Episode 303: Victorian Jacobites

On a January night in 1897, a crowded Episcopal church in Philadelphia was the stage for a curious ceremony. In the Church of the Evangelists, located in south Society Hill just ten or so blocks from Independence Hall, a gaggle of clerics unveiled a life-size painting of Charles I, King of England and–so far as the clerics were concerned–saint and martyr. Then Williams Stevens Perry, the Episcopal Bishop of Iowa, ascended to the pulpit to explain to the assembled multitude how Charles I, far from being an absolutist and enemy of liberty, had laid the foundations of American political order. This striking scene begins Michael Connolly’s description of a curious moment in the history of Anglo-American political thought and sentiment, a resurgent Jacobite movement that championed the cause of the Stuart monarchs as a means of opposing the corruptions of the modern age. It begins his new book Jacobitism in Britain and the United States, 1880-1910. Michael Connolly is Professor of History at Purdue University Northwest; this is his third time on the podcast. For Further Investigation Michael Connolly has previously talked on the podcast about American presidents, way back in Episode 2 (!!!) and then in Episode 60 We touched on the execution of Charles I in Episode 127, which focused on the escape of two of the men who signed his death warrant into the wilds of Connecticut