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- parliament wanted William of Orange to take over
- Will already in correspondence with MPs and powerful families
- knew invasion would be fairly easy
- initially found support with Whigs
- Bill of Rights 1689 meant there was no standing army
- WIII often let parliament do what they wanted in return for supporting war with France
- war was seen as justice: France scared people
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- could no longer use idea of divine right or royal prerogative
- foreigner with foreign advisors
- Jacobite supporters in Ireland
- 'country' influence of Tories
- WIII spoke English but refused to write in it
- parl wanted WIII to take more advice from English advisors and to take a more Anglocentric view
- WIII wanted to use England as a banking and manpower machine for his foreign activities
- recognises that parl needed freedom - strong parl in Netherlands
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- absolute monarchy in France
- strong parliament in United Provinces
- parliamentary monarchy in England
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- Collision's theory of state composition
- different meanings of republic in C17th: 'republic' more akin to 'state'
- while EI and JI were absolute monarchs, the state which they presided over could be manipulated and engaged with by those lower down the social scale
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- political divide engendered by religion since the Reformation
- lapse of licensing
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- agreement between parliament and monarchy
- indirect influence of the people over the state (e.g. James II)
- Glorious Revolution, Toleration Act and Bill of Rights: sense that someone further down the political hierarchy is having more of a say in the writing and practice of the constitution
- one of the changes is not the decline of religion (even though rel. orthodoxy and faith changes) but it is the way religion is applied to politics - there is a decrease in the power of persuasion and in the power of divine right
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Parliament and the people
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- parl derives rhetorical legitimacy and its right to rule from the people
- no vote = no direct participation in politics
- much stronger case that parliament is deriving legitimacy from indirect political participation
- has to listen to the political electorate because their rhetorical legitimacy depends upon them
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- derogatory terms
- court more urban
- country more country (duh)
- were used at the time but also useful way for historians to talk about divisions
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- formal group of people with similar political beliefs
- needs an agenda or manifesto, support base, members, campaigns, views on running of state etc.
- a lot of political debate is about who should have the ability to exercise power
- done in order to secure liberty: liberty defined differently by different sides
- divisions between parties becoming more separate in this period
- perhaps not political parties according to modern definition
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- process of modernity beginning to emerge?
- how to define modernity
- more of a process rather than a concrete birth
- Pincus and Knight see it as a sudden change - I disagree
- 1694 est. of Bank of England led to economic revolution which allowed for development of modern state
- gradual process
- freedom of the press
- agency of individuals developing
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What did parliament stand to gain by inviting William to become king?
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- widespread disaffection among both Whigs and Tories with JII in 1688, with particular resistance to his innovations and religious policies
- desire to restore old liberties but MPs wanted to prevent a recurrence of violence and radicalism of previous English Revolution
- main aim of most MPs was to restore political order asap and not waste time trying to tackle theoretical and ideological questions
- by inviting William to become king, parliament was not trying to create a new regime, but actually restore the old one distorted by JII
- William also commanded wide political support in England; he was linked by intimate contacts within both court and opposition circles and by friendships with a large number of key English nobles and political heavyweights
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- initially strong support for James to remain as king among High Tories
- soon undermined by James' refusal to stay in England as a focal point for rallying
- James escaped for 2nd time on 22nd Dec
- now even High Tories had to support William as only guarantor of public order
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- belief in subjects' right to resist tyrannical monarchs put Whigs wholly behind WII
- Bill of Rights: claims JII tried to subvert state
- meeting of 60 peers on 24th Dec agreed to ask WIII to run the country and make arrangements to hold elections
- eventually joint rule was offered to William and Mary in order to avoid the prospect of a prolonged interval without a monarch and to avoid insurrection
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- change in monarch gave parliament a chance to limit royal power ("before you fill the throne, I would have you resolve, what power you will give the king" - Falkland)
- committee set up Jan 29th to formulate a list of the rights of the subject, reinforcing those existing and introducing new legislation
- WIII and Mary had to agree to this legislation before they accepted the throne
- report contained a number of constitutional changes, including the guarantees for continuation of parliament, religious liberty for Protestants, proposals for reform of chancery and treason trials, fixed salaries for judges and cautious movement towards a permanent financial revenue
- 1689 Dec of Rights failed to carry out these reforms to limit power of the crown and only retained 11 which were considered to reflect existing rights (use of suspending power, maintenance of standing army and kept extra-parliamentary taxation as illegal)
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- relationship between monarch and parl was probably the most cordial it had ever been at Charles' death
- James inherited the best possible position
- James used prerogative powers to pursue religious policies; resorted to martial law; grew army; took measures against private ownership of arms; pursued example policies in Ireland, Scotland and N America
- revocation of Edict of Nantes in 1685
- introduced Roman Catholics as officers in the army, and also tried to bully gentry into repealing TA - shift back towards more absolute monarchy
- James failed (unlike CII) to hand over any authority or power to parliament, suggesting a want to hold onto an absolute monarchy by dictating and personally influencing all policy
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- first modern revolution
- took place over a number of years
- transformed foreign policy, imperial policy and Church of England
- beginning of the political economy: first time in which politicians began to argue openly and explicitly over issues
- popular, violent and divisive because James had been a moderniser, not a defender of traditional society
- substantial minority remained loyal to James
- deep divisions between Whigs and Tories
- "not the aristocratic, bloodless and consensual affair described in establishment Whig historiography"
- struggle between competing versions of modernity
- not struggle between Protestants and Catholics
- changes 1640-1660 were ephemeral and did not diverge from european pattern of political development towards absolutism
- three revolutionary effects from Civil War reversed upon Restoration: "many...became revolutionaries...but they did not achieve a revolution"
- James was overthrown because his modernisation squandered political capital and because Louis XIV's formation of a European political crisis gave William broad support
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- interplay between economics, law and politics
- how institutions develop in different social and economic institutions
- analyses how public policy is created and implemented
- began during Restoration and Jacobean period
- represents the victory of those who supported manufacturing, urban culture and the possibilities of unlimited economic growth based on the creative potential of human labour
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- not inevitable but there were long-term causes: socioeconomic changes, growing French power, political economy, fissures in church and state dating back from Elizabethan period
- GR as a process set in motion in 1620s and only ending in 1720s and 30s
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- not bourgeois in a class sense, but in a cultural and political sense: trading centre, commercial society, new cultural dominance of urban middle class, new culture of politeness
- aristocracy and gentry began to act more bourgeois
- "the depth of the argument, the intensity of the ideological differences and the breadth of social implications explain why the revolution involved such a broad swath of English society, why it was so violent and why it was so divisive. It was this protracted argument, rather than a speedy palace coup against an inept king, that transformed England and then Britain into a great European and imperial power"
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- "the distinction is drawn between those who observed natural and divine rule (absolute) and those who broke natural and divine law (tyrants or arbitrary)"
- absolute monarchy is a system in which the monarch has complete power over people and politics - demonstrated through DoB: "the possession of that right which God and Nature hath made our due"
- arbitrary monarchy is a system in which the monarch retains significant power over people but retains communication with parliament/people - Charles' treatment of influence within the Church
- Macauley: English Revolution as the transfer of supreme control of executive administration
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Charles' clash with Parliament
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- Charles asked parl to allow him to dispense individuals from the penal laws - why did he take such a combative path regarding religion?
- did Charles favour Catholicism as a religion? prefer the absolutism of Catholic monarchs?
- "Charles chose a set of policies that could be smeared as papist and absolutist and rejected policies that might have produced a cooperative parliament" Coward
- Had to deter to Parliament's wishes on key issues: Act of Attainder (could not pardon his friends), abandonment of DOI 1672, forced to accept TA, 1678 Act forced papists to require a license to see the king and impeachment of Danby
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- frequent parliaments
- free elections
- freedom of speech within Parliament
- no right of taxation without parliamentary consent
- freedom from government interference
- right of petition
- just treatment of people by courts
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- June 1662: prevented abuses in printing seditious, treasonable and unlicensed book and pamphlets, and regulated printing and printing presses
- allowed to lapse in 1695: "this marked the formal end of the censorship of the press by the state and the Church, which in any case was becoming increasingly difficult to enforce"
- as a result, "political journalism flourished...appeared a more volatile electorate than ever before"
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Increased political involvement
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- Locke's publication of 'the Reasonableness of Christianity' is an example of radical notions now easily published (1695)
- "the two decades after the lapse of the Licensing Act were a golden age for printed material of all kinds published for a wide audience"
- loads of printed sermons, pamphlets and ballads on political issues published
- this proliferation of printed material "helped to carry party divisions beyond Westminster and London into provincial society and politics"
- WIII very aware of power of press to mould public opinion
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- two prominent newspapers: The Post Boy (Tory) and The Post Man (Whig) - 3x a week
- 1704: PB had over 3000 issues, PM 3800
- individual copies read by up to 50,000 people (coffee house culture)
- newspapers "quickly became an integral part of London's political culture and a critical agent in providing the London electorate with information about politics"
- "rapid spread of coffeehouses across England radically extended and socially deepened the possibilities for popular political discussion"
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Influence of Revolution 1688-89
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- voices of reformers growing fewer in number and increasingly distant from centre of affairs, eventually becoming absorbed in chorus of other disillusioned and disgruntled elements
- this, in the printing and preaching of reformation's supporters, proved a powerful spur to those concerned to effect a visible improvement in the nation's outward behaviour
- these ideas were fuelled by fear stemming from involvement in a war of immense proportions
- these ideas took shape in the form of a campaign for more effective law enforcement to achieve a national reformation of manners
- the GR was a "fundamentally transformative event in English and European history" and changed foreign and imperial policy and the political economy
- rise of organised dissent: 1689-1710, 3,600 dissenter meeting houses licensed, compared with 9500 parishes
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