The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  Already in the spring of 1688 William had been contemplating the possibility of an invasion of Britain as part of his latest campaign against Louis XIV. He was now able to take advantage of an entirely unofficial invitation issued on 30 June by the ‘immortal seven’ (five Whigs and two Tory magnates) to William to mount an invasion of England. At this stage William’s objective was to secure the Protestant succession for his wife, but not the throne for himself. Indeed, in his ‘Declaration’ of the reasons for undertaking the impending invasion, which he issued on 30 September, he went no further than to promise to defend the Protestant religion and to guarantee the election of a free parliament. William could not afford to depict himself as an adventurer threatening to depose a legitimate monarch. On this both Whigs and Tories, Anglicans and Dissenters, could agree.

  Not for the first time, nor for the last time, however, it was events in Europe which were to determine the destiny of Britain. When Louis XIV moved against the Habsburgs in Germany by attacking the fort of Phillipsburg on 14 September 1688 with 70,000 troops, William was free to move against England. (Only at this point, it seems, did it at last seriously occur to James that an invasion was a real possibility.) With destiny on his side, and remarkably good fortune – notably the ‘Protestant wind’ that blew the Dutch fleet down the channel also kept James’s fleet bottled up in the Thames estuary – William was able to land an army of 20,000 men, not the 14,000 usually quoted, on 5 November 1688. The presence of English and Scottish elements in the Dutch army gave it something of a ‘British’ identity. He cautiously occupied Exeter and slowly moved towards London. James advanced his army from London to Salisbury Plain to check the invasion. Astonishingly, however, he failed to engage the invading force with his own considerably larger army. He pulled it back towards the capital, a humiliating and totally demoralizing retreat, but one that was to determine that there would be no civil war in England in 1688. As his own health – and will – failed, so the morale of his army evaporated. James II began to realize that there was little sign of positive support for his wilting cause. Indeed, from the north there were disturbing reports of support for William. Meanwhile, William’s progress – words like ‘invasion’, ‘rebellion’ or ‘assault’ seem inappropriate – coincided with reports of secessions from James’ cause. William began to negotiate with James. Even at this late hour William was prepared to allow James to keep his throne on condition that Catholics were removed from office and a free parliament was summoned. Wishing to avoid such humiliating concessions, James fled London; on 22 December, with his nerves stretched beyond endurance, he escaped to France.

  The precise circumstances of his departure were extremely important. James may not have formally surrendered the crown, but his flight into the arms of Louis XIV left no practical alternative but for the crown to be offered to William. As G. M. Trevelyan put it, he ‘dethroned himself’.4 Even worse, it seemed that James was determined to do as much damage as possible to the political fabric of his own country. He left no formal framework of government behind him. Indeed, he had destroyed the writs authorizing the general election and had (it was reported) thrown the Great Seal into the Thames. Even worse, he had ordered the disbandment of his army but without disarming the rank-and-file soldiers. Two days of anti-Catholic rioting in the capital and in a number of provincial centres convinced the propertied classes that the only hope of restoring order lay in surrendering all to William. Informal meetings of peers and commoners invited William to assume the executive government until an elected convention could meet on 22 January 1689 to provide a legitimate structure for the future government of the country.

  MAP 2: Invasion of William of Orange.

  When the Convention Parliament met on 7 January 1689 to dispose of the throne, it had to decide between a number of alternatives. The first alternative was that James might be recalled and reinstated but subject to significant limitations on his power. His recent conduct had, however, eliminated what was left of his support and his popularity, even among the Tory Party, the king’s most loyal supporters. Furthermore, there were few, even among the Whigs, who really wanted an enfeebled monarchy shorn of its power. A second alternative was to declare James insane and to appoint a regent during the minority of the newly born baby son. This expedient might have been ingenious, but it was also dangerously impracticable. There was no guarantee that it would work. To Tories it might seem like dangerous tampering with the principle of hereditary succession. The third alternative was much to be preferred: to accept the fact that James had, in effect, abdicated the throne by absconding to France and that Mary was therefore the legal heir. James had not, in fact, renounced the throne, but to assert the obvious fact that the throne was vacant might avoid giving distress to Tories. William acted decisively, informing the convention that he would not agree to be merely a regent. If the throne were offered to Mary, it would be he, not his wife, who would exercise the executive powers. With the promise and prospect of firm government, the convention was content. On 6 February it declared the throne vacant and invited William to become king, subject to the accompanying declaration – which ultimately became the Bill of Rights. (In Scotland a similar document, the Claim of Right, was drawn up and agreed.)

  The Bill of Rights was a pragmatic document designed to meet an immediate situation. The throne was empty and legal authority had to be restored as a matter of urgency. The bill recited the evils of which James had been guilty and provided that they should not be repeated in the future: these included suspending and dispensing subjects from the penalties of the law, establishing a standing army, packing Parliament, levying taxes by force of the royal prerogative and pressuring juries. To these ends Parliament ‘ought to be held frequently’, elections ought to be free, and not only the male heirs of James but also all Roman Catholics were to be barred from the succession. What this might mean in practice would take years to reveal. Of course, the convention was not a parliament, and the solutions that emerged lacked any intellectual cohesion. Most of the participants in the great events of 1688–9 were less consumed with the long-term development of the political order than with the immediate problems which James II’s erratic and, of course, unprecedented behaviour posed. Even those contemporaries who may have had a longer-term view of events seem to have been more concerned with the protection of landed property and privilege than with the rights of Parliament.

  The significance of the Bill of Rights is that it redesigned the framework within which the monarchy was to function in the future, placing the succession unquestionably in the Protestant line and removing the prospect of a Catholic monarchy.5 Much trouble was taken to define the limits of royal power. It is important to underscore the fact that the bill did not envisage a permanently weakened monarchy.6 Several possible means of emasculating royal authority were discussed in the convention, but most of them were rejected. Whigs and Tories would have found it difficult to agree on them. More importantly, William would never have accepted them. Indeed, as his reign was to show, there was to be no sudden tilt in the direction of what later generations would recognize as limited or constitutional monarchy. Certainly, William never regarded his throne as being held on a contractual basis, whatever some Whigs in the convention may have wished. The Bill of Rights was neither contractual in its wording nor conditional in its content. Indeed, the offer of the crown was never even specifically made conditional on William promising to honour the Declaration of Rights. The Glorious Revolution, then, was achieved without any contractual agreement between crown and Parliament, still less between crown and people.

  While Whig contract theory was not enshrined in the Glorious Revolution, the Tory principles of divine right, hereditary succession and non-resistance were sorely compromised by the events of 1688–9. Although it was very difficult for Tories to square either those events or the provisions of the Bill of Rights with divine right and hereditary succession, it was just possible to do so. After all, it was Protestantism rather than heredity
which was now the statutory requirement for monarchical succession: Tories could argue that it was the abuse, not the principle, of hereditary monarchical power which had been responsible for the replacement of James II by William. Most Tories, horrified at the prospect of causing a civil war, were prepared to accept that William was king de facto if not de jure. Had James stayed to fight for his throne, the political dilemma facing the Tories would have become far more agonizing than it turned out to be. If it could be shown that he had abdicated, there was no purpose in the Tories fighting for him. The fiction that James had ‘abdicated’ may not have borne much examination but at least it satisfied Tory consciences. In this way, the Glorious Revolution could (just about) be depicted for Tories as confirmation of the principles of divine hereditary right.

  Consequently, this was not to be the end of divine right theory. In the 1690s some Tories managed to convince themselves not only that William owed his throne to divine providence but also that he continued to occupy it in accordance with the will of God. Once the regime was securely established, it, apparently, acquired the divine sanction that upheld the social as well as the religious order. Indeed, the reign of Anne witnessed a resurgence of Tory zeal for divine hereditary right,7 but the failure of the queen to bequeath an heir was a fatal blow to such enthusiasm. After the Hanoverian Succession in 1714, Tory belief in divine right lingered on more in the realms of political nostalgia and intellectual debate than in the sphere of practical politics.

  On the whole, the Glorious Revolution may be seen as a victory for a moderate Whiggism, although to depict the revolution simply as a victory for Whiggism overlooks the fact that it was the achievement of a coalition of Whigs and some Tories. Of course, Whig supporters boasted the virtues of a mixed and balanced constitution and the advantages of government by consent. Although much was written by Whig propagandists at this time about the conditional nature of government, about government as a trustee for future generations and, above all, about rights of resistance against tyranny, these arguments were not intended to form a conscious agenda for a revolution. They were used to rebut the authoritarian claims coming from the circles around James. The convention did contain a small but lively group of radical Whig reformers who sought to implement a thoroughgoing restructuring of the political system during the Glorious Revolution.8 Indeed, their contributions to the debates of the convention were vociferous, and may even have had some influence in Scotland and Ireland. Although they largely failed to persuade the convention to adopt their more ambitious schemes, they were to enjoy greater success in the future, not least with the Toleration Act of 1689 and the Triennial Act of 1694. Even these discussions, however, owed little to the ideas of John Locke. We now know that, far from being a tract for the men of 1688–9, Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (published in 1690) had been written some years earlier and for very different political circumstances. Indeed, the Treatises went far beyond the conventional Whiggism of the day. Locke rehearsed arguments on the basis of abstract reason to outline a thoroughly contractual political philosophy based on natural rights, popular sovereignty and rights of resistance. His conviction that it was legitimate to overthrow a ruler if stability and property were endangered did not fit comfortably with traditional Whiggism and its stress on historic rights and the historic constitution. Such arguments were almost irrelevant not only to the political circumstances following James II’s ignominious departure from England and the realities of convention politics but also to the post-revolution Whig Party. The Whigs of the 1690s were not anxious to popularize Locke’s advocacy of rights of resistance. One revolution, however glorious, in one political lifetime was quite enough. It was in the sermons of Whig divines and the pamphlets and tracts of the reign of Anne that Locke’s ideas were to be more consciously circulated and popularized.

  In religious life the Glorious Revolution inaugurated changes of incalculable significance, both immediate and long term. The Toleration Act, passed by the convention in May 1689 (although, perhaps significantly, the word ‘toleration’ does not occur in the act), removed the obligation to attend Anglican services from the consciences of Protestant Dissenters (but not from those of Catholics). The act established an extensive licensing system for non-Anglican chapels, a sure sign that the old fear of the Protestant Dissenters as regicide republicans was lifting. By the provisions of the act, Dissenters were allowed to have their own teachers and schools; it is from this date that the famous Dissenting academies of the eighteenth century have their origin. The act, furthermore, conceded that the discipline of Anglican church courts did not extend to the whole population, an important preliminary to the abandonment of censorship of theological works which took effect when the Licensing Act was not renewed in 1695. But religious toleration was to go no further than this. The act did not apply to Papists. The Clarendon Code was not to be repealed. The English universities were still barred to Dissenters and they were still required to pay church rates and tithe to the support of a church of which they were not members. Indeed, even William was unable to persuade an intensely Anglican parliament to repeal the Test and Corporation acts9 which excluded non-Anglicans from seats in Parliament, from offices and from corporations. Nor were he and his supporters able in 1689 to persuade either the convention or the convocation to agree upon a new scheme of comprehension,10 which would have generously allowed moderate Dissenters to return to the Anglican fold. (By this time, however, most Dissenters, save the Presbyterians, were far more interested in toleration than in comprehension.) Clearly, then, the provisions of the Toleration Act were limited in their scope; they perhaps represented the minimum reward which the Protestant Dissenters would accept for their resistance to James II in the period before and during the Glorious Revolution and the maximum degree of generosity towards them which Anglicans were prepared to permit. James II’s Declaration of Indulgence had been much more generous, extending to Catholics, Unitarians and even some non-Christian churches.

  In the decades immediately after the Glorious Revolution, Protestant Dissent prospered. Secure in the protection of William III and (intermittently, at least) reasonably secure in the protection of Whig ministries against Tory attacks, Protestant Dissent thrived. Between 1689 and 1710 no fewer than 3,900 meeting-house licences were issued. In London in 1711 there were twice as many Dissenting meeting-houses as Anglican parish churches! By this time the number of Protestant Dissenters in England and Wales was estimated at about 400,000. Pious Anglicans were appalled by the spectacular increase in the growth of Dissent – in this new free market in religion the Dissenters were comfortable winners – by the explosion in the amount of heterodox literature which followed the lifting of censorship in 1695 and, in general, by the emergence of a scientific and sceptical social climate. No wonder Anglican churchmen were so frequently resentful at the behaviour of the Dissenters, especially their practice of occasional conformity, by which they attended an Anglican church once a year and thus qualified for municipal office.

  Yet, from a different standpoint, it was one of the achievements of the Glorious Revolution to have re-established the dominant theological position and to have safeguarded the commanding social influence which the Church of England had enjoyed before the reign of James II. Indeed, after the worrying flirtations of Charles II and James II with Catholicism, Anglicans could congratulate themselves on having successfully repelled some very dangerous challenges to their position. After all, William was indifferent to Anglican doctrine, and the Whigs and Dissenters entertained extensive schemes of religious toleration. The Tories, however, managed to secure the passage of a de facto oath of allegiance, on which most of the church could unite, rather than a de jure oath of allegiance, on which it almost certainly could not. The Whigs, inspired by hostility to high church clergy, insisted that all clergy should take the oath. About 400 of the lower clergy, together with six bishops, were unable, on grounds of conscience, to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary and refused to abandon their
commitment to the thirty-nine articles and to the divine right of kings. As a result, these non-jurors, as they came to be known, lost their benefices in 1689–90. Their secession from the church proved to be permanent and, in view of their personal talents and abilities, damaging. The schism of the non-jurors was the gravest schism in the history of the Church of England in the seventeenth century, especially when, as we shall see, it came to include the whole of the Scottish hierarchy. On the whole, however, over 90 per cent of the Anglican clergy took the oath. Those who resigned were replaced by men who were content to accept the Glorious Revolution. In this manner, therefore, the Church of England was reconstituted at the Glorious Revolution as the established church of England. Its status, however, remained a matter of debate and its prospects in an age of religious pluralism uncertain.

  The Glorious Revolution, then, was a real watershed in the history of England. It settled the vexed and urgent issue of the succession, defined the powers of the monarchy and guaranteed, while redefining, the status of the Church of England and its relations with Protestant Dissent. These were momentous changes and may, with some justice, be described as a revolution. Indeed, there were certain features of the events of 1688–9 which may be termed ‘revolutionary’ in a general sense; the dramatic collapse of James II’s regime from within, the setting aside of the existing laws of succession and the transfer of sovereignty from James II to William III. These events were to have enormous consequences not only for England but also, especially, for Scotland and Ireland. Indeed, repudiating the traditional Whiggish view that the Glorious Revolution was a moderate constitutional revolution, Steve Pincus has argued that it was ‘the first modern revolution … popular, violent and divisive’.11 But the violence, especially in England, was limited. While it is true that William III received public support in the closing months of 1688, that, too, was limited, and it must be remembered that James II had received considerable public acclaim just a few weeks earlier. Furthermore, such a ‘modern’ view of the Glorious Revolution severely downplays the importance of religious sensibilities and confessional issues. Indeed, it has even been argued that far from inspiring immediate political modernization, the Glorious Revolution left England as an ancien régime society. It was not an abrupt break with the past but was founded on a fundamental desire to return to a predictable routine of social and political order as opposed to the uncertainties created by James II’s unconstitutional and illegal innovations. If the Glorious Revolution was in any sense a revolution, it was not a revolution in any modern sense, nor was it intended to be.