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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Milton's work and the persona of Milton as constructed by poets, critics, and scholars throughout the generations have been endlessly--and variously--appropriated. Milton has been cited as a protoromantic, protoliberal, and protofascist; his works have been identified with almost every conceivable theological heresy, as well as varieties of orthodox Anglican theology. (1) Miltonic texts themselves may accommodate the phenomenon of what Thomas Corns has described as the "multiplicity of Miltons" because of what Corns himself characterizes as the inherent "plurality" (or perhaps complexity) of Miltonic ideologies. (2) This multiplicity notwithstanding, scholars have as yet to elaborate a set of unexpected, if not strange, intellectual, and cultural, affinities--those between Milton and the Jacobites. To be sure, the history of Jacobitism in England is long and complex; the current essay focuses on a specific moment in the life of Jacobitism in England, the Occasional Conformity Crisis of 1702-1704, and the role of Milton in the polemic which surrounded that crisis. Within that controversy, Jacobites may not have engaged with Paradise Lost with the same scrupulous care as Richard Bentley later would in 1732 with his new edition of the poem. (3) With Bentley's 1732 edition of the epic as a reference point, Jacobite appropriations of Milton appear schematic--if not crude. Yet Jacobites, like Bentley, would inflect Milton's epic for their own polemical purposes. Bentley would lend all of his authority to a version of the poem which would serve the interests of latitudinarian orthodoxy. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, Jacobites turned to Milton--specifically the trope of "warring angels" and the landscape of hell of Paradise Lost--as a means of furthering their own cause. Jacobite engagements with Milton's text were hardly refined, but the trope of warring angels which informed Milton's own poem nonetheless lent energy to High Church polemic during the period of the crisis over occasional conformity.
On a merely technical level, the Bill against Occasional Conformity, as Geoffrey Holmes has explained, was designed as a means to prevent what had become a common practice among dissenting laymen in their attempts to attain civic office. By simply taking the sacrament in an Anglican Church once during the twelve-month period before elections (and receiving a letter from the local vicar attesting to that fact), impediments to public service were thereby removed. (4) Occasional conformity, however, was not simply perceived as a technical loophole. For dissenters and their "moderate" allies--avatars of the newly emergent latitudinarian orthodoxy--the practice (which they persistently defended throughout the crisis over the Bill) became a means not only for claiming political legitimacy for themselves, but for the political sensibility and worldview which they were actively promulgating. (5) For Jacobites and High Churchmen, the practice of occasional conformity was rather, as Holmes explains, "an abominable hypocrisy." (6) Such an appellation, however, not only served to reflect Jacobite and High Church disdain for the individuals who embraced the practice, but also for the cultural sensibility it was purported to represent. Jacobites, that is to say, saw in the ostensible "hypocrisy" of the particular practice of occasional conformity a symbolic manifestation of the more general values of what they would call the culture of dissent.
Jacobites themselves, after so many years in the political wilderness under William, saw finally, with the ascendancy of Queen Anne, the opportunity of not only re-establishing the Stuart Monarchy (she was, after all, the granddaughter of Charles I), but of re-establishing the monarchy on Stuart principles. While Jacobites were intent upon reinvoking the worldview which the Stuart line--and especially the "Blessed Martyr Charles"--had come to represent, the practice of occasional conformity was seen as undermining the very principles of "Old England." Jacobites thus were intent on re-establishing, to paraphrase Peter Laslett, the world which had been lost, while moderates and dissenters, by their own lights, were firming the ground for an emergent modern liberal democracy. (7) The controversy surrounding the Bill Against Occasional Conformity became one of the polemical battlegrounds in which competing visions of Britain's future would contend.
Reinvoking the cultural and political landscape of an earlier Stuart culture meant, for Jacobites, reasserting the hierarchies which had been so cataclysmically undermined with the execution of Charles I. The proponents of latitudinarian culture advocated principles of political moderation, and argued for what we might call, in Jurgen Habermas's register, the rational or neutral public sphere. (8) Jacobites, by contrast, from the 1690s through the first decade of the next century, were eager to show continuities between the culture of contemporary dissent and the culture of the regicides. (9) While moderates claimed to occupy a kind of rational space in the ostensibly neutral public sphere, a High Church figure such as Mary Astell would argue that such supposedly moderate political persona masked very particular ideological commitments and affiliations-which all claimed their origins in the 1640s. (10) To be sure, in some sense, Astell was not a typical Jacobite; her radical attitudes toward gender marked her off from those contemporaries with whom she may have shared a vision of politics. (11) Yet the historiographical impulses which informed her work--especially her representation of the 1640s--evidence a characteristic Jacobite stance. Against Whig and latitudinarian attempts to deny the genealogical roots of contemporary moderation, Astell would persistently elicit the parallels between dissenting doctrines and practices and those of the 1640s. In her A Fair Way with the Dissenters, for example, a response to Daniel Defoe's Short Ways with the Dissenters (both published in the early part of 1704), Astell turned to those whom she called Defoe's "great Forefathers" of the 1640s, as a means of imputing the practices of contemporary dissent. The year 1641 was "never to be forgotten," she would write, because the "great Advocates for what they term Moderation," will "not suffer us to forget it, since they repeat its Methods every day." While, as Patricia Springborg has suggested, the presence of Charles I is registered on almost every page of Astell's political tracts, so are the writings of various "regicides"--including Baxter, Coleman, and, of course, Milton himself. (12) In A Fair Way, Astell would make the parallel explicit, observing that just as the 1640s "had their Pryns, Burtons, and Bastwicks," so "we have our Tutchins, Stevens and Defoes." (13) To be sure, Astell's historiographical observations were not so much designed as a means of constructing the past; they were the means rather of reinvoking the political models of the 1640s in order to diagnose, and then reject, the practices of contemporary dissent.
The energies employed by Astell and other High Church figures to link contemporary dissent with the 1640s point to a strange historiographical paradox: while revisionist historians of the last generation (J. C. D. Clark and J.G.A. Pocock the most prominent among them) had sought to curb the excesses of liberal (and indeed Marxist) historiographies which had asserted narrative continuities between different phases in a "progressive" English history, it was sometimes actually Jacobites, and not Whigs, who would assert most strenuously the connection between the 1640s and the 1690s and early 1700s. Some of the most persistent and earliest advocates of what Herbert Butterfield would call the "Whig Interpretation of history" were the High Church Tory set of the beginning of the eighteenth century. (14) Indeed, moderates and dissenters themselves would go to great lengths to deny historical continuities, and to argue for a public sphere based upon the newly created latitudinarian principles of toleration. It would be rather moderates--that is, whigs--who would emphatically deny the continuity between the 1640s and contemporary history. In his Moderation Still a Virtue, for example, James Owen, one of the genuine apologists for moderation, would lament how Jacobites continually "harangue us" with their "tedious Narratives of the late Civil Wars," imputing all contemporary ills to "the present Dissenters." Owen would assert the radical discontinuity...
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