Sixteen Eighty-eight as the Year One: Eighteenth-Century Attitudes Towards the Glorious Revolution

Abstract

Sixteen Eighty-eight as the Year One: Eighteenth- Century Attitudes Towards the Glorious Revolution Gerald Af. Straka WlTHJN A FEW MONTHS the religious and constitutional tensions introduced by the later Stuarts were relaxed by an astonish­ ing sequence—the invasion of William of Orange, the flight of James II to France, the quiet assemblage of the "Convention Parlia­ ment,” the recognition of a collateral Stuart line in the joint reign of William and Mary—that has since been called the Glorious Rev­ olution of 1688. After a tortuous period of national debate over the constitutional legitimacy of the Settlement, over religious toleration, and over the increased military expenditures required by two mam­ moth wars with France, the Hanoverian succession of 1714 brought to England a rapid acquiescence to the Settlement. Having once di­ gested the Revolution, eighteenth-century gentlemen came to praise what they had been forced to swallow. Both extremes—Bolingbroke, the Tory idealist, and Hume, the Whig skeptic—united in praising the Settlement of 1689, the former asserting that "the Revolution is looked upon by all sides as a new era. . . . On this foundation all the reasonable Whigs and Tories unite.... If this creed were made a test of political orthodoxy, there would appear at this time but very few heretics amongst us.”1 And Hume concurred that "the Revolution forms a new epoch in *This paper was presented at the Midwestern Regional Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Rockford College, Rockford, Ill., on October 23, 1970. 143 The Modernity of the Eighteenth Century the constitution. ... we in this island have ever since enjoyed, if not the best system of government, at least the most perfect system of liberty, that ever was known amongst mankind.”2 Since these eighteenth-century pronouncements, nothing has been written to diminish the glory of the Revolution, and little has been done to define its precise nature. Extremes from parliamentary su­ premacy to popular right are said to have been established in 1688, as well as the cabinet system, a national debt, political parties, mer­ cantilism, international prestige, imperialism—even, as the great Lecky observed, the English compulsion for trimming trees and hedges, and the love of good cupboard china. Yet considering all these attributions to something called the Rev­ olution system, one finds that what the Revolution is supposed to have effected is better understood when viewed symbolically rather than as an active cause. None of the above attributed effects was intrinsically related to the Glorious Revolution, and in fact some of them were actually inhibited, if not discouraged, by it. David Ogg admitted that though monarchy and popular right were joined in­ separably by the Revolution of 1688, "the parliamentary constitu­ tion dates from an Act {the Bill of Rights} which diminished the royal power . . . little, and from the rule of a king {William III} whose prerogatives were... great... .”3 "The effects of the Revolu­ tion . . . seem commonly to have been exaggerated,” said Robert Walcott4 in agreement with the earlier revisionism of Donald Groves Barnes, who, in 1939, proved that “practically all the evi­ dence points to the conclusion that neither the framers of the Revo­ lution Settlement nor the first three rulers after 1689 .. . anticipated the constitutional developments of the next three quarters of a cen­ tury.”5 J. P. Kenyon asserted that "the Revolution did not inaugu­ rate a period of constitutional monarchy or parliamentary govern­ ment, and that George II . . . was in many respects a much more powerful monarch than Charles II.”6 In other areas too—finance, trade, and the strident foreign policy of the eighteenth century—1688 seems more of a paragraph than a chapter in the story of institutional progress. From the effort to get James I to relinquish his control of perquisites to the final aboli­ tion of feudal tenures in 1661, the crown increasingly found itself 144 Sixteen Eighty-eight as the Year One blocked in the matter of arbitrary taxation to such an extent that the Civil List Act of 1698 looks rather like an afterthought. True, the Bank of England was an innovation, but it solved only a fund­ ing, not a financing, problem. As for England...