1688: The First Modern Revolution (review)

All serious students of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 will have to read this impressive monograph. Stimulating, challenging, and provocative, its virtues are manifest; its weaknesses less obviously so. Hence, this review sets out at greater length my doubts about Mr. Pincus's achievement than my appreciation of its virtues, but this imbalance should not detract from the substantial merits of his work—a book that will long be admired, and also encourage intense debate and profound controversy.

Much in Mr. Pincus's important thesis is persuasive. The Glorious Revolution is too often seen as little more than an aristocratic coup that removed a disastrous and reactionary monarch, James II, in order to restore England's ancient constitution and the people's traditional rights and liberties. Instead, Mr. Pincus regards James II as being initially very successful in building up a Catholic and absolutist state machine, influenced by and modeled on the achievements in France of Louis XIV, but reveals him steadily losing support as he tried to strengthen his position at the expense of the rights, liberty, and property of large and important groups of English people. By 1688, James II's opponents were so numerous and widespread that they could overthrow him in a violent and popular revolution, which soon created a new state and set England on a very different political trajectory. Mr. Pincus's wide lens looks not only beyond England to the rest of the British Isles, but to developments across Europe. He skillfully demonstrates his own deep knowledge of political, economic, social, religious, and cultural history. His arguments rest on an astonishing array of primary sources, and he writes with clarity and panache.

All of Mr. Pincus's chapters repay careful attention. He provides a fund of information on England's social and economic transformation in the seventeenth century, especially after 1660. He argues forcibly that James II sought to create a modern English state, though one built on a particular Catholic form of royal absolutism pioneered in France by Louis XIV. Substantial evidence proves that James II was overthrown not simply by the Dutch forces brought over by William of Orange, but by the massive rejection of his political and religious policies by his English subjects. He demonstrates the degree of popular involvement in violent actions by ordinary subjects in England, Scotland, and Ireland. England in particular is shown to have been transformed by revolutions in its foreign policy, its political economy, and its religious life. Mr. Pincus closes with a discussion of the reaction to the assassination plot against William III in 1696 that proves, in his view, that a majority of the nation had accepted the revolutionary changes that had occurred since 1688. For him, a radical Whig revolution had been consolidated, and royal absolutism defeated.

While there is a great deal to admire, Mr. Pincus does not entirely convince. Essentially a long interpretive essay, his monograph eschews a narrative approach and tells his readers very little about the motives and personalities of his leading characters, especially William of Orange. Those not well versed in the chronology and leading features of the Glorious Revolution should start with Tim Harris's more accessible recent monograph, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy 1685-1720 (2006). Mr. Pincus often simplifies and occasionally distorts the opinions of other historians—just to knock them down like ninepins. His comments on many fine historians, even those who have advanced similar arguments, lack generosity. I also have concerns about how he supports many of his arguments. He frequently buttresses his claims with a series of short quotations (often just a few words) taken from a variety of sources, combining them within a single footnote so that their reliability and provenance are not clear.

Some of Mr. Pincus's most important arguments are open to question and not as clear-cut or incontrovertible as he maintains. He insists on the violent nature of the revolution in England in 1688, but not even all the evidence he provides can...