The British state is as tangled in arcane rules as a kitten in a ball of yarn, but it’s not above issuing itself a scissors when either necessity or the political mood of the moment demands, and that’s what it did in 1833, when a Quaker, Joseph Pease, was elected as a Member of Parliament.
The strand of yarn that needed to be cut was the requirement that MPs swear their allegiance to the monarch-of-the-moment. Who’s not called the monarch-of-the-moment but the king or the queen, with a capital letter I can’t be bothered to hand out, and it’s all taken very seriously, thank you.
Irrelevant photo: This is what cats do on a rainy day. But hey, I did mention kittens…
Quakers and oaths
The problem in 1833 was that Quakers didn’t swear oaths, and I assume they still don’t. It’s against their religion, and you don’t have to read very far into Quaker history to find that when something’s against their religion, serious Quakers will go to no end of trouble not to do it. Their founder was well acquainted with prison. He was jailed for blasphemy, for refusing to take an oath, for having long hair, for assorted other things. That long-hair charge was ruled not proven (i’m not sure how–you’d think the evidence would be on hand, or on head), but he and several others weren’t released. Instead they were fined for refusing to take their hats off in court. They refused to pay the fine, which they considered unjust, and were returned to prison.
They’re a stubborn lot, the Quakers. I admire them.
So, no oath for Joseph Pease, who wasn’t the first Quaker elected to Parliament. One was elected in 1698 but never got to take his seat. Three years earlier, Quakers’ affirmations had been accepted in place of oaths in most situations. The exceptions were giving evidence in court, serving on a jury, and holding a paid crown office. (in 1828 that was modified so that affirmations were accepted if they were giving evidence. (In 1828 that was modified so that affirmations were accepted if they were giving evidence.)
MPs weren’t paid until 1911–they were assumed to be independently wealthy and the setup pretty much restricted the post to people who were–so it wasn’t irrational to think the new MP might be able to take his seat. He wrote to the speaker saying he hoped “my declarations of fidelity . . . might in this case, as in others where the law requires an oath, be accepted.”
The hell it would be. No oath, no seat in the Commons. A by-election was ordered and someone else was elected.
Which brings us back to Joseph Pease
That explains why when Pease was elected he expected trouble. He told his constituents that he was prepared to “go through much persecution in your cause” and wouldn’t “be surprised if the [Commons’] Serjeant-at-Arms be ordered to take me into custody.”
But it was now 1833–practically modern times, right? Two seventeenth-century laws that kept anyone but Anglicans out of public office had been repealed in 1828, and the Catholic Emancipation Act had been passed in 1829.
So Pease showed up, announced that he wouldn’t take the oath, surprising no one, and was asked–or possibly told–to step outside while the Commons discussed its response.
What the Commons did was set up a committee to look at laws and precedents, because what Britain has instead of a written constitution is an endless collection of precedents. How anyone who enters that maze finds their way back is beyond me, but find a way back they did, and in what must be record time they recommended that Commons accept his affirmation. The house agreed and he got to take his seat.
That same session of Parliament passed a law accepting affirmations for jury duty and public office from Quakers and Moravians.
Moravians? They’re a Protestant group founded in Bohemia by Jan Hus and predating Martin Luther. (Bet you didn’t know that. I didn’t know about that pre-dating business.)
Happy days. Have we reached the promised land?
Um no. Because although Catholics had been admitted to Parliament in 1829, Jews had to wait until 1858. And voting was still restricted to people with money.
Did I say “people”? I meant men. The idea of women either voting or running for office was too absurd to spend time on. So let’s focus on the next category of people to wriggle through the eye of the political needle.
Jews weren’t specifically excluded from Parliament, but to take a seat they had to swear an oath that included the words, “Upon my true Faith as a Christian,” and you can see what that’s a problem if you take this stuff seriously. Or even if you don’t. That would be a step too far, even for my own irreligiously Jewish self.
Disraeli, who’s known as Britain’s first (and only) Jewish prime minister, was born Jewish but converted as a child, when his parents did, so he had no problem a Christian oath. Interesting that he’s still considered a Jewish prime minister, don’t you think?
We can also unearth an MP and a Lord or two who had Jewish ancestors somewhere in the background but who was Christian enough to feel comfortable about the oath. Were they Jewish? Weren’t they Jewish? I’m sure it depended on who you asked, and quite possibly still does.
In 1850, a clearly Jewish Jew was elected to represent Greenwich, and instead of disappearing politely as a previous Jewish would-be MP had, he took his seat and refused to leave, causing an uproar. The house voted on whether to adjourn and he cast a vote. He also spoke on a motion that he be asked to withdraw.
The whole thing went to the courts and he was fined £500 for every vote he cast.
Over time, the Commons passed more than one bill that would have allowed Jews to take a different oath, but the Lords kept blocking it. Eventually, a compromise allowed each house to modify their oaths by a special resolution for each Jewish member elected.
None of this applied to people from other religions, or to atheists, although I haven’t seen evidence that any either ran for office or got elected at this point.
It’s hard to say when dissenting Protestants were allowed to take seats in Commons. At the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, according to Parliament’s website, some dissenters attended Church of England services occasionally to be sure they wouldn’t be excluded. That makes them hard or impossible to count.
So basically, I can’t offer any information on them.
But let’s got back to Joseph Pease yet again
Once he took his seat, he had one last problem to contend with: In this period, men took off their hats as a sign of deference to their superiors, and Quakers refused to recognize either superiors or inferiors, so they kept their hats on their heads. That’s one of the things George Fox was jailed for. So as Pease came in, the Commons doorkeeper would sweep his hat off for him and leave it in the Commons library.
Problem solved.
Breaking with tradition, he didn’t address the Speaker of the House as sir, and where other MPs referred to each other in speeches as the honorable member, he settled for the member. The roof did not fall in.
What oath do MPs take these days?
It’s all loosened up considerably. If they’re going to swear, they use a wording settled on in 1868. They get to choose their sacred book and say, “I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to [his or her] Majesty [fill in the appropriate name], [his or her] heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.”
I’d recommend inserting an and before “heirs and successors,” but no one’s asked me.
Having a choice of sacred books reminds me that, to date, no Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster member has been elected as an MP, which is a shame because they’d have to appear with a colander on their head and hold a copy of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
May I live long enough to see that happen.
But we’re not done with the choices now available. They can take the oath in Welsh, in Cornish, or in Scottish Gaelic. They can hold the book up. They can raise a hand but not hold the book. They can kiss the book. They can dance the hula and leave everyone speechless.
No, you can’t trust everything I say.
On the other hand, if they’re going to affirm, they say, “I do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm, that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to” etc.
I don’t know why they have to both declare and affirm, but it’s okay because it comes with a side of fries and a fizzy drink, but they don’t get to dance the hula.
What happens if you’re an anti-monarchist? You have a problem. Would-be MPS who don’t either swear or affirm their loyalty to the crown can’t take their seats, speak in debates, vote, or receive a salary. They can’t pass Go. And they can be fined £500 if they try to do any of that. And if that isn’t enough, their seat sill be declared vacant “as if they were dead.”
Notes from the U.K. 
Being a descendant of Quakers thanks for this mention. My Wetherill family left England because they refused to serve in the army and kill. They strictly believed in the 10 commandments “Though shalt not kill”. Then the Revolution started and my family went against the Quaker “oath” and Samuel Wetherill and his son (my 4 and 5x great grandfathers) joined the Philadelphia melitia to fight against England. They were excommunicated from the Quakers along with other revolutionary Quakers including Betsy Ross who was a close friend of the Wetherill family. They formed a new church called the Free Quakers. After the Revolution, they were accepted back as Quakers again but kept meeting at the Free Quaker church which is now a museum near Independence Square. The pattern for Betsy Rosses five five-point star is displayed there willed to it by my great grandfather Samuel Wetherill which was in the family safe in their mansion which is now the Philadelphia Art Alliance.
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Betsy Ross was a Quaker? Boy, they left that out of my high school history textbooks. Of course, they left out all the interesting stuff.
That’s a fascinating tale. It really does bring alive the question of how absolute one’s belief in not killing is. It’s far more easier when you don’t support the aims of a war and harder when you do. The earliest Quakers, though, fought in the English Civil Wars. The commitment to pacifism came later.
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Yes, she was raised a Quaker but married outside of the church which was a no-no! She stayed friends with my family and attended the new Free Quaker church. The US Quakers have been cut out of the US revolutionary history. Remember the trouble that General Washington had with uniforms for his armies? The history books don’t mention how he got the materials for the uniforms. The material was donated by Samuel Wetherill and most likely Betsy helped sew together the uniforms! The reason cloth was not available was that most of the raw cotton was exported to England and there was very little for colonial production. Samuel Wetherill had procured raw cotton aginst England’s wishes and had a thriving business making cloth. As far as the old England Quakers are concerned, the Wetherills from Yorkshire all left to avoid prison for not serving in the army. My family to the colonies, some to Australia and others to Ireland. They must have been the Quakers that believed though shalt not kill!
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Now that you mention it, I had no idea Washington had trouble getting uniforms. And you’re right about the Quakers being cut out of Revolutionary War history, although they did manage to cling on to their claim to being central in the Abolitionist movement.
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Lack of cloth for uniforms was particularly dire at Valley Forge. Some soldiers even took captured British soldiers uniforms just to keep warm. Some uniforms were even made out of hemp cloth. Samuel Wetherill helped the shortage with his donations before he later was kicked out of the Quakers for bearing arms. My high school history class did mention the hardships at Valley Forge but I didn’t know my family helped them with the cloth donations.
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Valley Forge, yes, is deeply embedded in high school history. The uniforms and shortage of cloth, less so. My impression is that hemp was used fairly widely then for cloth, but I’m pulling that out of the haze of my memory. I haven’t double-checked it. Don’t trust it too far.
Did your family pass its history on or have you researched it yourself?
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Most of my famlies information that was passed down was just family lore. An example was that the Wetherills invented lead free paint and that is where their riches came from. This is a true fact but we didn’t know the history of this family. In 2006 both of my parents passed. To deal with my greaving I started a geneoligical search of my families branches. The new sites like Ancestry.com were a big help as well as lord Google. There are many references to Samuel Wetherill particularily on the Revolution and the Quakers. I even found a listing of Quaker members that included my father. I could write a book or screenplay just on their history from the Revolution, the war of 1812, the civil war and industrial revolution. Even my grandfather Giles Wetherill who was an engineer and helped invent lazer guided missles in the 60s. Some other family lore that I confirmed were having a Carmelite monk as an ancestor, along with William Bucknel, and David Jayne, as well as being related to P.T. Barnum (1st cousin), and unexpected discoveries of family members that survived the Titanic and some that didn’t. Those are the most famous!
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Fascinating stuff. Thanks for the glimpse.
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My goodness – your column was informative as usual, and the comments even moreso !
As far as solemn oathtaking, it seems possible that, as in modern days, some people just agreed to whatever they needed to agree to.
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I’m sure they did. I found it an eye-opening that when I took British citizenship I was asked (okay, told) to “swear or affirm.” I don’t remember a mention of god, Christian or otherwise. That seems to be the standard form for all oath-type thing. When you’re dealing with groups of people, it’s easier and faster to just find something they’ll all accept.
As I typed that, though, it occurred to me that it really is splitting hairs to see an affirmation as different from an oath. They’re both statements that you’re telling the truth, and the Quaker objection to oaths was that they expected to tell the truth in all aspects of their lives anyway. Ah, well, it let them take their seats in Parliament.
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History books I studied did mention Washington’s trouble getting boots for the soldiers. Some of their feet were bleeding through their worn-out footwear on the snow. His wife and rich friends had trouble getting boots right away, too–was there a shortage of cowhide? no idea–so they sweetly knitted the poor soldiers socks. Boots were eventually supplied. I don’t remember reading anything about whether any of the socks were still usable. Anyway the soldiers had one or the other, for most of the winter.
Are Messianic Jews still considered Jewish? Is joining a Christian church the cut-off point?
Priscilla King
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Now that you mention boots, I do have a vague memory of barefoot soldiers, the bitter winter, Valley Forge. It’s all a jumble, though. I doubt socks would’ve lasted more than a day or two without boots, though, however nice they’d have been to start with.
As for who’s Jewish and who isn’t, it very much depends on who you ask. According the Jewish law, it passes from mother to child. If your father’s Jewish but your mother isn’t and you want to be Jewish, presumably you’d have to convert, although it’s not a religion that seeks converts. If someone’s Jewish by that definition but converts to Christianity, I’d expect them to be closed out of the community.
You could make an argument for immersion or distance from Jewish traditions and culture as the divide between being Jewish and not-Jewish, although as long as antisemitism persists I doubt anyone gets to de-Jewify themselves just because they’ve been raised outside the culture.
Then you get the Christian community, parts of which, at various times, haven’t accepted Jewish converts as fully not-Jewish. Disraeli’s one example. Marx is another. The Spanish distrust of the conversos is a third–it was a forced conversion, so many of them did indeed maintain their Jewish traditions, although I’m sure many didn’t. And then the Nazis decided who was Jewish by how many Jewish grandparents you had. Peter Ho Davies’ novel The Welsh Girl turns on the difference between various definitions of Jewishness. I found it fascinating.
Anyway, it’s a messy and fascinating subject, with as far as I can tell no clear answers.
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What an interesting history. And Mr. Wetherill has added to it. It all made me think about the numerous groups who were not acceptable to the folks in power (as threats to the established power structure) and how it all continues today, though not nearly as bad for a few folks as it was. Quaker history is fascinating. They were active in facilitating many changes in society.
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It is a fascinating history. And the rest is a lesson in how the powerful cling to their privileges.
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Yes. Succinctly put and true.
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A bunch of long haired peaceniks with hemp, tah !
” … swear their allegiance to the monarch-of-the-moment …”
Sorry, I ask to dissent. They swear allegiance to the Majesty, as right now embodied by the (rightful & legal) monarch-of-the-moment, be it King or Queen, and the (rightful & legal) successors. They recognise the maiestas of said Monarch, the “Größe, Erhabenheit, Würde”, or das König-Sein als solches. And this is not in-separately connected with one person (kingy or queeny), maiestas can be lost too.
There is no “and”, simply because there is no vacuum when the first monarch dies, the successor follows immedeately : Same maiestas, new monarch, no new swearing necessary : Keep Calm, Carry On.
I think KANTOROWICZ described the basis in The King’s Two Bodies.
About being counted as Jewish – please bear in mind that the nazis did give a rat’s fart for Jewish “culture” or religion, it was all about “Rasse”, their demented cult of blood & purity – I am not sure whether “Rasse” and “race” are the same words, in as much they mean the same.
BTW : How looks a “a clearly Jewish Jew” in 1850 ? A pawnbroker with sidecurls ?
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What I meant by a clearly Jewish Jew is one who was religious and took it seriously enough that swearing a Christian oath was impossible for him. But–and I tell you this as a Jewish atheist–there are degrees of Jewishness–or at least I think there are–involving how deeply you’re steeped in the culture and how central it is to your life. And, of course, whether you’re religious. It’s an absurdly complicated issue, Jewishness, made so both by Judaism and antisemitism. The conviction that Disraeli was a Jewish prime minister speaks, I think, to an underlying belief in Britain that you don’t get to stop being a Jew merely by converting to a different religion. How far is that from the Nazi belief in Rasse? I’m not sure. It’s less toxic, but I suspect it shares a root somewhere under the soil.
Your comments on the differnce between one monarch and the monarchy are intersting, but since when I new monarch comes in everyone has to swar the oath all over again, with a new name, I still lean toward thinking the oath is toward the individual monarch. But I’m happy to admit that I could easily be wrong about that.
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It is basically the same thinking, a few drops of water will not drive “the Jew” out. The ns ideology is basically simple, hence successful, while anything else that only marginally is “critical thinking” has the tendency to become complicated, and so is unsuccessful, simply because it requires own thinking. Thinking for one own (“Sapere Aude !”), thinking done properly in general, hurts. People prefer simple explanations, and simple solutions. No egg heads.
It is complicated.
And it does not get better.
So many variables. Definition from within, definition from without. And all in between.
I do not want to whine. A lot races through my head right now. All I know is that where ever I look, I can not see something positive, encouraging. In the end, I think, the way is inwards, towards silence. Turning around. And away.
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It’s particularly painful these days to think about the impact the Nazis had, since we’re seeing a resurgence of genuine fascism, in all its violence, lies, and simple solutions to complicated questions. I don’t think we can afford to turn away just now, much as I’d love to.
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>The conviction that Disraeli was a Jewish prime minister speaks,
>I think, to an underlying belief in Britain that you don’t get to stop
>being a Jew merely by converting to a different religion.
I read some of his books a long time ago, and I recall that Disraeli himself drew a complicated distinction between the Jewish religion and the ethnic group, who he for some reason called ‘Mosaic Arabs’.
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I do feel, for myself, that being not-religious doesn’t stop me from being Jewish. If I belonged to another religion, though, I’d expect it would, but it’s an experiment I’ve never tried so I can’t report on it. I do agree with Disraeli that there’s an ethnicity–a culture–as well as a religion involved, but again, if you convert to a different religion it seems odd to still consider yourself Jewish.
Anyway, yeah. It’s complicated.
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And yet it seems that most of the plotting occurred during the periods when everyone was swearing loyalty oaths.
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Oooh, you think maybe loyalty oaths don’t really work? I wonder if we’re the only two people who’ve noticed that.
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