"It is like restoring life to three kingdoms": reading Daniel Waterland on Oak Apple Day
Daniel Waterland's sermon on 29th May 1723 - 'Being the Anniversary Day of Thanksgiving for the Restoration' - exemplifies the purpose of the liturgical commemoration of Oak Apple Day. It is a day to give thanks for the gift of constitutional order, for the right ordering of the polity. In a disordered polity, the ability to live out the apostolic exhortation is hindered and undermined: "that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty". In a disordered polity, the divine purpose revealed in the prophet's vision is rejected: "But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it".
Waterland's account of what the 1662 Preface describes as "the late unhappy confusions" evokes Deuteronomy's warning against removing "thy neighbour's landmark":
Under pretence of espousing liberty and property, those wretched patriots pulled down all the ancient fences made for the security of both; shewing at length what kind of liberty it was that they affected: liberty to imprison, banish, plunder, and destroy all that had either loyalty to provoke their resentments, or revenues to supply their avarice: liberty first to deface, spoil, and crush the monarch, and next to accuse and condemn, and in the end to murder the man: liberty to tread under foot all authorities, to set up and pull down parliaments, or to model them at pleasure ... in a word, liberty to turn a kingdom upside down, and to leave it languishing, and well nigh expiring in its miserable distractions and most deplorable confusions.
Of particular significance here is Waterland's critique of 'liberty and property'. Waterland himself was a Whig and these words were the commonplace Whig slogan. They could, in a way, be regarded as a summary of that apostolic exhortation and of the prophet's vision. In the hands of "misguided zealots", however, they justified the tearing down of the 'landmarks', the constitutional 'fences' which secured a "quiet and peaceable life", "every man under his vine and under his fig tree".
The Restoration was a repairing of the landmarks, receiving afresh the blessing of constitutional order:
how exceedingly delightful and transporting must good order and government appear, after recounting the miseries of popular tumults, the distracting scenes of anarchy and confusion! Seeing then it hath pleased Almighty God thus miraculously to heal our breaches and to bind up our wounds; what remains, but that we "rejoice in the day which the Lord hath made" ... Let us then be thankful to Almighty God for the blessings which he hath sent us, and has preserved to this time; for restoring to us our happy constitution and legal establishment in one reign, and for watching over it in another; for securing and strengthening it in a third, and for improving, fixing, and perfecting it in the reigns following.
The threat to constitutional order, however, was not merely in the past. Waterland was conscious of how Jacobite ambitions threatened "to unsettle every thing, and to throw us back again into the wildest confusions":
such a restoration as some have vainly thought on, or endeavoured, could be nothing akin to that which we now commemorate; but as unlike it and contrary as possible in all material circumstances. And the reasons which once so strongly pleaded for the one, do now as strongly plead against the other; since it would not be restoring us to any happiness we want, but to such miseries, or even to greater than those from which we were this day delivered.
The sermon deserves to belong to the canon of classical Anglican political theology, demonstrating why constitutional order is to be regarded as a gift bestowed by God, a gift for which the Church rightly gives thanks. It also illustrates how this liturgical commemoration of the Restoration should be interpreted: not to glorify the Stuart line, not to indulge in Anglican triumphalism, but to recall particular circumstances which demonstrate how constitutional order is a blessing. The political theology underpinning the commemoration is deeply rooted in the wider Christian tradition, from Thomas Aquinas's praise for mixed government ("which is the best"), to Calvin's declaration that government's "use among men [is] not less than that of bread and water, light and air, while its dignity is much more excellent". As such, Waterland's sermon is a reminder of the importance of political theology to the Church's mission, setting forth a vision of human flourishing.
Finally, the sermon also illustrates the importance of particular occasions of thanksgiving in particular polities as means of embodying Anglican political theology. The absence of such occasions grievously undermines political theology, resulting in public teaching on and thanksgiving for the gift the right ordering of the polity disappearing from the Church's public ministry and witness. A campaign to restore commemoration of the 29th May in the Church of England or to promote its commemoration in other provinces is not the point. Reflecting on Waterland's sermon should recall us to a more meaningful and purposeful approach to those commemorations which have relevance in our contemporary polities - Accession Day in the United Kingdom, Independence Day in the United States, Dominion Day in Canada.
In an age when there is a palpable searching after a more compelling and attractive account of our common life in the polity than has been offered by either technocrats or populists, Anglicans should be unembarrassed about the means offered by our tradition to celebrate the gift of constitutional order, the ordering of the polity towards the common good, the communal flourishing for which Waterland gave thanks in his sermon: "it is like restoring life to three kingdoms".
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