The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688-89 9781503615564

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THE WORLD OF WILLIAM AND MARY Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688-89

William III and Mary II, two oil-on-canvas portraits made one, studio of Godfrey Kneller. Courtesy Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

THE WORLD OF WILLIAM AND MARY Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688-89

EDITED BY

Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 1996

Published with the assistance of the Richard and Caroline T. Gwathmey Memorial Trust Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1996 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data are at the end of the book Stanford University Press publications are distributed exclusively by Stanford University Press within the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America; they are distributed exclusively by Cambridge University Press throughout the rest of the world.

To A. G. H. !"Fred") Bachrach

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redictably, the tercentenary of the "Glorious Revolution" spawned a considerable number of lectures, conferences, and exhibitions to commemorate that momentous event. Less predictably, the participants in those celebrations tended to steer clear of the well-trodden canon of historical interpretation concerning the years r688-89. Thus, what might have been a mere exercise in the fine-tuning of received opinion became instead an impetus to build upon and expand revisionist ideas concerning the origins and consequences of the Revolution, ideas that had begun to emerge during the past two decades. The preliminary result of the new work is a profound change in our understanding not only of the course of the Revolution-its origins, its evolution, and its aftermath-but of its ultimate significance for English and European history. Most important, the long tradition of viewing the events of r688-89 as a uniquely British affair, which gave birth to liberal England with its contingent political and religious liberties, has been finally put to rest. Paradoxically, the revisionist effort to dispel the pervasive insular treatment of the Revolution (and the Whig interpretation it had traditionally received) has caused anything but a diminishing of its significance. By virtue of the revisionists' adamancy about expanding the context within which the Revolution has generally been viewed-as well as deepening and broadening perceptions of the aims and motives of its participants-the impact of the events of r688-89 on English and European history has been endowed with new proportions. Thus, though the Revolution may no longer be considered

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"glorious" in the traditional sense of being the harbinger of liberal England, the crossing by William III of the North Sea takes on an even greater global magnitude. The scope of such a historical reinterpretation explains why so little of the revisionist effort has hitherto been translated into a synthetic account of the Revolution. The need to probe and scrutinize previous presumptions as well as study afresh archival and printed records has taken precedence over the writing of a new narrative, and wisely so. Previous inter-Pretations of the Revolution were guided more by partisanship and glorious patriotic perceptions than by sound scholarship. Not surprisingly, then, the present volume of fifteen essays presumes neither comprehensiveness nor completeness. Like all other books the tercentenary celebrations have produced, it aims to furnish a series of important interpretative case studies on a variety of political, economic, religious, and cultural issues that will make possible a future synthesis. The distinctiveness of the volume lies in its offering important insights on topics that have long engaged the attention of scholars as well as others that have not been deemed relevant to our understanding of the Revolution. J. G. A. Pocock's analysis of the significance of the revolutionary impulse in England from the Civil War to the emergence of the new British Leviathan and Howard Nenner's probe into the role of heredity in the issue of the succession shed new light on a variety of ideological and constitutional issues. With equal sensitivity to text and context, Lois Schwoerer provides an insightful reading of contemporary and latter-day perceptions of the Bill of Rights. The financial and economic aspects consequent to the Revolution are addressed in the papers of D. W. Jones and Jonathan Israel, while Gordon Schochet and Bruce Lenman offer reflective interpretations of the issues of toleration, comprehension, and religious discourse. Essays deepening our grasp of politics and toleration are joined by those inviting us to rethink the common perception of the Revolution as a strictly political and religious event, or even an event within the exclusive domain of rational discourse. What has recently been taken into account is the broad structure of belief systems that informed the opinions and actions of contemporaries. Willem Frijhoff and Ernestine van der Wall, for example, draw attention to the significance of witchcraft and millenarianism in shaping the world view of most seventeenth-century people and our need to take into account such belief systems-alien to modern sensibility-in any rendering of the events of 1688-89. Still other essays seek to bridge

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the gulf between politico-social-economic history on the one hand and cultural-intellectual history on the other. John Dixon Hunt, Wijnand Mijnhardt, and Mordechai Feingold point out, in various ways, how learned and material culture (as well as high and low fashion) was conceived by contemporaries as part of, and even an extension of, political life and therefore was capable of coloring perceptions and informing actions. What emerges from these distinctive essays is the conviction that in spite of differing angles of approach, or perhaps because of them, the process of reinterpreting the Revolution requires a combined study of English and Dutch history within the context of European history. It is toward this task of helping lay the necessary scholarly foundations for a future comprehensive rewriting of the history of the period that the essays in this volume hope to contribute.

If books have lives, this volume was born in Holland early in 1986 when Fred Bachrach; professor emeritus at the University of Leiden and chairman of the Netherlands Executive Committee of the William and Mary Tercentenary Committee, proposed that the college chartered in r693 by a Dutch king and an English queen be invited to host an event commemorating the 30oth anniversary of the revolutionary accession of William III and Mary II. Paul Verkuil, then president of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, enthusiastically accepted the invitation, and it was quickly agreed that an international conference of scholarly distinction be held in Williamsburg on February 8-ro, 1989, on themes appropriate to the remembrance of such a historic event. The conference brought together a team of Dutch, British, and American specialists in early modern transatlantic history and culture. Most of that group are represented here; others were recruited especially for this volume. Among the conferences of 1989 that stimulated the production of books on the Revolution of r688-89, ours laid claim to a distinctive status, for the Congress of the United States, by resolution, had officially recognized the College of William and Mary as the sole agent for the commemoration of the tercentenary of the Revolution and the accession of King William and Queen Mary. The Williamsburg conference drew unprecedented support from a variety of public and private agencies, support that we gratefully acknowledge here. Joining the College as cosponsors were the British Institute of the United States, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the North American Conference on British Studies. Funding for the conference was

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most generously provided by the Research Programs Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities (an independent federal agency), the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, the Dutch-American West India Company Foundation, and the British Council. Among the many people who helped make the Williamsburg meeting a success, Dale Hoak is especially happy to thank Paul Verkuil and Thad Tate for their advice and unflagging encouragement; John Selby for his timely administrative assistance; and Lois Schwoerer, John Pocock, and Moti Feingold for their help in identifying participants. Steven Strickland and Robert Kingston (successive presidents of the British Institute of the United States), James Daniels (cultural attache at the British Embassy in Washington), and Lena Cowen Orlin (executive director of the Folger Institute) willingly shared their expertise. At the College, special assistance was provided by Anne Pratt, Meredith Wagner, David Kranbuehl, Gloria Talley, and Cheryl Pope in fundraising and the administration of finance; Bill Walker, Barbara Bell, Dean Olsen, Elaine Justice, and Cynthia Tracy in publicity and promotion; Tom Legg, right-hand man par excellence; and Darlene Crouch, who made much paper move. Also, special thanks to Jeanne Netzley who was instrumental in giving the book its present shape. A final salute goes to those whose generous grants have made possible the publication of this book: the trustees of the Richard and Caroline T. Gwathmey Memorial Trust of Richmond, Virginia; the directors of the Netherlands-America Amity Trust of Washington, D.C.; and Mr. and Mrs. Garrison Norton. M.F. and D.H.

Contents

Contributors

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The Anglo-Dutch Revolution of r688-89 DaleHoak PART 1:

I

Politics, Economics, and War

Some Consequences of the Glorious Revolution W. A. Speck

29

The Bill of Rights, r689, Revisited Lois G. Schwoerer Defending the Revolution: The Economics, Logistics, and Finance of England's War Effort, r688-ryr2 D. W. Jones

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England, the Dutch, and the Struggle for Mastery of World Trade in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (r682-1702) Jonathan Israel

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Standing Army and Public Credit: The Institutions of Leviathan J. G. A. Pocock

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Sovereignty and the Succession in r688-89 Howard Nenner

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I688 Remembered: The Glorious Revolution and the American Constitution John Kenyon PART

rr8

n: Ideas and Mentality

Providence, Liberty, and Prosperity: An Aspect of English Thought in the Era of the Glorious Revolution Bruce Lenman

I

35

"Antichrist Stormed": The Glorious Revolution and the Dutch Prophetic Tradition Ernestine van der Wall

I

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The Act of Toleration and the Failure of Comprehension: Persecution, Nonconformity, and Religious Indifference Gordon J. Schochet

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Anglo-Dutch Garden Art: Style and Idea John Dixon Hunt

I88

The Emancipation of the Dutch Elites from the Magic Universe Willem Frijhoff

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Dutch Culture in the Age of William and Mary: Cosmopolitan or Provincial? Wijnand W. Mijnhardt

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Reversal of Fortunes: The Displacement of Cultural Hegemony from the Netherlands to England in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries Mordechai Feingold

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Notes

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Index

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A photo section follows p. I94-

Contributors

Mordechai Feingold is Professor of Science Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He has written The Mathematicians' Apprenticeship: Science, the University and Society in England, rs6o-r640 (Cambridge, Eng., r984), edited Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), and coedited In the Presence of the Past: Essays in Honor of Frank Manuel (Dordrecht and Boston, 1991). Willem Frijhoff is Professor of the Cultural History of Preindustrial Societies and former Dean of the Faculty of Societal History at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. He is the author of numerous books and articles on early modern culture and mentality and is the coeditor of Witchcraft in the Netherlands from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century (Rotterdam, 1991). Dale Hoak is Professor of History at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. The author of numerous works on the mid-Tudor court and council, as well as the European witch-hunts (I400-I?OO), he has edited and contributed to Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge, Eng., 1995). He is presently studying war and the royal household in the period r 5 40-5 3 and the rituals and symbols of "imperial" kingship from Henry V to Charles I. John Dixon Hunt is Academic Advisor to the Oak Spring Garden Library, Upperville, Virginia, having previously served as Director of Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks. He is the editor of the Journal of Garden History and the author of various books and articles on many aspects of garden history. He is currently working on a description of garden design books in the Oak Spring Garden Library and a theoretical study of garden art.

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Jonathan Israel is Professor of Dutch History and Institutions at the University of London. He is the author of The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, r6o6-r66r (Oxford, 1986) and Dutch Primacy in World Trade, rs85-I745 (Oxford, 1990), and he has edited and contributed to The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge, Eng., 1991 ). D. W. Jones has taught in the Department of History, University of York, since 1965. He studied history at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, before earning his degree at Oxford, where he was a research student at Merton College. He is the author of War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough (Oxford, 1988). John Kenyon was Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor in Early Modern British History at the University of Kansas. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and holds an honorary Litt.D. from the University of Sheffield, his alma mater. His numerous publications include Stuart England, 2d ed. (Harmondsworth, 198 5), The Stuart Constitution, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), and Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, r689-I720 (Cambridge, Eng., 1977). Bruce Lenman is Professor in the Department of Modern History, University of St. Andrews. He has written several monographs and has edited a collection of sources on the Jacobite movement; his most recent book is The Eclipse of Parliament (London, 1992). A former British Academy Fellow at the Newberry Library, he was James Pinckney Harrison Visiting Professor at the College of William and Mary in 1988-89. Wijnand W. Mijnhardt is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Utrecht. He has published a book on the history of eighteenth-century Dutch sociability (Amsterdam, 1987), coedited The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment and Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992) and is completing a book on the revolution in reading in the Netherlands, I78o-18so. Howard Nenner, Professor of History at Smith College, was a practicing attorney in New York before taking up history. A specialist in the Stuart constitution, he has published a book and numerous articles on politics, legal culture, sovereignty, and the succession in late-seventeenth-century England, and has written The Right to Be King: The Succession to the Crown of England, r 5 87-I7 I4 (London, 1995). J. G. A. Pocock is Harry C. Black Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. He holds degrees from the Universities of New

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Zealand and Cambridge, and he previously taught both history and political science at the Universities of Otago and Canterbury and at Washington University, St. Louis. His many books include The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, Eng., 1957 and 1987), The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), and Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, Eng., 1975). Gordon f. Schochet is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, where he has taught since 1965. A specialist in British political theory, he is the author of Patriarchalism in Political Thought, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987) and numerous articles. He is currently studying toleration in early modern England. Lois G. Schwoerer is Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History at George Washington University and a former president of the North American Conference on British Studies. Her many works in lateseventeenth-century English history include The Declaration of Rights, r689 (Baltimore, 1981) and Lady Rachel Russell, "One of the Best Women" (Baltimore, 1988). She has also edited and contributed to The Revolution of r688-89: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge, Eng., 1992). W. A. Speck has taught at the Universities of Exeter, Newcastle upon Tyne, Hull, and (since 1986) Leeds, where he is Professor of Modern History. The editor of History, the journal of the Historical Association, he has written five books, including Society and Literature in England, ryoo-ry6o (London, 1983) and Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of r688 (Oxford, 1988). Ernestine van der Wall is Lecturer in Church History at the University of Leiden. Her dissertation in 1987 on the chiliast Petrus Serrarius (r6oo-1669) won the D. J. Vecgens Prize. She has published several articles in the field of Jewish-Christian relations in the early modern period and is presently preparing a study of the early Dutch Enlightenment.

THE WORLD OF WILLIAM AND MARY Anglo-Du tch Perspecti ves on the Revolutio n of 1688-89

Dale Hoak

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his essay looks back to a great moment in seventeenthcentury European history-the politico-military coup by which a Dutch prince, William of Orange, and his English wife, Mary, seized the imperial crown of England from Mary's father, James II. The accession of King William III and Queen Mary II on February I 3, I 689, was later said to have concluded a "happy Revolution" in the life of the English nation, a revolution precipitated by that "glorious enterprise" of arms, William's bloodless invasion (November 5, r688). 1 Orange's landing and march on London had forced King James into flight to France (December 23, r688) and apparent abdication. The crisis was resolved when the extraordinary convention of January 22 to February 13, I689, promulgated a Declaration of Rights (enacted with amendments in December r689 as the Bill of Rights) embodying the terms of the convention's offer to William and Mary to rule as joint sovereigns. 2 In England the "happy" events of r688-89 were rendered "glorious" by those who were the first to write up the history of "their" Revolution-Whigs who, like many others, had resisted the allegedly absolutist pretensions of the Catholic King James. In Whiggish mythology, William of Orange had delivered England "from popery and arbitrary power," a stirring assertion that conveniently ignored, among other things, William's opportunism, James's motives, and the role of the Tories in the making of the Revolution. All three of these were crucial in deciding the outcome, for when he first landed at Torbay, William did not intend to overthrow James, a soldier-king

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who was certainly prepared to stand and fight. By not defending James militarily in the face of William's developing conspiracy, the Tories eventually placed political pragmatism above dynastic principle; though they revered the legitimacy of the Stuart succession (for them a matter of divine sanction), they loathed James's Catholicism and the threat that it posed to an exclusive Anglicanism. Whig propaganda makes for splendid reading. Well into the twentieth century, textbooks on both sides of the Atlantic followed its majestic line on the meaning of r689: Parliamentary government, somehow a peculiarly Protestant institution, had triumphed over royal absolutism, tainted because it was a Catholic phenomenon. The Revolution, it was said, had nurtured the growth of freedom and liberty among the English people (though just when the seeds of liberty were thought to have been planted was never specified). The English, characteristically, had chosen moderation over mob action, the rule of law over the tyrant's whim. By fixing the terms of limited, constitutional monarchy, r688-89 marked a formative stage in the development of liberal democracy, that distinctive contribution of Anglo-Saxon civilization to Western political culture. 3 John Locke's contractual theory of government, articulated in The Two Treatises of Government (r69o), was long thought to embody the principles of the Whigs' "glorious" Revolution; the Bill of Rights appeared to codify those principles in the form of a contract between king and Parliament. In fact, although published soon after the event, Locke's book was not a product of the Revolution and it exerted no discernible influence on the provisions of the Bill of Rights. 4 Locke had formulated the contractual theory in response to the Exclusion Crisis of r679-8r, when parliamentary Whigs led by Locke's patron, the earl of Shaftesbury, had sought unsuccessfully by statute to exclude the future James II from his rightful succession to the throne. 5 As Richard Ashcraft has shown, the Two Treatises were published in r 690 less to defend the Revolution (as is often assumed) than to defend radical Whig theory at a moment when the course of the Revolution was dashing the radicals' hopes. 6 In practice Locke was too radical even for most Whigs; his impact on the course of events in r 688-89 was practically nil. But as part of the mythology of r688-89, Locke's ideas found a new life in the next century, and like the Bill of Rights of Whiggish lore, Lockean theory ultimately became more important than the Revolution itself in shaping constitutions and the writing of constitutional history in English-speaking democratic communities.

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The revolutionary usages to which others put the Revolution still endure. Consider the conduit of American history. Eighteenthcentury Americans were inspired to adapt the English Bill of Rightsfor them an artifact of the Lockean "contract"-to fit the circumstances of their armed rebellion against George III and their creation of a new federal nation-state. The Constitution of the United States, as amended in 1791, formally embodied this selective adaptation of the seventeenth-century English political experience. This development can, of course, be traced to other English sources such as Magna Carta and the Petition of Right (r628). But among the texts generated by Americans in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, nowhere is this course more directly revealed than in the influential effects of George Mason's reading of the Bill of Rights of r689. The first ten amendments to the Constitution-that inventive distillate of Lockean natural-right theory and traditions of the common lawbear the direct impress of Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, a document carrying over verbatim sections of the English Bill of Rights.? As a statement of the contract theory, the example of the American Declaration of Independence is no doubt better known, though Jefferson's stylistically succinct, powerful expression of the theory there echoed the substance of Mason's earlier, less elegant formulation in the Virginia declaration. Outside the English-speaking world, this aspect of the Anglo-American political tradition, so much a part of the ideology of Western liberty, still commands a power to move events. Witness President Vaclav Havel's speech of February 22, 1990, to the Congress of the United States, eloquent testimony of the extent to which the words of Locke, Jefferson, and Mason molded the makers of Czechoslovakia's "velvet revolution" of 1989. 8 The English Bill of Rights thus has two histories. The first, essentially an offshoot of Whig historiography, typically treats the Bill in isolation, as a document of constitutional importance. In this tradition, the provisions of the Bill constitute a legacy of principles the Revolution is said to have bequeathed to subsequent generations: that taxes are to be levied only by approval of the representatives of the people; that such representatives are to be freely elected and are to enjoy freedom of speech in their debates; that governments are not to dispense arbitrarily with the law; that no standing armies are to be tolerated in peacetime except by legislative approval; that parliaments (or representative assemblies) are to sit regularly and frequently. Other provisions regarding individual rights were to hold

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great legal import for the future, including the right of some of the Protestant subjects of William and Mary (those of social standing) to bear arms, petition the Crown, and empanel juries. Another type of history asks what the framers of the Bill intended its provisions to mean at the time. This history, based on circumstances in London in r688-89, comprehends the deliberations of the convention, and later of Parliament, in response to William's invasion and his and Mary's accession. It recounts what the parliamentarians of r689 thought had gone wrong with the government of Charles II and James II, and it considers the Bill in context as but one aspect of a complex web of domestic and international developme_nts. 9 Because assumptions about the legacy of the Bill of Rights rest on selective readings of what actually happened in r688-89, one must resist the notion that the members of the convention meant to lay down conditions for William's acceptance of the crown and that as a consequence they became the self-conscious architects of a new, limited type of kingship. 10 Thanks to the discreet influence and advice of William's chief allies in the convention (the court Whigs), most members present were content to restate existing rights of the king's subjects, rather than asserting new ones.ll The declaration (whose very name derived from William's own Additional Declaration of October 14, r688) was originally a list of 28 "Heads of Grievances"12levied against a fallen Catholic king, not a list of conditions presented to a Protestant prince and princess prior to their accession.13 The framers of the heads went out of their way to assure Prince William that their purpose was simply to declare what the law was, not to change it. In this sense the heads, they believed, stood as statements of fact, not "stipulations." 14 When, after intensive debate, the heads finally became the declaration, William Sacheverell, a Whig, probably voiced the consensus of the convention: "I do not suppose this Instrument of Government to be a new limitation of the Crown, but what of right is ours by Law." 15 It is true that the records of the debates in the convention of r689 contain references to a "compact" or "original contract," but such usages are nebulous, not specific; they appear to reflect the widespread belief that James II had failed to fulfill his obligations as king amd had betrayed the trust of his subjects. His flight seemed to confirm that betrayal, or so some believed. 16 Given the essentially informative, not contractual, purpose of the declaration, the framers adopted, as Robert Beddard has said, a hortatory, not mandatory,

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tone. 17 The declaration looked back to what had been, not forward to what would be, and for this reason it contained no enforcement clauses or penalties for the nonperformance of its provisions. In any case, on February r3, r689, before he became king, William explicitly rejected any implied conditional connection between the convention's offer of the throne and his acceptance of the declaration. The sequence of events that day is important: only after his acceptance of the crown, as a king of recognized, imperial jurisdiction, did he entertain a reading of, and acknowledge, the Declaration of Rights. 18 The Whigs were not troubled by this chronology. In William they believed they had made not a king of limited authority, but a powerful"weapon ... to go before us and fight our battells" in the coming war with France. 19 And a powerful king William was, though not one of the Whigs' making. The Whigs, chiefly, had produced the Declaration of Rights; William, as will be seen, had made himself king. Nevertheless, he knew that the declaration circumscribed royal action in two new ways. It required parliamentary approval first for the exercise of the royal dispensing power-that is, the power to dispense with statutes in specific cases (blanket suspensions of legislation having been flatly outlawed)-and second for the maintenance of a peacetime standing army. The first limitation represented a response to James Il's attempt to implement an aggressive policy to spread Catholicism, especially his attempt to appoint Catholic army officers by dispensing with provisions of the Test Act (which restricted appointments to public office to Anglican communicants). Although other kings had occasionally dispensed with statutory provisions in particular cases-for reasons that judges almost invariably had accepted -the practice was generally understood to contradict a fundamental principle of English government, namely, that statutes could be undone only by other acts of Parliament. 20 Hence the declaration provided that the dispensing power could be used only when authorized by statute. 21 By requiring the consent of Parliament to maintain an army in time of peace, the convention boldly checked one of the king's most important prerogatives. 22 Armies, as J. R. Jones has said, represented the raison d'etre of European kings, and with the notable exception of the period of the French Revolution, aristocratic, kingly control of military forces remained a central fact of European life down to the end of the First World War. The Revolution of r688-89 left William

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in control of the armed forces, but the existence of those forces was now subject to the approval of civilians in Parliament. 23 Remembering the rule of Cromwell's major generals, Charles Il's parliaments had refused to fund the king's requests for a larger land army. Large standing armies smacked of absolutism, Continental style; James II's rapid military buildup had raised anew the specter of absolutism in England. Moreover, William, a foreigner, was foremost a man of war; this, and the fact that the convention sat quite literally under the guns of a foreign army of occupation-William's Dutch guardsdoubtless influenced the framing of the resolution. 24 The requirement that William seek the consent of Parliament for the maintenance of his army signaled a seismic shift in the relations of Crown and Parliament and, in retrospect, the relations of British peoples and their governments. In 1698-99 Parliament shocked William by disbanding the bulk of the army he had raised for the Nine Years' War (r689-97); this was "the first and greatest test," in Jones's words, "of what were known as Revolution principles." By forcing William to accept a bill disbanding the army, Parliament showed how the Revolution had made a king dependent on a representative assembly, a humiliation (as Jones says) that was "inconceivable in any major European monarchy in the century before 1789." 25 If the Revolution had been about anything, it had been about religion, specifically, King James's Catholicism. William had been invited to England not as an adventurer or usurper but as a Protestant deliverer: as the recognized champion of the Protestant interest in Europe and as the only Protestant representative of the house of Stuart capable of securing the laws, liberties, and religion of the Protestant people of England from subversion by a Catholic king. 26 Consequently, apart from the dynastic issue, the centerpiece of the Revolution was the settlement regarding religion. In substance, the settlement of r 689 consisted of the famous Act of Toleration and the relevant provisions of the Bill of Rights and the Act for the Coronation Oath. The clauses relating to religion in the last two of these held unforeseeably profound legal implications for the future relations of sovereigns and subjects. The Bill of Rights terminated the Catholic Stuart claim to the throne, fixed the succession permanently in the Protestant line, and forbade members of the royal family to marry Catholics. These were unquestionably the most radical, innovative actions undertaken by Parliament in r689. Without precedent in English law or history,

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they could only be justified in politically pragmatic terms: "It hath been found by experience, that it is inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this protestant kingdom to be governed by a popish prince." 27 Catholic sovereigns (or even Protestant ones with Catholic spouses, like the first three Stuart kings) could no longer be trusted to preserve the liberties of their Protestant subjects. The result was to disbar James II, his son and grandsons (James III, Charles III, and Henry IX, respectively, the last of whom died in 1807), and all of the senior Catholic claimants from the related houses of Orleans, Savoy, and the Palatinate. This left, on the death in 1714 of Queen Anne, who was the last Stuart sovereign, no less than 57 Catholic males holding hereditary claims to the throne superior to that of Anne's Lutheran successor, George of Hanover. 2 B By making Protestantism, not primogeniture, a statutory provision governing the royal succession, the Bill of Rights dealt the divine right theory of monarchy a body blow from which it never recovered. Though pro-Williamite Tory apologists for the theory termed William's accession a miracle, kingship was now clearly empowered by man-made laws, not godly sanctions; kings and queens now had to follow a directive that originated not in heaven but in a statute. 29 The religion of the ruled determined the religion of the ruler-an arresting reversal of cuius regia, eius religio, the historic provision of the Treaty of Augsburg (15 55) by which Protestant and Catholic princes had settled the first phase of the Continental wars of religion. 30 The concept that Parliament could require, on behalf of the political nation, that a king hold to the same religion as his people was of great moment constitutionally. It implied a shift in the way in which sovereignty was actually employed, as well as a new view of the source of the people's rights. These implications were drawn out in a 1689 statute revising the coronation oath. The original Heads of Grievances had specified those areas where, in the framers' view, James II had infringed upon or overridden the rights and liberties of his subjects. Future kings and queens were to take an oath "for the maintaining of the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this nation; and the coronation oath [was] to be altered" accordingly.31 In the resulting act, the expected requirement that kings henceforth swear to maintain "the protestant reformed religion established by law" was amplified to require that in all matters of kingship the successors of William and Mary were to govern" according to the statutes in Parliament agreed on."32 If the Revolution can

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be said to have altered the seventeenth-century constitution, it was here that it did so. The Act for the Coronation Oath effectively changed the basis for the exercise of royal authority by making statute the guide for executive action. The result, observes J. R. Jones, was to distinguish the practices of what has been termed "office" monarchy in England from those of the "proprietary" monarchies in ancien regime Europe. 33 One need not revive the tenets of Whiggism to appreciate the nature of this change. Constitutionally, the Revolution established neither parliamentary sovereignty nor the limited, contractual kingship that some historians have read into r688-89. Sovereignty still resided in the king-in-parliament, 34 as it had under Henry VIII. Like Henry VIII, William III retained formidable prerogative powers. But if law fixed the king's religion (and so altered the royal succession), William's subjects, unlike Henry's, understood that the source of their rights must be the law and not, as had been the case before r689, the king's grace. This being so, the purpose of law was to secure those rights from encroachment by the king. In this important sense, as Howard Nenner has shown, the Revolution asserted, not a new definition of sovereignty, but a new concept of rights or liberties. 35 So it was that Protestantism, liberty, and law came to be related in the Bill of Rights and the oath for the coronation of William and Mary's successors. The dethronement of the Catholic Stuarts and the subsequent construction of legal prescriptions for the conduct of Protestant princes together presaged a sea change in the relations of parliaments and kings. The resolution in the Heads of Grievances calling for "the liberty of Protestants in the exercise of their religion; and for uniting all Protestants in the matter of public worship" 36 represented a radical solution to the problem of religious dissent in English society. Not only would dissent be tolerated; in this idealistic prescription, dissenters (chiefly Presbyterians, Baptists, and Quakers) would be comprehended within the Church of England. Toleration and comprehension, so much discussed during the Restoration, would be yoked in law. Of course such a formula affected only Protestants. What about Catholics, to whom William would have granted "an entire Liberty for the full Exercise of their Religion,"·37 just as James II had done for Catholics and Dissenters with his Declaration of Indulgence in r687? Not surprisingly, given the anti-Catholic mood of Parliament in r689, neither Whigs nor Tories were willing to extend such

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"an entire Liberty" to papists or, for that matter, to deists, atheists, or Jews, all of whom were finally excluded from the terms of the Act of Toleration. Only Dissenters were covered by the statute and only in a negative sense: they were simply exempted from the penalties of laws proscribing their public worship. The "toleration" of the act thus was not a positive right or liberty of conscience, but a narrow and limited "indulgence" granted to Protestant Nonconformists, something very far from the comprehension envisioned in the Heads of Grievances or William's own announced aim (in his first declaration) of establishing by law" a good agreement between the Church of England and all Protestant Dissenters." 38 John Spurr has shown why the Act of Toleration closed the doors of the Church of England to Dissenters in 1689, even to those who were most hopeful of comprehension, such as moderate Presbyterians. The Church of England "party" in Parliament, like the clergy in the lower house of Convocation, reckoned that "irreligious" dissent would lead to schism and so benefit papists who sought the destruction of Anglicanism. For High Anglicans, legalized toleration of dissent outside the church was bad enough, for it promoted "schism by law" in English society. But comprehension was far worse, as it imported the sin of schism into "the very bowels of the Church." Better to tolerate such sin outside the church than the divisiveness of dissent within.39 But King William, himself a vocal proponent of comprehension, also bears responsibility for its failure in 1689, for by alienating key politicians closely connected to the bishops and by seeming to favor dissenting ministers (especially Presbyterians) over the priests of the Church of England, he startled the Anglican clergy into nearly united opposition. When, on March 16, 1689, he proposed in a speech from the throne the abolition of the sacramental test for officeholders, he suddenly lost the support of both houses of Parliament as well. William's speech doomed his government's bill for a generous comprehension, a bill designed to go with another for toleration of a relatively few hard-liners who could be expected to reject admission to a comprehensive church. With comprehension dead, only toleration was saved, and in a negative form. The act did not render dissent acceptable, only nonpunishable, and instead of applying to a small number of intransigent Nonconformists, it was made to cover nearly half a million "respectable citizens," or about one-seventh of the population. 40 From this perspective, it would appear that the Act of Toleration

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was misnamed, for it actually hindered the cause of toleration. Indeed, the Revolution reversed the status that Catholics and Dissenters had enjoyed under the terms of James II's Indulgence of r687. Dissenters were required after r689 to pay tithes to the Church of England and Catholics and Dissenters remained barred from public office and the universities until the r82o's. Religious conflicts in the seventeenth century had fractured English society, and as W. A. Speck has said, the parliamentarians of r689 failed to address the causes of those deeply rooted divisions. 41 No doubt it was impossible, even unwise, for them to try to do so. In a sermon on "peace and unity" preached in November r689, King William's former adviser, Gilbert Burnet, the newly appointed bishop of Salisbury, contemplated the doctrinal differences separating Protestant conformists and Nonconformists. "It is not the Differences themselves that keep us asunder," he said; "they are too inconsiderable for that. It is a secret dislike that we bear to one another." 42 In fact some of those "Differences" were considerable-the Quakers' unique conception of an "inner light," for example, and the opposition of many Dissenters to a national church. The hatred, or secret dislike, of which Burnet spoke would be healed only with time and changes in hearts and minds. True toleration-the realization, as Johannes van den Berg has so sagely remarked, of the idea of tolerance43-suffered a setback in r689. On the other hand, progressive notions of tolerance were certainly much in the air: witness the publication in May of that year of John Locke's Letter on Toleration. Although there was no connection between Locke's tract and the events unfolding in London, 44 the ideas that the Letter promotedcomplete liberty of conscience and the public acceptance of all forms of worship (excluding Catholicism, of course)-were very close to those of King William, whose experience in the Netherlands (where Locke had composed the Letter) had, said Burnet, "made him look on toleration as one of the wisest measures of government." 45 The nature of William's personal religiosity remains debatable. G. V. Bennett's judgment that William's early education "had left him an informed and convinced Calvinist" is buttressed by a contemporary's assertion that he held "the point of Predestination the firmest that ever any man did." 46 It is also possible to argue that by seventeenth-century standards, William's expression of Calvinist belief was "decidedly tepid." 47 We know that the official respect he was bound to pay to the Church of England was almost certainly insincere.48 "Foolish" and "popish" characterized his sarcastic, contemptuous reaction to the Anglican rituals of his own coronation. 49

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In any case, if anything drove William's undeniably consistent policy of toleration for believers of all types, it was not, apparently, his own religious beliefs, but (as Jonathan Israel has argued) his international political interests. Those interests dictated that as he strove to check the French military juggernaut, he at all costs must not, in the eyes of great Catholic princes (such as the Emperor Leopold I, whose support or neutrality he sought), appear to be championing a specifically Protestant policy. 50 "King William's Toleration" (to use the contemporary phrase) was not so much the toleration of one who would save English Protestants from Catholic tyranny-though that is what William's propagandists put out for English consumption-as the politic toleration of one seeking to assure his powerful Catholic allies that he would safeguard the religion of English Catholics from attack by Catholic-bashing English Protestants. That is certainly what William, on the eve of his invasion, wanted Emperor Leopold and King Carlos II of Spain to believe, for, as William's Dutch backers soberly explained, theirs was not a war of religion against either King Louis or King James, but a classic guerre d'etat against France in which the Dutch-led anti-French coalition must first secure a stable English ally, an England rid of James and his destructive policies. 5-1 It is one of the great ironies of the Revolution that William, the erstwhile Protestant deliverer, had come to England (as he himself is reported to have confessed to his judges) "under an obligation to the Catholic Princes" to promote toleration for Catholics. 52 Blocked by the intransigence of those responsible for the Act of Toleration, an exasperated king, despite the law, nevertheless proceeded to implement de facto toleration by using his prerogative powers to thwart popular and ecclesiastical opposition to the religious practices of Dissenters and Catholics. The Act of Toleration required the licensing of Dissenters' places of worship. The subsequent proliferation of thousands of licensed Nonconformist congregations and meetinghouses testifies to the success of William's policy, 53 a policy that owed much to Dutch political interests forged in the international arena. 5 4 The relatively improved position of English Dissenters (and Catholics, too) in the 169o's suggests that the king's personal initiatives helped seed the liberty of conscience of which Locke and others had written. If so, Israel is surely right to argue that "King William's Toleration" inaugurated a decisive change in the intellectual and cultural life of the English-speaking peoples.ss However one reads the constitutional history of the period, the history of the politics of religious toleration demonstrates that the

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Revolution of r 688-89 was something more than merely a chapter in English or British politics. For reasons that should be obvious, William's sailing must be placed in a European setting. One must also accept that what happened was as much a Dutch as an English affair, and that the Dutch contribution was decisive. Anglocentric perspectives on a mythically "glorious" or a myopically "English" Revolution arguably should give way to descriptions of an Anglo-Dutch phenomenon. Students of real sociopolitical explosions-those in France (r 78999), Russia (1917), and China (1946-49), for example-might be forgiven for wondering what was so "revolutionary" about William and Mary's accession, which was by one reading little more than a polite resolution of aristocratic dissension. In England, no fundamental economic or social causes moved Whigs or Tories to action in r68889. Only the Tories, as John Miller has reminded us, possessed a coherent ideology, and it was decidedly counterrevolutionary. Tory doctrines exalted royal power, the sanctity of the law, and the obedience of the subject: an authoritarian prescription for the restless critics of hierarchy and heredity in state and society. 5 6 True, things changed dramatically at the top-a foreigner came to the throne in amphibious force-but the ruling dynasty, like the landed elites who supported the Stuarts, retained power. What relation did this bloodless business bear to the deeper transformations of the world of William and Mary? An answer has been proposed by those who argue that in England the true revolution of the seventeenth century occurred neither in the 164o's (the period of the civil wars) nor in the r6 so's (the era of the Commonwealth and Protectorate), but in the r69o's. 57 This revolution, part of the post-r689 settlement, marked the origins of the modern British state-the financial, military, and bureaucratic product of England's costly, incessant warfare against Louis XIV. 58 The centerpiece of this settlement was the founding of the Bank of England in r694.s9 Although private-it was capitalized chiefly with Dutch moneythe bank became an engine of public credit enabling the British to generate sufficient cash during the next century to defeat a far richer French adversary. (In popular parlance, this was the period of the second Hundred Years' War, spanning the years down to Waterloo.) Maintaining an armed Leviathan after r 689 required that the English mortgage their future. Because Parliament backed the bank's loans with public money, it was important that Parliament meet annually

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to approve the requisite taxes. Here was de facto control of the royal army, a powerful check on a willful sovereign. In the pages of the 169o's-in other words, in the textbook of wartime necessity-one can read the realities of limited monarchy. As J. G. A. Pocock has reminded us, there can be no doubt that by 1698, contemporaries appreciated the profound implications of the institutional changes wrought by King William's war making. 60 Fixing the epicenter of a seventeenth-century English revolution in the 169o's hardly negates the importance of what happened in 1649, when the officers of a parliamentary army destroyed the monarchy, or 1689, when Parliament changed the basis of the monarchical succession. But judged by its global effects, English history in the 169o's mattered more in the long run. Without the military and financial reorganization of those years, there would have been no worldwide British Empire. However, the birth in the 169o's of a tax-collecting British Leviathan-a permanently armed, bureaucratic, imperial monarchy-was itself a consequence of William III's conquest of England. Thanks to Louis XIV's expansionist war policy, the Dutch king of England was forced to assume the role of champion of the anti-French cause in the European theater of war. 61 It is impossible to imagine James II in that role, not because James lacked martial skills but because he so favored the French and the religion of the French. The key to events in I 688-89 was that Louis XIV launched an attack on Dutch merchants and the house of Orange at precisely the time in the seventeenth century when the English monarchy had become most favorably inclined toward France. When the Dutch-really a coalition of bourgeois and aristocratic Dutch interests-decided to retaliate, their first step was to split this Anglo-French alignment by invading England. In fact the commercial calculations of Amsterdam's mercantile elite in 1687-88 influenced the outcome of 1688-89 far more than the actions of Whigs or Tories, as Israel has persuasively argued. 62 In this interpretation, it was Franco-Dutch commercial friction that ultimately triggered William's armed expedition, just as Anglo-Dutch commercial competition had precipitated three earlier wars between England and Holland. For England, France, and Holland, and Spain as well, the stakes in this maritime struggle were colossal: access to the sea-lanes and to the slaves and goods of Africa, the Orient, and the Americas. 63 Until the 169o's the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch in succession had dominated this contest for trade across the world's oceans. By the late seventeenth century, Dutch hegemony in the

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world economy was greater than that of any commercial power before or since. 64 But by I?IS, colonial and commercial supremacythe basis of world dominion-had passed to the English. Thus, the Dutch military occupation of London in r688-89 signaled more than a dramatic turn in the dynastic affairs of Orange and Stuart. By harnessing England to his anti-French war machine, William of Orange forced English politicians to build the greatest militarycommercial engine the world had yet seen. Ever since the days of the Elizabethan imperialists (Raleigh, Dee, Hakluyt, Drake, and Harriot), the promotion of an English overseas empire could also be read in religious terms, as fulfillment of God's plan for the advancement of English Protestantism. For Tudor strategists, this was a religio-military crusade to be won at the expense of popish imperial might. The makers of the Revolution of r688-89 justified their vision of England's colonial and commercial future in similar terms. In this, it has been said, they were aided intellectually by latitudinarians in the Church of England. By an extraordinary coincidence, another revolution, this one in science, gave the latitudinarians a powerful new rationale for the argument that in fulfillment of England's post-Reformation imperial destiny, a revitalized church might lead the way to a prosperous millennium. The rationale-in the terms of James and Margaret Jacob's controversial thesis-was to be found in Newtonian mechanics. 65 In r687 Newton published his Principia mathematica, a capstone of Western thinking about space and matter. The ultimate effect of the Principia on educated minds was to sever forever the sympathies connecting celestial and terrestrial spheres; supernaturalism was now quite dead. It would be wrong, however, to think that Newton himself meant to advance a materialistic, secular understanding of the cosmos. From the Cambridge Neoplatonist Henry More, Newton had come to believe that although matter was lifeless, space must be spiritual because it was the indispensable medium of divine intercession. Gravity, a universal phenomenon whose effects could be described mathematically, provided scientific proof of the divine agency at work. Here (in the Jacobs' view) was a "Newtonian theology" that could be presented in defense of the Revolution itself: like gravity, the politics of r688-89 expressed God's handiwork. 66 Newton's own views on the presumed connections between divine action and Revolution politics remain conjectural. Politically, he probably espoused Whiggism; a member of the convention, he

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dined with Prince William in London and cast a vote confirming James's "abdication." Did he, like many others, see William's coming in religious terms? Millenarians in England and Holland certainly did; for them the Revolution announced a new age. In the Dutch Republic, those steeped in the prophetic tradition could suppose that having vanquished James, King William, a kind of Protestant Charlemagne, might yet return to liberate the continent from the papal Antichrist. 67 The religious expectations of English and Dutch millenarians are not so very far removed from the implications of a "Newtonian theology," a Neoplatonic outlook seemingly at odds with Newtonian mechanics. The story of the triumph of classical (Newtonian) mechanics, however, is too often narrowly told as the end of an inevitable progression in pure scientific thinking. In fact the mechanical tradition in science was then but one of three, and the mature Newton no doubt conceived of his most important work within a second tradition, one that we would call "magical." (The third employed organic models of growth and decay.) One aim of the magical tradition was to decipher by occult means a divinely implanted code thought to reveal the secrets of time and the physical universe. Like others, Newton assumed that this code lay hidden in numeric form in that handbook of the millennium, the Book of Revelation. Although the mechanical tradition in science eventually won out"magical" solutions to the puzzle obviously were based on a false set of assumptions-the fact that a scientist like Newton accepted those assumptions leads one to ponder the full nature of the Newtonian worldview. 68 The transformation of early modern European mentalities is usually associated with the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even among the educated, however, scientific knowledge was the preserve of but a few. Although science finally presented itself as the only means of rationally appreciating the world, the beginning of the end of superstition is, I think, better explained by the effects of the Reformation. In the sixteenth century it was Protestantism, not science, that first undermined supernaturalism, paving the way toward the calculating, practical skepticism that came to characterize most Western mentalities. The novelty of such an outlook sprang from the inherent tendency of Protestants to exalt reason as much as faith. Protestants, especially the radical ones-the heirs of John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli-dismantled the wonder-working apparatus of medieval Christianity. Here was

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the disenchantment of the world, a mental revolution still under way in the era of William and Mary. The transformation of Western mentalities that eventually spelled the end of witchcraft and a magical universe was but one aspect of a transatlantic world in the process of fundamental change. From this perspective, the political events of I688-89 deserve to be seen in a wider scope, as part of a great turning in Western culture and world history. The foregoing attempt to outline various interpretive contexts of the Revolution nevertheless begs an important question: How did it happen? In what follows, I will try to advance a new schema for analyzing the origins of William's "glorious enterprise" against England. 69 We ought to begin by recognizing that there were in fact two revolutions, or if one prefers, two distinct phases of the Revolution: one Dutch and one English. The first involved William's massive, virtually unopposed invasion of England from the southwest coast and the subsequent, heavily armed occupation of London by his Dutch guards. William concluded this military operation by ordering King James forcibly removed from Whitehall (by Dutch soldiers in the middle of the night of December I?-I8, I688) and escorted (again under the armed protection of the Dutch) to Rochester. There, after relaxing security and furnishing him with blank passports, William allowed the king to "escape" to France on the 23d. The English phase of the Revolution, which unfolded in the course of I689, essentially constituted a formal, negotiated response to the Dutch coup of December I688 (though it should be remembered that militarily, the Dutch occupation of London was not lifted until the spring of I69o). In this perspective, as Beddard has said, the work of the convention was of secondary importance because the outcome of the Revolution had already been determined at Windsor between December I2 and 17, I688, when William ordered the king taken prisoner. The understandable preoccupation of most historians with the English phase of the Revolution has obscured the primary importance and magnitude of Dutch military operations in I688, not to mention the political impact of the Dutch military presence in London during I 689 and the early part of I 690. By looking at the Revolution through the English end of the telescope, so to speak, viewers inevitably distort and diminish the big scene: the seaborne Dutch conquest of southern England. By every measure, this was the largest military maneuver of its kind since the end of the Roman Empire and, before the advent of the battleship, certainly the greatest such

The Anglo-Dutch Revolution of r688-89 operation ever launched in northern European waters. In scale, organization, financing, and sheer firepower-this includes the pieces of artillery actually put ashore-it dwarfed the forces of the fabled Spanish Armada. In 1588, Philip II threw r3r ships and 25,000 men against Elizabeth's England.7° In r688, William III launched 463 vessels and 4o,ooo soldiers and mariners against James II. The flotilla included 49 great men-of-war (with an average of 45 guns each) and hundreds of flutes and transports conveying tens of thousands of tons of munitions and stores-boots, bread, coats, and carbines for a landing force of 2r,ooo men; harnesses, saddles, fodder, and hay for s,ooo horses (r,ooo of which suffocated on the storm-tossed, abortive first crossing and had to be replaced); thousands of barrels of brandy, water, and beer; four tons of tobacco; and among the instruments of an extended authority, dies for casting William's own coins. The Dutch armada also carried the essential components of William's propaganda machine-a mobile printing press, printers, and copywriters.71 When the full dimensions of this gigantic enterprise became clear by the middle of October r688, there could be no doubt about its purpose. The Dutch, said the stunned English ambassador at The Hague, intended "an absolute conquest" of Stuart England.72 No historian, I believe, has ever quite grasped the relative magnitude of this Dutch military effort. Israel has shown that because William had to replace 14,ooo of his best Dutch troops (among the ones sent to England) with an equal number of German mercenaries for the defense of Holland, the stadholder in fact had doubled the size of the whole Dutch army by midsummer r688 to a level of about 4o,ooo soldiers, or about the number of all of James's forces. By October r688 he had doubled it again with the addition of more crack units of Germans and Swedes, three-fourths of whom were positioned to defend the Dutch homeland. 73 John Stoye has shown how William was able to acquire these regiments so quickly-by exploiting the existing north-German military system of recruitment and supply, a system in which the Dutch served as paymasters.74 To pay for the great Dutch armada and land forces, the merchants of the chief ports and cities of the United Provinces put up about 4 million guilders, with private Jewish millionaires (among them William's most valued confidants) putting up another 2 million. 75 Considering the population of the Protestant Netherlands-about I.9 million people in r68o 76 -this sudden outlay of national military-financial resources represented a staggering burden on the Dutch economy and people. With little more than a third

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of England's population of 5 million, the Dutch in r688 supported an army twice as large as James's. The relative financial and naval contribution of Holland, one olseven states of the confederation, was even greater, for it was in the cities of Holland (with a population of about 87s,ooo) that William drew his greatest support. Amsterdam, for example, outfitted 3 I of William's 49 great warships, and Rotterdam another 9. 77 In comparative terms, because Holland was less than one-fifth as populous as England, the Dutch citizens of that province shouldered a military-financial burden in 1688 perhaps ten times as great as that of their English counterparts. William's invasion was truly a Dutch effort requiring an extraordinary investment of national energy and resources. The Dutch merchant classes were not fighting over the prince's private dynastic quarrel, important though that issue was for William. They were fighting for their survival as a nation, a struggle that persuaded them to adopt William's strategy of invasion. The size of William's forces and the manner in which he deployed them clearly suggest that his plan of engagement was designed to achieve three successive objectives. The first two-the neutralization of James's army and the encirclement of London-were military and were aimed at achieving the third, the supreme political objective of reducing the king to the status of a pawn. It was crucial to demoralize James and his commanders by sheer dint of numbers. Because this plan worked so well, James apparently lacked the will to resist his nephew by military means; the king's retreat from Salisbury Plain (November 23, 1688) seems to confirm that. In fact, James initially elected to fight at Salisbury and was only persuaded against it by the nearly unanimous advice of his chief officers, some of whom had secretly agreed to go over to William's side. In exile James correctly claimed that his soldiers' inexperience and officers' suspect loyalty had dictated retreat. Recently revised estimates of the amount and type of arms available to both sides supplies another reason. If at Salisbury James actually mustered only about half of all of the British forces existing on paper-that is, about 19,ooo out of a total of 38,ooo or so 78 -he faced an invader of equal or superior numbers, for William's regiments, it is now thought, counted a total of about 21,ooo infantry, cavalry, artillerymen, and foreign mercenaries. 79 Moreover, William held a decisive edge in quality of men and firepower. His more experienced elite guards, the heart of the Dutch fighting force, exhibited matchless morale, and overall his army

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possessed superior weaponry-more and better field guns, and muskets of an advanced design. 80 It is little appreciated that James II lacked sufficient men and guns to beat back William's invading force. But did James know this? (Did William? He expected that many of James's men would not fight.) Certainly James's logistics, field intelligence, and communications were poor; rains had slowed down his posts and runners, and he had gathered insufficient fodder and provisions. 81 It is also true that at Salisbury, James was a sick man: severe (psychosomatic?) nosebleeds, triggered by worry and loss of sleep, precipitated a nervous collapse. That he initially insisted on fighting is therefore remarkable, though not out of character, for he was, after all, a soldier by training. The reputation he earned with the Vicomte de Turenne in France in the I65o's and at sea against the Dutch in I665, for example, shows him to have been a cool, courageous commander. James II may have been stiff and unimaginative, but he was no coward. At Salisbury he might have put up a fight. For various reasons he did not, handing William a victory almost by default. Relying upon psychology to explain this, one commentator concluded that "believing defeat to be inevitable he made it so." 82 History, not psychology, suggests that even in health, James could not have countered William's formidable power on Salisbury Plain. Retreat at Salisbury, however, does not explain how James lost his realm. It was never his intention to abdicate; he said he had read the history of Richard Il's deposition and was determined not to suffer a similar fate. 83 With respect to what happened on English soil after William's landing, the pivotal event was the king's deliberate, wholly unexpected decision to leave England in the early hours of December I I. As is well known, his attempt to embark secretly for Paris failed. (He got as far as Feversham, in Kent, where a band of Protestant seamen seized him. Loyalist guards returned him to London.) James's abortive flight caught his friends and William by surprise, for until that moment all parties had reckoned that Stuart and Orange would be able to come to terms to preserve James's kingship. Before December I I, William harbored no plan to topple the king-at least there is no evidence of any such plan. The role of usurper did not suit him; he had no interest in meddling in English politics; and in any case he had given Mary his word-and this was a matter of honorable importance to him-that he would bring no harm to James, her father. The chief purpose of William's expedition of November I 688 was

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to overawe James, to persuade him by a show of force to bring the English army and navy into the allied, anti-French camp. A keen observer of English politics, William reckoned that a free Parliament, not one packed in the way James was endeavoring to do in r687, would almost certainly agree to finance his use of English arms against Louis XIV. In early December, with thousands of the best Dutch foot and cavalry in London backing his demands-he had pushed all threatening English troops well away from the capitalthe prince expected James to agree to negotiate the terms of the prospective British commitment. By fleeing on the eleventh, however, James signaled his rejection of any such negotiations, leaving William an open path to the throne. 84 Exactly when William decided to seize James's crown is unknown. If Beddard is correct, the decision came swiftly on the twelfth, immediately after the prince obtained news of James's flight. 85 Perhaps, as Stephen Baxter once speculated, William had already foreseen "the actual result of the invasion." In her Memoire, Mary implied that William invaded England with the intention of dethroning James. In retrospect this may have been a self-fulfilling wish, because by 1686 she was certainly hoping that William would one day be king. 86 James himself said on November 27, r688, that he thought William had come to England for the crown. Though one suspects that William must have considered this possibility beforehand, the remark clearly tells us more about the king's state of mind than the prince's discoverable aims. Whatever the case, the public actions of English officials clearly confirm the finality of what William had done, for by December r8, when they knew James was in William's custody, they began greeting the prince symbolically and ceremonially as if he were king. 87 Of William's capacity so to act there can be no doubt. The prince's famed reserve and seeming aloofness are misleading; beneath the discipline and control was, as the French already knew, a man of exceptional "spirit and application." 88 At once pragmatic and opportunistic, William gambled from both strength and conviction. The launching of the "Grand Design" against England, especially the extremely dangerous cross-Channel sailing (undertaken in the wrong season after an initial stormy failure), shows the depth of his risktaking resolve. This resolve, clearly maturing in the early I 68o's, was apparently born of the conviction that Providence had set him the task of stopping French aggression. He would do this by building and leading a European coalition. The conquest of England was one part-

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the key part-of the politico-military strategy that sprang from this vision. Given the requirements of the strategy, it was, as Simon Groenveld has said, a vision that impelled William "to run greater risks than, humanly speaking, could be considered acceptable." 89 But in this great work God had already shown his hand; in r672, at the age of 22, William had saved the United Provinces by halting Louis XIV's advance very near the gates of Amsterdam, making himself not only the savior of the Dutch nation, but also (as some believed) the designated defender of international Protestantism. Although made in response to unforeseen, local circumstances, his decision to seize James, a pro-French Catholic king, and force him into exile might just as well be read from William's strategic point of view as but a necessary step in the fulfillment of a larger design. After all, becoming king of England was not his life's aim; contesting France was the real goal, and taking James's throne became a means to that end. "The sole consolation that I have is that God knows it is not my own ambition that makes me act" was the way he explained it to a confidant, Count Waldeck, on January I, I689. 90 William's decisiveness at Windsor in mid-December should not suprise us. It speaks volumes about those around James that they did not see the blow coming; the Dutch found the king asleep in his bed. What needs to be explained is James's motive in flight, not on December 23 when, as a deposed sovereign, he was allowed to leave his realm, but on the eleventh, when as king he decided to leave. The decision of December I r was almost certainly that of a father and king concerned for the safety of his six-month-old son and heir, James Francis Edward, the prince of Wales (b. June IO, r 688 ). By about December 9, James had convinced himself that radical Whigs meant to kill the infant prince. "'Tis my son they aim at and 'tis my son I must endeavour to preserve whatever becomes of me," he said. 91 It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that the king cared more for what his son embodied-the future of the Catholic Stuart succession and hence the Catholic faith in England-than he did for the English polity. His decision to escort his son secretly to France underscores his perception of the religio-dynastic implications of William's landing. William, he knew, wanted only to change royal policy, whereas the Whigs, who opposed William's desire to negotiate with the king, wanted to alter the royal succession. Hence on the eleventh James could not have foreseen William's audacious resolve to steal a crown he almost certainly had no intention of surrendering. Having taken his son to a safe French haven, James probably reckoned on returning

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to England. By throwing the Great Seal in the Thames and destroying the writs for a Parliament that he himself had called (for January r 5, r689), he meant to make all parties in England, including William, dependent on him. For he knew that one of the objects of the free Parliament demanded by Protestants was an investigation of the circumstances of his son's birth. In his absence, without royal warrant, there could be no Parliament, and hence no investigation. The Protestant canard that his son was a changeling smuggled into the queen's bed in a warming pan was an insult to his dignity, majesty, and blood. Three centuries of history written in hindsight make it difficult to accept that William and Mary could believe the Prince of Wales to be a supposititious baby. Certainly Mary believed it because, like many others, she thought the king a syphilitic no longer capable of fathering a healthy child. The faking of the queen's pregnancy constituted an outrageous plot to rob her and her husband of their rightful places in the Stuart succession. Worse, by perpetuating the Catholic ascendancy, this dynastic deception, if allowed to stand, would destroy the true church in England. Such, at any rate, was Mary's (and Princess Anne's) unshakable conviction. 92 Was it William's as well? Although his personal views on the matter are not known, William's public utterances conformed to Mary's private conviction. From The Hague on September 30, r688, William announced as one of the reasons for his armed appearance in England the need to inquire about the birth of the "pretended" heir. It was a matter, he said, in which he and Mary held "so great an interest ... , and such a right, as all the world knows, to the Succession to the Crown."93 Because William was capable of the greatest dissimulation-the contradictions of his propaganda addressed respectively to Protestant and Catholic audiences provide ample evidence of this-one must treat such public pronouncements with care. Most commentators have regarded this aspect of the Hague declaration as nothing more than a cynical pretext for the invasioni William, it is said, knew perfectly well that the Prince of Wales was legitimate. 94 In fact, we cannot be sure of this. William possessed no evidence to refute widespread Protestant suspicions that Mary of Modena's pregnancy was a monstrous Catholic trick. His wife had first heard the reports of those suspicions in December r687, and as late as April r688, when she was with William at Het Loa, she received from England what appeared to be a confirmation of the attempted fraud. 95 The cru-

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cial consideration is not whether William also believed the queen's condition to have been faked-perhaps he did in April r688 but later came to disbelieve it-but that the news of late 1687, true or false, steeled him to take action. Although he was primarily motivated to invade England by strategic considerations, the same reasons of state that compelled the seven independent Dutch states to back his expedition, the private, dynastic issue was very much to the fore of his thinking. It figured prominently in the confidential presentation he made to the States General of Holland when he sought formal approval of his plan. The States' own final, secret resolution of support for the invasion explicitly recognized the personal interest that both William and Mary held in such a great undertaking. 96 The fact is that William's dynastic interests were inseparably entwined with his grand strategy of swinging England into the antiFrench coalition. His marriage to Mary in 1677 was very much a part of that strategy. The ambitious dual purpose of the match was to advance his chances of inheriting the English crown and to exploit the favor of English parliamentarians whose expressed desire in 1677, contrary to the wishes of Charles II, was to assist the Dutch in their life-and-death struggle with France. In English-oriented accounts of this episode, it is said that the marriage was arranged by Charles II's chief minister, the earl of Danby, as a means of defusing a financial controversy then raging between king and Parliament. Charles had rejected Parliament's demand that, as a condition of voting him supply, he assist the Dutch militarily against the French. By tying Protestant Mary to the Dutch house of Orange, Danby, it is argued, gratified the parliamentary warlords who so much admired William, the perceived champion of international Protestantism after 1672. For an appreciation of what happened in 1688, however, the politics of the marriage in 1677 are best understood as part of a Dutchcentered design, for William, not Danby, had first sought the match. 97 The trauma of r672 had shown the prince that in the face of Louis XIV's aggression, the Dutch could not, as a matter of policy, tolerate an indifferent England. For William, England was the means to an end, the containment of France. In the late 167o's it was William's genius to perceive, contrary to contemporary political wisdom (as well as Louis's arrogant opinion), that in the expected second round against the French, England's untapped military potential would be decisive. 98 If England was potentially of central importance in Europe, William must be able to influence Charles Il's foreign policy.· This is what he expected his marriage to enable him to do. But it did

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not do so to the degree that he had expected. By r682, on the eve of renewed hostilities between France and Holland, Charles's "insufferable" isolationism had become, in William's own despairing words, "the principal cause of our present dangers." 99 The French attack on the Spanish Netherlands in r682 placed neighboring Holland once again in the gravest peril, so grave that in William's estimation "the situation at the end of this year will perhaps be even worse than in 1672!" 100 Despite the crisis, William was unable to persuade the burghers of Amsterdam to finance his request for r6,ooo additional troops. Perhaps the refusal led Louis XIV mistakenly to conclude that the aristocratic young stadholder was incapable of coordinating the interests of fearful bourgeois regents who lacked the will to resist further French expansion. 101 If so, this was a serious miscalculation, for Louis's subsequent decision to wage economic war against Dutch shipping eventually convinced those same regents of the linkage between the defense of their private mercantile interests and a Dutch state policy of offensive military operations against France. This linkage brings us to the root of the foreign origins of the Anglo-Dutch Revolution: Louis XIV's territorial ambitions along the Rhine and the guerre de commerce between Holland and France, a war that Louis launched in August r687, just one month before James II's queen conceived the child who should have become James III. The near coincidence of these events, a matter of sheer cosmic chance, ultimately triggered the decisions that set William's expedition in motion. In chronological order, the first of those decisions, as we have seen, was the prince's private resolve to intervene forcibly in English affairs, a decision he made not later than December r687, when he heard about Mary of Modena's pregnancy. We know this because early in r688, without consulting the States General, William simultaneously began directing two secret, overlapping operations: in Holland, the recruitment of troops for an invasion; and in England, via his well-established network of spies and allies, the Orangist conspiracy that produced, by the following June, the famous "invitation" of seven English peers (who, for their put-up work, were to be rendered "Immortal" by Whig propagandists). 102 Because of the timing, the decision to risk an invasion conveys a hint of princely desperation. Though he was technically assured of the defection of key English army officers, until October r688 William lacked the two essentials without which he knew he could not

The Anglo-Dutch Revolution of 1688-89

25

force James II's hand: the political backing of the States of Holland and money enough to pay for the requisite guns, ships, and horses. That he obtained both by October 1688 is explained by Louis XIV's blundering treatment of Dutch traders. 103 The background of this story is framed by armed French expansionism in the 167o's, the threat of which was only temporarily halted by the Treaty of Nijmegen (1678). By the terms of the treaty, which Dutch merchants favored and William opposed, the French traded economic concessions to the Dutch-principally a repeal of tariffs on French exports and duties on Dutch imports-for territorial gains. As a result of these economic concessions, Dutch shippers, during the ten years after Nijmegen, regained at the expense of French merchants the supremacy they had once enjoyed in the carrying of French goods, while Dutch producers once again profited by the export of Dutch products to French markets. In France the consequent economic losses in the early 168o's increased the pressure for state action against Holland, pressure that became greater when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes (1685), so bleeding France all the more by causing the flight abroad of Huguenot capital and expertise. The Franco-Dutch commercial war of 1687-88 began when France reimposed the earlier duties and tariffs and banned from France a variety of Dutch imports. Within four or five months of this action, William, fearful that England would forever be lost to proFrench, Catholic forces, independently set in motion his scheme to intervene in England on behalf of Dutch-leaning parliamentarians. This decision was unquestionably an extraordinary gamble. For although as stadholder he might expect to be able to command some ships and soldiers, he did not direct the sovereign affairs of the Holland regents, some of the most important of whom, in Amsterdam, had traditionally opposed his forthright strategy of checking France by military means. Without the support of the burgomasters of Amsterdam, William had no hope of implementing his ambitious scheme of knocking out France by first seizing England. He must therefore persuade the States of the urgency of his plan. But how? He claimed that Louis XIV and James II were secretly plotting to destroy Holland-an outrageous piece of propaganda that played upon the sixteenth-century Orangist myth of a renewed Catholic crusade against the Protestant Dutch, a myth consonant with the fearful memories of 1672. And who in Holland did not remember that the queen of England had been a French protegee? 104 Although fabricated, William's assertion of a secret plot seemed to gain credence when, in

Dale Hoak the last week of September, Louis suddenly seized more than roo Dutch ships then lying in French ports. When Louis invaded the Rhineland in the same month, the councilors of Amsterdam secretly joined other representatives of the States of Holland at The Hague on September 29 to give formal approval to William's Grand Design. 105 From this it should be clear, in conclusion, that the Anglo-Dutch Revolution was not a parliamentary revolution, but a dynastic putsch undertaken on behalf of the Protestant Stuarts by a Dutch prince in concert with powerful Dutch commercial interests. In England, the Revolution succeeded-and civil war was avoidedbecause the Tories, remembering the violence of the 164o's, refused to defend their king. Two unrelated events in r688 determined the onset of the Revolution: the birth of the Prince of Wales in June and Louis XIV's surprise arrest of Dutch shipping in September. The first sparked William of Orange into action and the second, which sent shock waves through mercantile circles in Holland, persuaded the States General of the United Provinces to adopt William's plan of invading England, "by sea from whence the very heart of the French power may be reached." 106 Although the resulting expedition fulfilled the prince's dynastic ambitions as well as his vision of building a grand anti-French coalition, William's designs on England were for the most part approved, financed, and organized by merchant oligarchs in Holland, especially those in Amsterdam. The aim of these merchants was to preserve the supremacy of the Dutch trading system on the high seas. As developed by William, their strategy-for that is what it was, a well-financed, farseeing politico-commercial strategy-was dictated by reasons of state, the security of the Protestant Netherlands. 107 To make the Netherlands secure against French aggression, it was necessary that England put its army and navy at the disposal of the Dutch. That, of course, is what William and some English parliamentarians had wanted Charles II to do. In r677 Mary Stuart was sent to Holland to promote that cause; in r 689 she returned to England as the queen who embodied it. William III's extraordinary accession to the English throne brought England into the Nine Years' War, a war that catapulted the English nation onto the world scene. Here, ultimately, was the meaning of the Anglo-Dutch Revolution of r688-89.

W A. Speck

Some Consequences of the Glorious Revolution

T

he celebrations of the tercentenary of the Glorious Revolution were curiously muted in England. Partly they were upstaged by the qua tercentenary of the Spanish Armada, which undoubtedly captured the popular imagination far more. People could identify themselves with a straight fight between Elizabethan England and Habsburg Spain. Moreover, they knew which side they were on, or at least would have been on. By contrast, it was not clear what the Revolution was all about, much less what taking sides would have involved. Those who took the trouble to try to find out were uncomfortable about celebrating an event in which Protestants had triumphed over Roman Catholics, leaving the "Papists" deprived of full civil rights for another century and a half. These religious scruples made the commemoration of the Revolution in 1988 rather different from the first in 1788 or even the second in r888. Perhaps religion also explains why politicians, who had less excuse to plead ignorance, were as unenthusiastic as the general public. The problems of Ulster-where the enmity between the Catholic King James and the Protestant "Prince Billy," far from being dead and buried, seems if anything more frighteningly alive now than evergave at least some political leaders pause about joining in celebrations of William of Orange's victory. The historical world was similarly ambivalent about the significance of the events of r688-89. Whereas previous centenaries could celebrate the events of those years as a Glorious Revolution, most historians these days believe they scarcely reflect much glory on the

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participants, and many doubt that they were particularly revolutionary. The certainties of the prevalent Whig interpretation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which the replacement of James II by William and Mary was seen as a transition from absolutism and even tyranny to parliamentary monarchy, were challenged by contrasting explanations of seventeenth-century English history. Thus Marxist historians had long held the view that the truly significant shift in constitutional history occurred with the emergence of a capitalist over a feudal mode of production, which resulted in the triumph of the bourgeoisie in the civil wars and interregnum between r642 and r66o. Thereafter a bourgeois polity was entrenched which easily survived the attempts of the later Stuarts to eradicate it. The Revolution merely set the seal on the fundamental changes that had occurred earlier in the century. Recently historians arguing from a more conservative viewpoint have asserted that, despite the political upheavals of the period, they resulted in no long-term change in England's political or social systems. On the contrary, from the Restoration of r66o to the reforms ushered in by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in r828, and above all by Catholic emancipation in r829, England displayed all the characteristics of an ancien regime. That is, it retained absolute monarchy, a confessional state, and an aristocratic ruling class. 1 Counterfactual historians seeking to measure the outcome of certain developments postulate what would have happened if they had not occurred. This is always a dubious exercise at best. Even in the more controllable field of economic history, where quantities can be measured and added to or subtracted from the historical reality and the hypothetical model, there is always more than one alternative set of opportunity costs. In politics the might-have-beens are immeasurable and innumerable. Yet it is not altogether idle to speculate what might have occurred had there been no Revolution. On the contrary, there is some truth in the claim that all history is implicitly counterfactual. When we make assertions such as attributing the outbreak of civil war in r 642 primarily to the intransigence and untrustworthiness of Charles I, we are by implication arguing that if the king had been more agreeable and trustworthy, civil war would not have broken out then. The Revolution of r688 happened because enough Englishmen were worried about the effects of James Il's policies to invite William of Orange to intervene in England's affairs and to rally to his call for a free Parliament when he arrived. Their stance was vital to the sue-

Some Consequences of the Glorious Revolution

3I

cess of the Revolution in the British Isles. There were not enough Scots ready to resist the king to effect a revolution in Scotland without the lead from England. Even then they had to fight a civil war to safeguard the revolution settlement there. In Ireland there was not so much a revolution or even a civil war as a conquest of the Catholics by the prince of Orange and his Protestant allies. It took William's military victory over James at the battle of the Boyne to retain Ireland as part of the new king's dominions. English resistance to James II was thus crucial to the success of the Revolution in all three kingdoms. And this resistance was far from inevitable, for Englishmen were reluctant revolutionaries in 1688. The vast majority had been steeped in the Anglican doctrines of passive obedience and nonresistance-the sinfulness of opposing the Lord's anointed on any pretext whatsoever-since the Restoration of Charles II. Even those not swayed by such ideological considerations had learned from the bitter experiences of the civil war that the results of resistance could be worse than submission to the royal will. James and his advisers relied on this reluctance, anticipating that it would generate sufficient in~rtia among his subjects for him to succeed in his aims. What those aims were is a matter of debate. Some argue that James only sought religious toleration, and that he was forced to resort to the royal prerogative to achieve this when Parliament refused to cooperate with the king to achieve it. 2 However, his intentions with regard to the Roman Catholics went far beyond mere toleration. He also sought, as he told the French ambassador, to establish the Catholic church in England. The appointment of Catholic Fellows to Magdalen College, Oxford, and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, was presumably intended to convert the colleges into seminaries for the training of a Catholic priesthood. His reception of four vicars apostolic appointed by the pope also suggests the establishment of the Catholic church. The legal monopoly of the Church of England as by law established was thus to be removed. 3 To James's Anglican subjects this was to subvert the law. By behaving as though he was above the law James was acting arbitrarily, even absolutely. Contemporaries distinguished between arbitrary or absolute monarchy on the one hand and tyranny on the other. Absolute kings were not tyrants, because they were accountable to God-not that the distinction made much difference in practice, because they were not accountable to their subjects. In stressing their divine, indefeasible, hereditary right and their subjects' duties of passive

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obedience and nonresistance, the Stuarts were no less absolutist in theory than the Bourbons. Moreover, they emulated the French kings in practice, and not just to achieve religious objectives. They sought to enhance the power of the Crown for its own sake, too. The purging of the judiciary, the interference in local administration and government, above all the growth of the standing army-all paralleled developments in contemporary France. Some of James II's subjects drew the parallel explicitly. Thus the regulators of corporations were compared with intendants, while the use of the army to teach citizens loyalty was likened to the French king's employment of dragoons to persuade Huguenots to conform. 4 If James had got his own way, therefore, there would have been toleration for all religious denominations prepared to live peaceably with one another and to pledge allegiance to the Crown. Roman Catholics would not only have been tolerated but would have exercised authority out of all proportion to their numbers, because the king would have controlled all administrative and judicial appointments and dismissals. He would have ensured that any Catholic who sought office obtained it. His will would have been upheld by a standing army and ultimately by a packed Parliament. Whether James would have succeeded in his campaign to pack Parliament is also disputed. Some historians are convinced that he was within sight of his goal, and that had the abortive elections of September r 688 been allowed to go their full course, they would have resulted in a majority prepared to uphold the king's policies. 5 Others are more skeptical, persuaded by the evidence from individual constituencies (some of which actually did have contests) that the campaign still had a long way to go before a successful outcome would have been guaranteed. 6 Contemporaries too were divided. Sir John Bramston was very dubious about the prospects of a Jacobite Parliament, because "people would not be so mad as to send to Parliament such representatives as would cut their own throats." 7 Yet many were so apprehensive that James might pull off the feat, that it persuaded them more than anything else to acquiesce in the invasion of William of Orange, being assured that he came to call a "free" Parliament. For opponents of James's absolutist tendencies, the prospect of a packed Parliament was the last straw. They argued that neither in theory nor in practice were English monarchs absolute. While few were prepared to go so far as to assert that there was an implied

Some Consequences of the Glorious Revolution

33

contract between the monarchs and their subjects, many were nevertheless of the view that historically the Crown was limited by common and statute law. Monarchs were accountable not only to God but to Parliament. But if Parliament could be reduced to an instrument of the royal will, then the concept of accountability would become a sham. The relationship of the Crown to Parliament was thus at the heart of the Revolution. The later Stuarts avoided answering to Parliament, which almost ceased to exist for much of the r68o's. After r68r Charles II failed to summon it, in defiance of the Triennial Act of r 664, and only his unexpected death in r685 brought about a meeting of the Houses subsequent to the accession of his brother. James II dismissed them toward the end of that year, and after dissolving them in July r687 he sought to transform the Commons into an instrument of the royal will. His attempt to pack Parliament was only called off when he realized that William of Orange was about to invade in earnest. In r689 the Bill of Rights stated that elections to Parliament ought to be free. That is often taken to have been no more than the expression of a pious hope. Certainly the Revolution did not bring an end to government interference in the constituencies. On the contrary, under the Hanoverians such interference was developed to such a fine art that it could be said the Court never lost an election in the eighteenth century. Yet Robert Walpole, for all his wire-pulling skills, never tried to regulate the boroughs as James II had done. He relied on influence and patronage to persuade borough patrons to support Court candidates; he did not embark on a systematic campaign to reduce the Commons to a cipher. Something of the impact of the Revolution on the electoral process can be established from the experience of the city of London. During the years r679 to r68r the capital had become a power base for the Whigs. Consequently Charles II determined to smash their hold on the city and to replace them with loyal supporters. In Decemher r68r, therefore, a writ of quo warranto was delivered to the sheriffs, ostensibly to ascertain whether or not London had abided by the terms of its royal charter, so that it could be recalled should any technical infringement be established. It was not hard to ascertain such a breach; the city was charged with passing an illegal bylaw enabling the collection of tolls from people entering the markets. The city answered this charge in King's Bench early in r683. One of the chief points raised in the trial was whether the right of London to act as a corporation was solely dependent upon the grant of the

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Crown or was an inalienable right of the citizens. Crown lawyers argued that the king conferred the privilege of acting as a body corporate by grace and favor. Privileges conceded by the Crown could be revoked by the Crown. Counsel for the city maintained that a charter once granted could never be forfeited. By its nature a corporation could never die. Cities were immortal. Legally there can be little doubt that the Crown had a cast-iron case. Charters were indeed granted by kings, who could revoke them. At the same time, the motive behind Charles's move was clearly political rather than judicial. The charter of London was not recalled because an illegal bylaw had been passed but because the Whigs were in power there. Charles was not only using the Crown's legitimate powers; he appeared to be abusing them. The Revolution was to mark a major change in the way rights and liberties were regarded. The notion that they were privileges granted by the monarch gave way to the concept that they were natural or civil rights. The old idea was conveyed in the use of the word "liberties" in the plural, the new by the more common use of the singular "liberty." In this transition the proceedings against the charter of the city of London played a vital part. In the short run, of course, the Crown won. The judges ruled that a charter could be forfeited and that "the taking of the Toll by the illegal bye-law and the libellous petition were a good cause of forfeiture." Consequently the "privilege" to form a corporation was forfeited to the king. Charles now had the power to appoint a royal commission to govern the city; by virtue of this power he could appoint lords mayor, sheriffs, and aldermen. Naturally he chose loyal supporters. 8 The city was thus governed by royal officials from r683 to r688. During these five years no elections were held and no Common Council sat. Not only did the city lose its charter, but all the livery companies lost theirs, too. These companies normally elected members of Parliament. When James II came to the throne, therefore, and summoned a Parliament, he ordered twelve livery companies to select liverymen, who returned four loyal aldermen as "representatives" for London. The political aim of the quo warranto proceedings had been well and truly obtained. Whig control of the capital was thoroughly smashed, and the Whigs' opponents entrenched in their place. A city with a proud tradition of running its own affairs had been reduced in constitutional terms to an instrument of the royal will. The Stuarts had alienated their subjects in their own capital to the point where many would prefer William of Orange to James II.

Some Consequences of the Glorious Revolution

35

The effects of William's intervention were remarkable. James panicked and granted many concessions to his aggrieved subjects, including the restoration of London's charter. The years when the capital had been run like a mere village, with no elections, came to an abrupt end. Between October r688 and June 1690, as Gary de Krey has observed, "most London liverymen were presented with twelve or thirteen electoral opportunities."9 The transformation in the fortunes of the city was perhaps the most prominent manifestation of the change of direction brought about by events in r688. Because the transition began before the prince's invasion, it is worth taking the counterfactual inquiry a stage further and asking whether it signified a change of mind on the part of James II. In addition to restoring borough charters and aborting the general election, he dismissed Catholics from office, reinstated the Fellows of Magdalen College, and disbanded the commission for ecclesiastical causes. "Nothing seems wanting but a free parliament," one newsletter writer noted, "and then I can't see what the prince will do." 10 Had the Revolution not occurred at this stage, something like the situation James had inherited from his brother in r6Ss would have been restored. The regime would have rested on the base of the Tory gentry and the Anglican clergy. What their attitude toward Whigs and Dissenters would have been is problematical. In the reaction to the Exclusion Crisis, they had aided the Crown in its proscription of Whiggery and zealously enforced the laws against dissent. Since then, however, they had been chastened as James had abandoned them and built up an alternative power structure in alliance with former exclusionists and Nonconformists. Anglicans had countered his appeal by offering Dissenters toleration based on statute rather than edict. Their genuine conversion to this policy can be seriously questioned, but as long as the threat from Catholicism persisted, they would probably have honored their commitment. 11 Probably, therefore, had James agreed to rule on these terms, there would have been a Tory regime such as had obtained in the early r68o's, mitigated by a degree of toleration for Dissenters and presumably for Catholics too. It is clear, however, that James had not the slightest intention of ruling on conditions laid down by his Anglican subjects. Even while he was making concessions to them, he was making arrangements to send his wife and infant son into safety in France. Had he successfully resisted William of Orange's invasion, he himself admitted that he would have been "absolute master to doe what he pleased." 12 There would have been no conditions then. When he failed to fight

W. A. Speck

William he made further halfhearted concessions but resolved to flee at the first opportunity. He would never have willingly accepted limitations on the power of the Crown such as the Revolution effected. That the Revolution stipulated any such limits has been denied. Instead it has been claimed that it marked a change of monarch but not of the monarchy. The assertion has even been made that William III was an absolute king. Yet contemporaries were aware that the nature of the monarchy had changed abruptly. One sign of this is the general agreement in the convention that the throne was in fact vacant. The interregnum from December r688 to February I689, during which William exercised the administration of the government, is unique in English constitutional history. (Charles II had dated his accession from January 30, 1649, the day of his father's execution, not from the start of his effective reign in r66o.) William himself would have found ironically amusing the proposition that he was absolute. One of the attributes of absolutism was the keeping of a standing army entirely under the king's command. While purporting to be declaring the king's legal powers, the Bill of Rights made the maintenance of a professional armed force in peacetime dependent upon the approval of Parliament. Initially this did not concern the post-Revolution regime, because it was at war with France until I 697. Thereafter, however, it very much concerned the king. He wished to maintain an army of at least 30,ooo men during the ensuing peace. Parliament used the powers it had claimed in r689 to reduce the armed forces to Io,ooo in I697 and to 7,ooo in I698. It is hard to see in what sense William, who contemplated abdication after this double rebuke, was absolute. On the contrary he was very much limited by Parliament. Though the drive toward absolutism which brought about the Revolution can be attributed to Charles II as well as to his brother, the religious issues that provoked it were mostly attributable to the activities of James II. James sought complete toleration for his fellow Roman Catholics. In order to achieve this goal he had to undermine the privileges of the established church. For England was a confessional state in the sense that Anglicans enjoyed three monopolies: of worship, of power, and of published opinion. The monopoly of worship was upheld by the legislation of the Cavalier Parliament erroneously known as the Clarendon Code: the Act of Uniformity of I662, the Conventicle Acts of r664 and r67o, and the Five Mile Act of I 6 6 5. Together these assured that Anglicanism, including subscription to all of the Thirty-nine Articles, re-

Some Consequences of the Glorious Revolution

37

mained the official orthodoxy, and that deviations from it, Protestant as well as Catholic, were proscribed. The monopoly of power was ensured in boroughs by the Corporation Act of I66I and for offices under the Crown by the Test Act of I673, both of which restricted posts in local and national government to Anglican communicants. And the monopoly of published opinion was guaranteed by the Licensing Act of I 66o, which created a system of state censorship whereby, for example, any publication on religious topics had to receive the imprimatur of a bishop. Charles II had objected to the narrowness of the religious settlement enacted in the legislation of the I66o's and had twice tried to ameliorate its consequences by issuing Declarations of Indulgence immunizing Nonconformists from prosecution under the laws. On both occasions he had been reprimanded by the House of Commons, which passed the Test Act following the second declaration. Thereafter Charles abandoned attempts to relieve the lot of Dissenters by means of the royal prerogative. Indeed, in the so-called Tory reaction following the Exclusion Crisis he actively encouraged prosecutions for breach of the penal laws. The result was that the years I 68 I -8 5 were the harshest Nonconformity ever endured. The concept of the confessional state was extended to its widest limits, so that applicants for alehouse licenses and for poor relief had to provide evidence of attendance at Anglican communion services. James II, undeterred by the experience of his brother's reign, sought to remove not merely the monopoly of worship but the monopolies of power and publication, too. He granted toleration to Catholics and Dissenters, admitted them into offices in local and national government, and allowed them to defend their views in print. By removing the apparatus of the confessional state, James hoped to achieve his goal of converting his English subjects to Catholicism, not by force, but by example and persuasion. His failure to secure a statutory basis for his policies, however, meant that at the Revolution, the Anglican confession was still the only creed officially recognized by the state, and its monopolies of worship, publication, and power were all constitutionally intact. How far they were eroded by the subsequent settlement is hotly disputed. The monopoly of worship was breached by the Toleration Act of I689. This was, however, a very narrow measure. It only allowed Protestant Dissenters who believed in the Trinity to worship in their own conventicles, whereas James II's Declarations of Indulgence had encompassed Catholics, Unitarians, and even non-Christians. The

W. A. Speck

act's narrowness, however, has been exaggerated. Certainly it was greeted with relief rather than consternation by Dissenters. Recording its passing in his diary, Samuel Jeake, a Nonconformist merchant, observed, "Now we were freed from the fears of persecution."13 Moreover, in practice even those left outside the scope of the legislation appear to have been unmolested. Presbyterians who announced their conversion to Unitarian beliefs in the reign of George I were not prosecuted, although technically this was in breach of the act. Even Roman Catholics were not harassed except during emergencies, such as the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745· The monopoly of publication survived the Revolution only to be removed in r 69 5 by the failure to renew the Licensing Act. The result was a torrent of irreligious and anticlerical literature, much of it critical of the established church. Anglican clergymen, far from feeling secure under the new regime, felt distinctly threatened by these developments. The only privilege safeguarded by the Revolution settlement was the monopoly of power guaranteed by the Corporation and Test Acts. The Toleration Act expressly did not affect these acts. If the concept of a confessional state remained meaningful after 1689, it was in the maintenance of the theory that servants of the Crown should demonstrate their subscription to the doctrines of the established church by qualifying themselves for office through attending an Anglican communion service. Yet the practice of occasional conformity allowed many Presbyterians to qualify themselves, until, as David Wykes has shown, even such lip service became unnecessary. 14 The biggest blow to the concept of the confessional state, however, was the Act of Union of 1707. As a historian has recently pointed out, in the new kingdom of Great Britain "adherence to the same doctrine, worship according to the same liturgy and, most emphatically, subordination to the same type of church government simply were not prerequisites for membership in the same state." 15 The Dissenters who were at last brought within the pale of the constitution after the Revolution were for the most part urban businessmen. During the course of the seventeenth century, dissent moved down-market. The Presbyterian peers and gentry who had played such a significant role in the Puritan movement were very little in evidence under William or Anne. On the contrary, the bulk of the peerage and the overwhelming majority of the landed gentry were Anglicans. If the Revolution entrenched an aristocratic social order, which

Some Consequences of the Glorious Revolution

39

according to some historians became almost a ruling caste, then it is hard to see why the religious affiliations of what was essentially an urban bourgeoisie loomed so large in the politics of the period between the passing of the Toleration Act and the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts. That the landed magnates, both peers and gentry, dominated the countryside and ruled rural England cannot be gainsaid. The notion that they also ruled the nation because they were the predominant element in Parliament, however, can be called in question. Such an analysis places too much emphasis on the structure of politics and not enough on its functioning. Structurally, no doubt, the House of Lords almost by definition, and the Commons overwhelmingly, were composed of a landed elite. Yet Parliament did not perform as a crude instrument of power to protect the interest of that elite. On the contrary, some measures supported by Parliament, particularly the system of government finance created after the Revolution, seemed to disregard the interest of landed proprietors. Whereas before I 688 there had been relatively little direct taxation of landed wealth, thereafter the wars against France placed a heavy burden on rental incomes. At the same time the establishment of a machinery of public credit, of which the most important institution was the Bank of England, founded in 1694, brought into existence a rentier class of "monied men," as contemporaries called them, who seemed to thrive on lending money to the government. The so-called "financial Revolution," far from benefiting the landed elite, seemed to many of its members to be bleeding it white to enrich usurers, stockjobbers, and others involved in the new monied interest. Baffled by the phenomenon of a predominantly landed Parliament supporting measures apparently diametrically opposed to the landed interest, they sought explanations in various conspiracy theories. Monied men, Dissenters, and even the Crown itself were identified as sinister agents attempting to subvert the balance of the constitution that had been achieved in the Revolution settlement. Consequently, schemes to reduce their influence by altering the tax structure, penalizing occasional conformity, and eliminating placemen from Parliament were all proposed as solutions to the alleged impotence of the landed elite to translate its hold on the structures of power into control of the functions of the state. In reality there were no such conspiracies. Contemporaries were confusing the interests of the ruling class with those of the state itself. As an instrument whose primary function was regulating Brit-

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W. A. Speck

ain's relations with other powers rather than those of different sections of British society, the state's first priority between I689 and I 7 I 3 was to maximize resources for war, and thereafter was to retain the capability of using its newfound great-power status not only in Europe but around the globe. 16 For one of the most important consequences of the Revolutionsome would argue the most important-was to transform Britain's role in the world. Before I689 it had not been a major European power. Although the extent to which the later Stuarts, particularly James II, reduced it to a satellite of France can be exaggerated, Britain was rarely able to play an independent part in foreign affairs after the Restoration. Attempts by the Crown to persuade Parliaments to vote supplies to sustain such a role were generally unavailing. The Revolution transformed this situation overnight. It was quite clear to the men of I689 that their decision to deprive James II of his throne and to replace him with William and Mary was one that they would have to defend against Louis XIV, if not James himself. The wars against France could aptly be renamed the wars of the British Succession. It has rightly been observed that men will not fight unless they perceive that their interests are at stake, but that they will only sustain hostilities by claiming that more than those interests are threatened. Parliament had to be convinced that commitment to Continental war was vital to safeguard British security. Once that commitment was made, an ideological justification was found in the notion that it was a war to protect Protestantism against the Catholic kings Louis XIV and James II. To wage this crusade sacrifices were required. Although the scale of these could not be anticipated in I 689, Englishmen were nevertheless prepared to pay the price required to defend the Revolution settlement. Unprecedented sums of money, amounting in the 169o's to more than £5 million per year, had somehow to be found to sustain the war effort. While landed resources undoubtedly played a key role in this effort, the assets of urban businessmen, particularly the financiers of the City of London, were just as crucial. Yields from the land tax at the wartime rate of four shillings in the pound were more or less fixed at £2 million. Therefore, expanding trade, and with it the yield from customs and excises, became an overriding concern of hard-pressed administrations. And in order to tap imports and manufactures, some wooing of those who created them seemed essential. Hence the cooperation between government and business, which to some pro-

Some Consequences of the Glorious Revolution

41

pagandists for the landed interest was a plot to erode that interest's traditional role in politics and society. The function of the state is therefore the key to the nature of the British polity after r689. It could no longer be described as an ancien regime in which an absolute monarchy presided over a confessional state and an aristocratic ruling class. Instead, it was a constitutional monarchy in which the Crown was limited by Parliament, and Dissenters and an urban bourgeoisie were encouraged to cooperate with a fiscal-military state to preserve the Protestant succession.

Lois G. Schwoerer

The Bill of Rights, r689, Revisited

N

ineteen eighty-eight and 1989 were splendid years for commemorating historic efforts to lay claim to rightscivil, human, and religious. There were celebrations of the 3ooth birthday of the English Bill of Rights, 2ooth birthdays of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and Bill of Rights to the American Constitution, and 40th birthday of the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. But these celebrations were strikingly different in tone and enthusiasm. In the United States, the Commission of the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution, under the leadership of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, refocused its energies on the Bill of Rights and, with the help of an advisory committee and many local and regional groups, laid plans for a two-year birthday party. 1 In the meantime a major exhibition on the Bill of Rights, dealing with the ideas of liberty that influenced the shaping of that bill and the partisan political struggle that accompanied its adoption, opened at the National Archives of the United States on June 9, 1989. A wealth of other activities, many of them national in scope and interest, were already under way. In like manner, the French celebrated the Declaration of the Rights of Man, expressing an attitude toward it of great pride, even pious veneration. Although certain aspects of the French Revolution (notably the Terror) received sharp criticism and reinterpretation, 2 the Declaration of the Rights of Man received nothing but praise. Americans also heaped plaudits on the French declaration. The Alliance Fran