For historians of the “Glorious Revolution,” the centenary of William of Orange’s fateful landing in England symbolizes how the events of 1688, and their constitutional outcomes the following year, retained a profound importance in eighteenth-century culture and politics. The magnitude and enthusiasm of public commemoration in 1788–89 has impressed most. Crowds in towns and cities throughout Great Britain and Ireland marked the triumph of liberty over James II’s absolutist vision, while the rival political causes of reform on the one hand and Tory constitutionalism on the other hand laid claim to what each regarded as the principles of the Revolution. The centenary, as Steve Pincus has recently observed, was also the “high-water mark” of public discussion about 1688, before the French Revolution led Edmund Burke definitively to downgrade England’s own Revolution from a radical victory for popular sovereignty to a rather conservative move to “preserve” the nation’s ancient constitution from a Catholic tyrant.Footnote 1
By contrast, the bicentenary of the Glorious Revolution in 1888–89 has been dismissed altogether. Lois Schwoerer, in her examination of how 1688 was remembered 100, 200, and 300 years hence, observed that commemoration efforts in 1888–89 were not half so enthusiastic as had been the case a century earlier. In fact, the Revolution had, 200 years later, been “all but forgotten,” with only a handful of pitiful local events held in its memory. When John Kenyon later surveyed the centennial remembrances, he similarly found less enthusiasm for the Glorious Revolution in 1888 than in 1788. Unlike its eighteenth-century predecessor, the bicentenary did not even warrant a mention in Roland Quinault’s reflections on the “cult of the centenary.” And comparing the bicentenary in 1888 to the 300th anniversary of Oliver Cromwell’s birth in 1899, Blair Worden noted that the former “made little impression.” The implication is that by the time of its bicentenary, the Revolution had faded into irrelevance. Schwoerer’s sources told her that it was a period too constitutionally settled and religiously tolerant, too concerned with social questions, and too wary of reopening old political wounds to bother celebrating the overthrow of a Catholic king and the establishment of a Protestant constitution guaranteeing limited monarchy.Footnote 2
The idea of a nation uninterested in the Revolution is reinforced by a considerable body of literature on Victorian historiography. The overwhelming judgment of historians is that the late nineteenth century was the Glorious Revolution’s graveyard. The year 1688 had occupied a privileged position in the mid-nineteenth century “Whig” narrative of English history, as formulated by Thomas Babington Macaulay. But the later Victorians’ intellectual and ideological reaction against the constitutional fetish of earlier Whiggery, it has been argued, necessarily diminished the historical prominence of William’s rescue of parliamentary institutions from James’s absolutism. Furthermore, the Revolution of 1688 apparently lost its eighteenth-century status as the nation’s great Stuart-era watershed to the Civil War and its surrounding years of crisis and constitutional experimentation. Once personae non gratae, by the late nineteenth century Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans found themselves incorporated into the acceptable body of national history: a staggering change for the monarchical state with its Established Church. These shifts in Victorian attitudes toward the Stuart period have been attributed to a number of developments in Victorian politics, society, and intellectual life, including changes within the historical discipline, the franchise question, the crisis of parliamentary management in the 1880s, the evolution and fragmentation of Liberalism, heightened imperial sentiment, nonconformity’s enhanced status, and the gradual dismantling of the exclusivist Anglican state.Footnote 3
This article revises an overly pessimistic view of the Glorious Revolution bicentenary and in doing so demonstrates that 1688’s relegation from historical significance was neither a straightforward nor by any means completed process by the late 1880s. Public meetings and religious services large and small were held across Great Britain and Ireland to mark the bicentenary, often alongside the tercentenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, another event of tremendous patriotic and religious significance. But the bulk of bicentennial enthusiasm was not, as historians assumed, to be found in stand-alone national or municipal celebrations aimed at the general population. Rather, it was intermingled with the activities of narrow political and religious groups for whom the Revolution retained its relevance. Just as Schwoerer has shown was the case in 1788–89, various groups used the bicentennial opportunity to appropriate the Revolution in rhetorical and emotional support for their causes. Far from withdrawing to make way for the Civil War and Interregnum, the Glorious Revolution in fact permeated public discourse surrounding some of the most prominent political issues of the late 1880s. In the debate over Irish Home Rule, Liberal Unionists and Ulster Protestants embraced what they saw as the constitutional and religious values of the Revolution. More broadly, 1688 acted in the context of the Home Rule controversy as a powerful symbol of Protestant identity and unity. But the Revolution also acquired a special relevance to Protestantism’s internal battles. The bicentenary was a meaningful occasion for critics of “ritualism” in Christian worship, and it fell during a time of acute anxiety about “Romanizing” influences and religious apathy in the Protestant nation. And as English nonconformity continued to negotiate its place in the Anglican state, Congregationalists railing against the principle of denominational schooling celebrated the Revolution for what they saw as its crucial role in the ongoing advance of civil and religious liberty.
Those historians who have previously examined the bicentenary, albeit comparatively cursorily, have bequeathed a distorted evaluation of the Glorious Revolution’s meaning to late Victorian society for several reasons. First, it is misleading to focus on 5 November, the date of William’s landing (and, with “Providential” significance, the foiled Gunpowder Plot of 1605), as in 1888–89 it was no longer the Church of England’s official day of national thanksgiving it had been a century before.Footnote 4 Bicentennial events organized by independent churches and Protestant groups were, in fact, spread across 1888 and 1889, though the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly did appoint 4 and 5 November as the days on which Kirk members should mark the bicentenary.Footnote 5 Second, historians of the bicentenary have confined their research to too small and arbitrary a selection of sources, with too much weight placed on unrepresentative metropolitan publications and too much trust placed in contemporary explanations for a perceived lack of national bicentennial interest. By making use of a much wider range of newspapers and other published sources from across the United Kingdom, and throughout the years 1888 and 1889, the true extent to which the bicentenary was marked, and, crucially, by whom, becomes clear.
Despite the undeniably influential role of The Times and major periodicals such as the Westminster Review in Victorian society, historians have too often fallen into the trap of assuming that the opinions and reports contained in them are somehow representative of British “national” opinion.Footnote 6 Until relatively recently, such publications were the ones most accessible and readily available to many Victorianists, particularly those outside Britain. However, the digitization of a host of national and provincial newspapers, chiefly from England, but also from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, has made it much easier for this reappraisal of the Revolution bicentenary to not only take a truly “four nations” or “three kingdoms” perspective but also to explore the subject at the subnational level of region and locality.Footnote 7 In this sense, the article is perfectly in tune with recent Revolution historiography, particularly Tim Harris’s magisterial account of the Stuart monarchy’s “crisis” of 1685–1720, which both fully incorporates the Irish and Scottish contexts into a traditionally Anglo-centric story and takes account of the “social history of politics” at the local tier.Footnote 8 As one Birmingham Daily Post columnist commented in 1888 when dismissing The Times’ “insinuated comparison” of its own centenary with those of the Armada and the Revolution, the London newspaper had clearly not recognized that it was “not the power it was.”Footnote 9
This more thorough investigation of the bicentenary brings new perspectives to the broader question of Victorian attitudes toward the Stuart period. The research that has done most to shape our understanding of “Victorian” views of the Stuart period has focused specifically on nineteenth-century historians themselves.Footnote 10 This is not, in itself, unadmirable. But the assumption has been too readily made that an identifiable evolution in historical writing during the Victorian period represents the views of “the Victorians.” Although a new appreciation for Cromwell, Puritanism, and the Civil War found its way from Harrison, Gardiner, and others into school textbooks, and the Glorious Revolution certainly did make a scholastic retreat, Victorian historians alone cannot possibly stand for a society encompassing a plurality of often-competing perspectives.Footnote 11
The declining fortunes in the 1880s of Macaulayite Whiggery and its elevated view of the Revolution also seem problematic in light of a revised account of the bicentenary. P. B. M. Blaas’s account of the death of Whig history in this period argued that a Gladstonian Liberalism concerned with Home Rule had little need of the historical narrative that had underpinned unitary government from Westminster, while the increasingly powerful Nonconformist element within the Liberal Party felt more affinity with Cromwell and the Puritans. As Michael Bentley has shown, however, Blaas, like many others, rather overstated the demise of a historiographical tradition that continued to exist in parallel with its “modernist” rival.Footnote 12 As the bicentenary illustrates, the Revolution and the Macaulayite narrative of “progress” still had a profound attraction for anti-Gladstonian Liberals opposed to Irish self-government. Furthermore, while Home Rule gained the support of the majority of Nonconformists, it was not the only policy debate at the time.Footnote 13 The fierce wranglings over education during the bicentennial period demonstrate quite clearly that the Revolution continued to hold tremendous significance for Congregationalists.
Previous judgments on the meaning of the Glorious Revolution to the late Victorian period have been based on the assumption that 1688 was chiefly regarded as an event in constitutional history, whereas the bicentenary demonstrates that the Revolution’s primary significance in the late 1880s was arguably religious and, more specifically, Protestant. This was a late Victorian society very different from that described by Schwoerer: more bitterly sectarian and far more anti-Catholic.Footnote 14 But even for those historians who have appreciated how nineteenth-century religiosity and the history of the Stuart period intersected, it has been Cromwell and the Puritans who are recognized as the beneficiaries of Victorian piety and Nonconformity’s acceptance into the mainstream of society.Footnote 15 The bicentenary in 1888–89 reveals the limits of this interpretation. Congregationalists, in particular, inherited from the post-Revolution era the “Opposition Whig” perception of 1688 as a radical, transformative event, rather than the “Establishment Whig” position built upon by Burke and Macaulay, which was, by the late nineteenth century, much diminished in stature.Footnote 16 The Revolution symbolized their cause in the education question, the political issue that, by the late nineteenth century, arguably most reminded Nonconformists of their enduring status as outsiders. The bicentenary was thus an opportunity to celebrate the contribution of Dissent to the national story, not because Nonconformists felt like an integral part of the nation, as the historiography on Cromwellism emphasizes, but rather because, in a number of important ways, they did not.
Countless articles and opinion pieces published in newspapers and periodicals during 1888–89 await the historian, dismissing the “jingle of numbers” of centennial years, or observing the Englishman’s lack of interest in marking the bicentenary of the Glorious Revolution, and offering explanations as to why.Footnote 17 If one is to take these perceptions of indifference at face value, there is no better confirmation to be found than in the great public history event of the bicentenary period. For it was not a commemorative occasion to mark the Revolution, but rather a royally sponsored exhibition on the Stuarts in London, co-organized by as well-known a Tory Jacobite as the British Museum’s Henry Jenner.Footnote 18 Schwoerer took it as a strong indication that the principles of the Revolution now mattered so little to anyone that the very seventeenth-century kings whom Parliament had fought and executed, or replaced with a foreign prince, were now openly celebrated under Her Majesty’s auspices.Footnote 19
But the relative warmth shown to the Stuarts and their sympathizers by the “Establishment” and a handful of national newspaper editors did not emanate from every portion of British society.Footnote 20 The Liberal Pall Mall Gazette saw the Stuart exhibition and the government’s declared intention to disperse “orderly public meetings” of the National League in Ireland as related topics. “The Stuart Exhibition is an interesting and pathetic memorial of a lost cause,” the newspaper suggested; “lost because the Stuarts tried to govern England as the Unionists are trying to govern Ireland.”Footnote 21 In the most contentious and emotive political debate of the late 1880s, Stuart history was of profound importance. For some engaged in that debate, the Revolution of 1688 still mattered a great deal.
The bicentenary did at least have the potential to be mildly soothing in the controversy over Irish autonomy, which had certainly not abated since the Liberal split and the defeat of the Government of Ireland Bill in 1886. Liberal unity figured as one of the key themes of discussion at the City Liberal Club dinner in January 1888, attended by both Home Rulers and Unionists, at which a speech was delivered tracing the growth of Liberalism since the Revolution.Footnote 22 But the bicentenary did not generally encourage political enemies, as the Glasgow Herald vainly hoped, to “bury the hatchet” as Whig and Tory had done in 1688; nor, as Schwoerer has suggested, did any lack of bicentennial celebrations reflect an unwillingness to stir up the troubles of 1886 once more.Footnote 23 Rather, the 200th anniversary of the Glorious Revolution heightened the historical meaning of an ongoing and very bitter dispute. Only a few Home Rulers, including the Indian nationalist and future first Asian MP, Dadabhoi Naoroji, sought to make rhetorical use of a radical interpretation of 1688–89 in the service of Irish autonomy.Footnote 24 But the Revolution did act as a potent symbol for the cause of Unionism—and Protestantism—in Great Britain and Ireland.
For Unionists, the definitive interpretation of the Revolution and its consequences was that bequeathed by Macaulay. Writing against the backdrop of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, his central message was that England’s mild, bloodless “preserving revolution” in the late seventeenth century had prevented a later, much bloodier, and more radical “destroying revolution.” In 1688 the country’s praiseworthy political institutions had been defended from James’s tyranny, ensuring for its people the rule of law, security of property, and internal peace.Footnote 25 The influence of Macaulay’s interpretation was palpable during the bicentenary. “It was a bloodless Revolution,” claimed Lord Edward Cavendish MP at the public commemorative event held in Derbyshire. “Other countries had had revolutions, but they had been characterised by crimes … it was with scarcely the loss of a single life that English liberty was secured.”Footnote 26 Yet in a number of ways, Cavendish’s fellow Liberal Unionists sought to portray the policy of Irish Home Rule as a contradiction, even a betrayal, of the values represented by the Whig interpretation of 1688.
First, in Macaulayite history, “revolution” in England’s case meant something rather conservative and orderly: something characteristically English.Footnote 27 Liberal Unionists could appeal to Whig history and take the opportunity presented by the bicentenary to suggest that Home Rule would be “revolutionary” in its “destructive,” un-English sense. As Lord Hartington discussed with his fellow Unionists in Huddersfield, “No Whig who glories in the Revolution of 1688 can affect to consider and regard the term ‘revolution’ as in itself a reproach. But I say the changes, the constitutional changes, which Mr. Gladstone is asking us to make in the government of Ireland are equal in magnitude and importance to the changes which have been effected in other countries by the process of violent revolution.”Footnote 28
This was a purposeful, bicentennial deployment of the language of “revolution” in relation to Home Rule, intended to convey the terrible importance of Gladstone’s policy and its antagonism toward 1688’s “preserving” beneficence. Hartington described Home Rule as “the greatest problem of political governance which the people of this country have had to decide for the last 200 years, since the Revolution of 1688.”Footnote 29 The duke of Argyll, who regarded Irish autonomy as a dangerous precedent for his native Scotland, moved a vote of confidence against the government’s Irish policy in March 1888 with the justification that “we are in a crisis greater than any which has occurred since the Revolution of 1688”: rather than the succession to the Crown being in question, it was the “composition of our Parliament.”Footnote 30 Indeed, the Revolution was central to his story of Scotland’s membership of the Union: the natural outcome of the Scots’ “horror” at a Catholic Stuart succeeding Queen Anne.Footnote 31
Second, the prospect of a restored parliament in Ireland seemed to depart from the Whig narrative of progress: a retrogressive step away from sound government at Westminster. The Glasgow Herald commented that “amen will be the response” to Macaulay’s Providential view of English history, but the newspaper also warned that “it would be foolish to lay the flattering unction to our souls that we are absolutely out of the wood.” The “Plan of Campaign,” the expected land reforms under an Irish parliament, and American financing for the Irish nationalist cause all seemed like a repetition of the Stuart king’s reign. Macaulay had not lived to see the “latest developments of anarchic Gladstonism—rebellion against ‘the authority of law,’ disregard for ‘the security of property,’ and a new conspiracy against liberty and good government in these islands, subsidised, as James II was, by foreign money.”Footnote 32 In many Unionist arguments, religion and rights were intimately related. Home Rule would mean the abandonment of a critical pillar of civilization: security for private, namely, Protestant, property. The Belfast News-Letter feared ignorance of the Revolution’s warnings “against repeating the experiment of an Irish Popish Parliament” whose “only work was the confiscation of property of inoffensive Protestants.”Footnote 33 The bicentennial period thus saw Unionists thread the themes of Jacobite popery and absolutism into their critique of Home Rule.
In Ireland itself, the bicentenary naturally highlighted the substantive politico-sectarian divisions over Home Rule. The Liberal Unionists who marked the bicentenary and Armada tercentenary with a meeting at Roscrea, County Tipperary, were, according to the Nation, “fanatics who … seasoned their Williamite fetishism with Spanish Armada sauce.”Footnote 34 Unsurprisingly, of course, it was in Ulster that the Revolution was most widely and explicitly linked to the Unionist cause and most vigorously employed as a symbol of a united Protestant struggle against Rome.Footnote 35 Orange lodges organized united Protestant services to mark both the Armada and the Revolution, and the double centenary naturally deepened the emotional meaning of the regular annual Orange celebrations in 1888: the commemoration of William’s victory in the Battle of the Boyne on 12 July and of the relief of Derry in August. For Ulster Protestants, 1888 and 1889 were also bicentennial years for the “Shutting of the Gates” at Derry in 1688 and for the city’s relief the following year: the defining events for Ulster’s Protestant “imperial patriotism” throughout the Home Rule controversy.Footnote 36
The aim behind the rhetoric of Ulster’s loyalist Protestant clergy was to emphasize that Home Rule was no less serious a matter for Protestantism than Spanish invasion or Jacobite absolutism. At Dundrod, near Belfast, the Reverend Nicholas Foster of the Church of Ireland delivered an impassioned address on the Land League: “There was a great crisis upon them, which would affect not only their liberty and freedom, but also their spiritual liberties. The open Bible and their Protestantism were in jeopardy. That year was the bicentenary of the glorious Revolution, the tercentenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Each was a crisis in the career of Protestantism; neither crisis, however, was more grave, nor either year more critical than the year 1888.”Footnote 37
With the real prospect of becoming a religious minority under a devolved Dublin administration, Ulster Protestants sought to affirm their place in the British nation through the memory of the Revolution. Through the Armada’s defeat and the Glorious Revolution, Orangemen argued, “the civil and religious liberty of British subjects was secured.”Footnote 38 The Grandmaster of Ireland, the earl of Erne, speaking at an Orange meeting at Carrickfergus, where William had landed, portrayed the Revolution as a victory for the Protestant faith “which has been the mainspring of the greatness and prosperity of this mighty Empire.”Footnote 39 A particularly powerful theme, which drenched the sermons given in Ulster around 5 November, was that England’s Protestant liberty and consequent material greatness had been won on the battlefields of Ireland and bought with the blood of Ulster Protestants: a debt that, by implication, morally bound the British people to resist Gladstone. Claiming that the “heroic exploits at Enniskillen and Derry” had saved England from Romanism was as clear a rejection of “bloodless” revolution as that now offered by its recent revisionists (though Macaulay, of course, had fully appreciated the story of Protestant heroism at Derry).Footnote 40 The message was that it would be the Protestants of Ulster who would once more defend England’s liberties from the papist threat. “All the battles for the maintenance of the Protestant religion and the liberty of England had been fought on Irish ground. … They would maintain the liberty and the religion handed over to them at that time.”Footnote 41
For Protestant groups in Belfast, the bicentenary was not only a celebration of the political and religious benefits of the Union but also an expression of a surgent civic pride.Footnote 42 The year 1888 was, coincidentally, when Belfast acquired official city status: the first such grant, hesitantly made, on the basis of “importance” rather than the situation of an Anglican bishopric.Footnote 43 Sectarianism and civic identity intermingled. The city’s own favorable position was linked to William’s victory in Ireland, implying that Catholic rule was unconducive to economic progress. As the Reverend Foster told Orangemen, Belfast “owed its present prosperous condition to the glorious Revolution as Belfast was the child of that revolution.” “What would Belfast have been if James II had been victorious,” he asked a Protestant Boys audience, “or where would have been their industries if King William had been defeated and King James victorious?”Footnote 44
The stridently Protestant character of Ulster Unionism, with its recently proven capacity to result in violence, seemed somewhat alien to many editors and writers across the North Channel and Irish Sea. Where previous historians of the bicentenary have identified a late Victorian religious tolerance that found celebration of 1688’s anti-Catholic dimensions less acceptable than in the past, it was against Ulster Unionism that this liberal cosmopolitan Britishness was defined in periodicals and newspaper editorials. In this way, the bicentenary was also capable of driving a cultural wedge between Ulster Unionists and their more moderate, though no less committed, political allies in Great Britain. The Unionist Glasgow Herald saw some likelihood that bicentenary commemorations in England, unlike the Armada tercentenary and its celebration of heroic Englishmen, would be “marred by exhibitions of partisanship, in its worst and in its most archaic form.” But the newspaper considered it unlikely that those commemorations would result in sectarian violence of the Belfast variety, which testified to “what strange uses the name of William of ‘Orange’ has been put in one portion of the United Kingdom.” For the Herald, as for historians of the bicentenary and Victorian historiography, the “Whig Revolution of 1688” was only of constitutional significance. Had the constitutional changes that followed in its wake not “surely swallowed up and blotted out much of its religious meaning?”Footnote 45
Orangeism in Ulster ensured this was phrased as a question, not an unequivocal statement. But while a violent bicentenary was less likely in British cities than in Belfast or Derry, by no means all British people found the Revolution devoid of religious significance. The explicitly anti-Catholic Protestant Alliance announced in 1887 that it was establishing a committee to arrange a bicentennial celebration, which would also commemorate the Armada tercentenary, in order to mark the “Accession of the Protestant Dynasty” and deliverance from “Romish power.”Footnote 46 The following year, this London-based “Commemoration Council” passed a resolution distinguishing its own celebration of the Protestant constitution and “Providential deliverance of the country from despotic rule and from Romish superstition” from the event then being organized by the Catholic duke of Norfolk’s Plymouth Committee to mark the Armada’s defeat. As the Alliance’s honorary secretary, A. H. Guinness (“a stout and valiant champion of the cause of bigotry,” according to the Tablet), scathingly observed in the London press, the latter was to take place under Norfolk’s own conditions “that politics and religion are to be ignored.” However, the Alliance’s plans for the double celebration fizzled out after some fiercely Protestant meetings in London at the end of May 1888, largely due to begrudging recognition of public “indifference” to the Romanist danger.Footnote 47
For all its Protestant triumphalism, the repulsion of Catholic Spain’s Armada could easily be designated as a national victory against a foreign invader. That was the thrust behind local tercentennial plans in Plymouth and Devon, and Norfolk was not alone among educated English Catholics in embracing the Armada tercentenary as a national event.Footnote 48 But the Revolution, by contrast, was inherently sectarian, an obvious magnet for anti-Catholic sentiment, and, when considered in its religious dimensions, it was a continuing offense to members of the Catholic Church. A foreigner had actually been invited as a preferable replacement for a legitimate Catholic king; Catholics were barred from the royal succession and left subject to highly discriminatory laws; and “King Billy” had led a Protestant army violently to subdue Catholic Ireland. Even Protestant speakers who observed that English Catholics were no longer a threat and regarded their emancipation as “progressive,” such as the canon of Canterbury, W. H. Fremantle, explicitly tied together James’ absolutism and his faith.Footnote 49
It was certainly possible to portray 1688 as a great watershed for parliamentary sovereignty and popular rights, rather than as the victory of divinely favored Protestantism over the evils of popery.Footnote 50 The public celebration in Chesterfield and Whittington, the birthplace of the Revolution plot itself, conformed to Schwoerer’s interpretation of a society ambivalent about the religious squabbles of the seventeenth century. There, public speakers, including the mayor of Whittington, alluded to the Revolution’s bestowal of a strong constitution, impartial justice, freedom of the press, and religious liberty. Indeed, the mayor emphasized that “he was sure they were all, whether Catholics or Protestants, animated by the desire of upholding civil and religious liberty.”Footnote 51
But the fury of Ireland’s sectarian divisions and the Home Rule debate could hardly permit such pluralistic attitudes throughout Victorian society as a whole. Ireland was, for some, a demonstration of the idiocy of sectarianism, but for many Unionists the point was that the United Kingdom’s cherished “civil and religious liberty” depended upon the explicitly Protestant English constitution forged in 1689 (despite the fact that elite English Catholics, including Norfolk, could be avowedly Unionist).Footnote 52 Beseeching the voters of West Carmarthenshire to “regain the seat for Constitutionalism,” Cardiff’s Tory-leaning Western Mail emphasized that the constituency’s Protestants would vote Unionist and thus “like their brothers in the faith in Ireland, uphold the religious principles of the Reformation and the political principles of the Revolution of 1688.”Footnote 53 The interdependency of the 1689 constitution’s political and religious principles was clear to Liberal Unionists, who tended to equate Protestantism with modernity and individualism.Footnote 54 The partnership of Protestantism and political liberty was a standard patriotic and anti-Catholic trope in the British Isles, particularly in Ulster, where it was rooted in an anti-authoritarian Presbyterian tradition.Footnote 55 However, it had an added resonance in the late 1880s, as Leo XIII continued Pius IX’s critique of liberalism, articulating a Catholic definition of liberty in the encyclicals Immortale Dei (1885) and Libertas Praestantissimum (1888).Footnote 56 Many Unionists stressed the intrinsically Protestant nature of the constitution forged in the wake of James’s exit. Sir Arthur Blackwood, the Post Office secretary who embraced Reformed Christianity with a convert’s zeal, spoke at a bicentennial celebration in Oxford, that vital city in the Stuart saga. A fiercely committed opponent of “Rome Rule,” he dwelled upon James’s Catholicism and the consequent importance of 1688 to a nation with a divine purpose. “Their forefathers had made the machinery of the Constitution exclusively Protestant, and with an open Bible, a free Parliament, and the Protestant faith England had for 200 years been the leader of Constitutional freedom to the whole world, and had carried the Gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth.”Footnote 57
The 200th anniversary of the Glorious Revolution therefore serves as a reminder that Ulster Protestants were not simply an isolated and marginal community within the Union; the Orange cause was intertwined with Westminster politics and explicit anti-Catholicism, though varying in shades of militancy, was to be found throughout UK society. Ironically, perhaps, it required the insight of a Gladstonian Home Ruler to appreciate the Glorious Revolution’s enduring religious significance. As John Morley responded to Goschen’s inference that the controversies of 1688, unlike those of the French Revolution then experiencing its own centenary, were dead and buried, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s remarks would be “received with surprise by anybody who has been Chief Secretary for Ireland on the 12th of July [as Morley had]. If he thinks that those differences of opinion which existed in 1688 are not still an active force in English politics he is very much mistaken.”Footnote 58 Orangeism, of course, linked its adherents in Ulster with Scottish Unionists, although it was recognized that, because of the protracted violence associated with William’s arrival, 1688 held a stronger emotional hold in Ireland than across the water.Footnote 59 But the bicentenary also boldly underlines the extent to which Ulster and Liverpool formed a sectarian singularity under the shadow of Home Rule.Footnote 60 The thoroughly Orange MP for South Belfast, William Johnston, attended a demonstration in Liverpool to mark the anniversaries of 1588 and 1688, at which he spoke on the government’s lack of interest in mandating a day of national thanksgiving. That the Liverpool Mercury’s London correspondent had earlier commented that Johnston was “surely hardly wise, in democratic days, when he proposes to celebrate a revolution” is highly instructive about the bicentenary. Many British journalists and editors saw the Revolution as a purely constitutional issue, when for men like Johnston, whose politics were defiantly Protestant, its significance was overwhelmingly religious. The Liverpool event itself was a vocal expression of the city’s strongest sentiments of Protestant unity. The Reverend Canon Woodward, an Evangelical Anglican, proclaimed that the meeting was “for the purpose of extending the language of brotherly love to all their Presbyterian and Nonconformist brethren.”Footnote 61
This was a tumultuous time in Liverpool. The city witnessed thirty riots between 1886 and 1889, as working-class Orangemen and Catholics took the Home Rule question to the streets. The bicentenary years are also notable for the impact of sectarian allegiance on local politics.Footnote 62 Yet the Liverpool demonstration does reveal how English anti-Catholicism could be hedged with caveats to legitimize itself in a national culture of moderation. Woodward went on to reassure that such meetings were also intended to inform “their Roman Catholic brethren that they had not a particle of bitterness against them—that while they detested their system, and believed it to be utterly corrupt and diabolical, they loved the votaries of that system as their fellow men.” Similarly, the Reverend R. H. Lundie, a Presbyterian, attacked the pope but emphasized the common beliefs shared by Protestants and Catholics. Nevertheless, the message proclaimed in Liverpool that day was clear, and it would have made uncomfortable listening for any Catholic. The Reverend Canon Taylor, another Evangelical Anglican of Irish birth, offered a special bicentennial resolution thanking God for 1688 and its bequest of “civil and religious liberty.” But it also warned that the “dangers were not yet quite over, the enemies of freedom were not quite dead.” The danger in question was “organised sacerdotalism,” and sanctuary lay in “Protestant union.” Protestants should “stand shoulder to shoulder” and, as at Derry, defend “British liberty” with the words “No surrender.”Footnote 63
For some, Protestant unity had a very practical meaning. By another fortuitous coincidence, 1888 was the year of the Lambeth Conference, which defined the Anglican Communion’s conditions for reunion with other churches.Footnote 64 Its influence can be felt in Fremantle’s bicentennial sermons delivered at Canterbury Cathedral.Footnote 65 Church reunion was also a cause particularly close to the heart of Charles Wordsworth, bishop of St. Andrew’s, Dunkeld, and Dunblane, who took the opportunity presented by Lambeth to lay out his fullest vision for Episcopal and Presbyterian rapprochement in Scotland. As he afterward informed his synod, it would have been “an unspeakable blessing if … the bi-centenary of the Revolution of 1688” had witnessed the “first step towards … reconciliation.”Footnote 66
However, in the vast majority of cases, bicentennial allusions to Protestant unity did not reflect aspirations for the amalgamation of the various and theologically irreconcilable arms of Protestantism in the British Isles. In the case of Anglicans and Nonconformists, they shared a sentiment described by Matthew Grimley in relation to interwar notions of English national character: “a sense of a common English Protestantism … that did not erase denominational distinctions, but, rather, was superimposed upon them.” But whereas this later Protestant Englishness no longer possessed or required a Catholic “Other” against which to define itself, in 1888–89 Catholicism still functioned effectively as the necessary opposite for Protestant identity throughout the British Isles.Footnote 67 For the sharply anti-Catholic members of the Protestant Reformation Society, the main lesson of 1688 was that “Protestants must stick together.”Footnote 68
The prominence and passion of Evangelical Anglicans at Liverpool, and their fraternal outreach to Nonconformists in the cause of Protestant unity, is striking. For as they spoke the bicentennial language of Protestant unity, Evangelical Anglicans were also turning against those members of the Church of England who seemed, to them, anything but Protestant.Footnote 69 The Revolution bicentenary demonstrates how Tractarianism left an enduring legacy of disharmony within the established church and English Protestantism in general.Footnote 70 The big tent of Anglicanism provided the arena for sacramental and liturgical disputes in the late nineteenth century no less passionate (if far less fatal) than those of the seventeenth century. Year 1888 fell during a time when “ritualist” practices of the kind associated with Catholic worship, including the use of candles, vestments, and incense, were spreading with phenomenal vigor. The occasion of the Armada tercentenary and the Revolution bicentenary thus symbolized for Evangelicals the continuing struggle of the “true” religion against Romish “superstition,” whether practiced by Roman Catholics themselves or by Anglican “ritualists.”Footnote 71 At the annual meeting of the Bristol Protestant League in January 1888, there was hope that the anniversary of William’s landing and the Armada’s defeat would bring Protestants together in celebration. But it was also an occasion to chastize the “Romanising confederacy known as the English Church Union” for defending such “Popish doctrines” as prayers for the dead and auricular confession and an opportunity to resolve in favor of Protestant unity “in view of the progress recently made by Popery, Ritualism, and Rationalism.” The Reverend J. Ormiston of the Reformed Episcopal Church of England preached that adherence to the Protestant constitution and the “principles of the great and glorious revolution of 1688” would mean “buckl[ing] on their armour” to face the “traitors in the Church.”Footnote 72 It comes as no surprise that the most prominent Anglican convert to Rome at the time, Cardinal Manning, was the target of several of the special commemorative sermons held under the auspices of the Protestant Reformation Society.Footnote 73
The bicentenary also happened to fall during the legal controversy surrounding the bishop of Lincoln, Edward King. The anti-Tractarian group the Church Association had accused King of transgressing the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 through his ritualistic discharge of Holy Communion.Footnote 74 Although his trial in an archiepiscopal court did not take place until 1890, proceedings began in January 1888 and formed the immediate context for a bicentennial “Protestant commemoration meeting” held at Derby in February 1889, at which the main speakers were Evangelical Anglicans. Speaking on the subject of King’s prosecution, the Reverend C. H. Wainwright of Blackpool called for support for all those maintaining the true faith, with the bicentenary serving as a reminder of the enduring need to fend off the Catholic danger. Alderman H. H. Bemrose informed the audience that the Armada and the Revolution were “the crowning events of two epochs,” both showing the “subtle influence of Rome” in English history, which was “used to cripple, and eventually extinguish liberty.” Protestants, Wainwright advised—in stark contrast to the ecumenical outreach of the ministers at the Liverpool meeting—should not cooperate with Catholics in any field, including temperance or philanthropy.Footnote 75 Elsewhere, Wainwright mourned the loss of the traditional 5 November thanksgiving service from the Prayer Book, the unfortunate result of “pander[ing] to Romanism.”Footnote 76
The Romanization of the established church was no less apparent or worrying to some Nonconformist groups, and no less needful, in their minds, of revolutionary fervor to counteract it.Footnote 77 The chairman of the Congregational Union, the Reverend Robert Bruce, introduced its published collection of bicentennial lectures with a warning against latitudinarianism.Footnote 78 Attendees at the annual meeting of the General Body of Protestant Dissenting Ministers of the Three Denominations (Presbyterian, Independent, and Baptist) resolved to commemorate the “deliverances vouchsafed by God from perils to Protestantism” in 1588 and 1688, a necessary move “in view of the fact that there is working in the country, in connection especially with the Ritualistic party in the Church of England, a subtle influence luring towards Romanism.”Footnote 79 The Cheshire Congregational Union’s resolution in thanksgiving for the “deliverance of this country from the dominion of papal tyranny” in 1588 and 1688 encompassed a pledge to “resist strongly all reactionary tendencies that would favour the revival of priestly power in any shape or form.” The Nonconformist struggle with the perceived popery in the established church was, in this case, distinctly local, arising from a feeling among the Congregationalists of Chester that the city’s bishop and dean had frozen them out of inter-Protestant relations and civic activism.Footnote 80
In Protestant circles throughout Great Britain, Anglo-Catholicism equated to the sly reconquista of England, and the spirit of 1688 was naturally summoned to enhance the rhetoric of indignation. One Welshman’s bicentennial reflections lamented the procession of “Puseyites, High Churchmen, [and] Jesuits” bringing about the country’s “return to monkdom, Popedom, and slavery.”Footnote 81 Attacks on ritualism also marked the fierce anti-Catholic reaction in Scotland prompted by Home Rule.Footnote 82 During a conference in Edinburgh to plan the commemoration of the Armada and the Revolution, the eminent Free Churchman, the Reverend James Wylie, noted the “ominous Romanising influences in the Church of England.”Footnote 83 Creeping Romanism was also perceived as no less of a threat to the Kirk itself.Footnote 84 A resolution passed at a commemorative meeting in Fife, reportedly attended by “between 6,000 and 7,000 people,” thanked God for “delivering us from the mummeries, superstitions, idolatries, blasphemies, and bloody cruelty of the Romish Antichrist” before calling on the General Assembly to remove the “Popish idols and Popish symbols and service-book” from St. Giles’ Cathedral and to purge the Scottish hymnal of “its Popery and superstition.”Footnote 85 At a much smaller bicentenary service in Dundee, ministers similarly denounced attempts to “introduce liturgies into the Church of Scotland.”Footnote 86
Anti-Catholic attitudes toward Home Rule and Anglican ritualism fed, and were fed by, a suspicion of growing papal influence in Britain. The policies of the High-Church Liberal leader seemed to confirm this suspicion. When the Reverend Johnston of Glasgow read to his congregation the General Assembly’s special bicentennial message, he “took occasion, in the course of his remarks, to observe that Mr. Gladstone was and had been a tool in the hands of Romanism”: a statement frank enough for one woman in the congregation to stand up and decry the politicization of the pulpit.Footnote 87 Even a Home Ruler like the famed mustard manufacturer J. J. Colman alluded at the Congregational Union’s bicentennial celebration to the dark forces at work in Westminster and the “possibility of the Roman Catholic Church exerting more influence in the country at the present moment than at other times.”Footnote 88
For members of the militant, and mainly Anglican, Protestant Reformation Society, the problem was not just Gladstone; the traitors had sat in both Liberal and Tory governments. At the society’s public meeting held in Hastings to mark the double centenary, even Conservatives, such as the Reverend F. Whitfield, felt compelled to attack the Salisbury administration. The Reverend George Clements spoke on the “Accession of the Protestant Dynasty and Its Blessings” and stressed that the gathering was not about partisan politics. “It was a religious meeting, and not for the purpose of praising one political party or the other. Each in their turn had yielded to the Papacy.” Reverend Clements even went so far as to suggest, to great applause, that “if every Roman Catholic member was turned out of the House of Commons that night it would be infinitely better for England. … What right had Roman Catholics, who were under the Pope as their ruler, to be making laws for a Protestant country?”Footnote 89
Home Rule, public funds for Catholic schools, and the prospect of a state-endowed Catholic university in Ireland all seemed to highlight this papal influence at the heart of government, but it seemed to be no more visible than in the improved diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and the Vatican.Footnote 90 The year 1887—the year of both a royal and a papal jubilee—had witnessed the development of a friendly discourse between the Court and the Vatican, capped by the (Unionist) duke of Norfolk visiting Leo XIII to deliver the queen’s personal congratulations. There was therefore some speculation in the year proceeding that full diplomatic relations would be restored, following the precedent of Protestant Germany. The wisdom associated with such a move, harking back to mid-century policy, was that the papacy could provide considerable assistance in governing Ireland and other Catholic subjects across the Empire. As it transpired, formal ties were not to be reestablished until 1914 and even then with the appointment of a British envoy rather than a full ambassador.Footnote 91 Yet the minor diplomatic developments of 1887 were enough to incite apoplexy among die-hard anti-Catholics. In the year of the bicentenary of the Glorious Revolution, the idea of the nation previously saved from popery by the Protestant hero of Orange now engaging in friendly relations with the Whore of Babylon herself seemed almost too much to bear. Ormiston warned the Bristol Protestant League not just about “traitors in the Church” but also about traitors in the State,” expressing his horror that the “accredited representative of the Crown” had recently visited the Vatican and “prostrated himself three times at the foot of the Pope.”Footnote 92 The issue also featured in the series of virulently antipapal commemorative sermons and meetings organized by the Protestant Reformation Society in Hastings—in anti-Catholic rhetoric, of course, the site of free Anglo-Saxondom’s original heroic stand against Romanist oppressors.Footnote 93
In Scotland, the mightily attended Fife meeting was the apogee of bicentennial anti-Catholicism. While a number of Scottish ministers were prepared to reject the alarmist prognostications about Rome’s rising power, the majority of their colleagues espoused them wholeheartedly. At the Commemoration Convention held in Edinburgh to mark the double centenary, the honorary secretary of the Scottish Protestant Alliance embarked on a long rant about the reestablishment of papal influence in Britain.Footnote 94 The resolution passed at the Fife meeting demanded that “our Queen and rulers … shall not enter into diplomatic relations with the Pope of Rome.”Footnote 95 Individual presbyteries also voiced their objections to the resumption of diplomacy, making full use of the backdrop of 1888, a year “suggestive of great historical deliverances wrought by God on behalf of our nation from the menaces and miseries of Popish tyranny.”Footnote 96
Bicentennial antipapalism was therefore tightly connected with political, ecclesiastical, and diplomatic developments, but it was also related to wider anxieties about the state of Protestantism, and Christianity itself, in modern Britain. The Protestant Alliance’s failed attempt to organize a proudly religious double commemoration brought together English and Scottish Protestants at the London meetings in May 1888, at which A. H. Guinness observed that the impetus behind celebrating the Armada as an event of religious significance had derived from Scotland rather than its southern neighbor, which had “sunk into a state of dreadful apathy.”Footnote 97 Yet even in Scotland, Wylie bemoaned the public’s inattention to “the question of maintaining Protestant supremacy,” and to a certain extent the largely localized Protestant bluster over the bicentenary was thus a response to the absence of an official national celebration.Footnote 98 Protestant ministers in both England and Scotland thus sought to use remembrance of the Revolution as a spiritual stimulus and a call to arms to educate the young “in the evils of Romanism.”Footnote 99
As religious “Independents” in England saw it, the Revolution was the pivotal moment not only in their own communal history but also in the nation’s. It also served as a powerful symbol for Nonconformity’s most cherished political causes. Victorian Dissent inherited the same interpretation of the Revolution espoused by the “Opposition Whigs” of the early eighteenth century: that 1688 had not merely been a fleeting reassertion of ancient principles, as the Walpolian “Establishment Whig” position put it, but rather the dawn of a new era of political and religious liberty and of a continuous process of social transformation.Footnote 100 The Revolution arose from an alliance of Dissenters and Anglicans against Stuart Catholicism, with full toleration as the outcome for Dissent through the Toleration Act of 1689: the “Magna Charta of Nonconformity.”Footnote 101 However, by the nineteenth century, Nonconformists’ continuing status as second-class citizens in key ways chafed against the reality of their numbers and their contribution to British society. Religious liberty thus constituted the central idea of Dissenting political thought. Opposition to the state’s involvement in religion through the established church underpinned the Nonconformist vision for the most prominent area of chapel politics: education.Footnote 102
The bicentenary happened to fall at a time when the “Nonconformist conscience” was focused upon the findings of the Royal Commission on the Working of the Elementary Education Acts—better known as the Cross Commission—published in 1888. A Conservative government had appointed the commissioners three years previously with the aim of securing legitimacy for increasing financial support for church schools. The majority opinion duly reflected Anglican and Catholic interests, recommending that revenues obtained from the local rates should not only fund the nondenominational board schools established in 1870 but also be shared with the schools of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. The minority report, however, took the Nonconformist counterposition, opposing the rates’ use for denominational schooling. For Nonconformists, if publicly funded schools were to exist in accordance with the principles of religious liberty, they had to be nondenominational. They had no wish for their rates to subsidize the teaching of popish superstition and dogma either by Catholics or Anglicans and no desire for children to receive it. True religious liberty, in the Nonconformist view, meant the separation of all faiths from the state; special treatment for church schools amounted to an egregious contradiction of that principle. The post-1886 alliance of Conservatives and Liberal Unionists prevented the former from moving ahead with the majority report’s recommendations. However, the Cross Commission prompted a rekindling of Nonconformist protest over the schools question, largely dormant since the mid-1870s, with the National Education Association formed in late November 1888 to oppose rate support for denominational schools unless they came under democratic control.Footnote 103
It was within this atmosphere of controversy that Congregationalist ministers and politicians in particular, in their speeches, lectures, events, and publications commemorating 1688, articulated what they regarded as the central theme of the Revolution: its critical contribution to the progressive expansion of liberty, particularly religious liberty.Footnote 104 At the Sheffield Congregational Union’s meeting to celebrate the bicentenary and the grant of toleration to Dissenters, the Reverend J. H. Hollowell, chairman of the Nottingham School Board, posited that 1688 had contained “the germ and the possibility” of the proceeding growth in civil and religious liberty.Footnote 105 But that growth and development had not occurred naturally or easily. Rather, ran the Nonconformist narrative, it had resulted from a persistent “struggle” that had not as yet ended. The education question merely represented its latest stage. The Reverend K. C. Anderson of Bradford addressed his fellow Congregationalists at Sheffield on “the struggle that had been going on through the ages for individual freedom and personal liberty” and charted freedom’s “painful and slow” progress since Saxon times. The Gladstonian Liberal MP, Henry Joseph Wilson, then followed him in calling for the work of the Revolution to continue, before chastizing those Cross Commission members who “wanted to stuff their catechisms and formularies down the throats of children.”Footnote 106
The fight had, of course, evolved. A bid for mere “toleration” from the Anglican majority in 1688 had become, 200 years later, a struggle for “equality,” or as the Reverend Dr. Andrew Fairbairn, soon to be founding principal of Mansfield College, put it, “perfect religious liberty.”Footnote 107 But the Revolution still served as an emotive reminder about how much was at stake in the education question. Addressing the meeting of the Congregational Union, its chairman, Robert Bruce, argued that the proposals of the Commission—packed, as he described it, with vested ecclesiastical interests—would “buttress” both the Established Church and Roman Catholicism while helping to “stamp out nonconformity in many rural districts.” The appeal to the values of 1688 was both explicit and impassioned:
In vain do we celebrate the bicentenary of the glorious Revolution, if, after 200 years of much suffering yet of great progress, we are to prove so recreant to the principles of civil and religious freedom as to allow the children of the working classes, belonging largely to our Nonconformist churches and attending our Sunday schools, to be driven like sheep, by State-paid officers, into schools which are called national and voluntary, but are really Church schools, with no choice or alternative, in 10,000 parishes, and with no efficient protection save a delusive conscience clause against having daily to learn and repeat doctrines they do not believe, or suffer socially if not pecuniarily for contumacy in refusing so to do?Footnote 108
The “struggle” was ubiquitous in everything that Congregationalists wrote or said in connection with the bicentenary. It was central to the Congregational Union’s published collection of (rather long-winded) bicentennial lectures, produced by such Nonconformist luminaries as Fairbairn, James Guinness Rogers, and John Carvell Williams.Footnote 109 Congregationalist ministers understood the bicentenary’s imperative as being to instruct a new generation on the meaning of 1688. For its examinations, the Union issued a textbook on the Revolution and its relationship to Nonconformity.Footnote 110 One minister in Melton told his Congregational Literary Class of the “chain of events” leading from Elizabeth I up to the Revolution, in which the “struggles for civil and religious freedom” took place: “a sketch of English history which … ought to be fully studied and mastered by the young people of the present time, if they wished to understand what the past struggles for freedom were worth to future generations.”Footnote 111
Independents were perfectly aware that from a Tory perspective they were still outsiders playing a seditious, rather than a contributive, role within English society. At a “crowded” public bicentennial event in Nottingham organized by the Congregational Union, J. J. Colman lamented that “if Nonconformists had not now to apologise for their existence, they were still frequently sneered at as political dissenters.”Footnote 112 But by laying claim to the revolutionary role of Dissent in the nation’s narrative of liberty and greatness, English Congregationalists attempted to assert their equal membership of the nation at a time when the education question reminded them of their inferior status. To some extent, it was a continuation of attempts made during the education controversies of the 1860s and 1870s to define Englishness in the Nonconformist terms of liberty of conscience, in opposition to membership of the Established Church. However, from the mid-1880s Nonconformist articulations of English identity began to shift away from this antagonistic character as disestablishment lost its political viability.Footnote 113
Nonconformists at times sought to reach out in a wider Protestant and patriotic embrace, as they fully recognized the divisive character of their previous major bicentenary: the marking in 1862 of Charles II’s mass expulsion of intransigent Dissenting ministers from the Church of England. While a small number of Anglican Evangelicals had sympathized with the “Puritan contribution to liberty” in 1862, that bicentenary was clearly a Nonconformist, as opposed to a Protestant, celebration.Footnote 114 To Congregationalists, their jubilations in 1888 seemed rather minimal compared to those twenty-six years previously, but for Bruce the relative excitement of 1862 had been a reaction to the “fierce and unreasonable opposition” of the Evangelicals in the established church, who had denied their theological similarities to the Dissenters of the Restoration period. A “wiser policy of silence or of mild acquiescence” on the part of churchmen in 1888, Bruce suggested, had “moderated to some extent our denominational fervour” and rendered the celebration “as a national affair rather than an ecclesiastical”: a “healthy and hopeful sign” of the “general recognition” of religious toleration. In this gentle view, given in a book intended for public consumption, time since 1862 had been a great healer.Footnote 115
In Congregationalist rhetoric, the liberty and scope for greater liberty achieved in 1688 was therefore not merely presented as a victory for Dissent, but for the nation as a whole. Independents, Armitage observed, “took heart of grace to observe that English history had not been without the moulding of their hands upon it.” He argued they had been the “first to grasp the principle of freedom for all people to worship God according to their consciences.”Footnote 116 Dr. Robert William Dale, one of the most prominent Congregationalist figures in the schools question, lectured that “there was nothing grander in English history than the resolution of a large body of the Nonconformists … in the time of James II to refuse to accept freedom by the violation of the law.”Footnote 117 Although the “Nonconformist conscience” was at this time engaged in a political battle against the established church and its friends in Parliament, 1888 still presented itself to English Independents as an opportunity to claim their place in the wider Protestant and national communities. The year was significant, argued one Dissenter in the Bristol Mercury, because Nonconformist rejoicing over the “great and glorious revolution of 1688” happened to be aligned with the wider Protestant celebration of the Spanish Armada’s defeat, while both events were of profound importance and interest to the “entire body of the nation.” The “combined bi and ter-centenary commemoration” was therefore “a Nonconformist, a Protestant, and a national act.”Footnote 118
The prevailing view of the Glorious Revolution bicentenary emphasizes its irrelevance to late Victorian society and the absence of any commemorative activity save for a few isolated, minor local events. But contemporary reports and observations of a national lack of interest failed to take account of the Revolution’s historical relevance to prominent issues and its ongoing emotional resonance for numerically significant groups across the United Kingdom. For Unionists in Britain and Ireland as they opposed Home Rule, for Protestant groups anxious about the spread of “Roman” influence in church and state, and for Congregationalists as they fought against denominational schooling, the bicentenary of the Glorious Revolution allowed the past to be used in the service of the present. At a time of anxiety—over Home Rule, over Catholicism, over the relationship between religion and the state—the Revolution was able to embody fears and hopes, criticisms and aspirations. The perceived significance of 1688, and of its concomitant view of history in terms of Providence and progress, was not, by the late 1880s, so totally diminished as many historians have implied.
This reappraisal of the Revolution bicentenary raises a critical point relating to the study of memory and commemoration as a subject within a national historical specialism: the importance of considering the internal diversity of a national (or in the United Kingdom’s case, multinational) unit, in particular in terms of place and politics. While bicentennial commemoration was visible throughout the United Kingdom, and intersected with major national political issues, in an organizational sense it was very often a matter of locality and region.Footnote 119 A great deal of the commemorative efforts came, for instance, from Protestant groups and Congregational Unions at the English regional level, individual presbyteries in Scotland, or local Orange lodges in Ulster. It is a general point for historians of Britain, but certainly one with pronounced applicability to the particular study of memory and commemoration, that any analysis of “British” attitudes and perceptions must take local and regional contexts into account for a truer “national” picture. It has been shown, for instance, how Orange bicentennialism mingled with Belfast’s civic identity. Similarly, Congregationalists in Suffolk ruminating on the Revolution referred to East Anglia as “a part of England where modern religious liberty had its birth” through the Magna Carta and the Pilgrim Fathers.Footnote 120 The celebrations in Chesterfield and Whittington were also clearly driven by town boosterism and local pride: “The rejoicings were essentially of a local character. … the Whittingtonians and the people of Chesterfield are proud that the Revolution Plot took place in their part of the country. … Other folks may forget the great event in English history which was stimulated at least by the conference at the old Whittington Inn, and think the time has arrived for letting it sink into the limbo of oblivion, but to Derbyshire men and Derbyshire women the inn and its incident will ever be cherished.”Footnote 121
Like countless writers and local organizers in 1888–89, historians have expected national, state-backed anniversary celebrations in Victorian Britain, and they have had their expectations dashed. Unquestionably, the pomp and spectacle of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, and even more so her Diamond Jubilee ten years later, have had a distortionary effect.Footnote 122 For historians, the emergence of a potent anniversary culture in the twentieth century, fueled by the two World Wars, has also arguably encouraged anachronistic assumptions about national commemorative activity in the Victorian period.Footnote 123 It is a case of inflated expectations: the absence of something similar to the Royal Jubilee in 1888–89 taken (even at the time) as lack of interest in the Glorious Revolution and other commemorative occasions blown up by historians into moments of “national” significance. Even the much lauded centenary in 1788–89 lacked royal or parliamentary sponsorship and was largely a provincial affair.Footnote 124 The Cromwell tercentenary was also certainly no more a popular national celebration than the Revolution bicentenary. Within Parliament, Conservative backbenchers and Irish MPs vehemently rejected any commemoration of Cromwell. As evinced by the controversy over his statue at Westminster, the 300th anniversary of Cromwell’s death was not universally more meaningful or acceptable to the Victorian polity as a whole than the bicentenary of 1688.Footnote 125
There are, however, some fruitful comparisons to be made between Cromwell’s improved fortunes as a historical figure in nineteenth-century Britain and the popular status of William of Orange. Orangeism, as a movement in Ireland and the destinations of Irish migration, is well documented.Footnote 126 But what of admiration for the man himself outside of Ulster Protestant culture, particularly in England? William was unable to develop into the twentieth century as a formidable figure of English national history in the same mold as Cromwell. His Dutchness was an obvious obstacle, though perhaps not totally insurmountable when considered in the context of late nineteenth-century Teuto-Protestant patriotism. Amid the imperial anxiety of that era and beyond, however, “Dutch” was an ominous reminder of imperial decline.Footnote 127 Most importantly, the continuing critique of Macaulayite Whiggery helped to diminish William’s stature. Henry Duff Traill’s 1888 biography, published alongside Harrison’s hagiography of Cromwell in Macmillan’s Twelve English Statesmen series, was an explicit rejection of Macaulay’s “overpainted” portrayal of the stadholder’s “king-craft and his statesmanship.” Orange, in Traill’s reading, was more of an “upright guardian” than a true “Father of the Constitution.”Footnote 128
It is also to be hoped that this article will encourage further reflection on Whig history and its shaping of Victorian culture. In particular, our understanding of this period demands a thorough study of the idea of “Divine Providence” in late Victorian public discourse to match the attention awarded to it by historians of other periods, including the first half of the nineteenth century and even the early twentieth century.Footnote 129 The “Providential” nature of 1588 and 1688 was a ubiquitous concept in bicentennial writing and oratory and a familiar element in Victorian rhetoric more broadly. But in the wake of Darwinism and its idea of random development, how did the “hand of God” fit into the intellectual framework of the world’s dominant, if increasingly anxious, economic and imperial power in the late nineteenth century? As the study of the past became professionalized and more rigorously empirical, what became of providence? The Whig interpretation of history was about more than just an overweening constitutional focus and questionable methodology; it also involved a profound belief in England’s divine purpose in the world and the favor bestowed on a righteous people in 1588 and 1688. J. A. Froude’s Protestant providentialism has, in this regard, stood out in this period for a number of historians.Footnote 130 However, an ideal analysis of the late Victorian discourse of providence would be as much social and cultural history as intellectual. As the bicentenary of the Glorious Revolution demonstrates, the providentialist view of history was, in Protestant circles, read from pulpits and fed to congregations.Footnote 131 Any historiographical dichotomy between the study of Victorian historical thought and intellectual life, on the one hand, and the kind of popular culture and religion expressed in the Revolution bicentenary, on the other hand, would be a false one.Footnote 132
From this, one can draw a further query relevant to the study of memory and commemoration in general. How do philosophies of history, and their receipt and reproduction, even if unknowing and unwitting, by the wider populace, shape the way in which the members of that body remember and commemorate the past? As the presence of the memory/history antagonism in Britain’s ongoing debate over history in the national curriculum demonstrates, the relationship between the past as intellectual pursuit, as politics, and as popular preoccupation is one of great topicality that itself demands historical analysis.Footnote 133 The bicentenary of the Glorious Revolution has offered a useful entrance to this question in that the episode marked was, at the time of commemoration, both central to intellectual contests over historiography and profoundly relevant to a number of communal identities.
