Frédéric HERRMANN

The Glorious Revolution (1688-1701)

and the Return of Whig History

The Glorious Revolution has gone through several interpretative patterns since
Lord Macaulay’s famous account in the nineteenth century. Once thought to be an
institutionally restorative and socially conservative revolution which nonetheless
promoted the most progressive aspects of the “ancient constitution” against a
tyrannical king, it was later revised to become a reactionary Anglican rebellion
against a modernizing monarch. Recent post-revisionist trends challenge both
visions and offer the image of a more popular, transformative but also violent tur-
ning-point in the history of the British society and State. It remains to be seen whe-
ther this will lead to a paradigm shift and whether the “radical” interpretation of
the Glorious Revolution does not in fact rely heavily on the original Whig model.

La Glorieuse Révolution a connu de nombreuses interprétations depuis le célèbre

travail de Lord Macaulay au XIXe siècle. Originellement pensée comme une révolu-
tion restauratrice des institutions et conservatrice de la société qui aurait néanmoins
défendu les aspects les plus progressistes de l’« ancienne constitution » face à un roi
tyrannique, elle est ensuite devenue une rébellion anglicane réactionnaire contre un
monarque modernisateur. Les nouvelles perspectives post-révisionnistes s’attaquent
à ces interprétations et préfèrent l’image d’un tournant transformateur de l’histoire
de l’État et de la société britannique qui aurait mobilisé le peuple, mais qui aurait
été plus violent. Il reste à déterminer si elles entraîneront un changement de para-
digme, et si cette interprétation « radicale » de la Glorieuse Révolution n’est en fait
pas grandement tributaire du modèle whig fondateur.

In the opening lines of his influential History of England, Lord Macaulay

proposed to “trace the course of that revolution which terminated the
long struggle between our sovereigns and their parliaments, and bound
up together the rights of the people and the title of the reigning dynasty”
(Macaulay I, 1). According to this standard interpretation, taken up again
later by Trevelyan, Macaulay’s great-nephew, the Glorious Revolution
was the final episode of a bitter struggle that took place over the course
of the seventeenth century between king and parliament. It brewed up
during the reigns of James I and Charles I, then erupted into the violent

Frédéric HERRMANN, The Glorious Revolution (1688-1701) and the Return of Whig
History, ÉA 68-3 (2015): 331-344. © Klincksieck.

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 332 Études Anglaises — 68-3 (2015)

conflict of the Civil War which itself led to the execution of the king
and more troubled times under the Commonwealth and Cromwell.
The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought back a measure of
social peace but failed to resolve long-standing issues both in church and
state. Uncertainties remained about the extent of the royal prerogative
and the religious settlement failed to either incorporate or eradicate
non-conformist elements. It was thus inevitable that a new conflict
would soon arise, though when it did, the political nation that opposed
James II/VII, aided by William of Orange, was able to work out a swift
and pragmatic consensus. The second revolution was instantly dubbed
“glorious” since, unlike the first one, it was a peaceful, virtually blood-
less affair, a “sensible” victory of moderation that succeeded in avoiding
the excesses of both divine-right monarchical absolutism and rampant
puritan republicanism. Above all, it was a restorative revolution, which
did not aim to transform society, but mainly to redress the king’s abuses
and bring England’s (and with it, Scotland’s and Ireland’s) political
structure back to its original stability, that of the “ancient constitution”
which guaranteed the rule of law and the subjects’ liberties. Thus, in this
teleological understanding of past events, commonly known as the Whig
interpretation of history (Butterfield), the Glorious Revolution should be
a source of national pride because it made liberty and progress possible
and opened the door for parliamentary democracy without shaking the
foundations of social order to the core. It set Britain apart from the rest
of Europe, especially France, which, from the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury onwards, committed innumerable acts of bloodshed and crimes in
the name of revolution, whilst choosing to ignore the beneficial aspects
of tradition.
Though dominant in the popular imagination, this view was challenged
from the 1970s onwards by historians who were branded as revisionists.
They focused on the relationship between local and central government,
or low and high politics, and warned against systemic, “structural causes”
that could be incorporated into the “grand narrative” of a fight between
crown and parliament. They showed that in the early seventeenth century,
parliament was rather more “an event” than “an institution” (Russell).
Power was more a local than a national matter and, on the whole, less
of an area of conflict than previously thought. The art of government in
the seventeenth-century lay in persuading the unpaid, voluntary local
élites of JPs and lords-lieutenant in the counties to do such essential
jobs as collecting taxes, enforcing the law or training the militia. When
James II alienated this traditional power-base, local and central interests
ceased to coincide, leading to a crisis. The wronged “natural élites”
being the Tory-Anglican interest-group that had consistently opposed his
“Catholic policies,” the Glorious Revolution can be seen as an “Anglican
Revolution,” an effort to salvage the Church of England from impending
Catholic doom. Finally, because the dispute remained precisely in the
hands of the aristocratic and ecclesiastical élite, it was a “palace coup,”

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 The Glorious Revolution (1688-1701) 333

a mere “dynastic revolution” (Beddard 97), a “petulant outburst” (Clark

130). The results of the Revolution were therefore limited, as expressed
by Barry Coward: “the most striking feature of the Glorious Revolution
was its failure to effect any fundamental changes in the English Church
or constitution” (312). Those Whig constitutional “monuments” such as
the Bill of Rights or the Toleration Act of 1689 were swept away in the
process. The Ancien Régime ruled on. Thus, though critical of Macaulay
and Trevelyan, the revisionists seemed to share some assumptions with
them, even to be dependent on them: the Glorious Revolution had been
a docile and conservative affair, driven from the top of society, not from
below. It was restorative: the local élites merely sought to reclaim their
challenged position in the political landscape, not to alter it. As William
Speck reminds us, 1688 was labeled a “revolution” by contemporaries in
contrast with the term “rebellion,” used to refer to the mid-century events
which had “turned the world upside down,” to use a famous phrase very
dear to Marxist historian Christopher Hill. The word “revolution” thus
indicated a cyclical return to a status quo ante, quite like the revolution
of the stars (Speck 1, 142). Only at the end of the eighteenth century did
a genuinely transformative revolution come about, namely the French
Revolution. The very meaning of the word had changed by then.
New research conducted over the last ten years has sought to move
beyond this paradigm. Whilst Edward Vallance’s account, geared towards
the general public but resulting from extensive research, amply shows that
the Glorious Revolution was emphatically not a bloodless and peaceful
affair (117, 127-31), Tim Harris chooses to speak of “separate English,
Scottish, Irish and British revolutions” (516), which drove deep wedges in
the British consensus. Both take an interest in how public opinion played
a part in the political process, thus challenging the notion of a revolution
by the élite, for the élite. Both stress the transformational effects of the
events of the late seventeenth-century in all spheres. But the boldest, most
debated statement is the one made by Steven Pincus when he speaks of
1688 as “the first modern revolution.” According to Pincus, the impulse
behind the Glorious Revolution was not restorative or defensive, but
creative and innovative. Such an impulse towards modernisation was in
fact equally shared by the monarch and a very wide array of his subjects,
especially of the merchant and urban communities, though they differed
in their projects and eventually clashed. The result of that clash should
be seen as a true revolution in the modern sense because it entailed a
transformation both of the “socioeconomic orientation and of the politi-
cal structures” (32) of the country. What these new, tentatively named
post-revisionist perspectives attempt to offer is a radically new reading
of the Revolution, which was not “unrevolutionary […] bloodless,
consensual, aristocratic, and above all sensible” (Pincus 5) but popular,
violent and radically transformative. Yet in this quest for modernity,
there is something of the teleological which is entirely reminiscent of
Whig history. Harris confesses that his argument “may sound unduly

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 334 Études Anglaises — 68-3 (2015)

Whiggish” (515) and Pincus takes great pain to distance himself from a
Marxist, class-based understanding of the concepts of “revolution” and
“modernity” (31-2). Marx had indeed famously spoken of the Glorious
Revolution as “the first decisive victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal
aristocracy,” which meant Marxist historians of the seventeenth century
disregarded the Glorious Revolution in favour of what they perceived to
be the more radical decades of the 1640s and 50s. Though it is entirely
legitimate to ask, in an attempt to prove all strands of past historiogra-
phy wrong, whether major governmental and societal changes were in
fact brought about by this episode in history—in other words, whether
it was a revolution in our modern sense—, a radical interpretation may
still possibly carry the apologetic and triumphalist overtones associated
with the Whig vision of history and of Britain’s place in the world.

The debate on the Glorious Revolution needs to be situated within a

theoretical discussion of the preconditions for revolution. Does revolu-
tion take place when the state-structure is brittle and offers inadequate
policies to a fast-changing society, or when it is not only relying on
secure foundations but also being driven through a coherent and solid
process of modernisation which seeks to respond to economic change
(Pincus 32-40)? In the Whig view, James II was a flawed ruler with
limited, confusing foreign and economic policies, a mentally ill person
even, whose irrational religious schemes were doomed to fail in a society
that was renowned for its phobia of Catholicism (which was associated
with foreign threats) and that was bound to unite against him (Turner
234). The Glorious Revolution took place because the Stuart state was
in disarray, and what the revolutionaries tried to salvage from it were
the “rights” and “liberty” that had always guaranteed political stability
and the welfare of the people. Hence this idea of a state restored to its
former glory. Apart from religious divisions, another structural problem
for the seventeenth-century monarchy was the chronic penury of its
finances. As no difference was made between the revenue of the crown
and the revenue of the state, the monarch was expected “to live of his
own,” that is to say to be able to carry out the duties of government
on the “ordinary revenues” initially granted his person by parliament,
which was notoriously reluctant to grant any more than what was felt
to be strictly necessary. The English were in fact amongst the least taxed
people of Europe (Holmes 83). Tax reform during the revolutionary
decades of the 1640s and 50s (with the creation of an excise tax on
necessities and luxuries) helped augment the financial capacity of the
parliamentary state. Apart from exceptions like the creation of a hearth
tax, the Restoration reverted back to the traditional system of public
finance. This led to several critical episodes during the reign of Charles II,
the most infamous being the Stop of the Exchequer in 1672, when the
crown could not repay its debtors and virtually declared itself bankrupt.
Charles II sought the financial support of Louis XIV, which cornered

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 The Glorious Revolution (1688-1701) 335

England in a muted alliance with France against Holland (punctuated

by two disastrous Anglo-Dutch wars) and undermined the king’s legiti-
macy. The Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81 took place against a backdrop of
suspicion that the king’s condonement of his brother’s Catholicism was
synonymous with a total subjugation of England to French interests and
with a deliberate attempt to introduce French absolutism. This created a
climate of acute tensions which failed to explode in the late 1670s, but
finally did ten years later (Macaulay I, 209).
In the 1970s, revisionists challenged the Whig thesis: absolutism was
in fact taking root in England during the 1680s, though its defeat was by
no means inevitable (Jones, Western). Among them, John Miller came
up with an original thesis, arguing that “James’s main objective was to
promote Catholicism […], his ‘absolutist’ measures were a means to an
end, rather than ends in themselves” (Miller 29). The king was not the
tyrant of Whig legend. Though his manner was authoritarian and over-
confident, his ambitions were modest: he sought the emancipation of his
Catholic coreligionists but not the forced conversion of his realms or the
creation of a French-style absolutist state that he simply could not afford.
Yet this was “a man in a hurry” (Morrill 78). He came to the throne in
his fifty-second year and before he was “providentially” given a son, had
no reason to think that anybody else but his Protestant daughter and son-
in-law would succeed him. Why should he have wished to strengthen the
monarchy for their benefit? Rather, it was urgent that parliament should
vote the toleration and advancement of Catholics before he died, and
this was to be done in due respect for the law. His manner of reaching
that goal, his wide-scale “purges” of local government officers replaced
with new appointees, was reprehensible, but more revealing of desper­
ation than of a wider absolutist scheme. Paradoxically, what we have
here is an image of the Stuart State as a weak vessel, which is not unlike
the one projected by Whig historiography. The purges were designed to
achieve a “packed parliament” of MPs favorably inclined to his poli-
cies. Whoever held power locally had a major hand in the nominations
for the parliamentary elections to the Commons. The problem did not
reside in the purges themselves: his brother had done exactly the same
in the early 1680s when he replaced Whig, “exclusionist” sympathisers
with the Tories who were later ejected by James, and no rebellion had
ensued. Nor even in the fact that this time round up to three quarters of
local government officers were sacked. The bone of contention was that
he appointed Catholics and nonconformists, who were not members of
the “natural élite” (Morrill 77). Upsetting the balance between central
and local power was a fatal mistake.
In this view, James II was a moderniser, a champion of tolerance
even, who extended his “indulgence” to non-conformists, and who was
opposed by a narrow, reactionary and bigoted Tory-Anglican leadership
bent on preserving their privileges from the encroachment of Catholics
and Dissenters alike (Goldie 1991, 107). The “Anglican Revolution”

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 336 Études Anglaises — 68-3 (2015)

over which Tory churchmen and gentlemen presided was not a principled
attack on absolutism. It was an attempt to persuade their king, initially
through pastoral teaching, to restore England’s traditional order without
undermining the royal authority necessary to maintain their own social
status. They certainly had no intention of building the foundations of a
future parliamentary state (Kenyon 442). This was in line with the Tory
doctrine of non-resistance and passive obedience to royal authority, even
in cases of clear disagreement with royal policy, a doctrine which they
used repeatedly when the Whigs in the Convention parliament of 1689
started suggesting altering the line of succession. By that point, they had
become, in Speck’s words, “reluctant revolutionaries” and they were
horrified that the “quiet revolution” that they had helped spark off had
escalated and led to regime change. Five of the seven bishops who had
refused to promote James’s second Declaration of Indulgence in the spring
of 1688 refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the newly-crowned
William and Mary a year later, starting the movement of the “non-jurors.”
Though they rejected both Catholicism and Protestant Dissent, they shared
with many Whigs, some of whom were actually Dissenters, a common
platform of opposition against the perceived threat of international
Catholicism. This was inspired by what has been described as an “old
Protestant view” of the world, shaped by memories of the Gunpowder
Plot and of the massacre of Protestants in Ireland in 1641, by Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments and by the pathos-laden Huguenot accounts of
the ignominious revocation of the Edict of Nantes (Claydon 1996, 139,
229). Hence, for a brief moment in 1688-89, Whigs and Tories united in
their rejection of “popery,” the other side of the coin of “tyranny” and
“arbitrary government.” But they were driven by confessional rather
than political motives. In a sense, the Glorious Revolution managed
to bring the long process of the English Reformation to its conclusion.
Whereas the Whig interpretation had stressed the conservation of what
it felt were the most progressive aspects of the ancient constitution (the
rule of law guaranteed by parliament, English “Protestant” liberties), by
contrast this “Protestant revolution” was purely reactionary.
According to this version of events, not only did the Tory-Anglican
interest group have no intention to lead a social or political revolution
but very few people would have actually followed their lead, as the vast
majority of the population remained extremely passive. What precipi-
tated the country into a real crisis in December 1688 was not the Stuart
state crumbling under the attacks of a reformist camp but the fact that
James II had lost his nerve and fled to France, forcing the kingdom’s
political leaders to look to William of Orange for stability (Smith 287).
This apathetical behaviour has been interpreted either as a sign of popu-
lar attachment to the Stuart church and state, or as the expression of
a paralysing fear of conflict which stemmed from the “horrifying cycle
of rebellion and warfare [that] had shattered the peace of every county,
and had caused the death of as many as a fifth of the islands” during the

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 The Glorious Revolution (1688-1701) 337

Civil Wars and was made worse by the ensuing “clashes, risings […],
martial interventions […] [and] rumoured plots” over the following forty
years (Claydon 2003, 1-2). In fact, the perception of most events from
1660 onwards may have been determined by the traumatic memories
of the middle decades of the century, such as the conviction in 1679-81
that the Whig exclusionists were regicides and Commonwealthmen in
disguise, which sparked off the Tory outcries that “[Sixteen] Forty-one
is here again!”. At the very beginning of his reign, James II benefited
from a very stable power base because of the fear that isolated cases of
rebellion like the Rye House Plot in 1683 or the risings of the duke of
Monmouth in England and of the earl of Argyll in Scotland in 1685
might actually plunge the kingdoms back into civil war. This resulted
in constant attempts to avoid returning to a violent and chaotic past,
the Glorious Revolution being in a sense the culminating point of those
efforts. It has also been argued that the Dissenters may have been swayed
by James’s overtures to them and collaborated more readily with him
than had been previously thought (Goldie 1996). Interestingly, those
seeking the protection of the crown may have been the more hetero-
dox and therefore vulnerable groups such as the Quakers (but also the
Jews), while more “respectable” nonconformists with a surer footing in
society such as the Presbyterians showed discomfort, when it was not
outright hostility, at the thought of associating with a “Popish prince”
(Herrmann). Such forces left the monarch’s authority unchallenged yet
posed a dormant threat. From that perspective, English society appears
ridden with divisions yet seems unwilling or unable to confront them
lest they bring forth a bigger crisis. The king’s “tyranny” may have been
disliked but the fear of upheaval and anarchy was stronger. This meant
that only an external intervention, like that of William of Orange, could
possibly untie the Gordian knots of English society (Claydon 2002, 5,
189) and that the Glorious Revolution should be seen as no more than
a foreign invasion. This is a point made by Jonathan Israel. This may
even have been the latest policy-trick of the Dutch States General in their
fight against France (108, 123).
The Israel-coordinated volume issued in the wake of the tercentenary
celebrations of the Glorious Revolution was the first one that empha-
sised its military dimension and broke with the image of a peaceful
affair conducted in the corridors of Whitehall. Thus, recent research has
aimed to establish why the violent, military aspects of the period have
been omitted by historians (Rameix) as well as to reject the hypothesis
of political conservatism and popular passiveness. In depicting England
as a reactionary nation, revisionists had in fact confirmed, rather than
challenged the Whig “conservative” paradigm. Vallance and Harris
quote ample evidence of rebellion against the king on the part of political
leaders as well as of more humble folk. In the north and the Midlands,
risings were orchestrated by leading members of the gentry in support of
William after his landing at Torbay in November 1688 (Vallance 127-32,

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 338 Études Anglaises — 68-3 (2015)

Harris 284-88). Vallance argues that the level of opposition in the country
was such that, had there been a military confrontation between the two
armies, the outcome in 1688 probably would not have been much dif-
ferent (134). Even more striking is the notion that popular participation
may have played a role in the way political leaders handled the crisis.
Several “anti-papist” riots broke out in the autumn of 1688 in England
and Scotland, leading to the destruction of Catholic churches and houses
and creating a climate of terror. Both the level of sheer violence and the
number of people involved in those events tend to undermine the myth,
maintained by Whig and revisionist historians alike, that the Glorious
Revolution was peaceful and solely aristocratic. Wishing to steer clear
from negative images of a rabid populace excited by its own prejudices
and fears, current research is also investigating the impact on the political
process of the fast-expanding network of more sophisticated newspapers,
newsbooks and pamphlets. This relates to Jürgen Habermas’s work on
the “public sphere” which, he argues, was born in Britain circa 1700.
Though initiated in the 1640s and 50s, a “news revolution” occurred at
the end of the century (Vallance 192), leading to intense public debate and
to the spreading of reformist ideas through mass-petitioning for example
(Harris 313-19, Vallance 184-92). We move beyond the Habermasian
“Bourgeois sphere” to enter the realm of popular politics. According to
Vallance, though the Glorious Revolution “cannot be called a revolu-
tion by the people […], it can be described as a popular revolution” (19)
whereby “the verdict of the people” (161) played a momentous part in
the course of the events.
According to Pincus, the reason why the Glorious Revolution was in
fact both violent and popular is because the Stuart state was far from
becoming weak but in fact increasingly strong. Unlike Miller, he offers
the image of a king whose claims were far from being modest and who
had a rather ambitious project of state-building, which sparked off a
brutal confrontation with his people (Pincus 7). This interpretation draws
on new evidence pointing to economic and bureaucratic change in the
late 1670s and 80s, namely with the rise of the manufacturing sector,
the expansion of colonial and East Indian trade but also the systematic
efforts to professionalise the handling of revenue. Such developments
yielded a lot more profits in customs, rendering the king’s financial situ-
ation much more comfortable than in the past. By 1685, when James
became king, the royal finances had actually become healthy for the
first time since Henry VIII (Holmes 166). As the monarch became less
dependent on parliamentary taxation, he could make bold choices such
as the “purges.” It was on the back of this new-found financial capac-
ity that James II could embark on a most confident and comprehensive
project of state reform controlled from the centre but that he thought
would fully benefit his subjects while raising the international profile of
England. His aim was, as Pincus puts it, to create a “modern absolutist
state” (Pincus 6). Such an account dwarfs the notion of an “Anglican

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 The Glorious Revolution (1688-1701) 339

revolution,” or of a narrow confessional response to a supposedly lim-

ited royal policy. According to Pincus, religion only had a role to play
inasmuch as national conversion to Catholicism was the best way for
James II to have his people acknowledge his absolute sovereignty and
accept his bureaucratic, centralising reforms. James II aspired to the
Gallican-French model of Catholicism of his cousin Louis XIV, which
yielded the monarch a high degree of independence from Rome and
affirmed his absolute rule within his realm (Pincus 121-2, 133). James
did not, however, wait for his subjects to convert before he started
implementing his agenda of bureaucratic expansion and centralisation.
He sought to exert control over local government, using new means of
communication and surveillance, expanding the military (especially the
navy) and accelerating economic growth through the planned acquisi-
tion of new territories across the globe and development of the agrarian
sector (Pincus 397). Equally, Pincus argues that those who opposed this
project did not have religious motives. He speaks of a group of interests
or body of opinion, Whiggish in aspiration, which proposed a rival vision
of the economic and political future of the kingdom. They too wanted a
modernisation but favoured a burgeoning manufacturing sector rather
than an agrarian and land-based one. The colonial and Atlantic worlds
should be used not as a vehicle for territorial aggrandisement but as
a commercial outlet for domestic industry. They laid the emphasis on
labour rather than on land, and reflected Locke’s notion that labour made
property potentially infinite and thus made it possible to eradicate want
and poverty, bringing in an ideology of progress. They were inspired by
the Dutch commercial model, although their brand of liberalism was
interventionist and not anti-statist (Pincus 8, 43). Championing religious
and civil liberties over royal hegemony, the revolutionaries of 1688 suc-
ceeded in imposing their agenda. Pincus pits himself against both Whig
and revisionist historians, offering the image of a revolution that was
truly transformative of society and state. However, it was because the
state had already started to modernise that the revolution actually took
place: “The Glorious Revolution […] was not the triumph of a group of
modernizers over defenders of traditional society. Instead the revolution
pitted two groups of modernizers against each other. […] This, I believe,
was a pattern typical of all modern revolutions” (Pincus 8).
While this conceptual redefinition has successfully renewed the debate
on the nature of revolutions, some other aspects of Pincus’s account have
been criticised, such as the assertion that 1688 was bloodier than the
French Revolution (see review by Vallance) or the wholesale evacuation
of the religious aspect (Sowerby). This, in particular, remains problem-
atic. As we saw earlier, popular violence was driven by the fear of a
Catholic plot and more generally of Catholic violence. It is thus difficult
to conceive of a “popular revolution” if religion is removed from the
equation. Doubts also remain about the tangibility of James’s “Gallican
project,” especially how it might have realistically been implemented in

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 340 Études Anglaises — 68-3 (2015)

a different context from the French one (Levillain 15). Equally, the vision
of a triumphant revolutionary movement is somewhat hard to reconcile
with the fragile consensus of 1689 which showed an extremely divided
population and an uncertain settlement. Harris shows how contempo-
raries successfully managed to work around those divisions in order
to come to a pragmatic agreement in England, if not in Scotland and
Ireland: “[…] what was achieved in 1689 was sufficiently moderate and
ambiguous that the Revolution could be interpreted in different ways
by different people depending on one’s political and religious outlook.
The result was that most people were able to make their peace with the
post-Revolution regime and few were driven into Jacobitism” (Harris
486-87). This spirit of moderation is evidenced by the discarding of an
elective monarchy and the fact that the Declaration of Rights was more
of a political warning to the new sovereigns than a systematic redefini-
tion of the constitution. Legally the Revolution was conservative, which
undermines the notion of a transformative revolution.
The real changes, as McInnes argued, occurred not in 1688-89 but
in the 1690s, and mainly as a result of William III’s war against France
(McInnes 1982b, 378). In exchange for granting supply and helping
foot the huge bills for the war, Parliament gained a tight control and
oversight of state expenditure. The monarch was still very powerful but
bargained away large areas of his prerogative powers in exchange for the
support of parliament, an “event” no more, but a real institution. The
expensive war led to intensive bureaucratic activity, increased taxation
and new financial institutions that revolutionised the way the state was
funded and the way the population related to taxation. England had
become the most taxed country in Europe. In 1697, the establishment
of the Civil List put an end to the archaic distinction between ordinary
and extraordinary revenue and neatly separated the monarch’s income
from the state’s revenue, another step in the shift of power from the
crown to parliament (Holmes 267). However, the same old interpreta-
tive and ideological divisions reappear here. One point of view is that if
change happened, it was in a haphazard, improvised or even accidental
fashion. More importantly, it was, in a large part, a rejection of the 1689
settlement. The increase in parliamentary activism—made apparent
by the Commission of Public Accounts, the Triennial Act of 1694, the
numerous Place Clauses tacked on to revenue bills and eventually the
Act of Settlement of 1701—was in fact evidence of the sheer distrust of
William III’s new “corrupt” and authoritarian rule and of the resent-
ment of the “monied interest” behind the new financial innovations
which posed a threat to the traditional élites (Cruickshanks 2). Hence,
those changes that transformed the British monarchy happened against
the Glorious Revolution and the type of régime it had put in place and
not because of it. Harris, on the other hand, thinks that the distinction
made between the Glorious Revolution and the 1690s policies is “a
false dichotomy, since the war was a direct, intended consequence of

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 The Glorious Revolution (1688-1701) 341

the Revolution. William invaded intending to bring England into his

European alliance against France, and many of those in England who
made or supported the Glorious Revolution did so precisely because they
wanted such a revolution in English foreign policy” (Harris 491). This
goes beyond the mere idea that England was forced to “fight the Dutch
war” because it was the price to pay for William’s liberation of England,
or was unavoidable if James (supported by France) was to be prevented
from reconquering his throne and from punishing his rebellious subjects.
Many people wanted “a revolution in foreign policy” because they had
identified French trading interests and French imperial hegemony as
the main threats for England. Hence, 1688-89 could be seen as a policy
(rather than a constitutional) turning-point and the 1690s as its logical
implementation.
Doubts remain, however, about how inclusive and participatory this
post-revolutionary state was. In Scotland and Ireland, two societies even
more divided after the Revolution than before, the marginalisation of
Catholic Irishmen, Ulster Presbyterians or Highland Jacobites took
place on a large scale and often in a very violent manner. In England,
conflict was more successfully assimilated, or in fact ritualised through
the parliamentary rivalry between the Whig and Tory parties. Civil
war was no longer a threat. The new arena for infighting was parlia-
ment, but also the constituencies, the newspapers and the coffee-house.
Historical evidence for the years 1689-1715 suggests an increasingly
participative political sphere. Elections turned out to be much more
regular and much more frequent than before (twice as many as between
1660 and 1688) and there was a notable increase in the electorate: a
quarter of the adult male population exercised their votes in free elec-
tions to seats for which more than one candidate was now fielded in
this new era of party-politics. Free discussion made possible by the
Toleration Act (1689) or the lapse of the Licensing Act (1695), rein-
forced the development of a public sphere and of a national political
culture. Mark Knights speaks of the public as “an arbiter of politics”
and of a shift towards “a representative society” (Knights 379, 6). Yet
of course this was no democracy. The pragmatic settlement of 1689
had excluded the extremes: on the one hand, Jacobite royal absolut-
ism, and on the other, the republicanism of the Commonwealthmen,
some of whom, though no democrats, would have happily welcomed
a widening of political participation. The new “fiscal-military state”
(Brewer xxi) was a capitalist state which added new layers of inequali-
ties to the old, traditional ones. The Glorious Revolution had glori-
fied “liberty and property” but it now often led to the curbing of the
former to defend the latter. It promoted the interests of the aristocracy
and the bourgeoisie, reconciled with one another, to the detriment of
the rest of the population. It even spawned one of the most exclusive
and punitive periods in British history (McInnes1982a, 80). Thomas
Paine later lampooned the post-1688 parliamentary régime for being

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 342 Études Anglaises — 68-3 (2015)

“of the same tyrannical unfounded kind which James [had] attempted
to set up” (Paine 94).

So how radical and transformative was the change brought by the

Glorious Revolution? After the Hanoverian succession and the rise of
Walpole in the years 1715-20, when popular participation was drastically
curtailed in an era often referred to as “the age of Oligarchy” (Holmes &
Szechi), political and economic inequalities were everywhere to be seen
in eighteenth-century Britain. Walpolian Establishment Whigs, eager to
justify the narrow basis of their power, insisted on the restorative nature
of the Revolution, which was an event which had happened in the past
to re-establish stability but had not authorised any major constitutional
changes. But more radical, “opposition” Whig voices, alienated from
central politics, saw 1688 as the beginning of an open-ended transforma-
tive process which might accommodate exactly that kind of momentous
change in the future (16-21). This is the essence of the argument between
Richard Price and Edmund Burke against the backdrop of the French
Revolution. In his defence of popular resistance and government, Price
declared the English Revolution “a great work, [yet] […] by no means a
perfect work”. However, “the principles of the Revolution” will continue
to lead and inspire future generations for more liberty, justice and equal-
ity (Price 191). Burke on the other hand wrote that 1688 had happened
to preserve the “ancient indisputable laws and liberties,” that is to say
property-rights now threatened by the plebeian likes of Price. It had led
to no “fabrication of a new government” (29), thus had given no war-
rant for popular rule. It is the alternative “radical” interpretation that
scholars like Pincus seek to reclaim, in opposition to the “restorative/
conservative” Burkean model that was so influential on Macaulay. Yet,
as Levillain asks: “Steven Pincus est-il un historien whig qui s’ignore
ou, du moins, un nouveau type d’historien whig?” (Levillain 20). Both
the Burkean and radical readings are Whig readings. And as such, they
tend to idealise the Glorious Revolution. Burke and Macaulay praise
its stability and moderation, Price and Pincus the open promise of radi-
cal change and popular sovereignty it stands for. But they all adopt a
teleological perspective, albeit the former opting for a type of progress
and modernity as a continuity with the past, the latter opting for one
born out of transformation. By making the Glorious Revolution a new
standard and model, “the first modern revolution,” Pincus adds another
layer of idealisation and recalls the fascination for English (rather than
British) superiority of Macaulay’s History of England. In the end, it is
a bourgeois liberal revolution that Pincus seems to celebrate, one that
created a new type of economy and society in which all are offered the
right opportunities to participate and succeed. Again, Macaulay is not
very far here. Such a glorification of the past, though the result of a
thought-provoking and otherwise impressive piece of work, gives no
real account of those excluded, alienated and sometimes victimised by

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 The Glorious Revolution (1688-1701) 343

the past, all the more so when it is so tightly linked to the emergence of
an empire. Maybe the next chapter in the history of the Revolution will
be written precisely about those people.

Frédéric HERRMANN
Université Lumière – Lyon 2
TRIANGLE-UMR 5206

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