Post by Waverley on Nov 18, 2009 15:28:58 GMT 1
1688: A Fight for the Future
The Glorious Revolution was the result of a contest between two competing visions of the modern state, argues Steven Pincus. The springboard for Britain’s eventual global dominance, this surprisingly violent series of events became a model for change the world over
England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 holds a special place in our understanding of the modern world and the revolutions that shaped it. For the better part of three centuries scholars and commentators identified it as a defining moment in England’s exceptional history. Political philosophers have associated it with the origins of liberalism. Sociologists have contrasted it with the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. Historians have pointed to the Glorious Revolution as confirming the unusual nature of the English state, the balanced ancient constitution which limited the excesses both of monarchical authority and popular liberty. Scholars of literature and culture highlight it as an important moment in defining English common sense and moderation. All of these interpretations derive their power from a deeply held and widely repeated narrative of the revolution.
Unfortunately, this narrative is wrong. Replacing it with a new one necessarily forces us to revise many of the basic historical, political, moral and sociological categories we use to make sense of the modern world. The old narrative emphasised the revolution as a great moment in which the English defended their unique political culture. In fact, the English revolutionaries created a new kind of modern state. It was that new state that has proved so influential in shaping the modern world.
In the familiar story the English people agreed to replace the Catholic King James II with the Protestants William III and Mary because, in his brief four-year reign, James II had gradually and myopically alienated the moderate and sensible English people. He had done this, according to this narrative, in a series of well-known missteps. In late 1685 he over-reacted to the romantic but hopeless rebellion of his nephew, the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, by judicially murdering hundreds of humble inhabitants of the English West Country in the Bloody Assizes. Determined to improve the social and political status of his Catholic co-religionists, James then ran roughshod over English law. He insisted on his right to defy parliamentary statute and awarded Roman Catholics military and naval commissions. In 1687 he used his newly formed and illegal Ecclesiastical Commission to force England’s Protestant universities to accept Roman Catholic fellows. When the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford resisted their king’s demands, he had the dons stripped of their fellowships and their institution turned into a Catholic seminary.
"James II, like his cousin Louis XIV, wanted Catholic subjects but not
a papal overlord" According to this once well-known narrative, after James had failed to persuade the House of Commons or the House of Lords to repeal England’s laws against Roman Catholicism, he decided to reduce the power of Parliament. He first asserted his right to nullify the Test Acts and Penal Laws. These parliamentary statutes – requiring, in the case of the Test Acts, that all political or military office-holders take the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England and, in the case of the Penal Laws, punishing those who officiated at or attended non-Church of England services – had successfully insulated the English from continental Catholic practices. Then James determined to have his royal fiat ratified by a Parliament packed with men whom he knew would do his bidding. In June 1688, seven bishops of the Church of England defied James by refusing to have his Declaration of Indulgence, emasculating the Penal Laws and Test Acts, read from England’s pulpits on the grounds of its illegality. James had the seven men dragged into court for a show trial. That even a carefully picked English jury acquitted the bishops demonstrated the limits to which the English were willing to go in support of their king. Soon after the trial, the English invited the Dutchman William III, Prince of Orange, to England to restore their religious and political liberty.
The English people enthusiastically welcomed William upon his arrival in the west of England in 1688. James’s army quickly melted away after a series of spectacular defections including that of the future Duke of Marlborough. James himself, preceded by his wife and newborn son, fled to France. The English people in February 1689, in what is described in the traditional account as a remarkable moment of political unanimity, agreed to replace James with William and Mary. The English justified the crowning of the new monarchs with the publication of the Declaration of Rights, detailing the ways that James had violated English law, thereby insisting on the limited power of English kings.
The Whig interpretation
In this traditional account of the Glorious Revolution, the English people, led by their natural leaders in the two Houses of Parliament, changed the English polity in only the most modest of ways in 1688-89. They slightly altered the succession, making it illegal for a Catholic ever to inherit the throne and passing the Toleration Act allowing Protestant Nonconformists to worship freely. There were, to be sure, some significant unintended consequences of this bloodless revolution. But these outcomes have been understood less as a direct consequence of these events than as the natural outgrowth of the English national character – a character that the Catholicising Stuart monarchs had done much to pervert.
This was the story that every English schoolchild and many North American ones used to know. This was the story that the great Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay laid out in his magisterial History of England, first published in the middle of the 19th century. It was an immediate and runaway bestseller and has deservedly been deeply influential ever since. Macaulay told his story in beautiful and accessible prose. He based his account on exhaustive research. And his thesis became the classic statement of the Whig interpretation of the revolution of 1688-89.
The Whig interpretation has a number of powerful implications. First, in the Whig story the revolution was unrevolutionary. Unlike other subsequent revolutions, England’s was peaceful, consensual, aristocratic and above all sensible. The English had no desire to transform their polity, their society or their culture. Instead they worried that James II had intended to do just that. Second, the Whig story holds that the revolution was Protestant. James had tried to re-institute Catholicism in England. The revolution ensured that England would remain Protestant. Third, it maintains that the revolution demonstrated the exceptional nature of English national character. Continental Europeans vacillated between the wild extremes of republican and popular government on the one hand and tyrannical royal absolutism on the other.
The English, by contrast, were committed to limited monarchy, allowing just the right amount of tempered popular liberty. Just as the English church was a sensible middle way between the extremes of Roman Catholicism and radical Protestant sectarianism, so the English, by maintaining their ancient constitution, were similarly sensible and moderate. In this context the English remained committed to their hierarchical social structure precisely because it did not impose unbridgeable gaps between the aristocracy and the people. Fourth, the Whig narrative insists that there could have been no social grievances undergirding the revolution of 1688-89 because English society had changed little in the period prior to James II’s flight. It was only once English property rights were secured by the revolution, only once absolutism was no longer possible in England, that the English econ-omy could truly flourish.
While it has been fashionable of late to criticise the Whig interpretation, the self-styled revisionists have in fact accepted much of it. Recently, revisionist historians like Mark Goldie and John Miller have placed more emphasis on the limited nature of James’s ambitions and the pivotal role played by conservative Anglicans troubled by the king’s pro-Catholic policies and his limited toleration for Protestant Nonconformists. In the end, however, they agree with the Whig narrative that the revolution of 1688 was moderate, bloodless and hardly revolutionary in the modern sense of the word at all.
A vast amount of new archival material and new methods of thinking about the historical process, however, make it possible to challenge every element of this established Whig account. England’s revolution of 1688-89, it is now clear, was the first modern revolution. The English experience in the late 17th century was not exceptional, but in fact typical (if precocious) of states like France, Russia or Mexico experiencing modern revolutions. The revolution is important not because it reaffirmed the exceptional English national character, but because it was a landmark moment in the emergence of the modern state.
Economic transformation
Three elements of the English experience of the later 17th century underscore the modern and revolutionary nature of the events of 1688-89. First, England’s remarkable social and economic transformation over the course of the 17th century is essential to understanding the origins and contours of the Glorious Revolution. England’s political history of the later 17th century simply cannot be understood without coming to terms with its economic history. England in the later 17th century was rapidly becoming a modern society. England’s economy (and that of the Netherlands) boomed, while that of the rest of Europe sagged because of the direct and indirect institutional effects of long-distance trade. In particular, England’s expanding trade to the East Indies and West Indies brought in a variety of finished goods for re-exportation and new raw materials such as tobacco and sugar for both export and internal consumption. The quickly growing West Indian and North American colonies also generated new kinds of demand for English manufactured goods. These developments made it possible for English statesmen to conceive of a more active role for the English government in order to harness these burgeoning commercial energies. Social and economic change did not make the revolution of 1688-89 inevitable, but it did shape the nature of the conflict over the future English state.
Second, while Whig historians and their critics have been alive to anti-Catholic sentiment among the English, they have failed to take seriously the nature and depth of James II’s Catholic commitments and their relationship to the modern and absolutist state that James was trying to create. In an era when Europe’s Catholics were deeply divided between supporters of Pope Innocent XI and supporters of France’s Louis XIV, James allied himself closely with the French king and against the pope. Throughout his life James expressed ‘great affection’ for the French Jesuits. He had made his abjuration in 1669 to the French-based Jesuit Father Edward Simeon. One 18th-century Catholic historian, Charles Dodd, very much alive to the ideological differences within European Catholicism, described James as ‘unfortunately bigoted to the Jesuits’. In the 1680s James developed a serious interest in the writings of the Jesuit-educated Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, charismatic preacher and perhaps the most influential Gallican theologian of his generation. These men, whose writings James actively disseminated through the translation efforts of the Benedictine monks stationed in St James’s Palace and the rapid-fire publications of the new English Catholic press, disagreed with the papal propagandists on two matters. The French Catholic apologists argued that religious heterodoxy could be corrected by force as well as persuasion. These men believed that heresy was an act of the human will and therefore that will sometimes needed to be broken to be corrected. And they believed, against defenders of the papacy, that there were no earthly limits on sovereign authority. Sovereigns, they claimed in tract after tract, could demand an active as well as a passive obedience from their subjects.
James, like his cousin Louis XIV, wanted Catholic subjects but not a papal overlord. Instead he insisted on absolute sovereignty within his own dominion, while at the same time seeking to Catholicise his Protestant country. James successfully promoted the spread of Catholic apologetic literature, the proliferation of Catholic schools and colleges and the opening of Catholic churches. No one living through the 1680s in England could have failed to appreciate the new prominence of Catholicism in English everyday life. And, while James was an experienced politician who was willing to make compromises to achieve his ultimate ends, he was adamant in his belief that there was one true church. Protestantism, wrote the English Jesuit William Darrell, was a ‘disease’. The man whom James chose as the tutor for his son, John Betham, predicted that God would not tolerate those who refused to accept the blessings of the one true faith. ‘God will not have patience to expect their natural death,’ he warned, ‘but will hurry them away without the least warning.’ Neither James, nor his circle of French-influenced Catholic advisors, nor the men they promoted were defenders of religious pluralism.
Third, Whig historians and their revisionist critics have understood the realm of politics far too narrowly. James wanted to do more than create a pliant Parliament. Deeply influenced by the particular brand of Catholicism he practiced and by the successful political model of Louis XIV, James and his supporters developed a modern arsenal of political tools. To use Max Weber’s terminology, they promoted a modern bureaucratic state rather than a traditional patrimonial one. They raised an efficient and disciplined professional standing army and a world-class navy. James and his advisers appreciated that this modern state needed an expanding set of resources to support his centralising, interventionist aims, so quickly concluded that an overseas territorial empire, with bases in India, North America and the West Indies, was an essential means to marshal them. He was in the process of moulding most corporations throughout England and Wales into loyal instruments of local politics. James used the press and various political institutions to spread his regime’s values and silence alternative viewpoints. James’s regime may look brief and fragile in retrospect, but from the perspective of the later 17th century he had created a powerful edifice.
By carrying out this ambitious and successful state-building programme, James had made it impossible for conservatives to undo his achievements. There could be no peaceful minor constitutional adjustment in 1688. James’s opponents were, by and large, revolutionaries, not reactionaries. They too appreciated that only a modernised English state could compete in contemporary Europe. Unlike James, however, the revolutionaries looked to the Dutch Republic rather than to the French monarchy for political inspiration. They, too, wanted a state that could support a powerful army and navy. They, too, imagined that such a state would have to be centralised and interventionist. But, unlike James and his advisers, the revolutionaries imagined that England would be most powerful if it encouraged political participation rather than absolutism, if it were religiously tolerant rather than Catholicising and devoted to promoting English manufactures rather than a landed empire. The revolutionaries understood full well that these political preferences put them at ideological loggerheads with Louis XIV’s modern Catholic monarchy. The revolutionaries were therefore fully committed to fighting an all-out war against France, not only to protect the British Isles from a potential French-backed Jacobite restoration, but also to ensure that there would be European markets available to English manufactures and that European liberty would be preserved against French-style absolutism. It was precisely because James had been able to create such a powerful state that many of James’s opponents realised that it could only be resisted with violence and that only a revolutionary transformation could prevent a future English monarch from recreating his modern absolutist state. Those who overthrew James II in 1688 and shaped the new regime in the following decade were necessarily revolutionaries.
Violent, popular and divisive
Though we have come to view the Glorious Revolution as bloodless, aristocratic and consensual, the actual event was none of these things. The revolution of 1688-89 was, of course, less bloody than the terrible upheavals of the 20th century, but the English endured a scale of violence against property and persons similar to that of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. Statistics that highlight the violence of revolutionary France, such as those cited by the historian Jack Goldstone, for example, inevitably include the Napoleonic Wars. By including statistics from the Nine Years War (1689-1697; also called King William’s War) and the wars in Scotland and Ireland, all direct consequences of the revolution of 1688-89, the percentages of dead and wounded are comparable to the French case. Englishmen and women throughout the country threatened one another, destroyed one another’s property, killed and maimed one another throughout the revolutionary period. Englishmen and women, from London to Newcastle, from Plymouth to Norwich, experienced violence and threats of violence, or lived in terrifying fear of violence. This was not a tame event.
Nor was it a staid negotiation conducted by elites. Men and women of all social categories took to the streets, marched in arms on England’s byways and highways and donated huge amounts of money – some in very small quantities – to support the revolutionary cause. When the members of the House of Lords tried calmly to settle the succession issue after James II had fled the country, an angry crowd numbering in the tens of thousands cut short the nobles’ deliberations and forced their hands. Given the power, efficiency and ideological cohesion of James’s regime, it was not surprising that many supported their king with great enthusiasm even in 1688 and beyond. Since the revolutionaries sought to replace James’s French-style modernisation programme with an alternative one, conservative Tories supported the undoing of his state edifice while doing everything they could to prevent the creation of a Williamite modernising state. In the end, despite some significant tactical victories in the early 1690s against their modernising opponents, the Tories failed to thwart the revolutionary momentum. The English throughout the 1680s, 1690s and thereafter were politically and ideologically divided. There was no moment of English cohesion against an un-English king. There was no period in the late 17th century in which the sensible people of England collaborated to rid themselves of an irrational monarch. The revolution of 1688-89 was, like all other revolutions, violent, popular and divisive.
The English in the later 17th-century forged the first modern revolution, one with long-term causes and long-term consequences. The English could not have transformed their state and society in the ways in which they did in the 1680s and 1690s had the events of the previous century – especially those of the crisis of the 1640s and 1650s – not unleashed a series of ideological debates that informed and transformed conceptions of state, religion and society. English politicians, whether supporters of James II or of William and Mary, could not have transformed England’s state institutions had the English economy not diverged from the late 17th-century European pattern of recession and retrenchment.
The consequences of the Glorious Revolution were by no means unintended or unanticipated. The creation of the Bank of England, war against France and religious toleration were all explicit goals of many of the revolutionaries. Precisely because the debates over these issues had long pedigrees, it would be wrong to understand 1688 or 1689 as a fundamental break in English history. The debates over these issues continued, albeit modified and reshaped by new institutional realities. Early modern England did not come to an end in 1688, nor did modern England begin then. But England’s late-17th century revolutionaries succeeded in fundamentally transforming the character of the relationship between the English state and society.
Though they rejected the modern, bureaucratic absolutist state model of Louis XIV in France, the revolutionaries embraced the concept of the modern state, creating one that was intrusive in different ways. Their state sought to transform England from an agrarian society into a manufacturing one, they oversaw the massive military build-up that was necessary to fight a war against the greatest military power that Europe had ever seen and they promoted a religiously tolerant society. John Locke, often described as one of the earliest and most influential liberal thinkers, was one of these revolutionaries. If the Glorious Revolution was a critical moment in the development of modern liberalism, that liberalism was not antagonistic to the state. Liberalism was not at its inception moderate and anti-statist. Instead, liberalism was a revolutionary programme for a modernising and activist state.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 pitted two groups of modernisers against one another. Both sides tried, against long odds, to appeal to the hearts and minds of the reactionaries. This was a pattern typical of most modern revolutions. For revolutions are not, as the social science literature has long maintained, battles between the forces of modernisation and the forces of tradition. Revolutionary situations, in the vast majority of cases, have been created when the regime in power decides, for whatever reason, that it needs to modernise. In so doing the regime extends the tendrils of the state deeper and more extensively into society than they had ever gone before, necessarily generating resentment. At the same time, by announcing a break with the past, the regime has lowered the bar for opposition movements.
Potential revolutionaries no longer need to persuade their fellow subjects to break with traditional and trusted ways of life. They merely need to persuade them that they have a superior model for change. The regime in power can no longer rely on the habitual loyalty of elites. The revolutionaries of late 17th-century England set the model for this now typical political pattern.
Steven Pincus is Professor of History at Yale University and author of Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy 1650-1668 (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and England’s Glorious Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). His latest book, 1688: The First Modern Revolution is published by Yale University Press this month.
The Glorious Revolution was the result of a contest between two competing visions of the modern state, argues Steven Pincus. The springboard for Britain’s eventual global dominance, this surprisingly violent series of events became a model for change the world over
England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 holds a special place in our understanding of the modern world and the revolutions that shaped it. For the better part of three centuries scholars and commentators identified it as a defining moment in England’s exceptional history. Political philosophers have associated it with the origins of liberalism. Sociologists have contrasted it with the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. Historians have pointed to the Glorious Revolution as confirming the unusual nature of the English state, the balanced ancient constitution which limited the excesses both of monarchical authority and popular liberty. Scholars of literature and culture highlight it as an important moment in defining English common sense and moderation. All of these interpretations derive their power from a deeply held and widely repeated narrative of the revolution.
Unfortunately, this narrative is wrong. Replacing it with a new one necessarily forces us to revise many of the basic historical, political, moral and sociological categories we use to make sense of the modern world. The old narrative emphasised the revolution as a great moment in which the English defended their unique political culture. In fact, the English revolutionaries created a new kind of modern state. It was that new state that has proved so influential in shaping the modern world.
In the familiar story the English people agreed to replace the Catholic King James II with the Protestants William III and Mary because, in his brief four-year reign, James II had gradually and myopically alienated the moderate and sensible English people. He had done this, according to this narrative, in a series of well-known missteps. In late 1685 he over-reacted to the romantic but hopeless rebellion of his nephew, the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, by judicially murdering hundreds of humble inhabitants of the English West Country in the Bloody Assizes. Determined to improve the social and political status of his Catholic co-religionists, James then ran roughshod over English law. He insisted on his right to defy parliamentary statute and awarded Roman Catholics military and naval commissions. In 1687 he used his newly formed and illegal Ecclesiastical Commission to force England’s Protestant universities to accept Roman Catholic fellows. When the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford resisted their king’s demands, he had the dons stripped of their fellowships and their institution turned into a Catholic seminary.
"James II, like his cousin Louis XIV, wanted Catholic subjects but not
a papal overlord" According to this once well-known narrative, after James had failed to persuade the House of Commons or the House of Lords to repeal England’s laws against Roman Catholicism, he decided to reduce the power of Parliament. He first asserted his right to nullify the Test Acts and Penal Laws. These parliamentary statutes – requiring, in the case of the Test Acts, that all political or military office-holders take the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England and, in the case of the Penal Laws, punishing those who officiated at or attended non-Church of England services – had successfully insulated the English from continental Catholic practices. Then James determined to have his royal fiat ratified by a Parliament packed with men whom he knew would do his bidding. In June 1688, seven bishops of the Church of England defied James by refusing to have his Declaration of Indulgence, emasculating the Penal Laws and Test Acts, read from England’s pulpits on the grounds of its illegality. James had the seven men dragged into court for a show trial. That even a carefully picked English jury acquitted the bishops demonstrated the limits to which the English were willing to go in support of their king. Soon after the trial, the English invited the Dutchman William III, Prince of Orange, to England to restore their religious and political liberty.
The English people enthusiastically welcomed William upon his arrival in the west of England in 1688. James’s army quickly melted away after a series of spectacular defections including that of the future Duke of Marlborough. James himself, preceded by his wife and newborn son, fled to France. The English people in February 1689, in what is described in the traditional account as a remarkable moment of political unanimity, agreed to replace James with William and Mary. The English justified the crowning of the new monarchs with the publication of the Declaration of Rights, detailing the ways that James had violated English law, thereby insisting on the limited power of English kings.
The Whig interpretation
In this traditional account of the Glorious Revolution, the English people, led by their natural leaders in the two Houses of Parliament, changed the English polity in only the most modest of ways in 1688-89. They slightly altered the succession, making it illegal for a Catholic ever to inherit the throne and passing the Toleration Act allowing Protestant Nonconformists to worship freely. There were, to be sure, some significant unintended consequences of this bloodless revolution. But these outcomes have been understood less as a direct consequence of these events than as the natural outgrowth of the English national character – a character that the Catholicising Stuart monarchs had done much to pervert.
This was the story that every English schoolchild and many North American ones used to know. This was the story that the great Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay laid out in his magisterial History of England, first published in the middle of the 19th century. It was an immediate and runaway bestseller and has deservedly been deeply influential ever since. Macaulay told his story in beautiful and accessible prose. He based his account on exhaustive research. And his thesis became the classic statement of the Whig interpretation of the revolution of 1688-89.
The Whig interpretation has a number of powerful implications. First, in the Whig story the revolution was unrevolutionary. Unlike other subsequent revolutions, England’s was peaceful, consensual, aristocratic and above all sensible. The English had no desire to transform their polity, their society or their culture. Instead they worried that James II had intended to do just that. Second, the Whig story holds that the revolution was Protestant. James had tried to re-institute Catholicism in England. The revolution ensured that England would remain Protestant. Third, it maintains that the revolution demonstrated the exceptional nature of English national character. Continental Europeans vacillated between the wild extremes of republican and popular government on the one hand and tyrannical royal absolutism on the other.
The English, by contrast, were committed to limited monarchy, allowing just the right amount of tempered popular liberty. Just as the English church was a sensible middle way between the extremes of Roman Catholicism and radical Protestant sectarianism, so the English, by maintaining their ancient constitution, were similarly sensible and moderate. In this context the English remained committed to their hierarchical social structure precisely because it did not impose unbridgeable gaps between the aristocracy and the people. Fourth, the Whig narrative insists that there could have been no social grievances undergirding the revolution of 1688-89 because English society had changed little in the period prior to James II’s flight. It was only once English property rights were secured by the revolution, only once absolutism was no longer possible in England, that the English econ-omy could truly flourish.
While it has been fashionable of late to criticise the Whig interpretation, the self-styled revisionists have in fact accepted much of it. Recently, revisionist historians like Mark Goldie and John Miller have placed more emphasis on the limited nature of James’s ambitions and the pivotal role played by conservative Anglicans troubled by the king’s pro-Catholic policies and his limited toleration for Protestant Nonconformists. In the end, however, they agree with the Whig narrative that the revolution of 1688 was moderate, bloodless and hardly revolutionary in the modern sense of the word at all.
A vast amount of new archival material and new methods of thinking about the historical process, however, make it possible to challenge every element of this established Whig account. England’s revolution of 1688-89, it is now clear, was the first modern revolution. The English experience in the late 17th century was not exceptional, but in fact typical (if precocious) of states like France, Russia or Mexico experiencing modern revolutions. The revolution is important not because it reaffirmed the exceptional English national character, but because it was a landmark moment in the emergence of the modern state.
Economic transformation
Three elements of the English experience of the later 17th century underscore the modern and revolutionary nature of the events of 1688-89. First, England’s remarkable social and economic transformation over the course of the 17th century is essential to understanding the origins and contours of the Glorious Revolution. England’s political history of the later 17th century simply cannot be understood without coming to terms with its economic history. England in the later 17th century was rapidly becoming a modern society. England’s economy (and that of the Netherlands) boomed, while that of the rest of Europe sagged because of the direct and indirect institutional effects of long-distance trade. In particular, England’s expanding trade to the East Indies and West Indies brought in a variety of finished goods for re-exportation and new raw materials such as tobacco and sugar for both export and internal consumption. The quickly growing West Indian and North American colonies also generated new kinds of demand for English manufactured goods. These developments made it possible for English statesmen to conceive of a more active role for the English government in order to harness these burgeoning commercial energies. Social and economic change did not make the revolution of 1688-89 inevitable, but it did shape the nature of the conflict over the future English state.
Second, while Whig historians and their critics have been alive to anti-Catholic sentiment among the English, they have failed to take seriously the nature and depth of James II’s Catholic commitments and their relationship to the modern and absolutist state that James was trying to create. In an era when Europe’s Catholics were deeply divided between supporters of Pope Innocent XI and supporters of France’s Louis XIV, James allied himself closely with the French king and against the pope. Throughout his life James expressed ‘great affection’ for the French Jesuits. He had made his abjuration in 1669 to the French-based Jesuit Father Edward Simeon. One 18th-century Catholic historian, Charles Dodd, very much alive to the ideological differences within European Catholicism, described James as ‘unfortunately bigoted to the Jesuits’. In the 1680s James developed a serious interest in the writings of the Jesuit-educated Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, charismatic preacher and perhaps the most influential Gallican theologian of his generation. These men, whose writings James actively disseminated through the translation efforts of the Benedictine monks stationed in St James’s Palace and the rapid-fire publications of the new English Catholic press, disagreed with the papal propagandists on two matters. The French Catholic apologists argued that religious heterodoxy could be corrected by force as well as persuasion. These men believed that heresy was an act of the human will and therefore that will sometimes needed to be broken to be corrected. And they believed, against defenders of the papacy, that there were no earthly limits on sovereign authority. Sovereigns, they claimed in tract after tract, could demand an active as well as a passive obedience from their subjects.
James, like his cousin Louis XIV, wanted Catholic subjects but not a papal overlord. Instead he insisted on absolute sovereignty within his own dominion, while at the same time seeking to Catholicise his Protestant country. James successfully promoted the spread of Catholic apologetic literature, the proliferation of Catholic schools and colleges and the opening of Catholic churches. No one living through the 1680s in England could have failed to appreciate the new prominence of Catholicism in English everyday life. And, while James was an experienced politician who was willing to make compromises to achieve his ultimate ends, he was adamant in his belief that there was one true church. Protestantism, wrote the English Jesuit William Darrell, was a ‘disease’. The man whom James chose as the tutor for his son, John Betham, predicted that God would not tolerate those who refused to accept the blessings of the one true faith. ‘God will not have patience to expect their natural death,’ he warned, ‘but will hurry them away without the least warning.’ Neither James, nor his circle of French-influenced Catholic advisors, nor the men they promoted were defenders of religious pluralism.
Third, Whig historians and their revisionist critics have understood the realm of politics far too narrowly. James wanted to do more than create a pliant Parliament. Deeply influenced by the particular brand of Catholicism he practiced and by the successful political model of Louis XIV, James and his supporters developed a modern arsenal of political tools. To use Max Weber’s terminology, they promoted a modern bureaucratic state rather than a traditional patrimonial one. They raised an efficient and disciplined professional standing army and a world-class navy. James and his advisers appreciated that this modern state needed an expanding set of resources to support his centralising, interventionist aims, so quickly concluded that an overseas territorial empire, with bases in India, North America and the West Indies, was an essential means to marshal them. He was in the process of moulding most corporations throughout England and Wales into loyal instruments of local politics. James used the press and various political institutions to spread his regime’s values and silence alternative viewpoints. James’s regime may look brief and fragile in retrospect, but from the perspective of the later 17th century he had created a powerful edifice.
By carrying out this ambitious and successful state-building programme, James had made it impossible for conservatives to undo his achievements. There could be no peaceful minor constitutional adjustment in 1688. James’s opponents were, by and large, revolutionaries, not reactionaries. They too appreciated that only a modernised English state could compete in contemporary Europe. Unlike James, however, the revolutionaries looked to the Dutch Republic rather than to the French monarchy for political inspiration. They, too, wanted a state that could support a powerful army and navy. They, too, imagined that such a state would have to be centralised and interventionist. But, unlike James and his advisers, the revolutionaries imagined that England would be most powerful if it encouraged political participation rather than absolutism, if it were religiously tolerant rather than Catholicising and devoted to promoting English manufactures rather than a landed empire. The revolutionaries understood full well that these political preferences put them at ideological loggerheads with Louis XIV’s modern Catholic monarchy. The revolutionaries were therefore fully committed to fighting an all-out war against France, not only to protect the British Isles from a potential French-backed Jacobite restoration, but also to ensure that there would be European markets available to English manufactures and that European liberty would be preserved against French-style absolutism. It was precisely because James had been able to create such a powerful state that many of James’s opponents realised that it could only be resisted with violence and that only a revolutionary transformation could prevent a future English monarch from recreating his modern absolutist state. Those who overthrew James II in 1688 and shaped the new regime in the following decade were necessarily revolutionaries.
Violent, popular and divisive
Though we have come to view the Glorious Revolution as bloodless, aristocratic and consensual, the actual event was none of these things. The revolution of 1688-89 was, of course, less bloody than the terrible upheavals of the 20th century, but the English endured a scale of violence against property and persons similar to that of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. Statistics that highlight the violence of revolutionary France, such as those cited by the historian Jack Goldstone, for example, inevitably include the Napoleonic Wars. By including statistics from the Nine Years War (1689-1697; also called King William’s War) and the wars in Scotland and Ireland, all direct consequences of the revolution of 1688-89, the percentages of dead and wounded are comparable to the French case. Englishmen and women throughout the country threatened one another, destroyed one another’s property, killed and maimed one another throughout the revolutionary period. Englishmen and women, from London to Newcastle, from Plymouth to Norwich, experienced violence and threats of violence, or lived in terrifying fear of violence. This was not a tame event.
Nor was it a staid negotiation conducted by elites. Men and women of all social categories took to the streets, marched in arms on England’s byways and highways and donated huge amounts of money – some in very small quantities – to support the revolutionary cause. When the members of the House of Lords tried calmly to settle the succession issue after James II had fled the country, an angry crowd numbering in the tens of thousands cut short the nobles’ deliberations and forced their hands. Given the power, efficiency and ideological cohesion of James’s regime, it was not surprising that many supported their king with great enthusiasm even in 1688 and beyond. Since the revolutionaries sought to replace James’s French-style modernisation programme with an alternative one, conservative Tories supported the undoing of his state edifice while doing everything they could to prevent the creation of a Williamite modernising state. In the end, despite some significant tactical victories in the early 1690s against their modernising opponents, the Tories failed to thwart the revolutionary momentum. The English throughout the 1680s, 1690s and thereafter were politically and ideologically divided. There was no moment of English cohesion against an un-English king. There was no period in the late 17th century in which the sensible people of England collaborated to rid themselves of an irrational monarch. The revolution of 1688-89 was, like all other revolutions, violent, popular and divisive.
The English in the later 17th-century forged the first modern revolution, one with long-term causes and long-term consequences. The English could not have transformed their state and society in the ways in which they did in the 1680s and 1690s had the events of the previous century – especially those of the crisis of the 1640s and 1650s – not unleashed a series of ideological debates that informed and transformed conceptions of state, religion and society. English politicians, whether supporters of James II or of William and Mary, could not have transformed England’s state institutions had the English economy not diverged from the late 17th-century European pattern of recession and retrenchment.
The consequences of the Glorious Revolution were by no means unintended or unanticipated. The creation of the Bank of England, war against France and religious toleration were all explicit goals of many of the revolutionaries. Precisely because the debates over these issues had long pedigrees, it would be wrong to understand 1688 or 1689 as a fundamental break in English history. The debates over these issues continued, albeit modified and reshaped by new institutional realities. Early modern England did not come to an end in 1688, nor did modern England begin then. But England’s late-17th century revolutionaries succeeded in fundamentally transforming the character of the relationship between the English state and society.
Though they rejected the modern, bureaucratic absolutist state model of Louis XIV in France, the revolutionaries embraced the concept of the modern state, creating one that was intrusive in different ways. Their state sought to transform England from an agrarian society into a manufacturing one, they oversaw the massive military build-up that was necessary to fight a war against the greatest military power that Europe had ever seen and they promoted a religiously tolerant society. John Locke, often described as one of the earliest and most influential liberal thinkers, was one of these revolutionaries. If the Glorious Revolution was a critical moment in the development of modern liberalism, that liberalism was not antagonistic to the state. Liberalism was not at its inception moderate and anti-statist. Instead, liberalism was a revolutionary programme for a modernising and activist state.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 pitted two groups of modernisers against one another. Both sides tried, against long odds, to appeal to the hearts and minds of the reactionaries. This was a pattern typical of most modern revolutions. For revolutions are not, as the social science literature has long maintained, battles between the forces of modernisation and the forces of tradition. Revolutionary situations, in the vast majority of cases, have been created when the regime in power decides, for whatever reason, that it needs to modernise. In so doing the regime extends the tendrils of the state deeper and more extensively into society than they had ever gone before, necessarily generating resentment. At the same time, by announcing a break with the past, the regime has lowered the bar for opposition movements.
Potential revolutionaries no longer need to persuade their fellow subjects to break with traditional and trusted ways of life. They merely need to persuade them that they have a superior model for change. The regime in power can no longer rely on the habitual loyalty of elites. The revolutionaries of late 17th-century England set the model for this now typical political pattern.
Steven Pincus is Professor of History at Yale University and author of Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy 1650-1668 (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and England’s Glorious Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). His latest book, 1688: The First Modern Revolution is published by Yale University Press this month.