The reason my eyes caught on Bedford's speech is that he has a cameo in one of my fics, but that was just about the regiment he raised in the '45. I see now that he's more interesting than I thought! I wondered at first how he could be a Duke if grandpa Russell was executed for treason, but it seems William III reversed the attainder. Hee, I also love this bit from Wikipedia: Several people were tried and convicted of seditious libel for publishing works about his ghost. Grandpa Russell, that is.
So this is a Whig arguing to weaken the central government so that it can be successfully kept in line, but it's interesting that the Tories were also making a similar argument, from another angle. There was a whole debate going on in the first half of the 18th century in England about a standing professional army vs militias. The Tories argued that a standing professional army was 1) too expensive, and also the government should keep out of wars on the continent for that reason, and 2) gave the central government too much power. (Of course the militias were mostly useless in the '45, but by that time the standing army argument, which the Whigs favored, had pretty much won.) I don't know enough about the US to tell whether this argument has any resonance there.
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Re: Jacobites and treason
Date: 2021-11-07 06:42 pm (UTC)So this is a Whig arguing to weaken the central government so that it can be successfully kept in line, but it's interesting that the Tories were also making a similar argument, from another angle. There was a whole debate going on in the first half of the 18th century in England about a standing professional army vs militias. The Tories argued that a standing professional army was 1) too expensive, and also the government should keep out of wars on the continent for that reason, and 2) gave the central government too much power. (Of course the militias were mostly useless in the '45, but by that time the standing army argument, which the Whigs favored, had pretty much won.) I don't know enough about the US to tell whether this argument has any resonance there.