Thread by @GrayConnolly

I owe @yhazony & others an Edmund Burke explainer/thread based on this good and provocative piece in the American Affairs journal here & my continued & obviously reasonable suspicion of anyone who is a Whig & not a Tory, such as Burke himself:

americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/americ…

As the article points out, Burke had, since 1766, ie ~10 years before the Americans rebel, considered that distance alone would see the Americans want some element of self government. This, though, they did have, at least as much as in other comparable empires of that time.

Burke did take the view that the Americans rebelled to keep what they "had under the English constitution". However, what British subjects did have under that constitution was obligations to the King, including paying taxes, and few in 1776 had any direct role in the government.

This Whiggish game is to some degree given away by the author saying that James II, a century earlier, had tried to destroy the "traditional English constitution", when, in reality, the Stuarts were its last protectors, esp as no British realm had ever had an elective monarchy.

The crux of 18thC battles between Whigs & Tories (which haunt down to this day) is that Legitimist battle over the British Crown. Who wears the Crown? Who determines who wears the Crown? By what rights does Parliament claim its own supremacy? Burke never answers this (& cannot)

The reality is that in the British Isles, the Reformation cuts a swathe through what is right & good. An ambitious King (in Henry VIII) & a Parliament loaded to its gunwhales with spivs & apparatchiks make war on the Church (defender of the poor) & then turn on each other.

By the time of the Stuarts arrival in England (noting the martyrdom of James' mother, Mary Queen of Scots), the Parliament, like a cancer, is turning on the Monarchy. There is nothing "ancient" & British here except the Scots saving the grasping English from the Welsh Tudors.

So what Burke means by a "traditional English constitution" makes no sense when only recently the British Isles had seen the Monarchy try to protect its legitimate prerogatives against a Parliament loaded up with the descendants of those who had pillaged the (true) Church.

Burke never discusses any of this. Like a true Whig, everything happened yesterday, nothing before. It is true that Burke gets the French Revolution right & that is to his credit. It is just that he has no similar understanding of his own country - or he is too scared to say this

The really interesting story, untold - & yes I would say this - is how the Scots kept the British project going. James II was the first King to really speak of a united British Isles where loyalty to a common British Crown meant confessional & other disputes were put to one side

However, so intolerant was the Protestant nature of Burkes 'traditional English constitution' that the Catholic James II was usurped in 1688 by, of all people, a Dutchman, William of Orange (supported by, of all people, the Papacy!). The Parliament then changed the succession.

So in other words, the settlement of 1688 & 1701 that Burke claimed to defend was nothing remotely ancient (where olde British succession was by legitimate descent & the realm was the monarch's) but modern (where a grifting Parliament 'on the make' would choose its Monarch).

The genius of the British settlement is to put things beyond politics - an hereditary Crown beyond any Parliament's capacity to alter, Courts that did justice without fear or favour. The very modern Parliament that Burke deceptively championed as old did away with all that.

TL:DR

"Lucifer was the first Whig" ~ Dr Johnson