In the Spring of 1776, Anglican priest and academic Richard Watson—then Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and later the Anglican bishop of Llandaff from 1781 to 1816—wrote a short tract designed to address what was then a civil war between the British Empire and its North American subjects. Watson used his The Principles of the Revolution Vindicated to address the pressing question of when rebellion was licensed; when Christians could rightly rise up in arms against their rulers; and when constitutional regimes ceased to truly be constitutional regimes. Watson, nearly 250 years ago, addressed in a specifically political sermon the questions of constitutionalism, post-constitutionalism, and morality that Christian clerics and intellectuals address today.
Like most British divines, Watson did not believe the British government had mistreated the American colonies in such a way that licensed the rebellion then centered in New England. Watson threw cold water on the idea that the King—then George III—had illegally levied moneys from the colonies. Watson noted that the government remained responsible to parliament. Unlike actual despots, George III did not use procedural tricks to shield unpopular ministers from being accountable to the public. George III had made no laws that were not sanctioned by parliament. The American Patriots, as they called themselves, invalidated their case when they claimed they were citizens beholden to an overbearing monarch.
Watson’s support for the monarch was unsurprising, but he nonetheless addressed the question of when and where constitutional regimes became post-constitutional regimes, and what the laity should do in such circumstances. Watson rejected the idea that maintenance of legal and political procedure was enough to call a regime constitutional. It was possible for a government, even as Watson noted an elected government—to become so corrupt that the constitution would be effectively defunct even as it maintained its basic institutional form.
It is possible, that under such circumstances, the foundations of the Constitution may be gradually undermined, and the great fabric of civil liberty finally subverted, by the very formality of law, and by the immediate agency of the very powers destined to support it; it is possible, lastly, that the bulk of the people, mistaking the forms and shadows of the Constitution for its substances and reality, may not be sensible of their danger, till they are borne down to the earth under the pressure of Taxes; may not be roused from their Lethargy, till they are fretted and galled by the Chains of Slaver.
Despite being an ordained priest in holy orders, Watson did not offer a division between a civil and religious responses to regimes that ceased to rule constitutionally. He was “persuaded” that those who shared in the culture and heritage of English and subsequently British liberties “will not degenerate from the blood of their Ancestors, but with united hands and hearts drag forth to consign punishment the most pestilent of all traitors, the traitors against the Constitution and the common Safety.” Watson, an ordained priest, licensed physical action—hearts and hands dragging forth—against post-constitutional regimes. Late Eighteenth Century Anglicans—Patriot and British—disagreed on the question of whether the American Revolution was appropriate, but neither rejected the idea that Christians retained the right to participate in revolutions.