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A Patriot for Whom? The Afterlives of Bolingbroke's Patriot King

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

David Armitage
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Extract

The transformation of patriotism into nationalism has become one of the accepted grand narratives of eighteenth-century British history. From its first appearance in English in the 1720s, “patriotism” as a political slogan expressed devotion to the common good of the patria and hostility to sectional interests and became a staple of oppositional politics. Though it was attacked by ministerialist writers, it was a liability only for those like the elder Pitt, whose attachment to patriotism when in opposition was not matched by his behavior when in government. However, the Wilkesite agitations and the debate over the American War decisively tainted patriotism with the whiff of factious reformism, and it was in just this context, in 1775, that Dr. Samuel Johnson famously redefined patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” In the following half century, both radicals and loyalists fought over the appropriation of patriotism: the radicals to rescue it from the contempt into which it had fallen in the 1770s, the loyalists and the government to harness its potent discourse of national duty for the cause of monarchical revivalism and aggressive anti-Gallicanism. It is now generally agreed that the conservatives won, as the oppositional language of the early and mid-eighteenth century was thereby transformed into “an officially constructed patriotism which stressed attachment to the monarchy, the importance of empire, the value of military and naval achievement, and the desirability of strong, stable government by a virtuous, able and authentically British elite.”

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Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , October 1997 , pp. 397 - 418
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1997

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