Harvington Hall in Worcestershire can be used as a structural analogy for the future of conservatism in England. Owned by a Catholic family for centuries, and still in the ownership of the Catholic Church, it contains more ‘priest hides,’ better known as priest holes, than any other home in England. It is believed to have been built by the most prolific maker of priest holes in England, St. Nicholas Owen. The hides were created to make sure that Catholic priests could be hidden from the agents of the state, as they ministered to the Catholic minority, the followers of the ‘old religion.’ From the time of Queen Elizabeth I, being a Catholic priest in England was a crime punishable by death, as was harbouring a priest. This placed the owners of Harvington Hall—and all such houses where the Faith was kept and priests hidden—in grave danger.
These Catholic families, and all who kept the ‘old religion,’ came to be known as recusants, from the Latin recusant, meaning to demur or object. It was applied to those who refused to attend the services of the state church—the Anglican Church. In reality, it was much more than objecting to Anglican services and refusing to attend them. The Recusancy Acts of 1558, which remained the law of England until 1888, attempted to make the practice of the Catholic faith impossible, by subjecting recusant Catholics to fines, loss of lands, liberty and, sometimes, death.
As recusant history developed, the word was also used to indicate “stubbornly refusing to submit to authority,” surely a worthy cause when that authority is immoral, unjust, or illegal.
In our own time, it is unlikely that conservatives will need political holes to hide in just yet, or that they will be subject to the death penalty for their beliefs, even though potential ‘hate crime’ laws—which are just a new kind of blasphemy law against all manner of free speech—may bring some unpleasant penalties. However, the image of conservative recusancy is relevant now, in terms of refusing to submit to the prevailing orthodoxy. It is also true that conservatives may go into a period of hiding and renewal, only to finally be revealed when the time is right, much like the recusants of old. This, as Peter Hitchens has written in a moving obituary for conservatism, has nothing to do with the Conservative Party, which is a wet neo-Whig and thoroughly useless party, conservative in name only. The party deserved the political cremation it received on July 4th.
It is the very ‘old religion’ of conservative thought, theory, and practice, which will have to endure a period of recusancy, most certainly by stubbornly resisting state-imposed orthodoxy, but also by privately strengthening the real foundation of conservatism. As the political journalist and historian Tim Stanley notes, this will only come about when the spiritual is acknowledged and built upon, something the Conservative Party and most of its former and current members of Parliament, ignore. In his eulogy, Hitchens writes of the central role of faith, of the “wells of Christianity from which true conservatism springs.” This statement is profoundly true, but this period of recusancy will also have to deal with the fact that in England those wells are almost dry.
While not denying that a socialist can be a Christian—although some would argue with how socialism has been implemented—a Christian, and certainly a Catholic can, one might say, naturally be a conservative. Once again, this has nothing to do with party, but philosophy, which may eventually emerge in party form, and will go through many changes, deaths, and rebirths. Hitchens points to the late Sir Roger Scruton as the man who “strove hardest to preserve conservatism.” He wonders if, just as Scruton and others took conservative philosophy and theory to the dry wells behind the Iron Curtain, Hungarians or Poles will someday bring conservatism to the recusants in hiding here.
England will not need political holes, but places of intellectual safety and civility and, it should be said, conviviality, because true conservatism is always convivial; it is not without reason that Sir Roger was also an expert on wine.
The prospect of recusancy was a moment of choice for Catholics in a hostile environment. Many took the wide road of ease and social mobility, acceptance and economic advancement. While not pushing the analogy of recusancy too far, the total defeat of a party, once conservative, but utterly bereft of both conservative ideas and governing, will bring a real time of forging in the fire, where a powerful exterior philosophy and practice will attempt to make it impossible for conservatism to emerge from the shadows.
At the moment, it seems we have the bland leading the bland, but recusant conservatives, even if a minority, can use this time to decide and deliberate what is worth fighting for, and it is most certainly not more of the same.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/recusant-conservatism