Come listen to another song,
Should make your heart beat high,
Bring crimson to your forehead,
And the lustre to your eye;—
It is a song of olden time,
Of days long since gone by,
And of a Baron stout and bold
As e’er wore sword on thigh!
Like a brave old Scottish cavalier,
All of the olden time!
— William Edmondstoune Aytoun, “The Old Scottish Cavalier”
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride”
THE month of April, according to some accounts, is dedicated to the Holy Eucharist, and to others,the Holy Ghost. Either way, it is an extremely beautiful month, with the spring flowers blooming in full assurance that winter is over. The month often (although not this year) plays host to Holy Week and Easter, and so the holiest time of the year is often arguably the most beautiful.
But there is another side to the month of April, a darker side. It is also carries the anniversaries of two battles that in many ways determined the course of our present. On April 16 we find the anniversary of the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and on April 19, the linked Battles of Lexington and Concord 29 years later. Both are annually commemorated in most solemn manner. At Culloden, after a procession a service organised by the Gaelic Society of Inverness is held every year at the Memorial Cairnon the Battlefield; the dead on both sides of the conflict are commemorated. Prayers and recitations are said in English and in Scots Gaelic, after which representatives of many different groups lay wreaths. Various Clansmen lay flowers on the day at the individual memorial stones where their ancestors fell.
Given that the actions at Lexington and Concord were a bit more drawn out in time and space, so are the ceremonies honouring them. The Weekend closest to April 19 and the week preceding are filled with such activities in Boston and all the communities between the Hub City and Concord. They include one at Boston’s Old North Church, one of the major stops on the Freedom Trail, with its “lantern service,” which is said in remembrance of the signalling of Paul Revere by the church’ sexton, alerting him that “the Regulars” were crossing by water to the mainland, rather than marching all the way along the Boston Neck. Members of the Governor of Massachusetts’ mounted guard, the National Lancers, will reenact the ride of Revere and his two or three associates, warning the countryside between Boston and Concord that “the Regulars are out!” and summoning the militia. All along the so-called “Battle Road,” in Minuteman National Park, there are re-enactments and living history lesson at various historic structures, and numerous parades — the one in Boston itself being the biggest. At the end of it all geographically (if not always chronologically, depending upon the year and the weather) is the Old North Bridge at Concorditself, where “once the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard ‘round the world,” in Emerson’s once-famous words (famous when school children were still taught things).
Culloden was the end and Lexington-Concord the beginning of two myth-filled struggles. The first named ended the Jacobite Wars, which started in 1688 with the overthrow of Servant of God James II in the so-called “Glorious Revolution,” continuing with the Scottish Campaign of 1689 and the death of Bonnie Dundee, and the Williamite Wars in Ireland (1689-92). They featured abortive risings in England and Scotland in 1715, 1719, and 1745-46, culminating in the tragedy at Culloden. Although they failed of their immediate objective, thanks to such as Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, they have cast a very long shadow. Variously affecting figures such as St. John Henry Newman, Lionel Johnson, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Ralph Adams Cram, they also played a strong role in the formation of Scots, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and even a certain kind of English (as symbolised by Belloc and Chesterton) nationalism.
Lexington and Concord, on the other hand, were the opening skirmishes of a conflict that woud eventually engulf all thirteen colonies and eventually escalate into a world war — fought in Europe, the West Indies, Asia, Africa, and on the High Seas. When it ended, a new nation was created that would double in size two decades later, go on to extend from coast to coast, and eventually become the dominant superpower of the planet — at least for a while. While Culloden is a wistful glance back at what might have been, Patriots’ Day is a joyous — sometimes raucous — celebration of what is seen in retrospect as a great victory.
But in truth, the two commemorations, although seemingly so different, are actually closely connected. It is not just that the revolutionaries used the arguments of 1688 to justify their actions in 1776. It is that the forces unleashed in the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland by the Protestant Revolt worked out their logical conclusions in a whole series of conflicts, of which the Jacobite Wars and the American Revolution — or First Civil War — were separate but linked chapters. This thesis, presented rather convincingly by Kevin Phillips in The Cousins’ Wars, seems quite accurate.
When Henry VIII suppressed the monasteries and distributed their lands to his followers, he unwittingly laid the foundations for a landed oligarchy that would in time control Parliament, murder King Chares I, and seize control of all three countries in the British Isles. Oliver Cromwell, the dictator who would spearhead this effort, was the great nephew of Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief tool in destroying the abbeys. Although the Restoration of 1660 brought Charles II back to the throne, the Oligarchy was left intact, deposed James in 1688 and replaced him with William and Mary, and successfully fended off all the attempts to put the Stuarts back on their thrones. When George III attempted to regain from the oligarchs some of the powers of the Crown, he was resisted by them and the thirteen little American oligarchies in each colony. Not only did their victory at home render toothless the British Monarchy from that day to this — and so leave them and their far less able successors entirely in charge — it also created a country where Whig principles would be supreme. Even that country, however, would still retain some few of the old principles, over which — in addition to states’ rights and slavery — the Second Civil War would be fought. That ended with the complete political defeat of the South’sAristocracy, who had — rightly or wrongly — seen themselves as inheritors of the old Cavalier tradition. Beyond all of that, as Phillips points out, the opposition in the British Isles to each of these revolutionary struggles was centred in roughly the same places: the North and South of England, and the “Celtic Fringe” areas of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. That same pattern showed up in British attitudes toward the two American conflicts.
Of course, the American Revolution had effects beyond the Anglosphere: Louis XVI’s intervention in the war both ended George III’s support for Catholic Emancipation and bankrupted France. That bankruptcy in turn led to the French Revolution, Louis’ murder in 1793, and the horrors that woud drown Europe in blood until 1815. These, in turn, led to the Carlist and Miguelist Wars in Spain and Portugal, the 1848 Revolutions across Europe, German and Italian Unification, and arguably World War I, the Russian Revolution, and World War II — and so the American supremacy earlier noted.
It is also interesting to note that Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland was a direct ancestor of Louis XVI, and of both Blessed Karl (who death is date, though not feast, is April 1) and Servant of God Zita. Through his sister Elizabeth, Charles was uncle several times removed of both the hapless George III and the likewise-murdered Nicholas II of Russia — being himself the grandson of the murdered Servant of God Mary Queen of Scots. It might be said in a real sense that Bl. Karl and SG Zita were fighting for all the best of old Christian Europe — and were defeated by the forces of modernity as headed by our own Woodrow Wilson.
So this April, whether you find yourself in Scotland, Massachusetts, or any other area fought over during either the Jacobite Wars or the American Revolution — or even if you are just in a country affected by either, which is to say, all on this planet — think of those who fought and died on both sides. In a very real sense, they were our fathers, and often enough as confused as we are now about the issues involved in the conflicts presented to them. Let us pray to Bl. Karl and Zita for wisdom with which to understand what we are confronted with, courage with which to do what we must, and aid for our own Salvation, without which victory is impossible, and with which defeat cannot happen.
