The Glorious Revolution and the Catonic Response

Abstract

The themes and issues raised in the writings of the Exclusion era Whigs foreshadowed the constitutional and legal arguments supporting the Whig triumph in the Glorious Revolution less than a decade later. However, the dramatic events of 1688–9 came to represent a victory primarily for a particular strain of Whig thought. The official Whig account of the revolution rested on the theoretical premises of the moderate brand of Whiggism we saw in Tyrrell. The radical Whig positions and theories associated with Locke and Sidney were largely marginalized. In both form and substance, the actions of the Convention Parliament in replacing the errant James II with William and Mary were accounted for and defended in terms counter to the central premises of radical Whiggism. The spirit of 1689 was not the stuff of radical Whig dreams. The Glorious Revolution and the Exclusion crisis of a decade or so earlier are linked on a number of levels. First, both situations raised many of the same issues about the extent of prerogative and parliamentary authority, the character of the English Constitution, and the very nature of the political and religious settlement in the nation. Second, the actors involved in the Glorious Revolution operated in a complex historical and ideological context that was in many respects unchanged from that of a decade earlier.