Just before
Christmas I was sitting in a Pub just outside of Neath. I head a man
talking about the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was speaking
rather what I would uncharitably call “Kipper Konverstaion”.
There had been an article in the Daily Mail about the event that had
far more to do with our time and its concerns than 1688. Even when
Edward Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he was
fearing for the fate of the British Empire. Gibbon blamed the
Christians for the fall of Roma and argued for a secular British
state...now I wonder how the Daily Mail would take that? All history
is seen and interpreted in the context of the time in which it is
described. The past has happened but how we learn about it and talk
about it is created by the time that we the learners and others
exist in. In a time of Brexit we find that the nice British
Parliament invited William and Mary to liberate Britain from the
threat of absolutism. But we fail to mention that like the Magna
Carta the Glorious Revolution was instituted by European powers
intervening into British life....but lets not mention that. Williams
army was four times larger than the Spanish Armada but we won't
mention that will we?
They never mention
that William had been plotting the invasion for years before and that
he felt a new regime help him in his war against France. The Kipper
revisionists never tell you about the violence done in Scotland or
Ireland that was far from Glorious or indeed how the foundations of
the Slave Trade began under this glorious change...but who am I to
point this out.? Edmund Burke, the hero of the Conservatives once
said “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern, make the
field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great
cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the British Oak, chew the cud
and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are
the only inhabitants of the field.” Burke could well be describing
Farage and his crew and the political culture of 2017. When the
Daily Mail begins explaining history I reach for my sick bucket.
The Glorious
Revolution of 1688-1689 replaced the reigning king, James II, with
the joint monarchy of his protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch
husband, William of Orange. It was the keystone of the Whig (those
opposed to a Catholic succession) history of Britain.
According to the
Whig account, the events of the revolution were bloodless and the
revolution settlement established the supremacy of parliament over
the crown, setting Britain on the path towards constitutional
monarchy and parliamentary democracy.
But it ignores the
extent to which the events of 1688 constituted a foreign invasion of
England by another European power, the Dutch Republic.
Although bloodshed
in England was limited, the revolution was only secured in Ireland
and Scotland by force and with much loss of life.
Moreover, the
British causes of the revolution were as much religious as political.
Indeed, the immediate constitutional impact of the revolution
settlement was minimal. Nonetheless, over the course of the reign of
William III (1689-1702) society underwent significant and
long-lasting changes.
To understand why
James II’s most powerful subjects eventually rose up in revolt
against him we need to understand the deep-seated fear of 'popery' in
Stuart England.
'Popery' meant more
than just a fear or hatred of Catholics and the Catholic church. It
reflected a widely-held belief in an elaborate conspiracy theory,
that Catholics were actively plotting the overthrow of church and
state.
In their place would
be established a Catholic tyranny, with England becoming merely a
satellite state, under the control of an all-powerful Catholic
monarch, (in the era of the Glorious Revolution, identified with
Louis XIV of France). This conspiracy theory was given credibility by
the existence of some genuine catholic subterfuge, most notably the
Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
A new crisis of
‘popery and arbitrary government' erupted in the late 1670s.
Public anxieties
were raised by the issue of the royal succession. Charles II fathered
no legitimate offspring. This meant that the crown would pass to his
brother, James, Duke of York, whose conversion to Catholicism had
become public knowledge in 1673.
Public concern about
the succession reached fever pitch in the years 1678-1681. The
so-called ‘exclusion crisis’ was provoked by allegations made by
Titus Oates, a former Jesuit novice, of a popish plot to assassinate
Charles II and place his brother on the throne. The fantastical plot
was given credibility by the mysterious death of Sir Edmund Bury
Godfrey, the magistrate who first investigated Oates’ claims.
Whig politicians
within parliament, led by the earl of Shaftesbury, promoted exclusion
bills which would have prevented James from succeeding to the throne.
But the radical
tactics deployed by the king’s opponents, including mass petitions
and demonstrations, gradually alienated some initial supporters of
exclusion.
Charles’s hand was
strengthened further by an agreement with France reached in March
1681, by which the king received £385,000 over three years.
With this financial
support, and with public opinion turning against his critics, Charles
was able to dissolve parliament on 28 March 1681.
Rebellion and revolt
James II’s
authority appeared to be secure when he succeeded to the throne in
February 1685.
The king’s initial
promises to defend the existing government in church and state
reassured many of those worried by his personal faith.
James was well-off
financially, with a tax revenue over £1,200,000. The manipulation of
borough charters in the last years of Charles II’s reign ensured
that James’ first parliament was dominated by loyal Tories.
Parliament also
voted James considerable emergency sums to suppress the rebellion
raised by Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son, the duke of
Monmouth in June 1685. James’ army of professional soldiers easily
crushed the 3,000 to 4,000 rebels who joined Monmouth’s cause.
Initial support for
the king ebbed away as it became clear that he wished to secure not
only freedom of worship for Catholics, but also the removal of the
Test and Corporation Acts so that they could occupy public office.
Unease at the king’s
appointment of Catholic officers to the army forced him to prorogue
parliament on 20 November 1685.
James then attempted
to secure his religious objectives through the use of his prerogative
powers. The test case of Godden vs Hales (1686) established James’
right to suspend the provisions of the Test Acts, thereby allowing
the king to appoint a number of Catholic peers to his Privy Council.
In April 1687, James
issued a declaration of indulgence, suspending penal laws against
Catholics and granting toleration to some Protestant dissenters.
In the summer of
1687, James formally dissolved his parliament and began canvassing
officials across the country regarding their support for the formal
repeal of the Test Acts. The information was used to begin a purge of
corporations, aimed at producing a pliable parliament which would
agree to the king’s wishes.
These measures met
with increasing opposition from the Anglican-Tory establishment.
In July, members of
Magdalen College, Oxford were stripped of their fellowships for
refusing to appoint the king’s choice, Samuel Parker, a bishop who
supported the repeal of the Test Acts, as their college president.
In May of 1688,
seven leading bishops, including William Sancroft, Archbishop of
Canterbury, refused to follow the order to read the king’s second
declaration of indulgence from their pulpits. James responded by
having them arrested for seditious libel and taken to the Tower of
London. Their acquittal at trial was met with widespread public
rejoicing.
Dutch invasion
The Anglican
campaign against James II’s religious policies went no further than
passive resistance. But a number of English peers including the earls
of Danby and Halifax, and Henry Compton, Bishop of London, went
further, making contact with the Dutch leader, William of Orange.
Two factors moved
James II’s opponents to urge William to intervene militarily.
Firstly, after years of trying, James’ Catholic second wife finally
fell pregnant. The birth of a healthy male heir, James Edward Stuart,
on 10 June 1688, dashed hopes that the crown would soon pass to
James’s protestant daughter Mary.
Secondly, William’s
co-conspirators believed that the parliament James planned to summon
in the autumn would repeal the Test Acts.
The grave danger
posed to the Protestant succession and the Anglican establishment led
seven peers to write to William on 30 June 1688, pledging their
support to the prince if he brought a force into England against
James.
William had already
begun making military preparations for an invasion of England before
this letter was sent. Indeed, the letter itself mainly served a
propaganda purpose, to allow the prince of Orange to present his
intervention as a mercy mission.
In fact, William’s
main reason for interfering in English affairs was essentially
pragmatic – he wished to bring England into his war against Louis
XIV’s France and a free parliament was seen as more likely to
support this.
The forces that the
prince of Orange amassed for his invasion were vast, the flotilla
consisting of 43 men-of-war, four light frigates and 10 fireships
protecting over 400 flyboats capable of carrying 21,000 soldiers. All
in all, it was an armada four times the size of that launched by the
Spanish in 1588.
Revolution
Aided by the
so-called ‘Protestant wind’ which prevented James’ navy from
intercepting the Dutch fleet, William landed at Torbay, Devon, on 5
November 1688, the exact timing of his landfall neatly fitting with
the anniversary of another celebrated moment when the nation was
delivered from popery.
James had made
military preparations for the defence of England over the summer and
autumn of 1688 and his army encamped on Hounslow Heath was, at about
25,000 men, numerically larger than the force brought over by
William. For the first time since the 1640s, England was faced with
the prospect of civil war.
News of the prince’s
arrival had sparked off waves of anti-Catholic rioting in towns and
cities across England. The civil unrest convinced James to leave
London and bring out his forces to meet the invading army in a
pitched battle.
But the Orangist
conspiracy against James had been maturing for years and had
infiltrated James’ own army, with the king’s nephew, Lord
Cornbury, one of the first to defect to William. At this point,
James’ health also deserted him. He was frequently debilitated by
heavy nosebleeds.
Having reached
Salisbury on 19 November with the intention of resisting William’s
advance, James had by the 23 November resolved to retreat back to
London.
The desertions
continued, with the defection of John Churchill, later Duke of
Marlborough, and James’ son-in-law, the Prince of Denmark on 24
November.
The final betrayal
came on the king’s return to his capital on the 26 November when he
discovered that his daughter, Princess Anne had also absconded to
join the Orangist side.
James now announced
that he was willing to agree to William’s main demand - to call a
‘free’ parliament. However, the king was now convinced that his
own life was in danger and was making preparations to flee the
country.
Meanwhile, William’s
advance upon the capital had met with some resistance - a bloody
skirmish at Reading on 7 December with over 50 killed.
On 11 December, in
the wake of renewed anti-Catholic rioting in London, James made his
first attempt to escape, but was captured by Kent fishermen near
Sheerness.
The king’s capture
was an inconvenience for William, who was now looked upon as the only
individual capable of restoring order to the country, and on 23
December, with the prince’s connivance, James successfully fled the
country.
The ‘convention
parliament’, made up of members from Charles II’s last
parliament, convened on 22 January 1689.
After considerable
pressure from William himself, parliament agreed that he would rule
as joint monarch with Mary, rather than act merely as her consort,
and on 13 February William and Mary formally accepted the throne.
Before they were
offered the crown, William and Mary were presented with a document
called the Declaration of Rights, later enshrined in law as the Bill
of Rights, which affirmed a number of constitutional principles, such
as the illegality of prerogative suspending and dispensing powers,
the prohibition of taxation without parliamentary consent and the
need for regular parliaments.
In reality, the Bill
of Rights placed few real restrictions on the crown. It was not until
1694 that the call for regular parliaments was backed up by the
Triennial Act.
Pressure from
William also ensured the passage in May 1689 of the Toleration Act,
granting many Protestant groups, but not Catholics, freedom of
worship. This toleration was, however, considerably more limited than
that envisaged by James II.
Consequences of
1688
If we take the
revolution to encompass the whole of William III’s reign, it
certainly imposed limitations on royal authority.
Parliament gained
powers over taxation, over the royal succession, over appointments
and over the right of the crown to wage war independently,
concessions that William thought were a price worth paying in return
for parliament’s financial support for his war against France.
William’s wars
profoundly changed the British state. Their massive cost led not only
to growth of modern financial institutions – most notably the Bank
of England founded in 1694 – but also to greater scrutiny of crown
expenditure through parliamentary committees of accounts. The
bureaucracy required to harvest all this money grew exponentially
too.
The revolution’s
legacy might be seen as negative in other ways. In Ireland and
Scotland, the revolution was militarily contested and its settlements
extremely politically and religiously divisive. For example, Irish
Protestants disregarded the generous peace terms of the Treaty of
Limerick (3 October 1691) and established a monopoly over
land-ownership and political power.
The revolution also
failed to limit the power of parliaments and created no body of
protected constitutional law. Therefore the Septennial Act of 1716
was able to effectively undermine the terms of the 1694 Triennial
Act, ushering in the lengthy rule of a Whig oligarchy.
The revolution also
fostered the growth of slavery by ending the Royal African Company’s
monopoly on the trade in 1698. For the non-white inhabitants of the
British Atlantic empire, the Glorious Revolution represented not the
broadening of freedom but the expansion of servitude.
Before I get told
off I would recommend that you read an excellent book by Steven
Pincus. The research is formidable and extensive. The Conservative
lens through which the events of 1688 is out of date and full of
propaganda of the right.
In
this brilliant and provocative book, Steve Pincus creates a welcome
stir that will enliven the study of the later 17th century. Its
author is like his revolutionary Whig subjects: self-conscious and
polemical about a desire to set things on a new footing. The result
is a bracing, combative, highly stimulating argument, written in
vivid and lively prose. The book is an ideal one to give to students,
not only because Pincus enthuses about and revels in his subject in a
way that is highly infectious, but also because he writes such a
strongly argued and argumentative piece. Almost all the chapters
court controversy and should provide ample scope for debate.
The
overall argument is relatively easily summarised. The revolution of
1688 was the first modern revolution. Like more recent revolutions,
it was violent, popular, and divisive. It was not an aristocratic
coup or a Dutch invasion, but a popular rejection of James II’s
French-inspired, Catholic, absolutist modernisation of the state in
favour of an alternative Anglo-Dutch vision that prized consent,
religious toleration, free debate and commerce. By the mid-1690s this
second, Whig version had triumphed. Britain had experienced a truly
transformative revolution that had reshaped religion, political
economy, foreign policy and the nature of the state.
The
first half of this review will sketch out the argument in more
detail. I shall then conclude with some reflections on it.
The
first chapter examines the way in which 1688 has been viewed by
subsequent generations. Pincus seeks to explain why, if 1688–9 was
really revolutionary, it should have acquired a reputation as
conservative, moderate and peaceful. Discerning a change of Whig
attitudes under Walpole in the 1720s and 1730s, Pincus also suggests
that the radicals of the later 18th century turned their back on what
they saw as an imperfect revolution. Both moderates and radicals thus
came to see 1688–9 as a conservative revolution, though the first
group celebrated it for that and the second despised it for it.
Pincus then takes the modern scholarly community to task for having
‘claimed with a united voice’ that the ‘lives of most Britons
were remarkably little affected’ by the revolution.
The
next five chapters (part two of the book) examine pre-revolutionary
England. Chapter three adopts an explicitly comparative European
perspective, arguing that by James II’s reign England was
urbanising ‘more rapidly than any place in Europe’; had become
commercial; and had developed an infrastructure of communication and
debate (p. 60). These ‘social and economic changes informed a new
kind of politics’ (p. 87). Political change thus occurred in
part as
a result of a
new type of commercial society. Chapter four surveys politics in
1685. Pincus argues that the warmth with which his accession was
greeted showed that ‘the vast majority of English men and women
were willing to accept a Catholic king as long as he was willing to
rule within the parameters established by the English constitution in
church and state’ (p. 104). Chapters five, six and seven turn to an
examination of the king and his policies. Chapter five takes issue
with Macaulay’s interpretation of James’s policies as ‘stupid
and perverse’ – Pincus thinks James had political skill – and
also with historians who have suggested that James did not have
absolutist intentions. Instead, Pincus argues that James ‘pursued
an aggressive and very modern agenda – modern not because it was
particularly tolerant but because it adopted the most up-to-date
notions of state building’ (p. 121). The model was the brand of
Gallican Catholicism developed by Louis XIV. The French king’s
alliance with the Jesuits and hostility to Rome shows that James
deliberately surrounded himself with those closest to the French
position. Indeed, Pincus argues, ‘James’s commitment to
French-style Catholicism placed limits on his commitment to
toleration’ (p. 135). For James, toleration was merely ‘a means
to an end, not a deeply felt principle’ (p. 137).
Chapter
six, the most traditional in the book, explains the ways in which
James sought to modernise the state by reforms of the army and
implement ‘a very modern surveillance state’ (p. 153) in which
discussion of royal policy was unwelcome and in which opposition
resulted in removal from office. Chapter seven charts the resistance
to this process of Catholic modernisation which Pincus argues was
more widespread than has previously been recognised. Returning to a
thread running throughout the book, he sees this opposition arising
on secular rather than religious grounds. Even those who wanted
toleration saw ‘that civil liberty was a necessary prerequisite to
real religious liberty’ (p. 180). Indeed ‘it was precisely
because James II’s opponents deployed the language of liberty
rather than that of salvation … that it makes little sense to
discuss their triumphs as an Anglican revolution’ (p. 198). Having
initially embraced the opportunity for religious freedom offered by
James, more and more dissenters voiced their opposition to James’s
Catholic modernisation project. ‘Most Whigs and Dissenters moved
beyond a narrow politics of religious identity in 1687 and 1688. They
did not believe that religion was unimportant – far from it –
rather, Whigs and Dissenters developed the claim that religious
liberty was impossible without the protection of the law’ (p. 209).
Even so, Pincus argues, the demise of James’s regime was not
inevitable by the summer of 1688’, since he had proved remarkably
successful (p. 211). ‘James was able, using the resources,
institutions and traditions he had inherited, to mold a modern state’
(p. 213). He was ‘not the bumbling, bigoted and hopelessly
unrealistic king described in Whig historiography. He did much to
centralise political power in England’ (p. 216).
The
next section of the book examines the revolution itself. Three
chapters insist that 1688–9 was popular, violent and divisive. It
thus meets ‘the theoretical standard of revolution’ (p. 223) and
can be compared to events in France in 1789. Indeed, ‘popular
disaffection rather than military revolt destroyed James II’s
modernizing regime’ (p. 234). 1688 was not an aristocratic putsch
or a Dutch invasion. It was bloody, with violence directed not just
against Catholics but also James’s protestant supporters, and
extensive in both Scotland and Ireland. Rather than spawning
political consensus, the revolution also fostered bitter division.
Party-political differences rapidly rose to the surface and the
temporary unanimity of groups in 1688 fell apart soon after as a
result of partisan feuding. ‘As in all modern revolutions, there
was a political ebb and flow between those who simply wanted to
dismantle the modernizing programme of the ousted leader and those
who wanted to implement an alternative modernization agenda’ (p.
300).
The
fourth part of the book – in many ways its intellectual heart –
therefore examines the revolutionary transformation envisaged and
ultimately effected by the Whigs. The first transformation, explored
in chapter 11, was a revolution in foreign policy that was explicitly
intended by the revolutionaries rather than being the result of a
Dutch king’s will. William did not simply impose his European
agenda on the nation; instead, ‘the English invited William to
England because they knew he would support their image of the
national interest’, which meant war with France (p. 307). James’s
aggressively pro-French and anti-Dutch foreign policy meant that
‘most English people came to understand their own problems in
remarkably modern and nationalist terms’; they saw the world in
European terms (p. 333). This was not, however, a war of religion,
for Catholic powers supported England and the Dutch; rather it was
‘an international struggle against Louis XIV, a tyrant and aspiring
universal monarch, who was equally threatening to Catholic and
Protestant’ (p. 339).
A
second revolutionary transformation occurred in political economy,
the subject of chapter 12. Against those he sees as stressing
hostility to new economic ideas, Pincus argues that the revolution
has to be seen in the context of a debate ‘between two rival modern
economic programs’ (p. 368), a ‘fierce debate between a
land-based Tory political economy and labor-centered Whig one’ (p.
369). Both sides wanted the post-revolutionary state to intervene in
support of their economic programme. James had thus sought to use the
state to back Josiah Child’s East India Company, which sought to
expand territorially in India. James had a ‘coherent and modern
imperial policy’ but it was at odds with Whig notions that property
was created by human endeavour and that banks had much to do with the
nation’s wealth (p. 381). The Whigs wanted a manufacturing rather
than a landed society. And they initiated their economic policies in
the 1690s after gaining the political ascendancy.
The
third major revolutionary change, Pincus argues, occurred in the
Church. Claiming that many scholars insist that the revolution did
little to change the Church of England and that ‘the
post-revolutionary Church of England was united in its commitment to
intolerance and persecution’ (p. 402), Pincus argues that it was
transformed by 1688–9 into a church whose bishops upheld toleration
and which placed the security of civil liberties above all else.
The
final chapter of the book takes the debates over the assassination
plot against William in 1696, and the subsequent widespread
subscription to a national ‘association’, as testament to how
much had changed. Embracing William as rightful and lawful king, most
‘now eschewed a moderate and ambiguous interpretation of the events
of 1688–9’ (p. 454). Notions of hereditary divine right were
abandoned; and the plot ‘dealt the final deathblow to Jacobite
economics’ (p. 461). The assassination plot of 1696 ‘made it
possible for the Whigs to consolidate their radical revolution’ (p.
473).
Pincus’s
methodology and many of his recurrent themes are extremely welcome.
The book’s concern to see history in the whole, and hence to
correlate changes in politics, religion and the economy, helps us to
evade scholarly ghettoes. The book’s deliberate use of the
secondary literatures of other disciplines, notably the political and
social sciences, is important and should help us to stand back from
events in 1688 to ask how they fit into wider patterns of change. The
thrust of the book’s argument, that 1688–9 was the first modern
revolution, is made in the light of a wide-ranging analysis of the
literature on revolutions. The criteria for a revolution are set out
and, it is suggested, centre on state modernisation programmes. These
open spaces for contest by conceding the need for radical change, are
often related to international affairs and create new forms of
publics and politics. Though this is a wide definition of revolution
(and requires us to think harder about modernisation theory),
encouraging historians to engage with the social science literature
in this way must surely be a good thing.
Pincus’s
desire to compare the revolution of 1688 to other revolutions and to
compare England with its continental neighbours is methodologically
refreshing. Similarly he has an important case to make when charting
of a shift from the confessional concerns of the earlier 17th century
to the more complex and interest-ridden world of the 18th, in which
matters of political economy featured prominently. Indeed, this will
make the book an important read for anyone studying the 17th century
and trying to assess the degree of change and continuity over the
century. By stressing that key changes occurred in the later Stuart
period rather than earlier, and that these help to explain the
character of Britain in the 18th century (not a point that he makes a
good deal of but which his concern with political economy makes very
clearly) Pincus’s book will find a place in any discussion of the
timing and impact of revolutionary change. The overall argument that
1688–9 was and is important and that the controversies it both
reflected and created penetrated a wide political nation are also an
important addition to work by Geoff Holmes, Bill Speck and (more
recently) Tim Harris who showed how popular and divisive partisan
politics were in this period. Pincus really does show why 1688
mattered and why it can’t just be dismissed as the last invasion of
England or as an aristocratic coup. By refocusing attention on the
later 17th century as a period of national importance and as a period
of exciting changes, Pincus has helped to reinvigorate it and make it
worthy of discussion and debate.
As
this suggests, I have great sympathy for many of the arguments put
forward. But, in the interest of further stimulating that discussion
and debate, I shall suggest that some of the strengths of the book
also, paradoxically, admit weaknesses.
Pincus
is nicely argumentative, delights in controversy and is keen to take
on scholars, both dead and alive – but sometimes this is also
problematic. He invents some historiographical Aunt Sallies to knock
down. In each of the three chapters in part four, outlining
revolutionary change, he creates a rather distorted view of what
historians actually argue. There are very few scholars, I think, who
don’t admit that the revolution transformed the contours of foreign
policy or that this change was not in some way part of a longer
struggle against French influence and power, as he suggests at the
start of chapter 11. At the beginning of the following chapter Peter
Dickson and John Brewer, who between them have done most to establish
the notion of a financial revolution in the 1690s, are lumped
together with a ‘profound consensus’ that sees no demand for
modern financial institutions. Pincus’s characterisation of the
historiography of the church, at the start of chapter 13, is also
rather questionable. There are few historians who don’t recognise
the changes brought about by the revolution or who are unaware of
divisions between Low and High Church wings or who argue that the
church was ‘united in its commitment to intolerance and
persecution’ (401–2). Pincus, sometimes rather needlessly,
exaggerates the coherence of scholars ranged against him. Moreover,
if we take two standard textbooks for the period, Geoffrey
Holmes’s Making
of a Great Power and
Julian Hoppit’sLand
of Liberty? (1) we
can find many of the arguments developed in Pincus’s book.
Similarly, although Pincus and Tim Harris disagree about the strength
of James’s regime (Pincus thinks it much stronger and more
successful), the argument that 1688–9 was more important than the
mid-century revolution and was radical, violent and popular
(particularly in Ireland and Scotland) is shared by Harris’s
recent Revolution.(2) This
is not to say that Pincus’s book is not original or well footnoted.
Indeed, there are over a hundred pages of notes. But he highlights
areas of disagreement rather than agreement with other historians.
Sometimes that is a virtue; but not always, and it can actually make
it harder to appreciate his own contribution.
Other
strengths can also at times leave his argument vulnerable. Pincus
must surely be right to argue that the revolutions are not made
overnight and he does well to integrate an account of change in the
restoration era into an account of 1688. Yet he is himself open to
the accusation that he makes against others of an overly short
chronology. There is relatively little consideration of the claims of
the mid-century revolution – which was also violent, divisive and
popular. A more sustained comparison between the two 17th century
revolutions would have been extremely useful to show how they
differed and answer a series of questions that are raised by Pincus’s
argument. How precisely did debates over property and political
economy differ in the 1680s from those of the 1640s? How was the
‘public’ of the later Stuart period different to that of the
earlier? Was the vision of religious toleration different in the
later period? How did the imperial impulse of the mid-century differ
from that of the end? I think there were differences (though also
interesting parallels) but these are never spelt out. Perhaps there
is scope for a collection of essays comparing the two 17th century
revolutions and indeed those with the American and French revolutions
of the 18th century.
Moreover,
by ending his account in 1696 Pincus leaves himself little scope to
examine the medium and longer term impact of 1688–9; and the early
end-date may actually leave a false impression of Whig triumph. He
ends his story at the high-tide of Whig fortunes. Just a few years
later, in 1698–1700, the Whigs were divided and weakened; and if
the story had ended in 1710 or 1713, it might have sounded very
different. By then, the Tories were resurgent. Ideas about
non-resistance and about the danger of toleration were again being
openly discussed in the popular literature; and the political economy
of the Whigs was distrusted and reviled. At the end of Anne’s
reign, then, the revolution and its principles seemed far from being
consolidated; they were once again being contested. Longer term, the
critique of the later 18th century radicals about what the revolution
failed to achieve also deserves some real consideration. Moreover,
such reservations make Pincus’s claim that 1688 ‘paved the way
for parliamentary democracy’ (p. 43) seem a needless exaggeration
of his argument, one that ironically give his analysis a Whiggishness
even though he is explicitly countering Macaulay’s Whig
interpretation.
Pincus
is excellent on integrating different branches of history. It is
genuinely refreshing to read an account that brings together
politics, religion and economics, as well as drawing on the
theoretical literature about revolutions and modernisation. So it is
slightly curious that one of the central concepts of the book – the
state – is so lightly conceptualised and that Pincus doesn’t make
more of the social history of the state that has been developed by
Mike Braddick, Phil Withington, Patrick Collinson, Steve Hindle and
others. Central to Pincus’s argument is that there were competing
state-modernisation programmes. By ‘state’ Pincus tends to mean a
centralising, bureaucratic state that becomes, as he puts it on page
467, ‘more than a local affair’. But the social historians have
taught us that the early modern state was never merely a central or
local affair, nor was it simply about institutions. We can talk of a
parish state and also of a dispersed state, whose institutions were
locally situated, socially constructed and which also relied less on
power than on negotiation. The ideal of the voluntary office-holding,
participatory state was one retained by many of the revolutionary
Whigs. There were many others who discerned in the post-revolutionary
state a decay of the ‘public spirit’, a danger of overly large
royal influence as a result of the enormous amount of patronage now
at its disposal and a restricted freedom of self-governance, whilst
at the same time remaining deeply supportive of revolution principles
and indeed interpreting the latter as representing their own ideals.
Pincus argues that both ‘sides’ wanted to transform the state and
that one vision of the state triumphed over another; but the battle
against a centralising, bureaucratic, authoritarian and coercive
state was certainly not over by 1696.
As
this suggests, Pincus’s polemical vigour, so refreshing in many
ways, sometimes leads him to over-simplify the complexity of the
dividing lines. For example, Sir Bartholomew Shower is described as
an anti-monopolist lawyer who successfully pleaded that property was
not limited to land but also included mobile wealth (pp. 385–6).
Pincus hails his argument as sounding the deathknell of an opposing
political economy based on land, exemplified by James II’s policies
and by the East India Company. The decision that Shower helped to
secure is described as a ‘landmark’ one. Shower thus outlined ‘a
very different imperial regime’ to the one espoused by James II. We
would conclude from this that Shower was a revolutionary Whig. In
fact, he was a Tory, who was knighted for his services to James II,
with whom he was very closely identified in the late 1680s. He was
attacked as a Francophile, mercenary and popish tool of the king –
the very reverse of the image that his legal argument would suggest.
The larger point to be made here is that the ambiguities of positions
within the two competing ideological camps are important and
sometimes need more acknowledgement.
Two
reservations might also be made about the interpretation of 1688.
First, the attempt to rehabilitate James is interesting but there is
also a tension in the argument. Pincus goes out of his way to say
that James was a skilful politician; that he was, until as late as
the summer of 1688, rather successful; and hence that revolution was
not inevitable. But he also refers to institutional collapse in 1688
and stresses the depth of popular and elite hostility to James’s
policies. Given that collapse and hostility, and the reliance of the
state on large ranks of unpaid office-holders, it is difficult to
argue that James’s absolutist policies and modernising programme
were really very successful at all – or at least not without
offering some yardstick for measuring ‘success’. Of course,
hindsight is a wonderful thing and certainly in 1687 the king
still seemed strong.
But the strength of James’s modernised army state was always rather
illusory, an edifice of royal power built on a monarchical republic.
It took courage to challenge it; but once challenged, it fell apart
rather rapidly in England, if not in Ireland. Second, Pincus is also
excellent at showing the divisions within Catholicism and how James
II surrounded himself with Francophile Jesuits and emulated Louis
XIV’s model. But (beside the issue of whether the French and
English states were sufficiently similar for that to work) this
creates another tension. In 1685 Louis XIV tore up religious
toleration in France; yet after 1686 James II in England embraced
toleration as a central policy. Pincus argues that the latter was
only ever a means to an absolutist end; but the ideological defences
of toleration that he encouraged complicate any use of France as a
model and ironically also promoted commercial arguments that were
designed to appeal to the Whigs.
These
are only a few of the controversies that Pincus’s excellent book
stirs. That it invites such debate is one of its very real strengths
and makes it a book that will be difficult for any student of the
17th century or of revolutions to ignore.
William
III by
T Claydon (Longman, 2002)
Revolution:
The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy by
T Harris (Allen Lane, 2006)
The
Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World
Impact by
J Israel ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
The
Glorious Revolution by
J Miller (Longman, 2nd edn., 1999)
The
Glorious Revolution: A Brief History with Documents by
SC A Pincus (St. Martin’s Press, 2005)
England
in the 1690s by
C Rose (Blackwell, 1999)
James
II by
WA Speck (Longman, 2002)
The
Glorious Revolution: 1688 and Britain’s Fight for Liberty by
E Vallance (Little, Brown and Co, 2006)
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