Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James II (1848–1861) is the greatest historical polemic in English. It championed a Whig interpretation of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought William and Mary to the throne in place of James II. Macaulay represented the Revolution as a heroic defense of liberty and constitutional propriety against tyranny and absolutism. In his own polemical account of 1688, Steven Pincus frequently criticizes Macaulay, but his work resembles that of the great Whig historian, not least in employing an interpretive framework that seems at times oversimplified. Nonetheless, this important book opens up a debate about an event too often dismissed as a conservative coup d'état.
The bold thesis of the work is summed up in its title: 1688 was the first modern revolution. Both “modern” and “revolution,” however, are heavily loaded terms, and they should be used more cautiously than is done here. Pincus defines them according to social scientific tenets borrowed from Samuel Huntington, Charles Tilly, and Theda Skocpol. His approach reifies “modern revolution” into a single objective category (“a structural and ideological break from the previous regime” [31]) that could be fitted onto any nation or period. It downplays contemporary understandings of events, their shifting meanings, and the deep disagreements as to how they should be interpreted. The author plausibly maintains that attempts to modernize the state can lead to revolutionary change, but he goes further in arguing for intentionality. Modernizing revolutionaries, in other words, knew exactly what they were doing.
Pincus is hardly the first scholar to call 1688 a revolution, or to connect it with modernity. After the publication of J. R. Western's Monarchy and Revolution (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972), most historians agreed that the revolutionary aspects of 1688 came about as unintended results of its success. Tim Harris has recently suggested that 1688 was a real transformation carried out by revolutionaries who were hardly reluctant, but he limits its scope to political and religious issues. Pincus, by contrast, sees revolutionary modernity as embracing economic and social as well as political change. This leads him into some provocative but ultimately questionable propositions.
Perhaps the most significant of them concerns religion. Theories of modernity often assume that religious beliefs have become less central to public behavior. The problem with 1688 is that it was almost always justified in ways that stressed religion: James II was a Catholic and was therefore inclined to use arbitrary authority to advance his insidious goal of undermining Protestantism. Worse still for the modernizing argument, religion remained just as politically divisive among the governing elite after 1688 as it had been before. One can admire this book's dogged insistence that every previous historian has been wrong about the role of religion in 1688, but ultimately such reluctance to give the devil his due produces a surprisingly narrow understanding of revolutionary change. James II is represented as a state modernizer. His critics are depicted as opponents of his methods, not of his religion. Apparently, they strove for a modernity that was commercial, anti-French, and protective of English liberties, but they were not motivated by Protestant zeal. As trade disputes and foreign policy are not very compelling explanations for revolutionary change, the reader is left with the defense of liberty as the fundamental reason for the downfall of James II: more or less exactly what Macaulay thought.
Removing religion from a central role in the Revolution also means reinterpreting James II's Declaration of Indulgence, which granted broad toleration for religious worship. Pincus falls back on the traditional Whig view, that the Declaration was meant to establish Catholicism and extended to other groups only in order to dupe them into supporting it. In the end, James turns out to be more of a Catholic than a modernizer. Pincus largely ignores the Tory accusation that James was trying to break up the established Church of England—surely a modernizing step, although one that was not taken after 1688. To stress this point would make the Glorious Revolution seem more religious, more Tory-inspired, and less modern.
Pincus wants to keep 1688 Whig and secular. This leads to some strenuous attempts to tame the sources, which are often furiously denominational. References to “Popery” are read as attacks on absolutist government, and fear of Catholic influence is interpreted as patriotic disdain for French tyranny. The deep Protestant roots of English national identity, as revealed by Linda Colley, remain buried here.
A little subtlety and flexibility would have improved this book immensely. Too many straw men are created for the sake of setting up an argument. Nobody today takes Macaulay's views on social change seriously, so to debunk them is meaningless. To my knowledge, no reputable historian has called James II a “moderate” either, although Pincus implies that many have. Even when his arguments are most convincing, Pincus can push them too far. For example, he persuasively contends that most of the bishops appointed by William and Mary were Whigs rather than moderate Tories. Not all Whig bishops, however, were strident in their espousal of the doctrine of resistance. To place such an interpretation on John Tillotson's guarded political pronouncements seems forced as well as unnecessary. The author's brusque dismissal of Tory efforts at religious comprehension is an example of overkill in the opposite direction. Tories are not allowed to have much influence on the Revolution settlement, and one wonders how they managed to survive the Association of 1696, which apparently bound the whole nation together behind Whig principles of change.
In spite of its shortcomings, the grand aspirations of this book and the broad sweep of its claims will insure that it is taken seriously by scholars working on the Glorious Revolution for years to come. It may not cast as long a shadow as Macaulay's History, but it will stand out as the opening salvo in a series of historical battles that will light up 1688 in newly vibrant tones.
