While the 1745 Jacobite rising represented the last opportunity for the Stuarts to be restored by force of arms, many religiously devout Jacobites resisted integration into, or were excluded from, the mainstream political culture of Hanoverian Britain. However, with the accession of George III, many Anglican Jacobites such as Samuel Johnson and John Shebbeare enthusiastically supported the new monarch, due to the stark differences in policy and personality between him and his Hanoverian predecessors. While the Anglican contribution to counterrevolutionary politics is relatively well documented, Roman Catholicism was the faith community that underwent the most pronounced shift from Jacobitism to loyalism. This article examines the career and political principles of Bishop George Hay (1729-1811), Vicar Apostolic of the Lowland District of Scotland, to better understand the Catholic Church’s role in British counterrevolutionary politics. To this end, this article argues that the Catholic Church’s institutional politics in Britain from the American Revolution onward were largely informed by the same political theology that had previously wedded it to the Jacobite cause. Indeed, Bishop Hay stands out for his consistent adherence to the principles of passive obedience and non-resistance, which he transformed into effective weapons against the revolutionary movements that swept across the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century.
It is easy to consider the late eighteenth century as the least significant period of British Catholic history, when the faithful lived in a state of political and social limbo, neither legally emancipated, nor actively persecuted. However, the reign of George III saw a steady increase in the political visibility of Catholicism. Since Catholicism is inseparable from apostolic leadership, this transition is most effectively studied by examining the Vicars Apostolic.Footnote 1 In Scotland, where Catholics were poorer and proportionately less noble than their English counterparts, the Vicars Apostolic were the strongest political voices within the Catholic community. While the English laity formed associations such as the Cisalpine Club, whose anti-papalism sometimes threatened to split Catholic political interests, Scottish Catholics formed no such societies, and tended to entrust their political concerns to the Vicars Apostolic.Footnote 2 Indeed, Hay’s personal theology strongly reflected the Counter Reformation’s emphasis upon episcopal power.Footnote 3
Hay was by far the most politically active Vicar Apostolic of late Georgian Scotland. As a former Scottish Episcopalian with a Jacobite family background, and the zeal of a convert, he was not ecumenically or religiously tolerant in any modern sense, and he clashed with theological innovators within the Catholic Church, such as Alexander Geddes (1737-1802).Footnote 4 Geddes, an extremist even by Cisalpine standards, produced an English translation of the Bible, which Hay rejected on the grounds of Geddes’ ‘latitudinarian sentiments and fondness for novelty’.Footnote 5 However, during the reign of George III, the counterrevolutionary principles of Hay and the other Vicars Apostolic actually endeared Catholicism to the British state. Importantly, Hay also formed relationships with some of the most notable statesmen of the age, including Edmund Burke, who Hay remarked in 1779 had ‘taken our affairs to heart as much as if it had been his own’.Footnote 6
While dedicated historiography about Catholicism in late Georgian Scotland is extremely limited, one does benefit from the work of Mark Goldie. In particular, Goldie’s ‘The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, considered the reconciliation of Catholicism and Scottish society as part of a fundamental change in Scotland’s religious disposition. Goldie argues that the Kirk’s tolerant, Moderate Party exercised considerable dominance, and the country shed much of its anti-Catholicism, partly as a reaction against the vicious anti-clericalism of the French Revolution. Footnote 7 Goldie considers George Hay and John Geddes as culturally enlightened clerics, and strong leaders who acted tirelessly to exploit the unique political circumstances in which they lived. He also decries the dishonest appropriation of Hay by Victorian ultramontaines and the equally nefarious appropriation of Geddes by twentieth century liberal and ecumenical Catholics. Goldie later expanded his analysis of Hay’s philosophical views, and described Hay’s approach to metaphysics as ‘both combatively Catholic and blithely ecumenical’, by using Protestant philosophical premises to reach Catholic conclusions.Footnote 8 More recently, Goldie considers Alexander Geddes as representative of a unique strain of politically radical, anti-papal, British Catholicism that was successfully suppressed by the Vicars Apostolic, and ultimately obliterated in the nineteenth century.Footnote 9 This article builds upon Goldie’s work by granting a dedicated political treatment to Bishop Hay, whom Goldie rightly describes as ‘a crucial internal cause of the Catholic renovation’ and ‘an instinctive Tory on questions of civil obedience’.Footnote 10
Scottish Catholicism presents an important context for analysing the religious and political shift from Jacobitism to Hanoverian loyalism in the second half of the eighteeenth century. Although it occurred slightly later, the Catholic shift away from Jacobitism was more dramatic than the same transition as undertaken by Anglicans such as Johnson or Shebbeare. Indeed, Catholicism was unquestionably more committed to Jacobitism than Anglicanism. While only four per cent of Church of England clergy became nonjurors at the height of the schism in the late seventeenth centuryFootnote 11 (along with the great majority of Scottish Episcopalians), the British Catholic rejection of the Glorious Revolution was practically total.Footnote 12 However, after James Francis Edward Stuart (the Old Pretender) was granted a royal funeral in St. Peter’s Basilica in 1766, Pope Clement XIII called a conclave to determine whether the Church would recognize Charles Edward Stuart (the Young Pretender) as the rightful heir to the throne. The Pope stacked the conclave against Charles. He forcefully argued that the interests of British Catholicism were not synonymous with that of the Stuart Dynasty, and that recognition of Charles’ claim could imperil future progress toward Catholic toleration in Britain and its overseas colonies, where large numbers of Catholics already lived.Footnote 13 The conclave therefore refused to recognize Charles’ claim, thus opening the door to political reconciliation between the Church and the Hanoverian Dynasty.
Twelve years later, the first Catholic relief act passed Parliament, removing a few of the most burdensome penal laws against English Catholics (Scottish Catholics would have to wait until 1793). From the 1770s on, a serious political program for Catholic relief began, ultimately culminating, after many travails, in the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. While most Britons continued to share the unifying pan-Protestant identity that is central to Linda Colley’s scholarship, this article concerns the decades in which the more militant aspects of that identity softened, thus granting Catholicism a permanent and expanding foothold in society and politics.Footnote 14
However, the limited toleration of Catholicism by the British state should not be viewed as inevitable. In Scotland, where ecumenical relations had historically been roughest, the Church hierarchy required tireless, politically engaged leaders to advance the cause of the Catholic community. Scottish Catholics have received limited scholarly attention, even though men like Bishop Hay embody the transition from Jacobitism to loyalism. Although Hay had sounder Jacobite credentials than most, he recognized that integration into the culture and sociability of Hanoverian Britain was the only realistic policy available. Hay’s papers in the Scottish Catholic Archives at the University of Aberdeen’s special collections provide abundant evidence that he spent the last quarter of the eighteenth century opposing revolution using arguments with Jacobite traits and features, relying heavily upon religious principles of passive obedience and non-resistance. It therefore follows that the very ideological sentiments that had driven Scottish Catholics to the periphery of society helped to accomplish the Catholic renovation that Goldie identifies.
Change and Continuity Across Hay’s Life
The life of George Hay spanned a period that began with intense dynastic struggle and ended with a fundamental battle for the survival of monarchy itself. Hay was born in Edinburgh on 24 August 1729, the second child and only son of James Hay (d. 1756/1759), and Mary Morrison (d. 1756). The Hays were Episcopalian nonjurors and committed Jacobites. As he later described in a 1772 letter to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Hay’s own father was captured by British forces following his involvement in the Jacobite rising of 1715. He and other prisoners were put aboard a ship for transportation and shortly afterwards ‘made themselves master of the Ship during the passage and returned to Bordeaux, where they were maintained by the Liberality of their Royal Master’.Footnote 15 Hay took up his father’s militant Jacobitism, leaving his medical studies in Edinburgh and serving as a medic in the Young Pretender’s Army at Prestonpans when he was sixteen years old. He was arrested for his involvement in the ’45 and imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle for three months, and in London for one year. While imprisoned, Hay made the acquaintance of a Catholic bookseller named Thomas Meighan, who initially exposed him to Catholicism.Footnote 16 After returning to Edinburgh, Hay found that he was still at some risk from the authorities, and removed to Kilbride in Lanarkshire, where he acquired a copy of John Gother’s A Papist Misrepresented and Represented.Footnote 17 This further exposure to Catholicism caused him to establish a friendship with the Jesuit, John Seaton, who received Hay into the Catholic Church in Edinburgh on 21 December 1748.Footnote 18
Unable to finish his degree in Edinburgh on account of his Catholicism, Hay sought employment as a chemist, and later as a ship’s surgeon, until he met Bishop Richard Challoner of London, who convinced him to enrol in the Scots College at Rome in 1751.Footnote 19 Hay was ordained to the priesthood in 1758 and returned immediately to Scotland. By 1768, he was made titular bishop of Daulis and consecrated at the hidden seminary at Scalan on 21 May 1769. This title allowed him to serve as coadjutor to Bishop Grant (1706-1778), his predecessor for the Lowland Vicariate, which he took over in 1778.Footnote 20
Hay’s episcopate was more visible than that of his predecessors. A prolific author of theological and devotional works, Hay dedicated considerable time and attention to religious publications, while navigating complex political challenges.Footnote 21 On one occasion, he distributed 10,000 catechisms, in clear violation of the penal laws.Footnote 22 In 1770, when there was an upsurge in persecution of Catholics in South Uist, Hay facilitated their emigration to Canada, thus proving that the Catholic community was prepared to suffer displacement rather than apostatise.Footnote 23 After the anti-Catholic riots that occurred in Edinburgh following the English Catholic relief bill of 1778, Hay immediately travelled to London, where he successfully negotiated compensation for Catholic property from Parliament and the city of Edinburgh.
Despite the marginalized position held by Catholics in British society, Hay saw the British constitution as far better than the revolutionary ideologies that abounded in the late eighteenth century. In the annual clergy meeting of 1779, he successfully passed a measure recognizing the sovereignty of George III, nearly a decade before the Scottish Episcopalians did likewise.Footnote 24 As an administrator, Hay maintained tight control over his vicariate. Indeed, not all his priests appreciated his leadership, with one bitterly referring to him as the ‘mitred Duenna’.Footnote 25 However, Hay showed himself to be compassionate as well as strict. In 1794, when David Downie, a radical outlier among Scottish Catholics, and a former member of Hay’s Edinburgh congregation, was tried for high treason and sentenced to death for amassing weapons, Hay visited him in prison, publicly prayed for him in St. Margaret’s Chapel, and personally ministered to his family.Footnote 26 By 1797, his declining health led him to delegate many of his responsibilities to his new coadjutor, Alexander Cameron, until his resignation was accepted by Rome in 1805. Hay spent his short six-year retirement living at Aquhorthies Seminary, which he had previously founded in 1799.Footnote 27
What, then, is unique about the political climate of Hay’s episcopacy? While the Age of Revolutions undeniably created tensions within Great Britain and its colonies abroad, it also provided the ideal circumstances in which to begin a process of reconciliation for certain groups that had historically dwelt on the periphery of British society, including Catholics. Since the Reformation, Scottish Catholics were subject to severe penal laws that excluded them from government, limited their ability to own property, forbade their involvement in many professions and severely limited their access to education. Penal legislation also criminalized Catholic worship and forced priests and laity to practice their faith in secret. In political terms, virtually all Catholics lived in the shadow of Jacobitism. However, after two failed Jacobite risings in 1715 and 1745, the Stuart cause lost most of its militant supporters due to military infeasibility and lack of leadership. Therefore, once it became apparent that Catholicism would be a permanent feature of newly acquired British enclaves such as Quebec, the years between the end of the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic Wars presented a unique opportunity for the British state to reconcile itself to its Catholic subjects. Indeed, in the face of the French Revolution, Jacobitism itself became romanticized, transforming from a treasonous threat, into a harmless social and cultural tradition.Footnote 28
Hay’s correspondences and pastorals reveal his attention to military service, another component in the growth of Catholic loyalism. Even before Catholics were permitted to openly serve in the British military, many did so illicitly, and their service was an open secret. The post-1745 pacification of the Highlands was followed almost immediately by its militarization. While this process began within the framework of an occupation, Highlanders were rapidly integrated into British military culture. General John Burgoyne testified that during the Seven Years War, he ‘had the honour’ to command 500 Roman Catholics and had not prevented their attendance at Mass.Footnote 29 A 1764 report by the bishops to Propaganda Fide estimated that 6,000 Scottish Catholics had served in the British Army from 1756 onward.Footnote 30 The Catholic hierarchy had no incentive to inflate such statistics in an internal report. Indeed, it surely grieved them that large numbers of Catholics submitted to the enlistment oath that required an explicit renunciation of Catholicism. However, while the bishops rejected the enlistment oath, they supported military service in principle. In 1778, Hay circulated a pastoral letter encouraging Catholics enlist openly, on the condition that the recruiter waive the offensive oath.Footnote 31 By 1779, Hay was in correspondence with Sir John Dalrymple concerning the establishment of an all-Catholic regiment.Footnote 32 Hay assured Dalrymple that the Catholic community opposed the American Revolution and was willing to supress it by force, if the state would reciprocate by repealing the penal laws.Footnote 33
Meanwhile, in North America, Catholics proved resolutely loyal in the face of the American Revolution, and the Catholic hierarchy played a direct role in this trend. In Quebec, Bishop Jean-Olivier Briand forbade his priests, on pain of excommunication, to consort with the American Jesuit, John Carroll.Footnote 34 When General Arnold’s siege of Quebec City was repulsed, Briand released a pastoral letter praising General Carleton and requiring all Quebecois Catholics to attend a thanksgiving Te Deum.Footnote 35 It was not only in colonies where Catholics composed a majority that they proved loyal. Indeed, the minority status of Catholics in places such as New York’s Mohawk Valley inclined them towards loyalism, to protect their somewhat fragile community. Virtually all Scottish Catholics in the Mohawk Valley took up arms in support of the British, and ultimately emigrated to Canada. British authorities were cognisant of the Scottish Catholic emigrant community and its contribution to the war effort. During the height of the war in New York, Colonel Barry St. Leger foreshadowed mid-nineteenth century British military policy by allowing Fr. John McKenna (formerly of the Scottish Mission), to travel with the army and celebrate daily Mass at the siege of Fort Stanwix in August of 1777.Footnote 36 Many Catholic Highlanders joined the King’s Royal Regiment of New York, which served in the St. Leger Expedition, and the Saratoga Campaign.Footnote 37
The fallout from the French Revolution was the most important turning point for the relationship between Catholicism and British society. Although British clerics had overwhelmingly supported ministerial policy during the American Revolution, this loyalist trend accelerated during the French Revolution. The absolute stability of the Hanoverian Dynasty in the latter half of the eighteenth century allowed orthodox Christians to deploy the full force of their counterrevolutionary doctrines, without incurring charges of Jacobitism. In the words of Robert Hole, religious arguments were extremely valuable because they represented a ‘fine meshed net to catch those who had eluded the looser weave of secular arguments’.Footnote 38 The basic structure of this religious ‘net’ was articulated by George Horne who, in an early response to the French Revolution, preached from Canterbury Cathedral on 25 October 1789 that ‘the laws of God enjoins obedience to every government settled according to the constitution of the country in which it subsists’.Footnote 39 The Catholic hierarchy, especially Bishop Hay, deployed this same line of argument in their pastorals, thus demonstrating the compatibility of Catholicism and the establishment.Footnote 40
Hay in the Age of the American Revolution
On 23 January 1778, Hay wrote to Bishop James Grant, his ageing superior for the Lowland District, updating him on the Scottish Catholic community’s response to the American Revolution, which had commenced two and a half years earlier. Hay’s letter clarifies the civil conduct of Catholics during that conflict:
I have a news to give you which I dare say will give you pleasure. Every body here seems catched with the military spirit, & many of our people from the Highlands are enlisting, Morar & Keppoch & several others of their country having got commissions.Footnote 41
Hay proceeded to inform Grant that he had been successful in guaranteeing the payment of pensions to Catholic Chelsea Pensioners, who were technically ineligible to receive public funds on account of their faith. The Lord Advocate and Lord Justice assured Hay that while they could make no public decree in favour of Catholic pensioners, they were willing to personally overrule any attempts made on a local level to prevent Catholics from receiving their funds.Footnote 42 In keeping with his cooperative relationship with the legal authorities, Hay informed Grant that he had instructed the faithful to enlist openly in the military, as Catholics, and simply refuse to take the explicitly anti-Catholic enlistment oath. Hay claimed that many Catholics who followed this procedure had been applauded for their honesty by the recruiters, who accordingly waived the oath. His report concerning the commissions is slightly ambiguous, as he did not specify if the officers in question were themselves Catholics, or simply nobles from largely Catholic families and communities. However, in another letter of the same year to Geddes, Hay reiterated his report about Catholic enlistment and explicitly stated that ‘a good number of our young Gentlemen have got commissions.’Footnote 43 Moreover, he also expressed strong personal support for the war: ‘I cannot help being filled with indignation against the French on this occasion, for encouraging & and now publicly patronizing the rebellious & ungrateful Americans & it gives me pleasure to see that everybody in this country seems zealous for the support of government’.Footnote 44
Hay’s primary coordinator regarding Catholic military service was Sir John Dalrymple, Baron of the Exchequer and a figure in the Edinburgh literati.Footnote 45 In response to Darlymple’s enquiry concerning the Catholic perception of the American Revolution, Hay replied, ‘I question if one man of common sense can be found amongst us who has it [the rebellion] not in abhorrence and who would not willingly do his best to supress it.’Footnote 46 He also drew Darlymple’s attention to the overwhelming loyalism of Catholic Highlanders who had emigrated to America. However, Hay also emphasized that formal repeal of the penal laws, rather than informal indulgences, was the only way to permanently improve the relationship between the Catholic Church and British society. Although enforcement of the penal laws had waned dramatically by the 1770s, Hay enumerated the laws and provided Dalrymple with examples as recent as the last decade, of priests being prosecuted and lay Catholics dispossessed of their property.Footnote 47 Hay also informed Bishop Richard Challoner, Vicar Apostolic of the London District, of his correspondence with Dalrymple and the prospect of leveraging Catholic military service for relief legislation.Footnote 48 His initial letter to Dalrymple concerning Catholic loyalty was given directly to the North Ministry, where it was met with great approval. Hay also believed that the Dissenting Protestant interests in England would cooperate with Catholic relief to further their own emancipation. In his estimation, the American War, combined with threats of French invasion, and a ministerial desire to placate Irish Catholics, created good overall circumstances for a general programme of Catholic relief.Footnote 49
While Hay believed that the Catholic laity were already well affected towards the government, he understood that the new generation of clergy would play a key role in any future reconciliation between Catholicism and British society. Geddes was living in Spain and teaching at the Scots College at Valladolid. Hay encouraged him to condition future priests for a cooperative relationship with the state by instilling in seminarians ‘submission and obedience to higher powers, whom God in his providence has placed over us’.Footnote 50 For Hay, the best way to promote obedience to the Hanoverian state was the same as for any other state: through a fundamentally religious emphasis upon principles of passive obedience and non-resistance that had long been a feature of British Catholic and High Anglican political thought. Such principles formed almost the entirety of Hay’s political theology, and he deployed them with increasing confidence during his episcopal career.
When Bishop Grant died in December 1778, Hay became Vicar Apostolic. Once in this position, Hay accelerated his involvement in matters of state and promoted an unambiguous loyalist identity. Having previously been a committed Jacobite, this transition deserves explanation. Indeed, in 1772 Hay took the opportunity to write personally to Charles Edward Stuart during a visit to the Scots College, Paris. The letter was secretly passed along to the Prince by John Gordon, Principal of the Scots College. After briefly recounting his and his father’s past commitment to the Stuart cause, Hay continued:
My present State of Life in which divine Providence has pleased to put it out of my power to be of any other service to Your Majesty’s Cause than by prayers, which are never wanting, but happy at any opportunity of testifying the sincere attachment I have to Your Majesty’s service I have taken the liberty to send to Abbe Grant’s Care for Your Majesty a Copy of a little piece I was induced to publish lately in defence of some points of Religion which had been recently attacked by a celebrated writer among us. I am sensible how unworthy it is of your Royal acceptance and how presuming it is in me to present it But I hope your Goodness will deign to consider it not as to its own value but as a sincere testimony of the inviolable attachment and most profound respect, with which I have the honour to be[.]Footnote 51
Is it possible to reconcile the above letter with Hay’s involvement in loyalist politics? His letter certainly conveys a strong emotional attachment to the Stuart family, but it also applies limitations to that attachment. Hay explained that the rare circumstance of his being in France constituted the main reason for sending the letter. Furthermore, while Hay proudly acknowledged his Jacobite pedigree, he also distanced himself from any future Jacobite activism. Finally, he stated his desire that the Prince should read his recently published theological work - presumably his recent apologetic, The Sincere Christian. At this time, it was known that Charles’ behaviour had taken a turn for the worse, frequently lapsing into bouts of alcoholism and rage.Footnote 52 Furthermore, he had also temporarily conformed (or apostatized) to the Church of England during an incognito visit to London in 1750. While it is impossible to say how much Hay knew about Charles’ personal mishaps, Hay’s letter, especially his interest in having the Prince read The Sincere Christian, can be considered as a kind of pastoral measure, not an expression of militant Jacobitism. Hay was not alone in maintaining an emotional attachment to the Stuarts while professing sincere loyalty to George III. Samuel Johnson, who often described himself as Jacobite, called George III ‘the best king since James II’.Footnote 53 Indeed, George III himself saw no harm in granting pensions to former Jacobites such as Johnson and Shebbeare; the latter had been imprisoned for seditious libel against the Hanoverians during George II’s reign.Footnote 54 In addition to George III’s political inclusiveness, many Jacobites also admired his personal religiosity, which he publicly professed from the very beginning of his reign, notably astonishing the attendants of his coronation by pulling off his crown as a gesture of humility before receiving Holy Communion.Footnote 55 No action could have stood in starker contrast to the occasional conformity of the early Hanoverians.
A consistent theme of Hay’s political theology was submission to civil power. The failure of Jacobitism, combined with the willingness of George III and his ministry, after extensive consideration, to enact Catholic relief, convinced Hay that the Hanoverian Dynasty had achieved a sort of heavenly mandate.Footnote 56 During the reign of George III, enforcement of the penal laws fell dramatically, and the North ministry consistently sought a cooperative relationship with Catholics.Footnote 57 Nonetheless, Hay understood the inherent Jacobitism of the older generation of Scottish Catholic clergy, and resolved to follow a gradual programme to increase their attachment to the Hanoverian state. One way to accomplish this was through participation in the public fasts proclaimed by the King during the American Revolution. The general fasts occurred on a roughly annual basis from the beginning of the conflict, and received overwhelming support from Church of England and Church of Scotland clergy.Footnote 58 In 1780, Hay circulated the instructions for the fast day in an ad clerum requiring priests to hold public, penitential prayers on the appointed fast day, and preach a sermon about loyalty, emphasizing the individual’s obligation to go beyond simply wishing his country well in a secular sense: ‘but also as the holy scriptures expressly command to make Supplications, prayers & Intercessions for Kings & for all that are in high stations that we may lead a quite & peaceable life under them 1.Tim. II.’Footnote 59 Hay’s draft also included a mandatory prayer for ‘Our Sovereign King, the Queen & all the Royal family with all our Civil Magistrates’. Noticeably, Hay excluded the names of George III and Queen Charlotte. Hay sent the ad clerum to a priest under his charge, requesting his thoughts on the wording of the prayer and explaining that he had found amongst the mission’s clergy a ‘very general approbation of the proposal of praying for the king’ and so resolved to compose it in such a way that ‘it should give no handle of offense to anybody’.Footnote 60 Clearly, while Hay was eager to prove that the political loyalty of the Catholic community lay with the government, rather than the American rebels, he understood that there was still anti-Hanoverian sentiment amongst parochial clergy, who, like himself, grew up with a strong attachment to the Stuarts. The difficulty that Hay faced concerning Catholic participation in the general fasts shows that the reconciliation between Scottish Catholics and the British state was by no means assured. While Clement XIII’s refusal to recognise ‘Charles III’ in 1766 closed the door on Stuart restoration from the Church’s perspective, some Catholics simply ignored Clement’s will and regarded Charles as their de jure monarch. In fact, the rectors of the English College, Scots College and the Irish Franciscan and Dominican houses in Rome were expelled by the pontiff after those communities celebrated Charles ‘accession’ with a Te Deum and an alleged coronation.Footnote 61 Such actions demonstrate the attachment of some to the Stuart Dynasty, or, at the very least, their aversion to the Hanoverian. In Scotland, it would take the concerted efforts of the Vicars Apostolic and the threat of republican upheaval to fully and permanently convince the Catholic community to rally around George III in order to safeguard the very institution of monarchy, and Christianity itself.
Relief, riots and public relations
When Hay took over the Lowland Vicariate and subsequently became the public face of Scottish Catholicism, he began to more publicly express the loyalist tendencies that he had shared primarily amongst his fellow clergy. In early February 1779, the fallout from the (English) Papists Act of 1778 reached its climax. While the Act itself passed both Houses of Parliament virtually unopposed, rioting ensued quickly in Scotland even though the English legislation did not apply north of the border. From the outset, it was clear that Scottish Catholics would require separate legislation from the English Act, since the penal legislation passed under King William was instituted separately for England and Scotland. The General Assembly of Church of Scotland, with its dominant Moderate Party, passed resolutions in favour of Catholic relief, giving Hay and his colleagues every reason to be hopeful that legislation for Scotland would soon follow. However, elite Protestant attitudes differed from popular ones, and conflagration ensued in Edinburgh where a great deal of Catholic property was destroyed, including Hay’s own house.Footnote 62
As soon as the riots subsided, Hay set off for London, where he stayed at Edmund Burke’s residence while lobbying Parliament for compensation on behalf of the Catholic community. The first meeting between Burke and Hay probably occurred in late March or early April 1778, when Hay accompanied Lord Linton, eldest son of Earl of Traquair to London for the presentation of a Catholic loyal address signed by ten English Catholic Peers and two hundred prominent commoners and men of property, with Linton and the landowner George Maxwell being the only two Scottish signatories.Footnote 63 This foray into national politics, small though it may have been, represents Hay’s earliest efforts to publicly affirm the Catholic shift away from Jacobitism and forge relationships with sympathetic national political figures like Burke. In keeping with his lifelong support for the civil rights of the Catholic community in Britain and Ireland, Burke himself drafted the loyal address which required ‘very few alterations’ from the Catholic laymen.Footnote 64 The earliest mention of Hay in Burke’s correspondence is found in his letter to James Boswell on 1 March 1779, in which Burke expressed his disappointment in the Edinburgh rioters and dryly remarked that he hoped ‘a man might be allowed to say his prayers in Latin without any gross violation of the native, inherent, essential privileges and immunities of the broad Scotch’, and went on to say ‘I cannot conceive that Bishop Hay is so dreadful a person as Julius Agricola’.Footnote 65
Although Hay’s political disposition was based in a fundamentally different tradition than that of Burke, the two men quickly became personal friends during Hay’s 1779 stay in London. Upon his return to Edinburgh, Hay wrote to Burke thanking him for his hospitality and advocacy, telling Burke that he had ‘made an impression upon My heart which it is impossible for me to express in words, but which no length of time shall ever be able to obliterate’.Footnote 66 Not long after Hay’s visit, the 1780 Gordon riots engulfed London, giving Burke a first-hand experience of what Hay had witnessed in Edinburgh, thus furthering the common understanding between the two men. Indeed, despite his status as a leading member of the Opposition, Burke worked closely with the North Ministry to craft the government’s response to the rioters whom he decried in parliament as “deluded fanatics”.Footnote 67
While Lord George Gordon is well known for his instigation of the 1780 Gordon Riots in London, historians have granted almost no attention to his Scottish equivalent, William Abernathy Drummond, who was the single largest instigator of the anti-Catholic riots that affected Edinburgh and Glasgow in January and February of 1779. Surprisingly, Drummond was not a Presbyterian, but rather a nonjuring priest of the Scottish Episcopal Church, which itself was subject to penal laws.Footnote 68 As Hay explained to Geddes:
Altho’ the passing of the act for the mitigation of the penal laws last session seemed to give universal satisfaction to the nation, the non-jurants were vexed to the heart at it & could not bear expressing themselves in the most virulent manner about it. Among others my friend Dr. Abernathy was particularly violent & setting himself to rummage some old books in the advocates library, he thought he found sufficient Evidence in them to prove that we are authorized by our Religion to break faith with heretics, to lie, betray & even murder them when the supposed good of the Church requires it.Footnote 69
The publication of Drummond’s pamphlet by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) had enormous consequences for the way that lower and working class Protestants across Scotland viewed Catholic relief.Footnote 70 Drummond initially challenged Hay to an in-person debate, but Hay declined, preferring to answer Drummond with a publication of his own. This situation presented a valuable opportunity for Hay to publicly combine loyalist politics with Catholic apologetics. Hay’s pamphlet, An answer to Mr. W. A. D.'s letter to G. H, emphasized Catholic loyalty and lamented the fact that the penal laws made two million British Catholics legally unable to serve their country. However, Hay also publicly acknowledged that ‘great numbers, both in the last war and at present, entered the public service, and ventured their lives for her [Britain’s] defence against the common enemy.’Footnote 71 One part of the tract that shows the influence of Hay’s Jacobite background is his criticism of the government’s decision to rely upon German mercenaries, rather than prioritizing the service of British Catholics who, ‘saw with reluctant shame and indignation the mercenary arms of foreigners employed in defence of the constitution for which they were ready to die’.Footnote 72
Next, Hay directly addressed the content of Drummond’s pamphlet, calling it ‘a confused medley of different and disparate things, huddled together without distinction and interspersed with bold assertions, unconnected consequences, and repeated boastings of victory.’Footnote 73 The propriety of addressing Drummond in such terms is debatable. However, Hay’s papers suggest his belief that a swift rebuttal of Drummond’s pamphlet was necessary. He informed Geddes that Drummond’s publication had had immediate effects, including within elements of the Kirk, particularly the synods of Glasgow and Ayr, which quickly created parliamentary petitions against Catholic relief and sent delegations to the Lord Advocate.Footnote 74
Hay’s response was strongest in addressing Drummond’s theological claims. Indeed, he sufficiently proved that Drummond’s hasty research was misguided in large part, and even intentionally false at times, such as his excessive reliance on sources from an obscure Spanish lawyer, whom Drummond had erroneously referred to as a ‘Doctor’ and an ‘eminent divine’ of the Catholic Church.Footnote 75 The most important part of the theological dispute was Drummond’s accusation that the Catholic Church allowed its members to break faith with heretics (especially heretical rulers) and even murder them. Hay refuted the accusations by discrediting many of Drummond’s sources, exposing the dishonesty of his Latin translations and arguing that Catholics were required to keep faith with heretics, and could only retract an oath or promise when the promise itself seeks an end that is inherently unchristian.Footnote 76 At a time when the British government was considering whether Catholics could be relied upon as good citizens, this was an important distinction to make. Hay also rejected Drummond’s claim that Catholics sought to exert religious authority over the Protestant majority. Rather, Hay emphasized the passivity of the Catholic community, arguing that when a new religion displaces Catholicism in any given country, the Church’s laws against heresy are no longer applicable there, and Catholics ‘by their principles, in order to restore religion, are obliged to return to preaching and suffering.’Footnote 77
Such sentiment is consistent with Hay’s Jacobite background: most Catholic Jacobites were clear that reestablishment of Catholicism was not part of their political programme. An example of this approach is found in the final testament of Donald MacDonald of Tir na Dris, created before his 1746 execution. The testament states that he had ‘no view to establishing that Church or religion’, but rather took part in the rebellion because of his ‘allegiance to our only rightful, lawful and native sovereign, due to him had he been a heathen, Mahommedan or even a Quaker’.Footnote 78
Hay’s loyalist advocacy and Catholic apologetics during the American Revolution were, in many ways, a dry run for the even more important public role that he would play during the French Revolution. When Hay took over as Vicar Apostolic, he faced considerable challenges as an administrator and as a political figure. He confronted these challenges by engaging with the state and building relationships with public figures such as Dalrymple, Dundas, and Burke. Meanwhile, he continually asked Scotland’s Catholics to passively submit themselves to the state and delegate their concerns to the Vicars Apostolic. Hay’s strong emphasis on absolute submission to the state and his opposition to revolutionary politics put him on track for a cooperative relationship with the government when the French Revolution had important consequences for Scotland’s Catholic community.
Hay in the Age of the French Revolution
Hay was an instinctive critic of the French Revolution. Writing to a priest under his charge in November 1789, he condemned the Revolution in some of the strongest terms imaginable:
The seditious disposition of people in varying parts of Europe & the fatal effects they occasion to many innocent well meaning people are to be sure very deplorable, & make me still more & more inclined to favour honest Pastorini’sFootnote 79 interpretation of the Apoc: and to think that preparation is making for the last Period of time.Footnote 80
Hay wrote this letter roughly four months after the fall of the Bastille, and many prominent Britons (especially Opposition Whigs) still regarded the events as favourable.Footnote 81 Indeed, only one month prior, Edmund Burke had expressed a much milder approbation to Pierre-Samuel du Pont, telling him ‘I must delay my congratulations on your acquisition of liberty. You may have made a revolution, but not a reformation. You may have subverted monarchy, but not recovered freedom.’Footnote 82 If Burke sought to muster mainstream, Protestant forces against the Revolution, Hay was in an ideal position to lead an explicitly Catholic campaign against it, and thus help to avert the growth of radicalism in Scotland. Furthermore, the public loyalism that he had displayed decades earlier during the American Revolution had prepared him well for a new decade of counterrevolutionary activity. Importantly, his opposition to the American Revolution meant that he could not be accused of inconsistency, a charge which Burke had to rebut on many occasions during the 1790s.Footnote 83 Lastly, and perhaps most significantly of all, Hay possessed a genuine and aggressively counterrevolutionary ideology, based upon old principles of passive obedience and non-resistance, which he utilized to its full potential throughout the decade.
In 1794, Hay visited Burke again in London, writing to Geddes: ‘Yesterday I went to see my good friend Mr. Burke & his Lady, where I was received with the most cordial affection indeed by both, & I shall see him again, God willing, next week.’Footnote 84 Hay and other figures in the Catholic hierarchy did not merely view Burke as a helpful advocate for Catholic relief, but also as a valuable political thinker. John Geddes may have been the first Vicar Apostolic to read Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). One month after its publication, Geddes wrote that ‘Mr. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France have been well received and 15,000 copies have been sold in a few Weeks. There are Antagonists; but I think his book will do much good in the present crisis.’Footnote 85 Later, during Christmas 1790, Hay wrote to Geddes, soliciting a copy of Reflections.Footnote 86 After acquiring a copy, it was not until March that he wrote Geddes again on the matter, with several rather qualified thoughts about Burke’s tract and the French situation in general:
As I was curious to know Mr. Burkes sentiments about the affairs of France, I have been perusing his work. I see he is somewhat apprehensive least the contagion should cross the Channel, & on that Account, I have sometimes thought he may have put things in as strong a light as they could bear; but on supposing the facts (many of which I was a stranger to, nor can I doubt of their truth coming from such a person & in so public a manner) & considering his reasoning upon them, I cannot help being deeply affected with the state of that people & consider their misery as one of the heaviest Judgements that We have heard sent upon a nation.Footnote 87
Hay went on to express concerns over the future of the Scots College Paris. He and other Scottish Vicars Apostolic had been at odds with the college for some time, particularly concerning their role in the college administration.Footnote 88 The French Revolution increased Hay’s concerns about the Scots College and led him to believe that the French authorities would fill the school with faculty who promote ‘the ruin of all Religion’.Footnote 89 In 1791, Hay’s counterrevolutionary stance was bolstered by Rome when the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Declaration of the Rights of Man were condemned by Pope Pius VI. By 1792, the September Massacres saw three bishops and 220 priests martyred along with countless lay men and women, thus confirming the anti-clericalism of the revolutionaries, and leaving no room for political ambiguity on the part of the Vicars Apostolic. Indeed, the sad fate of French Catholicism evoked massive sympathy in Britain, which became home to as many as 7,000 exiled French priests who crossed the channel.Footnote 90 Witnessing the scene in London in late August 1793, Abbé Paul MacPherson, Scots agent in Rome, remarked of the émigré priests: ‘not only is no insult offered to them, but everyone of every rank pays them the greatest attention’.Footnote 91
In April 1793, Henry, Lord Dundas successfully introduced and passed a relief bill for Scottish Catholics, thus extending the relief that had been granted to English and Irish Catholics. This legislation included not only the extremely mild terms of the 1778 English Catholic relief, but also the much more substantial measures passed in 1791. The legislation of that year legalized the hearing and saying of Mass, membership of the priesthood and diaconate, the establishment of Catholic schools and allowed Catholic admission into the legal professions and the lower ranks of the military. One month later, Hay and Geddes presented themselves to the Sheriff-Substitute of Midlothian and took the Oath, Abjuration and Declaration required by the new law.Footnote 92 Shortly thereafter, Hay and the other Vicars Apostolic of Scotland released a pastoral letter celebrating the new law and exhorting Catholics to firm obedience to the state. The document began by acknowledging the damage done to the Catholic community by the penal laws, but quickly changed tack, celebrating the relief legislation and the end of the most oppressive statutes:
These times, blessed be God! are now no more: Our humane Legislators, after being fully satisfied as to the innocence of our tenets, and the purity of our moral Doctrine, our attachment to Government, and our love to the happy Constitution of our country, have, with the greatest unanimity and approbation of both Houses of Parliament, repealed the penal laws that stood against us.Footnote 93
Hay and the other Vicars Apostolic also exhorted Catholics to reciprocate by ‘giving every proof of our gratitude and loyalty towards our gracious Sovereign, the best of Kings’.Footnote 94 The pastoral also instructed all Catholics to take the loyalty oath, which the Bishops stated ‘does not in the smallest degree interfere with, or affect any article of our religious principles’.Footnote 95 The Vicars Apostolic owed the acceptability of the oath to Samuel Horsley, Lord Bishop of St. Asaph, who persuaded the Lords to substitute inoffensive language in a section of the proposed oath that labelled certain Catholic beliefs (some genuine, and some fictional) as ‘impious, unchristian and damnable’.Footnote 96 Horsley’s high church advocacy for Catholics was not only a matter of theological affinity, but also a form of reciprocity for the past decades of Catholic loyalty.Footnote 97 Hay and the other Bishops concluded the pastoral by encouraging Catholics to pray regularly for the King, observe all laws, and act in moderation, while bearing in mind that popular prejudices still existed against Catholics, and stressing that ‘it is only by our Christian demeanour that their prejudices will be removed.’Footnote 98
From that point onward, Hay and the other Vicars Apostolic released a steady stream of pastoral letters attacking the French Revolution and promoting the loyalist cause. These letters were not mere quid pro quos. Rather, they were an accurate reflection of the ideological tendencies that Hay and the other Vicars Apostolic had consistently expressed for decades. In fact, in January 1793, four months before Catholic relief was extended to Scotland, Hay sent Geddes a draft pastoral letter which is the most detailed expression of political theology amongst his personal papers. In the first part of the letter, Hay argued not only that rebellion is forbidden by Scripture, but that it is repudiated by history and the fragility of human nature itself:
The history of all ages evidently shows the fatal & pernicious effects of popular seditions against lawful authority; and they have been no where more deplorable & apparent, than in the dreadful havock they have already made, and God only knows where they are as yet to end, in a neighbouring nation: A nation, formerly renowned for Religion, virtue and politeness, but at present, through the unsearchable Judgement of God, given up as a prey to infidelity, crimes and the and the most unheard of barbarity: Such have been the fatal consequences of the insidious acts of wicked and designing men, in poisoning the minds of the people with discontent & rancour against their lawful Governors, and exciting them to sedition and Rebellion from the chimerical Ideas of a Liberty & Equality, which is altogether inconsistent with the present weak & imperfect state of human nature.Footnote 99
Of equal importance to Hay’s practical criticisms of revolution was his belief in passive obedience and non-resistance. Scriptural support quoted directly by Hay included Romans 13:1 which extols civil obedience, ‘for there is no power but from God, & those that are, are ordained of God’, as well as Wisdom 6:2, which speaks to rulers themselves, calling upon them to ‘Hear therefore, ye Kings & understand, learn ye that are judges of the ends of the earth, give ear, ye that rule the people, for power is given you by the Lord, & strength from the Most High’. Likewise, as he had done in his earlier pastorals and ad clerums during the American Revolution, Hay reiterated his emphasis on the duty of Christians to pray for kings and all persons in positions of authority (1 Timothy 2:1).Footnote 100
After establishing the duties that Christians owed to their rulers, Hay confronted the subject of rights. While he rejected ‘the pretended Rights of Man’, he did enumerate five natural rights which he did believe to exist:
Thus man has received from God a natural right, (1) To the preservation of his person and children, when he, or they, do not forfeit that right by crimes (2) To his liberty, whether bodily, natural, civil, or Christian: that is, that every innocent man has a natural right to be preserved from bodily confinement, and to act one way or another as he chooses in every thing, which is neither commanded nor forbidden by any law, natural, civil or divine. (3) To his good name & reputation, when he does not voluntarily throw it away by a publick bad behaviour. (4) To employ himself in such innocent labours as he pleases, in order to provide the necessaries & comforts of life, for himself & family (5.) To the free & undisturbed use of his lawfull property, whether acquired by inheritance, donation or industry. These are all natural rights of Man, which every one is conscious of from his own feelings; and these are all abundantly secured to him by the civil laws of every well ordered State to which he belongs and perhaps nowhere more effectually than in the constitution of our own Country.Footnote 101
Here, the influence of Burke’s Reflections is evident, as Burke enumerated a very similar list of natural rights, under which men:
have a right to do justice, as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in public function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their industry and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour.Footnote 102
In the next section of the letter, Hay directed his attention to several of the most heterodox Enlightenment philosophers, to show that Catholicism is incompatible with the ideological tradition that produced Jacobinism. Hay repeatedly cited Baron d’Holbach’s Systems of Nature, which denied the existence a priori knowledge, free will, and God Himself. Hay also quoted Rosseau’s Discourse on Inequality to contrast the Rousseauian state of nature against the orthodox Christian view of society and civil order. While Hay clearly engaged with radical philosophical texts, he believed that the mass of Christian people should oppose radical ideas by shunning them and their authors, thus rejecting them passively, instead of actively engaging with them. Therefore, he urged Catholics to ‘Have no fellowship with such unfruitfull works of darkness; Fly from that Babylon of confusion, in which they would involve you and dread the avenging Justice of Almighty God’.Footnote 103
This approach clearly highlights Hay’s Jacobite background. Indeed, a fundamental component of Catholic and nonjuring Anglican political theology was the basic conviction that faithful Christians should avoid contact with harmful ideas and thinkers. For example, in 1734, the Jacobite antiquarian and nonjuror, Thomas Hearne, wrote that he avoided attending a class on John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding while at Oxford, because he considered Locke to be ‘a man of very bad principles’.Footnote 104 Hay was not the only religious leader who displayed a very similar disposition during the 1790s. In 1791, Charles Inglis, the first Anglican Bishop of Nova Scotia, extolled his congregation to avoid all contact with ‘those who, either from bad principles, ambition, a restless temper, or discontent, are given to change—would disturb the public tranquillity, promote sedition, and subvert the order of society.’Footnote 105 Ingis was an outspoken loyalist and missionary priest of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) during the American Revolution, and his previous four generations of ancestors had been nonjuring priests of the Scottish Episcopal Church in which Hay was raised.Footnote 106 Clearly, some counterrevolutionary figures of the 1790s drew heavily from the tradition of religious Jacobitism, both in its Catholic and Anglican forms. Indeed, the death of militant Jacobitism, combined with the threat of revolutionary republicanism, breathed new life into old ideas, thus allowing people like Hay to deploy the full force of their ideology in a way that endeared them and their faith communities to the establishment. Most importantly, the counterrevolutionary writings of Hay and other religious leaders remind us that the principles of passive obedience and non-resistance achieved longevity because they were religious principles, rooted in the individual’s free submission to Christ and His Church. It was only upon this foundation that counterrevolutionaries could comfortably apply them in defence of the state.
The pastoral discussed above is held in draft form at the SCA, written in Hay’s hand. While the manuscript includes an attached letter to Geddes, in which Hay gives him permission to redact it and asks him to publish 500 copies at Hay’s expense, there is no evidence that the letter was published, and Stothert’s 1875 biography of Hay explicitly claims that it was not.Footnote 107 The same correspondence confirms that Geddes was also highly engaged in counterrevolutionary politics, and that it was he who initially suggested the publication of such a pastoral. In the event of its publication, Hay requested Geddes to send copies of the pastoral to his ‘acquaintances in high stations & particularly one as from me to Mr. Burk[e].’Footnote 108 Hay’s desire to circulate the pastoral among important political figures shows how confident he was in the acceptability of his views, regardless of their origins in Jacobite discourse. Indeed, the 1790s saw many high-profile Anglicans revive religious arguments against revolution, thus carefully reconciling Jacobite political theology to the loyalist movement. In A Letter to John Bull, Esq, William Jones of Nayland acknowledged that many people considered religious arguments against revolution to be inconsistent with the legacy of 1688. However, Nayland reminded the reader that ‘Mr. Burke hath very able and very seasonably taught us, that the Revolution of that time did not alter the hereditary government of this kingdom, but left laws and doctrines as sacred as they were before.’Footnote 109 While many Anglicans like Nayland readily accepted Burke’s justification of the 1688, it is unknown what Hay himself made of Burke’s argument concerning that Revolution. However, one can see how he directly incorporated some of Burke’s arguments, including his enumeration of several qualified natural rights. Indeed, it is possible that Hay read the Reflections through his own political lens, thus ironically agreeing with Charles James Fox that Burke’s work favoured ‘Tory principles’.Footnote 110
While Hay’s 1793 pastoral seems not to have been printed, he published similar pastorals throughout the 1790s. The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was a crisis for British Catholicism and threatened to undermine the loyalist record that Hay and other Vicars Apostolic had established across their careers. In Ireland as in Scotland, the Church leadership proved staunchly loyal and anti-radical. Like Hay, Archbishop John Troy of Dublin saw political radicalism as objectively unchristian and an obstacle to Catholic Emancipation. During his episcopacy of 1786-1823, Troy excommunicated the Rightboys, the Defenders, and the United Irishmen and forcefully opposed the French Revolution, warning Catholics not to ‘approach the rotten tree of French liberty if you wish to live’.Footnote 111 Nonetheless, the class consciousness and strong anti-British sentiment of Ireland’s labouring Catholic poor often overruled their religious obligations, and large numbers of Catholic laity and a significant minority of priests joined or supported the United Irishmen, whose leadership was mostly Anglican and Presbyterian.Footnote 112
While the Catholic population of Scotland was smaller and evidently less susceptible to political radicalism, Hay continued his loyalist advocacy throughout the Irish rebellion. The primary goal of Hay’s 1798 pastoral, like his 1793 draft, was to show the incompatibility of Catholicism and Jacobinism, reminding his flock of ‘the antichristian doctrines with which the books of the Jacobins, and of all their infidel associates, are filled’.Footnote 113 In addition to citing some of the same Scriptural sources used in his earlier letter, including Peter and Paul’s epistles on civil obedience, Hay likened Jacobins to the ‘false teachers’ who shall ‘bring upon themselves swift destruction 2 Pet. ii. I.’, thus giving the letter a distinctly apocalyptic tone.Footnote 114 Hay’s fierce opposition to the 1798 Rebellion served to assuage any questions about the loyalty of Scotland’s Catholic community. Indeed, the government did not hesitate to deploy the all-Catholic Glengarry Fencibles to Ireland that year.Footnote 115
The year 1798 was a time of great tribulation for the Church in Europe. After Bonaparte’s proclamation of the Roman Republic on 10 February, Pope Pius VI refused to renounce his temporal power and was taken captive by French forces. In May, Hay, Geddes and John Chisholm, Vicar Apostolic of Scotland’s Highland District, released a pastoral letter lamenting the capture of the Pontiff, and asking the laity to pray for his safety. Hay, Geddes and Chisholm also used this opportunity to explicitly associate Catholic support for Pius with patriotic allegiance to ‘the sacred Person and Government of our gracious Sovereign, King George III’, and the common, Christian struggle against the forces of revolution, both foreign and domestic.Footnote 116
Clearly, Hay and the other Vicars Apostolic of Scotland were active participants in the loyalist movement of the 1790s, thus showing that loyalism was a multi-confessional movement. From the 1770s onward, the Catholic hierarchy in Britain slowly became more comfortable in their capacity as public figures. While many critics of the French Revolution such as Burke, opposed it from a Whiggish perspective, and made a point of contrasting it with the Glorious Revolution, Hay relied upon straightforward religious principles of passive obedience and non-resistance, the same doctrines that he held to earlier in his life as a Jacobite. While such principles had formerly marginalized Catholics, and indeed many Anglicans, the transformation of the European political scene allowed clerics like Hay to publicly proclaim their political theology in a way that defended the rights of all monarchs. To this end, Hay made ample use of Scripture that required submission to kings and rulers, regardless of country or dynasty. The pastoral letters from which this article has drawn are valuable pieces of evidence affirming the full participation of the Catholic Church in the political culture of 1790s Britain and are equally important in affirming the longevity of basic Jacobite principles, long after the Stuarts became politically irrelevant. One also sees that Hay was adept at incorporating the views of other counterrevolutionaries such as Burke when those ideas were compatible with his own religiously informed thoughts on government and civil society.
Conclusions: Bishop Hay and the Development of Catholic Loyalism
The life of George Hay encompassed a period that was vital for the reintegration of Catholicism into British society. In his episcopal career, Hay successfully transitioned from the militant Jacobitism of his youth, into the role of a committed loyalist. On the surface, such a transition may resemble a significant ideological departure. However, this article has shown that there was as much continuity as change involved in this process.
Ascending to the Apostolic Vicariate during the height of the American Revolution, Hay convinced the Scottish Catholic Church to recognize George III as rightful sovereign, thus formally beginning the Church’s involvement in loyalist politics. During the American and French Revolutions, Hay’s correspondence, pastoral letters, and ad clerums show his instinctive opposition to revolution. Importantly, this counterrevolutionary disposition was rooted in the same political theology that Hay had subscribed to as a Jacobite. To this end, the principles of passive obedience and non-resistance were crucial features of his political and religious thought, and his political writings repeatedly drew from Scripture to show the incompatibility of Catholicism and political radicalism.
Hay’s political activities accelerated during the 1790s, when many orthodox Christian critics of the French Revolution confidently deployed the full force of their counterrevolutionary doctrines. The basic conviction of Hay and other Christians of Jacobite extraction was that God forbade people to alter their governments. While this principle was considered a threat to the British state, and the Protestant Succession in the wake of the Glorious Revolution and the several Jacobite risings that occurred between 1689 and 1745, the late eighteenth century was preoccupied not by matters of dynastic succession, but by a fundamental choice between monarchy and republicanism. In this environment, the formerly threatening doctrines of Jacobitism became some of the greatest ideological weapons available to the establishment. Indeed, the ability of Hay and the British Catholic hierarchy to ably express these counterrevolutionary doctrines endeared them to the state.
As a proponent of strong episcopacy, Hay consistently emphasized the passivity of the Catholic laity on political and religious issues. On one level, this lends some credibility to the common view of Catholic life in late Georgian Britain as detached from political culture. However, while Hay encouraged the laity to embrace submissive and passive citizenship, the leadership of the Church was heavily involved in political discourse and was actively engaged with some of the most important statesmen and intellectuals of the age, including Edmund Burke.
Indeed, while Hay consistently asked Catholics to delegate their political concerns to him and the other Vicars Apostolic, the laity still played an important role in the Church’s transition from Jacobitism to loyalism. Without cooperation from the vast numbers of laity who entered military service, participated in general fasts, and overwhelmingly rejected revolutionary ideology, the political theology of Hay and the Vicars Apostolic would have been empty words. While the Catholic contribution to counterrevolutionary politics did not extirpate sectarian tensions, it did foster significant cooperation between Catholicism and Britain’s religious establishment. I conclude with Samuel Horsley’s 1791 parliamentary speech in favour of Catholic relief, which encapsulates this imperfect, yet important reconciliation:
Emancipated from the prejudices which once carried them away, the Roman Catholics are led by the genuine principles of their religion to inoffensive conduct, to dutiful submission and cordial loyalty. My Lords, the Roman Catholics better understand than the thing seems to be understood by many of those who call themselves our Protestant brethren, in what plain characters the injunction of the unreserved submission of the individual to the government under which he is born is written in the divine law of the gospel.Footnote 117
While nineteenth century Catholic Emancipation would entail distinctly different political challenges, significant progress towards fundamental Catholic relief was achieved by the leadership of Britain’s Vicars Apostolic, perhaps most importantly by one of Scotland’s most constructive Jacobites, Bishop George Hay.
