Four Atlantic Kings (For Ana Maestro)

Did Thomas Jefferson ever meet England’s King George III? It would seem not. In 1786, he visited Buckingham House and stayed overnight. Yes, it was called a “house” in those days. As a gardener and a farmer, the American Founder appears to have wanted to see Buckinghamshire’s famous Stowe Gardens. But to leave his visit at that is to swerve away from the two major issues of the Revolutionary period. A glance at Jefferson’s original version of the Declaration of Independence, written ten years prior, reveals the political chasm that separated Jefferson from his former king. It also signals Jefferson’s attempt to blame George III for the nefarious institution of slavery. Then again, the “Architect of Democracy” owned slaves himself. These worked at his estates at Monticello, Poplar Forest, and elsewhere, and he could never bring himself to free them all as his own principles demanded of him. When Jefferson visited Buckingham House, then, he was both bidding farewell to a king and reapproaching his own deepest contradiction. He was also probably lucky to come away from that visit without losing his head.

Losing one’s head is a fate shared by revolutionaries and kings alike.

We must view the events in England and Virginia c.1650—which presaged the American and French revolutions over a hundred years later—in the light of what historians like Eric Hobsbawm, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Geoffrey Parker have called “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth-Century.” And this crisis extended well beyond England, France, and the future United States of America.

We know all too well what happened to Louis XVI of France on the morning of 21 January 1793 in the Place de la Revolution in Paris. Unlike George III, the King of France wasn’t separated from his empire’s rebels by the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, his head was removed for him by a man who had frequented the halls of his palace. Charles-Henri Sanson, the High Executioner of the first French Republic, had been the royal executioner under Louis XVI. Thus, the French monarchy literally fell into the hands of its own executioner. And this time no axe, sword, or gibbet. The guillotine made the ceremony almost effortless. Of course, any list of the specific political agents of Louis XVI’s demise would be headed by Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre delivered a series of speeches in the final months of 1792, which sealed the King’s fate.

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In his magnum opus, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785)—which he first published in French while serving as an American diplomat in Paris—Jefferson locates the origins of American constitutionalism in a particular document signed in the spring of 1651. The agreement came after negotiations between the governor and burgesses of Virginia, on one side, and, on the other, the men sent by Oliver Cromwell and the English Parliament to demand the colony’s loyalty near the end of the English Civil War (1642–51). Here is the relevant passage from “Query XIII” of the Notes on the State of Virginia:

And in 1650 the Parliament, considering itself as standing in the place of their deposed King, and as having succeeded to all his powers, without as well as within the realm, began to assume a right over the colonies, passing an act for inhibiting their trade with foreign nations. This succession to the exercise of the kingly authority gave the first color for parliamentary interference with the colonies, and produced that fatal precedent which they continued to follow after they had retired, in other respects, within their proper functions. When this colony, therefore, which still maintained its opposition to Cromwell and the Parliament, was induced in 1651 to lay down their arms, they previously secured their most essential rights, by a solemn convention, which having never seen in print, I will here insert literally from the records.

Jefferson proceeds to record in print for the first time a set of articles agreed to by the representatives of each side on 12 March 1651 at “James Citie” (aka “Jamestown”). In sum, rights in exchange for loyalty and the surrender of arms. But did anyone really think that the Virginians would not obtain new weapons? For that matter, did anyone think that at some point in the future, the colonists wouldn’t resist Parliament again or that Parliament wouldn’t again violate the rights of her colonists? In the minds of Jefferson and others, the door to the slippery slope of independence was now ajar.

This is to observe that Jefferson grasped the historical parallels, not to say the ironies, implied by those two rebellions against kings in 1642 and 1776. It was Cromwell, after all, who ordered the execution of James I of England on 30 January 1649 outside the Banqueting House on Whitehall, marking the victory of the antiroyalist Roundheads over the monarchist Cavaliers. Visitors to Jefferson’s home at Monticello will see Cromwell’s death mask among the curious collection of books, paintings, artifacts, and stuffed animals acquired by the Founder. If I recall, it’s located in the northern wing of the house, not far from a stuffed mockingbird. That mask buttresses the circle Jefferson drew around the conflicts of 1649–51 in his review of American constitutionalism in “Query XIII.”

We must view the events in England and Virginia c.1650—which presaged the American and French revolutions over a hundred years later—in the light of what historians like Eric Hobsbawm, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Geoffrey Parker have called “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth-Century.” And this crisis extended well beyond England, France, and the future United States of America.

The collapse of the Iberian Union in 1640 and the fall of Beijing to Qing forces in 1644 exhibit its truly global reach.

Two years prior to the English Civil War—and nearly a century and a half before the War of American Independence and the French Revolution—Cataluña and Portugal rebelled against the regime of Philip IV and his favorite minister, Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimentel, the Count-Duke of Olivares. In June 1640, Olivares sent Juan de Palafox y Mendoza to Mexico, where he served as the Bishop of Puebla. Palafox subsequently maneuvered himself ever so briefly into both the positions of Viceroy and Archbishop of Mexico, known at the time as New Spain. Palafox aligned himself with a faction of the criollo elites who wanted lower taxes, access to indigenous labor, and more political power in contrast to the designs of Olivares and his other agents in Mexico. The criollos instinctively appealed to Philip IV and Palafox in their struggle against two viceroys, the Duke of Escalona and the Count of Salvatierra. Palafox responded by pushing back against Escalona and Salvatierra. But in the end, his vision of a more independent Mexico was too radical for his day; the Spanish establishment reigned in the reformer and his allies.

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After his program for decentralization of power in Mexico failed, Palafox was recalled to Spain by Philip IV and his councilors in 1649. Palafox was being punished, but he was now free in one important respect. In 1643, six years before recalling Palafox, Philip IV had accepted the resignation of the Count-Duke of Olivares, the man who was Palafox’s most immediate superior. Palafox could now speak his mind to the only person he considered superior to himself. Upon emerging from his meeting with the unruly bishop of Puebla, Philip IV uttered the following words to his secretary Fernando Ruiz de Contreras: “Don Juan de Palafox has spoken to me in a way that no man has spoken to me in my entire life.” Palafox would spend the rest of his days as bishop of El Burgo de Osma in Soria, where he would put the final touches on his magnum opus, a novel called The Conquest of China (c.1654), first published in Spanish at Paris in 1670. Curiously, the novel was initially published in French. Also curiously, The Conquest of China figured among a famous set of books sent from Paris by Jefferson to his friend James Madison in 1785. The letter Jefferson attached to his shipment is today known as “Books for a Statesman,” and both books and letter arrived roughly a year and half before the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which in turn produced the United States Constitution of 1789.

There’s more to say about the coincidences and synchronicities of the evolution of the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century in England, Spain, France, America, and China.

For now, we’ve established a quadruple analogy: Cromwell was to Charles I as Palafox was to Philip IV as Jefferson was to George III as Robespierre was to Louis XVI. Analogies, of course, are not by any means equivalences. And readers are free to choose for themselves which of the interactions between these four rebellious leaders and their respective kings are preferable. But how many readers in places like Cuba, Iran, or China are still not free to make these kinds of choices? Why is that? Should we be prepared to sacrifice something to see that they are? If so, how much? And finally, how long are we prepared to wait?

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Image of Sir Anthony Van Dyck – Charles I (1600-49) – Google Art Project on Wikipedia.