Reconsidering the British Revolutions of 1688

Abstract

Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution, by Scott Sowerby. Harvard Historical Studies, No. 181. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2013. x, 404 pp. $49.95 US (cloth). The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy: The Revolutions of 1688-91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts, edited by Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, No. 16. Woodbridge, UK, Boydell Press, 2013. x, 315 pp. $115.00 US (cloth). These are two important books that focus on what for many years was the less studied political upheaval of Britain's seventeenth century: the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. Scott Sowerby's is a monograph derived from his Harvard doctoral thesis. Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor, both products of Cambridge, edited the collection of essays that promises to provide new insights on the final crisis of the last wholly British ruling dynasty. The monograph is about causes, the collection is concerned with contexts. The former takes a decidedly English perspective, while the latter deliberately attempts to enhance our understanding of 1688-89 by looking beyond England for explanations and consequences. The editors of the collection suggest that recent years have seen explosion of interest in the 1688 Revolution; this is probably an oblique reference to Harris's 2006 monograph (Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British monarchy, 1685-1720, London) and Steven Pincus's 2008 veritable doorstopper, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven). Pincus's provocative argument, that 1688 was a revolution of essentially secular-minded commercial interests seeking to topple a monarch, James II, who aimed to modernize the English state in the =absolutist mode of Louis XIV, is countered directly by Sowerby several times. But Sowerby's agenda is far more ambitious than simply overturning Pincus's thesis. Making Toleration is an attempt at historical excavation and revisionism that wants us to rethink what we know about late Stuart England's political culture (p. 34). Sowerby claims to have uncovered evidence in over 130 archives and libraries of a political movement that was the key casual factor generating the revolution of 1688: the repealers. The repealer movement's chief sponsor was none other than James II. The movement's aim was to reshape the English polity by enacting liberty of conscience for all Christians. In order to achieve this ambition, Parliament would need to repeal the statutes penalizing religious dissenters, both Protestant and Catholic, as well as the laws that barred nonconformists from civil and military offices. The activities of the repealers generated political opposition, which morphed into a counter-movement; the Glorious Revolution was largely the result of the tussle between these two movements from the spring to the autumn of 1688. The revisionist component of Sowerby's book involves portraying the king as an aggressive but not authoritarian (let alone tyrannical) reformer. For example, the imprisonment of seven bishops who refused to read the king's second Declaration of Indulgence was not undertaken, Sowerby argues, to cow the clergy into accepting toleration, but instead resulted from the king's impatience: he wanted the trial of the bishops over before Parliament met. The book puts religious concerns at the heart of the 1688 Revolution. Repealers and anti-repealers had different visions of what sort of Christian polity England was to be. Moreover, confessionally-based fears, especially popular anti-popery, were crucial for mobilizing support for the overthrow of James II in England and carrying on the war against France in the 1690s. Toleration was granted in 1689 because, Sowerby contends, the Convention Parliament wanted to keep radicals loyal to the revolutionary Williamite regime during the war, not as a reward to moderate nonconformists for recently refusing the embrace of the departed Catholic sovereign. …