The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [905]
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