The Glorious Revolution
Page 33
So ended any even nominal Catholic Stuart claim to the British crown (though impostors posing as descendants of Bonnie Prince Charlie appeared in the Victorian era).18 Though Charles Edward came closest to challenging the Hanoverian succession, it is debatable how long he could have maintained control of England even if he had seized London. The exiled Stuarts nonetheless succeeded in capturing the popular imagination, particularly the Young Chevalier, whose exploits in the ’45 and after would feed the imagination of nineteenth-century romantic novelists, notably Sir Walter Scott in his Waverley; or ’Tis Sixty Years Since, published in 1814. By contrast the first two Georges would inspire little public devotion. Yet by 1745 George II could draw upon a far more reliable wellspring of loyalty than his (very limited) personal magnetism. As the Jacobite army headed towards Derby, pulpits across England rang out with loyal sermons. Yet the preachers rarely spent much time discussing the virtues of George II himself. Instead, they stressed the need to preserve England’s post-Revolutionary constitution, which ensured stability, the rule of law and, above all, economic prosperity.19 The financial catastrophe that would follow a Jacobite victory was repeatedly emphasised, the Bishop of Chester even managing to link the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation to high taxation. The greatest number of loyal addresses came from large trading ports such as Liverpool and Bristol. In the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the public were urged, not to defend their monarch, George II, but instead ‘our happy constitution in Church and State’.20 The Hanoverian monarchy may not have wormed its way into the hearts of the English people, but it had, more importantly, fattened many people’s wallets. The stability and prosperity secured by the Revolution settlement proved far stronger than any emotional attachment to an exiled dynasty.
From its immediate aftermath to the present day, public debate about the Revolution has, through all its permutations and controversies, cohered around at least one fact: 1688 was a struggle over the English constitution. In academic circles, however, the interpretation of 1688 as an English constitutional revolution has been under threat for a long time. In 1984, in response to a suggestion from the cross-bench peer Baron Henderson of Brompton that there should be some public celebration of the tercentenary of the revolution in order to promote ‘patriotic’ history, a correspondent to the Times’s letters page wrote that it was not only ‘questionable whether 1688 bequeathed us the modern parliamentary system’ but also commemoration might have the unfortunate effect of ‘awakening emotions that have laid dormant within the national psyche’. The Revolution, it was pointed out, hardly improved ‘Anglo-Scottish relations’, nor, given the fact that William of Orange was welcomed ‘by many because he would not pursue the Stuart policy of religious toleration’, was it the ‘advent of parliamentary democracy’. Given that the Revolution was, in any case, bound to be celebrated in one part of the United Kingdom, the correspondent wondered whether it would be wise for the government to sponsor ‘what would appear to be an undiluted Orange-flavoured brand of history’.21
While they might use slightly less strident terms, many historians would agree with this interpretation of the Glorious Revolution. The constitutional changes effected, at least in 1688–9, as a result of the Revolution settlement were minimal. The religious liberty granted under the Toleration Act was far more limited than that which James II had attempted to get Parliament to approve in the final year of his reign (a policy which had played a large part in leading to his ‘abdication’). To adopt a less Anglocentric view, it was less than glorious, too, with serious conflict, loss of life and even incidents of military atrocities in Ireland and Scotland. Taking a broader perspective has also encouraged historians to view this as an event with essentially European causes. The English political revolution could not have happened without the intervention of Dutch arms. The reasons for William’s involvement in English affairs had far less to do with the invitation sent to him by the ‘immortal seven’ (necessary though it was for the Prince’s propaganda purposes) and far more to do with the need for English financial and military assistance in the Dutch struggle with Louis XIV. Once installed as British monarch, William used his new kingdom, in the words of one historian, as a ‘milch cow’ to fund war against the French.22 By 1697 Britain was contributing 45 per cent of the costs of William’s army in Flanders and making up a quarter of that army’s manpower.
There is much to support the view that 1688 represented a Dutch invasion and occupation of England, albeit one with considerable support from a fifth column of English politicians, soldiers and clergymen. Such an interpretation has the advantage of reminding us how close England itself came to serious armed conflict, with only James’s loss of nerve preventing the country from experiencing another, perhaps more bloody civil war. However, if we see the Glorious Revolution simply from the perspective of William III and his Dutch advisers we will miss much that is significant about the events of 1688 and after. Contemporaries called this a revolution and there remains significant evidence to support this view. First, this was not merely a palace coup or piece of European realpolitik. The English people were deeply involved in the changes brought about during the Revolution. It was ordinary people, not the gentry, who first flocked to William’s cause in the west of the country. It was the London crowd, so virulent in its anti-popery, which played a large part in James’s decision to flee his kingdom rather than attempt to stay and fight. The massive amount of ink spilt in attempting to legitimate or to contest William’s right to the throne revealed the importance placed by both sides upon winning over public opinion.
Secondly, if the Revolution did not represent the advent of parliamentary ‘democracy’ it certainly enshrined parliamentary government. Through its increasing control over government expenditure, its power to scrutinise public accounts and later through the statutory device of the Triennial Act, Parliament became an integral, permanent institution at the heart of government. This revolution in Parliament was accompanied by a financial revolution which laid the foundations for Britain’s emergence as a great power in the eighteenth century, through the creation of new institutions such as the Bank of England (which owed a good deal to existing Dutch joint-stock companies). The Revolution not only established the Westminster Parliament as the pre-eminent political body in the British Isles, but also heralded its emergence as an imperial authority. The years following 1689 saw a significant tightening of Parliament’s control of colonial administration. A revised Navigation Act (1696) authorised colonial vice-admiralty courts, legislation was issued to help suppress piracy (1700) and regulate privateers (1708) and, in 1710, a general post office with branches in England, Ireland, Scotland and the American colonies was created. The consequence of this legislation was a growing sense of interconnectedness, politically as well as economically, between the constituent parts of the British Empire and the metropolitan centre. The increasing involvement of Westminster in the colonies’ internal affairs also brought about the extension of rights and privileges enjoyed in Britain to the Americas. Parliament compelled colonial assemblies to grant religious toleration in terms modelled on the English Toleration Act and the Naturalisation Act of 1740 offered the same rights as enjoyed by natural-born British subjects to foreign Protestant and Jewish settlers.
The end result of these changes was a growing feeling among many white, English-speaking colonists that they held the same rights as Crown subjects in Britain (a view, however, not shared by many in Westminster). As tensions over trade and taxation between Britain and its American colonies increased over the course of the eighteenth century, many colonists looked to the constitutional inheritance they shared with the British, the Revolution of 1688–9, to offer them the means to defend themselves from the perceived predations of an over-mighty and unrepresentative empire. In particular, they looked to that clause of the Bill of Rights of 1690 which affirmed that ‘Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by Law.’ This
novel right to bear arms, shorn of the element of religious discrimination, would later form the basis for the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States: ‘A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’23 However, while the impact of the Glorious Revolution upon the white inhabitants of the British Atlantic was, in the long term, to furnish them with the ideological ammunition necessary to throw off imperial rule, for the non-white inhabitants 1688 heralded a massive increase in unfreedom in the first British Empire. The Revolution effectively ended the Royal African Company’s monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade. In 1698 the African trade was opened up to other companies on the payment of a 10 per cent duty on exports and by 1712 all restrictions had been done away with, leading to a doubling in human traffic. If the Glorious Revolution marked a watershed for Britain as a colonial and trading power, the nation’s rise to greatness was, in part, built upon the labour of enslaved Africans.24
Thirdly, the change of monarchs ushered in cultural, as well as political, change. Many contemporaries spoke as much of a Williamite ‘reformation’ as ‘revolution’: 1688 was seen as an opportunity to return divine blessings upon the nation in terms of its salvation from popery, through a thorough reformation of public morals and manners. The popularity of this campaign remains a matter of historical debate, but it is a reminder that the Glorious Revolution did not represent the abrupt dawn of a secular age. Christian religion remained at the core of public and private life and religious controversy could be as raw and vindictive as it had been in the 1640s. However, these conflicts were increasingly tempered by a growing conviction that what was important was sincerity rather than correctness of belief.
Advice sheets like the Athenian Mercury dished out the kind of moral guidance on sensitive topics that had previously only been offered in private and it was now left up to the anonymous individual reader whether or not to heed such counsel. The decade after the Revolution did see an upsurge in national and local efforts to regulate moral behaviour. Yet it was arguably the case that communities cracked down on prostitution, drunkenness and ‘idleness’ as much out of a desire to curb criminality and social disorder, as out of a fear of divine judgements for leaving sin unchecked. However limited in scope, the Toleration Act represented a significant retreat by the Church-State. A plurality of religious beliefs was accepted which went far beyond earlier pragmatic recognitions of religious diversity (such as the French Edict of Nantes). The British state was moving closer to the ideas of radical thinkers like John Locke, who argued that the civil authorities should not seek to regulate religious worship or belief: 1688 may have represented a ‘Godly revolution’, in that it inspired a religious and moral revival, but its architects did not attempt to create a ‘Godly commonwealth’ of ‘saints’ as some Englishmen had sought to do in the 1650s.
Finally, the Revolution imposed real limitations on the power of the monarch. Ironically, fetters were placed upon the crown less as a means of protecting Parliament and the public from the threat of Catholic Stuart absolutism than as a defence against the likely succession to the throne of more foreign Protestant princelings. The 1701 Act of Settlement, with its limitations upon royal powers of appointment and royal power to wage war independently, effectively ended the threat of royal tyranny. What the Revolution did not prevent, as one historian has recently pointed out, was the possibility of legislative tyranny.25 The threat of an over-mighty Parliament became a reality as the Septennial Act effectively destroyed the Revolution’s commitment to regular elections, ushering in the rule of a Whig oligarchy. While our constitution remains such a nebulous (or as Edmund Burke would have had it, immemorial) entity, we may continue to suffer under the government of what Lord Hailsham memorably described as an ‘elective dictatorship’.
NOTES
PREFACE: THE QUIET REVOLUTION
1 Hansard, 7 July 1988, col. 1233.
2 Quoted in A. L. Morton, A People’s History of England (London, 1938), pp. 277–88.
3 On the role of the Stadtholder or Stadholder see J. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 300–07.
4 Hansard, 7 July 1988, col. 1262.
5 Ibid., col. 1237.
6 Ibid., col. 1234–5.
7 Ibid., col. 1239–40.
8 Ibid., col. 1245–6.
9 Ibid., col. 1253–4.
10 Ibid., col. 1258.
11 H. T. Dickinson, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Debate on the “Glorious Revolution”’, History, 61 (1975), pp. 28–45, at p. 34.
12 Ibid., p. 35.
13 Dickinson, p. 36.
14 Ibid., p. 7.
15 D. Szechi, ‘Mythistory versus History: The Fading of the Revolution of 1688’, The Historical Journal, 33 (1990), p. 143.
16 Dickinson, p. 40.
17 Ibid., p. 45
18 The Times, 21 November 1788, p. 4.
19 Pp. 117–18. (Baldwin was a pseudonym for the radical political philosopher William Godwin, husband of Mary Wolstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley.)
20 P. 164.
21 B. M. Gardiner, The Struggle against Absolute Monarchy (London, 1908), p. 78.
22 Pp. 163–4.
23 P. 44.
24 Gardiner, p. 79.
25 P. 446.
26 G. M. Trevelyan, The History of England (3rd edn., 1945), p. 472.
27 Ibid., p. 475.
28 Morton, p. 277.
29 C. Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (London, 2nd edn., 1972), p. 210.
30 Ibid., pp. 237–8.
31 C. Hill, ‘A Bourgeois Revolution?’ in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980): ‘If the Revolution of 1640 was unwilled, the coup d’état of 1688–9 and the peaceful Hanoverian succession were very much willed. The self-confident landed class had now consciously taken its destiny into its own hands.’
32 Hill in a letter to the Independent, February 1988.
33 Quoted in J. Morrill, ‘The Sensible Revolution’, in his The Nature of the English Revolution (Harlow, 1993), ch. 20., p. 421.
34 J. P. Kenyon (ed.), Dictionary of British History (Ware, 1994).
35 R. A. Beddard, ‘The Unexpected Whig Revolution of 1688’, in his The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford, 1991), p. 97.
36 See J. Israel, The Anglo-Dutch Moment (Cambridge, 1991), esp. chs. 3 and 10.
37 Ibid., p. 100.
38 P. 312.
1 A POPISH PLOT?
1 J. P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London, 1972), p. 56.
2 Ibid., p. 59.
3 Ibid., p. 86.
4 Ibid., p. 88.
5 Ibid., p. 106.
6 J. Spurr, England in the 1670s: ‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford, 2000), p. 266.
7 A. Marshall, The Strange Death of Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey (Stroud, 1999); Alan Marshall, ‘To Make a Martyr, The Popish Plot and Protestant Propaganda’, History Today (1997), pp. 39–45; P. Hammond, ‘Titus Oates and Sodomy’, in J. Black (ed.), Culture and Society in Britain 1660–1800 (Manchester, 1997).
8 Kenyon, The Popish Plot, p. 101.
9 Op. cit.
10 Ibid., p. 149.
11 Spurr, England in the 1670s, p. 271.
12 Kenyon, The Popish Plot, p. 175.
13 Spurr, England in the 1670s, p. 279.
14 Ibid., p. 280.
15 Ibid., p. 282.
16 Ibid., p. 283.
17 Ibid., p. 286.
18 Ibid., p. 289.
19 Ibid., p. 291.
20 Kenyon, The Popish Plot, p. 111.
2 THE PROTESTANT DUKE AND THE POPISH PRINCE
1 The Axminster Ecclesiastica 1660–1698, ed. K. W. H. Howard (Sheffield, 1976), pp. 93–4.
2 J. G. Muddiman (ed.), The Bloody Assizes (1934), p. 54. Muddiman’s text is from the fifth edition (1705).
3 The Autobiography of Sir John Bramston (Camden Society, o.s. 32, 1845), p. 192.
4 J. W. Ebsworth, ‘Thomas Dangerfield’, Dictionary of National Biography (1888), vol. 14, pp. 16–18. See also Duke Dangerfield declaring how he represented the D. of Mon— in the Country (1685); Dangerfields Dance. Giving an Account of several Notorious Crimes by him Committed; viz. He pretended to be a Duke and feigned himself to be Monmouth (1685).
5 B. Sharp, ‘Popular Political Opinion in England 1660–1685’, History of European Ideas, vol. 10, no. 1 (1989), pp. 13–29, at p. 23.
6 The best account of Monmouth’s rebellion is R. Clifton, The Last Popular Rebellion: The Western Rising of 1685 (Hounslow, 1984). See also W. MacDonald Wigfield, The Monmouth Rebellion: A Social History (Bradford-on-Avon, 1980); P. Earle, Monmouth’s Rebels (London, 1977).