“Great American Story” Part 2

“No taxation without representation!”

Every American school boy and girl learns this as the rallying cry that inaugurated the sequence of events that led to the birth of the United States of America.

In this essay, I will continue my efforts to provide a Catholic response to Hillsdale’s “Great American Story” project by presenting this protest against unjust taxation in the context of a political tradition inextricably bound up with England’s break from the Catholic Church. Further, I will emphasize how the struggle over taxation fostered a deeper struggle between the colonists and Parliament: not simply an effort to secure representation, but a fight over the interpretation of the very meaning of representation. This conflict, and the failure of the colonists and Parliament to arrive at an agreement, resembles nothing if not the earlier strife among Protestant sects, who all justified their theological positions by appeal to the Bible but could not agree on the meaning of Scripture.

To be fair, the colonial conflict of interpretation is more understandable, since the tradition debated was of much more recent vintage than Biblical Christianity. The Hillsdale historians correctly note that the link between representation and taxation has roots in the Magna Carta of 1215, through which nobles forced King John to submit to accept their veto power over royal taxation: John and subsequent English kings could impose taxes only with the consent of the nobility, a victory that did indeed distinguish the nobility of England from that of the continent. Still, the Magna Carta hardly established a continuous political tradition of “self-rule” extending from the Middle Ages to the 18th century.

The Hillsdale historians are a bit too quick to accept the colonists’ own understanding of the genealogy of the political principles they invoked to legitimize their cause. These principles and their history are, in fact, an “invented tradition,” one born out of the 17th-century struggle between Parliament and the Stuart kings who wished to transform England into an absolute monarchy. The possibility of such a showdown between king and Parliament, however, became possible only through the prior elimination of the other traditional check on royal power: the Catholic Church.

Most Catholics interested in history are well aware of England’s break from the Catholic Church under Henry VIII. Fewer Catholics understand the relationship between this religious event and the development of English national identity and the notion of the English as a uniquely “free” people. The English did not even become properly English until the generation immediately preceding Henry. Norman kings ruled England from the time of William the Conqueror’s victory over the Anglo Saxons in 1066. The language of the English court was French through most of the Middle Ages and English kings retained French noble titles until finally driven off the continent at the end of the Hundred Years War in the middle of the 15^th century. The Tudor family that emerged victorious in civil war that followed defeat on the continent stand as the first “English” monarchy in the modern sense, a sense that Tudor monarchs themselves helped to create. They created this sense of Englishness most powerfully through Henry VIII’s decision to break from the Roman Catholic Church and declare himself the supreme head of the Church of England.

What made English Protestantism English? All Protestants rejected the “tyranny” of Rome. What did the Church of England offer as an alternative? Lacking the robust theologies of Lutheranism and Calvinism and retaining much of the liturgy of the Catholic Church, Anglican Protestants came increasingly to define themselves simply in terms of liberty—first in their opposition to Rome, then to the absolute monarchies of Catholic rivals such as Spain and France. This conceit obscured the fact that Henry’s takeover of the Catholic Church was itself an act of absolutism that neutralized one of the great checks on royal power during the Middle Ages. Ironically, Henry achieved this victory over the Church only by empowering the other great check on absolutism, the nobility. Having destroyed the Church, Henry was desperate to legitimate his new regime by appealing to the remaining pillar of authority in England, Parliament. Threats and intimidation went only so far. Henry secured the support of Parliament through generous bribes, most in the form of monastic lands recently confiscated from the Catholic Church. Suitably enriched, Parliament was happy to pass the torrent of legislation deemed necessary to legitimate Henry’s revolution. This arrangement had the unintended consequence of empowering Parliament beyond anything known in the Middle Ages. Elizabeth continued this strategy, to the dismay of her Stuart successors. To shore up England’s Protestant bona fides, she granted tolerance to a dissenting sect of Calvinists, the Puritans. This group became an increasingly powerful political force in the House of Commons, which soon became a forum for criticizing high church Anglicanism as a kind of crypto Catholicism.

In the seventeenth century, Parliament’s newfound sense of its authority clashed with the Scottish Stuart Kings’ desire to extend the absolutism England had achieved in religion to Parliament itself. The Stuarts’ high church sensibilities aside, Parliament interpreted the Stuarts’ politics as itself an equivalent of Catholicism, now a synonym for tyranny and all that was opposed to English liberty. After decades of civil war, revolution, dictatorship and restoration, a Stuart king, James II, actually did convert to Catholicism; once he produced a male heir, Parliament drove him from his throne in a coup d’etat that the victors dubbed the Glorious Revolution (1688). The Hillsdale historians only briefly mention this act of lawlessness, glossing it simply as the final victory of the ancient English tradition of “self-rule.” Having secured its victory over James, Parliament passed a Bill of Rights to clarify once and for all the rights of Parliament vis à vis the king. To secure England’s identity as a Protestant nation, Parliament also passed a series of penal laws outlawing the Catholic Church and punishing those who continued to remain faithful to the Church, hoping to accomplish by a slow bleed what they had failed to accomplish through one hundred and fifty years of war. John Locke, generally considered the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution, explicitly excluded Catholics in his much praised “Letter Concerning Toleration.” When the American colonists cried “no taxation without representation,” they did so in the spirit of 1688.

The specter of Catholic tyranny was ever present in this spirit. Taxation and representation might seem like issues far afield of religion, yet the colonists saw in unjust taxation nothing less than the tyranny of the Catholic Church itself. The specific tax in question, the Stamp Act (1765), required colonists to pay a tax on all paper products entering the colonies from England; a stamp on the paper product was proof of payment. Parliament passed the tax to generate revenue to pay the debt incurred in financing an ultimately victorious war against the French in North America. Despite being freed from the French (Catholic) threat, colonists were outraged that Parliament would impose a tax on them without their consent, as no representatives of the colonies had seats in Parliament. They condemned such action a violation of a sacred tradition of English liberty stretching back to, yes, the Magna Carta.

John Adams, future Founding Father, likened this action to a regression to something he called “the canon law,” which he described in a pamphlet as the most refined, sublime, extensive and astonishing constitution of policy, that ever was conceived by the mind of man, . . . framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandizement of their own order. All the epithets I have here given to the Romish policy are just: and will be allowed to be so, when it is considered, that they even persuaded mankind to believe . . . that GOD almighty had intrusted [sic] them with the keys of heaven . . . Nay with the mysterious, awful incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine, the flesh and blood of God himself.

In British political culture, Catholicism remained a synonym for tyranny. The anti-Catholic vitriol of colonial political rhetoric appears nowhere in the Hillsdale account of these events.

Thick-skinned Catholics might look the other way at this anti-Catholicism due to sympathy for the colonists passion for political justice. Even here, historical honesty complicates the story. The Hillsdale historians generally accept the colonists’ account of the situation: Parliament’s tax violated the English principle of self-rule. There are serious historical problems with this. First, with respect to taxation, colonial governance prior to the Stamp Act is better characterized as no-rule. The Hillsdale historians concede England exercised a very light hand in governing the colonies; they neglect to mention that part of this light hand involved ignoring the colonies’ refusal to pay duties on imports and the further evasion of payment through the rampant smuggling central to the colonial economy. England tolerated this because it understood that its colonial population was an essential asset in its effort to constrain French colonial expansion. Aside from the new taxes to pay the war debt, what the colonists decried as “tyranny” was simply Britain’s effort to enforce the rule of law on colonists who had grown used to living outside the law.

So too, the issue of representation is far more complicated than the Hillsdale historians would have us believe. The colonists had no representation in Parliament because Parliament presented the kingdom of Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales), while the colonies were part of the British empire, whose territories never had direct representation in Parliament. Though “self-rule” encompasses a wide variety of activities beyond taxation, the colonists never complained about their political status until they were finally required to pay taxes to support the empire that protected them. Taxes aside, the very notion of “representation” needs further historical context than provided by the Hillsdale story. Parliament insisted that the colonists were, in effect, “represented” in Parliament because Parliament governed in the best interests of the empire, which were in the best interests of the colonists. This may offend the modern reader who takes “one man, one vote” democracy as the standard of representation, but no such representation existed even within England proper. Property restrictions limited voting and service in office to the very few, who governed, theoretically, in the interests of the many.

Parliament insisted that the colonists were represented in this sense, which they called “virtual representation.” Professor McClay states that the colonists rejected this “as rubbish, and rightly so.” Rubbish by our standards today? Yes. But by the standards of the 18^th century, such virtual representation marked England as the freest nation in the Western world. Who was right? Who decides? The colonists and Parliament both appealed to the ideals of 1688. Unfortunately for the colonists, those ideals included the assertion that Parliament itself was the arbiter and judge of the “rights of Englishmen.” To mollify the colonists, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766 but also passed The Declaratory Act, affirming the principle of virtual representation and the authority of Parliament to determine the proper governance of the colonies. The shoving match over taxes would continue for eight years. In each instance of conflict, Parliament repealed or reduced the taxes while always asserting its authority through the principle of “virtual representation”; the colonists dismissed all such fiscal concessions as evasions of the real issue, “true” representation. The spirit of 1688 now haunted Parliament: the institution that once redefined the authority of the king now found its own authority challenged by upstart colonists.

This cycle of political rebellion echoes the earlier rebellions in religion. McClay himself acknowledges that his lecture on “The Revolution of Self-Rule” could have easily been titled “From Martin Luther to Thomas Jefferson.” Patriotic American Protestants are happy to make that connection; I hope that patriotic American Catholics are troubled by it. Jefferson was an Enlightenment deist who had moved beyond Protestant Christianity but still acknowledged the role of the Reformation in advancing human freedom; whatever political differences set him at odds with his more conservative friend John Adams, he could agree that the Catholic Church was the root of all tyranny in history. The common bond of anti-Catholicism was no longer sufficient to reconcile the colonists with Parliament. By 1774, appeals to “the rights of Englishmen” had foundered on irreconcilable interpretations of the meaning of that tradition. Jefferson and other patriots looked to another authority, an authority higher than the rights of Englishmen: the universal rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness bequeathed to man by “Nature’s God.” On what basis could anyone contest Jefferson’s interpretation of these rights? In the religion of Nature’s God, every man would be his own Magisterium.