A Proper Revolution?

Steve Pincus: 1688 - The First Modern Revolution

National Review, October 15, 2009

Infuriated by the high-church, high-Tory critiques of a British historian impertinent enough to suggest that the tercentenary of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 was not worth celebrating, Mrs. Thatcher’s then Lord Chancellor jibed that “academic historians never make their money by saying that the established truth is true.” I’m not sure what the late Baron Hailsham of St. Marylebone would have made of a new account of that same revolution by Yale professor Steve Pincus. Meticulously researched and deftly written, Pincus’s book demolishes established truths (actually untruths) about the Glorious Revolution only to cram 1688 into a corset (“the first modern revolution”) that might be meant to be sexy, but ultimately doesn’t fit. That said, this is so evidently serious a book that old Hailsham might have been not only forgiving but even, maybe, something of a fan.

The 1688 revolution was traditionally believed to derive much of its gloriousness from its absence of significant bloodshed, except in Ireland (which, revealingly, was not thought to count), a blessing usually put down to the fact that its central drama — the overthrow of James II, England’s last Roman Catholic king — was an essentially conservative affair. According to this version of events, the replacement of James with the dual monarchy of the Dutch prince William and his wife (and James’s daughter) Mary was an easy sell, a restoration as much as a revolution, intended by a good number of its supporters to return hallowed (if sometimes fictional) English liberties to their central place in a constitution threatened by the newfangled ways of a monarch in thrall to a foreign religion and, no less sinisterly, to the absolutist ideology of “Lewis XIV” (to use the contemporary, splendid, and unapologetically English spelling), the foreign tyrant who was the wretched James’s ally, mentor, and paymaster. Yes, the Glorious Revolution may have paved the way to more radical changes in the way England was run, but so far as possible (even during the tricky 1688–89 hiatus) it did so in a way that was in accord with existing law — and who could object to that?

The distinction between this happy tale and the chaos and slaughter of subsequent revolutions abroad is obvious and, for those remaining Britons who know their history, a source of pride, clinching proof of a sensible people’s innate talent for moderation. When, in a classic exposition of both this view and her indomitable tactlessness, Mrs. Thatcher took advantage of the bicentenary of the French revolution to remind Le Monde that the Glorious Revolution was an example of the way that English liberties had evolved in a process marked by “continuity, respect for law, and a sense of balance,” the Iron Lady was making the point that the French Revolution was everything that 1688 was not — and that it was all the worse for it.

Ironically, the survival of this “Whig interpretation” of (to borrow Mrs. Thatcher’s description) 1688’s “quiet revolution” has been helped by the persistent disappointment of leftist British historians that, despite a possible near miss in the 1640s, their country has never enjoyed the imagined benefits of a “proper” revolution. Lord Macaulay and Edmund Burke, the two most influential exponents of the Whig analysis, may have shaped their narratives in a manner designed to persuade their countrymen that the revolutionary upheavals then raging on the Continent (Macaulay’s The History of England from the Accession of James the Second was published in 1848, while Burke was writing when the guillotine was at its busiest) were not the British way, but it was an approach that played into the hands of later, lesser writers only too keen to dismiss James’s dethroning as just another aristocratic putsch. The 1688 revolution was, sniffed Engels in 1892, a “comparatively puny event.”

That’s not Professor Pincus’s view. He maintains that the 1688 upheaval was not only enormously significant (which it was), but that it should be considered — dubious compliment — the first “modern revolution.” Sadly, he never quite succeeds in satisfactorily establishing what that term means, coming closest when he writes about “a structural and ideological break with the previous regime . . . and a new conception of time, a notion that they [revolutionary regimes] are beginning a new epoch in the history of the state and . . . society,” an idea of Year Zero that is, awkwardly, difficult to square with the painstaking quest for precedent that was such a feature of 1688.

These definitional problems should come as no surprise. Stripped of its already imprecise chronological sense, “modern” is in this context too vague and too broad an adjective to mean very much: Even the most archetypically “modern” revolution — the Russian, with its strong strains of murderous millennial fantasy and traditional peasant Jacquerie — came with distinctly medieval aspects.

If there’s one thing we do know about modern revolutions, it’s their tendency to extreme violence. Unfortunately, Pincus’s determination to demonstrate the modernity of 1688 occasionally appears to have led him to paint a portrait of its convulsions in colors somewhat closer to the blood-drenched hues of revolutionary France than to the discreet, largely decorous tones that this most proper of revolutions really deserves. Even if we include (as we should) the Irish campaign and the fighting in Scotland, the Glorious Revolution can be blamed for perhaps some 20,000 deaths, almost none of them in England. By contrast, the revolution that tore England apart in the 1640s cost 190,000 lives in England alone (as a percentage of the population, a total higher than that accounted for by World War I — and in Scotland and Ireland the relative toll was even worse). It was a catastrophe so terrible, and in its social implications so potentially dangerous, that it goes a long way toward explaining the restraint displayed by the revolutionaries of 1688. That earlier conflict had come close to being a “modern revolution” — and there was little appetite to repeat the experience.

Pincus makes much of the rancorous controversies, sharp ideological divisions, and (in an attempt to debunk the argument that the revolution was little more than the maneuverings of shifting aristocratic cabals) popular enthusiasms that characterized England’s politics in the aftermath of the revolution and on deep into the 1690s. He demonstrates that these struggles had revolutionary consequences. Nevertheless, those who fought in them generally did so within well-established legal and political structures. 1688 was indeed a proper revolution, but in both senses of the word.

Another element in Pincus’s definition of a modern revolution is that it typically represents a clash not between the old order and the new, but between two conflicting visions of modernity. That’s a contention that could be disputed when it comes to some of history’s later revolutions, but it works well for 1688, in particular as an explanation of why so many conservatives were prepared to throw in their lot with the revolutionaries. As Pincus shows, by 1688 James had taken England a long way down the road to Versailles. The machinery of a Continental-style centralized absolutist state was being put in place. To add insult to injury, this was linked to an aggressive recatholicizing effort (albeit often camouflaged by bogus calls for wider religious toleration) that left little doubt that James’s ultimate ambition was to impose upon England a “national” Catholicism equivalent to the Gallicanism then being preached from French pulpits. Under the circumstances, many traditionalists, however deep their philosophical (and, not infrequently, religious) scruples about turning against their lawful king, felt that their vision of England left them with no choice other than revolt or (almost as devastating to James) sullen neutrality.

But with James consigned to history by his 1690 defeat (at the Battle of the Boyne, in the Roman Catholic Ireland that was his last redoubt), what next for England? Many studies of the 1688 revolution conclude with the former king’s final flight to France and a quick canter through the Bill of Rights (sound familiar?) and the other legislation most associated with the post-revolutionary settlement. If the biggest weakness of Pincus’s book (other than sporadically subjecting 1688 to the Eisenstein treatment) is an at times elliptical approach to narrative, its biggest strength is the way that the author takes the story far deeper into the 1690s than is customarily the case. We could argue about whether, as Pincus claims, the changes seen in those years constituted a continuing revolution, but that they were revolutionary is indisputable.

While these changes bear strong hallmarks of the improvisation and desire for compromise that are a characteristic of English political history, Pincus makes a forceful case that they were more cohesive than is usually understood. They were certainly comprehensive. By 1697, England had reset its foreign policy. Equally, attitudes to political and religious freedom had been altered in ways almost unimaginable a decade or so before, and the financial system had been restructured in a manner that was a death knell to the ancient aristocratic ideal of land as the source of wealth. The bourgeois trading and manufacturing Britain that was to dominate the planet was very clearly taking shape. Perhaps the greatest pleasure to be found in reading this book, however, comes from the prominence that Pincus gives to the debates that accompanied this transformation: often overlooked and almost always fascinating discussions that, in their sophistication, breadth, depth, and cleverness, foreshadow the brilliance of the thinking that was to emerge in America during the course of the third, and most glorious, English revolution of all — the one that caught fire in 1776.

1688 and All That

Michael Barone: Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers

National Review, July 30, 2007

Clio, that most elusive of Muses, can be glimpsed, but never caught. The interpretation of history is forever in flux, as much reflection of the present as window on the past. There are few better examples of this than England’s turbulent 17th century. Depending on whom you asked, and when, its conflicts were painful, but ultimately progressive; painful, but ultimately reactionary; or painful, but ultimately pointless. The natural response to the publication of yet another interpretation of one of the pivotal events of that century, the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, is to ask, what now?

According to Michael Barone, the answer is star-spangled Macaulay, classic Whig history with a distinctly American accent. The Glorious Revolution was, he writes, America’s “first revolution,” “a reference point” and “a glowing example” for the American Founders. The ghosts of P. T. Barnum and Betsy Ross will be unable to resist a smile at those words. To describe England’s last revolution, a characteristic mix of royal infighting and aristocratic maneuver, as American is, in its endearing exaggeration and patriotic pride, more typically American than anything that actually happened in 1688. That said, Barone’s broader point holds true, but with one important caveat. The Founders were inspired by the Glorious Revolution, but less by its reality than by its myth. The same may well be true of its latest chronicler.

That hasn’t stopped him from writing an excellent, well-researched overview of the prelude, consummation, and consequences of the revolution that is his topic and his totem, the revolution that saw off James II, England’s last Catholic king, and with him the last serious chance that the nation would succumb to absolute monarchy. Our First Revolution is no small achievement. The history of England in the 1680s is one of whirligig allegiance, helter-skelter intrigue, and perilous diplomatic gamesmanship. To retell it, as Barone does, in a manner that’s both informative and easily accessible to the general reader, demonstrates a way with a story that would be beneath the dignity, and beyond the skills, of many academic historians.

That’s not to say that the book is without its flaws. The most significant is, somehow, also very American. Barone is a product of a country that is, in a number of respects, history’s happiest accident, so it’s perhaps not surprising that, despite some hints to this effect, he cannot quite bring himself to admit the extent to which the Glorious Revolution was the product, not of optimism, but of pessimism. Its inspiration lay not in the quest for freedom, but in the fear of a return to the disorder of the six or so preceding decades, decades that had seen an intellectual, moral, and political unraveling so profound that it led to warfare, regicide, and dictatorship. When Hobbes, the finest philosopher of the age, wrote that the absence of a common, recognized authority would mean war (“and such a war as is of every man against every man”), he was writing from experience: Barone notes that the English civil war claimed perhaps 190,000 lives, as a percentage of the population more than that accounted for by the Kaiser or Hitler. In Scotland and Ireland the toll was still worse.

Despite that, Barone feels able to dismiss the upheavals of civil war and republican government as something of an irrelevance. This is to ignore the fact that the anxieties that fueled the Glorious Revolution were a direct response to the savage lessons of those earlier years. And so was the willingness to overthrow a monarch, or even monarchy itself, if that’s what it took to keep the peace.

Those lessons began in the 1620s. On one side the Stuarts, James I and, more fatefully, his son Charles I, were trying to create a modern centralized despotism of the type rapidly gaining ground across the Channel. On the other were England’s merchant class and much of its gentry, jealous of privileges and liberties dating back to the Middle Ages. Charles tried to trump these ancient traditions with superstition: the belief that a king ruled by divine right. But a century into the Reformation, the Almighty was not what He once had been. Kings might rely on God, but did God rely on kings? And if God did not rely on kings, what did He have to say about the rest of the social order?

In their attempt to find out, the English rejected Charles, they rejected the egalitarianism of the mid-century radicals, they rejected Puritan excess, they rejected Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and they rejected military rule. In 1660 they returned, exhausted, to monarchy and Charles II, a cheery cynic who understood that faute de mieux was as good a reason as any to be accepted as king. It’s a measure of his political skills that Charles (who had no legitimate children) was able to ensure that his brother James, a devout Catholic, would succeed him. It’s a measure of his perceptiveness that he thought that his dour and stubborn sibling would hold the job for less than four years. In the event, James II, who came to the throne in 1685 dreaming of Catholic restoration and hog-tied parliaments, hung on for just over 46 months. By early 1689, he had been replaced by William of Orange, a safely Protestant Dutch prince, and William’s wife, Mary, who was not only a safely Protestant English princess, but James’s eldest daughter, a Goneril all his own.

It may fit a little awkwardly with his overall thesis of 1688 as a signpost pointing to the liberties of an independent America, but Barone doesn’t dodge the degree to which religious intolerance was responsible for James’s downfall. The U.S. Constitution may have provided for absolute religious freedom, but its architects lived in a more safely secular environment. Wary survivors in an age of religious fury, the revolutionaries of 1688 enjoyed no such luxury. Religion needed to be tamed, fenced-in, watched. They feared that toleration of some expressions of religious belief might come at too high a price. In that sense, the First Amendment would, to them, have looked like a suicide pact. A militant Catholicism was not only resurgent on the European mainland, but had become the ideological enabler of despotism. Not to resist James’s attempts to foster a Catholic revival would have been madness. When the king demonstrated that he was prepared to use the tools of absolutism to get his way, he merely proved his opposition’s point.

Barone faces a similar problem in discussing the revolution’s immediate aftermath. The passages in which he describes it come across as a little confused, incoherent, and ambiguous. There’s a good reason for that: These events were confused, incoherent, and ambiguous. Barone’s difficulty is that he needs them to form a clear path to Philadelphia. What he gets instead is a muddle. What he misses is that that was the idea.

William’s motive in coming over from the Netherlands to grab the crown was partly dynastic, but primarily strategic. He wanted to lock England into an alliance against Louis XIV. The rest, so far as he was concerned, was conversation. That left those who supported him with the job of securing social peace and, while they were at it, their own privileges. With despotism discredited (its very arbitrariness made it the antithesis of order), and a republic looking too tricky to contemplate, they tried to dream up an answer to the question of where sovereignty really lay. This led to some fine-sounding declarations ambiguous enough to satisfy just about every faction. These efforts were then supplemented by years of piecemeal legislation — ad hoc, gradualist (after an initial flurry), and pragmatic — that helped shape a new constitution without ever defining it. The most satisfactory answer, it was discovered, to the big questions, was silence. It’s difficult to think of anything less like the spirit of Philadelphia in 1787.

To find a connection it’s necessary (and a touch anachronistic) to treat the Glorious Revolution settlement as a whole, but that’s what the American Founders seem to have done. To them these laws (which included the promotion, ironically, of greater religious toleration, the enactment of a bill of rights that was an obvious predecessor of its American namesake, and provisions designed to promote the independence of Parliament) were a precedent. They were both a fumbling codification and, in their apparent success, a definitive proof of the notion that sovereignty was too potent to be entrusted to one person or, indeed, one institution. Look at this another way, however, and liberty becomes a practical means, not an idealistic end — a crucial distinction largely invisible to those who used the romantic myth of a Patrick Henry–style 1688 as a rallying cry for the English in America nearly a century later.

Nevertheless, the fact that this dispersal of sovereignty was accomplished by bestowing rights and freedoms upon a significant portion of the population was not a myth. As Barone convincingly shows, the fragmentation of the old order left a space for the growth of free enterprise and freer enquiry, a space in which the ideas that became America could flourish, a space that was, essentially, an accident, the happiest of accidents.