Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (70 page)

And yet, the very qualities which made the Revolution of 1688–9 so glorious to its contemporaries might seem to reduce its significance or appeal to later generations. After all, this Revolution was raised in defense of religious intolerance born of anti-Catholic prejudice. It strengthened the contemporary hierarchical system of ranks and orders and it tightened the stranglehold of the landed aristocracy on political and social power. Finally, it did nothing, apparently, for the great mass of the English people. Recent historians of the Revolution have emphasized that most of the English elite in 1688–9 were conservatives, “reluctant revolutionaries,” even counter-revolutionaries, defending their own hegemony against upstart Catholics and obscure Dissenters. But the authors of this book would counter that revolutions, whatever the motivations or plans of their originators, rarely end up where they are supposed to go. For example, the English elite of the early 1640s were also “reluctant revolutionaries,” but the process they began ended by abolishing the monarchy. We would argue that the Revolution of 1688–9 also went farther than William or the seven signers intended, for it represented the final break of early modern England with its medieval past and the irrevocable embrace of its modern future. It did so by resolving most of the questions that the Tudors had left to plague the Stuarts.

First, the Revolution of 1688–9 provided a rational and forward-looking answer to the question of sovereignty. Though contemporaries were reluctant to admit it, and William and his successors would surely have denied it, from henceforward the ultimate sovereign power in England was vested in Parliament. After all, the 1689 Convention had called itself into existence, debated the succession, taken the Crown from James II, ignored his son Prince James, and offered it to William and Mary. Despite Anne’s proximate claim to the throne after Mary, Parliament mapped out a succession that would jump to her only if William failed to have children, either with Mary or some future wife. Admittedly, most contemporaries were not comfortable tinkering with the succession. They preferred to act as if Parliament’s actions in 1689 were a one-time emergency measure, regrettable and never to be repeated. But, as we shall see, within the next decade Mary would die, William would remain a widower, and Princess Anne would prove unable to bear healthy children of her own. That would force Parliament to consider the succession again. By the Act of Settlement of 1701 it decreed that, if neither William nor Anne produced an heir, the crown would, after their deaths, go to the Stuarts’ nearest Protestant relative. This proved to be a member of the Brunswick family, the electors of Hanover, in Germany. In so decreeing, Parliament skipped over numerous Catholic candidates with better claims, including Prince James. In fact, this legislation barred Catholics from ever sitting on the throne of England again. That is, Parliament ignored the laws of hereditary succession, and what had previously been thought of as the will of God, to redraw the succession according to its own liking. As early as 1690 one radical made this implication of the Revolution explicit when, asked to drink the healths of King William and Queen Mary, he hoisted one “to our Sovereign Lord the People for we can make a king and queen when we please.”
¹⁹

Perhaps he went a tad overboard. In 1689 the king still retained both the title of “sovereign” and most of the executive powers restored to him in 1660, including the right to choose ministers, set policy, and make war and peace. But from 1689 it would remain an unspoken but ever more obvious truth that English monarchs would have to do so in such a way as to please Parliament. This was less because of the implied threat of deposition, but because, if they were to have any hope of succeeding in those policies, they would need the support of a parliamentary majority to vote the necessary funds. For reasons that will become clearer when we explore the issues of war, foreign policy, and finance, the days when the monarch could dissolve Parliament to avoid unpleasant confrontation or inconvenient legislation, let alone rule entirely without it, were over. Rather, Parliament had to be called every year and allowed to sit, and ministers had to be chosen with whom it could work. Thus, 1688–9 marks the shift from a monarch’s parliament
s
to
Parliament
as a separate, permanent, and, ultimately, dominant institution. The end result would be the modern British monarchy, limited and constitutional.

The Revolution solved another longstanding problem in an enlightened way by enacting a partial religious toleration. That is, for the first time since the Civil Wars, and now permanently, Parliament abandoned the idea of a coercive national Church, enshrining in law the notion that Protestants of different hues could worship in their differing ways and still be good subjects, living together in peace. Admittedly, this was a very limited toleration. Catholics were excluded from it entirely; their toleration lay well over a century in the future. Nor were Dissenters
fully
tolerated, since they were still required to register their meeting houses with the government and keep the doors open during services. Nevertheless, there was something revolutionary and modern in the rejection of the notion that all had to be of one faith to be good English men and women. It would take until the nineteenth century, but religious tensions would gradually ease and thereafter all these groups would be brought fully into English public life. Here, too, the Glorious Revolution was a step toward a modern society, tolerant, diverse, and multi-confessional.

The Revolution also provided new, if provisional, answers to the questions of war and foreign policy as well as money – questions which would be increasingly linked. It should be recalled that William had not invaded to solve the questions of sovereignty or religion. What he wanted was to enlist the wealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland into his crusade against the exorbitant power of Louis XIV. Louis, for his part, could not allow this to happen: first, he wanted to keep the United Provinces isolated and Britain neutral; second, as an absolutist Catholic monarch he could not sit idly by while his cousin, James II, was overthrown. As a result, a war between France on the one side and Britain and the United Provinces on the other became inevitable in 1688. In fact, that war would be the first of seven colossal conflicts pitting Britain and its allies against France and its allies between 1688 and 1815. These wars would test British resolve, the British economy, and the British political, social, and administrative systems to their utmost. Remember that, up to this point in history, the three British kingdoms had played a small and often inept role in European affairs. France was a much larger and wealthier nation, its population three times that of England and Scotland. Moreover, because both sides had colonial empires, these would be world wars. Obviously, they would answer the longstanding question of Britain’s role in Europe and the world.

Just as obviously, they would be very expensive. Therefore, even without the constitutional changes noted above, William III and his successors would have to call Parliament regularly in order to fight them. As a result, Parliament has met every year since 1689 without exception. This would further strengthen parliamentary sovereignty as that body wrested concessions from successive monarchs in return for financial support for these wars. In turn, Parliament’s cooperation, the resultant increase in levels of taxation, the development of new techniques for raising money, and the growth of the royal administration necessary to supply the logistical demands of these wars would render the British Crown (if not its wearer) both rich and powerful. This last distinction would be drawn explicitly in 1698, when Parliament would pass the first Civil List Act, separating the king’s personal finances (to run his household and some older government offices) from its prodigious annual outlays for the army, navy, etc. Britain would field vast armies and far-flung navies, all coordinated by a massive, but increasingly efficient, bureaucracy and paid for by what would turn out to be the most powerful economy in the world. And so, as a result of the international fallout from the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 and the need to settle the question of their place in the world, the three kingdoms would settle the question of finance as well.

The Revolution also settled the issue of local control, at least in England. (As we shall see, it provoked crises in Ireland and Scotland that would take decades, if not centuries, to work out.) On the one hand, the growth of royal bureaucracy tied the local nobility and gentry more tightly to the Crown, because they came to depend on the lucrative jobs it provided; on the other hand, local control would remain, for the next hundred years at least, very much in the hands of this landed aristocracy who had chased one king out of the country and selected another. In London and other cities, the Toleration Act opened public life to urban, Dissenting merchants and financiers who would play a crucial role in the war effort. This would lead to tensions between this monied interest and the old landed interest throughout the period.

There is perhaps, one more general point to be made about the Revolution of 1688–9. It was, in our view, a profoundly modern event. To say that people can depose their kings and choose their rulers and their religion(s) is to embrace rationality, modernity, and a belief in the ability of human beings to solve their problems without divine intervention. It is no coincidence that the age which produced scientists such as Boyle, Halley, and Newton, or the first economists, such as William Petty and Gregory King (about whom more below), should have leaped to that embrace. It is true that there was much talk of divine providence from the pulpits in 1689, of a “Protestant Wind” that had saved England. Some of the forward-looking intellectuals named above would have embraced such an interpretation enthusiastically; others opposed the Revolution entirely. But the truth was that human beings had overthrown God’s lieutenant; human beings had chosen a new king and queen; and those beings were now free to choose among a variety of religious beliefs. In other words, the most profound significance of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 is that it broke, finally and forever, the Great Chain of Being. Pieces of the Chain would remain intact for years, and some continue to hold to the present day. But the broad notion of a God-ordained hierarchy in Church, State, and society which could never be challenged or changed was doomed. The next century would see English men and women explore and exploit this new situation. Having broken their chains, they would now begin to flex their muscles.

CHAPTER TEN

War and Politics, 1689–1714

When the “immortal seven” invited William of Orange to invade their country in the summer of 1688, they did so, primarily, to preserve the Protestant ascendancy and the rights of Parliament. Many who supported the ensuing revolution probably did not realize that they were also committing British arms and resources to a full-scale war with France.
¹
In fact, the Revolution of 1688–9 made that struggle, known as the Nine Years’ War, the War of the League of Augsburg, or, in America, King William’s War, inevitable. James II still lived and, unpopular as he may have been with most of his subjects, there remained in all three kingdoms a substantial number of hard-core loyalists. These individuals, soon to be called “
Jacobites
,” sought French assistance to overthrow the Revolution Settlement and restore King James. Louis XIV offered that support, in part because James was a friend and fellow monarch, in part to fulfill his lifelong goal of absorbing the Spanish empire into the French. To do this, he would have to wreck the Anglo-Dutch alliance and break Dutch power. Conversely, war was necessary on William’s part to preserve the Revolution Settlement, the Anglo-Dutch alliance, and the territorial integrity of the United Provinces; and to further
his
lifelong goal of stopping Louis from becoming the master of Europe.

William’s major problem, therefore, was to convince the British ruling class and, by extension, the British peoples that his war was
their
war; that they were fighting not only to save the Dutch or the Spanish (hardly popular allies after the conflicts of the past century), but to preserve their own constitution and way of life. He had, in other words, to convince them that James II and Louis XIV still threatened both Parliament and Protestantism. This was an especially hard sell, in part because British arms had such a poor record in continental wars. Moreover, this particular war was likely to prove the most expensive ever fought by the British state, stretching the resources and capabilities of the Crown, as well as Parliament’s willingness to pay for them, to their very limits. How well was the new regime fitted to make this case?

William III, Mary II, and the English People

The very name “William and Mary” reminds us from the start that the revolutionary settlement rested on an unusual and precarious constitutional foundation. The new king was not the rightful heir of the previous monarch; indeed, his predecessor, whom many continued to regard as the real king, still lived. Those willing to act on that opinion became Jacobite conspirators. Others may have had little love for King James personally, and would not lift a finger to help him return, but they could not, in conscience, swear allegiance to the new regime. This group, mainly Tory clergymen, became known as “nonjurors.” Finally, while most of William’s subjects tacitly acknowledged him as king, there is little evidence that they ever loved him or saw him, as they had seen Henry VIII, James I, or even Charles II, as God’s representative on earth or the Father of the Nation. Remember that William’s new subjects had been preached to for centuries about hereditary succession and the Great Chain of Being. They had been told repeatedly, especially after the Civil Wars of mid-century, that only the hereditary monarch was the true king and that resistance to him, let alone revolution against him, was a grave sin. This did not dispose them to embrace the Revolution Settlement or revere its chief beneficiary. Admittedly, they had also been told that whoever sat on the throne
currently
was entitled to at least passive obedience as the de facto king. Still, William III never felt completely at home among his British subjects, for he could never be assured of their heartfelt loyalty.