England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion, and War by Craig Rose (review)

93 were the cause of his discomfort? What of the empire, and the institutions that embodied it? A political system is an agglomeration of ideas and institutions, and an accurate portrait of English society must account for how the two interact. Charles W. A. Prior Queen’s University at Kingston CRAIG ROSE. England in the 1690s: Revolution , Religion, and War. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Pp. xviii ⫹ 331. $34.95 (paper). This book would have covered England , Scotland, and Ireland in the 1690s had Mr. Rose not been obliged to change careers, his poignant Preface explains. You are in his grip from the onset, as seventeen engaging introductory pages explain how the ambitious William of Orange set out to get what he wanted in England. The purpose of the Blackwell series is to retell the history as it was seen at the time: local, decentralized. We are not given the long view stretchingintothe Whig ascendancy. Despite the good general work of David Ogg, Leo Braudy, and others, the decade of the 1690s has not been studied in this detail before, no doubt because it is so messy, throwing up flawed, shifting alliances, firecrackers that went out damply, plansandplotsthatcametonothing . To make the period less alluring, the repellent William is central because his personality seemed to matter as much as his policies—reserved to the point of silence , untrusting, lover of only and all things Dutch. His popular queen died at only 32 to the panegyrical grief of all but the Jacobites, depriving William of ‘‘the cloak of hereditary legitimacy, flimsy though it was.’’ William’s supporters reverted to language of providential deliverance . It took an assassination plot in 1695–1696 to restore any kind of public sympathy for William. Mr. Rose is exceptionally lucid on the distinctions between Whig and Tory, demonstrating the disorganized nature of parties loosely united by beliefs, forced into confederacies with unwilling bedfellows . Tories thought of Whigs as ‘‘incendiaries , intent on nothing less than the overthrow of the Crown and the Church of England,’’ but naturally, to the Whigs, ‘‘King James’s reign was merely the culmination of a conspiracy which had been hatched under Charles II.’’ So who was conspiring to bring down the establishment ? Everyone, it seems, as long as they accused someone else. ‘‘As conspiracy theories go, the Jacobite interpretation of the revolution has more to recommend it than most’’: that is, the English were to be taken out of the French orbit but still required to pay for and fight William’s war for the Dutch. In time William III shifted away from theRevolutionWhigswhohadhelpedenthrone him. Mr. Rose quotes the extraordinary explanation of Tacitus—‘‘the first day after the Reign of a Tyrant is always the best’’—by Henry Booth, Earl of Warrington (as Lord Delamere, he had been at the forefront taking up arms for William ) when it dawned on himthattheking was not interested in the nation, only in securing hisown grip on thecrown.There is much more thorough analysis, in this dense and detailed account, of the seven bishops, convocation, the rise of Atterbury and his narrow failure to bring off William’s defeat, or even to win the ‘‘scholarly controversy’’ with William Wake. Mr. Rose even finds room for the Society for the Reformation of Manners. If there is a single motif, it must be power politics at its ugliest, accusation and counteraccusation in a welter of confu- 94 sion and broken promises. This is where Mr. Rose is most comfortable; the religion of his title is his weakest hand. Symbolizing the duplicity of the decade , the front cover and the last chapter present a well-known print,TheEmbleme of Englands Distractions. An enterprising printmaker adopted a common practice , replacing the original figure of Oliver Cromwell with William. This print not only played into the hands of Jacobite propagandists; it also symbolized the contradictory rivalries and partnerships that characterize the decade for Mr. Rose. Look, he says, at William’s‘‘internalcontradictions ’’ in policy: Cromwell had tried to ‘‘woo conservatives while at the same time protecting the radical sects,’’ and now William tried to do the same. Courting the Tories simply alienated the Whigs who should have supported him since the early 1690s. By...