The Glorious (English) Revolution of 1688/1689

Preface

You may think this sounds extremely boring and of no relevance to you, but you would be wrong. If you are English (or indeed Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish) it is highly relevant to you today, because the English Bill of Rights is still the law of England, despite what many people will try to tell you. There is an English Constitution, and it sets out many of your fundamental rights!  

I have always loved English history, but I've never really thought very much about the Glorious Revolution of 1688/1689, when the Catholic King James II of England fled to France with his wife and baby son, following the arrival of a fleet and army led by William of Orange in Torbay on 5 November 1688. William had been invited by a number of high-ranking men in the land to come and save England from the Romanising King James.

The result of a very long back story. In the 1600s Charles I had precipitated a Civil War which resulted in the beheading of the King and the establishment of the Commonwealth under Cromwell, and when England was a Republic and had no monarch. In 1660 Charles II, the son of Charles I, was reinstated as King of England (and King of Scotland).

The Restoration of Charles II did not fully resolve the issues raised in the earlier part of the century which had led to the Civil War. There was conflict between Charles II and Parliament, and when it appeared that Charles would die without a legitimate heir (he had a number of illegitimate heirs, the most prominent of whom was Monmouth, who led an unsuccessful rebellion against James II) there was a debate in Parliament about whether his brother James should be permitted to become the king on Charles II's death because James was a Catholic. Charles II had been a crypto Catholic. James was not excluded and when Charles died suddenly James was king.

The plan behind the attempt to exclude James from the line of succession to the Crown, was to replace him with his Protestant daughters, Mary, who was married to the Protestant William Prince of Orange, and Anne, who was married to a German.

Before the Second World War (1939 to 1945) I believe it was generally accepted by British Historians that the Glorious Revolution had been a turning point in the history of England, and not just England but also a turning point in the history of Europe and the world. I will explain this view later.

However, I am not an academic historian, and I was not aware that there had been any change in attitude or perspective of the Glorious Revolution because I'd never really read into the Glorious Revolution. Just lately I have become much more interested in the English Constitution, meaning, basically, Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights 1688/1689, and the Act of Settlement 1701.

The Bill of Rights is still the law of this land, although governments since 1689 have sought to change the Constitution, which is described in the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement as immutable! The only way the Bill of Rights could have been changed was if an amendment had been passed during the lifetime of the Parliament that had passed the Bill of Rights. After that it was not possible to change the Bill. The Constitution of England was, some might say, frozen; others might say that the English in the Bill were protected from tyranny, either by a king as in 1685/1688, or any other body or person that might seek to oppress the English in the future.

Legally there are problems with an entrenched Constitution. Times change, circumstances change and therefore the Constitution must be flexible. It’s an argument.

The English Constitution was formed as a settlement between all the different factions at the time and it was an amazing achievement to be able to pull all the factions together into an agreement about how England was to be ruled and where power lay.

There had been trouble for centuries about who truly ruled England. The English Settlement lasted unchanged until the Reforming Age when Parliament passed The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the Reform Act of 1832 and other acts.

However, in my reading about the Glorious Revolution I came across J.R. Jones’s, "The Revolution of 1688 in England", which is part of The Revolutions in the Modern World Series, published by W.W. Norton and Company Inc. in 1972. J.R. Jones was Professor of English History at the University of East Anglia and is the author of a number of books about 17th-century England. This particular series, The Revolutions in the Modern World, was under the general editorship of Jack P. Greene, Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University in the US.

I enjoyed the book. It is very interesting. I do like to read the bibliography of books, especially history books, so I read through Jones's Bibliography. He recommends books dealing with the various issues in such a history and makes comments about them saying how useful they are or not, as the case may be.

He wrote the following:

"The Glorious Revolution of 1688 by Maurice Ashley (1966) provides a straightforward factual narrative. Apart from perhaps the chapter on Scotland, the English Revolution of 1688/1689 (1938) by G.M. Trevelyan is now obsolete. Finally, as has been said repeatedly in the course of this study it is my contention that Lucille Pinkham’s William III and the Respectable Revolution (1954) is uncritical, un-historical and defective in interpretation throughout."

I have read a lot of bibliographies, as you might guess, but I don't think I can say that I have read one that just says a book is 'obsolete'. My Collins Concise Dictionary tells me that obsolete means ‘out of use or practice; not current; out of date; unfashionable or outmoded’. So, I take it to mean that Jones considers that The English Revolution by GM Trevelyan was out of date or unfashionable.

What I find strange about this comment is that Trevelyan's book was published in 1938. The following year the Second World War broke out and I assume, although I do not know, that they would not have been much detailed research into the English Revolution 1688/1689 during the War. This would suggest that academic historians only began to research this issue at the earliest, shortly after the end of the War in 1945. Jones published his book in 1972 which is less than 30 years after the War.

Is it possible that there had been sufficient research done before 1972 that that would have led him to judge Trevelyan's book to be out of date? If not, did he just mean Trevelyan’s views had become unfashionable within a very short period of time? Why say ‘obsolete’? Why not say Trevelyan’s view are not worth considering any more?  

I found a book containing essays about the Glorious Revolution of 1688/1689, ‘Liberty Secured? Britain Before and After 1688’. Jones was one of the essayists. I confess I have not read this book, but I have seen a useful description of the perspective of these ‘modern’ historians (by which I mean historians since 1945). The description reads:

“Historians writing in the nineteenth century about the Revolution of 1688-89 presented it as an event of central importance in the history not only of Britain but of the whole world. Such an interpretation now seems outdated, and a great deal of attention has been switched to the English Revolution of the 1640's and 1650's on the grounds that developments in the earlier period possess much wider and more fundamental significance. 

The authors of the nine essays in this volume, the second in the series The Making of Modern Freedom, do not claim that the Revolution of 1688-89 in itself constituted an epoch-making event in an unfolding history of progress and freedom. They see the Revolution as a stage--although an important stage with many and long-term effects--in the processes of change that were affecting virtually all aspects of English life in the last decades of the seventeenth century. It marked a conjunction of many trends, changes, and developments in the years before and after 1688.

J. R. Jones begins the volume with a comparative examination of English liberties with those of the only other European state in which government depended on representative principles and practice--the Dutch Republic. The next two papers deal with the 1689 convention, summoned to secure liberties and rights which James II had tried to alter. Howard Nenner describes the significant change in the character (or tenure) of the rights of subjects vis a vis sovereigns, and John Miller shows how in many respects the Revolution settlement was a set of compromises that were illogical and, in the view of the radical Whigs, incomplete.

Two sets of linked chapters examine areas of life in which the Revolution brought no formal securing of rights, freedom of the press and religious liberty. Lois G. Schwoerer considers the attitudes of successive governments toward the press up to the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695, and G. C. Gibbs describes what followed this end of prepublication censorship. Gordon J. Schochet reconstructs the intellectual context of the Toleration Act of 1689, and R. K. Webb traces the progress from grudging acceptance of religious diversity to the inauguration of religious liberty in the next century and a half.

The final papers explore two other aspects of change during the next century that stemmed from the Revolution. Henry Horwitz examines modifications in the theory and practice of law, and Kathleen Wilson analyses the movements pressing for political reform and the debates that saw the articulation of new concepts of liberty.” (My emphasis added in italics).

Helpfully, they say that historians since 1688/1689 were wrong to view the Glorious Revolution as a turning point in English, European and World history. The modern historians decided that the struggles between Charles 1 and Charles 11 with Parliament were much more important.

I do not see that! I do not know anything about these ‘modern’ historians who take this view, but taking into account what has happened in both England and Europe since 1945 I imagine this change of view was motivated by a wind of political change, if I can call it that. The result has been to diminish the impact of the English Revolution, the actions of William of Orange and the significance of the War of the Spanish Succession against Louis XIV, waged successfully by England and the European Allies.

In my next blog I will explain my reasoning.