Ideas of Monarchical Reform: Fénelon, Jacobitism and the Political Works of the Chevalier Ramsay, by Andrew Mansfield

Abstract

This is a constructive endeavour to explore the philosophy of a spiritual and intellectual adventurer, Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Scottish émigré in France whose commitment to Jacobitism was surpassed only by that to European freemasonry. Ramsay came from a family in Ayrshire divided by religion; his father was a Covenanter, his mother an Episcopalian. His sympathies were more influenced by the latter, but were more substantially shaped by non-juring intellectuals in Aberdeenshire who tempered their Jacobitism with Quietism. They were in close contact with Flemish and French mystics; contacts which led Ramsay to arrive in Cambrai in 1710 at the household of Archbishop François Fénelon. Over the next two years, not only did the archbishop persuade Ramsay to convert to Roman Catholicism, but he imbued him with his political philosophy to broaden, but not dilute, the base of monarchical government in the interest of public liberty. Fénelon’s views on political virtue were designed to influence the heir to the throne, the duc de Bourgogne, to transform France after the death of Louis XIV. However, Bourgogne died three years before his father in 1712. After Fénelon’s own passing, Ramsay spent six years, between 1717 and 1723, editing and interpreting the archbishop’s works, which brought him to the attention of the Jacobite Court at Rome where he was briefly employed as a tutor to the infant Charles Edward Stuart. But he was unceremoniously dismissed after a duel and returned to France to broaden his intellectual interests. He moved on from a universal plan of government that synthesised natural law and divine right theory to uphold absolute monarchy and reject the Revolution of 1688–90. In key publications from 1727 to 1732, deism became the inspiration for his blending of science, education and political economy with mysticism and history to uphold political virtue, unity and order. In the process, he tempered his advocacy of absolutism. Robust monarchy was to be supported not so much by a British-style parliament as by a hereditary aristocratic senate.