When the restoration of a real monarchy is mentioned in the Neo-Tory articles of the 1930s, it is usually with the addition that one must travel far back in English history to find such a thing. The Revolution becomes a decisive watershed in this interpretation of English history. It divides an idealized Middle Ages and Merry England from the history of the 18th and 19th centuries, seen as a period of decay for national values and institutions. In his book The Four Georges: A Revaluation of the Period from 1714–1830, Petrie endeavoured to present the aftermath of the Revolution as a gradual usurpation of power and property by an early capitalist liberal oligarchy.83 According to Petrie, it was because of the concentration of property and power in the hands of the few that won such popular support among the poor for the attempts at restoration of the Stuarts, who had been usurped in the Revolution. ‘It was becoming impossible for the poor to obtain justice at all when they came into conflict with those who governed the country, and this explains why Jacobitism drew so much of its strength from what are now called the working classes.’84
Charles Petrie’s entire historical oeuvre revolved around a reinterpretation of the Revolution of 1688–9. He believed that the Revolution had not been a spontaneous movement of freedom in the name of the people, but rather ‘the triumph of a small and unscrupulous minority working entirely in its own interests, which were in conflict with those of the mass of the English people’.85 The Revolution had enabled liberal individualism to destroy the unity of the nation once and for all, and Petrie claimed that the inevitable consequences – materialism, industrialization and finally socialism – were the decisive catalysts for the downfall of the country. Lymington agreed that the Revolution was the point in time ‘when the Whigs inaugurated the era of individualism which flowered into the Industrial Revolution and ultimately into a universal franchise that now seeks to mitigate the organic ills of industry by the opiates of Socialism’.86 It is claimed that the defeat of the Crown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 pushed through the dominance of the material over the authoritarian and enabled the beginning of a bourgeois class rule which, assisted by a progressive-thinking liberalism, disempowered not only the monarchy and the landed gentry but destroyed the whole concept of the state as superior authority. For the Neo-Tories, the direct political expression of this development was the extension of the voting franchise in the 19th century; this meant that national decline was no longer driven solely by the liberal oligarchy but additionally by a newly empowered electorate. William Sanderson summed it up thus: ‘In 1832 the first extension of the franchise to irresponsible individuals without status, tradition or patriotic purpose was carried through, in spite of the resistance of an equally irresponsible oligarchy; and henceforth Parliament became a heterogeneous mass of individuals without part or lot in the body politic and a reflector of ignorant, unpatriotic, and irresponsible opinions.’
... The historians Bryant and Petrie shared their radical anti-Whig interpretation of history with writers such as Lymington, Sanderson and Ludovici, and with those Neo-Tories like Jerrold who stood for the tradition of political Catholicism represented by Belloc and Chesterton and who interpreted the history of Protestantism as a liberal materialist decline. The obvious paradox within this position, that Great Britain had achieved its status as a world power in the 19th century, under largely Liberal rule – was avoided by Neo-Tory dialectic, according to which Britain’s imperial growth was an expression of the overflowing energy of the Anglo-Saxon race and the original English urge for adventure. Liberalism, they claimed, had turned this energy to their uses but beyond simple materialism, had forgotten their obligation to consciously design a form of leadership.89 Liberalism thus seen, with its indifference towards tradition, race and religion, was the most decisive danger to the unity of the Empire. .....
According to Charles Petrie it had been Charles II’s actual goal to remove the inherited monarchy from political influence and to raise it above party interest to become the true leader of the nation; and if he had achieved it, the power wielded by the wealthy, who also crafted laws to their own benefit in Parliament, would have been limited to its previous influence.101 In Arthur Bryant’s biography from 1931, Charles II also appears as a martyr who made one last attempt to return the nation to the one true state of affairs.102 By contrast, the Whigs appeared to Bryant to be national traitors and the opportunist representatives of special interests. The historian Hearnshaw wrote in a very sympathetic review that while to Bryant Charles II seemed almost to be a martyr or saint, the meanness and treacherousness of the leaders of the Whig Party were portrayed with outstanding accuracy: ‘Their unreasonableness, their violence, their unscrupulousness, their remorseless vindictiveness deprive them of our sympathy even in the hour of disaster and death.’
-- Chapter 3: Counter-narratives of History: the Fight for Interpretation in Neo-Tories: the Revolt of British Conservatives against Democracy & Political Modernity (1929 - 1939), Bernhard Dietz
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.
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.
-- Introduction: Jacobitism in the Age of Victoria in Jacobitism in Britain & the United States, 1880 - 1910 by Michael J. Connolly
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