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Inheriting a Legacy of Liberty

Posted on | March 27, 2023 | 2 Comments

The Queen of Bohemia

In his monumental Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke goes to some length to demonstrate how the principle of inheritance operated in English law. The young person to whom he addresses his lecture — which began as a correspondence — seemed to have been deceived by those who contended that the English constitution included a “right” of the people to choose their own king. This contention, as Burke shows, was based on a misunderstanding of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which had the effect of bringing William and Mary to the throne. Yet in the very document establishing this succession, the signatories declare the fealty of “ourselves and our posterity” to their new sovereigns — and their posterity: How could the principle of inherited authority be voided, asked Burke, if the English people could by solemn compact bind their descendants as subjects of the descendants of their sovereign? So the imagined “right” to choose their own king was not proven by the Glorious Revolution; rather, it was explicitly denied.

Most people have never actually read Burke’s Reflections. If they have studied it at all, they’ve done so as college students under the supervision of a professor who includes excerpts from it as part of a syllabus on political philosophy, and thus absorb only a limited conception of Burke’s argument, one that overlooks such details as his emphasis on the importance of the principle of inheritance in English law.

Consider the Queen of Bohemia, a relative of William and Mary. The Queen of Bohemia was the daughter of King James I, and was allegedly a target of the conspirators (including Guy Fawkes) in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. While her English cousins were going through their ordeals in the 1600s — Cromwell and all that — she was the wife of Frederick V of the Palatinate, who became King of Bohemia, a title he held for only one year before being exiled because of a defeat in the Thirty Years War. Despite their misfortune, Frederick and his English-born Queen had numerous children, the 12th of whom was Sophia, who in 1658 married Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover. In the meantime, the English throne had passed from William and Mary to Queen Anne. None of them left any surviving children, which precipitated a succession crisis:

Anne was the only person remaining in the line of succession established by the Bill of Rights 1689 [which excluded Catholics from the English throne]. To address the succession crisis and preclude a Catholic restoration, the Parliament of England enacted the Act of Settlement 1701, which provided that, failing the issue of Anne and of William III by any future marriage, the Crown of England and Ireland would go to Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and her Protestant descendants. Sophia was the granddaughter of James VI and I through his daughter Elizabeth, who was the sister of Anne’s grandfather Charles I. Over 50 Catholics with stronger claims were excluded from the line of succession.

As a Protestant nation, the English refused to be ruled by Catholics, which is how Sophia’s son, the grandson of the Queen of Bohemia, became King George I, establishing the Hanoverian dynasty in England. Was the exclusion of Catholic claimants to the crown a violation of the principle of inheritance in English law? On the contrary, it was confirmation of that principle. Going back to Henry VIII, the English had rejected papal supremacy, and the fundamental point of “Cromwell and all that” was the continuation of England’s Protestant legacy, even if they had to behead King Charles to accomplish it.

All of this may seem irrelevant to Americans today, but ask yourself why our forefathers fought the War of Independence and why, in agreeing to the ratification of the Constitution, they insisted that it immediately be amended with the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, establishing freedom of religion? Our nation was founded by men who understood the rights for which their English ancestors had fought during all those decades from James to Charles to Cromwell and onward. The legitimacy of colonial assemblies as instruments of governing authority in America had been recognized by the Crown and upheld by Parliaments, so that when George III started infringing on this long-established arrangement, the American colonists resisted. They saw the King as seeking to deprive them of their inherited rights — a legacy of liberty that Englishmen could trace back to Magna Carta.

American patriots love to speak of their “God-given rights,” adopting the rhetoric of the Declaration about the “self-evident” truth that “all men” are “endowed by their Creator” with these rights — which is fine, except when you ponder why these truths were not proclaimed at some other time in some other place by some other people, but rather by English-speaking Americans gathered at Philadelphia in 1776. And when they leave off quoting the Declaration, well-meaning American patriots are fond of quoting the Preamble of the Constitution without making much of the phrase wherein the Framers declared their intent to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” extending to the infinite future the principle of inheritance.

My emphasis on the English origins of our conception of rights, as a legacy inherited from our ancestors, is not intended to exclude those Americans whose ancestors were not English and thus had nothing to do with this particular history. As Americans, all of us are rightful beneficiaries of this legacy, no matter where our ancestors came from, or how recently they may have arrived. Readers will recall my praise for Vivek Ramaswamy as “an enthusiastic proponent of American exceptionalism,” notwithstanding the fact that Vivek is a Hindu whose parents immigrated from India. Vivek gets it, in terms of the importance of “the Blessings of Liberty” which we seek to preserve under the Constitution. My ancestor fought in the Revolution as a teenager in the South Carolina militia, and I would hope that all his descendants — probably thousands of us by now — share the same sensibility expressed by Vivek Ramaswamy. Meanwhile, in Colorado, we have this adamant declaration from Jeff Goldstein:

Be it so understood:
I refuse to “unpack white violence.” I reject the idea that my existence “perpetuates white power structures.” I will not — and in fact cannot — “examine my implicit biases.” I’m an individual. I refuse to grant determined interpretive communities authority over my being. My meaning is mine. It is what makes me me.
I’m not taking any “journey” to “discover” the impact of my “privilege” on “black and brown peoples.” I will not become “anti-racist” or “anti-fascist” to satisfy your demands. I reject Cultural Marxism. I am an individual. I’m not defined by my color, my religion, my sex. I’m Jeff.
I will not “respect your pronouns” or “celebrate” your “queerness.” I am hostile to your sexualizing of children. I reject your neologisms, your “triggers,” and your desire to control my speech. I know who and what you are: you are my presumptive master, or else the Useful Idiot who empowers him. But I will grant you and your ideology no power over me.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) Jeff is definitely an individual, as he says — and if you’ve ever met him, you certainly wouldn’t argue the point — but he is recognizably American in his individualism, as he understands the “Blessings of Liberty” as the Framers intended it, as belonging to him by inheritance as an American. While I suppose that Jeff would bemoan the lack of liberty and the violation of rights in distant places — Quebec or Kabul, Kinshasa or Kathmandu — it is the preservation of freedom in America that concerns him.

Intelligent people understand what Ronald Reagan once pointed out, in his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” about our nation:

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

Our freedom as Americans — our nation’s proud claim to be liberty’s “last stand on earth” — has a history, and if we don’t teach that history to our children, how can they possibly understand how precious this legacy is?

The Queen of Bohemia could not be reached for comment.



 

 

Category: Constitution, Great Britain, History

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2 Responses to “Inheriting a Legacy of Liberty”

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  2. News of the Week (April 2nd, 2023) | The Political Hat
    April 5th, 2023 @ 4:34 pm

    […] Inheriting a Legacy of Liberty In his monumental Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke goes to some length to demonstrate how the principle of inheritance operated in English law. The young person to whom he addresses his lecture — which began as a correspondence — seemed to have been deceived by those who contended that the English constitution included a “right” of the people to choose their own king. This contention, as Burke shows, was based on a misunderstanding of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which had the effect of bringing William and Mary to the throne. Yet in the very document establishing this succession, the signatories declare the fealty of “ourselves and our posterity” to their new sovereigns — and their posterity: How could the principle of inherited authority be voided, asked Burke, if the English people could by solemn compact bind their descendants as subjects of the descendants of their sovereign? So the imagined “right” to choose their own king was not proven by the Glorious Revolution; rather, it was explicitly denied. […]