Restoration and revolution / Revolution
the cornerstone of the Whig
interpretation of English
history. According to this
tradition, the members of
the Convention parliament
who voted the crown to
William and Mary were not
constitutional innovators, but
defenders of England’s “ancient
constitution” (the body of fundamental laws
which were held to guarantee the rights and
liberties of the English) from the absolutist
designs of James.
In the words of Edmund Burke in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790), the revolutionaries “regenerated the
deficient part of the old constitution
through the parts which were not
impaired”. In contrast to the violence and
terror engulfing revolutionary France at
the time that Burke was writing, this earlier
English revolution was “glorious” because
it was carried out by parliament. Above all,
1688–9 was to be celebrated because it was,
according to the Whig interpretation, a
bloodless revolution. The emphasis on the
peaceful nature of the revolution was not
only a result of a wish to contrast it with
violent revolutions in continental Europe,
but also out of need to present 1688–9 as a
pivotal point in a story of national political
self-determination. As GM Trevelyan
rather sheepishly admitted in his History of
England (1926), there was “a certain
ignominy in the fact that a foreign fleet
and army... had been required to enableEnglishmen to recover the liberties
they had muddled away in their frantic
faction feuds”.
Recent historians have questioned the
optimistic outlook of the Whig account,
with its description of a steady movement
towards parliamentary democracy.
Instead, they have presented the revolution
as little more than a dynastic usurpation,
in the words of Blair Worden, “a swift
aristocratic coup”. According to these
historians, the revolution changed very
little in constitutional terms as the
Declaration of Rights was a largely
toothless legal instrument. They have
pointed to the outbreak of post-
revolutionary wars in Scotland and Ireland
between 1690 and 1692 as evidence that
the consequences of 1688–9 were also less
than “glorious” (see box on p101).
Historian Jonathan Israel has stressed the
importance of the military dimension to
the revolution, arguing that events were
not only shaped by William III and the
Convention parliament, but also by the
presence of a large occupying army of
Dutch soldiers in London.
However, the claim that the revolution
was essentially bloodless has remained BRIDGEMAN IMAGESunchallenged. It is time this last piece of
“Whig smuggery” (as one historian has
aptly described it) is put to rest. As recent
historians have correctly argued, the
revolution was one important stage in a
protracted and messy struggle over the
succession to the throne, which continued,
with the Jacobite revolts of 1715 and 1745,
into the 18th century. The issue was
whether hereditary succession should be
followed, allowing James’s Catholic heirs
to inherit the crown or whether lineal
descent should be ignored in favour of a
Protestant monarch.The roots of the Revolution
Accounts of the Revolution of 1688–9
should begin in the 1670s, when James’s
conversion to Catholicism became public
knowledge. Anxieties about the rise of
arbitrary government and the destruction
of the Protestant religion under a “popish”
monarch led to the turmoil of the Exclusion
Crisis of 1678–81, when Whig politicians,
scared by rumours of a “popish plot”,
attempted by legislative means to bar
James from becoming king.
The plot was the fabrication of the
former Catholic convert Titus Oates. ButA 19th-century painting by Edward
Ward dramatises the moment
when the news of William’s arrival
in Devon is broken to King James“The claim of a bloodless Revolution has
remained unchallenged. It is time that this
piece of ‘Whig smuggery’ is put to rest”