The sublime vastness of the Atlantic and its notorious historical fluidity offers severe challenges to those who choose to read and write in this boundless and yet largely undefined genre. A prime constraint to the development of Atlantic histories is universities themselves, bound as institutions to serve national decorum, holders of regional archives and, likely, gravely underfunded departments hesitant to send (and fund) scholars on transnational treks of exploration. Atlanticists have largely countered these numerous impediments with a turn toward the literary, a necessary and often rewarding cross-discipline attempt to get to cultural truths about past perceptions of the ocean that separated the old world from the new. In some sense, David Parrish’s Jacobitism and Anti-Jacobitism in the British Atlantic World, 1688-1727 attempts to reveal the sophistication of English/British political and religious culture as a trans-oceanic force. However, rather than a literary turn, Parrish develops a history drawn from scores of letters and dispatches located in a diverse array of archival records on both sides of the Atlantic. The result is a significant body of work which demonstrates not only the complexity of early-modern communication networks but also a direction for historians to make – not a turn – but a return to archival materials which likely remains unexplored.
With each turnover of monarchs, (James II &VI, William III, Anne, and the Hanoverian successors) loyalty oaths followed. Parrish argues that Jacobitism was much more than a “subcultural element” (3) of political England made by defenders who swore and refused to relinquish their loyalty to James II/VI and his heirs. To understand Jacobites and those that opposed them, one needs to follow the “shared words, images, and forms of behavior” (3) which consumed English/British politics for over half a century – both domestically and throughout the Atlantic world. Parrish accomplishes this by dividing his book into two parts: the first offers context, the second cases studies. Politics, religion, and the print culture of anti-Jacobitites are the thematic strands that make up the first section of the book. Case studies of how colonial outposts expressed (sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly) variant forms of anti-Jacobitism follow in the second section. Parrish draws examples from New England, the mid-Atlantic Colonies, and the Carolinas. Unfortunately, the Caribbean colonies did not make it as part of Parrish’s case study work, although instances of Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism within the West Indies are scattered throughout the book.
The first chapter is filled with political instances of transatlantic Jacobite sentiments. What do we make of pirates who rename their ships after rebel Tories who participated in the 1715 Jacobite invasion? Or pirates that dub George I a “Turnip Man,” with seditious breath? (19-20) The animosity over the 1688 revolution was not only transatlantic, it was on the Atlantic. Sedition is, indeed, the theme of the first chapter, the many attempts to stamp out Jacobitism, and the many ways Jacobitism refused to give in.
Chapter two informs of the political and religious complexity surrounding those who refused to give up their oaths to James II/VI. These “nonjurors” did not all respond in equal manners, as they consisted of a milieu of Anglican, Catholic, Episcopalians, and Quakers emanating from all regions of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Parrish develops a story where Jacobite ideology evolved over the next quarter of a century following the revolution of 1688, a maturation process that continuously “echoed” across the Atlantic. (39) Anglicans in Virginia charged Pennsylvanian Quakers whose ideological principle of “non-resistance” as Jacobitism itself, that in the face of French threats in the Great Lakes Quaker sentiments could not be known. (42) Anglicanism suffered a “traumatic schism” following the accession of William and Mary, with 4 per cent of Anglican clergy refusing to recant their oaths to the previous monarch. Parrish, however, aptly demonstrates ambiguous and regional divisions within the Anglican church, that variant shades of Jacobitism overwhelmed Tory political attempts to dismantle and forestall further dissent. From England to Scotland, and to Ireland, Jacobitism not only survived but, in its maturation process, travelled across the Atlantic to affect politics of colonial regents. The last half of the chapter is a masterful interpretation of archival material scattered across the Atlantic: Edinburgh, London, and Boston in the United States.
Perhaps the most important chapter is the third. Here, Parrish focuses on print culture and reveals work that Isabel Rivers, Nicholas Rogers, Douglas Hay, and James Raven have long espoused. Newspapers, pamphlets, chapbooks, and other printed ephemeral traveled over networks crafted by families, institutions of religion, political and merchant concerns. When the empire sailed the Atlantic, news from the old world was devoured by colonial readers. What Parrish contributes is a fresh look at how colonialists worked to shape anti-Jacobitism to their own advantage, portraying colonial contemporaries not just as mere receivers of private and public discourses but self-interested activists ready to direct and steer what and what is not a Jacobite.
In the case study of chapter four, Parrish focuses on the political struggle between South Carolina governor Sir Nathaniel Johnson (1703-1709) and Anglican minister of St.Philip’s church in Charleston, Edward Marston. Ironically, both Johnson and Marston were former nonjurors, yet both charged the other of Jacobitism. Such fights signified, according to Parrish, that England’s political mudslinging associated with Jacobitism had traveled the Atlantic and appropriated to serve self-interests.
Parrish argues in the next chapter that seventeenth-century mid-Atlantic colonies were a Dissenter stronghold. As the eighteenth century developed, Whig and Tory partisanship in Britain over issues of Jacobitism and tolerance quickly spilled across the Atlantic affecting who governed and who did not, colonies such as New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Pragmatically, colonial governor Robert Hunter (New York and New Jersey, 1710-1720) chose the path of tolerance, especially in New York where the population was ethnically mixed. Yet Hunter’s moderation became a target of SPG (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts) backlash which sought and received Queen Anne’s support of a High Church appointee on Long Island behind Hunter’s back. (124) Hunter’s tolerance toward Quakers further aggrieved High Church supporters who complained bitterly of the governor’s religious equanimity. Hunter and his allies countered that such religious zeal was a threat to peace and order and took to writing pamphlets to make their case. (128) Nonetheless, the queen’s affection toward Tory stalwarts demarcated that political party’s ascendancy and appointees to colonial possessions across the Atlantic followed. Only the death of Queen Anne and the coronation of a Whig adherent, George I, added to by the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion in Britain prevented Hunter from losing his post. (130)
In New England, Britain’s obsession over party politics infiltrated the northern colonies with relative ease (imperial wars, intensified transatlantic communications, Church of England adherents against a backdrop or whiggish Puritanism are some of Parrish’s listed primary causes). (139-141) Jacobite and anti-Jacobite charges took an intensified torrid turn. Parrish highlights the correspondence between Puritan minister Cotton Mather, and a Presbyterian Covenantor in Scotland, Robert Wodrow to conclude that the two were convinced of that “Episcopalians, Anglicans, Tories, and Jacobites were inseparable” and alive and well in New England. (146) Further complicating New England’s sentiments on Jacobitism was a High Church Anglican, Tory supporter and bookstore owner, John Checkley. Checkley viewed himself as a “Bostonian Sacheverell” and bankrolled the republication of a controversial attack against deists and religious toleration written by a nonjuror, Charles Leslie. In 1719, and on the heals of the Jacobite Rebellion at Stornoway, Scotland, magistrates in Massachusetts demanded that Checkley declare an oath to George I. Checkley refused, twice. What Parrish points out are Checkley’s numerous points of contact, his circuit of men whom he corresponded with on both sides of the Atlantic. (152)
Parrish’s book does much more than prove the liveliness of the Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism debate. Parrish proves beyond any doubt the significance of transatlantic networks, print culture, and mutualized party politics on both sides Britain’s Atlantic.