The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [906]
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.
110. Ibid., p. 351. Johnson’s position here is close to that of Swift, who in The Examiner 33 (22 March 1710) had contrasted the true, Tory, idea of passive obedience with its Whig caricature, and had insisted that the true idea of passive obedience included an ultimate safeguard to the people: ‘The Crown may be sued as well as a private Person; and if an arbitrary King of England should send his Officers to seize my Lands or Goods against Law; I can lawfully resist them. The Ministers by whom he acts are liable to Prosecution and Impeachment, although his own Person be Sacred. But, if he interpose his Royal Authority to support their Insolence, I see no Remedy, until it grows a general Grievance, or untill the Body of the People have Reason to apprehend it will be so; after which it becomes a Case of Necessity; and then I suppose, a free People may assert their own Rights, yet without any Violation to the Person or lawful Power of the Prince’ (Jonathan Swift, The Examiner and Other Pieces Written in 1710–11, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1941), p. 114). Consider also Swift’s comment in his sermon ‘Upon the Martyrdom of King Charles I’: ‘When oppressions grow too great and universal to be borne, nature or necessity may find a remedy’ (Jonathan Swift, Irish Tracts 1720–1723 and Sermons, ed. Louis Landa (Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1948), p. 229).
111. Section 209, in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 404–5.
112. Life of Johnson, below, p. 321. Boswell also underlined Johnson’s fervour for ‘constitutional liberty’, in contrast to his reputation for being ‘abjectly submissive to power’ (ibid., p. 167); cf. also Johnson’s aversion to the destruction of liberty (ibid., p. 645). For Johnson on the decline of party in the eighteenth century, see ibid., p. 75. Maxwell derided Johnson’s reputation for supporting ‘slavish and arbitrary principles of government’ by reference to his indomitableness of character, for he was ‘extremely jealous of his personal liberty and independence, and could not brook the smallest appearance of neglect or insult, even from the highest personages’ (ibid., p. 322). It was this disposition of character which also led Johnson to reflect critically on Burke’s arguments for party discipline, presumably in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, which had been published three years earlier in 1770: ibid., p. 378.
113. Ibid., p. 341.
114. Ibid., pp. 227-8. Boswell supposes the ‘violent Whig’ to have been Gilbert Walmsley (1680–1751). Consider too Johnson’s dictum that ‘A wise Tory and a wise Whig, I believe, will agree’ (ibid., p. 828) – an opinion which seems to have made a deep impression on that notable Whig Samuel Parr (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 353).
115. Life of Johnson, below, p. 730.
116. Ibid., pp. 606-7.