Thesis Correspondence II

George Frideric Handel by Balthasar Denner

Dear Dr. _____,

I have pulled as many articles by Paul Monod as I could find, after having already read his book Jacobitism and the English people, 1688-1788. My experience with Monod's scholarship is that he is usually very solid; Corp's antithesis in a way. He uses political history to inform his cultural history, and in the end, he manages to turn out rather firm arguments. I personally struggle with Monod's use of paternalism, and his political discussions often drift from Jacobitism to Tory/Whig debates. Yet, he may allow for a broader discussion on classical influences of the eighteenth-century Jacobite controversy.

Wesley

Notes on Jacobitism and Country Principles in the Reign of William III by Paul Monod in The Historical Journal, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Jun., 1987).

Monod begins by announcing an age of “Jacobite restoration” in historical scholarship. He sets out to address the neglect of study (in 1987) on Jacobitism during William III, arguing that English Tories did reveal some sympathy, although not overtly, in refusing the Association of 1696, bills of abjuration, and the Fenwick attainder. Evidently, scholars had been disassociating English Tories from the Jacobite movement (and for good reasons), but Monod wishes to argue that a tendency at least did exist in Tories to not entirely throw off all hopes for the Stuarts. However, Monod differentiates opposition to William from loyalty to James. The Jacobite influence must be seen as more subtle in Parliament, and although some Tories did wish for James' return, they shrank from an immediate effort. This influenced their policies without ever becoming realized in full revolt.

Integral to the Tory political platform were the Country principles, held by many of the landed English squires, which argued against standing armies, pensioners, or placemen, and advocated a transparent and cheap government. The Exclusion Crisis divided the squires; some becoming Whigs and others disliking Whig indifference of hereditary succession (an idea integral to landed nobility for obvious reasons). This created a Court-Country dichotomy, which eventually led to a Country party of Whigs and their Tory allies. As Monod argues, Jacobitism became the catalyst that pushed reluctant Tories into the Country party (a Jacobitism which was able to work outside of its strict pro-Court form; a conservative Jacobitism). Five phases emerge before Country Jacobitism was fully established:

1688-89 – a period marked by Jacobite failure as James pursued military measures in Scotland and Ireland without regard for Whigs

1689-92 – same sort of results as above

1692-3 – James appealed to Whigs, who persuade him forgo authoritarian rhetoric and issue the Country manifesto.

1693-96 – excluded Tories began drifting towards both Country and Court.

1696 – the Assassination Plot derailed the Country alliance for a time, but with the end of William's reign, Country Jacobities resurfaced and eventually established a mode of Jacobite policy which continued through the eighteenth-century.

Since the new settlement of William and Mary was not entirely conservative and contained disruptive procedure (even though in the name of the Constitution), Tory loyalists and Country squires objected for conservative reasons. Loyalists held that the Glorious Revolution destroyed the Constitution by handing the throne to a usurper, and the Country coalition saw that William and Mary's administration only enhanced the problems of centralization begun in Stuart Restoration. The Country party were somewhat justified in their concerns, since war with France in 1689 expanded the English state. Squires from both the Tory and Whig persuasions worried about higher taxation and ministerial despotism, which easily might blend loyalism and Country attitudes. However, it took the Stuart court three years before understanding this potential.

The “Whiggish” Jacobite faction, led by the Scottish Presbyterian Sir James Montgomery, London printing businessman Robert Ferguson, and barrister Charlwood Lawton helped begin negotiations for the Country manifesto by arguing that James must govern by law, establish liberty of conscience, further a free parliament, turn down all French aid, and dismiss the army after overturning William's invasion. Eventually, Whig and Jacobite tendencies meshed at the conservative interest of the Country, and English Jacobitism itself entered a new phase. Montgomery has written that James possessed many errors, but “not every error can furnish a good reason for... revolutions.” The 1693 declaration was seen as a renewal of the Constitution, furthering liberty of conscience, limiting power, initiating free elections, and alleviating tax burdens. The Whig Jacobites did not succeed in converting the Country faction towards a Whig Jacobite conspiracy, but it did initiate a new and more realistic phase in Jacobite policy to unite Country Whigs and Tories in a conservative bipartisan effort to frustrate the Junto government.

Notes on Dangerous Merchandise: Smuggling, Jacobitism, and Commercial Culture in Southeast England, 1690-1760 by Paul Monod in the Journal of British Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Apr., 1991).

Reasons for smuggling trades in the eighteenth-century are unclear and diverse. Certain contemporary chroniclers frame smuggling as a way to assert popular rights, bravery, or a distaste for repressive government. Scholarship differs in its representation or smuggling. Cal Winslow gives a romanticized view of 1740s tea smuggling in the English south-coast as a “social crime,” pitting the laboring class against the established social authority. On the other hand, economic scholarship favors a “big business” model, in which one-third of all English trade to Holland and France was smuggled, effecting both prices and distribution. John Styles criticizes Winslow's view of social crime by arguing that crime and commerce often operated independent of each other. Monod builds the case that among the political and economic developments of the time, Jacobitism played a part in making smuggling a “big business.” He claims that three features were integral to Jacobite influences on smuggling in the English south-coast: local landlord “paternalism”for those who allowed smuggling on their property, a mixture of politics and commerce within smuggling, and formalized structure. Jacobite secret society clubs became a way of expressing a love for the Stuarts more evocatively.

Jacobite landowners (Monod cites many Jacobite landowners by name) were protective of their tenants in smuggling controversies, even frustrating courtroom proceedings in the quest to end smuggling (more examples cited). Landowners did not protect tenets merely for altruistic reasons; doing so enhanced their local prestige and legitimacy. In many cases, disaffected landowners turned to Jacobitism and smuggling in conjunction (examples cited). This connection between Jacobitism and “paternalism” led to politicization of smuggling itself. The trade was subsequently used to transport Jacobite correspondence and agents (many, many examples cited; Monod has done his research here, solid as usual). Monod ties smuggling with Jacobite underworld club culture.

Notes on Painters and Party Politics in England, 1714-1760 by Paul Monod in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Spring 1993).

In this article, Monod proposes that the early Hanoverians could not establish a Biblical or classical “history” painting genre in England due to their inability to avoid party politics, and eventually Whigs developed a diverse and commercial sphere for art after 1730. The common feature against English “history” painting among both Tory and Whig was the association of such art with Roman Catholicism, superstition, and idolatry. The Jacobite “foppish” traditions of the Stuarts were abandoned. Furthermore, in post-Stuart England, “history” painting found no royal patron. Even Horace Walpole himself admitted that William III had done nothing to further art, George I was entirely devoid of artistic zeal, and the hated Charles I initiated the “first era of real taste in England.” Many in England longed for a higher form of Western art, but did not trust its Continental sources. In this context began the career of the only real “history” painter in England, Sir James Thornhill, who seemed to reach the “higher” form of art in his painting of St. Paul's Cathedral with a Baroque court style. However, he abandoned his work and turned to gardening and architecture after his association with the South Sea scandal. Under Shaftesbury's influence, the Whigs next turned to architecture in order to successfully establish an artistic achievement for England. Yet English art did not entirely slip into obscurity between the eras of Thornhill and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Jonathan Richardson initiated a form of art that did not degenerate into the “low” and yet appealed to a universal set of “Gentlemen in general.” It was to be neither high or low, but sophisticated, scientific, and neuter to factions, thus beginning a new era for art in England during the 1730s.

Notes to The Politics of Handel's Early London Operas, 1711-1718 by Paul Monod in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 36, No. 3, Opera and Society: Part I (Winter 2006).

Although Handel's operas are not partisan (like the difficulty of Whig artists in Monod's last article), Monod sees them as containing veiled political hints that are informative to his broader English political context of division between Whigs and Tories. Handel would have been careful not to offend either Whigs or Tories in his audience, but his plays still for the most part carry the contemporary Whig flavor of patriotism, populism, and most of all “politeness.” However, operas were far from universally popular among the Whig faction. John Dennis provided the most vehement Whig enemy to opera. He claimed opera, especially in its Italian form was effeminate, favored arbitrary power, and built on “foreign foppery.” More devastating were Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's moderate Whig objections: it's “only Design is to gratifie the Senses...” and its context was too fantastical, having “painted Dragons spitting Wild-fire.” Like Plato, Steele argued that if audiences could not perceive sense in music and if music excluded “Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature,” then it must be cast out of the commonwealth of England. However, The Spectator did retreat from this position so as not to offend readers, and argued that opera may be an artistic possibility if it became more natural in its rhetoric and was deduced “from the general Sense and Taste of Mankind.” A group of English aristocrats including Shaftesbury and Burlington kept English opera alive by encouraging both the polite philosophy advocated in The Spectator and a tinge of Italian culture. Shaftesbury put forward the ideal for the virtuous aristocrat in his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, and although never mentioning opera, proposed Renaissance Italy as the birthplace of modern principles of rationality in art. Burlington also deemed bad taste as “Gothic,” and believed Italian art brought back an association with ancient Rome.

Burlington became Handel's patron from 1712-1717, and a few of Handel's operas are sufficient to demonstrate the Shaftesbury Whig philosophy of Burlington in the creation of these works. In Teseo, Handel plays out the Classical issue of dynastic succession in eighteenth-century Whig moods, having the Athenians support by popular consent of Teseo as king instead of King Egeo's hereditary claim to the throne. Yet by a stoke of Providence, Teseo seems to be a legitimate heir after all, and Egeo redeems his character with a change of heart. Virtue and popular consent play out firmly in this play. Amadigi differs from Teseo in that it is not strictly political, but it does match the contemporary political scene in its rejection of female leadership (as in the case of the Georgian era after the reign of Queen Anne). On the other hand, his play Silla read straightforwardly does include anti-Whig sympathy, implying a political inconsistency. Furthermore, with the founding of the Royal Academy, Whigs moved more and more away from opera because of its state sponsorship. Monod ends by saying that Handel's creation of some fine pieces while giving England a polite form of Italianate entertainment was the result of genius not politics. (This sounds rather terse with Handel's work, but I think Monod did draw connections between the political culture of the Whigs and Handel's operas. This was the most speculative I've seen Monod yet.)