1688: The First Modern Revolution
By Steve Pincus
Yale, 647 pages, $40

 

The onset of the French Revolution in 1789 sparked a heated debate in England concerning the character of its own Glorious Revolution a century before. The philosophical pamphleteer Richard Price called the events of 1688 and 1689 “a bloodless victory” in which “the fetters which despotism had long been preparing for us were broken, the rights of the people were asserted, a tyrant expelled, and a Sovereign of our own choice appointed in his room.”

As a result of it, Price claimed,

security was given to our property, and our consciences were emancipated. The bounds of free enquiry were enlarged; the volume in which are the words of eternal life was laid more open to our examination; and the era of light and liberty was introduced among us, by which we have been made an example to other kingdoms, and became the instructors of the world.

The practical philosopher Edmund Burke—who had initially welcomed the French Revolution but soon became much less sanguine about its likely consequences—was also prepared to celebrate the Glorious Revolution. But he characterized it differently. “The Revolution,” he claimed,

was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty. The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers.

Steve Pincus, who teaches British history at Yale University, argues in his weighty new tome, 1688, that Price was more nearly right—that the Glorious Revolution marked a sharp break with the past and deserves to be ranked alongside the French and Russian revolutions as a hinge moment in history.

To this end, Pincus advances a highly plausible argument that James II, the king deposed by the parliamentary coup of 1689, was a would-be absolute monarch on the model of Louis XIV. He demonstrates that the revolution was more than a revolt of the British aristocracy; it was accompanied by considerable violence directed against James’s Catholic co-religionists and his supporters, which suggests a degree of civil unrest and displeasure with the ruling faction that belies the image of the Glorious Revolution as a model of the peaceful transfer of power. And he rightly makes much of the fact that it eventuated in England’s adopting a pro-Dutch and anti-French foreign policy in a manner that helped to reorder Europe. So too with domestic policy. The Whigs, who became the dominant political force in England in the century that followed, were the motive forces in the seismic events of 1688 and went on to establish the Bank of England in 1694 and impose taxes on land; they were, he shows, economic modernizers intent on the promotion of manufacturing, and such change transformed the world’s economy in the century to come.

In short, Pincus argues persuasively that the revolution prevented the establishment of an absolute monarchy in England and that it marked a dramatic shift in public policy. He has a powerful case to make. The problem is that he makes it relentlessly, repeating his larger claims with such vehemence and frequency that one is left wondering whether this book’s scholarly author doth not protest too much. And in the end, he does not succeed in proving that what happened in and after 1688 was, in the full sense of the word, a revolution.

When Burke rejected the argument advanced by Price, he spelled out the grounds of his contention in a fashion quite cogent. “The nation kept the same ranks,” he observed,

the same orders, the same privileges, the same franchises, the same rules for property, the same subordinations, the same order in the law, in the revenue, and in the magistracy, — the same lords, the same commons, the same corporations, the same electors. The Church was not impaired. Her estates, her majesty, her splendor, her orders and gradations, continued the same.

Burke had a point. For example, the so-called Act of Toleration, which permitted dissenting Protestants to worship as they chose—and is often cited, as it is here by Pincus, as an example of revolutionary change—was really an act of indulgence rather than a confirmation of right. It afforded to Catholics, Unitarians, and atheists no relief at all from the penal laws. And the failure to repeal previous acts of Parliament meant that Dissenters who refused to take communion in the Church of England were barred from public office. At least in principle, if not always in practice, they were treated as pariahs, unworthy of joining the ruling order of what remained in large measure a royalist, Anglican, and aristocratic regime.

In addition, though William of Orange wanted the English crown and got his hands on it as a result of the Glorious Revolution, he was reluctant to accept it for what it actually was—a gift of the British Parliament and therefore, by definition, revocable by the Parliament that had given it to him. William never renounced his dynastic claim, and he never abandoned the appeal to divine right. Moreover, as Burke suggests, the structure of the House of Lords remained unchanged, as did the constituencies represented in the House of Commons.

The Declaration of Rights adopted in the wake of the revolution was a compromise document cobbled together to make it possible for Whig and Tory to stand together in league with their new Protestant king. It left ambiguous whether James II’s “abdication” was constituted by his abuses as king or by his flight from the realm.

For a time, while Tories appealed vaguely to the necessity of the case, to the rights of conquest, and to Providence, the Whigs insisted on defending the revolution as an act of legitimate popular resistance to tyranny. But after their crushing electoral defeat in the wake of the show trial they conducted on ideological grounds of the ultra-royalist Anglican divine Henry Sacheverell in 1710, the leaders of the Whig party preferred to sidestep ideological confrontation. A hundred years after the revolution, no Tories and very few Whigs were inclined to object when Edmund Burke wrote that the events of 1688 constituted “a revolution, not made, but prevented,” adding, “We took solid securities; we settled doubtful questions; we corrected anomalies in our law. In the stable, fundamental parts of our constitution we made no revolution, —no, nor any alteration at all.”

Pincus, an erudite and thorough scholar, is surely familiar with all this. But like a novice lawyer assigned a difficult case, he gives the arguments on the other side such short shrift as to raise doubts about the arguments he makes himself.

Moreover, he makes a labor of what should be a joy. Pincus is not at all a bad writer. Without in any way disgracing himself as a scholar, he could have made of this a rip-roaring tale, for the Glorious Revolution was a real drama. Instead, however, Pincus starts every chapter in the manner of a graduate dissertation, by setting up other scholars as straw men so he can do a star turn in knocking them down. And he ends every chapter in the same fashion—with a needless, pedantic summary of the argument made therein. Lay readers will find this tedious; scholarly readers, especially those to whom he has not done full justice, will find it annoying; and those familiar with the secondary literature will wonder at his failure on occasion to cite in the book’s voluminous notes those who anticipated one or another of the arguments he makes.

All this is a shame. For if Price exaggerated the revolutionary character of what took place in and after 1688, Burke overstated its conservative character. The statesmen who made the Glorious Revolution, dominating the Convention Parliament in 1688 and engineering the ouster of a king in 1689, had learned from the mistakes made by Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads in the 1640s and 1650s. The latter abolished episcopacy, executed Charles I, eliminated the House of Lords, and founded a republic, and it all ended in ashes. In contrast with their predecessors, the men who succeeded in 1688 took the advice proffered by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy to “all who wish to eliminate an ancient way of life in a city and reduce it to a new and free way of life” that “one ought, since new things alter the minds of men, to see to it that these alterations retain as much of the ancient as possible; and if the magistrates change from those of old in number, authority, and term of office, they ought at least to retain the name.”

In their deliberations and resolutions, the canny statesmen of 1688 and 1689 were as careful as possible to observe, or at least mimic, the procedures and forms of legality, and they did everything within their power to foster and preserve an illusion of continuity. But their efforts in this vein did not alter the fact that the revolution had worked a profound and, as it turned out, permanent transformation in the direction taken by the nation, and the long period of Whig hegemony, though initially quite precarious, enabled a new order gradually to emerge within a framework comfortably preserving much of the old.

When figures from the Continent such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Jean Louis de Lolme visited England in the 18th century, they saw in embryo a future radically different from virtually everything in the human past. Great Britain may not have been, as Montesquieu said, “a democracy based on commerce,” and it is no doubt an exaggeration to call it “a republic disguised as a monarchy.” But that description is close enough to the truth to justify our setting that polity alongside the Dutch regime of the preceding century as the harbinger of something entirely new. Had Pincus directly confronted Burke’s argument, had he gone to the heart of the matter and attended, as others have, to the manner in which Parliament—dominated by Tories and Whigs in turn—consistently used the power of the purse to keep William of Orange on a very short leash, he could have made a case that the Glorious Revolution marked a genuine change of regime of the very sort suggested by Montesquieu.

For an accurate, nuanced, and dramatically satisfying account of this remarkable era, one would do better to read a multivolume work, completed 71 years ago and still in print, that Pincus never even cites: Winston Churchill’s Marlborough: His Life and Times. It is not an accident that the greatest English statesman of the 20th century was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Very few of those so honored could write as well, and next to no one in any age has had a better understanding of the nature of politics.

+ A A -
You may also like
Share via
Copy link