The Glorious Revolution
Page 2
The interpretation of the Revolution as a sort of constitutional year zero was persuasive. A minority of radical Whigs, such as Catherine Macaulay, effectively conceded the conservative interpretation of 1688 by now pointing to the shortcomings of the Revolution, particularly as regards its limited impact on political representation. However, the idea of the Revolution as a break from England’s constitutional past proved problematic towards the end of the century, as far more radical revolutionary movements emerged, first in the American colonies and then in France. In this cauldron of international political upheaval, it seemed for moderates and conservatives wiser to stress the continuity of 1688, rather than its novelty.
What emerged, most influentially in the writings of Edmund Burke, was a counter-revolutionary revolution, an interpretation which reaffirmed the importance of 1688 in preserving the ‘ancient constitution’, one which had never endorsed giving resistance to public authority. This constitution was not shaped by sudden or abrupt upheavals, like that experienced in America or the one looming in France, but rather, like the action of water on rock, was moulded by subtle, slow and almost imperceptible changes. The Glorious Revolution, in Burke’s vision, had seen no violent tumult, but only a ‘small and temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession’. The revolutionaries, he argued, ‘regenerated the deficient part of the old constitution through the parts which were not impaired. They kept these old parts exactly as they were, that the part recovered might be suited to them. They acted by the ancient organised states in the shape of their old organisation, and not by the organic moleculae of a disbanded people.’15
Moreover, it was a revolution effected by the English political elite in Parliament, not through the invocation of popular sovereignty. George Chalmers, writing in 1796, stated that he considered the
Revolution as glorious; not because much was done; but because little was done; because none of the old foundations of our government were weakened, and none of the land-marks of the law were removed … because it was achieved by the good sense of Englishmen; because the Parliament sat quietly and voted independently, what necessity demanded, and wisdom approved; because, when a mob presumed to interpose with premature tumult, King William signified to the mobbish chiefs, that he would not accept a sceptre from such mean hands.16
Burke’s radical opponents, most notably Thomas Paine, were not interested in challenging his version of history. Instead, Paine and others began to argue that the past was not a suitable guide to the present generation in their political difficulties; indeed, they must free themselves from the weight of history and make their world anew:
Every age must be free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies … The parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, has no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence.17
With radicals implicitly conceding the conservative interpretation of the Revolution most ably articulated by Burke, the remembrance of 1688 ceased to arouse English political passions to the same degree it had previously. The Times reported that the centenary of the Glorious Revolution was celebrated at King’s Lynn on 17 November 1788 at the town hall
by a numerous and respectable party of ladies and gentlemen of this place and neighbourhood; a subscription was raised for that purpose, and the gentlemen who were appointed to conduct the entertainment, displayed their taste and abilities in the most elegant and sumptuous manner. We are happy to add on this occasion, that all party animosity and political differences seemed to be entirely forgotten, and everyone used a laudable emulation to commemorate the glorious preservation of our civil and religious liberties. The only anxiety which seemed to dwell on the minds of the company was a heart-felt concern for the dangerous indisposition under which our most gracious Sovereign now labours [a reference to George III’s mental illness].18
This view of the Revolution as a sensible, bipartisan affair, ensuring parliamentary government and creating a constitutional monarchy, became a staple of the English history textbook from the early nineteenth century up to the middle of the twentieth century. Edward Baldwin’s The History of England for the Use of Schools (1840) stated that the Revolution constituted ‘the final settlement of the government of England’. It was the culmination of the struggle ‘between power and liberty’ under the Stuarts.19 Mrs Cyril Ransome’s Elementary History of England (1897) instructed the reader that the Revolution marked ‘the beginning of a new period in English history. Since that date no one has been able to pretend that the kings of England reign by any other than a Parliamentary title, or that Parliament is not the supreme authority in the government of the country.’20
School histories downplayed any military elements in this revolution. Bertha Meriton Gardiner, the wife of the great Whig historian of the civil wars Samuel Rawson Gardiner, wrote that ‘William landed at Torbay in November, 1688, with a small army of Dutch and English troops’, thereby turning what was actually an armada into a mere lifeguard for the Prince of Orange.21 There was, the textbooks assured children, virtually no loss of life as a result of William’s landing. Ross’s Outlines of English History for Junior Classes in Schools (1860) taught students that in ‘all this great movement there was no fighting’, nor was ‘a revolution so quietly effected, and rarely has there been so clear a case for resistance to the constituted authorities’.22 Houghton’s A Summary of the Principal Events in English History (1875) informed pupils that ‘this great change was effected without bloodshed; by the mere strength of the hatred the English bore to tyranny’.23 Such authors stressed instead the conditional nature of the English Parliament’s offer of the Crown to William and Mary, emphasising the importance of the Declaration of Rights and its statutory equivalent, the Bill of Rights. According to Gardiner, by taking the crown upon the terms of the Declaration of Rights, William acknowledged that he ‘must give way to the wishes of the House of Commons’.24 G. T. Warner and C. H. K. Marten’s The Groundwork of British History (1936) followed the same line, claiming that the Bill of Rights ‘completed the work which Magna Charta had begun’.25
The views present in these school textbooks and primers were distilled and refined in the great liberal historian George Macaulay Trevelyan’s single-volume History of England (1926), the first work of its kind for over fifty years and the dominant historical narrative of the nation in the interwar period. Trevelyan stated that the glory of the events of 1688–9 ‘did not consist in any deed of arms, in any signal acts of heroism on the part of Englishmen … The true “glory” of the British Revolution lay in the fact that it was bloodless, that there was no civil war, no massacre, no proscription, and above all that a settlement by consent was reached of the religious and political differences that had so long and fiercely divided men and parties.’26 The Revolution did more than simply arbitrate ‘successfully between the two great parties whose feuds bade fair to destroy the State. It decided the balance between Parliamentary and regal power in favour of Parliament, and thereby gave England an executive in harmony with a sovereign legislative.’27
The version of the Glorious Revolution encapsulated in Trevelyan’s work survived the emergence of the group of British Marxist historians linked to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), whose populist works aimed to offer the public an alternative to the traditionalist, nationalist and imperialist histories generally dished up in schools. Indeed, Marxist historians of the seventeenth century such as Christopher Hill and A. L. Morton borrowed much of the Whig/Liberal analysis of 1688–9, though they grafted it on to a narrative of class struggle. Morton’s A People’s History of England (1938), the CPGB’s quasi-official national history, concurred with earlier works in
seeing the offer of the Crown to William and Mary as being conditional. The Bill of Rights, according to Morton, laid down ‘the conditions upon which the Whig bourgeoisie was pleased to allow the monarchy to continue to exist’.28 Hill’s The Century of Revolution (1961) argued, like earlier school histories, that the Revolution was necessary to maintain social order. James II’s policies had led to anarchy and rioting in London, so the elite saw that the restoration of some government was necessary to maintain ‘social subordination’.29 After the turmoil of James’s rule, the Glorious Revolution saw ‘a restoration of power to the traditional ruling class, the shire gentry and town merchants’. Although the Declaration of Rights was rather vague as a ‘statement of political principles’, it established that any ‘future ruler would at his peril defy those whom Parliament represented’.30
In a work designed for a more scholarly audience, Hill would go on to elaborate on how Britain in the seventeenth century had undergone two bourgeois revolutions, one ‘unwilled’, the civil wars of the 1640s, and one consciously ‘willed’ by the social elite, the Revolution of 1688.31 However, though the aim of the Revolution was to consolidate the power of the bourgeoisie, the fruits of these events in legal and constitutional terms were very similar to those described by Whig and Liberal historians: ‘effective parliamentary control over the executive, the rule of law and the political independence of judges, restored traditional local government and greater freedom of the press. It ended rule by royal favourites and ideological sycophants, most of whom were recent converts to the rulers’ religion.’32
The Revolution was the cornerstone of the Whig interpretation of British history, and much of this account, describing it as a bloodless political coup which established constitutional monarchy and religious toleration in Britain, was successfully incorporated into later Marxist accounts. However, from the 1970s onwards a historiographical movement known broadly as ‘revisionism’ began to attack the key shibboleths of the Whig reading of early modern British history. The post-war retreat from Empire, economic decline and a growing lack of confidence in social scientific models of historical change (in particular, those informed by Marxism) undermined the optimistic teleology of the Whig account, with its description of a steady movement towards parliamentary democracy. Revisionist scholars such as J. P. Kenyon and J. C. D. Clark attacked the ‘shallowness’, ‘superficiality’ and ‘glibness’ of Trevelyan’s account of Britain’s ‘sensible revolution’.33 Instead, the revisionists presented the Revolution as little more than a dynastic usurpation that changed virtually nothing beyond the line of succession. Kenyon’s Dictionary of British History described the Glorious Revolution as simply the ‘events that brought about the removal of James II from the throne and his replacement by his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange’.34 These historians emphasised the importance of the role of William III himself in shaping events, rather than English MPs. The ‘Revolution of 1688 was a dynastic revolution,’ affirmed the historian Robert Beddard, ‘one that came from above, from inside the royal family, not from below.’35 Revisionist scholars, in particular Jonathan Israel, emphasised the importance of the military dimension. They agreed with earlier historiography in seeing the Revolution as bloodless, but stressed the extent to which 1688 represented an invasion by a foreign power, driven by the commercial and political interests of the Dutch Republic. Equally, the settlement of 1688–9 was shaped not only by the desires of William III but also by the presence of an occupying army in the capital.36
Revisionist historians pointed to the vagaries of the Revolution settlement and scotched the idea that either the Declaration of Rights or the Bill of Rights placed conditions upon the acceptance of the crown. ‘The Revolution monarchy,’ according to Beddard, like its Restoration predecessor, ‘depended upon trust, not upon contract.’37 The politicians who enacted the Revolution settlement, were not, in this reading, constitutional innovators. They preferred seeing their actions as restorative, returning England to its ‘ancient constitution’, which had been threatened by the novel and dangerous policies of an absolutist papist, James II. The contractual theories of government of John Locke represented an isolated voice in a political discourse that was dominated by the discussion of the power of divine providence to confer a title, and the duty of giving obedience to a monarch de facto (in possession of the throne), rather than de jure (holding the title by hereditary or legal right). These revisionist historians, most notably J. C. D. Clark, also stressed the limited and contested nature of the religious settlement embodied in the 1689 Toleration Act. According to them, the Anglican Church-State remained a powerful and resilient entity well beyond the Revolution settlement. That settlement itself was less than secure given the continued military threat from the supporters of the Catholic Stuart pretenders to the throne, the Jacobites, a threat that did not finally diminish into insignificance until the late eighteenth century. This revisionist interpretation of the Glorious Revolution has filtered down into schoolbooks. The most successful recent textbook on Britain’s seventeenth-century history, Barry Coward’s The Stuart Age (1980 and many subsequent editions), states bluntly that the ‘most striking feature of the Glorious Revolution was its failure to effect any fundamental changes in the English Church or constitution’.38
There is much to be said for the revisionist interpretation of the Glorious Revolution, particularly in its emphasis upon the dynastic struggle, the role of Dutch military power and the continued importance of confessional conflict after 1688. Yet it should also be noted that there is much in this new picture of the Revolution that will be familiar from the older Whig and Marxist reading. The idea that this was a revolution that was not really a revolution at all reiterated those older interpretations of events. The revisionist picture, though it did take note of the military aspects of the Revolution, also stressed the extent to which it unfolded with little bloodshed. Like previous historians, revisionists also assumed that this was a revolution engineered by the political elite with very little involvement from the mass of the people. In the revisionists’ version of events the Glorious Revolution remained Britain’s quiet revolution.
This book challenges both Whiggish and revisionist interpretations of the Glorious Revolution in a number of important ways. First, it argues that the Revolution was very far from being bloodless. Revisionist historians, as well as their Whig, liberal and Marxist predecessors, have tended to focus predominantly on events in England. However, a cursory survey of how events unfolded after 1688 in Ireland and Scotland reveals that, as a British revolution, it was marred by horrific violence. The Revolution settlement in Ireland was enforced by military conquest and in Scotland too the issue of the succession was contested by arms and sealed by the bloody massacre of Glencoe.
Even in England itself, this Revolution represented much less a peaceful transfer of power from one dynasty to another than one important stage in a protracted and messy struggle over the royal succession. Most recent accounts of the Revolution tend to begin their narrative in 1685, with the accession to the throne of James II. However, if the issue of the succession is important, and it is the contention of this book that this was the central issue at stake in 1688–9, then the story of the Glorious Revolution should really begin in the 1670s, when James’s conversion to Roman Catholicism became public knowledge. This event raised English fears concerning the prospect of being ruled by a popish monarch prone, it was believed, to arbitrary government and bent on the destruction of the Protestant religion. These anxieties led to the turmoil of the so-called ‘Exclusion Crisis’, when Whig politicians, spurred on by rumours of a ‘Popish Plot’ to assassinate King Charles II and place his brother on the throne, attempted to bar James from succeeding to the crown by legislative means. The plot itself was completely fictitious, but the paranoia aroused by the threat of Catholic insurrection led to the deaths of many innocent suspected ‘plotters’.
The failure of exclusion to prevent James from inheriting the throne pr
ompted some to take more desperate measures. A rising led by Charles’s eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, attempted to seize the crown by force, but Monmouth’s followers, mainly poor labourers and farmhands, were cut down in their thousands by the royal army at the battle of Sedgemoor, and hundreds more rebels were hung, drawn and quartered after the ‘Bloody Assizes’ which followed. Even during the Revolution in England, skirmishes between James’s and William’s forces occurred in which soldiers were killed and there were mass panics and riots in December 1688, owing to rumours of an impending massacre of English Protestant civilians by the King’s disbanded Irish soldiers. The political changes that followed the dynastic revolution were, then, achieved at a high cost in human lives.