One may make a double-take upon seeing 1880–1910 in the title of this book. Scholars of late-Victorian Britain, however, are probably familiar with the renaissance of a Jacobite movement through the foundation of the Order of the White Rose (OWR) by Burham Ashburnham, 5th earl of Ashburnham, and the noted Cornish antiquarian, Henry Jenner, in 1886. The OWR sought to revive the direct Stuart line removed from the throne in 1688. Those who have heard of the OWR, and its offshoots, often scorn these latter-day Jacobites as a group of reactionaries, unable to cope with the growth of a liberal, and increasingly democratic, Britain.
Michael J. Connolly seeks to counter this easy dismissal and give the latter-day Jacobites, eccentric though they may have been, their due. He begins by highlighting their serious intellectual roots. They found solace, and a prescription for change, in the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Britain's decline, as they saw it, came from the overthrow of God's law of divine right to rule, epitomised in the Parliamentarians’ regicide of Charles i and in the Glorious Revolution. Thus, their public actions focused on remembering and commemorating the ‘legitimate’ Stuart monarchs. Less publicly, the Jacobites acknowledged Maria Theresa of Bavaria as the true monarch rather than the Hanoverian Queen Victoria. Challenging Victoria's reign was a very brave stance in the 1880s and 1890s. Despite their small numbers, these latter-day Jacobites, especially the more radical wing, the Legitimist Jacobite League (LJL), seemed something of a threat to the liberal order. The Church of England and the capital's political authorities took them seriously, attempting to stop them commemorating their heroes in churches and at public statues. In February 1892, for example, London police stopped the Jacobites laying a wreath at the statue of Charles i in Charing Cross. An attempt to lay a similar wreath at Mary, Queen of Scots’ tomb in Westminster Abbey led to a very public dispute with the abbey's canon and his vergers at the gate of the royal chapel.
These direct-action activities earned publicity, but usually of the negative kind. The OWR condemned the LJL for their extremism and sought instead to provide what Connolly rightly considers a coherent critique of the ills of industrial Britain through their publications. Queen Victoria's death in 1901 offered an opportunity to achieve some of their aims as her successor, her son Edward, the Prince of Wales, was not very popular. Their attempts to label him a ‘usurper’, however, failed to catch on. The government none the less took revenge on the Jacobites, banning any decoration of King Charles's statue the following year.
Though unsuccessful in Britain, the Jacobite cause did find some traction overseas, especially in Spain, where a Carlist legitimist cause for the throne there had serious and widespread support. Jacobitism also spread to the United States. This expansion into the democratic republican of America needs some explanation, and Connolly does a good job of analysing it. The movement ironically began in New England, the home of Cromwellian Puritans, rather than in the more ‘cavalier’ parts of the country further south (though there was some interest in Virginia). The reason it began in New England was because of one man, Ralph Adams Cram. Cram's ancestors had first come America in the 1630s and were among Massachusetts's first families. A famous architect, Cram found much to admire in the conservative Federalist heritage of his New England home. An avowed admirer of the arch ‘High Federalist’, Alexander Hamilton, he sought to revive the Hamilitonian critique of democracy, a political system which in 1890s America seemed to consist mostly of personal political patronage and urban machine corruption. Cram and others like him found some inspiration in the British Jacobite movement and established their own American OWR in 1896. They displayed the usual trappings of commemoration of the Stuart monarchs, mostly through the Episcopal Church, but also put forward a practical Federalist programme for government. Though, like their British counterparts, their actual political influence remained minimal, they did have some cultural impact among High-Church Episcopalians and in the field of architecture. Cram merged his profession with his politics becoming the leading exponent of Gothic architecture for American churches and college campuses and his legacy can be seen in prominent buildings across the United States from New York City to Texas.
World War I finished the latter-day Jacobite movement, as all sought to rally around the king in Britain and the president in America in the face of unprecedented military conflict. (The fact that the new legitimist Stuart heir to the British throne, Maria Theresa's son, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, led a German army to the front did not help either.) Connolly concludes, though, that despite failure, the ‘Anglo-American Jacobites were a potent traditionalist movement’ and were ‘Tory revolutionaries’ (p. 143). This reviewer is not sure how potent or revolutionary they were. They really had no political impact, and, after their demise, they dispersed in various political directions from crypto-Fascism to supporting Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. None the less, this well-written and well-researched book makes a strong case that they were not just a preposterous historical footnote. Connolly clearly shows that, beyond the pro-Stuart antics, they were serious critics of the liberal hegemony and their critique had resonance in religious and cultural terms. In the current crisis of liberalism, their ideas, in spite of their elitism, might again resonate among the increasingly popular integralist/Christian nationalist versions of Anglo-American conservatism.
