Popular Revolution or Foreign Invasion?

Steve Pincus presents a new approach to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 based on an impressive range of published material and manuscripts. Unlike most English historians, he has not been brought up on the Whig interpretation of history propounded by Macaulay; he makes a good case for questioning the assumption that 1688 was a uniquely English event and compares it with the American, French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions. He sees the 1688 revolution as a landmark moment in the emergence of a modern state. With passing glances at Scotland and Ireland, his book is concerned mainly with England. Yet like most Americans, he identifies with the Protestant Dissenters, so many of whom shaped US history, but who were a relatively small minority in England where the majority of the population were members of the Church of England.

Pincus stresses James II’s pro-French policies, and suspects the existence of a secret Anglo-French alliance, concluding that James and Louis XIV “could divide the world between themselves,” although he admits that the evidence for this is scanty. James is also said to have wished to introduce a French-style parliament in England. Given that the French parlements were law courts, perpetually engaged in challenging the power of the Crown, this is unlikely. We are told, too, that James wanted to introduce French-style Catholic modernity into England on the model of the Gallican Church. The French Catholic Church, however, was not monolithic, but divided into Ultramontanes, Jansenists (who were allied to the parlements), and Gallicans. Nor did Louis XIV have absolute power over the church in France. He was circumscribed by the rights and privileges of his subjects: although the Sorbonne was a thorn in his side, he did not think he had the right to alter the charter of the University of Paris.

When “the English invited William to England,” the people enthusiastically welcomed him, making this a “popular revolution” like that in France after July 1789, argues Pincus. Since the electoral system, with its rotten and pocket boroughs, was one of inverse proportional representation, how do we know that? It is true that a substantial number of people, we do not know how many, wished that the Prince of Orange would come to England. At that time the “sense of the people” was often said to be expressed by the large open constituencies, which the Whigs had mostly held at the time of the Exclusion Crisis (1678–81), but which after 1689 were usually captured by William’s opponents, the Tories. Seven people sent the invitation to the Prince of Orange, but none of them would sign it because of the risks involved. Pincus is right to regard James II as a modernizer, interested in trade, sea power, and economic development. He is mistaken, however, in saying that James was creating a modern bureaucratic state by increasing the size and scope of government departments, a development that took place in William III’s reign, as the work of Sir John Sainty and Robert Bucholz has shown.

James was the real revolutionary in granting toleration to all, including Protestant Dissenters, Catholics, and Jews, as he had done in his colony of New York since 1680. How can liberals today condemn that? The so-called Toleration Act of 1689 did not benefit all Protestant Dissenters: it dispensed Trinitarian Protestant Dissenters from the penalties of the law, but the rest continued to be persecuted. Pincus cites Gilbert Burnet and the Presbyterian Roger Morrice as witnesses to the toleration that Catholics enjoyed, but Catholic priests could be and were put to death for nothing but being priests. James’s religious policies were anathema to the Church of England, which strongly defended its monopoly of office in church and state and opposed James’s use of his dispensing power to admit Catholics to universities and to a small number of offices. Although it was declared illegal in 1689, in James’s reign, the majority of the judges ruled that the dispensing power was legal, and judges interpret...