This collection examines the significance of the Revolution of 1688–89 within a broad “Britannic” and international context. While the short introduction points out that many of the contributors were too young to have participated in the conferences and essay collections that appeared following tercentenary celebrations of the Revolution in the late 1980s, most of the contributors are well known experts on late Stuart history and many have already published elsewhere many of the findings presented here. The first essay, by Lionel K. J. Glassey, is a sound introduction to the historiography of the revolution. Glassey examines all the adjectives used to describe the revolution over the last 300 years, including the more traditional, “glorious,” “bloodless” and “Whig,” as well as all those that historians have used more recently such as “reluctant,” “accidental,” “sensible,” “moral,” and “modern.” While all of these terms have their pitfalls, they each contribute in some way to our understanding of the Revolution. For example, as Glassey points out, while not all the revolutionaries of 1688 were “reluctant,” James II's own actions pushed many moderates to take extreme measures, and James's flight to France on December 11, gave the Revolution something of an “accidental” and “unexpected” quality. In this case, the king's so-called abdication and the ascension of William and Mary were consequences that could hardly have been foreseen. Glassey concludes that “no adjective can encapsulate the complexities of the events of 1688–9” (32) and the rest of the essays bear this out.
Two essays on England follow. Mark Goldie offers an analysis of Church of England sermons preached on or around 26 July 1685, the day assigned by James II as one of public thanksgiving for the defeat of the Monmouth rebels. Monmouth's Rebellion occurred within months of James's ascension, when he still had the support and confidence of the Anglican clergy. Twenty-nine of these sermons were printed, mostly by obscure clergymen whose sentiments were typical of Anglican loyalism at this juncture. These men upheld the Tory doctrine of passive obedience, locating it in Christ's resignation to earthly authorities. Nonetheless, a few years later most of them supported the Revolution. Not that they wholeheartedly rejected passive obedience, rather they simply found numerous exceptions to its application. Furthermore, to the Tory mindset, there was a yawning chasm between a motley crew of dissenters seeking to overthrow the rightful king in 1685 and the political elite that sought to save the church from an untrustworthy king in 1688.
John Marshall takes on “Whig thought” during the Revolution, reviewing the major Whig positions expounded in the 1680s and 1690s and indicating the limits of their liberalism. The Whigs of 1688 were quick to distance themselves from the Commonwealth tradition. They were proponents of liberty, but not libertinism. They supported toleration for Protestants but remained anti-papist bigots. They had nothing at all to offer women. Furthermore, “Whigs repeatedly took leading roles in supporting the expansion of slavery and the slave trade” in the 1690s (77). The same men, John Locke among them, who saw 1688 as a victory over slavery in England, justified and facilitated the enslavement of Africans in the New World. So much for “glorious.”
The next two essays focus mainly on Scotland. Alasdair Raffe looks at the abolition of episcopacy in Scotland, examining why it failed to take root and why Presbyterianism triumphed with the Revolution. He locates episcopacy's weaknesses in the Restoration settlement which was high-handedly foisted on the Scots from London. The episcopal church in Scotland suffered from manifold institutional and personal deficiencies that Charles II's administration neglected to resolve. It had no set liturgy or canons, it failed to attract high caliber clergymen, and its prelates were slow to create any kind of healthy episcopal culture. When the Revolution came, Scotland's dominant religious tradition, Presbyterianism, had little trouble resuming its position. Tim Harris's chapter on Scotland handily shows why the New British History (which is not so new anymore) with its multi-kingdoms approach can be just as fruitful to an analysis of the late Stuart era as it has proven to be for the mid-century crisis. Most compelling is his exploration of how both Charles and James played “the British card,” that is, playing one kingdom off another. Charles II had considerable success with this strategy during the Exclusion Crisis, showing his English opponents that the Scots would never accept their tampering with the succession. James II's attempt to push toleration for Catholics through Scotland first, in the hope that the English would follow suit, failed miserably and only resulted in alienating the episcopal establishment.
John Gibney and Toby Bernard contribute the two essays on Ireland. Both point out that the large land transfers from Catholics to Protestants following the Cromwellian conquest remained intact following the Restoration. This meant Protestant settlers were vastly outnumbered and surrounded by unhappy Catholics. Gibney examines how memories of the Irish rebellion of 1641 shaped Catholic and Protestant responses to English politics and policies between 1660 and the Revolution. Even as Catholics strove to play down their participation in the massacre of 1641, Protestants were haunted by the “spectre of 1641,” especially during the hysteria generated by the Popish Plot. Bernard looks at Catholic efforts to appeal to the Stuarts for their lost properties, including—in their bolder moments during James II's reign—simply wresting church lands from Protestant hands. Although Catholic re-confiscation of sacred sites did not go without a fight, unlike Gibney, Bernard does not believe that Protestants in Ireland were able to overcome their racial and sectarian differences, even during the Jacobite invasion.
Owen Stanwood contributes the one essay on the Revolution in the Atlantic world, demonstrating how the colonial peripheries were affected by the political and religious upheavals that rocked Europe in the last years of the seventeenth century. Stanwood's analysis of the tense atmosphere fueled by the rumors about the Revolution in Britain and militant anti-popery in Barbados, New England, and the Chesapeake colonies in 1688–89 is extremely impressive. In each case, settlers felt vulnerable to attack from Catholic or Catholic-led enemies: indentured servants, slaves, Indians, the French. Colonial governors who sensed the dangers of the situation and acted quickly to sooth fears and stand in defense of Protestantism managed to avoid insurrection, such as in Barbados. Those who failed to do, as in the case of Governor Edmund Andros in New England, lost control of their authority.
Tony Claydon takes us back to Europe with an examination of English foreign policy following the Revolution, asking why Britons were so willing to support the war against France that essentially lasted intermittently for the next 100 years. His reading of the pro-war tract literature demonstrates that there is no simple explanation as to why France was, above others—the Dutch, the Spanish, the Austrians, and even the Turks—the focus of British animosity. But clearly this Catholic power striving toward universal monarchy under Louis XIV, this disrupter of the peace and common enemy of Christendom, this imperial rival, ancient foe, and closest continental neighbor posed the greatest threat.
Returning to England, Gabriel Glickman's essay examines the rhetoric of opposition to the Revolution Settlement that long permeated the political culture throughout and beyond the Augustan era. The focus here is not just Jacobitism but various strains of Tory, republican, and Whig Jacobite arguments. Glickman demonstrates the centrality of the Revolution to political discourse in the early eighteenth century.
The collection closes with an “afterword” by Stephen Taylor that discusses the achievements of the Revolution: the settling of the succession and the constitutional settlement; the establishment of mechanisms which could fund war; the calming of religious tensions; the sense of common cause among the elites as well as their willingness to trust William and Anne with the enormous resources it took to continue the war against France. To every one of these suppositions, one could quarrel. But Taylor believes that “slavery and popery” were simply no longer the bugbears they once were. His strongest argument to my mind is simply this: that William and Anne could be trusted because they did not support a pro-Catholic foreign policy (James I); they did not marry a Catholic (Charles I); they did not sleep with Catholics (Charles II); and they were not themselves Catholics (James II). But that, in turn, brings us back to the continuing power of religious animosity.
I imagine this collection would be most useful in a graduate seminar as an overview of the historiography of the late Stuart era. It complements but does not replace the many first-rate essay collections published on the Revolution in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which were far more interdisciplinary and also concerned with the role of women. Nonetheless, several of the essays are particularly outstanding, including those of Goldie, Raffe, Claydon, and Harris. And while the chapters by Marshall, Taylor, and Glassey are essentially overviews, they each contain some very compelling insights.
