The Resurrection Man

The Book of Holy Kings (XXII)

The deep sacred core that gives life to Britain’s story exists on a level far removed from inter-denominational and religious strife. Harold Godwinson, for instance, was an Orthodox king, Charles I an Anglican, and James II a Catholic. They fought like tigers, all three, for a spiritually-grounded society against forces that sought, in their different ways, to rationalise, disenchant, and desacralise the holy isle of Britain.

The son and the grandson of James II battled ceaselessly to restore the covenant between God and people that had been so scandalously sundered in 1688. James III (1701-1766) launched three unsuccessful invasions in 1708, 1715, and 1719. In 1743, he made his son Charles Edward (‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’) Prince Regent, and two years later this charming, charismatic young leader landed in the west of Scotland and rapidly rallied the clans to his standard. The Jacobites – as the partisans of the Stuarts were called – marched as far south as Derby before turning back and returning north. The clansmen were footsore and weary and had no guarantee of ultimate success. What they did not know was that London was in a state of panic at their approach, with the government rudderless and preparing to leave. But Charles missed his moment, the opportunity was lost, and the Jacobite cause withered quickly on the vine.

The Bonnie Prince became Charles III upon the death of his father in 1766 but was never again in a position to contemplate another coup. He died in 1788 and the crown passed to his brother, Henry Benedict. This king – Henry IX – was a devout, maybe even saintly man, who had been made a Cardinal at the age of just twenty-two. But he had neither the desire nor the ability to relight the Jacobite flame. After his death in 1807, the succession passed through numerous European royal houses, becoming more and more remote from Britain all the time.

Practically speaking, all the attempts to restore the legitimate line had ended in total and absolute failure. But the Jacobites had aimed at something more profound than a mere exchange of dynasties. Their themes were transcendent, rooted in the timeless triple principle of God, King, and Country. As one Irish Jacobite, the poet Séamus Dall Mac Cuarta, put it, they had fought ‘for the only faith of St. Patrick and from love of the Virgin’s Son, with fidelity to our nation and to vindicate the right.’

This was a spiritual, civilisational struggle, a Holy War against the secularism, liberalism and materialism that were bleeding the land dry. What counted for the Jacobites was the vertical dimension, shining down like the Sun and bringing life and bounty from God to King to people. It was the horizontal dimension that mattered for their opponents – economic prosperity, chiefly, and material success. Everything else – religion, art, literature, etc. – followed sheepishly in its slipstream.

This Weltbild made Britain an industrial powerhouse and master of the world. But there was a hollowness at the heart of it – a collective loss of soul and a turning away from the country’s spirit and substance. Such a mindset, for all its associated growth and expansion, could never satisfy the deepest longings of the native British soul. It was and is an artificial overlay, innately out of tune with what (and who) the nation is.

One contemporary who saw through these pretensions was the poet, painter and printmaker, William Blake (1757-1827). ‘Commerce,’ he observed, ‘is so far from being beneficial to Arts or the Empire that it is destructive to both as history shows. It is not Arts that attend upon Empire, but Empire that attends and follows the Arts.’

Blake had it right. He called himself a ‘mental prince’, and rightly so, for in an age where royalty had ceased to hold meaningful sway, he showed himself a prince of the imaginative spheres, those high levels of creation where the destiny of nations is laid up in letters and pictures of gold.

Truth and meaning speak to us from these planes, but England – the giant Albion in Blake’s mythology – has been seduced and drugged by a raft of materialist philosophies that have blinded eyes, stoppered ears, and blocked up hearts. He railed against the mechanistic premisses of the social theorist, John Locke (1632-1704), the astronomer, Isaac Newton (1642-1727), and the scientist, Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Albion, he warned, was sunk in ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep.’ What we need instead is ‘fourfold vision’, the recovery of a holistic conception of the cosmos and a recognition that reality is essentially spiritual and that politics and economics play a strict second fiddle.

Albion has to awaken, therefore. But how? Will the conditions of modernity, fundamentally unreal as they are, even allow it? 100%, Blake believed. And why wouldn’t he? He was the Resurrection Man – ‘English Blake’ as he styled himself – the prophet of the English people, bearer of the eternal Word that speaks from the imagination of a race to the imagination of a race. He knew the way out and through – mental fight, dedication, imaginative focus, and indomitable belief – chariots of fire, bows of burning gold, arrows of desire.

The Dark Satanic Mills will then come crashing down – the factories of Blake’s era, disfiguring the landscape and belching out toxic fumes, and the schools and churches of his time and ours, pumping out pure rationalistic poison. That will give us a clearing, a free space where the Divine can strike like lightning.

What will we see then? The City of God, no less, the Heavenly Jerusalem, descending not upon a middle-eastern sandscape, but right here and now on England’s scarred and battered but perennially green, pleasant – and above all, holy – land.

Blake himself said it best:

'Awake! Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion,
Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time.'