94. The ambivalence in Johnson’s attitude towards Hume which is smothered by his avowals of disdain is detectable also in his attitude towards other notorious literary figures of the eighteenth century. As Boswell points out, in the Dictionary Johnson quotes ‘no authour whose writings had a tendency to hurt sound religion and morality’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 107; on the subject of the principles of citation in the Dictionary, see now Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–1773 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially ch. 7). Nevertheless, we find Johnson echoing Bolingbroke on the character of a patriot king (Life of Johnson, below, p. 321), praising Mandeville for opening his ‘views into real life very much’ (ibid., p. 682), and befriending Fox (ibid., p. 926).
95. The recent and occasionally tempestuous debate on Johnson’s politics can be traced in the following: Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘The Political Character of Samuel Johnson’, in Isobel Grundy, ed., Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984), pp. 107–36; J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 186-9; Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, 2nd edn (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990), ‘Introduction’, pp. ix-lxv; J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); The Age of Johnson, vols. 7 and 8 (1996 and 1997); Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill (eds.), Samuel Johnson in Historical Context (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). There are wise words on this debate to be found in Redford, Designing the Life, pp. 158–60.
96. A letter to Boswell from an anonymous reader of the Life in 1792 comments on the political complexion of the west Midlands in the eighteenth century: ‘I will venture to say that if you will take a Journey into the Parts of Wales, contiguous to Shropshire and Cheshire you will meet with Anecdotes very much to your Taste from many of the Gentlemen, resident in those parts, who are very little removed from Jacobitism’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 389).
97. Life of Johnson, below, p. 25. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (see n. 109) a number of state oaths were imposed on office-holders in Church and state, which required them to swear allegiance and supremacy, i.e. an acknowledgement that the sovereign was supreme governor of England in spiritual and temporal matters (OED, 1), and (after the Hanoverian succession in 1714) to abjure the House of Stuart. For Johnson on subscription, see ibid., p. 341 – a comment which takes on relevance, given the importance which has been attached to whether or not Johnson himself subscribed the oaths. Elsewhere Johnson condemned a refusal to subscribe as ‘perverseness of integrity’ (ibid., p. 434).
98. Ibid., p. 26. On Sacheverell, see Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Dr Sacheverell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973). On Jacobitism and its geographical distribution, see Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
99. For instance, in 1740, before William Hogarth: Life of Johnson, below, p. 85.
100. Ibid., p. 293. For typically contemptuous comments on liberty, and on the human appetite for it, consider Johnson’s pamphlet against the American colonists, Taxation No Tyranny (1775): ‘We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties: an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ (Donald J. Greene, ed., Samuel Johnson: Political Writings, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. X (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 454. The Lives of the Poets also presented Johnson with opportunities to condemn the English enthusiasm for liberty: ‘At this time a long course of opposition to Sir Robert Walpole had filled the nation with clamours for liberty, of which no man felt the want, and with care for liberty, which was not in danger. Thomson, in his travels on the continent, found or fancied so many evils arising from the tyranny of other governments, that he resolved to write a very long poem, in five parts, upon Liberty’; ‘It has been observed that they who most boldly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it’ (G. Birkbeck Hill, ed., Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), III, 289 (‘Life of Thomson’) and I, 157 (‘Life of Milton’)).
101. Life of Johnson, below, p. 233. There was of course no necessary conflict between a prizing of subordination (‘the condition of being subordinate, inferior, or dependent; subjection, subservience’ –OED, 2) and Whiggism.
102. Ibid., pp. 277-8.
103. Ibid., p. 101. Cf. also Johnson’s whispered conversation with Oliver Goldsmith before Temple Bar (ibid., p. 386). Johnson was clear that the ‘45 was illegal, citing in 1770 the Highlanders’ greatest want as ‘the want of law’ (ibid., p. 326).
104. Ibid., p. 76.
105. Ibid., pp. 434, 922. Nonjurors were beneficed clergymen who refused to take an oath of allegiance in 1689 to William and Mary and their successors (OED, 1).
106. Ibid., p. 827: my emphasis. The comment was made in 1781, the pension granted nineteen years earlier in 1762 (ibid., p. 199–200). Note also William Strahan’s testimonial to Johnson’s ‘perfect good affection’ for George III in 1771 (ibid., p. 332). The famous interview between Johnson and George III corroborates Strahan’s opinion (ibid., p. 281-5).
107. Ibid., p. 377. Compare Edward Gibbon on the positive effects of the establishment of a militia in the mid eighteenth century: ‘The most beneficial effect of this institution was to eradicate among the Country gentlemen the relicks of Tory, or rather of Jacobite prejudice. The accession of a British king [George III] reconciled them to the government, and even to the court; but they have been since accused of transferring their passive loyalty from the Stuarts to the family of Brunswick; and I have heard Mr. Burke exclaim in the house of Commons, “They have changed the Idol, but they have preserved the Idolatry”’ (The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. John Murray (London: John Murray, 1896), p. 182 (draft ‘B’)). Johnson’s Whiggish friend Dr Taylor elicited from him on the subject of monarchical title the acknowledgement that ‘Possession is sufficient, where no better right can be shown… for as to the first beginning of the right, we are in the dark’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 607).
108. Life of Johnson, below, p. 396.
109. Ibid., p. 859. The Glorious Revolution – sometimes referred to simply as 1688 – refers to the invasion of Britain that year by William of Orange, who had been invited to defend the English from encroachments on their religion and property by his father-in-law, James II, and who became king as William III. 1688 was ‘necessary’ for Johnson presumably because in no other way could the Church of England be maintained (ibid.). The pre-eminence of religion over politics in Johnson’s thought which this reveals is helpful in trying to understand the movements in his political sympathies, and their perpetually conflicted nature: for him, religious truth and political right were never aligned.