Thomas Hamilton, Jacobitism and the Catholic connection

sagestreet:

Fair Warning: This is a longish post chock-full of historical detail. (So perhaps not a ‘commute read’. More of an ‘evening read’, as it were.)

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Defending Alfred Hamilton would be an ungrateful task, so I shan’t bother to try. 

Still, dissecting Lord Hamilton senior’s motivations might deepen our understanding of what those s2 flashbacks were all about and explain why Thomas’s father was so afraid of his son’s pardon plan that he had him institutionalised.

In this meta post, I will try to show…

• that Thomas wasn’t eliminated ‘for being gay’; he had become a political liability.
• what exactly was so dangerous about his plan to pardon pirates!
• what the political climate was like at that time and why it was his undoing.

Remember when Thomas accused his father (and, thus, England) of waging, “A war, sir, to ensure that a Protestant sits on the throne of Spain,” and added, “We are fighting a war in the service of the son of God. And it is treason to offer forgiveness to any man who would seek it?” in this dinner scene here:

It’s important to remember that Thomas’s statement is more than just a throwaway line about how he doesn’t care if a monarch is Protestant or Catholic; it’s supposed to do more than just elicit warm, fuzzy feelings of inter-religious tolerance and ‘can’t-we-all-just-get-along-ness’ in us.

This statement serves a specific function in ‘Black Sails’: 

It provides us with information on the historical background at that time and hints at why Thomas posed a political risk to his father.

The writers of ‘Black Sails’ kept saying that Thomas wasn’t eliminated for being gay, that instead his sexuality was used against him for political reasons.

But what exactly were those political reasons?

Why did Thomas’s words get his father so enraged? And why were the words ‘treason’ and ‘traitor’ bandied about quite so often?

Also, I was wrong about this painting here. I can’t believe what an idiot I was because the truth was staring me in the face the whole time. This painting practically screams, ‘Politics!’…

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