The Glorious Revolution

by Edward Vallance

  Edward Vallance completed his BA and Ph.D. at Balliol College, Oxford. From 2000 to 2002 he was the De Velling Willis Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield. He is now a lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Liverpool. His most recent book, A Radical History of Britain, is published by Little, Brown.

  ‘Very welcome as an up-to-date and well-informed narrative account of the Glorious Revolution. He tells the dramatic story with a calm authority and easy style … Vallance leavens his account by allowing a large range of late-seventeenth century accounts to be heard … fascinating … balanced without being anodyne, wide-ranging without being superficial assured without being complacent. It deserves the wide audience it is aimed at’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Well researched and immensely readable. His judicious use of details makes history come alive … A highly accomplished account of a decisive chapter in our national story. Its conclusions that the Glorious Revolution may simply have replaced the possibility of royal tyranny with that of a legislative one is particularly chilling at a time when our hard-won liberties are once again under threat’ Daily Express

  ‘A brisk, taut and lucid account … Vallance retells the story of the Popish Plot, with the pace of a thriller, building the sense that something was rotten in the state of England’ Independent

  ‘Does the best of making this complicated, extraordinary phase of British history accessible’ Guardian

  ‘Certainly lives up to the hype as it manages to conjure up a colourful, lively account … Vallance avoids dullness by instead creating vivid pen portraits of contemporary characters’ Herald

  ‘Gripping … [Vallance] writes with considerable narrative flair … a tremendously exciting introduction to the period’ Telegraph

  ‘Vallance furnishes a quick moving narrative … packed full of local colour and picturesque anecdote’ History Today Magazine

  ‘Lucid and perceptive’ Literary Review

  ‘Entertaining, concise and well-judged’ The Economist

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-1-405-52776-7

  Copyright © 2006 Edward Vallance

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

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  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Mum and Dad

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  PREFACE: The ‘Quiet’ Revolution

  1: A Popish Plot?

  2: The Protestant Duke and the Popish Prince

  3: The Anglican Revolt

  4: The Dutch Invasion

  5: Panic and Flight

  6: Selling the Revolution

  7: The Revolution in Scotland and Ireland

  8: William and Mary

  9: William Alone

  CONCLUSION: The End of the Line

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  A Radical History Of Britain

  Rubicon

  Persian Fire

  Bloody Foreigners

  Endgame 1945

  PREFACE

  THE ‘QUIET’ REVOLUTION

  [The Glorious Revolution] established the tradition that political change should be sought and achieved through Parliament. It was this which saved us from the violent revolutions which shook our continental neighbours and made the revolution of 1688 the first step on the road, which, through the successive Reform Acts, led to the establishment of universal suffrage and full parliamentary democracy.

  MARGARET THATCHER1

  The Glorious Revolution brought into power, along with William of Orange, the landlord and capitalist appropriators of surplus value. They inaugurated the new era by practising on a colossal scale thefts of State lands, thefts that had hitherto been managed more modestly. These estates were given away, sold at a ridiculous figure or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure. All this happened without the slightest observation of legal etiquette … The bourgeois capitalists favoured the operation with the view, among others, to promoting free trade in land, to extending the domain of modern agriculture on the large farm system, and to increasing their supply of agricultural proletarians ready to hand. Besides the new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy, of the new-hatched haute finance and of the large manufacturer, then depending on protective duties.

  KARL MARX2

  On 30 June 1688 seven English peers, opposed to the pro-Catholic policies of the reigning King James II, wrote to the Dutch Stadtholder, the Protestant William, Prince of Orange, requesting his assistance.3 On 5 November 1688 William landed with a sizeable army and began a march upon London. James went out to meet him with a numerically larger force, but lost his nerve for the battle, partly as a result of defections to the other side from his officer ranks. Fearing for his own and his family’s safety, James made an attempt to flee the country on 11 December but was captured. However, on the 22nd the King succeeded in escaping to France. With the throne vacant and unrest in the city, the government was temporarily placed in the hands of the Prince of Orange and a convention of peers and MPs was summoned to decide how to settle the kingdom. On 13 February 1689 William and his English wife Mary, the Protestant daughter of James II, were crowned joint monarchs, as well as being tendered a document called the ‘Declaration of Rights’ which listed the country’s grievances against its former king. These events, which came to be known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’, form the subject of this book.

  There was a large amount of common ground between Margaret Thatcher and Karl Marx in terms of their interpretation of the Revolution of 1688. The two agreed that this was not a popular revolution, but an event orchestrated by the English ruling class, through Parliament. They concurred in seeing 1688 as essentially bloodless, involving no violent uprisings, and both believed that the accession to the throne of William and Mary laid the foundations for Britain’s rise to greatness as a commercial and imperial power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Above all, they were united in considering the events of 1688–9 as not really being revolutionary at all. For Thatcher, indebted to the ideas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Whig historians, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ marked the beginning of a ‘tradition’, the first step on the long parliamentary road by which Britain became a mass democracy. For Marx 1688 represented only the confirmation of an earlier revolution, the civil wars of the 1640s which had established the ascendancy of the emerging bourgeoisie.

  The attitudes of Marx and Thatcher, from the late nineteenth and the late twentieth century respectively, reflected a wider public consensus about the ‘unrevolutionary’ nature of the Glorious Revolution. Thatcher’s comments were made in a House of Commons debate about sending a humble address to the Queen celebrating the tercentenary of the events of 1688–9. These had, the address stated, ‘established those constitutional freedoms under law which Your Majesty’s Parliament and people have continued to enjoy for three hundred years’.4 Conservative MPs, such as Sir Bernard Braine, eulogised over the fact that the Glorious Revolution had established parliamentary government and opened the way for ‘the expansion of commerce, the extension of influence overseas, the building of empire and later that truly remarkable and peaceful transition from empire to a free Commonwealth’.5

  The leader of the Labour opposition, Neil Kinnock, countered Thatcher’s opening salvo by suggesting that the revolution had really been a ‘fudge’ and ‘compromise�
�� between Whigs and Tories designed to avoid a ‘second revolutionary civil war’. The actions of the Prince of Orange were wholly motivated by self-interest reflecting a level of ‘Dutch opportunism not now seen outside the realms of the European Nations Cup’ (a reference to the Netherlands football team’s trouncing of England in the tournament earlier that year – a trophy which the Dutch went on to win). However, despite the cynicism that Kinnock saw as motivating the actions of most of those involved in the events of 1688, he concurred with Thatcher (along with the historians Lord Macaulay, G. M. Trevelyan, A. J. P. Taylor and Christopher Hill) in seeing the revolution, in Taylor’s words, as ‘the foundation of our liberty’.6

  Kinnock, along with other Labour frontbenchers, went on to abstain from voting on the motion, but a significant group on the left wing of the party voted against submitting the address to the Queen. The former cabinet minister Tony Benn complained that what happened in 1688 was not a revolution but a ‘plot by some people … to replace a Catholic king with another king more acceptable to those who organised the plot’. Neither was it bloodless given the repression in Ireland of the supporters of James II. It certainly did not herald, Benn said, ‘the birth of our democratic rights’, the House of Commons representing only the richest 2 per cent of the population and excluding ‘working people, or middle-class people and … women’. He begged members to vote against the address ‘or, if they cannot do that, to abstain, so that at least we do not have to tell children that democracy had nothing to do with the franchise; it was all because William of Orange had to give an assurance to justify the fact that he landed an army in Torbay and took over, in order to repress the Catholics and the Irish’.7

  The Liverpool Walton MP and former communist Eric Heffer (who had stormed off the Labour conference stage in response to Kinnock’s attacks on Liverpool’s Militant-led city council), echoed Benn’s comments. Heffer stated that 1688 was ‘neither glorious nor a revolution’. This was because the ‘real revolution had already taken place when, the day after the king’s head was cut off in 1649, the House of Lords was abolished’.8 Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North, paraphrased Marx in stating that the accession of William and Mary effectively guaranteed ‘the powers of the landowning classes as well as bringing them the Protestant religion and the discrimination against Catholics that followed.’ Adopting an increasingly strident tone, Corbyn alleged that the ‘so-called glorious revolution of 1688 paved the way for the processes of imperialism and colonialism. Implicit in the wording of the Bill of Rights is the domination of colonies throughout the world and all the disgusting and degrading events that followed from that, such as slavery and the domination of subject peoples.’9 (Corbyn was right to view the Glorious Revolution as a significant chapter in the growth of both the British Empire and the role of slave labour within it, but he was on much shakier ground in his reading of the Bill of Rights.) Bob Cryer, MP for Bradford South, complained that the motion had suggested that ‘some sort of millennium was established [in 1688] and that our people have enjoyed constitutional freedoms under law for 300 years’. This was ‘patently offensive’ when the lives of those workers who ‘lost limbs and lives in the factories during the industrial revolution’ and whose ‘average life expectation was less than 30 years’ were recalled.10

  Beneath the partisan rhetoric, this debate displayed the consensus that existed between those poles apart on the political spectrum over the events of 1688–9. Conservatives like Thatcher applauded the Glorious Revolution because it was a revolution by Parliament, not the people. Left-wingers dismissed its historical significance for exactly the same reason (preferring 1649 instead). For Tories, the lack of popular agitation had saved Britain from experiencing the anarchy and terror of the French revolution. For socialists, this represented no revolution at all, but merely a putsch by the political and financial elite in order to consolidate the establishment’s power. Sir Bernard Braine and Jeremy Corbyn could agree that the Glorious Revolution was a turning point in Britain’s history as a colonial power, but while the Tory Braine saw the birth of empire (with the happy ending of the commonwealth) as a cause for celebration, the anti-imperialist Corbyn viewed it as the beginning of a shameful and reprehensible epoch in our national history.

  The debate on this tercentenary address, with its surprisingly literate references to historians such as Trevelyan, Hill and E. P. Thompson, rested upon a broad agreement among historians of a variety of ideological and methodological hues about the Glorious Revolution. This historiographical consensus had been effectively established by the late eighteenth century. The early eighteenth-century debate on the subject was dominated by the issue of what had actually happened in 1688: had James effectively abdicated the throne by fleeing the kingdom or had he broken an original contract with the people and forfeited his crown? Whigs, if not endorsing the radical, natural-rights-based theories of the philosopher John Locke, argued that James had broken the trust invested in him by the people, by attacking the subject’s liberties, property and religion, and the people had consequently been absolved from their duty of allegiance to the King. However, unlike Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, most pamphlets utilising contract theory issued after 1688 tended to locate this agreement in England’s ‘ancient constitution’, its supposed repository of Anglo-Saxon customary laws that guaranteed the rights and privileges of the people and Parliament, making it a restorative revolution rather than a progressive one.

  The Revolution settlement, in England at least, consciously fudged the issue of whether James had broken his original contract with the people and instead opted for stating that he had ‘abdicated’ by fleeing the kingdom and thereby left the throne vacant. This version of events was designed to satisfy Tory opinion and avoid a clear breach with their core beliefs of non-resistance and passive obedience, just as the institution of a joint monarchy was meant to provide wriggle-room for Tories attached to the principle of indefeasible hereditary right. Like moderate Whigs, conformist Tory opinion agreed that the Revolution had been made to defend the ‘ancient constitution’ but saw this as embodying the values of loyalty to lawfully (and therefore divinely) constituted authority. Under Queen Anne, Tory writers became increasingly vigorous in condemning the notion that any resistance had been offered to James II in 1688. The Anglican minister and Tory polemicist Henry Sacheverell put forward this position in the starkest and most controversial terms in a sermon delivered on the auspicious date of 5 November 1709. He stated that they were the greatest enemies of the Revolution and ‘his late Majesty, and the most ungrateful for the deliverance, who endeavour to cast such black, and odious colours upon both. How often must they be told, that the King himself solemnly disclaim’d the least imputation of resistance in his Declaration; and that the Parliament declar’d, that they set the crown on his head, upon no other title, but that of the vacancy of the throne?’11

  Sacheverell’s sermon, and works supporting it from other Tory propagandists, appeared to threaten both the Whigs’ political revival since 1688 and, with its attacks on the Toleration Act, the concessions won for dissenters as a result of the Revolution settlement. Such an assault could not go unanswered, and Whig writers and politicians upheld the right of resistance. However, now as a party of government, they did so with a number of reservations about the highly exceptional circumstances which made that exercise of resistance permissible. Robert Walpole argued that resistance to monarchical authority ‘ought never to be thought of, but when an utter subversion of the laws of the realm threaten the whole frame of a constitution, and no redress can otherwise be hoped for’.12 Only one of the Whig managers of the charges against Sacheverell, Nicholas Lechmere, actually made any mention of a contract between the crown and the people. The rhetorical weakness of this position, in that it actually seemed to confirm much of Sacheverell’s own arguments about the general illegality of resistance, was picked up on by Simon Harcourt, one of his defenders. By reinterpreting the supreme power as constituting King,
Lords and Commons, and not just the monarch alone, Harcourt was able to argue that Sacheverell was correct to suggest that in 1688 there had been no resistance of public authority. Sacheverell was nonetheless found guilty, but his sentence was so light that it was generally viewed as a victory for the Tory party. The electorate appeared to agree with Harcourt and Sacheverell and delivered the Tories a healthy majority in the new Parliament.

  The Jacobite rebellion of 1715, and the association of the Tory party with it, put an end to the party’s revival in fortunes in the last years of the reign of Queen Anne. Instead, it ushered in the long rule of a Whig oligarchy, institutionalised via the Septennial Act, which effectively neutered the Revolution settlement’s commitment to frequent elections. For the government Whigs, advocating Revolution principles of active resistance and contractual government now looked like little more than an invitation to Jacobite insurrection. The supporters of Walpole and the ‘Robinocracy’ (as the ruling clique was called by its ‘Patriot’ opponents) now contended that those who talked up the right of resistance were as much enemies to the constitution as those that had sought to increase the royal prerogative beyond its legal bounds. Whig writers still maintained that the Revolution had preserved England’s ‘ancient constitution’ from the absolutist designs of James II, but this had not been achieved by an act of public resistance to the monarch, but through the cowardly flight of the King in the wake of the providential arrival of William of Orange. The English Parliament, meanwhile, had acted quickly to avoid a descent into anarchy and mob rule. It was in the speedy restoration of political and social stability, rather than in any affirmation of rights of resistance, that the Revolution’s glory lay.

  The debate over the Revolution continued to undergo various permutations throughout the eighteenth century. The one-time Tory Secretary of State and former Jacobite Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, in seeking to create a new country alliance against the Whig ministry in the 1730s, came up with a new version of the events of 1688. Bolingbroke’s interpretation followed that of the establishment Whigs in seeing the Glorious Revolution as preserving the ‘ancient constitution’, rather than in ushering in new governmental forms. However, Bolingbroke differed from Walpole’s supporters in stressing (quite correctly) the extent to which the Revolution was a bipartisan achievement. In his words, ‘The revolution was a fire, which purged off the dross of both parties; and the dross being purged off, they appeared to be the same metal, and answered the same standard.’13 It was now necessary, he argued, for Tories and non-government Whigs to join forces again, to resist the encroachment on English liberties of a state which had undergone exponential growth since the 1690s. In response, Walpole and his allies shifted tack by rejecting the traditional Whig interpretation of the Revolution, now appropriated by Bolingbroke, that it was effected to defend the ‘ancient constitution’ and instead suggested that before 1688 the English people had frequently lived under arbitrary rule. It was the Glorious Revolution which was the founding moment of a new epoch of freedom for the English. In the words of the London Journal, ‘our Modern Constitution is infinitely better than the Ancient Constitution: and that New England, or England since the Revolution, is vastly preferable to Old England, take it in any point of time, from the Saxons down to that glorious period’.14