Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 English Catholics and the Glorious Revolution of 1688
- 2 The making of the Catholic gentry in England and in exile
- 3 Conscience, politics and the exiled court: the creation of the Catholic Jacobite manifesto 1689–1718
- 4 Catholic politics in England 1688–1745
- 5 Unity, heresy and disillusionment: Christendom, Rome and the Catholic Jacobites
- 6 The English Catholic clergy and the creation of a Jacobite Church
- 7 The English Catholic reformers and the Jacobite diaspora
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Conscience, politics and the exiled court: the creation of the Catholic Jacobite manifesto 1689–1718
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 English Catholics and the Glorious Revolution of 1688
- 2 The making of the Catholic gentry in England and in exile
- 3 Conscience, politics and the exiled court: the creation of the Catholic Jacobite manifesto 1689–1718
- 4 Catholic politics in England 1688–1745
- 5 Unity, heresy and disillusionment: Christendom, Rome and the Catholic Jacobites
- 6 The English Catholic clergy and the creation of a Jacobite Church
- 7 The English Catholic reformers and the Jacobite diaspora
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The grip of the diaspora on recusant lives, the instability of their place in England, and an impassioned sense that the laws of God and man preserved the right of the exiled Stuarts had all established Jacobitism as an overwhelming presence in the political imagination of the English Catholic community. By 1716, recusant leaders were proclaiming these convictions at the public scaffold, exhorting their countrymen to work towards ‘Uniting and Reconciling all their Interests … in the only Measure that can render them happy’. However, Jacobite ideology could not be frozen in a state of such exalted self-certainty. Its advocates were soon forced to convert private zeal into a voice that could speak outside the sanctuary of the loyal household, enter into the less comforting arena of national controversy and confront the taunt that ‘You labour more than ever to estrange them from King James with such authentique wrighting … to declare he will not reign but to signify his publique zeal for the Catholique religion.’ The political thought of Catholic Jacobitism was fashioned out of successive exchanges between the court, the diaspora and its following in England: fixed on the terms of a restoration settlement, but ranging across wider horizons, to contemplate the moral image of a Catholic king, the place for Stuart piety in a Protestant realm, and the status of recusants beyond the point of an imagined second Restoration.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745Politics, Culture and Ideology, pp. 90 - 120Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009