Revolution

Tim Harris has spent much of his teaching life rethinking and re-imagining late Stuart Britain. His fascination with the growth of popular politics, mass journalism and crowds has been expressed in a number of groundbreaking books, including London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II and Politics under the Late Stuarts. He taught for some years at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, but has since 1986 taught at Brown University, Rhode Island, where he is now Munro-Goodwin-Wilkinson Professor in European History.

In 2005 he published the widely praised Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685, which is a prelude to the current book. Restoration won the 2006 John Ben Snow Prize.

Revolution

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2. Meeting the Radical Challenge: The Scottish and English Parliaments and the Rebellions of Argyll and Monmouth

8. ‘The Greatest Revolution that was Ever Known’: The Revolution Settlement in England

Conclusion: The Revolutions, Their Aftermaths, and the Remaking of Britain, 1691–1720

List of Illustrations

frontispiece: James II, by an unknown artist, c. 1690 (National Portrait Gallery)

1. The destruction of the Spanish fleet, 1588, and the Gunpowder Plot, 1605 (British Museum)

2. ‘The Triumphing English Commanders’ (Henry E. Huntington Library, California)

4. Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, by or after François de Troy (National Portrait Gallery)

8. The arrest of Lord Jeffreys at Wapping (Mansell Collection, British Museum)

14. Alleged Catholic brutalities during the Irish Rebellion, 1641 (British Library)

Preface

This book is a sequel to my Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (Allen Lane, 2005). It was written first. My study of the Glorious Revolutions in the three kingdoms was initially conceived as one book, and when I first put fingertips to computer keyboard I began with what is here Chapter 1, working my way forward in time, before going back and drafting the earlier sections. When it became apparent that the study was too long to be published as one, the decision was taken to produce two stand-alone books. This study of the Revolutions has therefore been recast with that objective in mind. It does not require a knowledge of Restoration to be understood or enjoyed, and every effort has been made to ensure that this book is entirely self-sufficient in that sense. Having said that, the two studies are intended to be complementary, and those who have both the inclination and the time will find that there is much to be gained from reading them together.

Earlier discussions of some of the ideas and arguments developed in this book can be found in ‘The People, the Law and the Constitution in Scotland and England: A Comparative Approach to the Glorious Revolution’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999), 28–58; ‘Reluctant Revolutionaries? The Scots and the Revolution of 1688–9’, in Howard Nenner, ed., Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain: Essays Presented to Lois Green Schwoerer (University of Rochester Press, 1997), pp. 97–117; and ‘Incompatible Revolutions? The Established Church and the Revolutions of 1688–89 in Ireland, England and Scotland’, in Allan I. Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds., The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2002), pp. 204–25. Any previously published material has been reworked and recast when being incorporated into this book. However, I should like to thank the University of Chicago Press (which holds the copyright of my Journal of British Studies article), the University of Rochester Press, the Four Courts Press, and the editors of the two respective volumes, for permission to reproduce any material that happens to overlap.

In a project of this size, one inevitably accumulates numerous debts over the years. I benefited enormously from discussions with Lionel Glassey over the significance of the Scottish Claim of Right. Both Allan Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer gave me valuable feedback on some of the Scottish and Irish material. Steven Pincus, who is working on his own study of the Glorious Revolution (though in its European context), has been a constant source of inspiration throughout: we came to an agreement whereby I would leave the European context to Steve, and he would leave Scotland and Ireland to me – and if I have learned anything from my work on James II, it is about the importance of not betraying one's friends and of honouring one's own side of the contract. Two of my graduate students – Leigh Yetter and Matt Kadane – gave me the benefit of their expertise on certain specific issues; all of my students (both graduate and undergraduate) have studied this material with me in various ways in classroom situations over the years, and I am deeply indebted to their input and insights.

In addition to the above, I should like to thank Charles Carlton, Tom Cogswell, Brian Cowan, Adam Fox, Mark Goldie, Mark Kishlansky, Peter Lake, Jason McElligott, John Morrill, Kalev Peekna, Lois Schwoerer, Ethan Shagan, Bill Speck, Stephen Taylor and David Underdown, for guidance on sources or discussions about interpretation and approach over the years. I have presented discrete sections of my work at conferences and colloquia across Britain and North America over the last decade or so, and I should like to thank everyone who has attended for their invaluable input; they have had a much greater influence on shaping the final outcome than they would ever have realized. I am particularly grateful to the warm welcome given to me by new friends in Edinburgh and Dublin, people whom I got to meet only after this project was in an advanced stage, but who were incredibly supportive of what I was trying to do. I only hope I have done justice to the integrity of the Irish and Scottish pasts for their own sakes. As with Restoration, I need to express my immense gratitude to the publishing team at Penguin, particularly my editor, Simon Winder, his production assistant, Alison Hennessey, my copyeditor, Charlotte Ridings, and my indexer, Caroline Wilding. Simon remains the perfect editor: inspirational and supportive, but with a great critical eye. He certainly made this work much better than it would otherwise have been and brought the best out of me. If only Simon had been able to work with James II, think how different the course of history might have been! However, if Simon had sounded out the views of Charles II or the Duke of Lauderdale beforehand – for which see the Introduction – I suspect he would never have offered James a contract. I certainly doubt whether my agent Clare Alexander would have taken him on with references like those, but I am delighted that she agreed to take me on and I can only hope that the end result repays in some small way all her efforts on my behalf.

My wife, Beth, and my children, Victoria and James, have been of tremendous support to me throughout the years – a necessary distraction to maintain my sanity during the lengthy time it took me to research and write this book (these books). My parents, Audrey and Ron, made much of the research possible by providing a home away from home during my trips to England. Other people who hosted my stays in the ‘old country’ (as we non-natives say where I live) include my brother and sister-in-law, Kevin and Tina; my sister and brother-in-law, Sarah and Matt; my parents-in-law, John and Grace; Adam Fox and his wife Carolyn; Chris Macleod; and Mark Goldie.

Research for this project would not have been possible without the financial support of a number of institutions. In particular, I should like to record my gratitude for the receipt of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as research support and leave time from Brown University.

I dedicate this book to two inspirational scholars and mentors. The first is Mark Goldie, who taught me when I was an undergraduate in the late 1970s, supervised my Ph.D. in the early 1980s, and has been a valued friend and collaborator ever since. I had always intended to dedicate my big study of the 1680s and the Revolutions to him, as a testimony to my appreciation for all he has done for me over the years; the big study became two, so clearly I must appreciate what he has done an awful lot. The second is John Morrill, who never actually taught me when I was an undergraduate or as a graduate student, but who was the internal examiner for my Ph.D. thesis and who has been a great supporter of all my professional and intellectual endeavours. It was John who first pushed me to explore the three-kingdoms dimension when I announced that I wanted to do a big study of the Glorious Revolution, and it is largely thanks to him that I have developed my fascination for Irish and Scottish history. There is, I appreciate, a certain irony behind an atheistical Protestant dedicating a book on the Glorious Revolution to two Catholics (albeit one lapsed). If I had been around in the late seventeenth century I suspect I would have leaned towards radical Protestant dissent, and perhaps even have been a Monmouth rebel (apart from the cowardice factor, and my reluctance to disobey authority, as my loved ones have been quick to point out). Indeed, a family historian claims that some of my remote ancestors were involved in the Monmouth rebellion (the Selwood branch of the family, for those interested in tracing what happened to them). But then, even the Duke of Monmouth was prepared to extend toleration to Catholics, provided they ‘be not found Guilty of Conspiring our destruction’.

In quoting from original sources, I have extended contemporary contractions but otherwise have adhered to the original spelling and capitalization, though I have very occasionally provided modern punctuation to assist in readability. Dates are in old style, although with the new year taken as having started on 1 January (rather than 25 March, as it did at the time).

Introduction

The birth of one's child is supposed to be a joyous occasion – a time to celebrate. So it was for James II. When his second wife, Maria Beatrice Anna Margherita Isabella d'Este (daughter of the Duke of Modena), gave birth to a son on 10 June 1688, James immediately issued proclamations in his three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland announcing the new arrival, urging local magistrates to encourage bonfire celebrations, and setting aside formal days of public thanksgiving.¹ London saw a stunning official pyrotechnic display on 17 July on the River Thames opposite Whitehall, with numerous state-of-the-art devices thought to be the height of ingenuity at the time. Thousands of balloons were launched up into the sky over the Thames, for them to transform themselves magically into various ‘figures’ as they fell back to earth. Twelve mortars fired grenade shells into the air, which when they exploded revealed ‘odd mixtures and shapes’, while a figure of Bacchus, representing plenty, discharged eight or nine barrels of combustibles out of its belly. There were also two huge female figures representing ‘Fecundity and Loyalty’ – somewhat ironically, we can appreciate with hindsight, since events were soon to show that there were reasons to doubt whether the Queen's fecundity and the people's loyalty could go hand in hand. The display cost the court a staggering £25,000.²

James himself had particular cause to rejoice. Although he had been married to Mary of Modena since 1673, his consort had struggled to produce the longed-for male heir. There was no doubt that Mary was fertile; indeed, she had numerous pregnancies in the first eleven years of her marriage, but they had all ended either in miscarriage or in children who were short-lived. A son born on 7 November 1677, christened Charles and granted the dukedom of Cambridge, died on 12 December that year. A daughter born in August 1676 who lived until 1681 had been to date Mary's longest-living progeny. She was still childless when she became queen in February 1685, having suffered her latest miscarriage the previous May; although only 26, she was getting on by Stuart child-bearing standards and, given her track record, the signs did not seem encouraging. By now, like many childless couples, the King and Queen were prepared to try anything that might increase their chances of conceiving. A pilgrimage by James to the holy shrine at Holywell in the summer of 1687 while his wife took the waters of Bath seemed to do the trick; rumours of the pregnancy were already circulating by late November, and the following month an official announcement was made.³

What is more, the couple got their desired son. The infant, christened James Francis Edward, would take precedence in the succession over James's two daughters – Mary and Anne – from his first marriage, to Anne Hyde. Although women could succeed to the throne in the British kingdoms, in an age of personal monarchy a male ruler was still preferable. However, the importance of the birth went deeper. James was England's first Catholic ruler since Queen Mary (r. 1553–8), and since coming to the throne in February 1685 he had pursued an ambitious policy of trying to increase the religious and civil liberties of his co-religionists across his three kingdoms. James had begun by using his royal prerogative to grant Catholics dispensations from the various laws designed to uphold the Anglican monopoly of office, education and worship, before opting with his Indulgence of 1687 to suspend the entire operation of those laws. He had failed as of yet, however, to persuade parliament in any of his kingdoms to agree to a permanent repeal of the penal legislation against Catholics. Thus whatever benefits Catholics enjoyed, they did so by the grace of the King. James's two daughters (born, as they were, before his own conversion to Catholicism) had been raised Protestants; indeed, his eldest daughter, Mary, was married to the Protestant champion of Europe, the Dutch stadtholder, William of Orange-Nassau. It seemed likely, then, that everything James had achieved for his co-religionists would be undone at Mary's accession. The birth of the Prince of Wales in June 1688 changed matters entirely. The Prince would be raised a Catholic and could be expected to continue his father's policies when he eventually acceded to the throne. Everything James had been working towards now stood the chance of having some long-lasting success.

James Francis Edward was never to inherit the throne. Indeed, his birth was to be the beginning of the end for James II. The Catholic King's policies had been highly controversial and seemed to pose a threat not only to the Anglican ascendancy in England (and the ascendancy of the Episcopalians in Scotland and the Church of Ireland in Ireland) but also to the rule of law. What safeguards were there for subjects' legal liberties if a reigning monarch could decide at will to dispense with or suspend laws that had been passed by parliament? Protestant dissenters, who had benefited just as much as the Catholics from James's efforts to promote greater religious freedom, were equally uneasy about the attempts to set royal prerogative above the law. Unsurprisingly, therefore, James's Protestant subjects, who comprised some 98 per cent of the population of England and Scotland, were far from enthusiastic about the birth of a Catholic male heir; only in Ireland, where three-quarters of the population were Catholic, was there any genuine rejoicing. As the Jacobite Life of James II – a retrospective account based in part on James's memoirs and papers – was to put it, ‘The birth of the Prince’, which gave ‘the greatest joy to the King and Queen, and to all those who wished them well’, at the same time ‘gave the greatest agonys immaginable to the generality of the Kingdom’.⁴

Twenty days after the birth of the Prince of Wales, seven individuals representing discontented elements among the landed aristocracy, the Church, the army and the navy in England – the earls of Devonshire, Danby and Shrewsbury, Bishop Henry Compton of London, Lord Lumley, Edward Russell and Henry Sidney – sent a letter to William of Orange explaining that the vast majority of people were ‘dissatisfied with the present conduct of the government’ under James II and would join with William, if he were to invade England with sufficient military force.⁵ It was an incredible letter – an invitation to a foreign power from high-ranking political and religious figures to invade their own country. It was to set in motion an incredible series of events, which would result in what has come to be known to English history as not ‘the Dutch Conquest’ but ‘the Glorious Revolution’ – a revolution seen as glorious, that is, because it rescued England from a popish despot and secured Protestant liberties through a Declaration of Rights (February 1689), subsequently enacted with a few additional safeguards as the Bill of Rights (December 1689). It was also to be a revolution that would have far-reaching consequences – though far from obviously glorious ones – for Scotland and Ireland.

William invaded that autumn with a large, professional army of some 15,000 men. He was taking a huge risk launching a military campaign so late in the season. The sea journey from Holland across to England was likely to be rough at that time of the year, and when William landed he might have to face difficult conditions on the ground. It was undoubtedly a ‘perilous and unprecedented venture’, and William was prepared for the worst: in advance of his departure he drew up his ‘last will and testament’ and advised his wife that should he be killed in action she should marry again.⁶ William's armada first attempted to set sail on 19 October, but a storm drove it back into the Dutch ports; hemmed in by westerly winds, it was not finally to embark upon its mission until 1 November. The initial plan had been to head for the north-east coast of England, to join up with the northern resistance movement against James spearheaded by Devonshire and Danby, but on the afternoon of the 2nd a ferocious east wind drove the fleet south-west and in sight of the Thames estuary. A hastily convened council of war therefore took the decision to abandon the east coast and head through the straits of Dover into the English Channel; the same ‘Protestant wind’ that had forced the change of direction also prevented the English fleet from sailing out to cut off the Dutch. After slackening sail on Sunday the 4th, in order to observe not just the Sabbath but also William's thirty-eighth birthday, the Dutch armada was finally to reach Tor Bay (off the south coast of Devon) at about 5 o'clock on the afternoon of 5 November. It being the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, the bells were ringing as the Dutch fleet approached land, which William's men ‘judged to be a good Omen’; the people of Devon ‘came flocking in droves to the side or brow of the Hill to view’ the ships, wondering at first whether they might be French, until they saw ‘the Standard of the Prince, the Motto of which was, For the Protestant Religion and Liberty’, which ‘soon undeceived them’.⁷ Disembarking at Brixham (on the west side of the bay and one of the three towns, along with Paignton and Torquay, which collectively constitute the area known as Torbay), William made haste for Exeter, the ‘capital’ of the West, which he entered with little resistance on the 9th. By 18 December he was in London and effectively in control of the government. By 13 February, with James having fled the country, William and his wife Mary were being proclaimed King and Queen.

As far as regime changes go, this one was achieved with remarkable dispatch and, in England at least, remarkably little bloodshed. James had mustered his army on Salisbury Plain to stop William's advance, but facing rebellions in the north of England and desertions within his own military, James panicked. He ordered a retreat from Salisbury on 23 November and returned to London on the 26th. Even William must have been surprised, especially given that James, when Duke of York, had earned himself a reputation as a brave military commander. ‘Yet’, as one verse satirist rhymed:

when he [James] went to meet the brave Nassau,
And all his troops to Salisbury did draw,
Swearing he'd conquer, or in battle die:
He basely fled, ere any foe was nigh.8

With William continuing to make steady progress on his march eastwards, James began to contemplate fleeing the country. He packed his wife and son off to France on 10 December and decided to follow suit himself in the early hours of the 11th. Even in this last act of cowardice, James was to be unsuccessful. As his boat was taking on ballast at Faversham in Kent for the cross-Channel trip, he was stopped by seamen who recognized the man James was with but not the King himself. Unaware of who they had in their hands (quite literally), they proceeded to strip-search the King to see if he had any treasure secreted about his person. It was only later that they discovered their captive's true identity. Failing at his first attempted flight, James was brought back to London on 16 December, but was deliberately allowed to make a second – and this time successful – escape to France on the 23rd.

It was a truly humiliating experience. James had been brought down without a fight. Not only had he failed to run away but he had been prevented from doing so by people who did not even realize he was their king. Moreover, he had been toppled by his eldest daughter's husband, who was in any case his own nephew, William being the son of the King's older sister, Mary. Indeed, James had been abandoned by his very own children, who seemed decidedly unconcerned by their father's fate. The diarist John Evelyn tells us that it was widely thought Mary ‘would have showed some (seeming) reluctancy at least, of assuming her Father's Crowne and made some Apologie, testifying her regret, that he should by his misgovernment necessitate the Nation to so extraordinary a proceeding’. But instead, when the Princess eventually arrived from Holland on 12 February, ‘she came into White-hall as to a Wedding, riant and jolly’. When William's chaplain, Gilbert Burnet, asked her ‘how it came that what she saw in so sad a revolution, as to her father's person, made not a greater impression on her’, she explained that her husband had impressed upon her ‘that it was necessary that she should appear at first so cheerful, that nobody might be discouraged by her looks, or be led to apprehend that she was uneasy, by reason of what had been done’. Yet even Burnet, who was also William's chief propagandist at the time, confessed that he ‘thought a little more seriousness had done as well, when she came to her father's palace’. James's younger daughter, Anne, had actually fled London in late November to join the rebels in the north of England. As the constitutional crisis unfolded in the early months of 1689, she could be found passing her time playing cards and ‘as merry as she used to be’. When the second Earl of Clarendon – a brother of James's first wife, Anne Hyde, who himself was to become a Jacobite – informed her that people ‘were extremely troubled to find she seemed no more concerned for her father's misfortune’, Anne replied that ‘she never loved to do any thing that looked like an affected constraint’. Asked whether ‘she thought her father could be justly deposed’, she said ‘that she was very sorry the King had brought things to the pass they were at, but she was afraid it would not be safe for him ever to return again’.⁹

James's plight in late 1688 contrasts starkly with the enthusiastic reception he had received when he became king less than four years before. Admittedly, James's very popularity at the time of his accession in February 1685 testified to a recent change in fortune for a man who had hardly been the darling of the people for much of the reign of his brother, Charles II (r. 1660–85). As Duke of York, and next-in-line to the throne by dint of the fact that Charles had failed to produce any legitimate offspring, James had encountered considerable opposition to his right of succession on the grounds of his religion. During the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, the Whig parliamentary opposition – the champions of limited monarchy and the rights of Protestant dissenters – had pushed for legislation to divert the succession in favour of a Protestant heir, claiming that the safety of the people (salus populi) had to come first, and that a Catholic ruler would mean not just popery but also tyranny and arbitrary government. It was a position which – initially at least – had attracted considerable support among the population at large. However Charles and his Tory allies had managed to defeat the challenge of the Whigs, and in the final years of the reign had built up considerable public support for the Catholic heir - mainly by playing on fears of renewed civil war (such as England had experienced in the 1640s) should anything be done to tamper with the hereditary succession. When James was proclaimed king in February 1685, there was extensive rejoicing in numerous places across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, as large crowds gathered around bonfires to celebrate the news. The bonfires were followed over the next few weeks by hundreds of loyal addresses from inhabitants across all of James's dominions, pledging support for the new monarch. The parliaments which James called to meet in England and Scotland that spring proved overwhelmingly loyal bodies, seemingly willing to grant the King whatever he needed in order to consolidate his position on the throne. And although the Earl of Argyll and the Duke of Monmouth (the latter being the eldest illegitimate son of Charles II, and a Protestant) did launch rebellions in Scotland and England, respectively, in the late spring and early summer of 1685 in an attempt to topple the new regime, these generated limited support, further confirming the extent to which the radical Whig challenge had been contained by 1685.

In short, James appeared to be in a strong position at the time of his accession. His brother had done much to bolster the authority of the monarchy in his final years – using the law to defeat the political and religious enemies of the crown, enhancing royal control over the judiciary and local government through a series of purges, and making the crown more independent of parliament thanks to a combination of improved royal finances and subsidies from the French king, Louis XIV. People seemed to prefer to have strong monarchy, even if their monarch was Catholic, rather than risk a repeat of the mid-century crisis by tampering with the succession. More than this, people appear to have accepted the Tory-Anglican vision that the monarchy in Britain was divinely ordained and absolute – absolute, that is, in the sense that the king did not share his sovereignty with parliament and could not be resisted by his subjects. In other words, James not only inherited a powerful position but also a considerable amount of goodwill towards him from those who inhabited the dominions over which he was to rule. The fact that his position was to collapse so completely within less than four years, to the extent that he could be forced to flee in the face of a foreign invasion without even being able to engage the enemy in battle, is thus all the more astonishing.

Why, then, did James fall from power so quickly? This is the first main question that this book will seek to address. Was James just a disastrously incompetent ruler, who pursued unpopular and unrealistic policies? What, indeed, was he trying to achieve: a Catholic-style despotism or merely liberty of conscience for religious minorities? Did his position become so untenable that he was essentially brought down by his subjects, with a little help from outside? Or was his position as an absolute monarch in fact so strong that it took a huge invading army from abroad to topple his regime? The second aim of this book is to explore the nature and significance of the Glorious Revolution and the settlement that followed in the wake of James's downfall. Was it a genuine revolution, one that fundamentally changed the nature of the monarchy? Or was it a conservative affair, which merely sought to restore the constitution to what it had been before James II set about trying to extend his prerogative and overturn the rule of law? Did it establish modern-day liberties and give birth to our present system of constitutional monarchy, or did it do nothing of the sort? Did it mark a victory for a particular political interest group, and if so, which one – the Whigs or the Tories – or was it genuinely a bi-partisan affair, one in which the whole nation united to overthrow popery and arbitrary government? And how would our answers to these questions be different if, instead of focusing solely on England, we brought Scotland and Ireland into consideration as well?

James II, it has to be conceded, was not the brightest individual ever to sit on the throne of England (or that of Scotland or Ireland, for that matter). Contemporaries certainly recognized that he had intellectual shortcomings. The Duke of Buckingham once observed to Burnet during Charles II's reign, ‘the king could see things if he would; the duke would see things if he could’ – a verdict which, Burnet reported, ‘was the more severe, because it was true’, he himself agreeing that James ‘had no true judgment’.¹⁰ Catherine Sedley, one of James's mistresses, when articulating her bemusement at what James saw in any of the women he had sexual relationships with, famously quipped, ‘We are none of us handsome, and if we had wit, he has not enough to discover it.’¹¹ Not that lack of intelligence by itself inevitably dooms a ruler to failure; history affords us plenty of counter-examples, in both hereditary monarchies and modern-day democracies. James's intellectual shortcomings, however, were combined with a stubborn attachment to the Catholic faith and a desire to help his co-religionists at all costs – not in-and-of themselves evil characteristics, but unfortunate ones in a monarch who ruled over an overwhelmingly Protestant (and aggressively anti-Catholic) people who expected their king to protect the Protestant religious establishment. When Charles had sent James to Brussels in the spring of 1679 (essentially to get him out of the way as the crisis over the succession began to unfold in England), James had written that if the occasion presented itself, he hoped God would give him ‘his grace to suffer death for the true Catholike religion, as well as Banishment’.¹² It is a remark that encapsulates James's mindset, even if, when push came to shove in 1688, he chose to run away rather than risk death on the battlefield.

Although Charles II did all he could to protect his younger brother's right to the throne, he was under no illusion himself as to whether or not James had the personality to be a successful king: ‘My brother will lose his kingdom by his bigotry and his soul for a lot of ugly trollops’, he was reputed to have predicted.¹³ The Duke of Lauderdale, Secretary of State for Scotland for much of Charles II's reign, observed in the late 1670s that James had ‘all that weakness of his father [Charles I] without his strength’. (Given that Charles I had not only brought civil war upon himself in 1642 but suffered execution at the hands of the parliamentary radicals in January 1649, one might wonder what his strengths as king had been.) James loved ‘to be serv'd in his own way’, Lauderdale continued, and was ‘as very a Papist as the Pope himself’. The Scottish Duke had no doubt that this would be James's ruin, predicting that if James ‘had the Empire of the whole world he would venture the loss of it, for his ambition is to shine in a red letter [i.e., achieve Catholic sainthood] after he is dead’.¹⁴

Not surprisingly, James has received a bad press over the generations. The earlier Whig historians, who championed the achievements of the Glorious Revolution, saw James as an evil Catholic despot. Thus the great mid-nineteenth-century historian Thomas Babington Macaulay condemned James as a ‘tyrant’ in pursuit of an ‘insane policy’, which was ‘to promote the interest of his Church by violating the fundamental laws of his kingdom’.¹⁵ Similarly Macaulay's greatnephew, G. M. Trevelyan, writing on the eve of World War II, argued that ‘in his desire to restore Romanism in England’ James ‘found it necessary to become an absolute monarch like the other Princes of Europe’; he established ‘a large army, such as neither the Tudors nor his father or brother had ever commanded in time of peace’; and he ‘proceeded to break law on law’.¹⁶ So irrational did James's policies seem that historians not bent on seeing sinister motives behind his actions assumed the King was afflicted by some sort of mental illness. Thus F. C. Turner, in his classic biography published in 1948, suggested that by the time of his accession James ‘was suffering from premature mental decline’, possibly the result of an infection incurred ‘in the sexual excesses of his youth… which had resulted in a fairly common mental disease’.¹⁷

Modern scholars have tried to give a more balanced picture of the man. An important study of the Glorious Revolution that appeared in 1972 maintained that James was pursuing a realistic policy that could have succeeded: no madman in pursuit of an insane policy here. James might have been trying ‘to emulate most European sovereigns, using the contemporarily fashionable and effective methods of absolutism’, but given the way that Restoration politics worked, there was little his opponents could do to obstruct him; ‘it needed William's invasion to wreck’ James's policies.¹⁸ The fullest and most scholarly modern biography of James II, which has enjoyed several reprintings since its first publication in 1978, not only insists that ‘James was not a wicked man’ but also, in fact, that James did not wish to ‘establish an absolutism like that of Louis XIV’ in France. James did not ‘set out to undermine the English constitution’, ‘destroy the laws', or impose ‘his religious views on others by force’; his aim, rather, was merely to put ‘Catholics on an equal footing with Protestants, by allowing them to worship freely and to hold public office’.¹⁹ There are signs, however, that historians are beginning to react against too indulgent a view. Although James might not have been the popish despot of Whig legend, he was certainly seen by his contemporaries as ‘a bigoted Papist’, a recent study of James II reminds us, and one moreover who ‘did increase the powers of the Crown independently of using them to promote toleration’.²⁰

Whatever James's personal qualities as king, most scholars seem to agree that he might well have got away with what he was trying to achieve were it not for the intervention of William of Orange. As Trevelyan maintained all those years ago, James was so powerful ‘that his subjects only got the better of him by calling in foreign arms to their aid’.²¹ One modern-day historian, who has examined the Glorious Revolution from the Dutch perspective, has asserted that there could not ‘have been a Revolution, or anything remotely like one, without the armed intervention of the Prince of Orange. It was the Prince who… shattered James' power and destroyed his previously considerable military might.’²² It is true that historians have recognized that William's success was dependent upon obtaining a modicum of support among James's disillusioned subjects, particularly those of the upper classes. Nevertheless, received wisdom has tended to regard the Revolution of 1688 – that is, the overthrow of James II, as distinct from the settlement reached afterwards – as having been brought about essentially by external forces, rather than internal ones. To quote the leading modern scholar of British foreign relations in this period, ‘James's fall occurred as the result of an external invasion of England’; it should be seen not as an ‘episode of domestic political turmoil’, like the Great Rebellion against Charles I, but more ‘as an instance of what had last been seriously attempted a century earlier’, by the Spanish Armada of 1588.²³ As the author of one recent influential textbook has put it, it was William of Orange, ‘and he alone, who made possible one of the few great revolutions between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries which was first and foremost an invasion and only very secondarily a rebellion’.²⁴ If it was William alone who made the Revolution possible, and if the Revolution was not the product of domestic political turmoil, then the conclusion is obvious: there is little need to examine domestic politics, whether in turmoil or not, in order to understand why the Revolution happened.

If there is disagreement over how to understand James, there is even more controversy over the significance of the Glorious Revolution. One contemporary described it as ‘the greatest revolution that was ever known’.²⁵ Few would agree with that today. It was, after all, an event fuelled by anti-Catholic bigotry, one that was to lead to a bloody war in Ireland and the setting up of a severe penal code against the majority Catholic population (the implications of which are still with us), and, ultimately, to the loss of political sovereignty for Scotland. To modern scholars it hardly looks like a proper revolution at all, and certainly nothing like the revolutionary upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, which have more readily attracted the imagination of historians over the last several decades. There might still be some who believe that the Glorious Revolution laid the foundations for Britain's modern system of parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy, and for the eventual emergence of Britain as a great power in the eighteenth century and beyond.²⁶ To many, however, it fell far short of achieving any meaningful political reform and, instead of having a modernizing effect, essentially left England as an ancien régime well into the eighteenth (and perhaps even the early nineteenth) century.²⁷

The predominant tendency over the generations has been to cast the actual Revolution settlement of 1689 in a conservative light. Both Macaulay and Trevelyan, for example, saw the Revolution as ‘defensive’, a ‘preserving revolution’ that sought to vindicate ‘ancient rights’, the ‘spirit’ of which ‘was the opposite of revolutionary’.²⁸ Although Macaulay and Trevelyan nevertheless continued to insist that the settlement vindicated Whig principles of limited government, modern scholars have come to see the settlement, and particularly the Declaration of Rights, as more of a compromise between the two parties, designed to appease the concerns of the Tories as much as the Williamite Whigs, and which failed to address the concerns of the more radical Whigs who wanted more far-reaching constitutional change.²⁹ It is true that there has been some reaction against the conservative take on the Revolution, with some scholars seeking to reinvest the Declaration of Rights with more radical credentials and to see it at least as a qualified victory for Whig principles.³⁰ Far from all have been convinced, however, and the image of the Glorious Revolution as one of the least revolutionary revolutions in history continues to persist.

The picture would look different, one might think, if Scotland and Ireland were brought into it. The trouble is, modern scholars working on the later seventeenth-century period have largely studied the three kingdoms in isolation from each other, while the Glorious Revolution itself has been treated by historians primarily as an event in English history. Little work has been done on the Revolution in Scotland – we as yet, for example, possess no detailed study of the Claim of Right of 1689, the Scottish equivalent to the Declaration of Rights – and virtually none on the actual reign of James VII (to give James II his Scottish title). In the absence of much in-depth scholarship, Scottish historians have tended to see the Scots as reluctant revolutionaries who simply imported a ready-made revolution from England, even if ultimately the Scots did forge a settlement that was decidedly Whig and Presbyterian.³¹ The reign of James II and the subsequent revolution in Ireland has been somewhat better covered, but there has been an understandable tendency to focus on the war between the two kings – James and William – that ensued in the aftermath of James's overthrow in England.³² As a result, we have been left with a historiography of the Glorious Revolution that has centred predominantly on England, and which by omitting more radical and more bloody developments in James II's other two kingdoms has helped to perpetuate an image of the Glorious Revolution as a rather tame affair. It is hardly surprising that historians see the events of the 1640s and 1650s (which saw civil war, regicide and the setting up of a republic) as the only genuine revolution in English history.³³

This book will challenge some of our basic assumptions about the reasons for James's fall and the nature of the revolution that ensued. It will show that external factors alone cannot explain why James's regime toppled but that, on the contrary, it was domestic political turmoil that in the main was responsible for bringing James down. It will also argue that it is wrong to see the Glorious Revolution as unrevolutionary in spirit and in outcome. It has been written as a sequel to my Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, which explored political developments in England, Scotland and Ireland in the period from 1660 to 1685.³⁴ Although the two books are intended to stand alone, they are nevertheless complementary, and between them tell the larger story of the fortunes of the Stuart monarchy between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. They are also informed by a shared conceptual approach, designed to redress certain limitations in the existing historiography and to afford us fresh insights into the causes, nature and significance of what transpired in 1688–9.

There are three notable respects in which existing historical writing on the reign of James II and the Glorious Revolution remains deficient. First, most studies have been written from the top down, focusing on the political elite and concentrating on events either at court or at Westminster. Although historians have always been aware that there was some popular political agitation in England at the time of the Glorious Revolution, they have remained unsure how to integrate high and low politics into their analyses. Key political agency, in most historical accounts, is afforded to the aristocracy and gentry; if the Glorious Revolution was more than a foreign invasion, it was at most a revolt of the nobility.³⁵ The present volume argues for the need to set politics in a broader social context – to develop a social history of politics, one which looks at the nature of governance at the local level, pays attention to the importance of public opinion, and recognizes the crucial agency of those below the level of the traditional ruling classes. Restoration demonstrated how courting those ‘out-of-doors’ was a vital factor in Charles II's success in defeating the Whigs and bolstering the authority of the crown in his final years; its findings naturally suggest the need to explore in turn the extent to which James's ability or inability to carry public opinion with him contributed to the success or failure of what he sought to achieve.

Second, there exists no major modern study of the reign of James II and the Glorious Revolution that offers an integrated analysis of developments in all three kingdoms. Yet the toppling of James II from the throne of England had the inevitable consequence of toppling him from the thrones of Scotland and Ireland; indeed, when William of Orange invaded he came with the explicit intention of rescuing Protestant liberties in Scotland and Ireland as well as in England. The Glorious Revolution was, by definition, a three-kingdoms event, and needs to be studied as such; as we shall see, incorporating Scotland and Ireland into our account provides a markedly different perspective on the significance of the Revolution from that which obtains when we focus on England alone. Moreover, Restoration showed how both the government's actions and public reactions to political developments were shaped by an awareness of the fact that the Stuart kings ruled over three kingdoms and not just one. We thus need to explore the extent to which what James sought to achieve, how he sought to achieve it, and how people reacted to what he was trying to achieve, were conditioned by the fact that the King made policy for Scotland and Ireland as well, not just for England.

Third, scholars have, in the main, failed to appreciate the revolutionary significance of 1688–9, largely as a result of their failure to set political developments at this time in their broader social context and three-kingdoms’ perspective. This book will show that 1688–9 was genuinely revolutionary, both in the making and in the outcome.

Before proceeding with our account of the reign of James II and the Revolution which brought him down, however, it would be helpful to say a little more about the particular approach adopted and provide some additional context on the precise nature of James II's inheritance.

Revolution

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction