In 1988 Margaret Thatcher praised the the revolution of 1688 and
claimed it as a conservative foundation story. Neil Kinnock then leader
of the Labour Party in ignorance rose in the House of Commons and too
praised its significance for liberty. It was left to the late Tony Benn
to point out its significance for the establishment of capitalism, the
promotion of slavery and the subjugation of the Scottish and Irish
people.. I would too like to add to Benns exposure of the Tory Myth, Now
is 1688 is being used by many new right wingers to promote Brexit
Island. the truth was that 1688 was imposed by a Dutch European
army....lets correct their ignorance....
The Grasshopper, William Burke, and the Conservative myths of the “ 1688 Glorious Revolution” and Professor Steven Pincus.
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.
I
nitial 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.
I
n 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)
