Languages of Loyalism: Patriotism, Nationhood and the State in the 1790s (original) (raw)

2003, The English Historical Review

IF much of the work published during the past decade on British responses to the French Revolution is to be believed, England was swamped during the s with a tidal wave of conservative loyalism focused on the defence of a British ancien régime against revolutionary France. Loyalism, having won an intellectual propaganda war against popular radicalism by superior argument, organization and force of numbers, had appropriated and reconfigured old cultural traditions into a new British conservative identity commanding widespread popular support. To Francophobia, divine-right political theory and High Church Anglican anti-deism were added the apotheosis of the monarchy, a cult of veneration for the British constitution and a reconfiguration of patriotism, for much of the eighteenth century the intellectual property of radicals, as a fiercely defensive nationalist creed. 1 This image of loyalism has been successfully challenged in recent years. The language of patriotism, by no means appropriated by conservative loyalists during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, remained a site of contest and an inspiration for liberals and radicals well into the nineteenth century. Loyalism too, is much more complex than it appears. Though in theory a submissive and inflexible doctrine, in practice loyalism was an empowering movement that gave its followers a public presence and political voice with which to criticize the polity they sought to defend. 2 Loyalist associations and volunteer corps were no more the tame servants of the state than the press, which portrayed many shades of loyal opinion during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Despite the increasing interest displayed by scholars in the loyalist writings of the s and s, much remains unknown about the intellectual and rhetorical strategies employed by loyalist writers, the interplay of old and new modes of political discourse in .