Glorious Revolution, The

John Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317887171
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa rinascimentale

First published in 1983, John Miller's Glorious Revolution established itself as the standard introduction to the subject. It examines the dramatic events themselves and demonstrates the profound impact the Revolution had on subsequent British history. The Second Edition contains a fuller discussion of Scotland and Ireland, the growth of a fiscal-military state and the role of religion and the Revolution.

PART ONE: THE BACKGROUND

1 THE FALL OF JAMES II

When James, Duke of York, was proclaimed king on 6 February 1685, few would have predicted that within four years he would be in exile in France, his departure regretted by few of his subjects. Although the ports were closed and guards patrolled London’s streets, there was no disorder and many expressed joy at the new king’s accession.

The ease of his accession came as a surprise. A few years before, there had been a concerted attempt to exclude him from the succession to his brother’s throne on the grounds that he was a Catholic. Three times between 1679 and 1681 the Commons had passed exclusion bills, but the Lords rejected one and the others were frustrated by Charles’s dismissing Parliament. The Exclusion Crisis marked the climax of a growing mistrust between Charles and his parliaments. Parliament had welcomed Charles back in 1660 and had taken care to restore an effective monarchy, to guard against any recurrence of the upheavals of the civil wars and Interregnum, but in return had expected Charles to rule more responsibly than his father had done in the 1630s. Trust in the king was badly shaken by his alliance with the Catholic and absolutist Louis XIV, who was generally believed to be seeking to establish a universal monarchy. MPs also expressed anxiety about the ‘growth of Popery’ at home, partly because of Charles’s attempt to grant Catholics a modest toleration in 1672, but more because James, his heir presumptive, had become a Catholic.

In 1678 Titus Oates revealed an alleged ‘Popish Plot’ to assassinate Charles. Although his story was a pack of lies, few doubted its veracity and its implications were alarming. Hitherto the prospect of a Catholic king, although worrying, had been far from immediate. Charles was only three years older than James and in excellent health. If, as seemed likely, he outlived James, he would be succeeded by James’s elder daughter Mary – and Mary and her husband, William of Orange, were Protestants. Oates’s story forced people to consider what would have happened had Charles been killed. Experience taught that Catholic rulers persecuted their Protestant subjects with implacable cruelty, ignoring the constraints of humanity, morality and law. Catholic rule was identified with violence, armed force and illegality – in short, ‘arbitrary government’ [Doc. 1] like that of Louis XIV. Although Oates declared that James was not involved in the plot, he was its obvious beneficiary. To save themselves from absolutism and bloody persecution it seemed to a majority of the Commons and the electorate that it was essential, a matter of self-preservation, to exclude James from the succession.

The exclusion campaign was the logical culmination of the Commons’ growing distrust of both James and Charles. The outcome was less predictable. Charles would not agree to exclusion, which he saw as part of a broader attack on the rights and powers of the Crown. In their efforts to overcome his resistance, the Exclusionists (or ‘Whigs’) challenged his essential prerogatives (for example, his right to call and dismiss parliaments) and mobilised mass support, using techniques of agitation and propaganda reminiscent of those used in 1641–2. As the panic of the plot died down, many who had been unhappy about Charles and James’s conduct in the 1670s came to see in the Whigs’ tactics a greater threat to the established order in Church and state than anything that James might do; more and more conservatives (‘tories’) rallied to the defence of ‘Church and king’. They wished to maintain the ascendancy of the Church of England, against both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters, and to support the monarchy against the apparent threat of civil war.

The Tories’ opposition to exclusion led the Whigs to denounce them as ‘Papists in disguise’. The mutual recriminations of Whig and Tory had, by 1681, divided the ruling elite more deeply than at any time since 1660. Charles eagerly exploited this division, throwing the full weight of his authority behind the Tories. He dismissed Whigs from offices in local government and the militia and put Tories in their places. He encouraged the persecution of Dissenters, most of whom had supported Exclusion. Above all, he used the law courts as instruments of political vengeance. Whigs prosecuted on charges of treason or on private suits were condemned by Tory judges and Tory juries. The king could not change the magistrates of the towns, most of which had charters allowing them to choose their own; in many cases these were Dissenters, or Whigs, who failed to enforce the laws against Dissent. Local Tories and the central government co-operated in having these charters surrendered or quashed. New ones were issued which gave the king the power to remove officials and members of the corporation at will, giving the Crown greater control than ever before over the boroughs’ internal affairs. In parliamentary boroughs, it would also be able to influence elections [93].

By 1685, a few years after the monarchy seemed to be tottering, it had broken the Whigs as a political force and was on the verge of controlling elections. However, the Crown had gained this power only with the Tories’ co-operation and it could be exploited only if they continued to co-operate. Although the Whigs claimed that the Tories were unprincipled sycophants, who enlarged the king’s power in return for places, the Tories had helped to build up the Crown’s authority for what seemed to them sound political reasons. The Whigs, they believed, were rebels and republicans. Only a strong monarchy could prevent political and social upheaval. James’s assurances that he would uphold the Church’s pre-eminence, and his defence of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, made them far less apprehensive than the Whigs about the prospect of his becoming king. Even so, certain tacit conditions underlay their support for the Crown’s growing authority. So long as the king protected the Church, so long as he gave the Tories a monopoly of office, so long as he bent the law only against the Whigs, the Tories were quite content. If the king tried to use his newly-acquired powers against the Tories, their reaction would be very different.

JAMES II AND HIS SUBJECTS

James had much in common with the Tories. He had an exalted view of kingly authority and expected his subjects to obey him, but he also recognised that kings had a sacred obligation to care for their subjects’ welfare and to rule according to law [Doc. 2]. James differed from the Tories, and from the vast majority of his subjects, in being a Catholic. His conversion, in his mid-thirties, was fully considered and psychologically satisfying. He thought in terms of simple polar opposites and found in the Catholic Church an unquestionable authority, which (he felt) other Churches lacked [Doc. 4]. Like many converts, he wished to share his faith with others, but Catholic worship was forbidden by law and Catholics were excluded from Parliament and public office. Moreover, generations of Protestant preaching and propaganda had instilled strong prejudices against ‘Popery’ even if, in Defoe’s words, people ‘do not know whether it be a man or a horse’ [132 p. 34].

James faced formidable obstacles in his efforts to promote Catholicism, but he was determined to try. He hoped to find a Parliament that would repeal the penal laws (which forbade Catholic worship, education and publishing) and the Test Acts (which excluded Catholics from offices and from Parliament) [Doc. 5]. He believed that once the Catholic clergy could compete with Protestants on equal terms, and once people could become Catholics without losing their chances of office, thousands of converts would come forward. He had no intention of imposing his religion by force: his army was predominantly Protestant and he expected to be succeeded by Mary. Not until late in 1687 was there a prospect that his queen might give birth to a son, who would take precedence over Mary and be raised as a Catholic. Until then, James assumed that Mary would succeed him and firmly rejected suggestions that he should disinherit her in favour of a Catholic [Doc. 3]. This meant that, in his efforts to have the penal laws and Test Acts revoked, he had to observe the forms of law, as any violence against the Protestants would be repaid, against the Catholics, after his death. As the Marquis of Halifax acutely noted:

Converts will not venture till they have such a law to secure them as hath no exception to it; so that an irregularity, or any degree of violence to the law, would so entirely take away the effect of it that men would as little run the hazard of changing their religion after the making it as before. [8 p. 335]

James’s strategy depended on his persuading a parliament to repeal the penal laws and Test Acts. This would require the co-operation of at least a section of his subjects. England in 1685 was still a mainly agricultural country, its government and politics dominated by the landed elite, the nobility and gentry. This elite controlled most parliamentary constituencies, boroughs as well as counties, and provided the great majority of MPs. James therefore needed the co-operation of at least part of this elite to carry his programme through parliament.

Unfortunately for James, Tories and Whigs, Anglicans and Dissenters, agreed in detesting Popery, if in little else. The Tories had rallied to James in the Exclusion Crisis despite his religion, because they feared civil war. Most Tories and Whigs were against allowing Catholics freedom of worship. Those few who might allow them toleration were against their being admitted to offices or to Parliament: once in power, they believed, Catholics would persecute Protestants. ‘I can with a very good conscience’, wrote the Tory Earl of Clarendon in 1688, ‘give all liberty and ease to tender consciences … but I cannot, in conscience, give those men leave … to come into employments in the state who by their mistaken consciences are bound to destroy the religion I profess’ [55 p. 223]. Although the Tories had given James the benefit of the doubt, they watched warily for signs that he might abuse his power and become another Louis XIV. Most Tories took it for granted that Catholicism and absolutism went hand in hand. James might be convinced of the purity of his intentions; he might believe that he acted only according to the law of God and the law of the land, and might dismiss his subjects’ suspicions as absurd or malicious; but those suspicions, however ill-founded, were a fact of political life. Given English Protestants’ preconceptions about the malign political implications of Popery, it was not surprising that James’s subjects placed the worst possible construction on his conduct. James was to give them ample cause to do so.

THE COURSE OF THE REIGN

In 1685 the obvious strategy for James was to rely on his ‘old friends’, the Tories. He promised to maintain the Church’s dominant position and continued to persecute Dissenters. This strategy was vindicated when a general election produced an overwhelmingly Tory House of Commons. This voted James the revenues enjoyed by Charles and additional sums to pay some of the Crown’s debts, refit the fleet and crush the rebellion led by Charles’s bastard son, the Duke of Monmouth. Monmouth’s defeat seemed to signal the final destruction of Whiggery. The reprisals which followed, the Bloody Assizes, may seem abhorrent to modern eyes but aroused little protest among the Tories. The rising gave James a pretext to double the size of his army. In future, he could feel more secure against rebellion or invasion.

Unfortunately for James, events in 1685 showed not only the bankruptcy of Whiggery but the limits to the Tories’ support. While prepared to vote him an adequate revenue, the Commons would do nothing to benefit the Catholics. In November both Houses expressed concern about James’s enlarging the army and his commissioning eighty to ninety Catholic officers, in defiance of the Test Acts. Standing armies were always seen as instruments of absolutism and James’s conduct seemed doubly sinister at a time when Louis XIV was using his army to convert Huguenots to Catholicism. Incensed by what he saw as its groundless suspicion and insubordination, James prorogued the most exuberantly monarchist parliament of the century. It never met again.

Parliament’s conduct forced James to rethink his position. If the Tories would not co-operate in repealing the penal laws and Test Acts, James would have, first, to change his strategy and, second, to resort to more dubious methods. On the first point, he would have to abandon the Tories and seek support elsewhere, among the Whigs and, more particularly, the Dissenters. If an Anglican Parliament refused to grant relief to Catholics, a Dissenting Parliament might grant a general toleration embracing both Catholics and Dissenters. To appeal to the Dissenters required a certain psychological adjustment. Although tolerant of individual Dissenters, James’s experience (and that of his father) led him to equate religious dissent with political sedition. As he became disillusioned with the Anglicans, he convinced himself that most Dissenters had been driven to defiance by religious persecution. By the end of 1686 he was ready to stake all on an appeal to the Dissenters and confident that his appeal would succeed.

Appealing to the Dissenters raised several problems. Like Catholics, Dissenters were unable to worship freely and suffered various legal disabilities: their exclusion (in principle) from municipal office could prove a serious blow to James’s plans for a Parliament, as the great majority of constituencies were boroughs. Since 1680–1 the Crown had sought to harass the Dissenters and break their political influence, putting power firmly into Tory hands. If there was to be any chance of a Dissenting Parliament, the Tories’ stranglehold on power in the localities had to be broken and that of the Dissenters built up: indeed, it had to be built up further than their lowly economic and social status warranted. James’s plans could succeed, therefore, only if the Dissenters were freed from their disabilities before the laws against Dissent were legally repealed and if their local political influence was artificially enhanced. At the same time, James wished to encourage conversions to Catholicism and to allow the small Catholic minority to add its limited weight to the campaign for repeal. In order to achieve these objectives, James had to extend his prerogative in ways which were dubiously legal, which, given his subjects’ preconceptions, were bound to provoke fears of absolutism.

The extensions of royal authority were of two types. The first involved the dispensing and suspending powers. Nobody denied that in some cases the king could dispense individuals from the penalties of the law ‘where equity requireth a moderation to be had’. He was expected, however, to use such powers sparingly, inquiring fully into the merits of each case. When Charles II suspended the laws against religious nonconformity in 1672, the Commons told him that this was illegal, but this was never confirmed by statute. James considered it morally wrong that he should be denied the services of his Catholic subjects, so appointed some to offices, dispensing them from the penalties of the Test Acts. In June 1686, in the test case Godden v. Hales, the judges ruled that the king possessed a dispensing power and could decide when to use it [Doc. 6]. Many of James’s subjects were unimpressed by the judges’ ruling, partly because James had dismissed those judges who thought differently [64] but more because of what followed.

Although it was possible to dispense individual office-holders from complying with the Test Acts, it was impossible to issue individual dispensations to the thousands of Dissenters and Catholics who wished to worship free from the penalties laid down by law. In April 1687 James’s Declaration of Indulgence dispensed the whole nation from complying with the penal laws, pending their repeal by Parliament. He thus moved from selective dispensations to the wholesale, if temporary, suspension of a body of laws. This suspending power was legally far more dubious than the dispensing power: statutes could be abrogated only by Parliament. It was made to appear doubly sinister by the suspicions already aroused by James’s religion. If he could suspend the penal laws, might he not try to suspend all laws? If he did, nobody’s person or property would be safe [Doc. 7].

The second extension of royal authority came in the campaign to pack Parliament. To break the Tories’ electoral influence and build up that of the Dissenters, James adapted and extended the methods of 1681–5. Tory municipal officials and JPs were replaced by Dissenters (or Catholics); more borough charters were confiscated and new ones issued. In addition, pressure was brought to bear on electors and possible candidates. In the winter of 1686–7 James interviewed MPs from his first Parliament in a last effort to overcome their opposition to repealing the penal laws and Test Acts. Having dissolved that Parliament in July 1687, he ordered that JPs be tendered three questions, which required them to state their position on repeal. Those who were against it were dismissed and replaced by others whom James hoped would prove more tractable. Given the Tory gentry’s dominance in the counties, and the wide franchise, James stood little chance of success in the shire elections, so the main thrust of his electoral campaign was in the boroughs. There the electorate was often very small and the franchise disputable, which gave ample scope for fraud and intimidation. Some corporations were purged several times until James was confident that he had found men to do his bidding. In one, the electorate was allegedly reduced to three, of whom two would elect the third. At Huntingdon it was proposed to enrol soldiers as electors; elsewhere army officers were named as candidates. Such manipulation was backed up by canvassing and propaganda. As James aimed especially to win Dissenters’ votes, many of his agents were Dissenters, who had learned their trade working for the Exclusionist Whigs [82] [Docs. 8, 9].

Both the extension of the dispensing power and the campaign to pack Parliament were inspired by what were (in James’s eyes) the purest of motives and merely extended prerogatives and techniques which had previously attracted little criticism, but the extension of these powers beyond traditional limits, together with the suspicion aroused by his religion, made his conduct appear deeply threatening. If by such means he could secure a House of Commons composed of Dissenters, Parliament would cease to be representative of the dominant elements in English society and would become a mere rubber stamp for royal policies. Moreover, once the Test Acts were repealed and Catholics could enter Parliament, similar methods might produce a Papist Parliament which could pass laws against Protestantism. As with the extension of the dispensing power, James’s campaign to pack Parliament might have a limited objective – the repeal of the penal laws and Test Ac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• An introduction to the series
• Note on referencing system
• Preface
• PART ONE: THE BACKGROUND
• PART TWO: THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT
• PART THREE: THE POST-REVOLUTION ORDER
• PART FOUR: DOCUMENTS
• Bibliography
• Index