I

W. A. Speck has produced a clear and succinct overview of the reign of James II for Longman's Profiles in Power series. Intended mainly for an undergraduate audience, it is written by a scholar who has had a distinguished career teaching and researching in this field and who excels at writing books of this pitch. Besides a prologue and an epilogue, the book comprises eight main chapters: the first four deal with England and proceed chronologically, covering James's career as duke of York, the two phases of his reign as James II, and then the Revolution; the second four are thematic, and look at Scotland, Ireland, North America, and Europe in turn. Speck thus shows himself aware of the recent trend to set English history in a broader British and international context; the contrast with his earlier 1988 study of the Glorious Revolution, which focused on England, is indicative of the way the field has developed in the interim.Footnote ⁴

Speck's assessment is balanced and judicious. In asking whether James was a bigoted Catholic who aimed at royal absolutism or an enlightened ruler ahead of his time in seeking to promote religious toleration, he comes down somewhere in the middle. James certainly did much to increase the powers of the crown and his campaign to pack the Lords and Commons in 1687–8, if successful, would have reduced the English parliament to a mere cipher. Yet Speck sees James as a sincere believer in liberty of conscience for peaceable dissenters; on those occasions when James did back a clampdown on dissent it was to meet a subversive threat posed by enemies of the state and thus akin to an anti-terrorist drive. In foreign policy James's approach was by and large pragmatic, Speck informs us, the major exception being his desire to reopen diplomatic relations with the papacy. James was certainly not a puppet of France – even though, as Pincus has shown, many of his contemporaries saw him as suchFootnote ⁵ – and whilst he could not afford to antagonize France in Europe to the point of war, he was quite prepared to stand up to Louis XIV in North America when he felt English interests were threatened by the French. So why did things go wrong? There were structural problems with his inheritance to be sure; such was the problematic legacy of the civil wars and interregnum that both Charles II and James II ‘would have had their work cut out to avoid their father's fate whatever political stance they adopted’ (p. 11). Nevertheless, Speck holds James personally responsible. Although several men gave James advice, and in Scotland and Ireland in particular he relied heavily on the advice of the earls of Melfort and Tyrconnel respectively, James was determined to be king and make the key decisions himself. He – and not his ‘evil counsellors’ (the language used by the Declaration of Rights of 1689) – was thus to blame for his own predicament.

If at times Speck appears to eschew analysis for fence sitting, he does provide us with precious insights into James II's make-up. James may have been stupid, but lack of intellectual ability is not necessarily a disadvantage to those who wield power. The key to understanding James is that he essentially had a soldier's view of the world. His treatment of the fellows of Magdalen College Oxford was more that of a superior officer condemning insubordination from subalterns than of a king admonishing recalcitrant clergymen. For James, the code of honour was central to the bond between commander-in-chief and his officer corps, hence why he was so unnerved when John Churchill and other officers in the army went over to William of Orange in November 1688. Authoritarian by nature, he was convinced that he had been singled out by God's Providence to return his subjects to the ‘true’ (i.e. Roman Catholic) faith. That Providence blessed his cause seemed to be confirmed by the birth of a son in June 1688; even the nose-bleed which prevented him from reviewing his troops on Salisbury Plain on 22 November could be attributed to Providence, since it averted a supposed plot by Churchill and others to seize the king and deliver him up to William as a captive. Speck accepts that James may well have been suffering a mental decline by the end of his reign: he was exhibiting such symptoms of irrationality and even derangement by the end of 1688 that some feared he had a brain tumour, whilst the French ambassador interpreted James's indecisiveness and precipitous failure in Ireland in 1689–90 as an indication that he was losing his mental powers. Yet Speck nevertheless believes James had many positives attributes: he was less rigid and more malleable than usually thought, and unlike his brother he was not devious but ‘had a deserved reputation for honesty and integrity’ (p. 152).

We may wonder whether James's blatant disregard of the promise he gave at the beginning of his reign to preserve the existing government in church and state reveals a man of honesty and integrity; certainly many millions of Protestants across England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the New World felt deeply betrayed at the time, though some will doubtless see this as a minor quibble. The real problem with this book lies elsewhere. Being neither a textbook nor a major work of research, but rather a short though wide-ranging interpretative overview drawing heavily on existing scholarship (albeit with the author's own insights from the archives), it is likely to date quickly. There is no point in me detailing here my own disagreements with Speck; interested readers can always turn to my own study of the Revolution. I will however observe that constraints of space mean that Speck cannot allow himself the depth of analysis necessary to support many of his contentions – as, for example, with regard to whether or not James acted in violation of the law in his use of the dispensing or suspending powers. We are thus left with interpretations that are contentious – such as the claim that ‘the verdict in the case of Godden versus Hales was therefore valid’ (p. 46) – or which fail to convince because the evidence is not subjected to sufficient critical scrutiny (compounded in this case by a factual error: James dismissed six judges – half the judicial bench – in order to obtain a ruling in his favour, not two as Speck alleges). The section on Europe is likely to be soon surpassed by Pincus's study and that on North America by Owen Stanwood's forthcoming monograph.Footnote ⁶ With the field moving on so rapidly, the book will not long continue to meet the needs of the undergraduate audience for which it was written.

John Callow's study of James II is more lightweight than Speck's, though ironically this might increase its shelf life. Callow is himself an established authority on James II, having already published two volumes from his intended trilogy of biographical studies of ‘the fallen king’ – the first covering James's years as duke of York, the second his years in exile.Footnote ⁷ The work under review here, however, is a coffee table book offering a brief illustrated history of the life of James II and highlighting some of the treasures to be found in the National Archives. The book serves its purpose well; a brief narrative constructed over five chronological chapters is supplemented with beautifully produced images – paintings, maps, contemporary letters, and other documents (not all of them from the National Archives). In short, this is a very handsome book. And since a review in an academic journal will inevitably highlight limitations, let me state upfront that I am a fan of coffee table books and welcome attempts by scholars to make this period of history in particular more accessible to a broader audience.

Given the brevity of the book, Callow inevitably whips through the narrative at breakneck speed. On the whole he does an effective job and succeeds in making sense of a complicated period of history. He also provides some insight into James's psychological make-up. Callow notes how the young Prince James witnessed first hand Charles I's weakness at Hull in 1642, when Sir John Hotham refused to surrender the garrison, and came to feel that if his father had been more decisive and used force, things would have worked out very differently (p. 7). Callow also reminds us that although during the 1650s James gained valuable military experience fighting for the French and proved himself to be a courageous soldier and able subordinate, he never tasted a truly independent command but was always dependent upon Turenne's advice and guiding genius. The memory of half-learned maxims and past successes ossified over time, leaving ‘James with an inflexible and increasingly hide-bound approach to warfare that one day would prove his undoing’ (pp. 17–18).

However, such insights are few and far between. Mostly the narrative sections are sound but predictable. There are also moments of concern. There are a few minor factual errors. Given that James came to the throne in February 1685 and fled England in December 1688, to claim that ‘within less than three years he had lost his crown and found himself a hunted fugitive’ (p. 1) is simply badly maths. The repeated misspelling of Sedgemoor (Callow opted for Sedgemore) is unfortunate. The claim that James ‘sanctioned a massive increase in the professional army from roughly 7,000 men in 1685 to some 40,000 just three years later’ (p. 60) is so misleading as to create a serious historical distortion. In fact he inherited an English military establishment of 8,565 men from his brother (separate armies existed in Scotland and Ireland); by contrast, in November 1688 the figure of (just under) 40,000 includes his Scottish and Irish troops.Footnote ⁸ There is very little on Scotland and Ireland until we get to the Glorious Revolution; yet James II ruled three kingdoms not just one, and what James was up to in Scotland and Ireland is actually also crucial to understanding how things played themselves out in England. The Seven Bishops were not tried for treason, but for publishing a seditious libel (p. 72). And it is not true that the king's flight was viewed as an abdication (p. 87); rather, James was viewed as having abdicated because in addition to having withdrawn himself from the kingdom he had also broken the original contract between king and people and violated the fundamental laws (as a reading of the book under review here by Julia Rudolph would have made clear). Even if this is just a coffee table book, the need to keep things simple cannot be an excuse for getting things wrong.

Julia Rudolph's book is at heart a study of the political thought of James Tyrrell, focusing in particular on his Bibliotheca politica of 1695. The significance of Tyrrell to the development of whig ideology has tended to be obscured by the historiographical obsession with John Locke, though as is well known Locke's ideas were too radical for most whigs at this time. It is Tyrrell, Rudolph seeks to show, who offers a paradigmatic expression of whig Revolution principles. In the process she provides a major re-evaluation of those principles, rescuing them from the charge (made both by contemporary tories and modern-day scholars) that they were incoherent and confused, and seeks to challenge conventional assumptions about the legacy of those principles, problematizing in the process Locke's role in the development of modern liberalism.

The challenge facing the whigs at the time of the Glorious Revolution was how to defend the overthrow of James II for acting tyrannically without embracing the revolutionary implications of resistance theory. Locke had suggested that when the agreement between the ruler and the people was broken the entire government was dissolved, and that power returned to the people, who were free to establish a new ruler and even form a new government. Yet most whigs sought to maintain that only the kingship had been dissolved in 1688 and that the ancient constitution remained intact. This involved not only showing that neither the existing political nor social order had been overthrown, but also denying the claim that parliament was sovereign and had the right to judge when a ruler acted tyrannically. They achieved this, Rudolph argues, ‘through a deliberate reliance upon traditional beliefs about Convention and Parliament from England's past, and upon contemporary fictions about representation and the role of the people’ (p. 12). Rather than seeing whig theory as muddled and confused, Rudolph protests, we need to recognize that it was the very duality and ambiguity within whig theory that made it so successful in meeting the needs of the society that accepted it. And by providing ‘a safe version of popular sovereignty and resistance’ and preserving ‘more progressive or “liberal” elements of the whig legacy … in a partial and modified form’, whig resistance theory, as articulated at the Revolution, played an important role in the transmission to posterity ‘of ideas about consent, freedom, resistance and popular sovereignty’ (p. 12). In all of this, Tyrrell was a key agent. His Bibliotheca politica, set as it was as a series of fourteen dialogues between whig and tory, was designed to enable readers to assess the credibility of opposing arguments as if they were undergoing a trial at English common law, and thus reach a rational acceptance of the ‘truth’ of whig Revolution principles.

Rudolph begins with a consideration of contract theory in Tyrrell's Exclusionist tract Patriarcha non monarcha (1681), a work that in fact does not have much to say on questions of justifiable resistance to political authority, in order to establish the context for the subsequent development of whig ideology in this regard. Much of the ground covered here, such as Tyrrell's refutation of Filmerian patriarchalism and his championing of England's ancient constitution founded upon an original contract with the people, is familiar. Rudolph does have interesting things to say about Tyrrell's position on women, whom Tyrell believed possessed natural freedom and wisdom equal with men, and about how women's natural right of self-preservation allowed them to resist a tyrannical husband. This was the limit of Tyrrell's exploration of resistance at this time, however. Although Tyrrell conceded that the people were able to judge when government exceeded its bounds and acted contrary to the common good, he explicitly stated his disapproval of the notion (previously articulated by Philip Hunton and later to be defended by Locke) that the subject might oppose the monarch when he can find no other redress. At this time – when the whigs were still hoping for a parliamentary solution to the problem of the Catholic succession – Tyrrell's embracing of contract theory did not lead to the conclusion that resistance was legitimate; the point was to show the abiding role of consent in government.

This was to change after 1688, as the rest of Rudolph's book demonstrates. In his Bibliotecha politica Tyrrell develops the view that the people have the right to resist a tyrant and that the great council has the right to fill the resulting vacancy in the throne. Resistance Tyrrell sees as both a natural and a historical right that resides in the whole people. However, the actions of this diffusive body are always commanded by the better sort. Moreover, when a king abdicates his government by ruling tyrannically, power does not devolve either to a representative body or to the people, but must revert to the descendants of the ancient great council that had first instituted civil authority. That council had comprised men of property – masters of families and freemen, not all subjects – who became part of the government they created. This enables Tyrrell to equate the extraordinary Convention of 1689 with the people and thus deny that the whigs made the promiscuous multitude superior to the king. It also enables him to insist that whilst, as a result of James II's violation of the original contract, there might have been justifiable resistance and a dissolution of power to the people, there had been ‘no corresponding dissolution of government since the people, as the council, forms a part of that ancient government that endures’ (p. 141). More than any other theorist, it was Tyrrell who succeeded in developing a politically and ideologically acceptable defence of moderate revolution.

In a final chapter, Rudolph offers a reconsideration of the relationship between Locke's thought and whig theory. Although Locke started from many of the same premises as Tyrrell and other whig theorists, it is normally argued that Locke differed in that he pursued the progressive implications of these ideas. Yet Rudolph believes that this argument has been pushed too far, reminding us that Locke's theory was based on ‘conservative’ views about gender and property, that there were limitations to Locke's supposed democratic or egalitarian principles, and that he supported an essentially unchanged form of government (or restored ancient constitution) under William III. The fact that Locke's theory had conservative as well as radical or egalitarian implications in turn complicates our understanding of the relationship of his ideas to the subsequent development of liberalism. When expounding upon supposed Lockeian ideas about consent, equality, and popular sovereignty, whig theorists tended to suppress their radical implications. In doing this, however, they made these ideas acceptable and thus helped them to endure. Ironically, therefore, ‘liberal ideas, and their democratic implications’, relied not only ‘on Locke's ability to open some theoretical doors’ but also on the ability of whig theorists ‘to close the door on those implications’ (p. 167).

This is a clever book that repays close reading. I admit to getting more out of it on a second and third reading; Rudolph does not always articulate her argument in the most lucid fashion, though she is also playing with some complex and sophisticated ideas – regarding methodology as well as interpretation – and thus the book functions on various levels. Her study inevitably begs the question of the contribution of tory-Anglican theorists in making the Revolution acceptable to the English people. Anglican divines – tory as well as whig – had to show how their opposition to James II's initiatives was not incompatible with the church's traditional teaching on non-resistance and passive obedience, and some tory writers did come to articulate a theory of limited resistance in exceptional circumstances.Footnote ⁹ One also wonders whether further insight might have been gained by paying attention to how the Revolution was justified in Scotland and especially Ireland, where active resistance to James II had more transparently taken place and where many writers sought to grasp the nettle of how it was possible to justify resistance to a king who acted tyrannically whilst at the same time putting a lid on resistance theory's more radical implications. In the larger, bi-partisan, and Britannic picture, one wonders just how significant Tyrrell was in making resistance acceptable – although of course this is to criticize Rudolph for not tackling questions she never intended to ask.

Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill's study of the Atterbury Plot is a curious book. No one nowadays would doubt the importance of Jacobitism as a historical phenomenon; that battle has long been won. Nor should we question the significance of the Atterbury Plot: more of a threat than sometimes recognized, its revelation in 1722 enabled the Walpolean whigs to proscribe the tories to the political wilderness and to establish a whig political ascendancy in effect until 1760. And yet we lack a major modern study. G. V. Bennett covered the plot only briefly in his biography of Atterbury, and that was published more than thirty years ago.Footnote ¹⁰ Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill are two distinguished scholars who know their Jacobitism and they have used a wealth of sources in the Stuart Papers, many of them hitherto unexamined, in order to offer this reassessment. The book thus promises much.

Most of the book is by Cruickshanks, who provides us with chapters one to nine. Erskine-Hill gives us an introduction and a conclusion plus chapter ten, which looks briefly at the aftermath of the plot and what happened to the plotters. The thesis of the book is straightforward. The new Hanoverian government was so unpopular by 1720–22, especially in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble Crisis, that the Jacobites could well have succeeded in bringing about a Stuart restoration, if they had played their cards right. Circumstances conspired against them, however, and when the Walpolean whigs got wind of the plot they suppressed it vigorously, invariably in violation of the law. There is no doubt who the heroes and villains are for these authors: at one point Cruickshanks compares the Jacobites to the Resistance in Europe in the years 1940–44!

The introduction offers a brief pre-history of Jacobite intrigue and sets up the key dramatis personae. The bulk of the book deals with the plot itself, its various phases, and the subsequent prosecution of the plot by the whigs. The first phase involved France's Scottish finance minister John Law, who sought to achieve a reconciliation between the regent of France and Philip V of Spain to secure the use of Jacobite regiments in the service of these two kingdoms to bring about a Stuart restoration. Although the fall of Law scuppered this scheme, the crisis that befell the British government following the bursting of the South Sea Bubble presented another opportunity. Initially British Jacobites hoped that if they could ensure the upcoming general election was free from government pressure they would obtain victory at the polls and bring about a more or less peaceful Stuart restoration. The third earl of Sunderland, whose position as chief minister had become precarious as a result of the crisis, now made overtures to the tories and held out the prospect of an early dissolution and free elections in an effort to save himself. Neither the early dissolution nor free elections materialized, however, and despite running a supposedly ‘brilliant propaganda campaign’ the tories found it impossible to overcome court influence, and the whigs were returned with an even larger majority in 1722 than in 1715. In the meantime the Jacobites switched back to contemplating a military solution, with a rising initially planned to take place during the elections, although this had to be postponed for lack of money. Sunderland's unexpected death on 19 April 1722 deprived the Jacobites of a valuable friend and protector in the government, whilst the subsequent searching of his papers unveiled to the new Walpole administration crucial evidence about the Jacobite intrigues. Although the plot continued, Walpole managed to nip it in the bud by making pre-emptive arrests and holding suspects in prison without bail.

When all is said and done, however, the book does not succeed. Cruickshanks has written her chapters almost as a series of notes: each of her chapters is divided into very short sub-sections, with nearly every paragraph given a new subheading, which makes for a very disjointed read. The main methodology is to present potted biographies of key actors (as if Cruickshanks is writing History of Parliament entries) and to join these together with narrative. There is little in-depth analysis, and too many important questions – such as how much genuine support there was for the Jacobites in England or the extent of the whigs' abuse of the law – are given rather superficial treatment. The reader is left with the feeling that so much more could have been done with the wonderful material. There is no doubt that the whigs, in suppressing the plot, acted with dubious legal propriety. They made large numbers of arrests; detained people without good cause and for too long (in violation of habeas corpus); forged evidence to secure convictions; and tried the ringleaders not at common law but in parliament, where their political majority could ensure that they would get the outcome they wanted. At times Cruickshanks misses the chance of making further strikes against the whigs. Thus she notes that those arrested who were eventually bailed had their bail set as exorbitant rates with the intent of ruining the fortunes of the prisoners (p. 170); she might have gone on to remind us that the imposition of excessive bail was condemned by the Bill of Rights of 1689. However, anyone familiar with English legal history at this time period knows that governments invariably sought to act by colour of law, even if they were bending the law or manipulating it to their own advantage. Naked abuse of the law by the whigs seems inherently unlikely; there would have had to have been some reason why they thought they were justified in acting as they did (even if we might deplore what they did). Cruickshanks's reluctance to probe in greater depth leads her into trouble. For example, she claims that because Atterbury was a peer of the realm, before he was arrested the House of Lords should have been notified and had the charges explained to them. But the question of whether English bishops were peers is a complicated one. It is true that the Seven Bishops of 1688, when protesting against their arrest, claimed that they were. Strictly speaking, however, they were lords of parliament. Atterbury's own supporters in the Lords accepted this, and in one of their protests against one of the votes of the House they explicitly acknowledged that Atterbury was not a peer of the realm.Footnote ¹¹ Cruickshanks also claims that Atterbury was detained illegally in the Tower in violation of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which had yet to be suspended at the time of his arrest; she dismisses the judges' claim that they could not bail prisoners out of the Tower on the grounds that the Act extended to all places of imprisonment. But the precedent here is clear, namely the detention of the first earl of Shaftesbury in the Tower in 1681 despite the Habeas Corpus Act, the judges declaring that they had no jurisdiction over prisoners in the Tower.Footnote ¹²

There are other needless errors that cause the reader to lose confidence in the analysis and suspect a partisan agenda on behalf of the authors. The claim that William of Orange ‘managed to land in the West Country with an army twice the size of James's’ (p. 3) in November 1688 is wrong; most scholars today would put the size of William's army at around 15,000, whereas, as we have seen, James's army at this time numbered 40,000. A proper understanding of what members of the Convention and political commentators meant when they claimed that James II had abdicated in 1688 reveals that it was not an ‘obviously fallacious argument’ (p. 21), though certainly James II himself thought it was a fallacious argument. Christopher Layer, the one Jacobite conspirator to be executed, Cruickshanks tells us, should have been executed on Tower Hill, and thus handed over to the London sheriffs, who were Jacobites and ‘who might have let him escape’. Instead, he was taken out of the Tower by the east wharf gate into the county of Middlesex and delivered to that county's sheriff, further evidence, Cruickshanks believes, of the whigs ‘using irregular proceedings to the end’ (p. 182) (as if Jacobite sheriffs letting condemned traitors escape would not be evidence of ‘irregular proceedings’!) In fact, given that Layer's indictment (as Cruickshanks points out) stated that the act of treason on which he stood charged had occurred in Essex, then Layer should have been returned to Essex for execution. The court opted to switch the location of the execution to London because of the gravity of the crime and for greater deterrent effect, something that was hardly unprecedented; moreover, surely it was common sense not to hand over their man to sheriffs whom they knew to be unreliable and whom they feared might fail to fulfil the responsibilities of their office as required by law.

Pat Rogers's impressive book seeks to tell the story of Alexander Pope's poem Windsor-Forest of 1713 – how it came to be written, what elements went into it, how it was received, and what the aftermath was (both for the nation and for the poet). It is a brilliant exercise in historical and literary contextualization, whereby it makes a compelling case for how this complex poem should be understood and how it was likely to have been read by contemporaries. Rogers demonstrates that Windsor-Forest contains more rhetorical and intellectual coherence than is generally supposed. In essence it is a Stuart panegyric written as an intervention in the peace process, which concluded with the Treaty of Utrecht, urging readers to accept the terms on offer and reject the further demands of the Allies and whig politicians at home. Pope not only expected peace to bring prosperity but also longed for an end to intestine strife and a future happy Stuart-ruled nation. It was ‘a desperate attempt to use the Peace as a last way of salvaging unity and purpose’ (p. 8). Yet Pope's dreams were soon to be cruelly thwarted, as the Hanoverian succession and subsequent unsuccessful Jacobite rebellion resulted in whig ascendancy and tory prescription, reprisals against Catholics, and Pope's own ejection from his boyhood home in Binfield on the edge of Windsor Forest.

Rogers begins with the ‘setting’, considering matters relating to the composition and publication of Windsor-Forest (including the question of Pope's revision of his earlier draft), Pope's days at and subsequent expulsion from Binfield, and Pope's main patron in his youth, Sir William Trumball, a verderer of the Forest. He then looks at the bibliographic milieu in which the poem was created, including Pope's relations with the Scribblerian group and the poem's dedicatee George Granville, first Baron Lansdowne. Chapter three explores how Windsor-Forest articulates a politics of the long term, the medium term, and the short term – the first going back to the Norman Conquest, the second relating to the reign of Queen Anne as it was affected by the overthrow of James II and the reigns of William and Mary, and the third being the immediate context of the poem, the Utrecht settlement. Here Rogers not only sets out Pope's vision of British history and his view on the Stuart dynasty, but also offers a careful and nuanced reassessment of whether Pope was a Jacobite (the balance of the evidence seems to suggest he was). The next two chapters look first at Queen Anne, the creation of her image as monarch, her involvement in works of peace, and the echoes of court life found in Windsor-Forest, and then at the historical associations of Windsor itself and the immediate surroundings of the castle. But it is chapter six on the war and the peace that will be of most interest to historians. Here Rogers shows how contemporaries would inevitably have read the poem as a thinly veiled attack on the duke and duchess of Marlborough and the duke's conduct of the war, even though neither John nor Sarah Churchill are mentioned by name and the word ‘Blenheim’ is studiously omitted. He also considers how the visit of the four so-called Iroquois kings to London in April 1710 was orchestrated by the tories to provide support for their ‘blue-water’ policy to strike at the French in their overseas possessions and to promote missionary work amongst the Indians in what could potentially become an expanded American empire, a crucial context for Pope's vision of the spread of imperial power. Rogers further shows how Pope's poem contains a tribute to the South Sea Company, which at the time of composition seemed to offer up the prospect of a solution to the rising national debt and of the opening up of lucrative commerce all over the western hemisphere. Yet Pope's vision of the future is one in which slavery would be no more, the ancient empires of the Incas and Aztecs restored, and ‘the blessings of humanity passed to all corners of the globe’ (p. 239). The final two chapters explore the literary contexts of Pope's work, detailing its debts to classical literary models (especially the georgic and epic strains derived from Virgil and the mythological vein based on Ovid) and renaissance writings (Camden, Drayton, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton), and then to more recent authors (Denham, Cowley, Evelyn, and Addison). The conclusion draws a number of threads together by re-reading the poem as an intimation of Jacobite mortality.

It is beyond my expertise to predict how literary scholars might react to Rogers's interpretation. The dust-jacket claims that the study offers a ‘radical new look’ at the literary climate of Anne's reign, and the fact that Rogers acknowledges upfront that the way his book is constructed ‘could seem to rest on an overdetermined interpretative method’ (p. 5) and that he frequently notes his disagreement with other Pope scholars suggests that he expects his interpretation to be controversial. To a historian his approach seems to be precisely the right way to contextualize a text and the argument all the more compelling as a result. Yet although Rogers's approach is thoroughly historical, it remains an exercise in unravelling the meaning of a literary work. Historians might justifiably ask what new light the book sheds on our understanding of the history of the period. Invariably Rogers relies on existing historical knowledge, often quoting at length from quite dated secondary works, in order to reveal the meaning of a work of literature, rather than using the literary text to provide new historical insight. One can excuse the claim made in the opening line of the introduction that ‘it is just over two hundred years since Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch, came to the throne’ (p. 1) as an unfortunate typo; it is the extended quotes from the likes of Winston Churchill and G. M. Trevelyan to establish a historical insight which make us wonder which century we are in. What I found historically most intriguing is Rogers's demonstration of how a Catholic crypto-Jacobite, nostalgic for what he sees as the golden days of the Stuarts, could look forward to British global commercial and imperial expansion and a world made free by peace and trade. It is surely an insight that does indeed invite us to rethink existing assumptions about both tory and Jacobite worldviews in a radically new way.

The purpose of Peter Jupp's book is to examine the changes that took place in the ways that Britain was governed by the executive and parliament in the period between the Glorious Revolution and the middle of the nineteenth century. It is quite self-consciously a student textbook, though Jupp hopes the infamous ‘general reader’ will also find his account of interest. Jupp feels that history students these days are encouraged to study such a broad range of subjects – be they political, social or cultural – that they have to focus more chronologically, leaving them with an insufficient knowledge of principal developments over long periods of time. Hence Jupp's decision to focus on a century and a half – though ironically this proved unmanageable in practice, and so he had to split the book into two identically organized sections of four chapters each with 1760 as the dividing line. Jupp also proclaims an intent to make a statement about the long eighteenth century, and to engage with the accounts of J. C. D. Clark, who has argued that England remained an ‘ancien regime’ state in the period 1688–1832, and of John Brewer, who has claimed that this time period saw the creation of a ‘fiscal-military state’.Footnote ¹³ The book reflects the insights of a scholar who has spent a career studying and teaching this topic and the judgements are always shrewd and balanced. Jupp seeks to document how the frame and scope of the executive, the role of parliament, and the nature of popular political involvement changed over time, revealing how change occurred at different rates and to different degrees in the different areas. Overall the picture that emerges is one of slow, evolutionary change, though significant change nevertheless – precisely what one would expect from a survey of this kind.

Textbooks are difficult things for scholars to assess. Predictably I found Part II on the period after 1760 more engaging, in part because this is the period of Jupp's expertise, but also because it is not mine; Part I covering the years of 1688–1760 told me nothing I did not already know. The book is clear, succinct, logically organized, and contains brief summaries at the end of each chapter. In that respect it is highly serviceable as a student text. Yet it is very dry. Jupp's style is to convey information in quite compressed form by enumerating points, almost as if he is dictating notes to students in a class. If helpful to students studying for an exam, it will surely hold much less appeal to the general reader. Moreover, we are surely entitled to ask what sort of educational philosophy underlies this book. The intent appears to be to synthesize an enormous amount of material in order to establish the existing state of our knowledge and then to convey that knowledge in a readily accessible form. My preference is for works that encourage students to think about how to pick their way through historical controversies, to engage critically with the evidence, and to formulate opinions of their own about complex historical phenomena. How does one assign an undergraduate essay on Jupp? What is the aim here – to invite students to discuss, criticize, analyse, or to test to see if they have absorbed correct information?

Perhaps the most disappointing thing is that Jupp opts not to do what his preface had led us to anticipate, namely offer an extended reflection on how his study forces us to rethink the long eighteenth century. There is no proper conclusion to the book; instead we have less than two pages of general concluding remarks affixed to the end of chapter 8. It would have been useful if he had pulled everything together and made a statement about the period as a whole, engaging in a direct way with the interpretative theses of Clark and Brewer. It still remains a puzzle, to this reader at least, why Jupp sees the period 1688–1848 as a whole. What has Jupp gained from spanning the traditional early modern/modern divide? Why go up to 1848? Is he inviting us to re-think traditional periodizations, and more particularly the way we design our courses? Clark's terminal date of 1832 at least has a clear logic.

II

It is customary to end a piece of this nature with some general observations on how the works under review have transformed the field, or at least some broader reflections on their collective impact. It is easier to do that when one is dealing mainly with monographs. What we have here are three general overviews (one of them a coffee table book), one case study (of a foiled plot), and two contextualizations of a particular text – not quite the range needed, perhaps, to make bold statements about the current direction of later Stuart studies. But why let this deter us? Despite the fact that we have very different types of studies here – and of varying quality, to be blunt – between them they do provide intimations of how the field is currently being shaped and where it is likely to go. Speck's book, for example, makes clear that English history for this time period is becoming thoroughly internationalized: this means studying not just the three kingdoms but also the European and Atlantic contexts. We are going to see further significant developments in this regard in the near future. I have already mentioned the forthcoming studies by Pincus and Stanwood, on the Glorious Revolution in its European and Atlantic contexts respectively. One might also note as a sign of this trend recent books by Nick Harding and Andrew Thompson on Britain and Hanover after the Glorious Revolution.Footnote ¹⁴ Jacobitism will continue to intrigue and there is clearly still much to find out. In Szechi's book we at last have the modern study of the Fifteen that the rebellion deserves. But I also think we are going to move beyond the sorts of questions posed by the likes of Cruickshanks and Szechi and start to reconceptualize our approach to Jacobitism. Recent work by Gabriel Glickman seems to be pointing the way in this regard.Footnote ¹⁵ We are also beginning to learn more about Irish Jacobitism, for too long a neglected topic.Footnote ¹⁶ And the Glorious Revolution is clearly still up for grabs. Expect more debate. It was an important landmark event not just in English but also in Scottish and Irish history, and it deserves to be fought over more (historiographically speaking). In terms of effecting long-term, lasting change, the Glorious Revolution arguably had a greater transformative impact than the failed revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. At least let us have that discussion. Whether we will see a successful attempt to rehabilitate James II, I am less sure. The raw material itself is not promising, though I am sure some will be bold enough to try.