid ideology for the spirit of contract in general. He was fully aware of the growing need for a peaceful, contractual, stable, equitable, regulation of corporate enterprises and competitive commerce.” Keeping mayhem at bay is Hobbes’ qualification for legitimacy. Those states that legislate laws, enforce the fulfillment of contracts, and keep our common life orderly are legitimate and demand obedience, no matter how they gained power or what physical form they took. Legitimacy is stability.20 On the one hand, Hobbesian government looks weighty, powerful, and thoroughly authoritarian – the sovereign is judge and executioner, decides the necessity of war, is unified and indivisible (no separation of powers), etc. On the other, subjects do retain some liberties – they cannot be commanded to harm themselves or implicate themselves in court, for example. Where the law is silent, subjects have liberty. Based in consent with limits on sovereign power – and that power can be withdrawn if the sovereign cannot preserve order – Leviathan helped lay the groundwork for modern liberalism. Catholic common good based on the unity of human ends gave way to the Hobbesian common good as the sum of varied individual goods, or, as political philosopher Charles N.R. McCoy describes it, In practice the substitution of the desire to be for the desire to be good means that the avoidance of death at any cost takes the place of telos, of the good in human life … If to be good absolutely meant – according to traditional political philosophy – to order one’s acts to the common good as part to the whole, then to be absolutely as the absolute good means to order the good of the whole to oneself … In place of the “unity of order” which the classical and Christian tradition had allowed for the political community, we find a “unity of composition” in which the activity of the parts is principally the same as that of the whole.

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Hobbesian liberalism leads to and enforces a “unity of composition” where everyone pursues their material ends, rather than a diversity of parts each organically contributing to the order of the whole by pursing the Good.21 Of course, Hobbes wrote none of this as pure theory untethered from reality. Many Englishmen had just witnessed the state of nature in the English Civil War, with the failure of authority and law, and the lack of effective collaboration among factions to maintain order. Nearly 200,000 soldiers and civilians had died and a king was beheaded, an event fraught with celestial significance for believers in divine right. Subjects had once granted King Charles I their loyalty, so long as the Crown protected their interests and kept disorder at bay. The king’s conflicts with Parliament had plunged the nation into civil war and, by failing to fulfill government’s primary responsibility to maintain order, released subjects from their oaths to support him. The Civil War had thrown Britain back into the state of nature. Oliver Cromwell restored order and earned the renewed loyalty of subjects, and Leviathan nearly reads as a handbook for legitimizing the Cromwellian order. Further, Leviathan counters the narrative of legitimacy and obedience based on Catholic natural law as seen in Suarez and Bellarmine. Hobbes constructs a materialist critique of the Catholic position, in which the Scholastics were swept up by faith in disembodied reason (rather than physical observations and sensations) and invented a theoretical supernatural world of angels and demons, and from these emerged fantastical doctrines like spiritual authority over the temporal. The theologians concocted fictions to legitimate extensive papal power, while Hobbes believed he defended stable and independent nation-states free from Roman interference. While holding no water for Cromwell, the Victorian Jacobites drew deep inspiration from Hobbes’ reflections on human nature, the foundation of authority, and the nature of obedience, and they referenced him liberally in their writings.

john locke and the revolution of 1688 At the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, Hobbes should have faced punishment but his former pupil King Charles II protected him. He never lived to see the second revolution in English politics, the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, when the Catholic King James II fled in the face of a gentry revolt and Dutch invasion to install reliably

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Protestant monarchs, William and Mary, on the English throne. A great admirer of King Louis XIV and his success in transforming France into a modern Catholic absolutist state, the “modern prince” James II wanted the same for Britain. He promoted tolerance for both Catholic and nonconformist religions in a nation with an Anglican establishment, modernized the British army and navy to defend against civil war and foreign invasion, and tried to “centralize and rationalize imperial governance.” None of this went over well with Britain’s Whig Protestant elite, particularly urban merchants and the propertied middle class, who pushed “an alternative modernization program” based on a decentralized open economic society that allowed for the easy acquisition of wealth and property. Historian Stephen C. Pincus notes that they advocated “urban culture, manufacturing, and economic imperialism”: These men and women not only wanted England to be a commercial society, they also wanted it to be a bourgeois society with urban rather than landed values. This was the revolutionaries’ cultural program. These were the Whigs’ revolution principles. England increasingly became a bourgeois society in the wake of the Revolution of 1688–89, because the political-economic program of the revolutionaries privileged urban and commercial values … The Revolution of 1688–89 was popular, violent, and divisive precisely because James II had not been a defender of traditional society. He had been a radical modernizer. James, to use Max Weber’s terminology, promoted a modern bureaucratic rather than a traditional patrimonial state … This involved not only trying to Catholicize England along Gallican lines but also creating a modern, centralizing, and extremely bureaucratic state apparatus. The French-style Catholicism James favored and promoted was ideologically suited to creating a modern polity. James II’s “Catholic modernization” struck opponents as the first steps toward a “holy league” with France to roll back the Reformation.22 The spokesman for the new regime was the son of a Puritan officer. John Locke fled into exile in 1683 for fear his liberal religious ideas would lead to prosecution, only to return to England in 1689 upon the fall of King James II. The fact that he returned with Queen Mary on her way to the throne signalled that Locke’s ideas were those of the new regime. In fact, Locke wrote his most important works in

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1689–90, stimulated by his return into writing a comprehensive study of human nature and politics. His Letter Concerning Toleration strictly separated state and church into independent spheres, the former a necessary society to protect one’s “civil interests,” the latter a “voluntary” one “that men may join in order publicly to worship God.” The practical impact of Locke’s influential thesis, philosopher Richard Cox writes, was “wholly to secularize government and to depoliticize religion” and “to reorient men primarily in the direction of their civil interests.” As Cox notes, this separation of the spiritual and temporal necessitated a rethinking of “what constitutes the good life” and, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke rejected Scholastic learning and denied humans carried innate ideas about the good or otherwise. Individuals were blank slates to be written upon by experience, sensation, observation, and education. Instead, echoing Hobbes, humans were driven by “innate inclinations of the appetite,” pursuing happiness and avoiding death.23 Locke then turned to government. In his Two Treatises on Government, Lee Ward writes, Locke “placed greater emphasis on the role of property in the purpose of the government and in the individualist logic of natural rights” and offered a ringing refutation of Filmer’s biblical foundation of government. What constitutes legitimate government, given that spiritual power has no role in civil life and individuals pursue their own happiness? Locke begins with humans with natural rights in a “state of nature,” proceeds to a social contract, and thence to government authority. In the beginning were individuals without innate moral knowledge and driven only by their need to acquire happiness, and while unlike Hobbes there is no brutal civil war, there are “inconveniences” to securing happiness. Natural man is not a devil in Locke’s world but “a pretty decent fellow.” As Charles McCoy explains, with each doing what he will with no moral principles, “in pursuing his private good man tends to procure the whole common good for himself.” Individuals, using reason and experience of the world, then recognize the necessity of rules to secure their private interests, and they move from nature to society with a social contract. Locke wrote in the Second Treatise, “The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community, for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living, one amongst the other, in secure enjoyment of their properties, and a

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great security against any that are not of it.” Locke reverses the Scholastic method of using reason to apprehend the common good and adjusts accordingly. McCoy describes how this shifted understandings of the common good: “Man must indeed refer the common good to himself (rather than refer himself to the common good), but he must do so not by seeking to procure the common good for himself but by seeing that it is the power of individual well-being that is the cause of the common good, and that this common good is simply the collectivity of private interests.” Legitimate government secures every individual’s pursuit of happiness under the rule of law and the sum of their various felicities creates a spontaneous common good.24 While Locke believed that majoritarian republicanism posed less of a threat to liberty than a traditional monarchy, he also carefully limited government to ensure that human self-centredness was curbed for mutual security, not eliminated. An individual only parted “with as much of his natural liberty in providing for himself, as the good, prosperity, and safety of the society shall require.” Property was the “great and chief end” of the social contract, and protection of the acquisition and holding of property was at the heart of Locke’s ideas and a primary motive behind the urban commercial impulse of the 1688 revolution. Since humans naturally pursued happiness, that meant humans possessed an innate “spirit of acquisitiveness.” For Locke, this was the primary purpose of creating government: freeing people of all aptitudes to pursue wealth and property under the rule of law. Canadian philosopher C.B. Macpherson later famously called this “possessive individualism,” the unity of liberal thinkers like Hobbes and Locke in creating “the possessive, competitive, accumulating, market-driven, autonomous and atomistic individual.” Locke laid the groundwork for liberal free market society and unlimited property accumulation.25 Legitimate government protected property rights, and when those protections broke down, men and women could seek out new arrangements. The right of revolution in Locke was based on essential property protections. When property was insecure, revolt was justified. Unlike Hobbes, who saw the decline of order as the ultimate catastrophe, Locke did not fear the transition from one political order to another. It was a rational decision to protect property. Propertied individuals were natural conservatives who would not take drastic steps

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like revolution unless absolutely necessary. Locke saw revolutions are a rarity, Ward explains: For Locke, the people are generally loath to do that which they have a perfect right to do … Hobbes views resistance as a natural act, one that threatens literally to restore the state of nature. Locke, on the other hand, sees revolution itself as a political act, an expression of the natural political power of the people. For Locke and Hobbes, the primacy of natural rights and the inherent fragility of political society produce very different theories of the right of revolution. In this confidence, one can see Locke’s experience of the relatively bloodless 1688 revolution. Entire governing systems could be replaced without massacring thousands and beheading a king.26 Locke cast a long shadow. His ideas justified the 1688 deposition of King James II, inspired the American and French Revolutions, and still resonate today. McCoy suggests that “Locke is the apologist for the laissez-faire democratic individualism of the nineteenth century,” a system that the Victorian Jacobites loathed. Nonetheless, they inhabited this world of ideas and engaged with these philosophers vigorously. They interpreted political, economic, and cultural changes through the lens of Western thought since the Middle Ages. It framed their objection to the execution of King Charles I and the legitimacy of the 1688 revolution, as well as rising democracy, the impact of the Industrial Revolution on people and communities, and the chaos of late Victorian cultural and religious life.27

1928

2 “Now the Moon is Blighted”: The Victorian Jacobite World

On 10 June 1886, the Earl of Ashburnham and the Cornish antiquarian Henry Jenner founded the Order of the White Rose (owr) in Great Britain after decades of Jacobite dormancy. The Order’s guiding principles were that temporal authority must have “Divine Sanction,” not “solely” consent of the governed, a liberal construct the Order abhorred. They regarded the execution (a murder, as far as they were concerned) of King Charles I and the Revolution of 1688 as “national crimes” usurping legitimate authority and dedicated themselves to study, remember, commemorate, and evangelize the Royal House of Stuart’s cause. The Order also opposed democracy – “within this Realm and beyond the Sea” – and pledged to support those everywhere who did the same non-violently. The personal values of members were also highly emphasized, as the Order promised to exemplify the virtues of loyalty, to discourage criticism and mockery of dutiful adherence to the Jacobite cause, to use the white rose as a symbol of honour, faithfulness, and obedience, and “to make this Symbol of their Faith the Symbol of their Lives.” The owr in its early years was constituted to remember and rewrite the historical record to the favour of the Stuarts, criticize Victorian parliamentarism in spoken word and on the page, and to live chivalrous Jacobite virtues in an unmannerly time. Practical politics held no interest for them, however. Why work through a system, one Jacobite sarcastically asked, dominated by a political class who “apparently believe that the Archangels are elected by universal suffrage, that Heaven itself is periodically devastated by a general election, and that entrance thereto will be regulated by competitive examination”? Part lobby and part fraternity, the owr initially took care to remain aloof from party affairs.1

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Jacobites in the owr believed that Queen Victoria was only the de facto queen, generating any semblance of legitimacy merely because she currently occupied the throne by a type of royal squatter’s rights. She and her predecessors were usurpers. The de jure queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland was, in fact, Queen Maria Theresa of Bavaria and her son, Crown Prince Rupprecht, the legitimate heir. Their rights to the throne were bestowed via the right of lawful succession that came down from King Charles I. Originally, the Jacobite Succession ran from Charles I through Charles II and thence to his brother James II, deposed in 1688 by a coalition of Protestant landowners and Dutch soldiers. The line proceeded to the “Old Pretender” James Francis Edward Stuart (King James III, in Jacobite parlance), then to the “Young Pretender” Charles Edward Stuart (King Charles III, the “Bonnie Prince” of the 1745 Rebellion), and finally to Henry Benedict Stuart (King Henry IX). Henry also happened to be the Roman Catholic Cardinal of York, England, and, as a devout man honourable to his vows, left no heirs. Rather than have the line expire with Henry’s death, Jacobites insisted the succession then shifted to the line proceeding from King Charles I’s daughter Henrietta Anne, which, through marriage, ran through the Italian House of Savoy and Austrian House of Austria-Este, the latter of which counted Queen Maria Theresa as member. She married the Bavarian King Ludwig III, which meant their son the Crown Prince represented the German House of Wittelsbach. For all their criticism of a de facto monarch, the owr well knew the tremendous popularity of the elderly Queen Victoria and proceeded with care in discussing her legitimacy, although some less discreet Jacobites called her “the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.” Maria of Bavaria had not claimed her legitimate rights yet, they claimed; prudence as well as honouring Victoria’s long service dictated that any contestation of the throne should wait until the queen’s death.2 Why an aristocratic Jacobitic order founded in 1886 attracted adherents in the United Kingdom and the United States can be traced to several sources. The first and most immediate was a spike in interest caused by a series of looming major anniversaries: 1888 marked the centennial of the death of Charles Stuart, “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” and the bicentennial of the Revolution of 1688 (Jacobites would never call it “Glorious”); 1895 was the 150th anniversary of the 1745 Jacobite uprising; and, most poignant, the 250th anniversary of King Charles I’s beheading approached in 1899. But the ori-

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gins of a renewed Jacobitism were also deeper than historical curiosity and the calendar. By the 1880s, many cultural elites, High Church Anglican clerics, and the aristocracy were looking to a revived Jacobite movement to organize their objections and propose alternatives to late Victorian life. This discontent involved religious, political, economic, and cultural changes impacting life in the British Isles and the United States.

canterbury and rome The movement in the nineteenth century from Darwinism to Pragmatism to Modernity was a century-long shift from a static world view to a fluid vision of life. This change was not an undisputed process. In the rush for more flexible ways of thinking and acting, many on both sides of the Atlantic resented a contentious and fast-moving world and, in response, reinvigorated orthodoxy. Taken as a whole, the nineteenth century was a revolutionary era in religious thought. The turn toward modernity did not begin suddenly in the years after publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) but was a drawn-out movement away from an older, fixed vision of life. Especially prominent in places like antebellum New England, a cool Protestant world view that stressed the rational and benevolent nature of human life and its place in the universe dominated AngloAmerican religious discourse. The vision of Scottish thinkers like Adam Ferguson and Thomas Reid emphasized how “common sense” realist approaches to understanding life and ethics were essential – emotion, skepticism, and extreme subjectivity clouded thought. British theologian William Paley posited that creation was like a giant clock, constructed and wound up by God the clockmaker. The changing of nature and the seasons, and the passing of time, was the ticking down of the clock. These type of portrayals of God, nature, and humanity were detached, aloof, objective, and harmonized with science. The head and the heart fused into one. As the century progressed, this rational vision came under assault as something less than fully human. Religious consciousness now moved away from rationalized and institutionalized worship, thence to a Whiggish moralism that linked man’s moral and social lives in a crusade for reform, to a pre-pragmatic devotionalism of intense emotional commitment outside the dictates of institutions or dogma.

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Nowhere was man restricted by the logic of his rational “head” but everywhere urged on the “feelings” of his emotions and “heart.” In addition, women used the new emotional religious experience found in “spiritualism” as a liberation, not only from religious rationalism but from what were viewed as patriarchal religious institutions. The new ways of religious thinking were anti-institutional, anti-authoritarian, and highly individual. When Darwin published Origin of the Species, the unity of head and heart, of thinking and emotions, so prevalent in the earlier religious rationalism finally split into liberal and orthodox Protestant Christianity. Darwin, in describing the endless evolution of all life into new, continually adapting forms, shattered the older view of a distant benevolent God, a rational understandable world, and an unchanging divinely ordained universe. It also introduced uncomfortable questions. Did God not rest after the seventh day? If creation is always changing, did that mean creation was not perfect? Did that mean God was not perfect? Now that life was seen as adapting and fluid across time, nothing was certain. Thought was now contextual, seeking fleeting truths in time, not objective truths outside time. Ethics was also contextual and historical, evolving to the needs of individuals and societies and not a far-off unvarying standard of conduct. Good and evil one year could be opposite the next. The most prominent exponent of this new pragmatic portrait of life was American philosopher William James, who in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) detailed the new religious consciousness. He proposed three criteria to keep in mind when searching for “authentic” religion. First, religion must be individualized and, emphasizing the centrality of the person in discovering solitude and salvation, must be free from the limitations of authoritative religious institutions that impede intense experience. Second, religion must have some utility or, to use James’ phrase, “serviceability to our needs” – that is, it must not be appealed to as an unchanging, objective, sometimes painful norm but instead must be seen as something individuals choose because it services their religious needs. Third, the religious experience must be intense, emotional, “feeling,” and first-hand (not mediated by institutions), appealing to the wants of the heart, not the demands of the head. The Jamesian vision takes religion out of the hands of clergy, churches, and dogma and places it within the hearts, homes, and needs of a democratic people.3

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Unsurprisingly, these changes riled many Anglo-Americans, who perceived in religious individualism and a lack of moral clarity the first steps toward nihilism and anarchy. Two faiths offered safe harbour to those who were critical of emerging modernity and who wished for a deeper, morally certain, historically grounded, and hierarchical church: Anglo-Catholicism and Roman Catholicism. The Anglo-Catholic movement originated in the early nineteenth century among a coterie of Anglican clerics wary of growing government hostility toward the established church. Adherents deeply resented plans to reduce the number of Irish bishoprics in the 1830s, for example. Intent on reconnecting with the pre-Reformation Catholic roots of the Church of England, High Church Anglo-Catholic clerics such as John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Pusey stressed the continuity of the Christian tradition and, in the face of fierce opposition from Low Church evangelicals, moved into an informal theological relationship with Rome. Speaking from their perch in English academia, the “Oxford Movement” Tractarians (so called for the many religious tracts they printed, bound into the multi-volume Tracts for the Times) helped revive medieval aesthetics in the church, renewed interest in Gothic architecture, and founded men’s and women’s religious orders. They also created deeply symbolic and richly ornamental liturgies (called “Ritualism” by critics) in contrast to bare-bones Low Church worship, gave rise to sacramentalism in the Church of England, and dedicated their lives to social activism among the working class in Britain and America. The tension between High Church ritualists and Low Church evangelicals had reached such a pitch by the 1870s that Parliament intervened to settle the issue. The fact that prominent Tractarians eventually converted to Roman Catholicism (like Newman, who became a cardinal) did not help the Ritualist case, as many saw in Anglo-Catholicism’s rise the spectre of Romish and Jacobite clerics undermining the Act of Settlement. In 1874, with the assent of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Parliament passed the Public Worship Regulation Act, which strengthened laws governing church aesthetics and provided for steep penalties against ritualistic practices. Five Anglican priests were arrested and thrown in jail for violating the act, making the 1870s resemble the 1570s rather than the Age of Victoria. The act proved an embarrassment, not a dissuasion. High Church Anglo-Catholicism spread widely on both sides of the Atlantic after 1900. Many Jacobites professed the Anglo-Catholic faith.

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Other Jacobites converted to Rome. Led by Popes Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius X, whose papacies covered the years 1830 to 1914, the Catholic Church actively opposed the assumptions undergirding modernity. Modernity for the Roman Catholic Church meant two things: first, the “modernist movement” within the church stressing détente with modern liberal democratic institutions; and second, the liberal rationalism of late nineteenth-century ideas. “Broadly speaking, and for those who employ it in an approbative sense,” notes historian Bernard Reardon, “[modernity] means that the modern mind is entitled to judge what is true or right in accordance with its own experience, regardless of whether or not its conclusions run counter to tradition and custom.” The popes hammered at this understanding. In Mirari Vos (1832), Gregory XVI attacked accommodations of liberty of conscience as reckless indifferentism. Men given that liberty would be too tempted by evil to make the right choice. “Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.” Pius IX’s papacy coincided with momentous political changes in Europe – the revolutions of 1848, the unifications of Germany and Italy, and the stripping of the Vatican’s temporal power – as well as a groundswell of Western enthusiasm for democracy, liberalism, and rationalistic scientific thinking. Confronted with these headwinds, Pius IX replied with fearsome certitude in 1864. First, in Quanta Cura, he criticized the intellectual trends of “this most unhappy age”: separation of church and state, secular public education over church-based instruction, and the right of the state to seize church property. Second, in Syllabus of Errors, he methodically listed eighty separate errors condemned by Rome: that human reason acted as humanity’s only guide in this world, that Catholic doctrine evolved with the spirit of the times, that philosophical and scientific findings are not subject to church criticism, that humanity is free to choose among the many faiths and that no faith is superior to another, that civil authority is superior to church authority and may interfere in church policies when necessary, that authority and right are materially not spiritually based, and that the Pope himself must come to terms with “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization,” among many others. Pius IX’s Syllabus represented the most comprehensive condemnation of liberalism and rationalism in the nineteenth century.4

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When Leo XIII became pope in 1878, the new Roman leader made attempts at improving the intellectual climate of the church. There would be no additional Syllabus from the new pope. Thomistic scholarship was reinvigorated by his encyclical Aeterni Patris, and a series of Catholic universities opened, including the Catholic University of America in Washington, dc. Pope Leo XIII, however, was no liberal. In Immortale Dei (1885) he defended church prerogatives against hostile state interference; in Libertas Praestantissimum (1888) he clarified the definition of true liberty as choosing the good, not choosing whatever happiness one wants; in Rerum Novarum (1891) he joined the church to the chorus of those protesting the treatment of industrial workers, condemning both socialism and capitalism; and in Testem benevolentiae nostrae (1899) he condemned Americanism as attempting to smuggle liberalism into the church. Despite his efforts, in the last decades of the nineteenth century a loose clique of scattered thinkers emerged to form a Catholic modernist movement. Pope Leo XIII’s successor, Pius X, detected an arrogant lack of humility in modernism. For the new pope, encouraging liberal and rationalistic intellectualism within the church, outside of disciplined Thomistic right reason, was foolhardy. “He instinctively feared that if the Church followed the Modernists, Catholicism would become a species of Humanist doctrine, not far removed from Protestantism itself,” explains historian Arthur Rhodes. “Then, like the latter, it would gradually degenerate into a number of sects, each with its own hierarchy.”5 The pope began issuing letters to correct modernism’s many errors. First came Lamentabili Sane, an updated Syllabus. The document listed sixty-five new errors condemned by the pope as hostile to the faith, many the result of recent modernist scholarship: among them, that the church cannot demand assent from communicants on doctrine, that students of scripture must approach texts historically rather than supernaturally, that “like human society, Christian society is subject to a perpetual evolution,” that the church is hostile to scientific discoveries, and that “modern Catholicism can be reconciled with true science only if it is transformed into a non-dogmatic Christianity; that is to say, into a broad and liberal Protestantism.”6 Two months later, the Vatican released Pascendi Dominici Gegis, which condemned the spirit of modernity – democratic individuals acting as free agents in politics, society, and economics, and privileging personal experience to understand the world – along with modernists’ advocacy of liberalism and rationalism. Modernists were “lost to all

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sense of modesty … in the employment of a thousand noxious arts”; “audacity is their chief characteristic”; “they disdain all authority and brook no restraint”; and “they were full of pride and obstinacy.” Pascendi’s language aimed squarely at individualism and its effects.7 Pius X believed liberalism made men self-centred and proud. When the measure of all things is the self, men grow blind to their surroundings and smug in their abilities. They become so certain of their conclusions that all institutions claiming broad socio-political authority are damned. “Let all authority rebuke him as much as it pleases – they have their own consciences on their side and an intimate experience which tells them with certainty that what they deserve is not blame but praise.” They believed the progressive future they prophesized and the democratic forms they welcomed were inevitable, so church intransigence only made the transition more pained. Modernist self-assurance morphs into boastful vanity. “If the laws of evolution may be checked for a while they cannot be ultimately destroyed. And so they go their way, reprimands and condemnations notwithstanding, masking an incredible audacity under a mock semblance of humility.” Modern liberalism changed men, from humble creatures who respected institutions and people outside their experience, and created new men, kings unto themselves and a collection of disconnected souls. For Jacobites dismayed at modernity’s ruin, Rome’s unapologetic defence of authority was attractive, and many of the movement’s leaders crossed the Tiber.8

anxiety over rising democracy Religious turmoil and the orthodox turn also reflected itself in politics, with deep Jacobite suspicion of emerging democracy. Two bills expanding the British franchise passed Parliament in 1832 and 1867, and Catholic Emancipation came in 1829. The Third Reform Bill passed Parliament in 1884–85 and “gave the vote to more than oneand-three-quarter million rural electors. This had the effect of increasing the size of the United Kingdom electorate by 72 per cent.” For the owr, this increasingly placed political power in the hands of those least capable and trained to wield it and, by broadening the franchise, weakened public respect for authority. This new system of governance believed, according to owr member R. Duncombe Jewell, that “because no one man among a thousand of them can govern himself, even in the simple matters of eating, drinking, or refraining from

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impertinent attempts to save his neighbor’s soul … therefore they are competent to govern those who have been dowered by God with powers of self-restraint, and with gifts of heart and intellect.” The owr had no love for democracy and saw rising political liberalism as evidence of national decline, the coming abolition of titled aristocracy and the monarchy, and an eventual British Republic. “It is this manyheaded, million-mouthed, enormous, and disaster-spreading monster which needs combating to-day – more even than the mammonworship which it is possibly destined to destroy,” Jewell warned.9 The United States moved in a similar direction, leaving behind the elite republicanism of Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and the Federalist Party to take up the mantle of Andrew Jackson’s “common man” after 1830. The franchise quickly broadened with the revision of most state constitutions, dropping property qualifications and religious tests. Massachusetts and New York liberalized their constitutions in 1820–21, and Virginia did so in 1830 and 1851. These constitutional conventions often disestablished churches too. Massachusetts only ended government support for Congregational churches in 1833, one year after Jackson’s re-election. With the rise of democratic politics came a different conception of government employment, from the elitist Federalist rule of learned men to the spoils system of opening positions to men of every rank and station. Democratic in theory, it also meant that when one party defeated another, the losers’ supporters would be replaced by the new guard. Too often this meant that unqualified men took up government work, typified by the 1830s Samuel Swartwout scandal – when a Jackson appointee to the New York Customs House ran off to Europe after embezzling over one million dollars. The connection between democratic government, the spoils system, and corruption continued for the remainder of the century, whether in the 1850s Covode scandal, Civil War profiteering, Credit Mobilier, or the 1880s Star Route frauds, only mildly curbed by passage of the 1883 Pendleton Act creating government civil service. In addition, after the Civil War, plutocrats began using their vast fortunes, earned via the wonder of industrial production and finance capitalism, to purchase political influence in Congress and state legislatures. Railroads were particularly guilty on this count, accused with some justification in the “Gilded Age” of having state politicians on the payroll in places like California and New Hampshire. To Anglo-American Jacobites, democracy looked more like the rule of money, not the generous elevation of the “common man.”

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Compounding this democratization came a flurry of assassinations, political violence, and trade union unrest in Europe and the United States between 1860 and 1914. The socialist Paris Commune uprising of 1871 led to thousands of French deaths, and the president of France was stabbed to death by an anarchist in 1894. The kings of Italy and Portugal were also both shot to death, and the empress of Austria-Hungary poisoned by an assassin, just between 1898 and 1908. Spain deposed Queen Isabella II in 1868, lost three prime ministers to assassination between 1870 and 1912, and surrendered its empire to the United States in the War of 1898. Outbursts in Russia took a bloody toll. In March 1881, Czar Alexander II was blown up by a bomb thrown by a terrorist, a peculiarity considering this czar was a liberal reformer compared with his predecessors. Unsurprisingly, his successor Czar Alexander III looked less kindly on liberalism. Between 1892 and 1911, one mayor of Moscow, two Russian interior ministers, and a prime minister also met their death at the hands of assassins. Balkan leaders fell at an alarming rate, in the midst of wrangling independence from the Ottomans. The gory murders in 1903 of the Serbian king and queen, and their prime minister, shocked Europe in their barbarity. The United States fared little better, with three American presidents gunned down between 1865 and 1901 and another, Theodore Roosevelt (then an ex-president), almost killed by a mad German barkeep in 1912. Labour agitation and strikes routinely hit the United States in this era: the crippling and violent 1877 railroad strike, the deadly 1886 Haymarket riot, the 1892 Homestead strike (during which Carnegie Steel director Henry Clay Frick was shot and wounded in his office by an unsuccessful assassin), the populist Coxey’s Army march and Pullman strike in 1894, the 1902 Anthracite strike, and the international cause célèbre Bread and Roses strike in 1912. Jacobites saw these as a parallel development to rising democratization – give a political inch and reformers will seek to take a mile by whatever means necessary. As democracy expanded and the franchise opened to the middle and working classes, those greedy for complete economic and political power sought the final elimination of all obstructions – royalty, aristocracy, and private capital – and used violence as a means to their end. Jacobites asserted that the various “isms” of the day served as vehicles for this violence: Socialism, Nihilism, and Anarchism.

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the expansion of markets and the industrial system Turning a disdainful eye toward the factory system, the owr believed industrial expansion had ruined Britain’s rural and small-town heritage and brutalized workers and the environment. British industrialization began in the 1780s, earlier than in the United States, and created the world’s leading factory system by the early nineteenth century. Railroad expansion after 1830 delivered mass-manufactured products around the nation and transformed formerly isolated towns into early suburbs of cities like Manchester and Birmingham. This transition from a dispersed small-producer economy to an urban industrial one came with significant social costs: overcrowding and disease, dangerous and unhealthy working conditions, and a heavily polluted city environment. Reaction against these jolting changes spurred Friedrich Engels to publish his Condition of the English Working Class in England in 1845 and to collaborate with German philosopher Karl Marx in 1848 to compose the Communist Manifesto. Romantic writers and poets also joined the fray. William Wordsworth protested industrial destruction of nature in poems like “The World Is Too Much with Us” (“The world is too much with us; late and soon/Getting and spending we lay waste our powers/Little we see in Nature that is ours”) and “On the Suggested Kendal and Windemere Railway” (“And is no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault? Schemes of retirement sown/In youth, and ’mid the busy world kept pure/As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown,/Must perish; – how can they this blight endure?”). His compatriot Robert Southey did the same but in prose, as did Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. The Jacobites professed no love of capitalism and sharply attacked wealthy landowners and manufacturers who profited from its growth. The owr appealed to those with an appreciation for history, continued Jewell, those who had not “degraded their estates by converting them into marketgardens,” who refused to breed horses for London cabs, and who never socialized with the “immoral plutocrats who rule the roost and associate fraternally with the Heir-apparent [Edward, Prince of Wales] to the Throne.”10 The organicism of earlier feudal hierarchies avoided these disasters, by curbing unlimited social mobility (and hence endless disappoint-

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ment and rootlessness) and stressing the roles and responsibilities of all social classes. Against capitalism, owr Jacobites proposed a new feudalism, or “feudal socialism.” Marxist historian Max Beer described the feudal socialist mindset: The representatives of institutions based on authority, clergymen, nobles, guild masters, romantic thinkers and poets, could not accept ideas and demands and economic practices which were based on individual freedom of judgment and of action – without regard to the church, the State, and the community, and placed egoism and self-interest before subordination, commonalty, and social solidarity. The modern era seemed to them to be built on quicksand, to be chaos, anarchy, or an utterly unmoral and godless outburst of intellectual and economic forces, which must inevitably lead to acute social antagonism, to extremes of wealth and poverty, and to a universal upheaval. In this frame of mind, the Middle Ages, with its firm order in Church, economic and social life, its faith in God, its feudal tenures, its cloisters, its autonomous associations and its guilds appeared to these thinkers like a well-compacted building. Capitalists cared only about profits and shareholders (and purchasing politicians to help preserve these winnings), not family and community. Order members emphasized duty, obligation, and stewardship.11 The United States underwent the same transition, albeit later. England’s and France’s harassment of American ships during the Napoleonic Wars, Jefferson’s embargo (and the depression it caused in seaport cities), and the War of 1812 demonstrated to the young republic the dangers of economic dependence. The Revolution and the Constitution achieved political independence, but the United States continued to lean heavily on the mercantile trade and its overseas networks for employment and wealth into the early nineteenth century. Dependence on European markets led to vulnerability. Thus, in the years after the 1815 Treaty of Ghent a factory economy emerged, transforming native raw goods into manufactured products for domestic use and export. Now hundreds of workers laboured under one roof, on innovative new machines, producing a high volume of manufactured goods. Mass production of industrial goods could be found in every state, but Massachusetts was home to a particularly large concentration of

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factories. Lowell, Massachusetts, deservedly attracted the balance of attention from contemporaries and historians alike. The city grew from a few farmhouses in 1820 to the largest cotton-manufacturing city in the world by 1860. Farm girls from neighbouring communities comprised the balance of the early workforce. These young women’s families did not need their labour, as the New England farm economy slowly declined in the face of expansion into the rich productive farmland of the West. Now, as wage workers, these women sent their paychecks home to support their rural families. The city became such a wonder of industrial growth that tourists visited to observe and tour the mills. American railroads and telegraphs allowed for the creation of a national market. When transportation and communication is slow and expensive, markets remain confined and local – costs outstrip profit. Railroads, however, shipped goods faster than roads and canals and could operate in most weather, and when a spiderweb of tracks began to expand from east to west in the 1830s, transportation costs dropped and markets grew. Farms and factories now tapped markets hundreds of miles away, linking by rail older eastern cities to the emerging western states. Telegraphs followed the railroad routes and communicated such information as political news, market demand and prices, and poor weather, which allowed enterprising farmers and manufacturers to identify the sharpest opportunities for selling goods. Problems came with industrial growth, and American Jacobites bemoaned the social cost of a factory economy. Workers’ lives were highly regimented, with every aspect of their daily existence organized by companies that built and owned the city. In addition, like Britain, factory cities became overcrowded and suffered from poor sanitation, high crime, and diseases like cholera, dysentery, and consumption. Labourers made low wages and conditions in nineteenthcentury mills were dangerous and unhealthy. The difficulties of this new industrial era spawned calls for labour organization to improve workers’ lot, with middling success, and strikes sometimes exploded in the cities. The new factory economy also destroyed older patterns of production and disrupted existing businesses with what economists would call “creative destruction.” Prior to the “market revolution,” households, families, and communities produced goods within local and neighbourhood networks, or “kinship networks,” for use in the community. “Reciprocity rather than gain” motivated many yeoman farmers and craftsmen. Lack of cash and a credit system encour-

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aged thrift and helped prevent the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Barter and exchange of needed goods and services became the medium of exchange, not the cash economy driven by passing individual desires and industrial mass production. In addition, the goods that were produced in what became known as the “moral economy” represented the authentic cultural expression of the families and households producing them: small-scale independent craftspeople spread across the villages of nineteenth-century America. Now these workers gathered in one place, participating in economies of scale. The goods they produced were now of lower quality, less individualized and distinctive – less expressions of authentic craftsmanship and local culture and more homogenized products for a competitive national mass market. The locally owned and operated ferries and coach companies now gave way to large railroad corporations owned by capitalists in the metropolis.12 This shift in production represented not merely a change in economic organization but an ethical shift too. Moving from local kinship and household production to market-based exchange fundamentally changed the moral nature of economic relationships. “The ‘local ethic’ valued the longer-term reciprocity between dealers embedded in a network of social connections; morality lay in accepting obligations and discharging them over time,” notes historian Christopher Clark. “The ‘market ethic’ emphasized quick payment and assumed a formal equality between individual dealers at the point of exchange; morality lay in the quick discharge of obligation.” In drawing the rural non-market world of pre-industrial America into the more urban market-oriented world of industrialism, this new ethic was morally suspect. The harsh competitive ethos of individualism violently upended that of the co-operative moral economy.13

victorian cultural angst All this fuelled potent cultural discontent on both sides of the Atlantic. Writers such as Edward Bellamy, William Demarest Lloyd, and Henry George wrote of “alternative Americas,” places of greater moral and social certainty with quirky plans like a single tax or futuristic utopian authoritarian states. With the help of an orthodox church or landed independence, men could once again discover the normative good life. Others, like John Ruskin, sought a rejuvenation of the simple agrarian life free from urban industrial deprivations or

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by participating in the Arts and Crafts movement and working to redevelop traditional craftsmanship against mechanization and mass production – think here of William Morris or Gustave Stickney. Poets like Louise Imogen Guiney (a close, if skeptical, associate of American Jacobites) longed for the chivalry and martial thrill of medieval Europe against industrial-era boredom, writing poems like “Of the Golden Age”: Once, gods in jewelled mail Through greenwood ways invited; There now the moon is blighted And mosses long and pale On lifeless cedars trail. Henry Adams and Charles Eliot Norton turned to the aesthetic order of the Catholic Middle Ages for artistic representations of the good society. Cathedrals became both road map and metaphor for Jacobites and anti-moderns.14 The unhappy collision of Darwin, liberal Christianity, the spread of political liberalism and democracy in Europe and America, the rise of massive urban industrialized economies of scale, and a deep cultural restlessness reconstituted traditional Western society. This was for many, in historian T. Jackson Lears’ phrase, “a crisis of cultural authority.” The traditional institutional sources of social order came under challenge – the independence and sanctity of the family, the certitude of ecclesiastical authority, the integrity of neighbourhood and community – and many echoed Edmund Burke’s century old cry, “we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.” The individual appeared alone and adrift in this new world. “In enfranchising the individual (at least theoretically), it also isolated him,” the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon wrote in 1896, speaking of emerging social democracy. “In isolating him from his caste, from his family, from the social or religious groups of which he was a unit, it has left him delivered over to himself, and has thus transformed society into a mass of individuals without cohesion and without ties.”15 Individuals, having been sprung from the confines of traditional society, operated on the principle of “individual autonomy … conquering fate through sheer force of will.” In the traditional world, individuals were limited by the needs of family and caste, the demands of the broader community, and the authority of churches

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and government; in the modern world, characterized by limitless faith in human progress, the potential of technology and scientific discovery, and the bounties of industrial production, emancipated individuals moved around fluidly, free from traditional restraints on social mobility and behaviour. In this new environment of expanding possibility, the individual’s role in politics and economics shifted.16 Whereas before, the wider demands of home, community, and parish constrained people, now the individual operated autonomously. He was free to decide whether government complemented his needs, whether politicians represented his agenda, and whether society reflected his preferences. “This highly individualistic conception of democracy emphasized self-pleasure and self-fulfillment over community or civic well-being,” historian William Leach observes. Liberal governments of universal suffrage and parliamentary or congressional democracy dovetailed with emerging modernity. Liberated from considering the provincial contexts of their native communities, individuals relied on their private store of reason. Philosopher Michael Oakeshott explains, At the bottom [the rationalist] stands (he always stands) for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of “reason.” His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his “reason”; optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his “reason” (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action. Modernity celebrated the advent of liberal government and welcomed the liberality of the rationalist mind.17

ethnic identity in the age of nationalism Finally, there was the issue of legitimacy and ethnic nationalism. The Earl of Ashburnham acted as the British agent for Spanish Legitimism, representing and promoting the interests of the Carlist cause.

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Ashburnham “aspires to be the Warwick of the Nineteenth century, the kingmaker of Europe,” one newspaper teased in the 1890s. He often dressed in Spanish regalia and welcomed the “Spanish Pretender,” Don Juan de Bourbon, into his home on his many English visits. When the Pretender died in Hove, England, in 1887, the earl escorted the body to London and attended his funeral in Trieste. The owr not only signified Jacobite Legitimism but acted as a common front for Legitimist interests around the world. The issue of legitimacy also applied to forms of ethnic nationalism in the Victorian age. Irish, Cornish, and Scottish nationalists all joined the owr, seeing in its embrace of Jacobite restoration a potential movement for political independence and cultural preservation against the homogenizing winds of modernity. The Irish Celtic Revival paralleled the resurrection of Jacobitism, and Jacobite themes permeated late nineteenthcentury Irish literature. For writers like William Butler Yeats, the defeat of King James II’s forces in Ireland in 1691 was a political and cultural catastrophe. “The resultant collapse of Catholic Ireland’s last great hope for restoration of power, land and dignity had left a scar on the folk imagination like no other engagement in Irish history,” writes historian Frank Shovlin. James Joyce was born outside Dublin in 1882 and grew up amid the Victorian Jacobite resurgence: The Ireland of Joyce’s birth and early manhood was a country which had exhibited a lasting and peculiar attachment to the Stuart or Jacobite cause, a hangover inaugurated in the late-seventeenth century on the fields of the Boyne and Aughrim, yet still both painful and inspirational over two hundred years later … All around him in varying ways his contemporaries of varying political hue were busy retrieving aspects of the disastrous collapse of Catholic Ireland associated with the Williamite War and putting them to use – sometime as polemic, more often as dreamy romance – in their writing. The Irish literary and language revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had direct political effects and fed rising support for Irish independence on both sides of the Irish Sea. Indeed, Lord Ashburnham was one of Britain’s most outspoken advocates of Irish Home Rule and served as president of the British Home Rule Association in the 1880s.18 The owr’s first chancellor, Henry Jenner, was the most prominent Cornish nationalist and language enthusiast between the 1880s and

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1930s. Jenner came from a distinguished lineage – his father had been an Anglican bishop and his grandfather a Cambridge don – and worked at the British Museum for forty years organizing historical exhibitions and helping preserve Cornish history. Jenner even composed a Cornish dictionary. “He did more than any other single person to re-awaken interest in early Cornish history and in the old Cornish speech,” his obituary in the Cornishman noted. “He was the first man to send a telegram in Cornish, and the first scholar to advocate a revival of the language.” Jenner also zealously promoted the Jacobite cause. When the British Liberal Party threatened to adopt the white rose as its emblem, he retorted sarcastically, If I may be permitted to suggest a suitable flower (if they must needs be Plagiarists and have a Flower) for the Liberals. I would name the Trumpet-Flower or Bignonia Radicans. It comes from North America. It attaches itself as a parasitical growth to some Tree or Building, and flourishes to the Destruction on that on which it fastens. Fixed firmly it blows (and its own trumpet) all over the place; and the Trumpet of it is blood-red with a centre of guilt, I ask pardon, I mean gilt. Therefore, Victorian Jacobitism, ostensibly a movement to commemorate the fallen Stuarts, acted as a stalking horse for a host of causes – religious, political, economic, and cultural – and a genuine philosophical opposition to liberal democracy. This is not to say their adherence to the Stuart cause was insincere, only that these latter-day Jacobites used their movement as an opportunity to open a wider critique on Victorian Britain and the Gilded Age United States. These multiple purposes made organizations like the owr more influential than if they had remained just an antiquarian society, but it also introduced sectarian tensions in the group. Some wanted the owr to study and rewrite British history with an eye to restoring Stuart reputation, while others wanted to effect real political change and run for Parliament, and still others waited for Queen Victoria’s death to contest the throne. These internal divisions would cause troubles later.19

1928

3 “Authority Has a Divine Sanction”: The Early Years of the White Rose in Britain A typical Order of the White Rose session proceeded thusly. Meetings were normally held in London’s St James Hall or sometimes in secret, where a member would “find himself in an old-fashioned hall with a vaulted roof, supported by oaken rafters, and great carved open fireplaces which burn coal with a lordly disregard of economy.” At the opening, new members swore oaths by putting their right hand on their heart and their left on the Eikon Basilike, a book of prayers and observations written by King Charles I. They would then kneel before the owr’s chancellor and state with verve the king’s last words: “Remember!” The chancellor or an Anglican priest chaired the proceedings, “ready of tact and humour,” followed by speeches, debates, and discussion over century-old controversies, rousing Jacobite songs, and toasts to the “Queen over the water,” whereby the Order members waved their wine glasses over a glass of water and drank deeply. White roses were in abundance, particularly surrounding portraits of Queen Maria Theresa and Prince Rupprecht, both of whom treated Jacobite overtures with kindness and corresponded with members regularly. The prince apparently took their inquiries “very seriously.” Some owr members, like Henry Jenner, even stayed with them on visits to Bavaria.1 The Order’s first attempts at raising public awareness of the Royal House of Stuart met with mixed results. When the Jacobites attempted to organize a Roman Catholic requiem mass for Charles Edward Stuart on the centennial of his death in 1888 the archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, shut down their plans. Shock at the cardinal’s refusal forced the owr to explain publicly the purposes of the organization and that they had no political or insur-

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rectionary intent. The Order’s members “recognize as vital, the principle that all authority comes from Above, and hold that in every State of Christendom the Sovereign Power, of whatever form it be, should exist of its own Divine inherent strength, and not merely by the will of the people or consent of the governed.” Their purpose was to promote remembrance of the Stuarts through public exhibitions and commemorations, the point of which was “to rewrite history that has been falsified, denied, explained away, and extenuated, and thus to commemorate a great race, a great epoch, a continuous tragedy.” They were legitimists with only literary intent, the owr insisted.2

the stuart exhibition of 1889 More promising was the role of the Order in organizing the highly popular 1889 Stuart Exhibition in London. Planning for a public exhibition of Stuart relics began in April 1888, with the Earl of Ashburnham chairing the organizing committee. The owr duo of Ashburnham and Henry Jenner as the energy behind this project – Jenner, with his connections and experience at the British Museum, organized a number of historical exhibitions in the 1880s and 1890s – raised some questions as to the exhibition’s intent but, with assurances that it was only a historical exhibition, arrangements began. Backed by Queen Victoria’s patronage, the “Exhibition of the Royal House of Stuart” in London’s New Gallery opened to the public in January 1889 and remained open until April. The Stuart Exhibition was only the New Gallery’s second exhibition after opening in the summer of 1888, the first being the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, a perfect anti-modern preface to the winter’s Jacobite extravaganza. Over two hundred Stuart portraits, five hundred personal relics, and a blizzard of documents went on display to wide public interest. The London Daily News described the exhibition as “one of the most interesting historical exhibitions ever seen in this country.” After costs, it even made a £1,000 profit. Had the aged Duchess of Cambridge not died in April, Queen Victoria herself would have attended.3 Not all reaction was positive, however. Many noticed that Stuart portraits were labelled with their Legitimist titles – Prince Charles Edward Stuart became “King Charles III,” for example, and Prince Henry, Cardinal of York, was “King Henry IX.” The News mocked that the show was an Order of the White Rose event, “a show of relics in almost the devotional sense.” Despite assurances to the contrary, the

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paper smelled political intent, a hilarious attempt to link the reverential display of King Charles I’s baby clothes to the superiority of monarchy over democracy. The owr also made an error in the exhibition’s wake. Instead of the profits being used to fund a “Stuart Lecture Fund … to give Monarchy a lift in its battle with the monster whose name begins with D,” they were spread between the national portrait galleries in London and Edinburgh. The money should have been invested and used to fund future Jacobite events. In addition, Queen Victoria believed she had been duped into supporting an exhibition celebrating Jacobitism. When meeting Jenner sometime later, she turned her back on him, declaring, “I have heard of Mr Jenner.” owr membership flourished in the wake of the exhibition, however; the Order numbered over five hundred members throughout the 1890s, including artist James McNeil Whistler, journalist Sebastian Evans, occultist MacGregor Mathers, and poets Lionel Johnson and Andrew Lang. It capitalized on its new higher public profile by launching a monthly magazine, the Royalist, with the first edition appearing in April 1890 on the anniversary of the Battle of Culloden, the bloody defeat and massacre of Jacobites that ended the Rebellion of 1745. Filled with commentary on current events, historical and philosophical articles, genealogical commentaries (many authored by Jenner), and notice of important Stuart dates as well as future owr meetings, it remained in publication for fifteen years.4

the jacobite world view The pages of the Royalist elaborated the Jacobite world view in theory and practice. In April 1891, the magazine featured a White Rose–Legitimist catechism, modelled on a religious catechism of theses, common questions, and answers. owr members could read this primer and an exposition on its two primary tenets – that “Authority has a Divine Sanction” and “the Murder of King Charles I and the Revolution of 1688 were national crimes” – and understand what was required of the Victorian Jacobite. The tenets were written in sufficiently broad language as to catch as many people as possible, considering the owr hoped to appeal to both Catholics and Protestants: “They may be reached by many diverse roads, starting like the radii of a circle, from it may be opposite sides of a circumference, but always converging and meeting in the centre.” Therefore, the Royalist editor explained, the catechism would appeal to followers of Joseph de

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Maistre, Thomas Hobbes, and Sir Robert Filmer alike – in other words, Catholic, secular, and divine-right absolutists.5 Five theses organized the catechism: authority has a divine sanction, democracies have no authority, legitimate authority can be found in England and Scotland, revolt against legitimate authority is criminal, and the murder of King Charles I and the 1688 revolution were examples of this criminality. Sovereign power is necessary and rules a commonwealth by laws. Laws both recognize natural or God-willed rights and create new rights and, in so doing, create concomitant duties attached to those rights. Rights and duties need protection, thus originating sanction, or “the force and virtue of law.” Without sovereign power, anarchy would result, which is contrary to the law of God and His order. But power and authority are different things. Authority has four characteristics: it is “prescribed by a Law,” that law must be “clear and certain,” it must have historical justification, and “it must not exist merely by the will of the people or the consent of the governed.” Power is force, while authority grants power legitimacy. Power might have a sinful origin, after all, overthrowing or subverting legitimate authority to gain control of a commonwealth and “a doctrine which allows to sin an equality with God’s Will is self-condemned.” Legitimate authority may arise in the forceful suppression of anarchy, “since what terminates Anarchy must be in accordance with God’s Will,” but force and usurpation differ. Force restores order and becomes authoritative; usurpation overthrows an existing authoritative orderly regime and is merely power.6 Democracies are all power and no authority, the Royalist catechism insisted, and therefore are illegitimate regimes because power is exercised “merely” by consent. Both monarchies and aristocracies can be authoritative, however. The word “merely” carries weight here, since it implies that a mixed regime incorporating aspects of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy could have legitimate authority.7 Revolt against legitimate authority offends God and is never licit since its basis is in accountability to the governed. Legitimate rulers are accountable only to God, not the commonwealth, but this accountability carries with it sombre duties, “namely to God, to whom he owes the Duty of using his Sovereign Power for the welfare of the Commonwealth.” Anyone who “takes part in [revolt] or condones it, or profits by it, or does not actively protest against it, and endeavour to prevent or undo it by all means in his power” must answer to God for their sin. King Charles I’s execution and the 1688

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deposition of King James II amply demonstrate the illegitimacy of rebellion. Charles held legitimate authority against the disorderly forces of parliamentary power. The “Glorious Revolution” likewise warred against authority and God’s will: “It was a Crime for two reasons. First, because it opposed Authority; secondly, because it asserted the Will of the People to be the Sanction of Authority; which is not only to break a law but to annihilate all law; and it was a National Crime because the Nation became a party to it by permitting it.” Yet not all revolutions were forbidden. Those in favour of restoring legitimate authority abided by God’s will, as in the restoration of King Charles II in 1660.8 This catechism left readers with too many uncertainties, and to clear these up, the Royalist published a series of clarifying essays between 1892 and 1894 under the title “Touchstone of Authority.” Since Victorian Jacobitism was a “missionary cause,” all difficulties must be surmounted to attract as many adherents as possible. After all, “we must think of its potential proselytes no less than of those who may be called its chosen people; of those who must substitute personal conviction for a birthright of loyal faith no less than of those who have continuously maintained all loyal traditions, and have handed them on as the most precious of heirlooms.” These essays elaborated on previous points. Man is social by nature and the institutions of government and law are God’s will. The laws of government “can only mean a will which unreasonable beings are physically bound to obey, and which reasonable beings (whose own will is free) are morally bound to obey.” Authority gave sovereign power the right to rule, as a kind of “law within a law,” and was both just and lawful. Power may have “possession and control of the physical force of the Commonwealth,” or what the Royalist called the “Imperium,” but without authority it remained an unjust, illegal, and immoral regime: “Where is the Imperium, there is the Sovereign power; and, therefore, it is clear that this power may be, ever as a matter of pure theory, exercised unjustly and obtained by unjust means. The importance of the search for authority consists in the fact that it is not the exercise of Sovereign power, but the right to exercise it by just acquisition.” A foundational element of Legitimist theory was that might (expressed by conquest, rebellion, or majority rule) does not make right.9 The true understanding of legitimate authority could be reached by many different philosophical routes, and the Royalist took pains not to disqualify any of them. All were welcome if they ended in

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Legitimism. “There is nothing in the catechism inconsistent with social contract theory,” for example. “Those who hold that theory can accept every word of the catechism by way of addition without the slightest inconsistency.” Justifying Legitimism based on expediency was also acceptable, if not ideal, because “the expediency of the system is but a deduction from its Divine establishment.” Most particularly, the Royalist assured Catholic Legitimists they need not worry; nothing in the catechism was inconsistent with their faith. In fact, the magazine recognized the significance of its Catholic readers and owr members, since “an argument for Legitimism which excludes Catholics from its subscribers musts [sic] needs be a reductio ad absurdum of its own aim.”10 Indeed, Catholics comprised an important segment of the Order’s membership, even if they did not always agree among themselves as to what legitimacy and obedience meant. In 1890, a vigorous debate took place in the Royalist’s pages between an anonymous correspondent called “Catholic Legitimist” and the Cambridge-educated writer and Catholic convert William Samuel Lilly. Lilly had just published two books; in one, A Century of Revolution, he treated the Revolution of 1688 surprisingly kindly for a Jacobite. “Who can deny that we Englishmen now enjoy the plenitude of all the liberties which the full exercise of personality implies?” he asked of readers two centuries after the deposition of King James II. Following up, Lilly wrote a short article in the September 1890 Royalist entitled “The Catholic Doctrine of Sovereignty,” in which he denied that government was based on either consent or expediency but instead modelled on the family. He also noted that the church forbade rebellion against a king, “save in the extreme cases, where his authority is made void by his [sinful] abuse of it.” The “Legitimist” wrote a letter in reply claiming Lilly was a bad Catholic for suggesting that people of their own accord could rebel. Only the pope could release the baptized from obedience to governments, but until then citizens must exercise a “patient obedience.”11 Clearly annoyed, Lilly answered that “‘Passive Obedience’ is not a Catholic doctrine” nor can the pope depose kings, and he quoted Aquinas, Suarez, and Bellarmine in his defence. Without the people’s power in the extraordinary circumstance of a leader’s grave sin, “King and Pope would be everything, and there would be nothing for the people of a country but to be helpless between hammer and anvil.” Although his reading of Catholic philosophy was suspect, Lilly fell back upon traditional Thomistic reasoning. The letter writer,

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“Catholic Legitimist,” instead followed more recent papal pronouncements, like Pius IX’s Quanta Cura and the Syllabus of Errors – that is, that “the Church does not allow that tyranny and injustice form a ground for resistance to a lawful Sovereign. The sole remedy for such grievous trials is Christian patience or the intervention of the Apostolic See. Only if rulers command or enforce that which is contrary to the Divine or moral law – the adoption of heresy for instance – would resistance meet with the approval of the Church.” On the pages of the Royalist, two Jacobite Catholics contended over the contours of morally lawful revolt, with one making room for the decision-making of the baptized and the other confining such decisions to the pope.12

observations on hobbes and filmer The distinct odour of Thomas Hobbes hangs over descriptions of authority in the catechism and “Touchstone” essays, especially in their invocation of anarchy and order. Appropriately, between November 1891 and February 1892, the Royalist printed a four-part essay series considering Hobbes’ Leviathan and its usefulness to the Jacobite cause, likely authored by another Cambridge-educated Jacobite, the journalist, poet, and son of an Anglican vicar Sebastian Evans. Evans regarded Hobbes as “one of the shrewdest, most original, and most independent of human minds,” whose works had been unjustly marginalized. Hobbes’ rationalistic approach to theology raised many objections, but these complaints blinded readers to his useful insights, particularly for Jacobites: It was as if he brought into a dark chamber a lighted lantern which enabled him to throw ample light into every nook and corner, and then attempted to employ the same process for the investigation of the heavens. Not one otherwise unseen star would his lantern enable him to discover; his confidence in it would only entitle to say, “There is nothing more in the Universe, because my candle shows me nothing more.” In this respect, the very intellectual qualities that made Hobbes great, became a weakness … But this incapacity for the logic of the infinite, though combined with more than the usual measure of the arrogance naturally belonging to this particular form of incapacity, is no reason for undervaluing the revelations of the lantern when it is exercised within the range to which it is properly applicable.

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Hobbes’ observations on the nature and legitimacy of authority made him an indispensable aid for the Jacobite cause and “an important bulwark of the doctrine of true Kingship.” Evans believed Hobbes to be a prophet for the nineteenth century.13 Although social contract explanations for the origins of authority were nonsense without historical evidence, Evans believed they served a useful function. “When a contract is to all practical intents and purposes acted upon, it becomes to all those same intents and purposes a reality,” he wrote. It was a time when many people believed in social contract theory, and that “contract need not have been signed, sealed, witnessed, and delivered; but men have accepted it by acting upon it, and must, therefore, be held to all its further consequences.” Hobbes rightly noted that contracts were “worthless without the sanction of authority,” just like any other explanation of the origins of power, including divine right. Hereditary monarchy maintained authority and prevented anarchy, just like Hobbes’ legitimate contractual ruler. Leviathan acted as a bridge between secular and divine-right absolutists, each believing in the existence of legitimate authority and the necessity of good order – one from the direction of the “laws of nature,” the other from the “laws of God.” Both wanted civilization and hated barbarism. Each ended in the same place. “And if it be a law of God, as well as of what Hobbes chose to call Nature, that men should live in Commonwealths,” Evans wrote, “if what is best for men must needs be the most in accordance with God’s will; and if monarchy be proved to be [the] best political condition for men – if these things be so, then it would seem that the difference between Hobbes and his critics must be very superficial.” No Jacobite should quibble with Hobbes’ premises, “as it is with assurance against anarchy.”14 Hobbes also rightly diagnosed the human condition when he declared that life without effective authority was “solitary, poor, brutish, nasty, and short.” Look around you, said Evans. Everyday observations of people proved Hobbes correct: “It really amounts to this – that mankind requires some influence to save it from itself, and if it be argued that no such ‘state of war’ as he describes is on record, the objection will scarcely hold good for many minutes in a generation which possesses a Stock Exchange, a stand-up conflict between labour and capital, a Monte Carlo, and a court for matrimonial causes.” Hobbes’ various laws to curb poor behaviour composed the bedrock of most judicial systems, “the endeavour of men, by reason, to contract themselves out of an anarchic equality.”15

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Finally, Evans insisted that Hobbes’ system defended absolute monarchy as well as any divine-right theorist. Monarchies subsumed private interests within the common good (as opposed to anarchy, where private interests clashed), governed with greater consistency and steadiness than other systems, and unified commonwealths around one authority rather than competing sources of power. Monarchies too often brought images of dictatorship into people’s heads, but the reality was that kings often decentralized power and prudently “left a very large margin for popular action,” like councils, assemblies, and parliaments to propose new laws. But such grants should never surrender pieces of the underlying sovereignty in legitimate authority. Hobbes detailed the warnings of weakened authority in Leviathan, like figurehead constitutional monarchs, the allowance of private conscience as an exception to obedience, property rights beyond public control and as a contending source of public power, the rise of demagogues and large cities as power centres, and imperialism and endless wars that endanger the commonwealth by foreign conquest. Weak thrones invite “rebellion, revolution, and the destruction of the Commonwealth.”16 After dispensing with Hobbes, Evans turned to a consideration of Sir Robert Filmer in another series of articles in 1892. As the bestknown exponent of divine right, Filmer appeared a perfect reflection of Jacobite ideas, but Evans criticized him more than Hobbes. Filmer totally rejected the legitimacy of social contract theory, “denying on first principles, that Sovereignty can be revocable, denied the validity or even the necessity of any antecedent contract.” He believed Hobbes’ contractualism yielded to “the opponents of authority” and “though it was well to conquer the enemy on his own ground, it was better still to refuse the foe even the choice of the battlefield.” In this use of contract, Filmer charged Hobbes with being no different from the Catholic theologians he hated, like Cardinal Bellarmine.17 Evans disagreed with Filmer’s analysis and defended Hobbes from attack on two counts. First, as he wrote earlier on Leviathan, both Hobbes and Filmer based their theories in a robust defence of monarchy, one through the laws of nature and the other by laws of God. “It is a case of all roads reaching the same point, when strictly and honestly followed,” Evans explained. Second, Hobbes at least recognized the difference between usurpation and force. Filmer too often inferred that power was its own justification, “that actual possession is not only nine points of the law, but all the ten”:

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Kingship, according to him, is true kingship, however obtained, per nefas no less than per fas; he sees God’s ordination in all powers that be, as though God could be the author of sin … [H]e does not so much as hint at any distinction whatever between the titles to absolute obedience of the hereditary patriarch of the people and of the successful rebel who deposes him. Social contract may be flawed, explained Evans, but at least it recognized the sin of rebellion against order. Filmer did get one thing right, however: that democracy was morally empty. It is incapable of inspiring unity since it depends upon divisions of power, parties, and opinion, and disunity leads to misery. If you compare the crimes of monarchy versus those of democracy in history, the balance of “cruelties, murders, injustices, and persecutions” lay with democracies or rebels battling against legitimate authority. It is nonetheless interesting that a major Jacobite writing in the owr’s magazine contended that Thomas Hobbes offered a better portrait of the difficulties besetting Victorian Britain and their solutions than Sir Robert Filmer. For Jacobites like Evans, Britain had reverted to a Hobbesian state of nature.18

from theory to practice The editors of and contributors to the Royalist turned all these philosophical observations into a critique of modern Europe and America, particularly the curse of rising democracy and the baleful pursuit of equality. In comparison with traditional monarchy, democracy represented illegitimate regimes with a bloody historical record against lawful permanent authority with a respectable one. Politics, the Royalist argued, consumed everything in democracies. Contemporary British politics boiled down to factional battles over a pittance, like who would occupy an insignificant office for a year, and constant politicking was a nuisance to citizens living their everyday lives: It disorganises everybody’s business, it excites men’s minds about affairs which most of them are not in the least capable of understanding, though a wise legislature has given them the power of deciding upon them, and it inflames their passions about matters in which they ought to be particularly cool; it fills the newspapers with speeches, misrepresentations, and political arithmetic, and the dead walls and hoardings with flaming posters that

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offend the eye. Then people shout and make crowds in the street, and canvass for votes, and fill letter-boxes with circulars, and generally obtrude themselves upon other people who do not want them, and do not want to vote for anybody. No doubt as good patriots we should count these things very minor evils if they did any good to the country, and should take them as we should take even the terrible calamity of a just war. But they do not do any good to the country, they do nothing but harm. They excite party spirit, they promote “burning questions” and election cries, and they cause legislation, which should be conducted in the most absolutely cold-blooded manner, to be entered upon in a state of fever-heat. For all of democracy’s claim to fraternity, permanent electoral hubbub eroded the unity of citizenship and drove wedges between neighbours. On one side stood the “fraternity” of democracy – “Be my brother, or I will be your enemy” – while on the other stood the common good of monarchy, “the natural, unforced brotherhood of all who are subject to a common rule.”19 Universal suffrage expanded authority to those least likely to understand civic necessities. Granting voting rights to more citizens left decisions to a “numerical majority, that is, in the hands of the class least instructed in history, least able to judge in difficult questions of policy, least fitted to govern either themselves or others, most easily led by agitators.” One Jacobite writer, expanding on the theme, later wrote, “The tendency of the age is towards democracy, and the tendency of democracy is towards harm. The Legitimist is, above all things, a king’s man, and in his eyes democracy is an accursed condition, to be prevented at all costs.” In other words, the least capable were in the saddle. Democratic politics thus became “a game of chance, as ignorant electors may be taught to expect more personal advantage from this side or from that.” These new voters suffered from a lack of education. Permitting voters without “an elementary knowledge of history” was akin to hiring a man to build a cathedral who had never studied architecture. A broadening suffrage also watered down the significance of each vote, ironically lowering the power of each vote by awarding them to more people. “A highly diluted voting power must in the nature of things carry with it a proportionately small sense of responsibility,” the editor of the Royalist wrote in July 1892, “and the sense of responsibility in the individual

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elector probably varies inversely with the size of the electorate.” Traditional monarchy with its limited franchise imbued electors with a weightier sense of responsibility. “Monarchy has often been tyrannical – sometimes cruelly tyrannical; for the scourge is among the instruments of Providence. But it has never been absurd.” Democracies were usually both.20 Democracies embraced the revolutionary dogmas of equality, in currency since the French Revolution, and in so doing privileged banality over excellence. For the Royalist and its editors, there was no surer sign of democracy’s corruption than its egalitarian critiques of hereditary aristocracy, “no artificially created system to fulfill any particular function” but one that evolved with experience. Aristocracy recognized the reality of the human condition: that “there are always governors and governed, leaders and led.” Working- and middle-class virtues differed from family to family, but aristocratic families raised their children in uniform virtues and placed the weight of long and distinguished family trees against them as pressure to act well. They raised their offspring to demonstrate self-possession, restraint, and honour, “a feeling of the binding nature of a man’s word … [T]he consciousness of belonging to an order which would feel itself disgraced by breaches of its code of honour, and would give cold shoulder to any of its members guilty of them is a great external strengthener of a weak conscience.” This education in the aristocratic virtues benefited Britain for centuries; there would be no Empire without it: An aristocracy is useful then as a school of certain qualities, producing a certain type of man valuable in statesmanship or war. It is good as a spur to ambition, since it provides dignities and honours better worth winning than mere wealth. Politically, it is a guarantee of stability and a barrier against headlong legislation. It is a bulwark against the mammon-worship which in every democratic country threatens to overwhelm society altogether. And it is a standing protest against the political vice which has been well characterised as the worship of the jumping cat; for its members stand on a secure eminence, and do not live upon the breath of popular favour. This education never guaranteed virtuous aristocrats. Like any human institution, it too suffered from its fair share of rakes but, more than any other class, it was “a nursery of certain virtues” necessary for

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national health. Egalitarian angst over aristocratic privilege was also absurd, to the harm of the country.21 Yet British aristocracy never ossified into a caste, the Royalist claimed, instead carefully balancing fluidity with stability. Primogeniture wisely prevented frequent acrimonious quarrels over succession and “maintains the dignity and historic continuity of a family,” but aristocracy also welcomed intermarriage with either titled or untitled families. The United States represented one extreme avoided by British aristocratic prudence, the rootless system of democratic egalitarian classlessness where no one knew who they were or where they belonged. What aristocracy the United States did have was generally that of money, a distinction that granted its owners neither couth nor cultivation. Germany represented the other extreme, “a too exclusive aristocracy.” In total, professing these inegalitarian aristocratic beliefs, Jacobites believed they were more revolutionary than any anarchist. “The Radical of the moment is really the High Tory,” a prominent Jacobite bragged in 1897.22

the marquis de ruvigny and the clash at westminster abbey The publication of the Royalist announced a new decade and a new tack for the Order of the White Rose. The reserved antiquarianism of the 1880s gave way to the activism of the 1890s, but not without controversy. In 1891, a Jacobite Executive Committee was organized and several owr members ran for Parliament as Jacobite candidates, including novelist Herbert Vivian (“Even in these degraded days there yet remains a faithful remnant, that hath not bowed the knee to the Hanoverian Baal,” he growled to the papers) and the young painter Gilbert Baird Fraser. At an October meeting in St Ives, Anglican priest R.C. Fillingham and Scots Gaelic activist Stuart Erskine delivered public lectures on the miseries of 1688 and the Act of Union uniting England and Scotland. In between Highland bagpipes, sword-dances, and rousing Jacobite songs, Fillingham lambasted King William as a “cold-blooded, calculating villain, who had not a vestige of conscience or scruple” and Queen Mary “compared to whom Jezebel was a martyr and Catherine de Medici a saint.” Visitors were then counselled to vote only for Jacobite candidates or those “most in sympathy with the Jacobite cause.” Some townspeople attended the meeting and did not approve of the proceedings, including one who mounted the stage

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and suggested everyone vote only for those who support Victoria as the rightful queen. In addition, he said, “it was owing to the great popularity of the present throne that gentlemen were allowed to come to St Ives and hold such a meeting and express such views as had been the case that night.” Even some Jacobites on the platform applauded, perhaps fearing violence if they refused.23 The Jacobite campaign culminated in a raucous December meeting at Cambridge, to which the university’s students were invited – a serious error. Opening the meeting, Fillingham explained to the noisy crowd that he remained faithful to Queen Victoria despite his Jacobitism. “Everything was changing, changing every day,” he complained. “The march of democracy was becoming swifter and swifter than ever, and it was impossible to say whether within the next 20 years England would be in a Monarchical, or a Republic, or a Socialist state.” To jeers and laughs, he proclaimed, “We are the party of the future.” Defending himself against claims of nostalgia, he declared that “the past might guide them to a purer standard of political morality” to fight parliamentary corruption, bribery, interest groups, hypocrisy, and the routine lying to voters. He would, in fact, “not be sorry if Parliamentary government collapsed altogether.” When pressed by the students to explain Jacobite principles, Reverend Fillingham replied “that kings reign not by the people, but by Divine right,” “that all the evils of English public life … were due to the Revolution of 1688,” that this “revolution was brought about by the selfishness and self-seeking of weak politicians,” that Roman Catholics must be fully integrated in British politics, and that the Irish should be granted Home Rule. This only enraged them. Two Jacobite parliamentary candidates also rose to speak: one tried to take questions but was jeered until his voice went hoarse, and the other managed to announce that democracy “was eating away the nation’s strength like a canker worm” and then had to sit down. The meeting ended in bedlam as students stormed the stage and the Jacobites fled out the back door.24 Member enthusiasm for more public confrontations began to crack up the Order. A faction within the owr wanted demonstrations and public activism and, while momentarily remaining uneasy members of the Order, founded a new organization. The Legitimist Jacobite League (ljl) was launched on 30 June 1891 after failing to convince the owr to become more politically vocal. owr members were considered “sympathetic antiquarians,” observed one historian, while

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the Jacobite Leaguers were “active restorationists.” They also published their own journal, called the Jacobite, far more radical than the Royalist, vowing to “wage relentless war against the champions of Democracy and the creatures of Revolution.” The ljl’s leader was Melville Henry Massue, a professional genealogist who preferred to be called the Marquis de Ruvigny with his full name as Melville Amadeus Henry Douglas Heddle de la Caillemotte de Massue de Ruvigny et Raineval. Ruvigny’s claim to his title was hotly contested and many mocked his presumption and refused to grant it to him in address. Indeed, the title of marquis was of relatively recent family vintage. Ruvigny’s grandfather, Captain Lloyd Henry de Ruvigny, a British army veteran who served against Napoleon in Italy, Spain, and France and was made a Knight of the Portuguese Order of the Tower and Sword, discovered in 1843 that he was descended from the first marquis’ daughter. (The first marquis had been French ambassador to the court of King Charles II.) Since the line via male descendants expired with no heirs, much like the Jacobite Succession, it now fell through the daughter’s line, which made the captain the seventh Marquis de Ruvigny. His son Colonel Charles Henry Theodore Bruce Berenguer de Ruvigny, the eighth marquis, was also a decorated military hero and colonial administrator in Afghanistan, Burma, India, and Africa. The ninth marquis of Jacobite fame was born in London in April 1868. His mother, after a difficult birth, died four days later and his maternal grandmother, devastated by the loss of her daughter, took sick and remained an invalid the remainder of her life. The marquis was very close to his grandmother – “a devoted Jacobite and keen genealogist,” he remembered – and inherited her politics and vocation. The Marquis de Ruvigny would be a central figure in the Jacobite story in both the United Kingdom and the United States for the next twenty years.25 Ruvigny’s thirst for confrontation came to a head in February 1892. First, he intended on placing a memorial wreath on the statue of King Charles I at Charing Cross to remember the anniversary of the execution. Oddly, he asked permission of the London police, which was denied. Ruvigny must have known this would result and decided to lay the wreath anyway, thereby drawing public attention and (potentially) sympathy to the Jacobite cause. Upon arriving at two in the morning, he found police guarding the king’s likeness. After one futile attempt to push his way past, he abandoned the effort in fear of arrest.26

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Second, and more notoriously, Ruvigny, the ljl, and the owr made plans to place wreaths on the tomb of Mary, Queen of Scots, in Westminster Abbey on the anniversary of her death. The owr, fearing government and press reaction, proclaimed in their 30 January meeting “that no demonstration or procession of any kind was intended, and that the intention was to honour the memory of Queen Mary, not to advertise anything or anybody.” The newspapers took no notice and, sensing a story, announced there would be a demonstration anyway. In addition, much as with the King Charles statue, the ljl asked permission of the Westminster canon, Charles Wellington Furse – the dean of the abbey, George Granville Bradley, was convalescing on the French Riviera – to lay a wreath on the tomb, which was refused. Canon Furse, reading advance press of the Jacobites’ intentions, feared an ugly scene at the abbey. The owr was appalled at Ruvigny and the ljl’s indiscretion. “They seemed to be quite unaware that permission was unnecessary,” the Royalist sputtered, “and that the laying of wreaths on tombs is an every day incident in the abbey, nor did they see that the act of asking permission put another aspect on the matter.” A scene, however, was exactly what Ruvigny wanted.27 On 8 February, the canon ordered the gates to the royal chapels closed and cloaked them with curtains to prevent peeks inside – this despite the abbey being free and open to the public. Canon Furse’s reaction was fearful and severe, taking the Jacobite threat to the Realm as announced by the press and Ruvigny very seriously. One newspaper queried, “What harm could possibly have arisen from these enthusiasts (certainly not traitors in deed, even if, which we doubt, they are in will) being allowed to show reverence to the unfortunate lady, it is difficult to conceive.” The owr arrived first, around one o’clock, deliberately separating themselves from the ljl firebrands. Finding the royal chapels closed, they visited Canon Furse and asked that their wreath be placed on the tomb of Mary, Queen of Scots. He obliged, handing it to the vergers. An hour later several hundred ljl Jacobites arrived at the abbey and were greeted by Westminster vergers and the police refusing to let them attend the tomb. As they were only there to deposit flowers in respectful remembrance, Ruvigny was flummoxed. “But this is a free day,” he protested loudly to no avail, as the vergers responded that they only followed the canon’s orders. Cries of “Infamous!” and “In the church, which they stole!” rose from the crowd. Undeterred, the Jacobites processed to the curtained gates (“certainly their appearance was somewhat

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strange when contrasted with the large board bearing the conspicuous inscription, ‘Free on Mondays and Tuesdays,’” one paper sympathetically observed) and hung a wreath bearing the dedication “In Memory of Mary of England, Scotland, Ireland, and France, Queen. From the Legitimist League, Feb. 8, 1892.” When another verger insisted Ruvigny take the wreath down, he refused. “I decline to remove that wreath. Take it down yourself.” The Jacobites even angrily mulled the possibility of protesting outside the canon’s residence. “The silent statues in the Abbey looked down for a moment or two on the unusual spectacle of a kind of indignation meeting,” the Manchester Courier reported. Ruvigny, having achieved his goal and sensing that the looming police awaited an excuse to arrest the lot of them, preached caution and the crowd soon dispersed into the rainy London afternoon.28

the order cracks up The break between the owr, embarrassed by the abbey episode, and the ljl was now complete. At an ljl meeting in late February, White Rose members tried to heal the breach but failed. The Royalist blasted the Jacobite League for recklessness and a confrontational policy that would harm the Jacobite cause. To practically defy rightful authority to exercise its rights and to be associated in the papers with a “Strange Scene in Westminster Abbey” is a bizarre method of doing honour to a departed saint … Those who cannot distinguish between homage to the dead and self-advertisement would do better to try some less holy ground than the south aisle of Henry VII’s chapel for their playground … We do not pretend to decide whether the League as a whole or in a disinterested condition is to blame for the “strange scene,” but this we know, that the Order of the White Rose is not, except so far as by inventing modern Jacobitism it may be thought responsible for the existence of other Jacobite societies. Ruvigny returned fire, charging the Order with cowardice. The ljl aimed to defeat democracy in Britain, “that clay-footed idol Demos” where “the voice of the people is held to be the voice of God,” and “with no uncertain voice declares war against the existing order of things, and the corruptions which are the outcome of modern

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politics.” When Victoria dies, Ruvigny wrote, it “may be that England for its many sins will be cursed with a democratic republic.” Yet if that is so, it will not last, much like the Cromwellian interregnum. A Stuart restoration will follow, since the current Hanoverians were an “alien race” of Germans ruling Britain, “an ever-increasing horde of foreign princelets.” In demonstrating these Jacobite principles, Ruvigny believed the owr fell far short: [I]ts sole business is of an antiquarian kind. And at its few public appearances its members only chatter Jacobite folk-lore over their teacups, or read dreary papers to each other under the exhilarating influence of watery claret. The Order certainly professes some excellent principles, but it lacks the courage to act up to them, and is avowedly hostile to all who wish to do so. The Order “is Jacobite only in name” and was frightened to put its principles in action.29 At the owr’s monthly session at St James Hall in London on 24 March 1892, a bitter raucous affair, the official separation was formalized. Three resolutions were introduced, two by Jacobite League members and one by the owr. Ruvigny rose to offer the first, censuring owr leadership for hostility to other Jacobite societies like the ljl. In a long speech eventually cut short by the meeting chair, he condemned the Order for opposition to the politically engaged and “more energetic flying column” of the ljl. The resolution failed overwhelmingly. The second resolution moved to expel four League members from membership in the Order for reckless and unprincipled behaviour: first, in reference to Jacobite parliamentary efforts, for “endeavouring to enlist the support of the democracy by a series of promises and pledges of the nature of bribes, and by unwarrantably mixing up the name of the heiress of the House of Stuart with their proceedings”; and second, for the “Westminster Abbey incident,” which “but for the silly action of the League, there would have been no opposition and no scandal.” This motion carried. The third resolution attempted to expel an owr member who spoke kindly of the House of Hanover; it was roundly mocked and failed. By meeting’s end, the Order and the League had parted ways. owr Chancellor Henry Jenner proclaimed that he was “very sorry for the whole business. He had tried his best to make peace, but had failed, and had found the League absolutely impossible. Therefore it seemed best that

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the League should separate from the Order and go its own way.” In the pages of the Royalist, the owr expressed no regrets. “The Order is probably far more truly Legitimist in its views than any of the League, but cheap notoriety and sham martyrdom are not among its desires, and it knows well enough that though ridicule nowadays is absolutely painless to persons, it goes far to kill causes.” Anger extended long past the March meeting, as some League members sued the Order for libel and the case lasted for months. The rift between the owr and ljl would not be healed for seven years. Nonetheless, their combined efforts propelled Jacobitism into the public eye “on a scale unwitnessed since the eighteenth century.”30

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4 “God Save Queen Mary”: The High Tide of Victorian Jacobitism

In 1894, a peculiar publication appeared in London called the Legitimist Kalendar. Authored by the Marquis de Ruvigny, it acted as an annual Jacobite guide to royalty and was published in various iterations until just before World War I. This was not the first attempt at an annual Jacobite calendar. The Order of the White Rose had printed a less ambitious centenary memorial calendar in 1888. Ruvigny’s Kalendar went much further, offering legitimist commentary on world affairs, the roll of legitimate royals, and a list of all Legitimist organizations in Europe and North America. As a counterfactual history of the world, it illustrated how world governments should look without usurpations, revolutions, or upstart democracies and republics over the previous three hundred years. It also demonstrated just how great an impact the Revolution of 1688 had in the Englishspeaking world, warping the arc of history and sending the British throne and the peerage down an entirely different path.1 Most useful in the Kalendar was a 365-day listing of important events pertaining to the Jacobite and, more broadly, the Legitimist cause. The major anniversaries were all there, including the death of King Charles I on 30 January and Royal Oak Day on 29 May, but also more obscure birthdays and events. Using the 1899 edition as an example, if it happened to be the second weekend in April and, as a loyal Jacobite, one wanted to mark important occasions with a prayer or reflection, one would note that Saturday, 8 April, marked the eight-first birthday of King Christian IX of Denmark. Sunday, 9 April, offered both melancholy and happy occasions: the death of King Edward IV in 1483, the execution of the Jacobite Lord Lovat in 1746, and the sixty-fourth birthday of Leopold III, King of the Belgians. Every day of the year revealed a person or event

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to remember. Locating the birthday and coronation date of Queen Victoria would prove impossible, however. No usurpers were welcome in the Kalendar, which meant all English monarchs after 1688 – and all other de facto European monarchs – were ignored. Ruvigny specialized in creating and sustaining alternative visions of a Legitimist Great Britain. His 1904 Jacobite Peerage, much valued by genealogists, detailed how the British, Scottish, and Irish aristocracy should be constituted had King James II not been deposed. The number of peerages would be radically reduced – absenting all those years of usurpers liberally granting and selling titles, and including those granted by the legitimate sovereigns in exile – and restoring titles to families who had lost their inheritance, including some American families. The US journalist and prominent Democrat John L. O’Sullivan, best known for coining the phrase “Manifest Destiny” for the westward growth of the United States, was the de jure Sir John L. O’Sullivan. His great-grandfather served under Charles Edward Stuart in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion and was knighted for his service by the exiled King James III.2 Predictably, the press found the Kalendar ridiculous, a curious waste of time and energy by Ruvigny. “It is difficult to see the reason for the publication,” the Edinburgh Evening News wrote, “unless it were with the charitable purpose of giving a fillip to the weary intellects of these latter days.” The Pall Mall Gazette lampooned the book, accusing Ruvigny of not going back far enough into history to establish legitimacy. “For instance, every schoolboy knows that Constantinople belongs, not to the Eastern Emperor, but to Greece, since Megarians built it in 600 B.C. or thereabouts.” Even the American press entered the fray, with the New York Sun calling the 1897 issue, printed by “a curious body of romantic enthusiasts,” an insult to Queen Victoria on the approach of her jubilee. The Washington Sentinel considered this “extraordinary almanac” “one of the queerest books one can imagine.” Nonetheless, the Kalendar remained a useful text for Jacobitism throughout its run. It also signalled the healing of the breach between the Order of the White Rose and Ruvigny’s Jacobite League, when the owr finally appeared in the Kalendar directory for 1899.3

remembering the royal dead While the Kalendar marked days for Jacobites to remember, some days could never be forgotten and were commemorated annually. Jacobites met on the battlefield at Culloden every April led by Theodore Napier,

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a ferocious Scots nationalist and Legitimist. “Napier’s Jacobitism was a living entity rather than a political programme,” notes historian Murray Pittock. “He still wanted the queen over the water to come home.” At Culloden in 1899, resplendent in his Highland dress, Napier boomed, “It was all very well to have a good Queen – no one excelled Queen Victoria as a ruler, and every one admired her – but while that was so, her title to the throne was not a good one, and it was a well-known fact that more than 600 persons were nearer to the throne by right than Queen Victoria.”4 Celebrations for Stuart monarchs were also faithfully marked throughout the year, particularly for King Charles I. The Jacobites “created a politics out of the exercise of their own literary gifts,” writes Pittock, “and turned their energies towards renewing the cult of Charles the Martyr.” A new organization to celebrate and defend the king, the Society of King Charles the Martyr (skcm), was founded on 4 April 1894 by Ermengarda Greville-Nugent, the daughter of wealthy Scottish quarry owner Augustus George Oglivy. In 1882, she married the ne’erdo-well son of Lord Greville, Patrick Emilius Greville-Nugent – the High Sheriff of Westmeath in Ireland with a passion for racehorses – thus uniting money and title, new wealth and old. As skcm foundress, she helped organize Anglo-Catholic services every January for the repose of the king’s soul. These church services began with small crowds but quickly blossomed into large events by decade’s end. The Marquis de Ruvigny was a frequent attendee. St Margaret Pattens Church in London sponsored the most famous of these, with pews packed full of black-clad mourning parishioners with white roses on their lapels and dresses. Near the altar, a large banner stood, donated by Mrs Greville-Nugent, that read “Sanctus Carolus, Rex et Martyr.” At the completion of services, the congregation walked to the King Charles I statue at Charing Cross to pray and lay wreaths. Like the Kalendar, critics found worship of the martyred monarch strange. To mourn for the late king, the Southampton Herald laughed, “is very little better than to grieve, as an old lady did when she learnt, at quite an early stage of the performance, that Hamlet’s father was dead.” The humour magazine Punch even composed a ditty mocking skcm efforts: Remember, remember, each scatterbrain member, Of Leagues for Legitimist rot, That now is the season for amateur treason And playing at piffle and plot.

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At three in the morning, the-powers-that-be-scorning, Turn up at Whitehall in full force, And there in doffed hat you must worship the statue, And pay your respect to his horse. The skcm referred to King Charles as the “White King,” in reference to the fact that he wore white at the coronation and was buried during a snowstorm, a moniker that sticks to this day.5 Adoration at the king’s statue caused considerable tension. As Ruvigny discovered in 1892, British authorities opposed decorating Stuart statues and used police to prevent it. The next year, the Jacobites tried again, and while they successfully laid a wreath on the statue, police removed it soon after. The two sides came to an accord in 1896. Processions were allowed (under the watchful eye of the police), but the London Board of Works required that all wreaths and flowers be submitted to them one day early, after which the authorities would place them on the statue. Many wreaths carried devotional messages written on sashes, however, like that placed on King Charles’ statue in 1897: O, most mighty God, who, in Thy heavy displeasure, didst suffer the life of our gracious Sovereign King Charles the First to be (on this day) taken away by the hands of cruel and bloody men, lay not the guilt of this innocent blood to the charge of the people of this land; and do Thou, O Lowly Saint, be our intercessor at the Throne of Grace. Concerned over “treasonable” content in these dedications and prayers, the city tightened statue regulations in 1899. Now the Board of Works demanded all decorations be dropped off two days early for review of their texts, lest they be fomenting rebellion or insulting Queen Victoria.6 The King James II statue also attracted Jacobite adoration, much of it led by Legitimist journalist Herbert Vivian. Vivian, the son of a Cornish Anglican priest, graduated from Harrow and Trinity College Cambridge with a degree in history and, as an earnest Jacobite monarchist, bristled at official regulations over Stuart statues. He also tried to lay a wreath at King Charles statue in 1892 and, when denied, puckishly did it anyway the next year without police interference. The King James statue at Whitehall, showing the deposed monarch in Roman regalia, particularly attracted his attention. In 1898, Vivian

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wrote to the Board of Works – on royal purple paper, no less – for permission to lay a wreath on the anniversary of the king’s death. He was willing to follow the same protocol as required for the King Charles statue, leaving a wreath one day early with the Board. When the Board refused permission with no explanation, he angrily wrote back – this time with purple ink on purple paper – to tell them he would do it anyway in defiance of their opposition. “You are entrusted with the care of the statues of the Metropolis for the public advantage, and not for the gratification of your arbitrary whims,” he complained. “I intend to test your right of interference by attempting to deposit a wreath upon the statue on the night of the 15th inst., and, if prevented by force, to take whatever legal steps may seem to me advisable for the vindication of public rights.”7 On the evening of 15 September, Vivian arrived at the statue in a hansom cab, wreath in hand emblazoned with the dedication “To the pious memory of King James the Second – Magnus in prosperis, inadversis major.” The Pall Mall Gazette reported that he and several supporters, under the watch of police, “inspected the railings around James II, and apparently decided that the zareba was rather stiff. At any rate, it was only the wreath that went over and fell wrong way up.” After the police took his name, the Jacobites cheered “God Save Queen Mary!” and disappeared into the night. Vivian was ebullient. “Vini, vidi, vici! As I anticipated, the Authorities, knowing themselves in the wrong, did not presume to interfere with me.” Opponents of the Jacobites may mock these efforts, he proclaimed, “but traditions of loyalty and regal authority cannot be expected to find favour in the successors of regicides, rebels, and other runagates.”8 It was one thing to honour dead kings; it was quite another to meet a prospective one. On the occasion of Queen Victoria’s sixtieth jubilee in June 1897, European royalty flooded into London for the festivities, including the de jure heir to the British throne representing Bavaria, Prince Rupprecht. For years, his photograph graced Jacobite meetings along with that of his mother, both embedded in white roses, but now the Jacobites had the opportunity to meet the prince in person. This, however, made for a dilemma as they considered options to welcome him. If they fawned over him and made a public demonstration in his favour – for example, lining the procession route shouting in German “God Save Queen Mary” and “God Bless Prince Rupert,” an idea they considered – it would embarrass him as the official representative of Bavaria. “To make any

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sort of a demonstration while the Prince was the guest of ‘the usurping Hanoverian’ would fail of good taste, and might haply compromise both prince and ‘subjects,’” the Daily Mail observed. There was also the unhappy coincidence of the date chosen to celebrate the jubilee, 22 June, which in the old Julian calendar (only fully adopted by Great Britain in the mid-eighteenth century) was 10 June, “White Rose Day” for Jacobites. This day marked the birth of the “Old Pretender,” King James III, and the spark that ignited the Revolution of 1688, when British Protestants feared the birth of a Catholic heir would roll back the English Reformation. Therefore, Victoria’s jubilee was a double insult: a usurper celebrating her illegitimate reign on a Jacobite holy day. Boxed in, the Jacobites opted for a lower-key tribute to Prince Rupprecht. Departing from his train car at Victoria Station, the twenty-eight-year-old prince was welcomed by a German embassy delegation. A crowd of Jacobites led by Lady Helen Mellor also presented him with a bouquet of white roses. Helen Blanche Mellor, a keen Jacobite, was the daughter of the Earl of Galloway and had married Ruvigny’s friend and fellow Legitimist W. Clifford Mellor the previous year. Although flattered by their attentions, the prince accepted the roses and continued his diplomatic role. There would no drama from “the heir who might have been our King,” as Vivian later called him.9

anti-jacobite counter-reaction This commemoration of Stuart kings inevitably drew a backlash. Anti-Jacobites suddenly found a new appreciation of the “Great Protector” and nemesis of King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell. Thomas Carlyle had helped restore Cromwell’s reputation in the 1840s with publication of his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History and three volumes of Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches. Increasingly, the fierce Puritan began to be identified with middle-class Britons, popular liberty, democracy, and the rights of nonconformist religion (that is, those outside the Anglican Communion). None of this appealed to the Jacobites, of course, for whom Cromwell was the perfect villain – the killer of the king, the enemy of beauty and excellence, the symbol of mob rule, unruly democracy, and the avaricious middle class. When proposals emerged in the 1890s to raise a new statue of Cromwell on the Westminster grounds, they were unsurprisingly appalled.10

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The short-lived Liberal government of Lord Rosebery first announced intentions to fund and erect a Cromwell statue at Westminster in 1895 but, faced with ferocious opposition from a coalition of Tories and Irish nationalists, dropped the issue. The succeeding Conservative government of Lord Salisbury, however, honoured Rosebery’s wishes when the ex–prime minister secretly paid for the statue with his own money. The statue was placed at a spot twelve feet below street level – an appropriate dwelling, said Irish nationalists, because “no greater degradation could be inflicted upon Cromwell than by putting his statue into a pit.” Even so, two petitions circulated asking the government not to erect the statue. Lady Mellor walked around the Westminster grounds in September 1899 gathering signatures on a Jacobite petition against its erection, and two months later another petition signed by a group of Conservative Peers also circulated, but neither worked. The statue was finally unveiled with no ceremony by a few Westminster workmen in November 1899, although at Queen’s Hall Rosebery delivered an address lauding the Protector. The anger did not subside immediately, however. In the summer of 1900, questions arose in the House of Commons as to why the location of the statue had been decided without Parliament’s input, to which Lord Salisbury wittily replied that resting in a hole was punishment enough. “Behold the punishment which a just monarchical government inflicts upon a rebel and a renegade,” he declared. Of course, the Jacobites honoured Cromwell and the three hundredth anniversary of his birth on 25 April 1899 in their own way. Vivian applied to the Board of Works to lay a wreath on the King Charles I statue reading, “To the Loyal Memory of the King by Some Royalists on the Tercentenary of the birth of the Regicide Cromwell whose Tercentenary certain misguided fellow countrymen are rejoicing over today. Fear God: Honour the King.” The request was denied.11 Other English towns approved Cromwell statues in 1899 in celebration of the tercentenary of his birth, including one in Warrington that caused chaos at the town council when it was debated. A wealthy local citizen offered to pay for the entire enterprise and donate it to the town, but some councillors were less than pleased. “Councillor Cannell violently said Cromwell was an absolute murderer,” the Sheffield Evening Telegraph reported of one man’s outspoken opposition. “He objected to having a monument to such a man who was such a diabolical scamp … He did not think the statue

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worth its price as old iron. It was [a] downright imposition, and the donor only wanted to make himself a big man.” The statue went up anyway. In St Ives, where Cromwell once lived, the opposition was more extreme. Funded entirely by private donations, St Ives raised its Cromwell statue in October 1901. Police intercepted a box of halters and nooses, sent to the ceremony by angry Jacobites, along with a pointed note to the local Anglican priest at the festivities: “To hang Archdeacon [Gerald] Vesey, who would revive the immoral policy of Cromwell – traitor, murderer and regicide.” The Daily Mail observed of the St Ives incident, “It is alleged that halters were distributed by the Jacobite League with the recommendation that the principal speakers should be hanged … The prejudices of certain St Ives people against ‘the monster who knocked down our churches and stabled his horse in our cathedrals,’ has not wholly died out.” As in Westminster and Warrington, the St Ives statue was erected despite opposition and remains today.12 These battles over historical memory often descended into the darker hues of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. Anti-Jacobites saw Jewish money and manipulation behind Legitimist efforts. When the Cromwell statue was built at Westminster, an anti-Jacobite claimed victory over the determined opposition of “the whining of a handful of Ritualists, Jew financiers, and Jacobites.” The Jacobites were hardly better. At a Royal Oak Day celebration at Kew, a representative of the Thames Valley Legitimist Club spoke optimistically of European restoration and boasted that Spain would soon be redeemed from “Jewish financial rule.” Anti-Jacobites also believed the Vatican was directing Jacobite efforts in an attempt to install a Roman Catholic back on the throne and return the United Kingdom to the faith it abandoned with Henry VIII. “The supporters of the present dynasty and of monarchical institutions had better bestir themselves,” Reynold’s Newspaper warned. “The institution of the Order of the White Rose, and the interference of the Roman Pope in English politics, are almost simultaneous events.” Already susceptible to German invasion nightmares, owing to rising tensions between the two nations, Britons also imagined the Jacobites as an internal threat. In a bizarre series of books, novelist Allen Upward suggested the fantastic possibility of a Roman-Lutheran accord, where Jacobites, in league with the Vatican and the Kaiser (Queen Mary III and Prince Rupprecht were Germans, after all), plotted an invasion of England to restore the Stuarts.13

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jacobitism, america, and spain Jacobite involvement in European affairs was not, however, just the stuff of calendars and fiction. They took public stands on major events in late Victorian Britain, in particular, the American war with Spain, the potential of a Carlist restoration, and Britain’s conflict with the Boers. The Jacobites always held an ambivalent attitude toward the United States, alternately condemning the upstart republic and appreciating its power and usefulness. When Theodore Roosevelt, then a commissioner with the United States Civil Service Commission, published a history of New York in 1891 and attacked King James II as a “cruel bigot,” the Royalist fired back that George Washington was a “compound of prize prig and hypocritical ruffian.” American politics, corrupted by plutocracy and riddled with lobbyists, “have been given over bodily to the detestable class of professional politicians, and society to men and women who are richer than they ought to be.” The Legitimist Kalendar made it clear that the de jure ruler of Hawaii was Queen Liliuokalani, not the United States, and lamented annexation as “the extinction of the national life of a people as the outcome of a series of financial intrigues which could receive no more scathing condemnation than has been meted out to them by Americans of the better sort.” That which was masked as “religious altruism” was now exposed “in all its naked ugliness” as the pursuit of profit.14 The Royalist highlighted two articles highly critical of the United States published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1891–92, likely written by a Jacobite, that give a detailed glimpse into the Jacobite critique of America. Since its origins, the United States considered itself an example to the world, a model of republican government that granted citizens broad rights to live and organize their lives as they saw fit. Its booming industrial economy raised living standards for millions and produced such a variety of products as to achieve selfsufficiency. Both its politics and its economics emerged from the American individualist ethos, which encouraged hard work, perseverance, single-minded pursuit of dreams, and hearty self-assertion in the face of all obstacles. The Blackwood’s author would have none of it: “The wonderful expansion and progress of the United States within the present century is perpetually cited as an irrefutable proof of what can be done when men are allowed to govern themselves unencumbered by the incubus of a throne and a hereditary legislature. And

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America is well content to pose as an object-lesson to the universe.” That lesson, however, was actually a warning. The United States demonstrated that republics were inferior to monarchies. American politics laboured under a corrupt democratic despotism, where might makes right, that “nullified” any supposed liberties its citizens enjoyed. City and party bosses orchestrated elections, and oligarchs controlled both political parties, making politicians mere puppets in the hands of the wealthy. Republicans, who dominated post–Civil War politics and were backed by major industrialists, used soldiers’ pensions as bribes for votes, manipulated the statehood process for western territories to gain congressional seats, gamed the census to depress Democratic representation, and stuffed government offices with loyal party hacks. “There is at least as much despotism in the United States as in any other country, civilised or uncivilised,” argued the author.“The United States, and each state, claims to be a republic, but each is practically an oligarchy of an objectionable form. Money and political power are ever in the thoughts of the people – with the exception of a small minority of noble men and women. The great idol of the country is ‘Self,’ and modern civilization is moulded accordingly.” The Blackwood’s author believed the political rot to be so deep that books would be written within one hundred years recording the rise and fall of the United States. The American industrial economy rocketed and crashed with frequency and left few but the rich with any certainty that their fortunes would last a day. Americans could be flush one day and broke the next, living in a tenement or grinding out their days in factory. “The individual man is, in the United States, worked harder and meets with less consideration than in any other country,” the Blackwood’s article stated. “The New World is a bed of thorns to thousands of the deserving poor.”15 Yet US politics and economics accurately reflected the governing ethos of the nation. Americans were inveterate individualists, narcissists, and rootless cosmopolitans pursuing money at every turn. “Selfgratification, self-indulgence, [and] self-aggrandizement are sought in every direction, and extracted whenever and wherever possible, regardless of consequences to others, without scruples, without remorse.” Next to money came the pursuit of fame. Inside every man or woman was a potential celebrity in the making: Popularity is a Moses’ rod. The citizens look up to it, dance and caper around it, crawl and squirm before it, dig intrenchments

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and besiege it, and are restless until they gain the coveted popularity. There is nothing too good, too dear, too sacred to keep from sacrificing at this altar … Court all, slight none, take no offense, quietly bide your opportunity to get “even.” Few citizens care to seclude themselves where they cannot be seen or where they cannot see. There is little objection – much less objection than desire, for newspaper or other notoriety. To do something unique, to get spoken of, to beat the record in any particular line, to be the hero of the day, hour, or occasion, is a pinnacle of delight. This Darwinian pursuit of money and attention explained not only cutthroat politics and economy but why the United States was beset with high levels of violence. Americans would not brook impediments to their desires; “the inalienable rights of others take second place when the individual citizen is in a self-asserting humour.”16 Despite a reputation for religiosity, Americans were the weakest of Christians. Outside of Roman Catholics, they only accepted a god who validated their individual preferences. “Being unable to reconcile individualism to any god but one after their own heart, each has his ideal god – not of stone, wood, or india-rubber, but a flexible and comfortably fitting ideal god, who suits at all times under all circumstances as his worshipper desires.” They raised their children in the same faith, birthing a new generation of self-important citizens, who “grow up, for want of proper restraint and correction, to imagine that they are the salt of the earth, and far superior to all their seniors.” Americans considered themselves a model republic and they were correct, according to Blackwood’s – a model of why republicanism was a bad idea.17 Yet the Jacobites also claimed a degree of sympathy with the American Revolution. The United Kingdom’s three major problems of the 1890s – population growth, high taxes, and poverty – were not all results of 1688 but of 1776 as well. The Royalist claimed that colonial New England’s tax grievances were legitimate. “The people of New England were justified, by every law which [the owr] recognizes, in refusing without their own consent to pay tribute to a usurper.” In losing the American colonies, the United Kingdom “lost us room to grow in; it lost us ample room for the over-population which is our increasing curse; it lost us resources which would have made even our national debt a trifle; it lost us the only country on earth whose

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troubles arise from being too rich instead of from being too poor.” In addition, many Stuart loyalists of 1745 fled to the United States, particularly the South, and as colonial soldiers “threw off the tyranny of the usurping House of Hanover.” In fact, North Carolina Jacobitism “should be as rife as in the Highlands of Scotland.” The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and the American Revolution were only thirty years apart. “Very many who fought against George III beyond the Atlantic must have been the sons of the men who fought against George II on British soil,” the Royalist postulated in 1892.18 This ambivalence played prominently in the US conflict with Spain. On the one hand, that the American republic defeated the Spanish monarchy and stripped it of its colonies was an enormous insult and proved that the usurping liberal Bourbon monarchy needed ouster. At a January 1898 memorial for Stuarts and Jacobites executed at London’s Tower Hill, owr members stated to the newspapers that “the present liberal usurping Government in Spain has allowed that ancient monarchy to be insulted with impunity by the mushroom republic known as the United States of America.” They called for the restoration of the de jure King Charles VII, retired to a London club, and “drank to the perdition of the United States.” At the war’s conclusion, the Marquis de Ruvigny in the 1899 Kalendar accused America of falsely claiming its cause as one of Cuban freedom – that “the general good sense of a great people has been misled by the interested efforts of a small number of speculators, who for thirty years have lusted after the Pearl of the Antilles.” Money rather than humanitarianism motivated the war.19 On the other hand, the American war with Spain presented a tremendous opportunity to restore legitimate monarchy to Spain. Rising tensions and then war with the United States roiled Spanish politics and energized the Legitimist Carlist opposition to the throne. Jacobites with Carlist loyalties, such as the Marquis de Ruvigny, the Earl of Ashburnham, and Henry Jenner, watched closely as fears of a civil war rocked Spain between 1897 and 1899. Carlism and war with the United States became closely entwined. “The Carlists are standing in an attitude of close watchfulness and ready to act when the appointed hour is struck,” the earl declared. Americans also saw in Carlism a way to grab Cuba and avoid war. If a Spanish civil war broke out, Spanish troops in Cuba would be withdrawn. The United States should increase pressure on Spain, aggravate its troubles, and thence gain Cuba without a dollar or blood. “In case of a disaster in Cuba, or

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of serious popular rioting against the Government for its weakness in dealing with the United States, or should serious conflicts arise in the Army,” the Daily Mail wrote, “the Carlists would rise, hoping to secure the support of that part of the Spanish public tired of their professional politicians.”20 The Carlist Jacobites even took direct action to unseat the illegitimate Spanish monarchy. In June 1899, Ashburnham sent his yacht Firefly to Belgium and France to purchase rifles, which would then be smuggled into Spain for use by the Carlists. Jenner assisted in the earl’s clandestine gunrunning and an owr member commanded the ship. Their adventures did not last long, as the ship was seized in Arcachon, France, carrying five thousand French-made rifles. Since the rifles were old, however, dating back to the 1860s, they could not be confiscated as “contraband of war” by French authorities. Instead, because no duties were paid on the cargo, they were held as security in lieu of payment of customs fines. The guns never made it to Spain, but one Carlist official claimed eight thousand rifles had already been smuggled in. As Jenner’s biographer Samantha Rayne notes, the Firefly mission demonstrated two important facts about the British Jacobites: first, that despite their staid, upright, aristocratic demeanour, “privately they were more radical and active”; and second, that the owr-Legitimist division lacked consistency and members of both organizations co-operated with one another. Nonetheless, for all the Jacobites’ efforts, the Carlist uprising never materialized and Spain remained a de facto monarchy until the Spanish Republic in the 1930s.21

against the boer war The Jacobites also opposed the Boer War, sometimes at personal risk. At the forefront of the anti-war efforts was Theodore Napier, who, like other Jacobites, saw in Afrikaner opposition to the expansion of the British Empire the spectre of Scotland’s resistance to British control two centuries earlier. Napier wrote a supportive public letter to Transvaal president Paul Kruger in July 1899 urging him to remain strong against British bullying, and throughout the winter and spring of 1900, after the war had officially begun, Jacobites distributed anti-war leaflets in London condemning the conflict. Understandably, this opposition was not publicly popular, especially as the war began poorly for Britain.22

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A “Stop the War” public meeting in Edinburgh on 8 March 1900 amply demonstrated this unpopularity with what became known as the “Queen Street Riot.” The organizers issued tickets for the event to keep out gate crashers, but so many counterfeit tickets circulated that when the meeting opened hundreds of people packed the hall, many of them University of Edinburgh students. The jingoistic students took over the meeting, threatening and catcalling speakers and scuffling with police. When Napier appeared on stage, in full Highland regalia complete with a Scottish “targe” or shield, and attempted to offer anti-war resolutions, the students began yelling, “Make that Johnnie with the feathers take his hat off!” The proud Napier refused, the students rushed the stage with sticks in hand (police with batons in pursuit), and a full-on melee began. One of the students hit Napier across the face with a club, cutting him badly, and dragged the old man down from behind. The speakers soon retreated from the stage to safer rooms at the rear of the hall. “Eventually the platform personages managed to slip away, and the mob was left with the police in possession,” the Edinburgh Evening News reported. “Chairs were smashed, forms damaged, and amid the scene of wreckage the students waved their flags and sang.” Napier recovered and readied to continue battle, if necessary. “He was bonnetless, and his long locks did not land so gracefully about his shoulders as usual, his face was cut and bruised, and the appearance of his dress showed that he had some rough handling. But he still carried his targe, which he had doubtless found useful for his protection, and seemed willing to face the mob again if need be in his attempt to leave the hall.” Departing the hall by the rear was no easy task – outside, hundreds of protesters chanted “Where is Napier? We want Napier!” with clear intent to harm him – but Napier and the meeting organizers were able to slip away with police guard. Police arrested Napier’s assailant, a university medical student named William Frederick Brayne who later went on to a distinguished career in the Medical Service in India and Kenya, but the court leniently let him off with a ten-shilling fine, about sixtyfive dollars in today’s money.23

the death of queen victoria The greatest challenge facing Jacobitism, and the event for which its adherents waited years, came in January 1901 when Queen Victoria died. Their plan, dating back to the early 1890s, had always been to

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contest the legitimacy of King Edward VII’s claim to the throne and throw enough doubt into British minds that would allow Queen Mary of Bavaria to become Queen Mary III. As one Anglo-American Jacobite described Jacobite plans in 1897, We don’t expect to accomplish anything just at present, or even in the immediate future, but we will wait until the death of her whom they call the Queen Victoria and then make an effort to assert the claim of her whom we believe to be the rightful Queen of Great Britain. When the Champion of the Crown, [H.S.] Dymoke, casts down the gauntlet and challenges any one to say that Albert Edward is not the rightful monarch of the British Isles his challenge will not go unanswered this time. He will find a champion who will uphold the claims of the exiled house of Stuart and its legitimate descendent, Mary, now of Bavaria, but rightly of England. Edward’s notoriously lascivious lifestyle would also hurt his claim, they believed, when compared with “a quiet, amiable, motherly woman, with none of the essential qualities required in the leader of a revolution,” as the New York Times described Mary of Bavaria. The Spanish Pretender, Don Carlos VII, was highly interested in the accession question and told Herbert Vivian, “I can see no hope for British Jacobitism so long as Queen Victoria lives, but should her son, the Prince of Wales, succeed her, his wild ways may make him so distasteful to a Puritanical nation that he may be driven out, and then thoughts may turn to the old line.”24 The Jacobites tried earnestly to enact their plans. Almost immediately after Queen Victoria’s passing, the owr refused to recognize Edward as the new king of England. Napier did the same. Another surreptitious Stuart loyalist nailed declarations to the gates of St James Palace, the Tower of London, and Guildhall, naming King Edward a usurper and stating that the legitimate sovereign was Queen Mary. Their protests did not work. The Champion ceremony never occurred (it had been abandoned by Queen Victoria at her coronation in 1838) and no mass movement materialized behind the Bavarian princess. Even when King Edward became deathly ill with appendicitis in 1902, and Jacobite hopes rose for an opportune crisis, he recovered without any calls for a Stuart restoration.25

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Some Jacobites also believed that Queen Victoria had created a formidable cult of personality after sixty years and that King Edward would not measure up in the eyes of the British people. “The democratic tendency will receive an extraordinary impetus” and the monarchy would collapse, with a republic taking its place. It would be a repeat of Oliver Cromwell without the beheadings. As Ruvigny posited back in 1892, Britain may get a republic but it will not last long, much like the Interregnum ran its course and gave way to a monarchical restoration. At that point, the Stuarts would be restored to their rightful throne. To the Jacobites’ disappointment, this too failed to occur. It was quite the opposite, in fact, as King Edward VII became a much beloved monarch. All these hopes and activities did not go unnoticed, however. In retribution, the British government forbade the Jacobites from decorating King Charles I’s statue in 1902.26

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5 “Up with the Standard”: The White Rose Comes to America

The Marquis de Ruvigny, having tasted notoriety in Britain, decided to expand the Jacobite movement to the United States. He departed for America in June 1892 and remained six months, visiting prospective members, organizing Jacobite societies in East Coast cities, observing the 1892 US presidential election, and meeting with reporters on the benefits of Jacobitism while attending the Chicago World’s Fair. For a brief period, the Duke of Newcastle, a pronounced Anglo-Catholic ritualist, also joined him. Ruvigny experienced particular success in Boston, “a city whose swell front dwellings are the temples, often, of odder theories than any Marquis could expound,” quipped the ChapBook. Boston Jacobitism predated Ruvigny’s visit, however, emanating from the city’s young fin-de-siècle cultural elite, chief among them the young New Hampshire architect Ralph Adams Cram.1

ralph adams cram The Crams had lived in southeastern New Hampshire for two centuries. Ralph Adams Cram’s paternal sixth-great-grandfather John Cram arrived in Boston in 1635 and eventually settled in Hampton Falls, a small colonial town near the Atlantic coast. John Cram’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all from the Puritan stronghold of Lincolnshire, England, which is ironic considering their illustrious descendant’s exuberant Jacobitism. Further back, the Crams were the “von Cramms,” Germans who lived in or near Hanover – another twist considering Jacobite hatred of Hanoverian interlopers on the British throne. The Crams could trace their lineage past Germany to the twelfth-century Netherlands. On the side of

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Ralph Adams Cram’s mother, the Blake and Sanborn families, both from Norfolk, England, had also settled in Hampton Falls and nearby Kensington, New Hampshire, since the 1640s. Both sides of Ralph Adams Cram’s family tree received their first propertied foothold in North America from charters and land grants bestowed by the House of Stuart, Kings Charles I and Charles II. An important early influence on Cram was his grandfather Ira Blake, known affectionately and authoritatively as “the Squire.” With his wavy hair and shaven face, he resembled a “handsome version of Henry Clay.” Two parts of the Squire’s life left an indelible impression on Cram. First, Blake’s politics were firmly New England Federalist, despite the fact that the Federalist Party had died forty years before Cram was born. “His admiration for the Adamses knew no bounds, in testimony of which he named his eldest son John Adams,” Cram recalled long after the Squire’s death. “He had scant liking for innovations of any kind, whether political, social, or economic.” Cram’s politics resembled those of his grandfather, in its belief in hierarchy and skepticism of revolutionary ideals like liberty, equality, and democracy. Second, the fading “squirarchy” of old New England, symbolized by Blake, represented an extension of Western feudalism; “this system with its vitality of human, personal relationships, which had persisted here and there in scattered enclaves, chiefly of English speech, was coming to an end – had come to an end, as a matter of fact – giving place to something altogether new.” For Cram, this new world was a corruption and it is not difficult to see why Jacobitism and, later, neo-Gothicism appealed to him. The Squire’s old colonial farmhouse in Kensington, New Hampshire, which he dubbed “the Old Place,” rested on a feudal continuum from medieval Europe to nineteenth-century America.2 As a young man, Cram moved to Boston to apprentice as an architect, and by the late 1880s he served as the art and theatre critic for the Boston Evening Transcript. His work brought him into contact, and soon close kinship, with the young decadents of the “Athens of America.” This coterie of poets, writers, sculptors, photographers, painters, and lithographers – who were pulling cultural leadership away from the dying Emersonian generation – found 1890s America a materialistdemocratic wasteland and promoted a demonstrative bohemian decadence as salve. They were also clubbish and met in festive groups, often in ostentatious or costumed garb, to talk about art, music, and their work. The first of these was called the Pewter Mugs, a roving din-

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ner and drinking club whose members looked for any excuse or “holiday” to celebrate. A frequent attendee, humorist and poet Gelett Burgess, recalled these Boston fetes: They drank their soda colored green, They talked of “Art” and “Philistine,” They wore buff “wescoats” and their hair, It used to make the waiters stare! They were so shockingly behaved And Boston thought them so depraved… Cram always attended, along with others such as innovative photographer F. Holland Day, New England landscape painter George H. Hallowell, poets Richard Hovey and Philip Henry Savage, and Thomas Henry Randall, Cram’s architect friend who joined him on his 1887–88 European tour. When he and Randall visited Italy and attended midnight Mass in Rome, Cram experienced a religious awakening: “Suddenly came the bells striking the hour of midnight and with the last clang the great organs and the choir burst into a melodious thunder of sound; the incense rose in clouds, filling the church with a veil of pale smoke; and the Mass proceeded to its climax … I did not understand all of this with my mind, but I understood.” When he returned to Boston, he received religious instruction in the Episcopalian Church from Father Arthur C.A. Hall (later Bishop of Vermont) – as a loyal Yankee he could not quite make the full leap to Roman Catholicism – and became a devout AngloCatholic ritualist.3 From the Pewter Mugs emerged a more exclusive fellowship called the Visionists. This group, numbering no more than twenty members, comprised “the madder and more fantastic members of the Pewter Mugs,” who met at a secret rented Boston apartment filled with their books and art. Here, they debated and pontificated on the latest cultural movements and their own works. The Visionists, Cram recalled forty years later, were an “assemblage of ardent youth that saw life as high adventure, and crusading as a career,” who took joy in being contrarian and wicked but were neither. These bohemians also dabbled in Christian Socialism, assisting at a storefront church on busy Boylston Street called Church of the Carpenter hoping to attract the Boston working class into the Episcopal Church. “At the Church of the Carpenter,” as one historian describes it, “ancient liturgy fueled

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anticapitalist dissent.” Cram believed that socialism was only safe under a monarchy, otherwise “it degenerates into communism which, in its turn, always leads to dictatorships.” Reflecting back, he explained in his autobiography, “We were socialists because we were young enough to have generous impulses.”4

american jacobitism organizes Meanwhile, as British Jacobites enjoyed the spotlight in the 1890s, the American Jacobites also earned their renown. Ralph Adams Cram remained an active force in Boston Jacobitism, balancing his involvement with his architectural career. He took to writing royalist poetry, the most famous of which was “Nottingham Hunt,” published in the national magazine Century in February 1895. The poem’s refrain honoured the fallen Stuart king: Oh, the dawn is all about us and the dew is in our faces, Dashed from off the rushing branches as we ride and, riding, sing: “Yoiks! The hunt is up, the hounds are out, the beaters in their places; ’Tis a gallant day for hunting in the name of Charles the King!” Cram’s friend Fred Bullard put the poem to music in 1896 and it was performed at Boston’s Symphony Hall. Cram also founded an informal branch of the Order of the White Rose and the news travelled widely, although it was never officially recognized by the British owr. “The existence of a Jacobite League in Boston shows a longing on the part of the Bostonian for something less prosaic and utilitarian than his Puritan Commonwealth can give him,” the British Idler joked. Other observers were less sanguine. The New Orleans Daily Picayune believed a Jacobite royalist organization in the United States evidence of anti-Americanism: “Here is an assault on the red schoolhouse and republican institutions that ought to make every drop of A.P.A. blood boil.” The APA, or American Protective Association, was a violently anti-Catholic organization briefly popular in the 1890s that viewed an American owr as the long arm of the pope reaching into American affairs, even if most members were devoutly Episcopal.5 Informal Jacobitism was not enough for some diehards, however, who wanted a formally organized branch in the United States. The Chap-Book of Chicago wistfully dreamed in June 1895, “If it be salu-

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tary for the soul to love a lost and hopeless cause, may we not look for something on this side? The Stuart Restoration is no more a lovely and belated dream here than there … Are there no others who will forget the present for a day and drink [to] ‘The King, may he come to his own again?’ The season for midsummer madness is not far away.” On 4 April 1896, their wish was granted with the official founding of an American branch of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, two years to the day after Ermengarda Greville-Nugent founded the British organization. Soon after, on Royal Oak Day, 29 May 1896, an American branch of the owr was also founded. Its “Declaration of Principles” stated: 1 All authority emanates from God. The people have no legitimate authority. 2 Governments exist “by the Grace of God,” not “solely” consent. 3 Monarchy is divinely ordained and is “the only certain guarantee of just, beneficent, and stable government; the only safeguard of social and political liberty.” 4 Revolution against legitimate rulers is “treason and sacrilege.” 5 Since temporal authority in monarchs is divinely ordained, revolutions cannot destroy lines of legitimate succession – they remain even if the revolution is successful. 6 Class distinctions derived from monarchical authority are “necessary to the welfare of society.” 7 Natural rights are a fiction. Instead, rights are privileges granted by the legitimate sovereign “for causes of merit and ability.” 8 The Stuarts have “a peculiar claim on our reverence and devotion,” and their reputations must be defended “against the lies of dead historians and living calumniators, and that in their lives and the lives of those who died for them we can find the truest examples of righteous principles, heroic chivalry, and noble devotion.” All legitimate sovereigns, murdered or deposed by revolution, were victims of political criminality and will be redeemed by the coming restorations. 9 Princess Mary of Bavaria is de jure Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. But Queen Victoria, “representing the idea of monarchy in opposition to democracy,” deserves the loyalty of everyone, until the Stuart Restoration comes. 10 Don Carlos, Duke of Madrid (King Charles XI) is the legitimate King of France and Spain.

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11 Order members will assist these legitimate sovereigns by all means possible. 12 Nations like the United States have no legitimate sovereigns in opposition to present government, but “it is clear that each state must profit by the establishment of a monarchical system. Whenever this is at present impossible, it is the duty of all to yield to the duly established officers of that state.” 13 Order members in the United States should work to “so modify the temper of the people as to make possible a gradual return to the principles of true and righteous government, holding themselves bound to support by voice and act all action that tends towards a return to the original principles of the Constitution long ignored, thence to the wiser council of Washington and Hamilton, and so to an ultimate government that shall be righteous in type, adequate and exalted in its administration.” As is clear from these principles, Irish, Scottish, Cornish, or other nationalisms did not play a major role in American Jacobitism. Jacobites like Cram evinced little enthusiasm for these national causes and in some cases, like the later 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, actually condemned them. For all its Stuart zeal, North American Jacobitism was a different beast oriented to the nationalisms of its own continent.6

father robert thomas nichol Central to the creation of both the skcm and the owr was a Canadian Anglo-Catholic priest, Father Robert Thomas Nichol, the lost founder of American Jacobitism. In the shadow of the Marquis de Ruvigny, who left a legacy of respected genealogical texts, and Ralph Adams Cram, who immortalized himself in architecture, Nichol streaked like a comet across the sky of fin-de-siècle America – founding the American owr and co-founding the skcm – and then largely disappeared. He was born in St Catharines, Ontario, on 17 May 1859. His father, Thomas Wright Nichol, was the son of Canadian War of 1812 hero Colonel Robert Nichol, a family legacy of which he was rightly proud. His mother, Sarah Ann Grayson, was an Irish émigré from Dublin. Family difficulties, however, led to him be raised by his mother’s cousins. After graduation from Toronto’s Trinity College in 1879, he began training for the Anglican priesthood and taught clas-

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sics for two years at the Perth Institute, a rural school halfway between Toronto and Montreal that was attached to Perth’s St James Anglican Church. Nichol was ordained in July 1883.7 Beginning in 1881, Father Nichol taught classics and Latin at the prestigious Trinity School in Port Hope, Ontario, a decade-long stint during which he instilled a love of Latin in students. “Timmy,” as the students called him, was an earnest, high-strung, fidgety young man and a devoted Ritualist Anglo-Catholic, who rapped students with his cane if they mispronounced words and condemned any tendency toward religious skepticism. He also appeared unhealthy, falling victim to fits of coughing into his supply of handkerchiefs. Nonetheless, the students loved him. His former student William Willoughby Francis, who later became head librarian at McGill University, recalled him: “A kind-hearted disciplinarian, he earned the respect of all and the affection of many of the boys. We kids of 1889 firmly believed three legends about him: that he wore a hair shirt; that he spent Holy Week, or as much of it as fell within the Easter holidays, hanging strapped to a large wooden cross on the wall of his bedroom; and that he had ‘only one lung.’” Nichol was also a fine preacher, Francis remembered, the only one at Trinity who kept his interest. “He was earnest, dramatic, and picturesque. He didn’t use the beautiful carved lectern which served also as pulpit, but stood Bible in hand on the choir steps. A real orator both in word and gesture, he spoke without notes. I have heard many sermons, but none so interesting as his.”8 Thus, it came as a surprise to students when Father Nichol left Trinity School, “untimely and without ceremony,” in July 1891. The reasons for his departure are unclear. Francis believed the headmaster lost patience with his Latin teacher’s outspoken Ritualism and dispatched him before he did further damage to the boys’ faith. The students, however, spread more lurid tales. As Francis wrote shortly after Nichol’s death, I do not believe that the dear old fellow was guilty of anything worse than Ritualism, but to my astonishment, a year or more ago, I found that one of my older contemporaries, a medical man, was fully convinced that Timmy had been summarily fired in disgrace for Wilde-Grecian propensities! Homo erat, and any aberration is possible, even in a saint … Boys can be fantastic scandalmongers – anything to them rather than the prosy fact of a

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critical interview with the Headmaster, to whom he was devoted, over Timmy’s ever more alarming Ritualism. Nichol left school and after a brief sojourn in England settled in New York City. He remained there the rest of his life but never became a US citizen.9 In New York, Nichol served as curate at the Church of the Transfiguration in Manhattan – popularly known as the “Little Church around the Corner,” which acted as parish church to many Broadway actors and actresses – and as chaplain to a community of Anglican sisters, the Sisterhood of St John the Baptist. In addition, he served as curate at St Mary the Virgin Church, the “Home of Ritualism” in New York City. “But for the fact that Latin was not used,” one Irish American paper observed, “there was little apparent difference in the ceremonies in St Mary’s and those which would have been called forth by a similar occasion in a Roman Catholic Church.” Here, the High Churchman Nichol launched his Jacobite mission to America. He offered masses in memory of King Charles I every January, submitted articles on the history of American Jacobite families to the Royalist, and, like Cram, penned Stuart poetry. In 1895, he composed “The Raising of the Standard,” which read in part, Up with the Standard! Around it shall throng The ghosts of your Kings, As ye bear it along – James, robb’d of his rights – Charles, last of the Knights – Meek Henry, whose wrong God has righted in heaven – All these join our song. Up with the standard! Till once more the race Of the Martyr sit throned In the height of their place: Till a king reign once more, To care for God’s poor, Strong, wrong doing to face – No Parliament’s henchman – A King “by God’s grace!”

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The British owr liked the composition so much that it was put to music and sung at Royal Oak Day celebrations in 1896.10 Nichol also involved himself in public commentary to promote Jacobite positions. In August 1895, New York’s Anglo-Catholic magazine Catholic Champion published a short editorial criticizing the French Catholic hierarchy for confrontations with the French Republic. Against public law, the church encouraged public processions and refusals to pay taxes aimed at French religious communities, a tactic the Champion condemned as violating the “Gospel Law of passive obedience.” Nichol wrote a furious reply that passive obedience only applied to legitimate governments, meaning “Divinely constituted Authority.” Since the French Revolution had usurped the monarchy and murdered the king and queen, the legitimate claimant to the French throne was the Carlist pretender Charles XI, Duke of Madrid and Bourbon heir. “To resist him, indeed – to question his Authority is undoubtedly sin,” Nichol wrote, “but to resist the outrageous and infidel impost of the present usurping government is surely not only not sin, but a Christian duty.” If the logic of absolute passive obedience was followed in all cases, then every revolt in history was unjust, including the Jacobite risings in 1715 and 1745. It would make the Duke of Cumberland a hero and not the Bonnie Prince. Nichol even criticized Pope Leo XIII for his policy of ralliement, which counselled French Catholics to coexist with the hostile Republic. Instead, Rome should direct “uncompromising hostility” to republican France.11 Nichol’s letter inaugurated a short, testy exchange with both the Champion editors and an anonymous correspondent over the meaning of authority and obedience. The editors reminded Nichol that until the Duke of Madrid regained the throne, the Republic remained the official state and taxes should be paid. In addition, they claimed, Pontius Pilate was also a foreign usurper, to whom Jesus advised Christians, “Give unto Caesar.” The correspondent likewise contended that legitimacy was a flexible term, adhering to different kinds of government in various times and places, and “must be judged by the commonly accepted laws and customs of the country it rules.”12 Nichol refused to back down. Pilate and the Romans were the legitimate rulers of Judea, he countered, and Jesus recognized this by denying any claim at political authority: “My Kingdom is not of this world.” To prove his case for divine authority, he cited excerpts from Royalist articles and their Legitimist catechism published earlier in

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the decade, arguing that democracy can never possess legitimate authority since it lacks divine sanction: You may think that these questions have little to do simply with Religion. To us Legitimists it seems far otherwise. We think that the right appreciation of them is of inestimable importance to all who would act rightly in the evil days to come. All earth, as long ago all Heaven, will surely be divided before long into but two camps – those that stand for God, and those that are against Him. Now, Sir, we Royalists simply cannot be atheists, for our foundation principle is – Divine Sanction. There is a God: by Providence He rules in the Kingdoms of men; all Authority to be legitimate, must spring from, must postulate Him. Nichol’s qualifications on passive obedience move far past positions staked out by Hobbes or Filmer, resembling instead Aquinas, Suarez, and Bellarmine on the grounds of legitimate disobedience.13 By the mid-1890s, Nichol’s crusade had made him the best-known Jacobite in the United States and at least four Episcopal Churches in New York City now offered King Charles services. The press noted the Canadian priest’s founding connection to both the skcm and the owr, his “ardent devotion to the Church of England and loyalty to the British Government,” that he was “one of the most devoted adherents of the Anglican-Catholic party in this country and England,” and that he was “a sincere and reasoned Jacobite.” A more skeptical W.W. Francis recollected reading about his former teacher’s devotion to Queen Mary of Bavaria. “All real Conservatives have Jacobitis at 20, but this nearly cured me,” he quipped.14

father william harman van allen Father Nichol was joined in his work by two others. Father William Harman Van Allen, in 1896 the pastor of the Church of the Epiphany in Trumansburg, New York, co-founded the skcm. The Van Allens had been in New York since Dutch settlement in the seventeenth century. Father Van Allen’s great-great-grandfather was a Revolutionary War veteran whose wife was aunt to future president Martin Van Buren. Their son, Emmanuel H. Van Allen, was one of the last slaveholders in New York and his son, John Van Allen, was

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a War of 1812 veteran. Daniel D. Van Allen, the pastor’s father, was a well-known teacher of French and German who for decades acted as principal for a number of schools across New York and Pennsylvania, finally retiring in 1897. The Temperance and Prohibition movements also animated the Van Allen family. Father Van Allen’s aunt, Sarah Anne, was an early member of the Women’s Christian Temperance League and the pastor himself joined the New York Anti-Saloon League. He remained a zealous anti-alcohol crusader his entire life.15 W.H. Van Allen was something of a prodigy. At age eleven, he tutored fellow students in Latin and at twenty-one followed in his father’s footsteps as headmaster of an Episcopal school. From 1891 to 1894, he prepared to enter the Episcopal priesthood and worked as a labour advocate for the Church Association for the Advancement of the Interests of Labor (cail), a national Episcopal organization endeavouring “to translate into action a deep-seated belief that as a part of her universal ministry to mankind the church had a genuine concern in the welfare of those involved in industry.” cail was part of a panoply of Protestant organizations nationwide devoted to the “Social Gospel,” an attempt to link social and economic reform with gospel teaching. After ordination in 1894, Van Allen served briefly as personal secretary to Bishop Frederic Dan Huntington (co-founder of cail) before becoming pastor in rural Trumansburg. In 1897, he assumed the pulpit at Grace Church in the growing industrial city of Elmira.16 With Nichol and the other Jacobites, Van Allen was a devoted admirer of King Charles I and offered Masses throughout his pastoral career for the fallen king. He also harboured a deep contempt for Oliver Cromwell, a logical Jacobite attitude. In 1895, he wrote a scathing letter to the New York Churchman objecting to the raising of the Cromwell statue at Parliament. The Anglican Church recognized King Charles as a saint, he wrote angrily, and “his murder was due to the bloodthirsty policy of that small faction among schismatics whose leader was Cromwell.” Van Allen’s remark travelled far. The Cambridge (Massachusetts) Tribune blasted the New York priest as a pale reflection of the recently deceased liberal Boston churchman Phillips Brooks: “The narrow and bigoted fanatics of the Van Allen type retard the broad Christian work of the Episcopal Church which received such an impetus through the benign influence of the late lamented Bishop Brooks.” Seven years later, Van Allen would be pastor to many Tribune readers.17

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alfred john rodway Assisting Father Nichol with owr work was Alfred John Rodway, a transplanted Englishman living outside Boston. Rodway was descended from an old Gloucestershire family who had fought on the Royalist side during the English Civil War. His father was a Welsh engineer and superintendent of the Birmingham Bath and Parks Department, while on his mother’s side, his maternal grandfather John Inshaw was an inventor and pioneer in steam power who assisted George Stephenson in developing England’s first steam railroad. Through his father’s connections, Rodway worked as secretary of the Bath and Parks Committee, which largely meant he served as the department’s business manager. When not working, he dabbled in heraldry and English history, researching Ashton Hall in Lancashire, and soon became “well known in literary and antiquarian circles.” Rodway also joined a number of Jacobite societies, including the Legitimist Jacobite League, and exhibited both a medal from the Spanish Pretender and a photo of Prince Rupprecht among his prized possessions.18 In 1889, however, Rodway’s life took a dim turn when the authorities arrested him for embezzlement of department funds. The defalcation amounted to £180, a considerable sum (over $28,000 in today’s money), and an unforgiving judge sentenced him to five years in jail for the crime. In desperation, his wife and sister stood outside Christ Church in Birmingham collecting signatures on a petition for a reduced sentence. Their efforts paid off – his sentence fell to only two years – but the situation was deeply embarrassing. Afterward, Rodway worked briefly managing the accounts of a cigar factory but soon left for America, likely seeking a fresh start where no one knew his name or past. He settled with his family in Roxbury, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, worked as an accountant, and resumed his antiquarian interests. Rodway also threw himself fully into the American Jacobite cause, helping Father Nichol raise money for stained-glass windows in the rebuilt St Mary the Virgin Church, and when the American owr was founded, he became its registrar and secretary.19 With Nichol in New York, Cram and Rodway worked together and soon Boston became a hub of Anglo-Catholic Jacobitism and monarchism. “The anti-Protestant crusade was in full swing,” Cram remembered. owr meetings floated between members’ houses, often held at Cram’s Pickney Street home on Beacon Hill, or sometimes at Fred Holland Day’s mansion in suburban Norwood, Massachusetts. They

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marked the Feast of King Charles the Martyr “and on other Loyalist days, drank our seditious toasts, sang our Jacobite songs” and kept up a correspondence with Queen Mary of Bavaria and Don Carlos of Spain. The New York Sun interviewed a Boston owr member in 1897, likely Cram, inquiring on the Order’s goals: To us this simply means a return to the principles represented by the Stuarts, and on account of which they were overthrown, namely, the prerogatives of the throne, or, as you would call it, the divine right of kings. We uphold the idea that there is such a thing as granting too much liberty to the common people. The commons of England are to-day the real rulers of the country – the throne but a shadow. We also believe that the time is coming in the future when there must of necessity be a fixed, visible head in these United States – a something or some one in whom the idea of country or the nation can be incarnated and idealized, which to-day we vainly strive to keep alive under the name of the flag or the stars and stripes. Ideally, Cram wanted a US constitutional monarchy, but “not so constitutional, however, as to deprive the monarch of all power of whatever nature. Society must be made over and renovated. There must be fixed grades and classes, and the line must be drawn somewhere.” The pivots of the Boston owr were the two primary Anglo-Catholic parishes, St John the Evangelist (whose pastor, Father Arthur C.A. Hall, baptized Cram into the Episcopal Church) and the Church of the Advent, both on Beacon Hill and both of which offered masses to King Charles throughout the 1890s. Of the two, Advent featured more prominently in Jacobite activities.20

father william barroll frisby The Church of the Advent’s pastor was a transplanted genteel southerner, Father William Barroll Frisby. Like other American Ritualists and Jacobites, Frisby came from an old American lineage. The first Frisbys arrived in Virginia in the 1650s and later moved to Cecil County, Maryland, where they became large landowners and prosperous merchants. The Frisby family paid a price for their prominence; in the War of 1812, British soldiers burned the home of Father Frisby’s grandfather in their assault on Baltimore. His mother’s Bar-

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roll ancestors were Welsh and descended from Colonel James Barroll of Herfordshire, England, a commander of Welsh Royalist forces in the English Civil War, a point of pride for the Advent’s Jacobite pastor. Once in America, the Barrolls settled in Kent County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Father Frisby was born on 30 May 1854 in Baltimore, graduated from Columbia College and the General Theological Seminary, and began his priesthood as a curate at Manhattan’s historic Trinity Church missioning in the New York slums. On Advent Sunday 1888, he assumed the pastorship at the Church of the Advent.21 Being “a ritualist of the most advanced type,” Father Frisby welcomed Cram and the owr into his parish, although he never became an Order member. He was, however, immensely loyal to the memory of King Charles I, the monarch who died for his faith. Frisby homilized on 30 January 1900 before a packed church: History has never done justice to Charles I. His biography has yet to be written. His virtues as a father and husband are incontrovertible. If Charles I had been willing to give up the Anglican Church, his life undoubtedly would have been saved. But true to his faith, he died in a state of grace, because he had made his confession to a bishop of the Church and received the sacrament … Let us learn, in conclusion, the true meaning of martyrdom: and when men try to throw down this faith, let us stand firm and true to the Church Christ came to establish, and follow in the footsteps of him who obtained a martyr’s crown. Frisby also began a fruitful collaboration with Cram and another noteworthy parishioner, the wealthy widow Isabella Stewart Gardner, to ornament the church in the aesthetics of Anglo-Catholicism. Cram first met Gardner when he worked for the Transcript; the two were likely brought together through introductions facilitated by a mutual friend, poet Louise Imogene Guiney. Cram and Gardner shared artistic tastes, as well as a love for Richard Wagner, and both attended the Bayreuth Festival in 1886. Gardner was also a dedicated Jacobite, hosted owr sessions at her mansion, and often festively dressed in period clothing for the occasion, once as Mary, Queen of Scots. Gardner’s generous gifts to the Advent helped the parish commission Cram to design the church’s massive rood in front of the altar, as well as much of the Lady Chapel, itself “the architecture of the White

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Rose,” as a Cram biographer observed. In addition, monies collected during services for King Charles the Martyr helped the parish purchase a statue of Archbishop William Laud for the chapel. Frisby reciprocated by consecrating Gardner’s Fenway Court home chapel at a midnight service on Christmas 1901.22

the philadelphia controversy of 1897 The problem with an American form of Jacobitism was its intangibility. No Cullodens, Tower Hills, tombs, or other historic places existed in the United States for Jacobites to visit and worship, only the geographic residue of Stuart decisions made two hundred years previous and three thousand miles away – Jamestown, the Charles River, North Carolina, etc. Father Nichol attempted to remedy the inadequacy and coax donations of some of the king’s relics to the United States, with the placement of a massive life-size portrait of King Charles I in St Mary the Virgin Church. He began advertising for donations in 1895 and, when sufficient money was raised, commissioned British painter Oswald Fleuss to compose the portrait. Fleuss based his work on the famous Van Dyck portrayals of the king made in the 1630s. The portrait was delivered in 1896, showing the king resplendent in his coronation robes, but the parish could not continue housing it. Nichol searched for a new home, finally coming to an agreement with the Church of the Evangelists in Philadelphia. “It had been originally intended that the picture should have been placed in the Chapel of St Mary the Virgin, New York,” the parish newsletter explained, “but owing to some supposed lack of harmony between the picture and the architecture, with the full approval of the rector of St Mary’s, it was offered to us at the Evangelists and most gladly accepted.” The New York Sun noted that the portrait “is said to have moved from one position to another [at St Mary’s] without ever having found a satisfactory place.” To celebrate its arrival, the Philadelphia church planned an elaborate service for the evening of 29 January 1897.23 The Church of the Evangelists was packed to capacity at eight in the evening when services began. After the singing of vespers, the gathered clergy processed to the portrait, singing John Keble’s hymn to the martyred king. Two Episcopal bishops, William Stevens Perry of Iowa and Leighton Coleman of Delaware, comprised part of the procession. A collection of other bishops sent their regrets and prayers, including Episcopal prelates from the dioceses of Springfield,

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il, Milwaukee, Chicago, Pittsburgh, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Father Nichol processed as well, displaying his Order of the White Rose medallion held by a purple ribbon around his neck, which signified his position as prior of the Order. Other pastors from neighbouring Philadelphia Episcopal Churches also joined. Once the men were positioned at the portrait, the curtain parted to reveal the king and a benediction was sung. Bishop Coleman offered the prayer: O Almighty God, Who didst command Thy servant Moses to make images of the cherubim of glory, and to set them of old in Thy holy Tabernacle: Bless, we beseech thee, our work in setting up to Thy glory in this Thine house a likeness of Thy servant and martyr Charles; and grant that all they that visit this temple may be moved by the sight thereof to a faithful copying of his constancy even unto death, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Bishop Perry then ascended the pulpit and delivered a short homily, tackling the prickly question of how Americans could do honour to King Charles I.24 Look to the earliest American colonies, he proclaimed, for they were all given life by Stuart charters. For all the talk of a small-minded king, he announced, it was Charles who gave Maryland its charter, whose 1649 Act of Toleration marked the earliest example of religious tolerance in the British colonies. “The source of the much-vaunted Maryland toleration was no other than the martyr who laid his head on the block rather than give up the Church to his foes.” Perry, a Rhode Island native, saw in the king the birth of his home state: “From this source, so often deemed tyrannical, opposed to personal liberty, caring only for prerogative, usurpation, and self-will, came the charter for Rhode Island, which in its broad, tolerant principles required no change till my own day and under which I was born.” Even the New England Puritans, “who abused him in life and maligned him when dead though using to the full the rights which he in his clemency and toleration had given them,” acquired their charters from the doomed king. After Cromwell’s Interregnum, the American colonials remembered the martyred Charles and returned to the Stuart cause. “The people at heart were true to the memory of their martyred monarch and came back to his son [Charles II] … King Charles was chosen by God to sacrifice his life and to make sure the continuity of purer catholicity. He laid his head upon the block rather than give up the Church of

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England to its foes. We of America owe him a debt of gratitude.” When Perry finished, the church’s pastor rose and read regrets sent by Bishop George F. Seymour of Springfield, Illinois, which said in part, “we pray that God may bring the English-speaking people to exalt him with honour for his great and loyal service and devotion, to the upholding of God’s Church, and the principles, as then understood and embodied in the English Constitution of Law and Order.” In the eyes of the assembled, King Charles I was as much an American founder as those who gathered at Independence Hall, only one mile away from the Church of the Evangelists, 121 years earlier. After the ceremony, Father Nichol sent a note to Queen Mary of Bavaria about the service, to which her Lord Marshal of the household replied: “We hope that this is only the first of many representations of our Royal Saint, and that soon King Charles will be a familiar object in stained glass, in relief on windows, in images on brackets and in fresco, on walls in our American churches.”25 Other Protestant denominations pounced on the service with a combination of amazement and condemnation. The Boston Baptist magazine Watchman blasted the Episcopal Church for honouring a man and his values that were at root anti-American. The English Civil War was “the revolt against Charles I. and all his works that planted the seeds of the American Revolution in the thirteen colonies. All that is most distinctive in our life antagonizes the system of government and the ideas of liberty for which Charles stood.” Protestant magazine thought the service symbolized national decline: “The simplicity that made us noble is passing away, and we are lured on to the follies that mark the decay of the great nations of the past.” The American press also hurled criticisms at the church for honouring the king. The Republican New York Tribune denounced the “reactionary tendencies” of the Episcopal Church and the awful irony of the service occurring so near to where the Declaration of Independence was signed. “It is a most amazing recrudescence of a lost cause and of false idols to be recorded in these last years of the nineteenth century … Is the Episcopal Church really going to approve of King Charles and what he stood for, thus ceasing to be American in its sympathies? Or is this apotheosis of the unfortunate King nearby the ill-considered act of a few dreamers?” “Flunkyism is as bad and as repulsive in the church as in society,” the Philadelphia Record thundered. Had Charles won the Civil War, “civil and religious liberty, as now known in England and enjoyed in America, would, for a season, and a long season, in all human probability, have perished.”26

1928

6 “The Heresy of Popular Sovereignty”: Ralph Adams Cram and the Royal Standard Cram and the Boston decadents’ dislike of democracy and affinity for monarchy also marked their growing interest in Jacobitism. Six months prior to Ruvigny’s American tour, the Pewter Mugs met at a Boston hotel to toast the memory of King Charles I (with “good scotch ale”) on the anniversary of his execution. All attendees were Americans but one, likely the Canadian editor Walter Blackburne Harte, who socialized with Cram’s circle. A letter to the Transcript editor in February 1892, signed “A Jacobite” (in reality, Cram), explained that there were “numerous zealous Jacobites in the city of Boston.” Their purpose was not necessarily to restore the Stuarts, as “the question can affect them hardly at all,” but instead to correct the errors of partisan historians regarding King Charles I and to memorialize his (and other Stuarts’) character, honour, and dedication. [I]t is quite clear that in these, the days of the realists, there is a growing movement towards the restoring of idealism, of the imagination, of hero-worship, of all those desirable qualities which made the early Renaissance so beautiful; and since this is so, it is quite reasonable that very many should be anxious to work seriously for the clearing of the memory of the last great English king, who was also the last royal representative in England of the now forgotten principles of idealism and chivalry, and for the better understanding of that strange time which saw the final conflict between the old life and the new. Two months later, Cram developed this idea in an article entitled “Concerning the Restoration of Idealism and the Raising to Honour

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Once More of the Imagination” for the Knight-Errant, a magazine designed and composed entirely by his bohemian circle. One historian called this article “an ideological manifesto of the group.” Cram decried the rise of individualism after the Renaissance and Reformation, and its attendant evils: democracy, equality, materialism, and agnosticism, all raging by the 1890s. But a restoration was coming after the inevitable fall of modernity’s ugly realism, at which time “the restored idealism shall quietly take its place, to build on the wide ruins of a mistaken civilization, a new life more in harmony with law and justice.”1 What began as an 1892 newspaper letter and was expanded into an article then blossomed into a small novel by Cram, entitled The Decadent, in 1893. The tale involved a radical socialist named Malcolm McCann who visits a former student named Aurelian Blake at his New England country estate. McCann was patterned after Walter Crane, the British socialist artist who ran afoul of proper Boston in 1891 by eulogizing the Chicago Haymarket bombers, and Blake after Cram himself. The emperor Aurelian saved the Roman Empire from barbarian attack and was called the “Restorer of the World.” Blake, of course, was Cram’s mother’s maiden name and that of “the Squire.” McCann first arrives by train in a filthy mill town, “a spectacle of humiliating prosperity,” where the inhabitants are as ugly and miserable as the buildings that house them. The smoke of the city envelopes its dwellers “like an ill-conditioned thundercloud over the mob of scurrying, pushing men and women, a mob that swelled and scattered constantly in fretful confusion.” City soot transforms people into animals, rats even, with neighbourhoods crowded with “ragged and grimy children” cursing at passers-by. As McCann rides out of town, Cram vividly describes the environmental and aesthetic nightmare of the nineteenth-century industrial city: The carriage threaded its way through the roaring crowd of vehicles, passing through the business part of the city, and entering a tract given over to factories, hideous blocks of barren brick and shabby clapboards, through the open windows of which came the brain-killing whir of heavy machinery, and hot puffs of oily air. Here and there would be small areas between the buildings where foul streams of waste from some factory of cheap calico would mingle dirtily with pools of green, stagnant water, the edges barred with stripes of horrible pinks and purples where the water

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had dried under the fierce sun. All around lay piles of refuse – iron hoops, broken bottles, barrels, cans, old leather stewing and fuming in the dead heat, and everywhere escape-pipes vomiting steam in spurts. Over it all was the roar of industrial civilisation. This was the reality of economic progress, efficiency, and wealth, Cram noted. “None of the adjuncts of a thriving, progressive town were absent, so far as one could see.”2 McCann travels from the polluted factory neighbourhoods and the tenements, and then through outer middle-class suburbs with new Queen Anne Victorian homes, “frantic in their cheap elaboration.” Eventually he escapes to the countryside and the hills (“Smooth fields of ripening grain and velvet meadow-land chequered the valley irregularly, slim elms and dark, heavy oaks rising among them,” in what could be a description of the Squire’s Kensington farm), and finally to Blake’s estate,“Vita Nuova” (“New Life,” the title of a small volume by Dante on love and loss). There, he finds his former pupil lounging in a luxuriously decorated draped room filled with “the warm, sick odour of tobacco and opium, striving with the perfume of sandalwood, and of roses that drooped and fluttered in pieces in the hot air.” Joined by one of Blake’s compatriots, Strafford Wentworth (named after the Earl of Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, friend and ally of King Charles I), they begin debating politics and the fate of the world.3 Wentworth sings Jacobite songs, derides “the vain phantom of popular government,” and attacks the potential of socialism in “any ringruled, mob-ruled State in this unhealthy republic.” No political reform is possible until “manhood suffrage, rotation in office, and representative government” are abolished. Wentworth declares he is a monarchist and “a vehement socialist,” pointing to a portrait of King Charles I as an example of a “glorious King.” Blake, however, takes both men to task, for although he admits that he too believes in Jacobitism and socialism, they are deluded. McCann dreams of a socialist utopia, Wentworth of a kingly one; neither will come to pass soon because civilizational collapse is only beginning. I wait for that which the gods may give. In the mean time, I stand with the “divine Plato,” aside, under the wall, while the storm dust goes by … in the mean time, sing, and forget the imminent night … I am weary of this servile and perishing world, rheumy and gibbering. Here I have my books of the Elect, my fading pictures,

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my treasures of dead civilization. This is my monastery, like those of that old Faith that, during the night that came down on the world after the ruin of Rome, treasured as in an ark the seeds of the new life … There is a depth of fall below the point the nineteenth century has now reached, and until that destiny is accomplished, you are helpless. He preaches a type of apoliteia, a disengagement with the world, to await the end and the new beginning from the ruins.4 Blake then launches into an extended critique of nineteenthcentury politics and society, in the end declaring that “night is at hand” and that hunkering down is the best option. He tells McCann that the French Revolution cleared the way for republicanism and capitalism, and that all revolution ends in materialism. The radical’s “ideal of life is a socialistic ideal of a dead, gross, physical ease and level uniformity; his ideal of government a democracy; his ideal of industry State factories with gigantic steam-engines – his whole system but the present system with all its false ideals, deprived of its individualism.” The United States suffers from as much rot as Europe, with the American system merely “cunning schemes and crafty mechanism.” In fact, the American ethos infects everything with its “triple-headed Cerberus”: democracy, public opinion, and freedom of the press. Democracy, Public Opinion, and Freedom of the Press – the idolatrous tritheism of a corrupt generation. Through the Institution of Democracy you have bound yourself with invincible chains to a political system which is the government of the best, by the worst, for the few – in other words, the suppression of the intelligent few by the mob for the bosses. By the Institution of Public Opinion you have made Democracy permanent, preventing forever the rule of the “saving remnant.” You have founded your unholy inquisition for the suppression of the martyrs to wisdom, and by your Institution of the Freedom of the Press you have raised a tyranny, an irresponsible final authority which will suppress, as it suppresses now, all honourable freedom of thought. What may seem bleakness is in fact Cram’s restoration of idealism – idealism not for today’s world but for the world after the fall. He quotes William Morris approvingly: “Ill would change be at whiles, were it not for the change beyond the change.” The change beyond

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the change is what comes after democratic socialist disaster: the restoration of monarchy, a rediscovered appreciation of beauty, and a renewed social and cultural order. Cram, through Blake, compared his task with that of sixth-century monks holed up in mountain monasteries, who “treasured the priceless records of a dead life until the night had passed and the white day of medievalism dawned on the world.” King Charles I represented the restoration of idealism in politics, religion, and art. Thus, when the Marquis de Ruvigny visited Boston in July 1892 and supped at Cram’s Beacon Hill home with other aspiring Jacobites, an American movement was well underway.5 Writing in 1894, a skeptical Harte pronounced American Jacobitism a mix of sincerity and impishness and recalled that, beginning in 1892, Cram (whom he sarcastically nicknamed “Napier McDougall, laird of Highdudgeon Peak”) became “head and front of the [Jacobite] League in Boston.” These Jacobites saw no tension between the American Revolution and their Stuart creed. The Stuart kings granted all but one of the East Coast colonial charters and the Revolution was not against the British throne or monarchy as a system of government but the Hanovarian usurper who occupied it. Contemporary American Jacobites had no interest in entering politics in the 1890s, and “though their political ideas are revolutionary and reactionary, no good democrat need lie awake fearing to be murdered in his bed on account of them.” Instead, they were “the expression of sympathy of the dilettante element in society, with certain aspects of the large general social movement away from the creeds and vicious materialism and commercialism of our modern civilization … [T]he Jacobite movement on both sides of the Atlantic really stands more for the restoration of some high ideals, and beauty, in art and life, than for anything else.” But in the wake of the Westminster Abbey incident, growing interest in Britain, and Ruvigny’s six-month American recruiting sojourn, the Jacobite movement was growing as both a political and cultural force. How peculiar, laughed Harte, that “Sans-culottism” was now orthodox and “fine old glowing revolutionary Toryism” signalled rebellion.6

the leadership of ralph adams cram Father Nichol had made his mark on American Jacobitism by 1898. He and Father Van Allen popularized King Charles services in Episcopal parishes, the owr operated in East Coast cities, and the

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Philadelphia controversy propelled the cause into the limelight, much as Ruvigny’s Westminster Abbey escapade had spotlighted British Jacobitism in 1892. Privately, however, Nichol was experiencing a spiritual crisis, doubting his Anglican vows and moving toward Roman Catholicism. He began quietly attending Catholic missions in New York City, likely given by the Paulist Fathers, and studying the Faith. When the pastor of St Mary the Virgin, Thomas McKee Brown, a zealous Ritualist, died in December 1898, Nichol was conspicuously absent from the funeral proceedings. On 11 February 1899 he announced he had left Anglicanism, been received into the Roman Catholic Church in a quiet ceremony the previous week, and intended to seek entry into the church as a priest. To this end, Nichol first travelled to Boston – perhaps to confer with his Jacobite colleagues – and then departed for England on 25 March to request entrance to the priesthood from the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. The “sudden conversion” came as “a shock to the clergyman’s friends,” the New York Times reported. “Despite his extremely ritualistic tendencies and his inclination to asceticism, none of Father Nichol’s associates suspected that he would leave the communion to which he appeared to be most earnestly devoted.” He also resigned from the Society of King Charles the Martyr and as North American prior of the Order of the White Rose, but not from the Order itself. American Jacobitism now searched for new leadership.7 The owr convened in Boston on 19 March. Acting prior A.J. Rodway read Father Nichol’s resignation, which was accepted, and the Order voted to send him their thanks, “expressing the regret of the order at Mr. Nichol’s resignation and unavoidable relinquishment of the onerous duties he had so nobly performed.” Next, Rodway moved to choosing a new prior. The obvious choice, Father Van Allen, refused the position via correspondence but suggested Ralph Adams Cram, who had been a charter member of the American owr and a long-standing Jacobite. Cram accepted, was presented the owr Charter seal by Rodway, and became the new prior of the Order. “I still treasure my parchment Charter as ‘Prior’ in those American territories between the Canadian border and the Rio Grande,” Cram noted as an old man decades later. The other Jacobites in Europe, including the British owr and continental Legitimists, were informed of the change by letter.8 Cram moved aggressively to push the Order into greater prominence. Along with owr member and Harvard College mathematics

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instructor Arthur Bowes Frizell, he formed a committee to study the feasibility of launching a quarterly magazine like the Royalist, one “containing Legitimist news and comment upon current events, traditions, genealogical and historical notes upon Legitimist Governments and their adherents.” A Royal Oak Day dinner was organized for May 1899 and members encouraged to invite prospective initiates. Cram also proposed allowing women members, but not in leadership positions – owr members of high standing and leadership were known as “companions,” while simple members were called “associates.” The change was approved and the Order backdated the decision to 8 February, the day Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed, perhaps as a nod to Mrs Gardner. Cram took the lead in this effort, proposing Visionist painter Thomas Buford Meteyard and his mother, Marion G. Meteyard, for membership.9 In April, Cram issued his first “official communication” setting out the Order’s plans and principles. Father Nichol was again congratulated, but the owr now needed to grow. It is now three years since the seal was affixed to our charter. During this period a most encouraging number of companions and associates, all men, have come to us; every man being of marked loyalty. The time has been one of preparation: no vigorous attempts have been made to enlist the sympathies of men not already connected with us, no action of moment has been taken, since it was felt that for a time at least we should chiefly consider questions of policy and administration and prepare the organization for the future … The period of preparation having passed, it has been decided that the North American Cycle shall enter into more active work. He reviewed the change to allow female associates (“Without the record of their steadfastness, self-sacrifice and devotion, the Cause would lose half its roll of glory”), the new aggressive membership drive and the intent to establish cycles across North America, and the publication of a magazine.10 When Cram turned to ideas, however, he struck a new tone, one more reserved toward American government and society than in previous years. While the North American Order allied with every Legitimist and their principles – the chivalric virtues, de jure government, authority as divine in origin, “the heresy of popular sovereignty,” the

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inherent goodness of monarchy, and honouring the Stuarts – the American context was unique, “in a distant land, surrounded by different conditions, with new problems confronting us.” So, while American Jacobites earnestly wished their European brethren success, living in a republic meant many of those principles “must be secondary to those that press upon us by reason of our personal allegiance.” For all their angst at American governing ideas, “false in theory and unchristian in principle,” they remained loyal Americans. I say that the United States is independent and legally constituted. The revolution of 1775, whether or no we may hold it to be unavoidable, is yet an accomplished fact. The result is a new nation, and whatever political changes may occur either in England or America, re-union is neither possible nor desirable, either for the good of this country or that other that gave us birth; a firm and loyal alliance between the two great Anglo-Saxon states will be a surer guarantee of world dominion and a more perfect safeguard of true liberty and righteous society than would be a restoration of the ancient unity and identity. The revolution is an accomplished fact and must be so accepted. Thus, while the owr shared a unity of ideals, the distance across the Atlantic demanded a diversity of applications. Cram’s dance in his 1899 owr declaration mirrored that of British Jacobites, trumpeting the de jure Queen of England, yet expressing fealty to Queen Victoria. It also echoed the earlier Jacobite embrace of Thomas Hobbes, that contract theory, admittedly noxious, was now accepted by most people and could lead to practical Jacobite ends. Cram’s declaration was an extended meditation on how to be both Jacobite and American.11 Cram well recognized the “grievously complicated” task of maintaining a Legitimist-Jacobite organization in the United States and admitted that no hereditary monarchy was coming to America anytime soon. Nonetheless, he charted a two-part owr agenda, one based on a critique of American governing theories, the other on immediate practical considerations. Changing the way Americans thought about politics and government, after two centuries of indoctrination in liberalism, was a herculean task that would require “a revolutionizing of the entire mental temper of the people.” Popular sovereignty, universal suffrage, and liberal conceptions of equality

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and rights had become civic scripture to most Americans, a second nature and almost instinctive political faith. This faith must be undermined and replaced with one that saw temporal affairs as a reflection of spiritual realities and its attendant virtues – a political, economic, and social life of genuine liberty based on restraint, authority, and hierarchy. Cram advised entering the battle of ideas “gravely and reasonably,” believing that Order members could persuade by words and example. Changing theory would take generations, but all great efforts take time.12 Practically, however, he saw opportunities. American government in the nineteenth century was corrupt, inefficient, and demoralizing to its citizens. Yet it had not always been so. The domination of the “false and inadequate Jeffersonian scheme” after 1800 and then a doubling of its intensity after 1828 with the so-called Era of the Common Man – congressional rule, extension of the suffrage, the expansive understanding of rights, new conceptions of political and social equality – had displaced the elite-based, presidential system of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalism. Cram always loved Hamilton and his quasi-British Constitution that centralized power in the federal government far more than Jefferson’s decentralized agrarian state. Hamilton’s ideal president was very nearly a king – vested with weighty powers to make decisions, as opposed to the never-ceasing discussion of Congress. This grew from his belief that men are imperfect, that government must therefore both curb and protect them from themselves and others, and that this imperfection also introduced natural inequality and, by extension, a natural aristocracy. “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” he wrote in Federalist No. 70. In a crooked Gilded Age, the emergence of an authoritative leader along Hamiltonian lines was needed and inevitable, Cram believed.13 As early as 1892, in his Knight-Errant article on restoring idealism, he wrote, “Conditions do not happen; they follow inevitably one from another, and we can find the qualities of the XIXth century already determined in the XVIth century, even as Alexander Hamilton foresaw the nature of our present politics a century ago, finding it to follow from the Constitution he so powerfully opposed.” Cram exaggerates, of course, as Hamilton advocated mightily for ratification despite misgivings. Yet the Constitution Hamilton wanted, with life terms and a much more powerful presidency and little allowance for democracy, comprised a governing document that Cram deeply

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longed to enact, fulfilling the vision of his New Hampshire Federalist grandfather. Under a new prior, the owr wanted to “reorganize our government on Hamilton’s just and noble lines,” transforming an Enlightenment-based American democratic republic into something quite different: [W]e should then have a system that would be stable, dignified and efficient, the “practical politician” would be eliminated, the civil service would become permanent and no longer subject to the “spoils system”; private legislation and interference in the government by a venal and incompetent Congress would cease, and in all its machinery and methods our government would not differ from that of constitutional monarchy … These practical reforms once established, the substitution of just and accurate theories of civil rights, of individual liberty, of the source of power and of the nature of kingly authority in place of the foolish and illogical ideas that now obtain and are our unwelcome heritage from the dark ages of the eighteenth century, would be a matter of no great difficulty. In the United States, the closest an American could get to being a Jacobite monarchist and still be a good citizen was through the restoration not of the Stuarts but of Alexander Hamilton.14 Cram also identified another way to honour the Stuart legacy without having an American king: live a good life of aristocratic virtues. White roses represented not just Jacobite sympathies but “all singleness of purpose, all perfect loyalty, all noble devotion in all relations of life, in all personal and social intercourse.” In a kleptocratic industrial nation, owr members should be models of chivalric behaviour, demonstrating not what is but what can and should be. “We cannot lay down our lives for our King, but we can hold them at the service of those that are dependent on us, whether friends or kindred. Without this, our labour is of no avail. With it we may accomplish much of that for the achievement of which we are constituted.” Living these virtues, combined with restoring the Hamiltonian system, made American Jacobitism oddly more achievable than its British counterpart. In the United Kingdom, Jacobites struggled toward a Stuart restoration, a highly improbable task. In the United States, admitting the creation of a monarchy as a nullity, they sought a new Federalism

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(which Cram believed eminently achievable long-term) and living lives of knightly character.15 Now in charge, Cram sprang into action. For the first time, the American owr sent a wreath to the King Charles I festivities at Charing Cross, with a “white silk ribbon” reading “America remembers her fallen king.” In the summer of 1899, they unveiled the design of a new coat of arms for the United States. As one Connecticut newspaper described it, In the center is the white rose crowned in the midst of the white cross inclosed [sic] in a white shield; above it a crown in which stars and roses blend montant, and being surmounted by the orb dissected by the cross, is pendant from the shield of the United States with stripes vertical and horizontal; on either side of the great ellipse which shapes the coat-of-arms on one side a shield with lilies of France, on the other a shield bearing the Stuart royal arms of England, France, Scotland and Ireland; beneath at the lower point of the ellipse (as the United States shield is at the upper point) appears reversed the shield bearing the arms of Castile and Leon. The motto around the ellipse reads: “Deo gratia non voluntate hominum” (By the grace of God and not the will of men), and in the ellipse beneath the white cross the word “Remember” – the last word spoken by Charles I on the scaffold on the occasion of his “murder,” as they put it. In addition, although it took eighteen months, the American owr finally issued its quarterly magazine in September 1900, called the Royal Standard.16

the royal standard Although both Cram and Rodway worked on the magazine, Cram wrote the editorial commentary on current events, which comprised almost one-third of the issue. He began by stating his own vision of owr principles, four years after Nichols had founded the Order. The Royal Standard, as a regular serial for the American Order, was “devoted to the advocacy of just, righteous and lawful government,” advocating for legitimate sovereigns, and upholding the Stuart cause. Its political principles, like those enunciated in 1896, were “lawfully

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constituted government, law and order, the Divine source of power, the Divine sanction of monarchy, the Divine right of legitimate sovereigns … chivalry, personal devotion to lawful Princes and rulers, faithfulness to the State, through the duly constituted authorities thereof, the sacrifice of self to the welfare of the nation, steadfastness in loyalty and obedience, [and] the exaltation of the idea of honour.” The Order’s motto of Deo gratia non voluntate hominum stood in meaningful contrast to the French revolutionaries’ “empty theory” of consent of the governed, which descended from atheism and the Protestant Reformation. Contractual theories infected the United States through the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, all for ill. “Embodied in the Declaration of Independence by the Gallomaniacal Jefferson, it has become a fetish in this country, though it is ignored in the Constitution and forms no part of that instrument,” Cram wrote. Instead, all temporal power derives from God, “and whoso exercises it does so by the Divine permission, being responsible for this stewardship to the Power that gave it.” That monarch who governs may delegate powers to others (even to those who he allows the people to select), “but these are his servants, not his masters, his councillors, not his dictators.” Further, what rights he bestows to the people are not natural and inalienable but granted privileges based on their ability to use them wisely. “The wisdom of the people is the measure of the privileges that may be entrusted to them, not their strength, their insolence or their usurpation.”17 To illustrate the owr’s conviction that voting was a privilege and not a right, Cram in the Royal Standard discussed the Fifteenth Amendment and the American South, lauding the former Confederacy for keeping suffrage limited and not enfranchising ex-slaves. “The enfranchising of the freed slaves was both a blunder and a savage crime,” he explained. Sounding like Hobbes, he went so far as to excuse Southern lynch law as the response necessary to restore order in the postwar South. For Cram, the problem was not that people were disenfranchised but that not enough were. “It is a very good thing that they should be doing this, and that it would be still better were the scheme to become popular in the North,” he wrote, suggesting (based on his previous denunciations of universal suffrage) removal of the vote from Blacks and whites who were, through lack of education or means, incapable of properly understanding public affairs. The amendment was “a war measure and nothing more … It was the beginning of the debauch of democracy, the breaking down of every

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safeguard of the ballot. To the South it brought ruin; and for our sin that ruin has swept over the North. It is the duty of every man who sees safety in the Constitution to give his voice in upholding the South, and then his life, if need be, in purifying the electoral franchise of the North on similar lines.” Here again, with proposals for a restricted franchise, we see Cram’s familial Federalism. Voting was not a right enjoyed universally but a privilege granted to the few.18 Turning to England, Cram declared there was no immediate controversy over the British throne, because Mary of Bavaria had not contested Queen Victoria’s occupation of it. If she had, she would have the de jure right to hold it as legitimate sovereign. Therefore, loyalty to Victoria was irrelevant. In the meantime, however, Jacobites should fight to restore the power of the throne from its current feeble state as “an empty show, an historical form, without power, without will, shorn of everything but the grandeur of history.” Great Britain floundered perilously, suffering under growing democracy: “At any moment the lower classes may gain control, and wherein, then, will she be better off than the great Republics?” The democratic danger was so acute that “this is a more vital issue than the question of a change of dynasty, and the Order of the White Rose recognizes this, yielding nothing of its devotion to the successors of the House of Stuart.” Take power back from Parliament and return it to the monarchy, he advised.19 Much like his British counterparts, Cram held ambivalent opinions about the war with Spain. “Forced upon a timid executive and an unwilling people by the cynical violence of a vicious Congress and the depraved clamour of an abandoned ‘yellow journalism,’” he observed, “the Spanish War, was nevertheless, a thing not to be escaped, though it might easily have been postponed.” Defending its empire, Spain rightly crushed the Cuban rebellion but did so brutally. Ultimately, the primary fault for why the Spanish lost the war and her colonies lay with “cheap politicians who, through the feebleness of the usurping dynasty, have sucked the life-blood of their country.” If the legitimate king had occupied the throne, this could have been avoided. Nonetheless, the United States waged a legitimate war, argued Cram. “Our provocation was great and the limit of patience was nearly reached; the crisis was hastened, not created.” The war could even be a boon to both nations. Spain might restore her rightful king and America may benefit from the national unity derived from conflict. “As for ourselves, our gain is beyond computation. When the war broke out we

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were on the verge of anarchy. The tyrants who have seized the political power, by their decade of utter misgovernment and industrial oppression had lashed the lower classes into almost open rebellion, while they had driven men of intelligence into a position of scornful isolation.” Cram genuinely believed the labour violence and populist rebellions of the 1890s portended a second civil war, avoided only because of the Spanish conflict. “The splendid fighting of our men has increased our self-respect, the achievements of our navy have strengthened our national pride, a pride that the scandal of our political army administration cannot quite destroy.” The acquisition of overseas colonies was also a good thing, as “our selfishness and introspection must cease.” America was now a great power, but war can either make or break a nation, even in victory. If the United States were to reform its “rotten and scandalous political system” so it could rule the new colonies with justice, the war will have been worth it. Being a colonial power will teach Americans the powerful lesson that the Sage of Monticello was wrong, “that Thomas Jefferson’s poetic phrases in the Declaration of Independence are attractive on paper, but very erroneous as statements of fact; in other words, we shall see that government does not derive its powers from the consent and will of the governed.” Cram may have been ambivalent about the war, but he was unambiguously an imperialist.20 Cram also congratulated US Army administration of Cuba, in contrast to civilian government at home. “Cursed with a civil government that ranges from imbecility in Washington through impotence in the state governments to blatant venality in the cities, it is impossible for us to regard the Indies with any feeling but that of envy,” he complained. Despite parsimonious government policy ruining the US Army pre-1898, the military now set an example of honest, efficient government, because Republican government has not yet been given the island, and because it is under the control of able men, trained to command, ignorant of politics, scornful of political methods. There is not a city in the United States so well governed as Santiago, not a state so well administered as the province of Havana. The military administration is beyond criticism. In the general collapse of government in the United States the army and navy have had no part. We can regard them with pride and satisfaction not only as fighters, but as administrators. Military rule is not a per-

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fect type of government, but sometimes it is desirable and necessary for a short time. As nations stand now it is impossible to doubt that temporary military rule would be a most salutary experience for the country, and might save it from the anarchy that is imminent. Cram’s genuine anxiety about the rising level of political and economic violence in the United States and Europe drove him, in the wake of the war with Spain, to ponder the possibility of military government to restore order and legitimacy.21 The remainder of Cram’s observations skimmed across news items of the day. He condemned the trend of raising statues and writing biographies to honour Oliver Cromwell: “Words cannot gloss him, laudation cannot save; he stands forth bare before the world, a murderer, a gory butcher, a tyrannical usurper, a canting, and crafty hypocrite.” The Royal Standard handled the British war with the Boers with kid gloves, despite asserting that Transvaal goldfields were behind the whole tragic adventure. Yet, unlike Napier, Cram was not anti-war, believing instead that the extension of British imperial rule would end with good. “As for the Boers, it is certain that in the long run, when they have settled down as subjects of the Queen, they will consider that all has happened for the best.” The Boxer Rebellion might also prove positive if the legitimate Ming dynasty regains the Chinese throne, he editorialized, but the July 1900 assassination of the Italian King Umberto I by an anarchist demonstrated that republicanism always ends badly. Anarchy resided in the rotten heart of democracy. “It is embarrassing for the reason that is simply a logical development of the democratic principle,” Cram wrote. “Anarchy shows the utter absurdity of the effort to maintain the principles of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right of public assembly; but these must be abrogated or society falls, and if they are abrogated, then the whole republican system falls also. Verily the choice is bitter!” President McKinley died exactly one year later, shot by an anarchist inspired by the Italian example.22 In addition, the Royal Standard contained poems by Cram and Nichol and an essay by another author claiming, in part, that America’s legitimate ruler was also Mary of Bavaria – the opposite of Cram’s assertions. When King James II was deposed as king of England in 1688, he retained his royal authority in the American colonies. Only “religious prejudice” against Roman Catholics commanded American

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acceptance of the Revolution of 1688. In 1776, King Charles III’s Catholicism prevented him being called to the throne of America by monarchists like Washington, Adams, and Hamilton. Had they been less prejudiced, Mary IV would preside to-day over the destinies of this great Republic; and had the signers of the Declaration of Independence been thoroughly true to their own principles, they would have declared George III to be a member of the line of usurpers, thrust into the throne of America by the British Whig leaders, to the detriment of the American prince who, by the constitutions of the several colonies, was the chief executive of each of them. The magazine also reprinted the 1896 owr principles and relayed contact information for all Legitimist groups in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Spain. A mini Kalendar graced the back pages, marking important Jacobite dates for September through November 1900.23 By far the most curious essay published in the Royal Standard was composed by the “Viscount de Fronsac,” entitled “Present Conditions in Canada,” in which the author presented himself as a native Canadian diagnosing the country’s many political problems. In fact, Fronsac was not a Canadian at all but an American named Frederick Gilman Forsaith who, through a lifetime of diligence and duplicity, had reinvented himself as a Canadian aristocrat descended from families in Scotland, France, and elsewhere. He was actually born in Portland, Maine, in 1855 to a wealthy family that made its money in the West Indies trade and grocery business. His grandmother Mary Parker Marr and her family started him on the path to faking genealogy by working for decades to prove they were descendants of the Scottish Jacobite John Erskine, the Earl of Mar. As Forsaith’s biographer Yves Drolet notes, these attempts were unsuccessful but Forsaith and his brother “grew up being told they had royal and Jacobite ancestry, which gave them a sense of belonging to an aristocracy.” Failing at the Erskine connection, the young and independently wealthy Forsaith turned toward connecting the family to the Scottish Forsyths and changed his name to Frederic Gregory Forsyth.24 A streak of self-loathing runs through Forsyth’s life, as he fled from his family’s business background to invent a titled past above such mundane money-grubbing. It began with his creation of the Aryan

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Order of America in 1880, an aristocratic and racially exclusive fraternal society “aimed at uniting the American aristocratic families within an organization that would secure the recognition of their titles and advance [Forsyth’s] social and political agenda.” This agenda was harshly anti-democratic and eugenic, even going so far as to advocate taxing excess births of the “common people” to create over time a “superior race of mental giants.” He then focused his Forsyth genealogical pursuits on the post-war American South, embraced the myth of the Confederate “Lost Cause,” and recruited into the Aryan Order ex-csa officers including generals Pierre G.T. Beauregard, Wade Hampton, and James Longstreet, although whether they were granted honorary membership or actually joined is unclear. Forsyth’s southern campaign failed to gain adherents and by the early 1890s he had turned his attention to Canada, where he believed Tories and Loyalist descendants would rally to his cause. To bolster his chances, he lied about his origins, claiming a Montreal birth and blood relation to the Marquis de Montcalm.25 Upon this fakery, Forsyth accused the Canadian government of betraying the foundations of Canadian nationalism in the BritishFrench settlement laid in the eighteenth century. The defeat of France in the Seven Years’ War could have led to complete subjugation and assimilation by the British upon the residents of New France, not just in Acadia but across the whole of Quebec, but this did not happen. “As the individual rights of the French Canadian nobles and seigneurs had been officially confirmed by the British authorities in the Articles of Capitulation of Montreal in 1760, the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and the Quebec Act of 1774,” Drolet explains, “Forsyth interpreted this confirmation as a recognition of their collective right to the preservation intact of the political and social structures of New France under the British Crown.” In the 1840s and 1850s, however, the Canadian “responsible government” reforms began the democratization and economic liberalization process and eroded the traditional authority of the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, and landowners. Forsyth regarded this usurpation of earlier settlements as a breach of contract that denied political leadership to the Canadian landowning aristocracy (of which he now considered himself) and dumbed down government. In an 1892 article, he complained, “The government changes hands so often that no man knows the ruler, but all men feel called on to shout commands. It is the Babel of anarchy.” He

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continued, “The people must become enlightened to their own defects. As a man to be wise in self-government must rule his temper and submit his will to the judgement of reason, so must he abstain from the rule of the majority, which is the temper of the mass.” Forsyth also believed that obviating the eighteenth-century settlements harmed his personal interests, since the elimination of seigneurial tenure allowed for the sale of land. Some of those lands in the Canadian Maritimes originally belonged to the Forsyths, and as French noble titles were recognized by the British in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, he insisted these lands belonged to him as Forsyth heir and had been illegally sold after land liberalization. Therefore, Forsyth submitted a series of massive land claims to a Halifax, Nova Scotia, court in 1897, claiming he was heir to 45 million acres of land (approximately 70,000 square miles) worth 50 million dollars (about 1.6 billion US dollars today). He asserted to the court that essentially all of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and its 800,000 inhabitants belonged to him. Alas, these claims were not recognized by the Canadian government.26 Forsyth amplified these charges against Canadian democracy and liberalization in his Royal Standard article. His position was that of an ardent Canadian nationalist. Since the 1840s, the twin evils of democracy and capitalism had demoralized Canada and led to an “exodus of the better classes” into the United States, particularly its artists and writers. Instead of an authoritative sovereign, the governor general was the tool of party majorities across the Atlantic: He is said to be that representative of the Crown, but in truth only represents that party of the democracy that happens to be in power in Britain. Canadians do not wish for their chief-magistrate an agent of the British democracy. They have a democracy of their own that is miserable enough, without being cursed with the representative of another … How impossible it is to have a satisfactory government in a country whose chief magistrate is only the accredited agent of a foreign faction! Forsyth preferred either a British viceroy appointed along the lines of India or that the Canadian Parliament should choose a royal to be king or queen of Canada. As it stood, Canadian government was worse than that of the United States because Canada was governed by two layers of democracy, first in Britain and second in Canada.

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The Canadian “democracy of a democracy” was a dependency, not a nation. In an endnote to the article, Cram applauded the idea of a Canadian royal court and suggested that other British colonies such as India, Australia, and South Africa should do the same to create “a true federated empire.” Perhaps with an assertive Hamiltonian executive, the United States could align with them.27 The Canadian government also sold lands taken from dispossessed French families to US interests for exploitation. No doubt having his recent land claims in mind, Forsyth angrily complained that promises to French Canadians and United Empire Loyalists were not being honoured: “Politicians and demagogues united to exploiters, none of whom has anything illustrious in person or ancestry, and not being handicapped by principle, have succeeded to the control of affairs; and who among them has their government substituted in the highest rank to take the place of those whom disgust and indignation have driven away? Behold the array of titled but low-born millionaires!” This wealthy heir of Portland merchants lamented that both Canada and the United States were trending in the same direction: “It is only among the United Empire Loyalists, French and British, that the brave heart maintains a lofty purpose,” but government excluded them and reduced their circumstances.28 Why Cram published Forsyth in the Royal Standard is a mystery. While Forsyth sympathized with their political ideas, his Aryan fixations trumped any deeper alliances with the Jacobites. He never joined the Order of the White Rose because it refused to espouse “armigerous Aryan ancestry.” He never cared for Legitimism or rival claims for the Spanish or French throne. While he lived briefly in Boston, Forsyth does not appear elsewhere in any Jacobite meetings or publications. Indeed, in the comprehensive William Munro Macbean collection directory of Jacobite works – encompassing material from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries – none of his publications appear. Unlike many other Jacobites, he also never evinced any interest in Roman Catholicism and instead “remained attached to the Anglican and Presbyterian traditions of 17th century British royalists.” As Drolet notes, Forsyth’s move to Canada “was undoubtedly the direct consequence of the failure of his endeavours in the American South and the uncertain welcome his movement was facing in New England.” The relationship between Jacobitism and the quixotic Forsyth was one of convenience.29

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cram, neo-gothicism, and jacobitism The next year, Cram further contributed to the Jacobite ethos by publishing the first of several paeans to Gothic architecture, Church Building: A Study of the Principles of Architecture in Their Relation to the Church. As he had earlier linked American Jacobitism to the living of chivalric virtues, in Church Building he coupled emerging neoGothicism to the Arts and Crafts movement and anti-modernism and saluted the heroic last stand of King Charles I against the materialistic post-Reformation tide. “Art is the measure of civilization,” Cram wrote. “The sanest, most wholesome art is that which is the heritage of all the people, the natural language through which they express their joy of life, their achievement of just living.” Architecture, as artistic expression, played a civilizing role, particularly ecclesiastical architecture. In the United States, however, church building proved an embarrassment, with few talented architects and even fewer beautiful buildings. No civilizing artistic impulse grew out of American secular culture. Church styles were a riot of conflicting expressions, “an absolutely futile confusion … the echo of artificiality of secular life.” Blame the Reformation, Cram declared, as “from that moment the decadence began … chaos took the place of order, uncertainty and affectation that of the clearly defined motives that until then had been followed consistently.” Art and architecture “is the exact expression of the mental, social, and spiritual temper of the times that produce it,” and American church building followed the “trivial fashion and triumphant individualism” of secularism. American Anglican churches were particularly impacted by this, he pointed out: “Georgian pseudo-temples with a steeple on one end and a little, screened chancel on the other.” The traditions of the Gothic style had difficulty taking hold.30 Cram explained that men build churches for four main reasons: to provide a place to worship, to exhibit craftsmanship honouring God, to display works of beauty that inspire devotion, and to create spaces for listening to pastors and priests. By his own day, churches had become “auditoriums and show structures.” A reaction was emerging, however, based on “the standpoint of architectural restoration.” That restoration attempted not to replicate the past but to build in its spirit; as Cram wrote, it was “Gothic as a living, not as a historic style.” Gothic was the starting point but not an end, otherwise it becomes “a dead archaism.” He elaborated in a later edition:

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Here and there strange people are questioning whether capitalism and industrialism are really benefits after all; why intellectualism and the “scientific method” should have acquired the absurd position they now occupy; if Protestantism is indeed an improvement over Catholicism, as some have held; if the new philosophy of Bergson (which is merely as old as St Thomas, Plotinus, St Augustine, and Plato) is not in fact a complete refutation of all the philosophy of the last hundred years; wherein democracy and universal suffrage and the parliamentary system have succeeded when other systems are held to have failed. And this same scrutiny is being meted out to the hasty reforms that have offered themselves – direct legislation, socialism, direct action, rationalism, woman suffrage, impressionism, Christian Science – with results that hardly fortify their cases. On the other hand, curious new events are coming to pass: men are turning to the Middle Ages for light and inspiration; the guild system comes to the front and finds such passionate defenders as Hilaire Belloc and his following; Bergson clears the way for the new disciples of St Thomas and Hugo of St Victor; Chesterton bursts on an astonished world; a Catholic reaction shows itself, and once more monasticism rises into sudden life. This revival of Gothic, he bemoaned, was only necessary because of Reformation barbarism. “From the day when Henry VIII began the suppression of the minor monasteries, the doom of Christian architecture was sealed.” A sainted Stuart king tried to revive it but was killed for his impertinence. King Charles I, Prior Cram wrote, “did indeed do his best to stay the ignominious progress and effect a reaction in favor of the national and Christian Gothic. Once more a healthy movement was crushed by revolution and with the Restoration the classical Renaissance resumed its progress.” In Cram’s eyes, Squire Blake’s New England Federalism represented the latter stages of feudalism, American fealty to the Stuarts demonstrated the perennial knightly virtues, and neo-Gothicism rediscovered a lost devotional aesthetic finally killed with King Charles I.31 With a new prior, a forceful push for new members, and a compelling quarterly journal, the American owr looked poised to expand on the work of Father Nichol into the twentieth century, but it was not to be. In 1899, Father Frisby began to experience bad headaches. In April 1902, he welcomed the Duke of Newcastle to

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Boston and feted him at his residence with a celebratory dinner. All appeared normal. The next month, however, Frisby began to feel poorly, and on 6 June, he died at his Church of the Advent residence from a brain tumour. Frisby’s death and the apparent blossoming of American Jacobitism under Cram’s tutelage marked the beginning of the end.32

1928

7 “The Persistence of Loyalty to Tradition”: The Decline and Fall of Victorian Jacobitism

In January 1903, on the anniversary of King Charles I’s execution, a lone American woman stood before the king’s statue at Trafalgar and attempted to toss a bouquet of posies atop it. A passing street sweeper, observing her lame efforts, grabbed the flowers, threw them himself, and wordlessly walked away. The scene in many ways symbolized the state of Jacobitism by the new century. For all the high hopes of Anglo-American Jacobites to alter the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States, their efforts fell flat. King Edward VII succeeded Queen Victoria, and King George V after him. Mary and Rupprecht of Bavaria never claimed or occupied the British throne. The Stuarts remained de jure kings and queens scattered across Europe. In America, suffrage continued to expand, individualism and materialism exploded, and the corruption of republican government never abated. With little to show, the cause dimmed – slowly in Britain, quickly in America.1

the decline of british jacobitism The Jacobite dinners, statue celebrations, King Charles services, and battlefield commemorations continued up through 1914 in Britain. Theodore Napier visited Culloden for wreath-laying until at least 1909 and began his own Scottish nationalist magazine, the Fiery Cross, in 1901. Jacobites also visited Westminster Abbey with flowers for the tomb of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1912, albeit more peacefully than twenty years previous. Their signature publications, however, soon ceased. The Jacobite stopped publication in 1904, the Royalist in 1905, and the last edition of the Legitimist Kalendar appeared in 1910

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(now edited by another royalist group, the Forget-Me-Not Club). While the Legitimist League still existed in 1910, the Order of the White Rose disappeared, although it reappeared momentarily in the 1920s and 1930s and counted novelist Evelyn Waugh as member. Indeed, one almost catches the scent of bohemian Jacobitism in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). The final blow to British Jacobitism came with World War I, when Prince Rupprecht commanded a German army on the Western Front, directly opposite British troops who were, at least theoretically, his subjects. Advocating Stuart legitimacy in this eventuality was, to say the least, awkward. The Society of King Charles the Martyr continues in existence, with branches in both the United Kingdom and the United States. In fact, the skcm’s American branch boasts over four hundred members. A new Jacobite organization called the Royal Stuart Society began in the 1920s and, according to its website, considers itself heir to the Legitimist movement of the 1890s.2 Of the Jacobite leaders, some receded into obscurity, while others continued as public figures for decades. After his failures in Spain, the Earl of Ashburnham largely retired from public life and died in Paris in January 1913. Henry Jenner retained his Jacobite convictions, and even stayed with Mary of Bavaria in Munich in 1911, but pushed away from the movement in dismay at its perpetual disorganization and bickering. “The curse of the Jacobite party has always been an utter inability to agree,” he grumbled in 1914. “At this particular moment, when almost anything might happen in the world of politics, it is particularly foolish for those who hold Legitimist views to fight amongst themselves.” Indeed, politics caught up with Jenner during World War I, when British authorities investigated the nature of his intimacy with the German Stuart heirs. After the war, now an old man, he flirted with fascism but never fully committed publicly to that ideology. Jenner also converted to Roman Catholicism, like his owr co-founder Ashburnham, and died in Cornwall in May 1934.3 The Marquis de Ruvigny converted to Catholicism in 1902 but continued his Legitimist efforts and remained highly esteemed in the European royalist community. In fact, the Spanish Pretender to the throne was godfather to one of his sons. The British Museum removed his Legitimist Kalendar from its shelves during World War I, but he partially redeemed himself and proved his loyalty by publish-

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ing a tome in 1917 on the fallen British dead. Ruvigny’s last years were also melancholy ones. One of his sons accidently shot and killed himself in 1911, and his wife of twenty-one years died in 1915. Ruvigny himself died on 6 October 1921 at age fifty-three.4

the post-jacobite years of herbert vivian Herbert Vivian remained a prolific travel writer and journalist until his death in 1940. He wrote a hagiographic travel account of Serbia in 1897, seeing in the small Balkan nation the hierarchical feudal society Britain once was and could be again. When assassins brutally murdered the Serbian royal family in 1903, however, he wrote a much more critical follow-up, The Servian Tragedy, and transformed into an Austrophile. Vivian never lost his monarchical and Jacobite loyalties, however, calling democracy the “new black death” in the 1930s. His book The Life of the Emperor Charles of Austria (1932) pictured the late deposed monarch as a latter-day King Charles I, valiantly attempting to save and restore his throne. In Kings in Waiting (1933) – part travelogue, part political commentary on central Europe – he visited Bavaria and recollected Victorian Jacobitism in the coy third person: [Mary of Bavaria] had long been regarded by a small remnant of British traditionalists as their lawful Sovereign, whom they toasted over the water as Queen Mary IV. Old Jacobite clubs were continued or revived, telegrams were sent and acknowledged on her birthday, public meetings and banquets held to affirm loyalty to her person. Most Englishmen smiled over such notions as those of harmless cranks, but there were others who, without contemplating the possibility of a Jacobite Restoration, found admiration for the persistence of loyalty to tradition. Vivian recalled a story about Mary of Bavaria, when she met a visiting Jacobite and his wife and gave them her signed photo. Her husband King Ludwig III suggested to her “with a smile” that she sign it “Mary R,” Queen of the United Kingdom. She refused.5 Vivian had no love for Adolf Hitler, calling the Austrian corporal who became German Chancellor in 1933 “a stormy petrel” and a “mountebank.” Nothing about the emerging dictator should appeal to Jacobites or traditionalists.

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It is far better to be eighteen than to be spoiled by experience … History has no lessons to teach him. Never look back though steam-rollers pursue. So he captures German youths, who yearn as desperately as their elders for some termination of the nightmare … Revolutionary times spawn strange fungi, but even so it is a poor reflection on boasted German intelligence that a man of this paranoiac type should have been so far trusted, so widely acclaimed as a saviour. Nazi violence in the 1920s and 1930s appalled him as “mob lawlessness in action” by “misguided idealists” who were attracted to Hitler’s movement because of its “spirit of self-sacrifice” and the vacuity of Weimer parliamentary liberalism. Naturally, Vivian wanted to see a restoration of monarchy over National Socialism, but the Germans mistrusted the exiled kaiser and the crown prince flirted with Hitler. Instead, he counselled, look to peaceful Bavarians like Prince Rupprecht rather than the Hohenzollerns when the restoration comes. “There is no reason why we should imagine the cause of peace likely to be endangered by a Restoration of the Monarchy. A dictatorship is a far greater menace.”6 Vivian believed Benito Mussolini held far greater potential and he openly supported the Fascist leader where his Jacobite compatriot Jenner did not. In Fascist Italy (1936), Vivian used his familiar travelogue formula to offer flattering commentary on Il Duce’s endeavours to resurrect Italy. As a habitual traveller, he had experienced liberal parliamentary Italy before and after World War I and considered it a failed state. “The farce of parliamentary government had been pushed to an extreme,” he remembered. “It was Whiggery at its worst”: rigged elections, weak disorderly governments that lasted months, and a multiplicity of political parties. “All politics were reduced to intrigues and scrambles for office, and office lasted so short a time that the politicians were chiefly concerned in feathering their nests.” Government ignored the king and attacked the Catholic Church. A communist terror campaign and Fascist reprisals ruled the streets.7 Then Mussolini appeared, raising Italy from “a gutter to a throne.” He restored order and Italian reputation and called on the country’s Roman imperial patrimony to inspire a new modern Italy. Roads, railroads, cities, and farms were all rebuilt and expanded. Mussolini fascinated Vivian; he viewed the dictator as part mystic, part prizefighter, part Roman orator. “I was impressed by his magnetism,

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determination, straight-forwardness and self-confidence,” he related after meeting Il Duce for the first time. The application of Catholic corporatist social thought brought particular credit to Fascist Italy. “[Mussolini] is restoring most of the glamour of the Middle Ages, especially that system of guilds which made strikes, unemployment, and labour disputes impossible, banished hunger and suffering, united all workers in a practical brotherhood of man,” Vivian wrote.“Mussolini’s corporative system alone suffices to raise him to a political pedestal which we should vainly seek in history or the contemporary countries of to-day.” In defending Italian Fascism, Vivian appealed to the lessons of British history, comparing Italy to the silly English prejudice against King Charles I because he ruled twelve years with no Parliament, “though no blame is attached to Oliver Cromwell, who made his Parliaments his washpots.” Thus Mussolini, who wanted to avoid such talk, kept the Italian parliament and the king around.8 Vivian did not embrace Mussolini uncritically. He condemned restrictions on personal liberty under Fascism. The dictator also ruled in the Italian monarchy’s stead, when he should restore the power of the king. In the best case, the dictatorship would transition back to monarchy after Fascism restored order and the Italian spirit; in the worst case, it would violently collapse into communism. On the whole, however, Vivian believed Fascism a success and chastised the rest of the world: “Instead of criticising and abusing Mussolini for accomplishing the salvation of a troubled people, the nations of the world would do well to strive to follow in his footsteps and emulate his methods. But alas! where is another Duce to be found?” Tyrannies ruled in Russia and Germany and incompetent republics governed in most other nations. The last such British statesman, Vivian declared, was King James II.9 Vivian was not alone in making these comparisons. Four years prior to Vivian’s Fascist Italy, Scottish writer Audrey Cunningham published Loyal Clans (1932), in which she distantly lionized Mussolini by giving tribute to Scottish Highlander loyalty to James II. There was no difference between loyalty to Jacobite principles and to the person of the king: “It is loyalty to a person as representing a principle.” Preservation of the common good was best served by unitary leadership: In any movement, leadership is essential; the vague aspirations and various desires of a number of men must be defined, and

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their energies organised, if they are to be effective, and enthusiasm for objects pursued in common is quickly merged in personal admiration for and devotion to the man who guides it, if he is in any sense worthy of his task, and his followers are sincere … Little wonder that the highlanders looked back with grateful loyalty to the rule of King James. They had found by experience that they could trust in his sense of justice and in his real care for their welfare. In Vivian and those like him, the 1922 March on Rome held hope that the Glorious Revolution could be reversed.10

the fall of the foundress The darkest tale of the British Jacobites belongs to skcm foundress Ermengarda Greville-Nugent, whose long life stretched from riches to ruins. Inheriting great wealth and living a cultured life of privilege, her marriage to Patrick E. Greville-Nugent promised entry into the ranks of British aristocracy. Her rakish husband quickly dispatched these hopes. In April 1892, drunk and travelling alone, he assaulted a young woman who rode in the same train compartment and was arrested. At trial, he denied any sexual contact with the victim but pleaded guilty to common assault believing the judge would give him a lesser penalty. He received six months of hard labour anyway, a lighter sentence owing to his social position but still an embarrassing and “crushing blow.” In the 1920s, he lapsed into insanity, as did the couple’s only daughter, Rose.11 Formidable death taxes on the two forced Greville-Nugent to liquidate much of her estate until she had little money left. Yet, accustomed to high living, she refused to abandon her lifestyle, riding in a chauffeured car and residing in a mansion complete with servant, despite the fact she could not pay her electric bills. One of her many debtors finally brought suit against her in March 1934 and she was arrested. Testimony at the trial revealed ugly details of her scanning newspaper obituaries to identify and “borrow” money from recent inheritors. She was “one of the most accomplished begging-letter writers in the country,” one witness testified. “Whenever she sees wills in the papers she send these pitiable letters of the nature you have heard … Whenever we have made inquiries we have always found her living luxuriously, and always quite shameless about her

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begging activities.” When questioned as to why she lived this life, she replied that if St Francis Assisi lived as a beggar she would too. At age seventy-three, Greville-Nugent was sentenced to two months in prison for neglecting her obligations. Like the others, she never abandoned her Jacobite faith and wrote articles and letters defending King Charles I from all aspersions. She died at age eighty-eight on 9 July 1949.12

the disappearance of american jacobitism In the United States, the Order of the White Rose dissipated rapidly. Frisby’s death in 1902 swept away a central figure in Boston Jacobitism who had collaborated closely with Ralph Adams Cram and Isabella Stewart Gardner since the 1880s, although his successor and skcm co-founder Father William Harman Van Allen continued services for King Charles I for years. Father Nichol’s resignation and conversion also absented a crucial organizing force in the Jacobite movement, just when the cause reached its apex. Alfred John Rodway returned home to England for good in August 1902, after a decade in the United States raising money and marshalling interest in American Jacobitism. Cram’s life also changed as he began a family. In December 1899, he became engaged to Elizabeth Carrington Read, daughter of Captain Clement Carrington Read of Virginia, a veteran of the Confederate States army. They were married on 20 September 1900, nine days after the Royal Standard appeared. Cram’s architectural career began to soar, as well, although not without bumps. His firm submitted designs for the First Church of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1901 but was not awarded the contract. The Cambridge Tribune suggested the failure was due to Cram’s involvement with the Order of the White Rose. Thus, a new family and career pressures likely led Cram away from his earlier outspoken Jacobitism. The most prominent American Jacobites – Rodway, Van Allen, Cram, and Nichol – all drifted away after 1902, and the Order vanished.13 Upon return to England, Rodway quickly found employment as an expert in heraldry and period costume design as a “pageant master,” assisting stage productions for his well-known brother Phillip Rodway, director of Birmingham’s Theatre Royal and Prince of Wales Theatre, as well as Barry Jackson at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. He also gave talks on Shakespeare and served as president of the Midlands Antiquarian Society in Birmingham. When Rodway died on 18

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September 1925 at age sixty-two, the newspapers made no mention of his criminal past or his transatlantic Jacobitism.14 As mentioned, Father Van Allen remained a loyal acolyte of Charles I and offered annual masses for the king at Church of the Advent, but his earlier Jacobitism faded. Instead, he became an integral member of Anglophilic Boston Brahminism and, during World War I, a zealous advocate for the British Allied cause. His outspokenness came with risks, however. When he offered prayers for the British dead in 1914, he received anonymous death threats. After the United States entered the war, Van Allen served with the ymca attached to the American Expeditionary Forces. He also publicly condemned the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin and Irish Catholics (thousands of whom lived in New England) who supported it, “the American citizens who across 3,000 miles, poured their poison into the hearts and ears and minds of these poor young men and gave them money.”15 Father Van Allen continued his crusade against alcohol, interpreting the war against Germany as a prohibitionist effort. In a January 1918 speech, he declared, “The war has opened our eyes. Conservatism of money, of grain, of fuel, of man-power, all demand nothing less than war-time prohibition. But why not after the war too?” Mere liquor regulation was not enough, and in condemning alcohol he exhibited the common prejudice fuelled by US wartime propaganda against German Americans – that all things German, particularly beer, were unpatriotic: The way to regulate a rattle-snake is to cut off its head … Drunkenness is an individual sin; but drunkard making is a national sin and calls for a national remedy … Blot out this pernicious thing and with it will go commercialized vice, much crime, pauperism, insanity, and debasing influences in every social activity … This is a holy war: We are fighting Kaiserism in its breweries as well as in its batteries, in its saloons as well as in its submarines. But victory will come with a new freedom such as the world has not yet known, when the righteous nation that keepeth truth shall enter into its full heritage. Down with the Kaiser! Down with his chief ally! After the war, Van Allen, now one of the most respected conservative churchmen in the country, used his bully pulpit to comment on world affairs. He had no admiration for the Russian Revolution and the Bol-

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shevists, attacking the “parlor anarchists, wild pacifists and mere radicals who, some of them on Beacon Hill, are advocates and apologists for this anarchistic spirit … The Bolshevik spirit is manifesting itself in Russia in idiotic deviltry, and those possessed of it are slipping back into a degradation greater than swine can ever know. Materialism rampant, based on the will to destroy – that is Bolshevism.” Van Allen believed President Woodrow Wilson should wait before demobilizing American forces as the dangers of anarchism and communism, then threatening post-war Europe, might expand to the United States. Unlike Vivian, however, he had little patience for the “cheap thunder” emanating from Mussolini and the Fascists. He retired from the Church of the Advent in 1929. Two years later, while in Europe in 1931, he broke his hip from a fall in Florence, Italy; soon after, he suffered a stroke and died in Munich on 23 August.16

the fame of cram Of all the Anglo-American Jacobites, Ralph Adams Cram achieved the greatest success after the movement faded. One of the pre-eminent American architects of the twentieth century, his elaborations of the neo-Gothic style in churches and universities graced communities across the country: the West Point Chapel, St Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue and the Cathedral of St John the Divine in Manhattan, the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland, the Cathedral of Hope in Pittsburgh, the Princeton University Chapel, the Doheny Library at the University of Southern California, and dozens of others. Cram also channelled his energies into writing. Although focusing on medieval Gothic architecture, he exposited on the aristocratic, chivalric, feudal virtues he had earlier detected in Jacobitism. Cram’s neoGothicism was Jacobitism in guise. In The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain (1905) and The Gothic Quest (1907), Cram attacked the Renaissance for killing moral politics. The Renaissance, with its “impulse towards individualism,” birthed political absolutism and introduced “the horror of a new paganism, empty of all its ancient virtues, a malefic miasma dooming civilization to a Gotterdammerung of three hopeless centuries. St Thomas Aquinas has given place to Machiavelli.” Nonetheless, the normally gloomy Cram saw hope in European cultural reaction – Newman, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris, and Wagner (“the greatest prophet of all”) – and the growing interest in Gothic, which he preferred to call “the Christian

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style.” Gothic design was “a mental attitude, the visualizing of a spiritual impulse … It was a style which was not racial in any respect; it had its manifestations in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, the Low Countries and England. It was the manifestation of an epoch, not of blood, of the zeit geist, not of a clan.” That Cram saw this as an extension of Jacobitism is evidenced in his reprinting his 1892 “Restoration of Idealism” as chapter 1 of Gothic Quest, with its nod to Alexander Hamilton for predicting that Jefferson’s election meant nineteenthcentury political disaster, much as the Renaissance presaged the catastrophes of the eighteenth century. He also built upon his first book, The Decadent (1893), with Walled Towns (1919), the beginning of which quotes liberally from Malcom McCann’s trip through the ugly American city to the countryside. Here, Cram imagines Christians withdrawing from modern life and settling into walled communities to live lives of virtue. As for the social vision, there must be not only the negative quality of revolt but the positive quality of construction. It is not sufficient to hate the tawdry and iniquitous fabrications of the camp-followers of democracy; the gross industrial-financial system of “big business” and competition, with the capital versus labour antithesis it has bred. It is not enough to curse imperialism and materialism and the quantitative standard. There must be some vision of the plausible substitute, and while this must determine itself shortly, through many failures, and will in the end appear as a by-product of the spiritual regeneration that must follow once the real religion and a right philosophy are achieved, there must be a starting somewhere. His descriptions bear more than passing resemblance to contemporary debates over a “Benedict Option,” with orthodox Christians taking to metaphorical mountaintop abbeys to escape the debaucheries of modernity.17 Cram also contributed widely to the political discourse of his day in The Nemesis of Mediocrity (1917) and The End of Democracy (1937). World War I demonstrated that the West lacked competent leaders with moral vision. In the past, healthy societies looked for guidance in the lives of saints and thinkers, but they had been replaced by “the uncouth flotsam of the intellectual underworld” and “semi-converted novelists, jejune instructors in psychology, and imperfectly developed

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but sufficiently voluble journalists.” These inept leaders pushed democracy, itself poorly conceived in the so-called democratic nations – nations with no experience in universal suffrage. America’s task in 1917 should have been inwardly directed, not to make the world safe for democracy but to make democracy safe for the world. How did the “High democracy” of St Thomas Aquinas and the Middle Ages – a democracy of hierarchy and limits, which conceived liberty as the freedom to pursue the good – decline into twentieth-century mobocracy, Cram asked. Renaissance humanism made man the centre of all things, replaced high democracy with absolutism, and severed morality from economics; the Reformation eroded the sense of human community and incited a riot of individualism; Enlightenment rationalism reduced reality to the material and tangible. Cram’s world of the Great Depression, Stalinist Communism, National Socialism, and Italian Fascism was massified and dominated by political oligarchies and industrial finance capitalism.18 The solution lay in the past, not in replication but in inspiration. Restore the aristocratic republic intended by American founders like John Adams, declared Cram in The End of Democracy: “If we are to retain any sort of free, representative government that guarantees liberty and justice with decency and effectiveness in operation, universal suffrage will have to be abandoned in favour of some restricted, selective scheme such as was in force and held to be a desideratum by the statesmen of 1787.” Voting should be granted to citizens not “by virtue of their humanity” but “by cause; something like a college degree, though not given for the same reasons.” That “cause” was small property ownership (not massive wealth and privilege), since only property conferred freedom on its owners. Wage workers were dependent on bosses for their living; “a proletarian is not a free man and only free men can safely participate in government.” Cram believed the entire American constitutional system should be reconceived. Voting should be done in a series of filtering elections, like an electoral pyramid. One hundred people in a community would elect ten men to join others elected from communities in a county, then those assembled would elect from that group another selection for representation at the state election, thence up to the national level. Cram also looked fondly upon Italy’s experimentation with corporatist vocational representation, where citizens grouped themselves by job (or guild/ union) and elected representatives in the same kind of pyramid voting process. The House of Representatives would be populated in this

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manner, while the Senate would transform into an American House of Lords, with senators serving life terms. The president of the United States would also serve a life term – Alexander Hamilton would, no doubt, have been pleased – and by doing so end the cycle of permanent campaigning that riled the peace of republics. “The nation would still remain a Republic; a fine designation, better and more descriptive than Empire or Kingdom, and under a non-political Head it would merit the title better than it does now. His Highness the Regent of the Republic of the United States: a good title and significant.” It is easy to ascribe fascist sympathies to Cram with designs like this, despite his denials, but New England Federalists toyed with similar schemes in the 1780s. The arch-conservative Federalist Jonathan Jackson of Newburyport, Massachusetts – just ten miles from Cram’s birthplace – printed a small book in 1787 detailing similar filtered voting plans. Cram also detected much of his philosophy in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Federalism of Squire Blake informed his Jacobitism and Gothicism but also illustrated his later advocacy for an aristocratic and corporatist republic.19 Cram never apologized for his involvement with the Visionists or Jacobites. He also expressed pride that he and his Jacobite companions had been so prescient in observing the superiority of monarchy and the coming fall of democracy: In the light of this new leading, my memory of old days is clarified, and I call to mind a period, now some forty years gone, when those men with whom I was then associated were convinced monarchists, not to say Legitimists and Jacobites. This was at the very meridian of the age of Triumphant Democracy, and to none of us, I fancy, was it more than a pious aspiration; certainly we did not quite expect to be taken seriously, nor, it is hardly necessary to say, were we so taken … Perhaps if, back in the very last days of the closing century, we had for one mad moment foreseen the progressive degeneration of the parliamentary system of government and the dark discredit to be cast on social and political democracy by its own revealing actions, as these were to be accomplished in the coming and immediate years, our hopes would have been better. Nothing of the sort was vouchsafed us. We were, I suppose, less the prophets of what was to come than the last ripples of the dying wave of Romanticism. Our monarchical bent was romantic, sentimental, decorative, rather than the

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issue of a critical and philosophical estimate of existing conditions and a drawing of conclusions therefrom. Their model leaders were St Louis of France and King Charles I of England, not the Kaiser or George V, he wrote. Once they had cast aside their romantic ardour, however, “study of the theory and scheme of government became rather a cherished avocation.” They discovered their romantic instincts in line with historical fact: Whig historians like Thomas Babington Macauley had written in self-flattery for their cause. Cram and his friends realized Charles was “an idealist and great gentleman, fighting for justice and the poorer and more Christian of his people, against as sorry a cabal of sportsmen, profiteers, receivers of stolen goods, and sour sectaries as ever assailed a high-minded king.” Living his own “Benedict Option,” Cram and his family lived on a secluded farm in Sudbury, Massachusetts, called Whitehall, named after the London street upon which King Charles I mounted the scaffold to his execution. Cram built a small Anglican chapel on the grounds called St Elizabeth’s, which he had staffed by the Cowley Fathers, much as they staffed Isabella Stuart Gardner’s home chapel by the requests in her will. Cram died on 22 September 1942 and was buried alongside his wife and two of his children on the chapel grounds.20

the last years of father nichol Father Robert Thomas Nichol’s post-Jacobite career was the most poignant. After his conversion, he twice applied for acceptance into the Roman Catholic priesthood but was denied by the cardinal archbishop of Westminster, Herbert Vaughan. When William W. Francis addressed a letter to his former teacher as “Reverend,” Nichol replied, “Since by the favour of God I became a Catholic, I am not in Holy Orders.” “He confessed it had been a hard blow when Cardinal Vaughan advised him not to apply for Roman ordination,” Francis reported after meeting the ex-priest in New York. “Doubtless the Cardinal knew that there are British types – witness Newman – who can never quite feel at home, Jonahs, within the Roman whale, and whom Grand-Mother Church cannot comfortably digest.” Laicized against his wishes, Nichol began a new career, working first at the New York Public Library before landing a position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an expert on Egyptian, medieval, and Renaissance art. Francis and a friend visited Nichol at the museum:

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Arrived there, his first remark made us exchange bewildered glances, and our guide explained that Adam had been created with all the knowledge that the human race ever had or ever will have. This knowledge flows down through the ages like an underground stream from which rivulets emerge now and then, and here and there. A larger branch than ever before or since came to the surface for the ancient Egyptians! Perhaps Cardinal Vaughan was right. During his two-decade employment at the museum, “Timmy” Nichol lived at the Blanchard boarding house in Greenwich Village, a favourite haunt of American writers in the 1920s and 1930s.21 Nichol’s co-workers had no knowledge of his former career as priest or Jacobite, despite his working at the museum for twenty years. When he retired in March 1933 for medical reasons – he suffered from Paget’s disease, a painful condition that weakens and warps bones – the museum awarded him an annual allowance of $1,800 (about $39,000 in today’s money) in addition to his pension, no small sum in the depths of the Great Depression. “Mr Nichol brought to the Museum a quality only too rare – a fine, old-world scholarship, profound, human and polite – the type of scholarship which one instinctively brackets with the name gentleman,” his superior wrote. He managed to visit friends and family in Canada, England, and Scotland a few more times in the mid-1930s before his health failed. Nichol died on 15 December 1937 in New York City.22 Nichol planned his own funeral with two close friends, Arthur Graham Carey, a wealthy New England silversmith, editor, and writer, and John Howard Benson, a noted stone carver and long-time professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. His close connection to these two men leaves us hints of his activities after exiting the priesthood in 1899. Carey was a prominent American advocate of Distributism, the anti-capitalist, anti-industrial agrarian political economy advocated by British writers G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Arthur J. Penty. The Distributists criticized the economic and social effects of the Industrial Revolution, promoted a rediscovery of the communal virtues of the village economy and feudal guilds, and modelled many of their ideas on the corporatist papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931). Carey wrote Penty’s obituary for the New York traditionalist magazine American Review in 1937 (the year of Nichol’s death) and two years later composed a statement

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of principles called A Declaration of Independents for his short-lived Distributist League of New England. Carey and Benson also worked closely with Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement and were both key influences on the movement’s primary artist, the Belgian Ade Bethune. Carey had met Bethune during his editorship of Catholic Arts Quarterly and she had brought both him and Benson to meet Day in 1935. In 1936, she replaced Benson as teacher at the Portsmouth Priory School, when he moved to the School of Design, and two years later she opened a studio upstairs from Benson’s workshop. Carey’s Declaration was printed by Sowers Press of New Jersey, a small religious press operated by printer Thomas Barry, himself close to both Day and her associate Peter Maurin. That Nichol’s closest friends were Distributists and admirers of the Catholic Worker Movement might appear miles away from his life in the 1890s, but they shared important similarities with Jacobitism: the restoration of traditional Christian virtues (as opposed to individualist market-based “values”), opposition to the industrial economy and its pernicious effects on the family, advocacy of a Christian agrarian socialism as opposed to the “getting and spending” of modern urban cosmopolitanism, and an adherence to the traditional social philosophy of Roman Catholicism. Much as Gothic architecture expressed the same ideas as Jacobitism for Ralph Adams Cram, Distributism likely did the same for Nichol.23 The funeral mass was held at St Ignatius Church in Manhattan, just two blocks from the Metropolitan Museum. Nichol owned a gravesite in Canada but told the local priest to give it to a poor person who could not afford one. Instead, he had fallen in love with the Carey family’s summer estate, “Creek Farm,” in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He visited it often and when Carey offered him a gravesite in the family cemetery he accepted. Benson, Carey, and two local farmers dug the grave and lined it with pine needles. A Portsmouth priest came and consecrated the ground. Benson wrote to a Nichol relative: It was a perfectly lovely spot and thanks to all the careful thought which our dear old friend had given the matter and the arrangements which he had made, it was in many ways even a happy occasion to bring his affairs to such a satisfactory conclusion. There was none of the usual ugliness which is so common at a funeral. It was all really simple. We lowered the pine coffin with

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the large black cross on it into the grave with reins from the stable, and we feel that is all just as he should have liked to have had it … We will all miss him very much but I do feel under the existing conditions it was far better that he went … Both Graham and I have been friends of his for years, and it was a great privilege for us to be able to do what we could in Portsmouth. On the New Hampshire seacoast, the old Jacobite received a touchingly simple burial, far removed from his elaborate ritualism of the 1890s and more befitting an acolyte of Chesterton or Day.24

1928

CONCLUSION

“The Fault of the Years”: The Significance of the Victorian Jacobites

Reviewing life from his rural Massachusetts perch in the 1930s, Ralph Adams Cram fondly recalled his Jacobite days and advised that whatever looked frivolous in hindsight reflected more the gravitas of Depression-era America than the merits of fin-de-siècle Jacobitism. “Fundamentally we had, I think, a genuine seriousness of both outlook and of purpose,” he wrote. “It was all very youthful and lighthearted – also somewhat silly, as I look back upon it from this height of years (but I dare say this is the fault of the years).” Rather than an inconsequential blip in Anglo-American Victorianism, the Jacobites represented an important cultural moment in the Mauve Decade when liberalism, democracy, and industrial capitalism came under attack. Although their numbers were small, Victorian Jacobites were important cultural and religious figures of their day. The Marquis de Ruvigny’s genealogical work left a legacy that family researchers build on today. Henry Jenner restored interest in Cornish culture and language. Fathers Nichol, Frisby, and Van Allen were influential clerics in Boston and New York and crucial to the ascent of North American Anglo-Catholic liturgy. Cram’s neo-Gothic contributions to American architecture remain a fixture in US cities and towns and are recognized as the achievements of one of the America’s greatest architects. In addition, the Jacobite movement’s aim to restore the Stuarts was only a small part of its program. Instead, the Order of the White Rose, Society of King Charles the Martyr, and others acted as an umbrella for a host of issues concerning to Jacobites. They advocated the restoration of idealism and aristocratic chivalric virtues in the grasping Gilded Age. They opposed the rising new democracy based

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on Reformation individualism and quantitative mass over qualitative judgment. They attacked the new industrial economy as destructive of the countryside and small towns and degrading to workers, communities, and the natural environment. They mocked Low Church charismatic evangelical Christianity as self-centred and unmoored to church traditions. The Jacobites also remained consistent to their ideals, even after the movement collapsed, maintaining their earlier principles, expressing them under different circumstances, or searching for an allied cause: Cram with neo-Gothicism, Nichol with Distributism, and Vivian with Catholic corporatism and even Mussolini. In these critiques, Victorian Jacobites often mirrored the other great reform movements of the day, and, reading their works, one can easily imagine any progressive or socialist making similar declarations. After all, Van Allen began his priestly life in the Social Gospel Movement, Nichol and Frisby missioned in the New York slums, and Cram wrote evocatively in the Decadent and elsewhere of urban industrial misery and professed Christian Socialism. In some ways, these Jacobites occupied that ground that Karl Marx feared and mocked in the Communist Manifesto. Marx labelled it “feudal socialism”: “half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.” Feudal socialism married itself to the Roman Catholic Church. “Clerical Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat,” wrote Marx. In fact, several Jacobites converted to Catholicism, including Ashburnham, Jenner, Ruvigny, and Nichol. Nichol experienced a Suarezian moment in the 1890s, abandoning the older Filmer divine-right doctrine of passive obedience for active resistance to illegitimate regimes, although he found Pope Leo XIII’s coexistence with the French Republic disconcerting. Some Jacobites also incorporated Thomas Hobbes into their world view, seeing in Leviathan an antidote for the new state of nature released by disorderly Victorian bourgeois liberalism.1 Marx condemned the alliance of aristocracy, priest, and peasant as an attempt to prevent the bourgeoisie’s efforts to both “cut up root and branch the old order of things” and encourage the growth of a revolutionary urban working class. Transatlantic Jacobitism represented an important aspect of reform movements that blossomed in

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the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When the 1920 Encyclopedia Americana included a lengthy essay by historian Harry Elmer Barnes titled “Social Reform Programs and Movements,” Cram (“seeing only the darkest phases of the present order”) was listed in the subsection “Aesthetic Revolt against Materialism and Misery,” along with Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoy, and others.2 The Jacobites were not nostalgic, backward-looking aristocrats seeking the recreation of a bygone time; they were uniformly aware the past could never return. Rather, they sought inspiration to reform their times. As Cram explained in Church Building (1899), [W]hen we build here in America, we are building for now, we are manifesting the living Church. It is art, not archaeology, that drives us. From the past, not in the past. We must return for the fire of life to other centuries, since a night intervened between our fathers’ time and ours wherein the light was not; and, therefore, it does not come direct in our hand. We must return, but we may not remain. It is the present that demands us, – the immutable Church existing in times of the utmost mutability. We must express the Church that is one through all ages; but also we must express the endless changes of human life, the variation of environment. This is church architecture; the manifestation through new modes of the ecclesiastical past; unchangeableness through variety; the eternal through the never-fixed. They looked back, he noted later, to celebrate, to remember, to study, but most importantly, “for the sake of getting a fresh start.” A return to precedent could help heal the rifts torn open in the West since the Reformation. The Jacobites were not airy, unserious aesthetes or roleplaying adolescents. No movement that turns to Hobbes for answers has its head in the clouds. The times were out of joint and the Jacobites meant to fix it.3 This sense of the past also impacted Jacobite perceptions of historiography and memory. They deeply resented the capture of British historiography by Whig historians since 1688, which villainized the Stuarts and the Tories and hailed all change since William and Mary as the unstoppable triumph of liberty, democracy, popular rights, and “progress.” They were profoundly aware that historiography lends legitimacy. It legitimizes violence and power and absolves men of all

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crimes and sins committed for the cause; on the other side, it delegitimizes all opposition. Of their power and violence, there was no excuse. Thus, the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution became stepping stones toward greater liberty, and Charles I, James II, and the Bonnie Prince were rendered sinister men attempting to stop human progress. owr and skcm members scribbled furiously to overturn this historiographical narrative. Understanding also that memorialization was itself historiographical, they drew attention to the statues and sacred sites of the Jacobite cause and opposed those erected in the spirit of the opposition, namely Oliver Cromwell. Disrespect statues and memorials and you tear down the historiography and national self-understanding that erected them. Memory held tremendous political and cultural power. Lastly, the Anglo-American Jacobites help us reflect on current anxiety over Western liberalism, particularly in the United States. In the 1950s, American historian Louis Hartz famously declared that there was a liberal tradition in America and no other. Without the conservative force of a titled aristocracy or national church, the United States had always been liberal and was thus impervious to foreign ideologies like traditional European conservatism or socialism. The appearance of any American conservatism or traditionalism was therefore a detour from mainstream ideas and an oddity without roots in national history. Richard Hofstader did Hartz one better in 1964, declaring American conservatism (then demonstrating itself in the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater) a psychological malformation and “paranoid style” of politics. Both men went far to capture American historiography and delegitimize critiques of liberalism in the United States. Russell Kirk’s 1953 The Conservative Mind, however, laid bare Hartz’s imperceptions and established a rich family tree of AngloAmerican conservatism and traditionalism firmly opposed to liberalism, stretching from Edmund Burke and John Adams to John Henry Newman and John C. Calhoun and to James Fitzjames Stephen, William Hurrell Mallock, Henry Adams, and beyond. The Jacobites, though not part of Kirk’s genealogy (Cram makes a brief appearance), are part of that continuum. Seventy years have passed since Hartz and Kirk, and the debate over American liberalism has again fired up in the twenty-first century. Critics have called into question the workability of liberal governing philosophies with tenuous understandings of the common good, but their observations are not without precedent. They do not occur in a

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vacuum, nor do they make “un-American” observations. There is a long anti-liberal tradition in Anglo-American history with a rich vein of commentary stretching from colonial settlement to today. The Anglo-American Jacobites were a potent traditionalist movement demonstrating, as Vivian described it, “the persistence of loyalty to tradition.” In the United States they sought a reinvigoration of Alexander Hamilton’s vision of the unitary republic, while in the United Kingdom they worked to redeem the empire from the post-1688 Protestant establishment. They were Tory revolutionaries.

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US Approaches to Multilateral Sanctions

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Notes

preface 1 Van Wyck Brooks, New England Indian Summer: 1865–1915 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1940), 432–3. 2 Ibid., 437.

introduction 1 Murray G.H. Pittock, The Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s (London: Routledge, 1993); Murray G.H. Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1991); Douglass Shand-Tucci, “Ralph Adams Cram and Mrs. Gardner: The Movement for a Liturgical Art,” in Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Fenway Court: 1975 (Boston: Trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1976), 28; Brooks, New England Indian Summer, 437; T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 199. 2 Michael D. Clark, The American Discovery of Tradition, 1865–1942 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 116–17; David Weir, Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–1926 (New York: suny Press, 2008), 53; Peter W. Williams, Religion, Art, and Politics: Episcopalianism and American Culture from the Civil War to the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 72. 3 Douglass Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 1881–1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 230; Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Art of

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Notes to pages 5–21

Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 130. 4 New York Times, 24 August 1902. 5 Ralph Adams Cram, My Life in Architecture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), 30; Walter Blackburn Harte, Meditations in Motley: A Bundle of Papers Imbued with the Sobriety of Midnight (Boston: Arena Publishing, 1894), 47, 60.

chapter one 1 Brother Louis of Poissy, Elementary Course of Christian Philosophy (New York: P. O’Shea, 1893), 388. The flower example is taken from Joseph Rickaby, sj, Moral Philosophy or Ethics and Natural Law (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1889), 109–10. 2 St Thomas Aquinas, “On Kingship,” in St Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, ed. and trans. Paul E. Sigmund (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 17; Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, op, Philosophizing in Faith: Essays on the Beginning and End of Wisdom, ed. Matthew K. Minerd (Providence, ri: Cluny Media, 2019), 241–2, 247. 3 Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II.104.5. 4 st II-II.64.7; st II-II.42.2. 5 “Cajetan on the Soul-Body Model of Relation of Spiritual and Temporal Authority,” trans. Gerardus Maiella, The Josias, 30 June 2020, https://thejosias.com/2020/06/30/cajetan-on-the-soul-body-model-of-therelation-of-spiritual-and-temporal-authority/. 6 Francisco Suarez, Selections from Three Works: A Treatise on Laws and God the Lawgiver; A Defence of the Catholic and Apostolic Faith; A Work on the Three Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity, ed. Thomas Pink (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2015), 43, 52. 7 See Thomas Pink’s introduction to Suarez, Selections, xi. Pink draws clear distinctions between Suarez’s and Locke’s conceptions of consent. 8 Suarez, Three Selections, x, 124–5, 127, 145. 9 Ibid., 781, 789. 10 Ibid., 798, 807. 11 Ibid., 809, 812–13. 12 St Robert Bellarmine, On Temporal and Spiritual Authority: On Laymen or Secular People, On the Temporal Power of the Pope. Against William Barclay, On the Primary Duty of the Supreme Pontiff, ed. and trans. Stefania Tutino (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012), 270, 275, 35. 13 “Speech to Parliament of 21 March 1609” and “Speech in Star Chamber

Note to pages 21–34

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

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of 20 June 1616,” in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 181, 214. “Speech to Parliament of 21 March 1609,” 195; The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, in Sommerville, King James VI and I: Political Writings, 75, 72. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7. Lee Ward, The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 40. Ibid., 36. Edwin Curley, introduction to Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 57, xv. Ibid., 76, 78. Ibid., 89; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Harry W. Schneider (New York: Macmillan, 1958), xiii. Charles N.R. McCoy, The Structure of Political Thought: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New Brunswick, nj: Transaction, 2017), 142–4. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 318, 216, 37, 484, 475; Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2013), 227–8. Richard Cox, introduction to Second Treatise on Government, by John Locke, ed. Richard Cox (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1982), xv; C.B. Macpherson, introduction to Second Treatise on Government, by John Locke, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), xi. Ward, Politics of Liberty, 212; John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, ed. Thomas P. Peardon (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1952), xii; McCoy, Structure, 146; Locke, Second Treatise (Cox), 58. Locke, Second Treatise (Cox), 77, 75; McCoy, Structure, 148; Ron Dart, The North American High Tory Tradition (New York: American Anglican Press, 2016), 209. Ward, Politics of Liberty, 264–5, 268. McCoy, Structure, 148.

chapter two 1 R. Duncombe Jewell, “The True Jacobitism: A Survival,” Albemarle Review 2, no. 1 (July 1892): 32. 2 New York Sun, 9 May 1897. 3 William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 31.

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Notes to pages 36–47

4 Bernard M.G. Reardon, ed., Roman Catholic Modernism (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1970), 9; Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, encyclical letter, 1832, Papal Encyclicals Online, http://www.papalencyclicals.net /greg16/g16mirar.htm; Pope BI. Pius IX, Quanta Cura, encyclical letter, 1864, Papal Encyclicals Online, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius09 /p9quanta.htm. 5 Arthur Rhodes, The Power of Rome in the Twentieth Century: The Vatican in the Age of Liberal Democracies, 1870–1922 (New York: F. Watts, 1983), 196. 6 Pope Pius X, Lamentabili Sane, encyclical letter, 1907, Papal Encyclicals Online, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10lamen.htm. 7 Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gegis, encyclical letter, 1907, Papal Encyclicals Online, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10pasce.htm. 8 Ibid. 9 Matthew Roberts, Political Movements in Urban England, 1832–1914 (New York: Macmillan, 2008), 25; Jewell, “True Jacobitism,” 33. 10 Jewell, “True Jacobitism,” 33. 11 Max Beer, Social Struggle and Modern Socialism (London: Leonard Parsons, 1925), 88–9. 12 Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 196. 13 Ibid. 14 Guiney quoted in Lears, No Place of Grace, 127. 15 Lears, No Place of Grace, 5; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor C. O’Brien (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 172–3; Gustave Le Bon, “The Psychology of Socialism,” in Gustave Le Bon: The Man and His Works, ed. Alice Widener (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1979), 109. 16 Lears, No Place of Grace, 17–18. 17 William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of the New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 6; Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 5–6. 18 Milwaukee Journal, 18 June 1898; London Morning Post, 26 November 1887; London Morning Post, 6 December 1887; Daily Telegraph, 16 January 1913; Western Times (Exeter), 27 April 1886; Frank Shovlin, “Jacobitism and the Literary Revival,” in Romantic Ireland: From Tone to Gonne; Fresh Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Ireland, ed. Paddy Lyons, Willy Maley, and John Miller (Newcastle upon Tyne, uk: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 383, 386.

Notes to pages 48–57

149

19 London Times, 10 May 1934; Cornishman (Penzance), 10 May 1934; Ian Fletcher, W.B. Yeats and His Contemporaries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 95–6.

chapter three 1 A Hanovarian Bohemian, “Latter-Day Jacobites,” The Bohemian 1, no. 1 (June 1893): 13; Pall Mall Gazette, 9 November 1893; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 10 March 1893; Samantha Rayne, “Henry Jenner and the Celtic Revival in Cornwall” (PhD diss., University of Exeter, 2012), 158, 160. 2 Fletcher, W.B. Yeats, 84; Guernsey Star, 25 February 1888. 3 Birmingham Daily Post, 4 April 1888; Daily Telegraph, 29 December 1888; Edinburgh Evening News, 29 December 1888; London Daily News, 4 October 1889; Illustrated London News, 6 April 1889; Lancaster Gazette, 10 April 1889; Neil Guthrie, The Material Culture of the Jacobites (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 154–5. 4 Morpeth Herald, 5 January 1889; London Daily News, 4 October 1889; Rayne, “Henry Jenner,” 154; Guthrie, Material Culture, 155; Fletcher, W.B. Yeats, 96; Pittock, Invention of Scotland, 125–6; Anna Pilz, “‘A Bad Master’: Religion, Jacobitism and the Politics of Representation in Lady Gregory’s The White Cockade,” in Irish Women’s Writing, 1878–1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty, ed. Anna Pilz and Whitney Standlee (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 148–9. 5 Royalist, 30 April 1891. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Royalist, 31 October 1892; Royalist, 30 January 1893; Royalist, 30 March 1893. 10 Royalist, 31 October 1892; Royalist, 30 November 1892. 11 William S. Lilly, A Century of Revolution (London: Chapman and Hall, 1889), 34; Royalist, 16 September 1890; Royalist, 16 October 1890. 12 Royalist, 16 November 1890; Royalist, 16 December 1890. 13 Royalist, 30 November 1891. 14 Royalist, 29 February 1892; Royalist, 31 December 1891; Royalist, 30 January 1892. 15 Royalist, 31 December 1891. 16 Royalist, 30 January 1892; Royalist, 29 February 1892. 17 Royalist, 30 April 1892.

150

Notes to pages 58–69

18 Royalist, 30 April 1892; Royalist, 30 September 1892. 19 Royalist, 16 April 1890; Royalist, 16 November 1890. 20 Royalist, 30 December 1892; Marquis de Ruvigny and Cranstoun Metcalfe, “‘Legitimism’ in England,” Nineteenth Century 42 (September 1897): 366; Royalist, 16 May 1890; Royalist, 30 July 1892; Royalist, 31 December 1892. 21 Royalist, 30 January 1893. 22 Royalist, 30 December 1892; Ruvigny and Metcalfe, “Legitimism,” 367. 23 Notes and Queries (London: John Francis, 1892), 489–91. 24 Aberdeen Journal, 5 November 1891; Pittock, Spectrum of Decadence, 98; Cambridge Independent Press, 11 December 1891. 25 Fletcher, W.B. Yeats, 97–8; Murray G.H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 238; London Daily News, 7 February 1893; Marquis de Ruvigny and Raineval, “Morris of Ballybeggan and Castle Morris Co. Kerry,” Genealogical Magazine, June 1903, 59–61; Marquis de Ruvigny and Raineval, Moodie Book: Being an Account of the Families of Melsetter, Muir, Cocklaw, Blairhill, Bryanton, Gilchorn, Pitmuies, Arbeckie, Masterson, etc. (Privately Printed, 1906), 98. Ruvigny’s maternal grandfather, George Moodie, was a Scotsman who moved to Canada in 1880, joining his brother John Douglas Moodie, a North-West Mounted Police officer and later a commander of Canadian troops in the Boer War. 26 Pall Mall Gazette, 2 February 1892. 27 Royalist, 29 February 1892. 28 Bucks Herald, 13 February 1892; Royalist, 29 February 1892; Daily Telegraph, 9 February 1892; Manchester Courier and Lancaster General Advertiser, 9 February 1892. 29 Nottingham Evening Post, 24 February 1892; Royalist, 29 February 1892; Marquis de Ruvigny, “The True Jacobitism,” Albemarle Review 1, no. 4 (April 1892): 121–4. 30 Royalist, 30 March 1892; Bristol Mercury, 6 May 1893; Pittock, Spectrum of Decadence, 98.

chapter four 1 Fletcher, W.B. Yeats, 96–7. 2 Marquis de Ruvigny and Raineval and Cranstoun Metcalfe, eds, The Legitimist Kalendar for the Year of Our Lord 1899 (London: A.D. Innes & Company, 1899); Marquis de Ruvigny and Raineval, The Jacobite Peerage (Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1904), 143–5.

Notes to pages 69–76

151

3 Edinburgh Evening News, 31 July 1895; Pall Mall Gazette, 27 July 1895; New York Sun, 11 April 1897; Washington Sentinel, 29 January 1898. 4 Pittock, Invention of Scotland, 128–9; Daily Mail, 17 April 1899. 5 Pittock, Invention of Scotland, 124; Who’s Who: An Annual Biographical Dictionary (London: A. & C. Black, 1907), 732; Leeds Times, 7 February 1891; Pall Mall Gazette, 30 January 1894; Daily Mail, 3 February 1897; Southampton Herald, 3 February 1894; Fletcher, W.B. Yeats, 103–4, 108. 6 Reynold’s Newspaper, 30 January 1898; Nichola Smith, Revival: The Royal Image and the English People (New York: Routledge, 2001), n.p.; Sunday Times, 31 January 1897. 7 Who’s Who: An Annual Biographical Dictionary (London: A. & C. Black, 1910), n.p.; Pejić Radmila, “Herbert Vivian, a British Traveller in Late Nineteenth-Century Serbia,” Balcanica 44 (2013): 265; London Standard, 27 January 1893; Cheltenham Chronicle, 4 February 1893; Smith, Revival, n.p.; London Morning Post, 20 September 1898. 8 London Standard, 16 September 1898; Pall Mall Gazette, 16 September 1898; London Morning Post, 20 September 1898. 9 Daily Mail, 3 June 1897; Fletcher, W.B. Yeats, 86; Pittock, Invention of Scotland, 122–3; Herbert Vivian, Kings in Waiting (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1933), 77. 10 Pittock, Invention of Scotland, 121, 124. 11 Dundee Evening Telegraph, 19 June 1895; Edinburgh Evening News, 20 June 1895; Dundee Evening Telegraph, 21 June 1895; Western Gazette, 21 June 1895; Stefan Collini, History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 132; Daily Telegraph, 24 August 1899; Dundee Evening Telegraph, 14 November 1899; Daily Mail, 7 September 1899; London Standard, 10 November 1899; London Standard, 15 November 1899; Daily Mail, 22 June 1900; Smith, Revival, n.p. 12 Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 8 February 1899; Nottingham Evening Post, 12 May 1899; Daily Mail, 26 January 1900; Cambridge Independent Press, 25 October 1901; Abbeville Press and Banner, 1 January 1902; Daily Mail, 24 October 1901. 13 Pittock, Invention of Scotland, 125; Bristol Mercury, 2 June 1896; Reynold’s Newspaper, 10 June 1888; Fletcher, W.B. Yeats, 102. With Upward, the Jacobites entered into the genre of the “invasion novel,” a popular strand of British fiction between 1890 and 1914 that reflected anxieties over the invasion of Great Britain by a hostile power, particularly Germany. 14 Royalist, 16 March 1891; Royalist, 30 April 1892; Legitimist Kalendar 1899, 14.

152

Notes to pages 77–87

15 “Despotism, Anarchy, and Corruption in the United States of America,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 149, no. 907 (May 1891): 733, 738; “Civilisation, Social Order, and Morality in the United States of America,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 151, no. 919 (May 1892): 617–18. 16 “Despotism, Anarchy, and Corruption,” 736, 740. 17 “Civilisation, Social Order, and Morality,” 621–2. 18 Royalist, 30 May 1891; Royalist, 30 March 1892. Ruvigny declared that America had “shaken off rightfully the ruler of another government” but that the American Revolution was “due largely to Jacobite sympathy in [the United States].” See New York Sun, 11 April 1897. 19 Washington Sentinel, 29 January 1898; Legitimist Kalendar 1899, 14. 20 Daily Mail, 11 September 1897; Weekly Rocky Mountain News, 30 December 1897; Daily Mail, 17 December 1897. 21 Rayne, “Henry Jenner,” 156–7; Daily Mail, 19 June 1899; Western Times, 20 June 1899; Dover Express, 23 June 1899. 22 Pittock, Invention of Scotland, 128–9; Dundee Evening Telegraph, 26 July 1899; Cameron County Press, 20 April 1900. 23 Edinburgh Evening News, 8 March 1900; Edinburgh Evening News, 16 March 1900. 24 New York Times, 3 May 1901; New York Times, 24 August 1902; Vivian, Kings in Waiting, 6. 25 The Free Lance, 31 January 1901; Pittock, Invention of Scotland, 130; Omaha Daily Bee quoting Indianapolis Press, 17 February 1901; New York Times, 24 August 1902. 26 Ruvigny and Metcalfe, “Legitimism in England,” 367; Ruvigny, “New Jacobitism,” 122; Fletcher, W.B. Yeats, 103.

chapter five 1 Wichita Daily Eagle, 10 June 1892; Pittsburgh Dispatch, 22 June 1892; Derby Daily Telegraph, 22 September 1892; Daily Inter Ocean, 12 June 1892; Chap-Book 1, no. 1 (1 August 1894). 2 Ralph Adams Cram, “The Last of the Squires,” Atlantic Monthly 145 (January 1930): 81–2; Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 317. 3 Cram, Life in Architecture, 58–9, 90–1; Gelett Burgess, The Burgess Nonsense Book: Being a Complete Collection of the Humorous Masterpieces of Gelett Burgess, Esq. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1901), 169–72; ShandTucci, Boston Bohemia, 70, 68–71, 310–13; Weir, Decadent Culture, 53. 4 Cram, Life in Architecture, 13–20, 91–3; Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 77–8, 373–9; Weir, Decadent Culture, 54–5; Jonathan McGregor, “A Queer

Notes to pages 87–96

5

6 7

8

9 10

11 12 13 14

15

16

17 18 19

20

153

Orthodoxy: Monastic Socialism and Celibate Sexuality in Vida Sutton Scudder and Ralph Adams Cram,” Journal of American Studies 52, no. 1 (2018): 65. Ralph Adams Cram, “Nottingham Hunt,” Century Magazine 49, no. 4 (February 1895): 557; Idler 7 (1895): 285; Daily Picayune, 7 January 1896; Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 321. Chap-Book 3 (15 June 1895): 109; Royal Standard, 11 September 1900. Charles Mair, Tecumseh, a Drama and Canadian Poems (Toronto: William Briggs, 1901), 264; “Robt. Timothy Nichol” (Reminiscences by a former pupil, Dr W.W. Francis, Osler Library, McGill University, Montreal), 24 January 1938, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York (mma). William Willoughby Francis to tcs Headmaster Philip Ketchum, 14 February 1938, Letter and Account of Robert Thomas “Timmy” Nichol, Trinity College School Archives, Port Hope, Ontario (tcsa). Ibid.; New York Sun, 12 February 1899. Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, 18 February 1899; New York Sun, 31 January 1896; Royalist, October 1894, 103–7; Royal Standard, 11 September 1900. Catholic Champion, August 1895, 205–6; Catholic Champion, September 1895, 223–4. Catholic Champion, October 1895, 256, 258–9. Catholic Champion, November 1895, 280–1. Fletcher, Yeats, 103; Chap-Book 6 (15 February 1897): 275; New York Times, 12 February 1899; Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, 18 February 1899; Francis to Ketchum, 14 February 1938, tcsa. American Ancestry: Embracing Lineages from the Whole of the United States, vol. 3 (Albany, ny: J. Munsell’s Sons, 1888), 56; Christian Advocate 93, no. 35 (29 August 1918): 1105. Albert Nelson Marquis, ed., Who’s Who in New England (Chicago: A.N. Marquis & Co., 1909), 949; Ronald C. White Jr and C. Howard Hopkins, The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), 70. Cambridge Tribune, 27 July 1895. New York Sun, 9 May 1897; The Owl, 4 June 1886. Birmingham Daily Post, 28 February 1889; Birmingham Daily Post, 25 March 1889; Birmingham Daily Post, 24 June 1889; Birmingham Daily Post, 3 August 1893; Women’s Voice and Public School Champion, 30 November 1895. Cram, My Life in Architecture, 19–20; New York Sun, 9 May 1897; New

154

21 22

23 24 25 26

Notes to pages 96–108

York Times, 31 January 1900; Robin Waterfield, Prophet: The Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1998), 36. Boston Evening Transcript, 6 June 1902; Churchman 85 (21 June 1902): 810. Boston Evening Transcript, 6 June 1902; Boston Evening Transcript, 31 January 1900; Churchman 81 (10 February 1900): 185; Douglass Shand-Tucci, “Ralph Adams Cram and Mrs. Gardner: The Movement for a Liturgical Art,” in Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Fenway Court, 27–30; ShandTucci, Boston Bohemia, 317–18; New York Tribune, 25 December 1901. Philadelphia Record, 30 January 1897; New York Sun, 31 January 1897; Catholic Champion 7, no. 12 (November 1895): 27. Catholic Champion 9, no. 3 (February 1897): 51–2; Literary Digest 14, no. 17 (27 February 1897): 528; Philadelphia Record, 30 January 1897. Catholic Champion 9, no. 3 (February 1897), 52; Philadelphia Record, 30 January 1897. Literary Digest (1897), 528; New York Tribune, 7 February 1897; Philadelphia Record, 1 February 1897; Philadelphia Record, 2 February 1897.

chapter six 1 Boston Evening Transcript, 20 February 1892; Weir, Decadent Culture, 61; Ralph Adams Cram, “Concerning the Restoration of Idealism and the Raising to Honour Once More of the Imagination,” Knight-Errant 1, no. 1 (April 1892): 13; Weir, Decadent Culture, 61. 2 Weir, Decadent Culture, 64–6; Ralph Adams Cram, The Decadent, Being the Gospel of Inaction (Privately printed, 1893), 1–5. 3 Cram, The Decadent, 5, 9, 11. 4 Ibid., 18–23. 5 Ibid., 27, 33–8, 41; Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 317, 361–9. 6 Harte, Meditations in Motley, 83–5, 88–93. 7 New York Times, 12 February 1899; New York Times, 23 December 1898. 8 Session Notes, Order of the White Rose, 1899, Boston Athenaeum Archives, Boston, ma (baa). 9 Ibid.; Order of the White Rose, “To the Companions and Associates of the White Rose in America,” St George’s Day, 1899, baa; Order of the White Rose membership application, 11 April 1899, baa; Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 380. 10 owr, “To the Companions and Associates,” baa. 11 Ibid.

Notes to pages 109–22

155

12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.; The Federalist, ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 362. 14 Cram, “Restoration of Idealism,” 10–11; owr, “To the Companions and Associates,” baa. 15 owr, “To the Companions and Associates,” baa. 16 Abbeville Press and Banner, 15 February 1899; Daily Morning Journal and Courier, 20 July 1899. Although the wreath was sent for the 30 January 1899 celebrations, it was likely organized by Cram and the Boston Jacobites since it took place within days of Father Nichol’s conversion. The Latin motto used by the owr on the coat of arms was taken from a medal issued by Henry, Cardinal of York, on the occasion of the death of his brother, Charles Edward Stuart, in 1788. 17 Royal Standard, 11 September 1900. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Yves Drolet, The Aryan Order of America and the College of Arms of Canada, 1880–1937 (Montreal: self-pub., 2015), 8–9. 25 Ibid., 12–13, 19–22, 38–9. 26 Ibid., 47; St John Daily Sun, 13 August 1892; Portland Oregonian, 3 September 1897. It should be noted that Forsyth was also a Thomas Hobbes afficionado. See his “Does Mistrust Give Weight to Authority? A Criticism of Republicanism,” Canadian Magazine 8 (February 1897): 337–40. 27 Royal Standard, 11 September 1900. 28 Ibid. 29 Drolet, Aryan Order, 34–6, 39. 30 Ralph Adams Cram, Church Building: A Study of the Principles of Architecture in Their Relation to the Church (Boston: Small, Maynard, & Co., 1901), 1–5. 31 Ibid., 8, 11, 43; Ralph Adams Cram, Church Building: A Study of the Principles of Architecture in Their Relation to the Church, 2nd ed. (Boston: Small, Maynard, & Co., 1914), 259, 262–3. 32 New York Times, 13 April 1902; Boston Evening Transcript, 6 June 1902; Washington Star, 11 June 1902.

156

Notes to pages 123–32

chapter seven 1 Daily Mail, 30 January 1903. 2 Ibid.; Wichita Daily Eagle, 27 December 1903; New York Times, 31 January 1904; Dundee Evening Telegraph, 16 April 1909; Washington Herald, 8 March 1911; Dundee Evening Telegraph, 12 February 1912; Daily Telegraph, 31 January 1914; Pittock, Invention of Scotland, 122–3, 128–9. See the websites of the British skcm (http://skcm.org/); the American Region of the skcm (http://www.skcm-usa.org/); and the Royal Stuart Society (http://www.royalstuartsociety.com/). 3 Daily Telegraph, 16 January 1913; London Times, 10 May 1934; Rayne, “Henry Jenner,” 158–67. 4 Aberdeen Journal, 24 August 1917; London Times, 7 October 1921. 5 Radmila, “Herbert Vivian,” 266–81; Herbert Vivian, The Life of the Emperor Charles of Austria (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1932), 250; Vivian, Kings in Waiting, 7, 64–6. 6 Vivian, Kings in Waiting, 12–14, 20, 22, 47, 83. 7 Herbert Vivian, Fascist Italy (London: Andrew Melrose, 1936), 5, 45, 48, 54–5. 8 Ibid., 6, 23–4, 59, 62, 91–2, 132–6, 277, 280. 9 Ibid., 277, 281. 10 Audrey Cunningham, The Loyal Clans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 8–9, 11. 11 London Standard, 27 April 1892; Belfast News-Letter, 13 May 1892; Reynolds Newspaper, 15 May 1892. 12 Daily Mail, 24 March 1934; Daily Telegraph, 24 March 1934; Daily Telegraph, 16 March 1938; London Times, 12 July 1949. 13 Boston Daily Advertiser, 4 December 1899; Cambridge Tribune, 19 May 1900. 14 Gloucester Citizen, 19 April 1911; Tamworth Herald, 14 February 1914; Daily Mail, 19 September 1925; Daily Telegraph, 19 September 1925; Gloucester Citizen, 19 September 1925. 15 New York Times, 24 August 1931; London Times, 28 August 1931; Michael Quinlin, “Boston and the Irish Rising,” Irish America Magazine, February– March 2016, http://irishamerica.com/2016/02/boston-and-the-irishrising. 16 National Advocate 53, no. 3 (March 1918): 36; Woman Patriot, 25 January 1919; London Times, 28 August 1931. 17 Ralph Adams Cram, The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain (New York: Churchman, 1905), 283–4; Ralph Adams Cram, The Gothic Quest (New

Notes to pages 132–41

18 19

20 21 22 23

24

157

York: Baker and Taylor, 1907), 18, 28–9, 57–60, 63; Ralph Adams Cram, Walled Towns (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1919), 6–11, 39–40. Ralph Adams Cram, The Nemesis of Mediocrity (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1917), 8, 21–2. Ralph Adams Cram, The End of Democracy (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1937), 148–56, 187; Michael J. Connolly, “Jonathan Jackson’s Thoughts: A High Federalist Critique of the Philadelphia Constitution,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 41, no. 1 (2013): 68–9; Douglass Shand-Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests: Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumenical (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 324. Cram, Life in Architecture, 19, 91–3; Ralph Adams Cram, “Invitation to Monarchy,” American Mercury (April 1936): 479–80, 482. Francis to Ketchum, 14 February 1938, tcs. H.E. Winlock to Metropolitan Museum of Art Executive Committee, 20 February 1933, mma. Arthur Graham Carey, “Arthur J. Penty: 1875–1937,” American Review, March 1937, 550–8; Distributist League of New England [Arthur Graham Carey], A Declaration of Independents (Scotch Plains, nj: Sowers Press, 1937); Richard Aleman, “The Distributist League of New England?,” Distributist Review, 7 March 2022, http://distributistreview.com/distributist-league-new-england. On Bethune’s ties to Carey and Benson, see Ade Bethune Collection, Library and Archives, St Catherine University, St Paul, mn, accessed 29 April 2022, http://library.stkate.edu/archives/bethune. J.H. Benson to Miss Grace M. Graydon, 23 December 1937, mma.

conclusion: 1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 245–7. 2 Harry Elmer Barnes, “Social Reform Programs and Movements,” in Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 25 (New York, 1920), 174. 3 Cram, Church Building (1901), 13.

158

Notes to pages 000–000

Index

159

Index

Adams, Henry, 45, 142 Adams, John, 39, 85, 116, 133, 142 American Protective Association, 87 American Revolution (1776), 78, 79, 100, 105 Anglo-Catholicism, 35; Boston as centre of, 95–7 Aquinas, St Thomas, 20, 21, 54, 93; Ralph Adams Cram’s admiration of, 131, 133; theology and politics of, 10–14 aristocracy: opposed to democracy, 38–9; superiority of, 60–1 Ashburnham, Bertram (Earl of Ashburnham), 31, 79, 80, 140; life after Jacobitism, 124; as organizer of Exhibition of the Royal House of Stuart, 50–1; support for nationalist and Legitimist movements, 46–7 Bellamy, Edward, 44 Bellarmine, St Robert, 54, 57, 93; opposition to, 20–1, 21–2, 26; theology and politics of, 19–20

Belloc, Hilaire, 121, 136 Benson, John Howard: friendship with Robert Thomas Nichol, 136–8 Blake, Ira, 85, 102, 121, 134 Boer War, 76, 115, 150n25; Jacobite opposition to, 80–1 Bradley, George Granville, 64 Brooks, Phillips, 94 Brown, Thomas McKee, 106 Bullard, Fred, 87 Burgess, Gelett, 86 Burke, Edmund, 45, 142 Cajetan, Thomas: theology and politics of, 15–16 capitalism, 104, 118, 121, 133; impact on Great Britain, 41–2; impact on United States, 42–4 Carey, Arthur Graham: friendship with Robert Thomas Nichol, 136–7 Carlism, 46, 76, 92; Jacobite support of, 79–80 Carlos, Duke of Madrid, viii, 47, 88, 124; on Edward VII succeeding

160

Index

Queen Victoria, 82; Nichol’s support of, 92; Rodway’s support of, 95–6 Carlyle, Thomas, 73, 141 Charles I, King of Great Britain: American Jacobite memorialization of, 87, 91, 94, 97, 111; British Jacobite memorialization of, 70–1; in Cram’s Decadent, 103, 105; and Cram’s neo-Gothicism, 120–1; and Sir Robert Filmer, 21; and Thomas Hobbes, 23, 26; and the Philadelphia portrait controversy, 98–100 Charles II, King of Great Britain, 53, 63, 85, 99 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 121, 136, 138 Church of the Advent (Boston): and Father Frisby, 96–8, 122; and Father Van Allen, 130–1 Church of the Carpenter (Boston), 86–7 Church of the Evangelists (Philadelphia), 98, 100 Church of the Transfiguration (New York), 91 Coleman, Leighton, 98, 99 Cram, Ralph Adams, 141, 142; background of, 84–7; and Boston as a Jacobite centre, 95–6; and the Decadent, 102–5; and Father Frisby, 97–8; on idealism, 101–2; life after Jacobitism, 131–5; and neo-Gothicism, 120–1; as owr prior, 105–11; and the Royal Standard, 111–16, 119 Cromwell, Oliver: Cram’s condemnation of, 115; Jacobite opposi-

tion to, 73–5; Van Allen’s condemnation of, 94 Culloden, Battle of, 51, 69, 70, 98, 123 Cunningham, Audrey: comparison of King James II and Mussolini, 127–8 Darwin, Charles, 33, 34, 45, 78 Day, Dorothy, 137 Day, Fred Holland, 86, 95 democracy: Aquinas criticism of, 12–13; Cram’s criticisms of, 102–5, 109–10, 112–15, 121, 132–4; Forsyth’s criticisms of, 118–19; Jacobite condemnation of, 58–60; and the nineteenth century, 38–40; Ruvigny’s criticisms of, 65–6 Dickens, Charles, 41 Disraeli, Benjamin, 35 Duke of Newcastle (Henry PelhamClinton), 84, 122 Edward VII, King of Great Britain, 10, 41, 82, 83, 123 equality. See aristocracy; democracy Erskine, Stuart, 61 Evans, Sebastian, 51; admiration of Thomas Hobbes, 55–8 Exhibition of the Royal House of Stuart (1889), 50–1 Ferguson, Adam, 33 Fillingham, Robert Charles, 61–2 Filmer, Sir Robert: and divine right theory, 21–3; Jacobite observations on, 57–8, 93 Fleuss, Oswald, 98

Index

Forsyth, Frederic Gregory: Royal Standard article, 116–19 Francis, William Willoughby, 90, 93, 135 Fraser, Gilbert Baird, 61 French Revolution (1789), 30, 60, 92, 104, 112 Frisby, William Barroll: and Boston Jacobitism, 96–8; death of, 121–2 Frizell, Arthur Bowes, 107 Furse, Charles Wellington, 64 Gardner, Isabella Stuart, 107, 129, 135; and Ralph Adams Cram, 97–8 Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald, 12–13 George, Henry, 44 Gregory XVI, Pope, 36 Greville-Nugent, Ermengarda, 70, 88; life after Jacobitism, 128–9 Guiney, Imogene Louise, 45, 97 Hall, Arthur Crawshay Alliston, 86, 96 Hallowell, George H., 86 Hamilton, Alexander, 39, 89; Ralph Adams Cram’s admiration of, 109–10, 119, 132, 134 Harte, Walter Blackburn, 101, 105 Hartz, Louis, 142 Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orleans, 32 Hitler, Adolf: Herbert Vivian’s criticism of, 125–6 Hobbes, Thomas: contrast with Locke, 28, 29, 30; Forsyth’s admiration of, 155n26; Jacobite admiration of, 55–7; philosophy of, 23–6

161

Hofstadter, Richard, 142 Hovey, Richard, 86 industrialization. See capitalism Jackson, Andrew, 39 James, William, 34 James I, King of Great Britain: and divine right theory, 21–3 James II, King of Great Britain: Jacobite memorialization of, 71–2; and John Locke, 26–8 Jefferson, Thomas: American Jacobites’ dislike of, 109, 112, 114 Jenner, Henry: background of, 47–8; and Carlism, 79–80; and the Exhibition of the Royal House of Stuart, 50–1; life after Jacobitism, 124; as owr chancellor, 66–7 Jewell, R. Duncombe, 38, 39, 41 Johnson, Lionel, 51 Joyce, James, 47 Keble, John, 35, 98 Kirk, Russell, 142 Kruger, Paul, 80 Lang, Andrew, 51 Le Bon, Gustave, 45 Legitimism: and the Legitimist Kalendar, 68–9; meaning of, 52–4; and nationalism, 46–7; and Robert Thomas Nichol, 92–3 Legitimist Jacobite League (ljl): founding of, 62–3; conflict with the owr, 65–7 Legitimist Kalendar: ceasing of pub-

162

Index

lication, 123–4; publication of, 68–9 liberalism: Cram’s opposition to, 96, 108–9, 133; and Thomas Hobbes, 25–6; and John Locke, 29–30; Roman Catholic opposition to, 36–8. See also democracy liberty: Aquinas on, 11–12; Cram’s critiques of, 104, 115, 133; Filmer on, 22–3; Locke on, 28–9 Lilly, William Samuel: debate over meaning of obedience, 54–5 Lloyd, William Demarest, 44 Locke, John: philosophy of, 26–30 Louis XIV, King of France, 27 Ludwig III, King of Bavaria, 32, 125 Maistre, Joseph de, 52 Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward: and Mass for Charles Edward Stuart, 49–50 Meteyard, Thomas Buford, 107 monarchy. See democracy Maria Theresa, Queen of Bavaria, 72, 75, 88, 93, 100; Jacobite letters and visits to, 96, 124, 125; and Queen Victoria’s death, 81–2; and the Royal Standard, 115–16 Marx, Karl, 41, 140 Mary, Queen of Scots, 64, 65, 97, 107, 123 Mary II, Queen of Great Britain, 9, 27, 61, 141 Massue, Melville Henry (Marquis de Ruvigny): and American Jacobites, 84, 105; background of, 62–3; and the Legitimist Kalendar, 68–9; life after Jacobitism, 124–5; and the owr, 65–6; and the

Westminster Cathedral controversy, 64–5 Mathers, McGregor, 51 Mellor, Helen Blanche, 73, 74 Mellor, W. Clifford, 73 modernism: Cram’s criticism of, 120–1; Roman Catholic opposition to, 36–8 Morris, William, 45, 104, 131 Mussolini, Benito, 131, 140; and Herbert Vivian, 126–8 Napier, Theodore, 82, 123; opposition to Boer War, 80–1; and Queen Victoria, 69–70 nationalism, 89; Forsyth and Canadian nationalism, 117–19; Jacobite support for, 46–8 Newman, John Henry, 35, 131, 135, 142 Nichol, Robert Thomas: on authority and obedience, 92–3; background of, 89–92; leaving the priesthood, 105–6; life after Jacobitism, 135–8; and the Philadelphia controversy, 98–100 Norton, Charles Eliot, 45 Order of the White Rose (owr): activities in Boston, 95–6; conflict with Legitimist Jacobite League, 65–7; Cram as owr Prior; 105–11; decline of 123–4, 129; early years of, 49–50; and the Exhibition of the Royal House of Stuart, 50–1; founding in the United States, 88–9; founding of, 31–2; and the Royal Standard, 111–12; and the West-

Index

minster Cathedral controversy, 64–5 O’Sullivan, John L., 69 Paley, William, 33 passive obedience, 54, 140; Robert Thomas Nichol on, 92–3 Penty, Arthur Joseph, 136 Perry, Wallace Stevens, 98, 99, 100 Pewter Mugs, 101; activities of, 85–6 Philadelphia Controversy of 1897, 98–100 Pius IX, Pope, 36, 55 Pius X, Pope: as anti-modernist, 36–8 Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, 35 Pusey, Edward, 35 Randall, Thomas Henry, 86 Reid, Thomas, 33 Ritualism, 35; and Robert Thomas Nichol, 90–1 Rodway, Alfred John, 106, 111; background of, 95–6; life after Jacobitism, 129–30 Roman Catholicism: and anti-modernism, 36–8; Jacobite conversions to, 106, 124, 140 Roosevelt, Theodore, 40, 76 Rosebery, Lord (Archibald Primrose), 74 Royalist: ceasing of publication, 123–4; commentary on contemporary politics, 58–61; commentary on Hobbes and Filmer, 55–8; and the Jacobite worldview, 51–5

163

Royal Standard: published by American owr, 111–20 Royal Stuart Society, 124 Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria, 32, 49, 95, 124, 126; visit to London for Queen Victoria’s jubilee, 72–3 Ruskin, John, 44, 131, 141 Salisbury, Lord (Robert GascoyneCecil), 74 Savage, Philip Henry, 86 Seymour, George F., 100 socialism: Cram and, 86–7, 103, 121; Jacobites and Christian Socialism, 86–7; Jacobites and “feudal socialism,” 41–2, 140 Society of King Charles the Martyr (skcm), 124, 128, 129; founding in the United Kingdom, 70–1; founding in the United States, 88–9 Southey, Robert, 41 Spanish-American War: Jacobite reaction to, 79–80 Stickney, Gustave, 45 St Margaret Pattens Church (London), 70 St Mary the Virgin Church (New York), 91, 95, 98, 106 Stuart, Charles Edward, 32, 49, 50, 69, 116 Stuart, Henry Benedict, 32, 50, 155n16 Stuart, James Francis Edward, 32, 69, 73 Suarez, Francisco, 54, 93; opposition to, 20, 21, 22, 26; theology and politics of, 16–19

164

Upward, Allen, 75 Van Allen, William Harman: background of, 93–4; life after Jacobitism, 130–1 Vaughan, Herbert Alfred Henry, 135, 136 Victoria, Queen of Great Britain: death of, 81–3; as de facto queen, 32, 69, 70 Visionists, 86, 107, 134 Vivian, Herbert: and King James II

Index

statue, 71–2; life after Jacobitism, 125–8 Washington, George, 39, 76, 89, 116 Waugh, Evelyn, 124 Westminster Cathedral Controversy of 1892, 64–6 Whistler, James McNeil, 51 William III, King of Great Britain, 27, 61, 141 Wordsworth, William 41 Yeats, William Butler, 47