Revolution

We have seen that it is misleading to characterize the Revolution in England as coming solely from above, or to suggest that by 1688 James II's position was so strong that he could only have been brought down as a result of a foreign invasion. James's regime collapsed from within; indeed, there was such widespread opposition to James's ambitious measures to help his co-religionists prior to William's invasion that there would have been some sort of revolution in the autumn of 1688 even if William had never set foot on English soil. Even William's ‘conquest’ of England can, in many respects, be regarded as being effected from below, since James was not overcome in battle by a foreign army but, rather, he fled in the face of widespread disaffection amongst his subjects.

The last couple of decades, however, have seen renewed attempts to invest the Glorious Revolution in England with more Whiggish – and more revolutionary – credentials. For one leading modern authority, it was an ‘Unexpected Whig Revolution’ – Whig, that is, not so much because it redefined the powers of the monarchy, but because it marked a break in the succession, and therefore a belated victory for Exclusion, and because the dynastic coup revolutionized England's domestic politics and foreign policy.³ The author of our most detailed study of the Declaration of Rights has concluded that the Revolution was a victory for Whig principles and changed ‘not only the English king, but also the kingship’: Whigs dominated the committees that were responsible for drawing up the terms upon which the crown was to be offered to William and Mary, and although some compromises had to be worked out along the way, the Declaration of Rights nevertheless significantly altered the existing powers of the crown and helped establish limited monarchy in England.⁴ Likewise, an important study that appeared on the occasion of the tercentenary in 1988 argued that significant inroads were made on the prerogative by the Revolution settlement, and that ‘the debate on the nature of the monarchy’ ended ‘decisively in 1689 with the victory of those who argued it was limited and mixed’; the Declaration of Rights, rather than asserting ancient rights and privileges', ‘made new law under the guise of declaring the old’.⁵ Most recently, one historian has argued that England's revolution of 1688–9 was ‘quite revolutionary’, and ‘fundamentally transformed the policies and ideology of the English state’.⁶

The extensive disagreement amongst scholars stems partly from the ambiguities inherent in the Revolution settlement itself. The settlement of 1689 involved not only some degree of compromise but also a certain amount of fudging, lending itself to a plurality of readings as a result. Contemporaries could interpret what had transpired within a Whiggish framework or subscribe to a more Tory reading of events, depending upon their personal political agendas and how they felt they needed to salve their own consciences: 1689 could both be seen as having changed quite a lot and as having altered very little – as a victory for popular sovereignty or as a miraculous deliverance wrought by God. The ability of the Glorious Revolution in England to appear all things to so many different types of people, of course, goes a considerable way towards explaining its success. Acknowledging this should not obscure the fact, however, that there remain certain key interpretative issues that need to be resolved.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE COMMONWEALTHMEN

The events of December 1688, and James's flight on the 11th, created a power vacuum at the very heart of the government. On learning of the King's withdrawal, the Earl of Rochester (James's brother-in-law by his first marriage) immediately summoned the spiritual and temporal peers to meet at the London Guildhall to form a provisional government; on the 12th, James's privy counsellors were invited to join them. Attendance fluctuated between twenty-two and thirty-eight, depending on the day and hour. The King's old friends, led by Rochester and the bishops, found they could count on the support of the majority, although there was a strong minority of ‘violent’ Whigs and ‘angry’ displaced courtiers whose sympathies lay with William. It was this body which, indirectly at least, was responsible for bringing James back to London on the 16th.⁷

When William himself arrived in the English capital on the 18th, ‘the greatest Lawyers, and those that came in with the Prince’ advised that William and his wife Mary should simply assume the title of king and queen, following the example of Henry VII after the battle of Bosworth Field (1485). Legally this had a number of advantages. It would legitimize all acts of resistance, since legislation from Henry VII's reign – the so-called De Facto Act of 1495 – granted indemnity to all persons who obeyed a de facto king or who fought for one against a de iure king. It would also enable William to call a parliament, which could be summoned only by a king. William refused to assume the crown, however, since he had promised in his invasion manifesto to refer the settlement of the nation to parliament. Instead, he called another assembly of peers, to meet on 21 December at the Queen's Presence Chamber in St James's, to give their advice on the best manner of pursuing his declared objectives. This proved to be a divided body and, with the de iure king as yet still in the country, did nothing to address the question of how to obtain a parliament. The Earl of Nottingham insisted that only James could issue writs for a parliament and suggested that he should be brought back with his authority specifically limited. In order to hear the voice of the commons, William decided to call a meeting for the 26th of the surviving MPs from Charles II's reign, together with the Lord Mayor, aldermen, and fifty representatives of the common council of London. Significantly, the members of James's 1685 parliament, an overwhelmingly Tory body, were ignored – presumably because, following the purges of Charles II's final years, this was not deemed a freely elected body. James's second flight on 23 December, however, changed the dynamic amongst the peers. Nottingham made a last-minute attempt to secure a conditional restoration of King James, proposing that there should be annual parliaments, to sit for a minimum of thirty days; that James should be required to take parliament's advice on religious and constitutional issues; and that William should serve as guarantor for what parliament demanded (in effect, in the capacity of a regent). Nottingham's motion was not carried. Instead, on Christmas Day the peers agreed to two addresses: one inviting William to issue writs for electing a convention to meet on 22 January; the other asking him to assume the direction of the government in the meantime. The following day the assembly of commoners followed suit with similar addresses, and William assumed the responsibilities of government on the 28th.⁸

The elections to the Convention were relatively tranquil, at least compared to the turbulent general elections of the Exclusion era or the fierce partisan disputes that were to characterize the reigns of William and Anne. It is true that there were a few fervent contests, fuelled by partisan campaigning and divisions amongst the electorate over the dynastic issue. All told, however, there were just 50 contests, compared to 101 in March 1679, 77 in October 1679, 54 in 1681 (when many Tories had decided not to compete rather than face inevitable defeat at the polls), and 79 in 1685. Some constituencies managed to avoid contests in 1689 by agreeing in advance to return one Whig and one Tory unopposed. The result was a House of Commons in which the two parties were fairly evenly matched: out of a total of 513, there were 174 known Whigs to 156 known Tories, along with 183 new members.⁹ It is usually assumed that the Whigs had an overall majority, since the House chose the Whig Henry Powle as speaker in preference to the Tory candidate, Sir Edward Seymour. Yet Powle was a moderate Whig, who had voted against Exclusion in 1679 and who had consistently favoured a policy of limitations on a popish successor. He was chosen less for his partisanship than because he was the one candidate likely to be acceptable to all. The Tories held the ascendancy in the Lords. Significantly, however, the upper House chose the Marquis of Halifax, the self-styled ‘Trimmer’ (i.e., one who trimmed between the two extremes), as their speaker.¹⁰

The build-up to the meeting of the Convention saw a heightened public debate about how to settle the government. Contemporaries noted how ‘people began to divide into different factions’ as pamphlets flowed from the presses in an attempt to influence opinion both within the Convention and outside it.¹¹ Although the Licensing Act, which had been renewed in 1685, technically remained in force, there was no way of effectively enforcing its provisions at this juncture. According to one estimate there were at least 300 pamphlets and other printed works in circulation between the autumn of 1688 and the end of February 1689, though this is probably on the conservative side; according to another estimate, some 2,000 titles appeared over the course of the year 1689.¹² Some of the works were for settling the throne on William and Mary jointly, or even on William alone; others ‘for declareing the government dissolved and beginning all de Novo’; still others for some sort of solution that would have preserved James as king, at least in title, either by recalling him on terms, or else by making the Prince and Princess of Orange regents during the remainder of his life; and some maintained that if there had to be a breach in the succession, then Mary, as James's immediate heir (assuming one believed in the ‘warming pan’ myth) should reign alone.¹³

Most Whig writers appealed to contract theory in order to justify the overthrow of James II. A number of pamphlets merely echoed the case against James made by William's invasion manifesto of October 1688 and reiterated by Burnet in his Enquiry into the Measures of Submission, though in the process often highlighted the three-kingdoms dimension to the crisis. The Anatomy of an Arbitrary Prince, for example, complained how James had ‘broken his Oath before God and Man, and the Laws of the Land, and his repeated Promises of Keeping them inviolable’ by erecting Catholic chapels and schools, appointing Catholic judges and magistrates, setting up the Ecclesiastical Commission, suspending the Bishop of London, attacking Magdalen College, seizing town charters, keeping a standing army, and also ‘By Invading the Fundamental Constitution of Scotland… altering it from a legal limited Monarchy, to an Arbitrary Despotick Power’ and by removing Protestant officers in Ireland and putting in Catholics.¹⁴ A belief that James had broken his contract could lead to one of two possible conclusions: either that the king had deposed himself, or that his subjects had the right to depose him. The first was more commonly reached; the second was intrinsically more radical. Thus Burnet, as we have seen, had insisted in the autumn of 1688 that a king who subverted ‘the whole Foundation of the Government’ annulled his own power and ceased to be king.¹⁵ Robert Ferguson, in defence of William's invasion, similarly argued that if the sovereign subverted ‘the Fundamental Laws of the Society’ he thereby annulled ‘all the Legal Right he had to Govern, and Absolve[d] all who were before his Subjects, from the Legal Engagements they were under of yielding him Obedience’. Yet Ferguson went on to argue that ‘our Predecessors and Ancestors’ had always reserved to themselves a right ‘of inspecting his Administration… and of abdicating him from the Soveraignty, Upon universal and egregious faileurs [sic] in the Trust that had been credited and consigned unto him’, citing parliament's deposition of Richard II as an example. Asking whether a king of England could ‘so misbehave himself in Office’ that he could be ‘Degraded and Deposed from his Regal Dignity’, Ferguson pointed out that even ‘the highest Assertors of Monarchy and Regal Prerogative’ allowed that there were various cases in which kings might ‘both abdicate themselves from their Power and Authority, and be renounced and degraded by others’, and insisted that James's misbe-haviour had been such as not only to justify resistance but also to ‘render it now Just and Expedient to Abdicate him’.¹⁶

Most who embraced contract theory argued that William alone should be made king. Thus one author claimed that since James had subverted the government, the people were free to settle the exercise of government themselves, and that they should make the Prince of Orange king: William deserved the crown, for all he had done, and England needed a strong king to fight the war against France, whereas to offer the crown to both William and Mary would be to engage in a risky experiment of ‘joint-power in governing’, of which England had no experience.¹⁷ Similarly Ferguson, despite taking the more radical line that subjects could depose their king, nevertheless opted for the constitutionally conservative solution that the deposed king should be replaced by another member of the royal family who agreed to uphold the existing constitution, and that ‘a Democratical Republick’ was an ‘impracticable’ solution which would not suit the temper of the English people. Parliament should settle the crown as expeditiously as possible and keep it within the royal line and family, Ferguson thought, although parliament did not have to give it to the next heir. He was also adamant that although the Princess of Orange deserved to have the royal title, sovereignty could be vested in only one person, and that ‘Reason of State’ dictated that it should be lodged ‘where it may be most for the publick good’, namely in the Prince of Orange.¹⁸

There was a group of radical or ‘true’ Whigs – or commonwealth-men, as they were sometimes called – who believed that it was not enough simply to replace one king by another but instead saw the need for fundamental constitutional reform. The three central figures in this group were John Wildman, the one-time Leveller agitator turned Whig plotter, who sat in the Convention for Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire; John Hampden, an Exclusionist MP and Rye House plotter, who was MP for Wendover, Buckinghamshire; and Samuel Johnson, the defrocked former chaplain to the late Lord Russell (the Earl of Shaftesbury's right-hand man in the Commons during the Exclusion Crisis) and author of the influential Julian the Apostate (1682) and A Humble and Hearty Address to all English Protestants in this Present Army (1686). They had important friends in the upper House (among them lords Bolton, Delamere, Lovelace, Macclesfield, Mordaunt and Wharton), as well as in the City of London (especially among the dissenters), while they also cultivated the support of a number of dissident clergymen (including the Presbyterian minister John Humfrey, the eccentric Anglican clergyman Edmund Hickerin-gill, and the lawyer-turned-cleric Edward Stephens). They took advantage of the breakdown in licensing controls to argue their case in the press: at least fifty-one ‘rights and reform’ pamphlets (including new works and reprints of earlier tracts) appeared in late 1688 and early 1689, although most of these were published anonymously and it is not always easy to ascribe authorship.¹⁹

The commonwealthmen argued that the events of 1688 had resulted in a dissolution of the government and that the people were therefore free to erect a new system of government if they desired. As Humfrey explained, since England's government was mixed, with power vested in king, Lords and Commons, the fact that the King was ‘now gone’ meant that this ‘one Corporation’ was ‘now broke’. The same was true regardless of whether one thought that James had forfeited his crown by attempting to introduce popery and arbitrary government, or had simply departed from his government by going from his people. ‘Supreme Power’, Humfrey argued, therefore reverted into ‘the hands of the People’, who could ‘place it as they will’, and ‘bound and limit it as they see fit, for the publick Utility’. If they did not take this opportunity to deliver the people from slavery, Humfrey warned, ‘the Ages to come’ would ‘have occasion to blame them for ever’.²⁰ Wildman argued that if James's ‘Desertion of the Government’ amounted ‘to a Demise, or Civil Death’, then ‘the next Heir ought immediately to be Proclaim'd, and must Inherit the Crown with the same inseperable Prerogatives that heretofore belong'd to it, and all Laws or Acts of Parliament made to limit and abridge them’ would be ‘null and void’. But if, as Wildman himself maintained, ‘the Departure of the King’ amounted to a dissolution of the government, then power reverted to ‘the People’, who might erect a new system of government, ‘either according to the old Modell, if they like it so well, or any other that they like and approve of better’.²¹

A few commonwealthmen favoured the abolition of the monarchy. One author, debating ‘Whether Monarchy or a Common-wealth be best for the People’, argued that although ‘a good King’ might be ‘better’, good kings were ‘so rarely to be found’, and bad ones ‘so pernicious and destructive’, that ‘Wise men’ thought it best ‘to take up with the mediocrity of a Common-wealth’. This particular author seems to have had in mind the idea of restructuring the English state along the lines of the governments of cities and corporate towns (such as London, with its Lord Mayor, court of aldermen and common council), which he described as being really commonwealths, with sovereignty vested in a representative body.²² The author of Now Is the Time proposed a republican regency for the remainder of James's reign. During this time, he suggested, a grand committee of the Lords and Commons (forty from each, half of them serving for life, half by a system of biennial rotation), presided over by the Prince of Orange (or whomever he appointed as his deputy), should form a council of state or governing senate, while parliaments should ‘be Chosen Triennially’ and ‘meet Annually’. ‘Such a Constitution’, this author believed, ‘would effectually Secure us… from Popery and Tyranny’, though these arrangements need continue only ‘during the Life of the King’, and not under ‘a Protestant Successor’.²³

Typically, however, the ‘true’ Whigs argued for a limited monarchy. The English constitution was ‘defective’, Wildman maintained, and in need of ‘some touches of… Legislative Skill to help it out’. For example, ‘every Well-Constituted Government’ ensured that the legislative power should meet frequently; yet in England the king, through his prerogative, had the power ‘to keep off Parliaments’ as long as he pleased. Wildman also thought it wrong that the king should have the right to appoint and dismiss judges at his pleasure, but he also insisted that changing judges' commissions to good behaviour would not improve things, since this would only make the king more careful to appoint men who would always ‘stand firm to the King's Interest’ in the first place. Instead, Wildman proposed, judges ‘should be chosen by Them who are chiefly concern'd, and for whose benefit and protection both the King and Laws were first made and intended’ – by which he clearly meant the people, with presumably their choice vested in their representatives in parliament. Indeed, Wildman insisted that those who censured James II for breaking his promise to govern according to law were wrong to do so, since ‘the present Laws and Constitutions of England’ did ‘undoubtedly give the King a Power to make the Judge, and to the Judge a power to pronounce the Law’, and James II had never done anything without ‘the Opinion and Concurrence of his Judges’. Wildman further thought it ‘very incongruous’ that the king should have ‘the absolute power of Peace and War… whilst the power of maintaining it’, through voting taxation, was ‘in the People’. He also argued the need for electoral reform: the property qualification for voters should be raised from the 40 shillings mark to a £40 freehold to ensure that electors were less open to bribery; there should be a redistribution of parliamentary seats, to do away with rotten boroughs and the over-representation of relatively underpopulated areas (like Cornwall, with its numerous corporations); and a secret ballot should be introduced. As a sop to Williamite sentiment, Wildman finished by saying that if the matter were left to him alone, ‘the Government should be Monarchy, and this Monarchy should be Absolute and Arbitrary, and the Prince should be my King’. ‘But the Honour I have for Him’, Wildman concluded, did not extend ‘to His Posterity’; just as ‘a good Man’ might have ‘a Profligate Son’, so Wildman himself would ‘be loath to Repose such a Trust… in the hands of any one’ he did not know.²⁴

Similar reforms were suggested in other commonwealthmen tracts. Humfrey thought the control of the militia and the power of appointing judges should be given to parliament, and also that the questions of the royal veto and the king's prerogative to call and dissolve parliament should be addressed.²⁵ A Letter to a Friend (possibly also by Wildman) argued that the people should set up a limited monarchy wherein control of the militia, the right to declare war and peace, and the appointment of judges, sheriffs and other officers were lodged in the legislature, namely king, Lords and Commons, since this would ‘necessitate frequent Parliaments, and make it impossible for the Monarch to enslave us’.²⁶

Most Tories, and the majority of the bishops, found it difficult to countenance any idea of a breach in the succession. They favoured either restoring James upon terms, or a regency (with James keeping the title of king); failing either of these, they would have preferred settling the throne on Princess Mary alone. Archbishop Sancroft took the lead, summoning a meeting of all the bishops who were in the London area at Lambeth Palace on 26 December, where they discussed plans ‘to call back the King’, whom they proposed to ‘bind hand and foot’ so that he would ‘never be able again to break in upon them, or put the Papists into their preferments’. Early in the new year this group, following consultations with certain London divines (amongst them William Sherlock), decided to draw up an address to William to ask either that he send ‘Propositions’ to the King or that William allow them to do so. Some eighteen bishops were involved in this ‘conspiracy’ to seek a conditional restoration of James, though Bishop Compton of London himself would have nothing to do with it; they were joined by some thirty temporal lords (amongst them Nottingham, Clarendon and Rochester) and fifty commoners.²⁷

In the end, ‘this Hierarchicall party’ backed down from either addressing James or seeking William's permission to do so. They did, however, make their case in print. One broadsheet, purporting to be a speech to the Prince of Orange by ‘a True Protestant’ of the Established Church, thanked William for his undertaking to restore English liberties and secure the Protestant religion, but advised that his ‘honour’ lay in keeping close to the sense of his first Declaration, which obliged him to ‘refuse the false glitterings of a Crown’. If he let himself or his wife be crowned, he would blemish the Protestant religion with the deposing doctrine, unite the forces of international popery, strengthen the French king, and create strong factions against him. It was in William's power, the author continued, ‘to prevail with the King to give so much into the People's hands, as will make them safe’; if James, however, were to return ‘by a high hand’ (presumably with foreign backing), he would then be able to ‘act without controul’.²⁸ Sherlock, in a pamphlet purporting to be a letter to a newly elected member of the Convention, insisted that it was essential to stick to the old establishment as near as possible, and favoured inviting James back ‘under such legal restraints’ as to ‘put it utterly out of the king's power to invade our Liberties or Religion’. It would be wrong to judge how many were for James by the late defection, Sherlock asserted; the reason why ‘the whole Nation… was very unanimous for the Prince’ was ‘not that they were willing to part with the King, and set up another in his room, but because they were horribly afraid of popery, and very desirous to see the Laws and Religion of the Nation settled upon the old Foundations by a Free Parliament, which was all the Prince declared for’. Yet ‘many who were well-wishers to this Design’, Sherlock contended, ‘will not renounce their Allegiance to their King; and now they see what is like to come of it, are ashamed of what they have done… and are ready to undo it as far as they can’. Sherlock was most worried about what would happen on the religious front. Anglicans were glad to be rid of popery, but they would ‘not be contented to Part with their Church into the bargain’; the dissenters were likewise glad to be rid of popery, but now they expected ‘glorious days for themselves’. ‘Consider how difficult it will be,’ Sherlock implored, ‘for any Prince who has but a crazy Title to the immediate possession of the Crown, to adjust this matter so, as neither to disgust the Church of England, nor the Dissenters.’ If either of them should be disobliged, there would be ‘a formidable party’ against such a prince. ‘Should any King be deposed, and any other ascend the Throne,’ Sherlock predicted, it would ‘be necessary for them to keep up a standing Army to quell the Discontents.’²⁹

ABDICATION OR DESERTION? THE DEPOSING OF KING JAMES

In his letter to the Convention, read on 22 January, the opening day of the session, William told those assembled that he had ‘endeavoured to the utmost of [his] Power to perform what was desired’ of him and that it was now up to them ‘to lay the Foundations of a firm Security’ for their religion, laws and liberties, claiming that all he wanted was to see ‘the Ends of [his] Declaration… attained’. William did, however, urge the need for unity and speed, since ‘the dangerous Condition of the Protestant Interest in Ireland’ and ‘the present State of Things Abroad’ meant that delay could be fatal. Despite this, the Commons decided, on the intervention of Tory member Sir Thomas Clarges, to defer beginning the debate on the state of the nation until 28 January, to give members more time to assemble. In the meantime, the Convention set aside 31 January (in London and Westminster) and 14 February (elsewhere) as days of thanksgiving for God's making the Prince of Orange ‘the glorious Instrument of the great Deliverance of this Kingdom from Popery and Arbitrary Power’, thereby explicitly casting what had happened so far in a providential light.³⁰

In reaching its resolutions concerning the settlement of the crown, the Convention managed to sustain at least the appearance of a broad degree of consensus. However, the debates reveal significant divisions not only between Whigs and Tories but also within the parties, as well as disagreements between the Commons and the Lords. This ability to maintain consensus in the face of severe political disagreement was something that eluded the Scots, and goes a long way towards explaining why the constitutional settlement in England was very different from that which was to be worked out north of the border.

In discussing how revolutionary the Glorious Revolution was, and whether or not it was a victory for Whig principles, historians have typically focused on the significance of the legal restraints placed on the crown by the Declaration of Rights. However, arguably the most radical act of 1689 – and certainly the most unequivocally Whiggish – was the transfer of the crown itself from James to William and Mary. Tories had always held, as Secretary of State Sir Leoline Jenkins had put it during the Exclusion Crisis, that it was ‘impossible for subjects to renounce or divest themselves of the allegiance they were borne under’;³¹ but that, of course, was exactly what the English did in 1689. However, it is usually argued that they did so in the most conservative way conceivable. Thus the Convention did not depose James, but determined that he had abdicated, thereby leaving the throne vacant and in need of being filled. A look at the debates on the vacancy, and an examination of the various options that were considered but rejected, forces us to question whether a conservative reading is appropriate.

The debate in the Commons on 28 January was opened by Gilbert Dolben, a Tory, who argued that ‘the king is demised’ and James II no longer ‘King of England’ as a result of his having withdrawn himself ‘from the administration of the government, without any provision to support the commonwealth’.³² By ‘demised’, Dolben insisted, the law meant ‘deserted the Government’, the Latin demisio meaning ‘laying down’; he also used as synonyms ‘abandoned’ and ‘forsaken’, and was adamant that James's forsaking the government had been voluntary. Dolben did not mention any maladministration on James's part, but seemed to think that the King's fleeing the realm and consequent absence from the kingdom constituted the demise, although in a later speech he qualified himself by saying that ‘if the King would not stick to his Laws, nor redress the grievances of his people’, he would call that ‘a voluntary Demise’.³³ Since a demise was equivalent to the death of the king, there was no reason that this should affect the succession, and thus presumably the crown passed to the next heir.

The first to make the case for abdication was the radical Whig Sir Robert Howard. He began by outlining James's misdeeds, comparing him to Richard II (who had, of course, been deposed), and claiming that although there was ‘a Maxim in the Law that the King can do no Wrong’, many able lawyers of old took this to mean that if a king did wrong of his own volition ‘he thereby ceases to be King’. ‘The Originall of Power’, Howard continued, was ‘by Pact and Agreement from the People’, but there had been ‘such Violences offered to our very Constitution’ that it was clear the pact had been broken. He therefore thought it ‘to be above a Demise, A very Abdication of the King’, and insisted that the people now had the right ‘to new form themselves, under a Governor Yet to be Chosen’. Moreover, Howard added, James had not just broken the original contract with his people, he had also refused to govern them ‘by withdrawing the Seals and making no Provision for the Government in his Absence’. Was not this ‘an Abdication of it’? The Whig Henry Pollexfen spoke next, saying that in his opinion the King had ‘forfeited his Right to the Crown of England before he went away’.³⁴ Other Whigs linked contract theory with abdication. For example, Sir William Pulteney maintained that ‘there is an Abdication and… the Crown is void’; ‘the Office of the King’, he went on, was ‘originally from the People’ and if the king endeavoured to destroy those he was entrusted to preserve it was a breach of trust. ‘I know there is a Maxim That the King can do no Wrong,’ Pulteney added, ‘but I would fain know Whom to blame else for the Wrong that has been Done us: it has been originally and primarily by no other but the King.’³⁵ Moreover, it was not just the wrongs that James II had committed in England that were causes of concern; some MPs also complained how James had given Ireland away to ‘the Irish papists’ after it had only recently been recovered following the ‘bloudy Massacre’ of 1641.³⁶

The Tories were unhappy with where the Whigs were taking the debate. Sir Robert Sawyer tried to blur the issue of terminology, arguing that demise and abdication meant the same thing. In his opinion the King's departure was an abdication, as was James's refusal to govern according to law; what he was against was the inference that an abdication constituted a ‘Dissolution of the Government’. The disposal of the crown was not in the people, he insisted; besides, the Convention did not represent a quarter of the people of England, while members should also consider ‘the Relation which wee have to Scotland and to Ireland’, which the Convention did not represent at all. ‘If the Crown be fain’, Sawyer said, it was ‘just as if the King were dead’, and so the privy council should simply proceed to proclaim the next heir, according to standard practice whenever a king died. The people could not choose whomsoever they wished to be their king, though if there was a dispute over who was the next heir, they might choose from among the several competitors – which was presumably Sawyer's way of getting around the problem of the Prince of Wales.³⁷ Heneage Finch wanted to know whether it was ‘the maleadministration or the going away of the King' that amounted to an abdication. Finch was adamant that there had been no dissolution and insisted that the English monarchy was not elective but hereditary. ‘By neglect, or male-administration’, a king could ‘forfeit no more than is in him’; the consequence was therefore ‘no more, than that his personal exercise of the Crown is gone; but still it must subsist somewhere’. Finch suggested establishing a regency during James's life, as if the King were a lunatic.³⁸ Sir Christopher Musgrave wanted to know whether the intention was ‘to depose the king’. He denied that James had subverted the government, but questioned whether, even if James had ‘forfeited his Inheritance to the Crown’, the Convention had the power to depose him. Musgrave also said that he was concerned about the trouble the Scots might cause, if they did not concur with the English Convention.³⁹ The Whigs tried to sidestep this issue by insisting that it was not a question of ‘whether we can depose the King; but, whether the King has not deposed himself’, as Sir John Maynard put it. Besides, as Sir William Williams pointed out, the plain fact was that James was gone and had ‘deprived this Nation of the Exercise of Kingly Government’. It was essential to declare the throne void, Hugh Boscawen maintained, because there was now a ‘little one beyond sea too’ (namely the Prince of Wales).⁴⁰

In the end, the House agreed to the following resolution:

That King James the Second, having endeavoured to subvert the Constitution of the Kingdom, by breaking the Original Contract between King and People; and, by the advice of Jesuits, and other wicked Persons, having violated the fundamental Laws; and having withdrawn himself out of this Kingdom; has abdicated the Government; and that the Throne is thereby vacant.

The syntax is awkward and may have been designed to cloud some of the deep disagreements that existed among members. It is notable, however, that neither the word demise nor desertion appear in the resolution. Although many members were reported as being unhappy with the resolution, only three voted against it – though one did walk out before the vote was put. On the following morning, the 29th, the Commons passed a further resolution, ‘That it hath been found, by Experience, to be inconsistent with the Safety and Welfare of this Protestant Kingdom, to be governed by a Popish Prince’.⁴¹

When the Lords convened to discuss the state of the nation on the 29th, it unanimously concurred with the Commons' vote against a Popish prince. Bishop Turner of Ely, however, then introduced a motion for a regency, arguing ‘that the King was in being and so was his Authority’, but by reason of being a Catholic ‘was uncapable of Administring the Government’. It received powerful support from the likes of Clarendon, Rochester, Ormonde, Nottingham and all the bishops in the House except Compton, and was only narrowly defeated by a vote of 51to 48.⁴² Lords turned to the resolution on the vacancy on the 30th, and after a long and heated debate, lasting until 10 o'clock at night, eventually agreed to the clauses about the original contract (by a vote of 56 to 48), James's violation of the fundamental laws (by a majority this time of 11), and James's having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, but objected to the word ‘abdicated’ in the penultimate clause, which they changed to deserted. On the following day they voted down the final clause, concerning the vacancy of the throne.⁴³

This was now a critical moment for the Revolution. It was more than seven weeks since James's initial flight and the nation was no nearer to settling the throne. The situation in Ireland was rapidly deteriorating, while the European situation – with Louis XIV of France, having just invaded the Rhineland Palatinate, threatening to dominate Germany and overrun the Dutch – demanded speedy action. Delay could only play into James's hands, giving him the time he needed to launch an attempt to regain his three kingdoms with a French-backed invasion of Ireland. To many in England, until the Convention ruled on the succession, James remained technically their king. When Dr Sharp, the man whose anti-Catholic sermonizing under James II had been the catalyst for the establishment of the Ecclesiastical Commission, preached before the Commons on 30 January to mark the anniversary of Charles I's execution, he formally prayed for James II as ‘King and Supream Governour in all Causes and over all persons’, and maintained ‘that deposing Kings was popish doctrine’.⁴⁴ There were sermons, bells and bonfires in London on the 31st to mark the day of thanksgiving, though Reresby remarked that ‘the rejoiceing was not soe great… as was expected’. Indeed, Morrice noted that there were ‘severall Sermons’ in favour of restoring James II, the most ‘conspicuous’ being that by Bishop Lake of Chichester before the Lord Mayor at Bow Church, who reminded his listeners that ‘The Church of England teacheth us to be obedient in all things to Kings’, ‘that Kings can no way be set aside, no way limited, no way restrained’, and that therefore ‘We must return to our duty and invite him in againe’. Morrice heard that the sermon ‘had given universall offence to the very body of the City of all persuasions’ and ruined the bishops' ‘interest throughout the City and Kingdome’. Nevertheless, Sherlock and a dozen or so other divines were said to have preached similar sermons on that day.⁴⁵

Concern about the failure of the Lords and the Commons to agree over the issue of the vacancy, and fear that the violence of the debates might drag England into civil war, prompted William's supporters in London to petition both Houses on Saturday 2 February, urging that the Prince and Princess of Orange ‘be speedily settled in the throne’. Two groups of about twenty citizens presented separate petitions to the two Houses, with Lord Lovelace heading the contingent to the Lords and Anthony Rowe, member for Penryn, that to the Commons; they were accompanied by crowds of people who assembled outside the Convention and jeered those members believed hostile to a Williamite settlement. To avoid stirring up too much commotion, the petitioners had decided not to collect signatures, but this merely gave the Lords and the Commons the excuse to reject the petitions on the grounds that they were not signed. Thus Serjeant Maynard (a Whig) protested in the Commons: ‘Here's a Petition proferred you from you know not whom… if you read it, the Parliament is without doors and not here.’ Sir Edward Seymour (a Tory) articulated his concern that the petitioners made use of ‘miserable people’ and his worry that pressure out-of-doors might interfere with the freedom of parliamentary debate: ‘If your Debates are not free, there is an end of all your proceedings… What comes from you is the result of reason, and no other cause. As your Debates must be free, so must your Resolution upon them; which cannot be unless some care be taken to preserve you from the Mob.’ Lovelace and his allies therefore immediately set about obtaining signatures, an action hardly likely to assuage the fears of the likes of Maynard and Seymour; they allegedly collected some 15,000 and it was reported that a crowd of 10,000 was intending to descend on Westminster with the petitions on Monday the 4th. Conservative peers, fearing that the opposition to the Commons' resolution might collapse in the face of such pressure from out-of-doors, urged William to have the petitions suppressed. William agreed, partly to forestall any possibility of riotous unrest, but also because he wanted to ensure there could be no grounds for thinking that the Convention had been coerced into offering him the crown by an unruly rabble.⁴⁶

This pressure from out-of-doors appears not to have had any immediate impact on opinion in the Convention. The Commons unanimously decided, on 2 February, to reject the Lords' amendments to the resolution about the vacancy and called for a conference with the Lords on the 4th. Here, John Hampden explained that the word ‘deserted’ did ‘not fully express the Conclusion necessarily inferred from the Premises’: ‘deserted’ respected ‘only the Withdrawing’, but ‘abdicated’ applied to ‘the Whole’ (namely James II's endeavouring to subvert the constitution by breaking the original contract and his violation of the fundamental laws, as well as his withdrawing himself). Hampden also insisted that the throne was vacant, since there was no person on the throne ‘from whom the People of England’ could ‘expect regal Protection’ and to whom, therefore, they owed ‘the Allegiance of Subjects’. The Lords decided, by a vote of 54 to 49, to adhere to their choice of ‘deserted’, although the question of whether to agree with the Commons that the throne was vacant was defeated by a vote of just 55 to 54. The next day, the Lords explained that they objected to ‘abdicate’ partly because it was not a term known to common law and partly because it implied ‘a voluntary express Act of Renunciation’, which there had not been in this case and which did not follow from the premises. With regard to the vacancy, the Lords insisted that the English monarchy was not elective but hereditary, and although government by King James had ceased (by dint of his desertion), no act of the king alone could bar or destroy the right of the heirs to the crown. If the throne was therefore vacant of James II, allegiance was due ‘to such Person as the Right of Succession does belong to’, implying, in their mind, the Princess of Orange.⁴⁷

Inspired by the Lords' resolution, Mary's supporters in the Commons seized the opportunity to challenge the notion that the throne was vacant, often invoking the British dimension to show why the Convention could not simply declare in favour of William. ‘We are not debating for ourselves’, Clarges protested, ‘but for all the King's dominions’; the crown was hereditary, not elective, and should go ‘to the next Protestant Heir’. Likewise, Sir Joseph Tredenham, another self-professed Maryite, pointed out that ‘Scotland must have a Share in this Election’, adding that ‘as long as we stand firm to the Succession’, Scotland would surely concur with what England did. In the end, the Commons rejected the Lords' amendments, though this time by a vote of 282 to 151, and called for an open conference with the Lords on the following day to explain their reasoning.⁴⁸ The Whig lawyer John Somers argued that although abdication was not a word known to common law, neither was desertion. Both were Latin words, though with distinct meanings. Abdication signified ‘entirely to renounce, throw off, disown, relinquish any thing or person, so as to have no further to do with it’, either ‘by express words or in writing’ or ‘by doing such acts as are inconsistent with the holding or retaining the thing’. A desertion, by contrast, ‘was temporary and relievable’. The Commons had insisted that James had abdicated the government, therefore, to make it clear that he had ‘no right of return to it’. The Commons' spokesmen also insisted that this would not make the crown of England ‘always and perpetually elective’, since the constitution, notwithstanding the vacancy, remained the same; as a result of the abdication, the Convention had to supply a defect, but ‘only for this Tyme’. Despite spirited speeches by Nottingham, Clarendon, Rochester, the Earl of Pembroke and the Bishop of Ely in defence of the amendments, the Lords capitulated. Opinion in the upper House was further swayed by the fact that William, in a meeting with Halifax, Danby and other peers on 3 February, had made it clear that he would return to Holland if the Convention decided on a regency or to make his wife queen alone, while Mary herself had let it be known that she did not want the crown for herself, but would only rule jointly with her husband. On the morning of the 6th, after a brief debate lasting half an hour, the Lords decided by a vote of 65 to 45 to agree to the Commons' resolution. News that the two Houses had finally reached agreement over the vacancy was celebrated with ‘bonefires at many noblemen's doores, and in many places all over the town’, and with the ringing of church bells.⁴⁹

THE DECLARATION OF RIGHTS

The Convention had determined, then, that James's abdication followed from his having broken the original contract, endeavoured to subvert the constitution, and violated the fundamental laws of the kingdom, as well as from his having withdrawn himself without providing for any government in his absence. He was taken to have abdicated, in other words, because he had shown that he was no longer willing to rule his kingdom of England in accordance with its constitution – a Whig interpretation of events. This amounted to a self-deposition; James had un-kinged himself. The Convention did not claim to have deposed James, although one might argue that the mere fact that the Convention imposed this particular interpretation on events meant that, in effect, they had.

Yet if the resolution concerning the abdication and vacancy was a clear-cut victory for the Whigs, the same cannot be said of the decision to accompany the settlement of the crown with a Declaration of Rights. On 29 January, the day after the Commons had determined that the throne was vacant, Lord Wharton, a Whig, urged the lower House to offer the crown to the Prince and Princess of Orange and resettle the government ‘as near the ancient Government as can be’. He was challenged by Lord Falkland, a Tory, who said that before members decided whom to put on the throne, they should take care to secure themselves ‘from Arbitrary Government’ and consider ‘what powers we ought to give the Crown’.⁵⁰ It has been suggested that Falkland's interjection was a delaying tactic, designed to divide the House and give conservative forces within the Convention time to manoeuvre on the question of who should head the government.⁵¹ It certainly caused a delay. A number of Whigs rushed to support Falkland's proposal, arguing in the process the need to address problems dating back to Charles II's reign as well as those that had occurred under James II. William Garroway said ‘we have had such Violation of our Liberties in the last reigns’ that the Prince of Orange could not ‘take it ill, if we make conditions, to secure ourselves for the future’. Hugh Boscawen agreed that ‘Arbitrary Government was not only by the late King that is gone’ but had been ‘farthered by the extravagant Acts’ of Charles II's Cavalier Parliament. William Sacheverell insisted that, God having ‘put this opportunity into our hands’, the whole world would ‘laugh at us’ if we made ‘a half settlement’, and saw the need to ‘look a great way backward’: indeed, he thought there were not three laws from the last twenty years or more that deserved to be continued. Whig lawyers, such as Somers, Treby, Pollexfen and Maynard, however, were concerned that discussing conditions would take up too much time, ‘whereby Ireland might be destroyed and Holland hazarded’. Pollexfen suggested that Falkland's proposition was made ‘to confound’ the House. Claiming to be ‘as much for Amendment of the Government as any man’, he protested that going about it in this way would ‘not settle the Government, but restore King James’: one kingdom (i.e. Ireland) was ‘gone already’; the clergy were divided; and the more the English divided amongst themselves, the more they would make way for the popish interest. Besides, Pollexfen continued, it was impossible to make new laws until there was a king: ‘A Law you cannot make till you have a King’, he proclaimed. The whole idea was ‘not practicable’.⁵²

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to dismiss Falkland's proposal as insincere. As we have seen, Tories had been concerned about abuses of royal power under James II; they also saw the need to establish further guarantees for the Anglican establishment to ensure that it could not be undermined by a future monarch, especially if that future monarch was to be another non-Anglican – the Calvinist William of Orange. Hence Falkland was joined by another Tory, Sir Edward Seymour, a fierce critic of James II in the 1685 parliament, who asked his fellow members whether they would ‘let men go on in the same practices they have formerly’ and ‘establish the Crown’, but not secure themselves, adding that ‘theire business there was to secure themselves from Tyranny’. Falkland himself reiterated the point later in the debate, saying ‘we must not only change hands, but things; not only take care that we have a King and Prince over us, but for the future, that he may not govern ill’. The idea that he was merely trying to delay matters to allow conservative forces in the upper House to frustrate the Whig initiative in the Commons on the vacancy, is belied by the fact that Falkland objected to the Lords' amendments to the Commons' resolution on the vacancy in the debate in the House on 2 February, insisting on the word abdicate because it ‘relates to breaking your Laws’, whereas desertion left open the possibility that James might ‘come again, and resume the Government’. After a lengthy debate, the Commons agreed that before they filled the throne, they should appoint a committee ‘to bring in general Heads of such things’ as were ‘absolutely necessary… for the better securing our Religion, Laws, and Liberties’.⁵³

The committee, which comprised twenty-eight Whigs and twelve Tories and was chaired by the Whig lawyer Sir George Treby, identified some twenty-three ‘Publick Grievances of the Nation’ that needed redressing, which they brought to the House on 2 February. Five more grievances were added to the list during the debate that day. These twenty-eight ‘Heads of Grievances’, as they are normally known, identified a number of concerns that would have been shared by Whigs and Tories alike. Thus they declared the royal suspending power, the dispensing power, the Ecclesiastical Commission, extra-parliamentary taxation and the keeping of a standing army in peacetime without parliamentary consent to be illegal. They also proclaimed against the quo warranto proceedings and interference in the freedom of parliamentary elections; called for frequent parliaments; demanded a number of legal reforms (concerning the appointment of sheriffs, impanelling of juries, levying of bail, regulation of treason trials, and the tenure of judges); complained about oppressions and abuses in the collection of the hearth tax and the excise; defended the right of subjects to petition the crown; insisted that no member of the royal family should be allowed to marry a papist; suggested that future monarchs be required ‘to take an oath for maintaining the Protestant religion, and the laws and liberties of the nation’; and that ‘effectual provision… be made for the liberty of Protestants in the exercise of their religion and for uniting all Protestants in the matter of public worship as far as may be possible’ (something which most Anglican spokesmen had come to deem necessary in the wake of James's attempt to appeal to the dissenters). Some of the items on the list were thought of as being merely declarations against the alleged illegal activities of James II. Others were demands for reform that would have required fresh legislation. Several of the grievances had a distinctively Whiggish appeal. Thus the Heads of Grievances asserted not only ‘that Parliament ought to sit frequently’ but suggested ‘that their frequent sitting be preserved’; that there should be ‘no interrupting of any session of Parliament, till the affairs that are necessary to be dispatched at that time are determined’ (an allusion to how Charles II had managed to frustrate the demands of the Whigs during the Exclusion Crisis); ‘that the too long continuance of the same Parliament be prevented’ (to avoid a repeat of Charles II's Cavalier Parliament of 1661–79); that ‘no pardon… be pleadable to an impeachment in Parliament’ (an allusion to Danby's pardon in 1679); that ‘the acts concerning the militia’ were ‘grievous to the subject’; that judges should hold their commissions quam diu se bene gesserint (on good behaviour, rather than at royal pleasure); and even that judges be paid salaries out of the public revenue (so as to ensure the independence of the judiciary from the crown).⁵⁴ Such concerns had been raised by the country opposition to Charles II in the mid-1670s, by the Whigs of the Exclusion Crisis, and by the Rye House plotters of 1683 and the Monmouth rebels of 1685.

When the Commons came to debate the Heads of Grievances on 4 February, the Whigs were divided as to how to proceed. Colonel Birch was for sending the Grievances to the Lords immediately. Wildman, however, suggested that they should split them into two, separating out those clauses that were declarative of old law and those that would require fresh legislation, arguing that when the Commons had framed the Petition of Right (1628), they had ‘refused to have new Laws, but claimed what they demanded ab origine’. Sir Thomas Lee agreed that some of the heads could only be remedied by new laws and that the House would need to reframe the document they sent to the Lords. The Commons therefore decided that the same committee that had drawn up the Heads of Grievances should re-draft the document, distinguishing such as were ‘introductory of new Laws’ from those that were ‘declaratory of ancient Rights’. They seem to have been influenced in part by the realization that pressing for further radical reform, at a time when the Lords would not even agree that the throne was vacant, would create further division between the two Houses, as well as by an appreciation that William himself was opposed to limitations. Yet members also appear to have accepted Pollexfen's point – made in opposition to Falkland's original motion – that the Convention did not have the power to make new law, which would require the royal assent.⁵⁵

Late on the afternoon of the 6th, having finally accepted the Commons' resolution concerning the abdication and vacancy, the Lords proceeded to discuss who should fill the vacant throne. The Marquis of Winchester proposed declaring William and Mary king and queen of England, and was supported ‘with great Vigour’ by fellow Whig peers Devonshire and Delamere. Nottingham made a last-ditch attempt to sabotage the settlement, saying that this ‘could never be justified by reason or Law, but only by the Sword’, that it would lead to a lengthy war, was contrary to all oaths, and would make the monarchy elective. Clarendon, Rochester and many of the bishops concurred. The Williamite peers replied that declaring William and Mary king and queen was the only way to prevent the mischiefs Nottingham had enumerated, because it would make England so strong by a union at home and with ‘the Reformed interest’ abroad that England's enemies would be ‘unlikely to make a War upon’ her; that it was ‘most highly reasonable’ to ‘set him upon the Throne that had delivered us’; and that there were many precedents for the two estates departing from the strict line of succession but this had never made the crown elective. Nottingham then raised the issue of Scotland, reminding peers that this ‘was a free Kingdome and might as well constitute a King to Reigne over England, as England might constitute one to Reigne over Scotland’. Halifax tried to calm concerns on this point by proposing that they should crown the prince and princess ‘King and Queen of England with all the appurtenances thereunto belonging’ and ‘afterwards Consult with Scotland’. The House accepted without a division the resolution that William and Mary should be crowned jointly, and Nottingham was even induced to chair a committee to redevise the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, which would allow for the acceptance of William and Mary as monarchs de facto rather than de iure.⁵⁶

On the afternoon of 7 February, the Commons' committee that had been assigned to separate the Heads of Grievances into two reported back with a declaration of ancient rights, together with a demand for new legislation by a future parliament to remedy the other ‘Defects and Inconveniences’. The following day, the Commons voted to amend the resolution in favour of crowning William and Mary jointly with a proviso placing executive power in William alone, and appointed a new committee – this one chaired by the Whig lawyer John Somers and comprising sixteen Whigs and five Tories – to consider what amendments to make to the Lords' vote of the 6th, and to connect that to the declaration of ancient rights. Before the end of the day this committee had produced the draft of what was to become the Declaration of Rights; gone was the demand for future legislation to remedy those grievances which were not declarative of ancient rights. The Lords then reviewed the draft, suggesting various amendments, some of which the Commons accepted, and the final text of the Declaration of Rights was approved by the Convention on the 12th.⁵⁷ William and Mary were then proclaimed king and queen of England in London and Westminster on the 13 th, and shortly thereafter in the rest of the kingdom.⁵⁸

It has been suggested that because the committees that were responsible for framing the Declaration of Rights were dominated by Whigs, and the offer of the crown to William and Mary was accompanied by a statement of rights, the constitutional settlement of 1689 should be seen as a Whig victory (albeit a qualified one, since some of the more radical demands for reform were omitted in the face of opposition from William and conservative opinion in the Convention). Such a view seems questionable. As we have seen, as the crisis of 1688–9 unfolded, Tory Anglicans had not shown themselves shy of seeking additional legal safeguards from the crown, whether as the price of James keeping his throne or of William getting it. At the same time, many Williamite Whigs had seen no need for limitations on the new monarch, since in William they had a king of their own liking. Furthermore, a close examination of the Declaration of Rights suggests that there was little that was distinctively Whiggish about it – the wording it adopted, and rights it proclaimed, would in the main also have been agreeable to Tory-Anglican opinion.

The Declaration began by asserting that James II, ‘by the Assistance of divers Evil Counsellors, Judges, and Ministers… did endeavour to Subvert and extirpate the Protestant Religion, and the Lawes and Liberties of this Kingdome’. It then listed eight means whereby he had sought to do this, followed by a further five abuses deemed to have been committed ‘of late Years’ (that is, under Charles II as well), all of which were determined to have been ‘utterly and directly contrary to the knowne Lawes and Statutes and freedome of this Realme’. The Declaration did not however claim, as the Commons had initially resolved on 28 January, that James had broken his original contract with the people. Instead, it stated that James had ‘abdicated the Government’ and left the throne ‘vacant’, and that the Prince of Orange, who had been raised by God to be ‘the glorious Instrument of delivering this Kingdom from Popery and Arbitrary Power’, had, on the advice of the Lords and principal members of the Commons, called a parliament to effect ‘such an establishment as that their Religion Lawes and Libertyes might not againe be in danger of being subverted’. This body, the Declaration continued, seeking the best way of ‘vindicating and asserting their antient rights and Liberties’, decided to declare a series of ‘premises’ that they insisted were ‘their undoubted Rights and Liberties’. They listed thirteen in total, which were intended to address the abuses of power identified in the first half of the Declaration, though there is an asymmetry, since, clause by clause, the second half of the document does not exactly correspond to the first.⁵⁹

Did the Declaration of Rights merely vindicate and assert ancient rights and liberties, or did those who framed it deliberately set out, as some historians have claimed, to make new law under the guise of proclaiming the old? Despite being drawn up in committees dominated by Whigs, the Declaration of Rights had to be approved by the Convention as a whole, which was more evenly balanced between the two parties. The Lords, which had shown such legal tetchiness over the Commons' use of the word ‘abdication’, had the judges review the Declaration carefully, to ensure that nothing was declared illegal that patently was not so, and insisted on a number of modifications to the wording of the Commons' draft as a result.⁶⁰ Moreover, there was also the concern that any new limitations imposed by the Convention before William and Mary were proclaimed king and queen could subsequently be deemed null and void. Indeed, in 1660 the Convention Parliament that had recalled Charles II had determined that all legislation enacted over the preceding two decades that had not received the royal assent, freely given, was null and void, while one of the main arguments used by Whigs against the court's offer of limitations during the Exclusion Crisis had been that such limitations imposed on the Catholic heir before he became king would be rescinded immediately upon his accession, since a king could not have his prerogative given away before he came to the throne.⁶¹ Furthermore, since the Convention of 1689 was not a true parliament, if it had tried to proclaim new laws under the guise of asserting ancient rights and liberties, its innovations would never have stood up in a court of law if subsequently challenged. There are good grounds for thinking that what the Declaration of Rights proclaimed to be existing law was genuinely believed, by those who helped frame the document or else gave their consent to it in the Convention, actually to be existing law. It is conceivable that they were wrong, or deceiving themselves in order to vindicate the overthrow of a king they disliked (James II, as we have seen, had always claimed that he was acting within his legal rights), though the fact that the Declaration passed a bi-partisan and bi-cameral Convention shows that, if this was the case, there must have been a wide degree of consensus underpinning this self-deluding desire to believe in a particular (though erroneous) interpretation of the constitution – something which further undermines the argument that the Declaration of Rights marked a victory for one particular party.

What particular ancient rights and liberties, then, did the Declaration of Rights vindicate and assert, and which, if any, broke new constitutional ground? Controversy has hinged in particular on the first three resolutions in the second half of the document, namely those against the suspending power, the dispensing power and the Ecclesiastical Commission, and the sixth resolution, that against keeping a standing army in peacetime without parliamentary consent. Before examining them more closely, two things need to be emphasized. The first is that these were as much Tory grievances as they were Whig ones. The bishops had led the attack on Charles II's attempt to use the suspending power to establish some degree of liberty of conscience in 1662 and 1672 (whereas, in fact, the future Whig leader, the Earl of Shaftesbury, had supported Charles's use of the suspending power in this context),⁶² and it was the bishops, again, who had led the opposition to James's II's subsequent attempts in 1687 and 1688. The dispensing power had been challenged by the Tory-dominated parliament of 1685 and by the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, and James's Ecclesiastical Commission had been set up to discipline recalcitrant Anglican clergymen. The Tories had also challenged James's build-up of a standing army in the parliament of 1685; indeed, Cavalier-Anglican opposition to standing armies stemmed from their hatred of the Long Parliament's New Model Army of the 1640s and military rule under Cromwell, and those who were later to emerge as Tories had criticized Charles II's attempts to establish a peacetime standing army in the late 1660s and 1670s. The second point to emphasize is that contemporaries genuinely appear to have believed that all of these were illegal; indeed they had already challenged their legality long before the framing of the Declaration of Rights. In believing this, they were arguably correct. It would certainly be wrong to imply that those who sat in the Convention seized the opportunity provided by the breakdown in royal authority to declare illegal powers which they believed the crown legally possessed.

The first resolution forthrightly declared that ‘the pretended power of suspending of Lawes or the execution of Lawes by Regall Authority without Consent of Parliament is illegal’. This was an implied condemnation of James's Declarations of Indulgence, and seems relatively uncontroversial. Contemporaries had long thought that the only body capable of suspending laws was the same body that had enacted them – namely parliament: king, Lords and Commons acting together. Charles II had tried to claim that, as head of the Church, he had the right to suspend ecclesiastical laws, and this was the rationale behind his Declaration of Indulgence of 1672. Parliament had told him that he was misinformed and made him withdraw the Indulgence in 1673. Charles's action in 1673 was interpreted as an explicit acknowledgement by the crown that it did not possess any such power, and was repeatedly cited by those who condemned James's attempts to establish a suspending power.⁶³

The second resolution – that against the dispensing power – is somewhat more complicated. The original draft of the Declaration of Rights had condemned it outright. The Lords took exception, however, arguing that the king did possess such a power and that the granting of non obstantes (dispensations) could, in fact, be beneficial to the subject. It was the way that the dispensing power had been extended under James II that was the problem. The Commons therefore changed the wording, so that the final text of the Declaration of Rights read ‘that the pretended Power of dispensing with Laws, or the Execution of Laws, by Regal Authority, as it has been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal’.⁶⁴

Yet had the way the dispensing power been exercised ‘of late’ been illegal? James, after all, had obtained a judicial ruling in favour of his right to give dispensations from the Test Act in the case of Godden v. Hales of 1686. In 1688 Lord Chief Justice Herbert, the judge who presided over Godden v. Hales, published a detailed justification of his ruling. Here he repeated the distinction between things that were mala in se (evil in themselves, which the king could not dispense with) and those which were mala prohibita (that is, which had been legal until prohibited by parliament, which the king could dispense with). Herbert also insisted (citing Coke) that nothing could ‘bind the King from any Prerogative’ which was ‘sole and inseparable to his person’, such as his ‘Sovereign Power to command any of his Subjects to serve him for the publick weal’, and further claimed that the king could even dispense with statutes made pro bono publico (‘for the public good’, as some had argued the Test Act was), if no particular damage arose to a particular person as a result. Addressing the issue that Godden v. Hales had been a feigned action (which he claimed he had been unaware of at the time), Herbert said this did not invalidate the ruling: feigned actions were often directed out of Chancery to settle ‘great and difficult Points of Law’, so why might not the king ‘direct such an Action to be brought, to satisfie himself whether he had such a Power’? Yet the ruling had not ‘given up our Lives, Liberties, and Estates, to be disposed of at the King's pleasure’, Herbert insisted, since the king could not ‘dispense one tittle with Magna Carta or any of the other laws whereby the lives, liberties or interests of any subjects are confirmed’.⁶⁵

However, several observations need to be made before we conclude that the declaration against the dispensing power broke new legal ground. The first is that ‘the pretended power of dispensing with laws… as… exercised of late’ was not solely an allusion to James's dispensations from the Test. James had used his dispensing power in other ways during his reign – for example, to dispense the fellows of Magdalen College from their college statutes laying down the procedure for the election of a new president; even Herbert thought that James's attempt to use the dispensing power in this case was illegal.⁶⁶ Secondly, as we saw in Chapter 5, many contemporaries thought the decision in Godden v. Hales was wrong. Not only was it a feigned action, set up to achieve a judicial ruling in favour of the dispensing power, but the judicial bench had been purged in advance to ensure the right result. As one pamphlet, dated 22 December 1688, somewhat colourfully put it, the judgment had been procured ‘by packing a dozen Judges, and knowing their opinions beforehand, and turning out those who dissented, and putting in a parcel of Blockheads who should agree’.⁶⁷ It was also arguable that Herbert had misinterpreted his case law. In 1689 the Whig lawyer, historian and polemicist William Atwood produced a lengthy tract responding to Herbert's self-vindication, claiming that Herbert had misinterpreted both the precedents and the authorities he had cited. With regard to statutes pro bono publico, Sir Edward Coke had said that the king could dispense with the penalty granted to himself, not with the statute itself. Nor was it the case that the king could dispense with all things that were mala prohibita. There were ‘many things in Magna Charta’, Atwood stated, that were ‘but mala prohibita’, but even Herbert conceded that the king could not dispense with one tittle of that. The reasoning upon which Herbert had based his initial judgment, namely that Henry VII had nevertheless dispensed with an act of Henry VI's reign against the appointment of sheriffs for more than one year, even though the act had included a provision against non obstantes with regard to the sheriffs, was faulty, Atwood claimed, since the particular case in question related to the county of Northumberland, an ancient liberty, where the shrievalty was inheritable for life with a fee to the crown. Moreover, it could not be shown that any sheriff had held office for more than one year by the same patent (and even if it could be, this would not create a right). The Test Act could not be dispensed with, Atwood insisted, because doing so would violate the interests of private persons, since the Test Act declared and confirmed ‘an Inherent Right, and Interest of Liberty, and Freedom in the Subjects of the Realm’, namely a freedom ‘from Popish Slavery and Tyranny’. Indeed, Calvin's case of 1608 had established that the king could not dispense with an act of parliament which ‘disableth any Person, or maketh any thing void, or tortious, for the good of the Church or Commonwealth’, because ‘in that Law all the King's Subjects have an Interest.’ In Atwood's view, the resolution in Godden v. Hales was worse than the infamous ship-money verdict of 1637, which had sanctioned Charles I's imposition of an extra-parliamentary levy on the grounds of emergency: for though on this occasion the judges ‘made the King the sole Judge of the Kingdom's Necessity, yet they suppos'd it to be at a time when there was a real Danger’, while with James the dispensing power was ‘abus'd to the bringing in what the Parliament labour'd to prevent’. If Herbert had done his research, he would have found that it was ‘far from being a setled Point, That the King might dispense with particular Persons as to whatever is not prohibited by the Law of God’. Non obstantes had long been in dispute, and several parliaments had been against them. Atwood concluded by demanding that Herbert should be prosecuted for treason for deliberately subverting the law.⁶⁸

A final observation follows from this last point. If a judge made a bad ruling or misinterpreted the law, the appropriate body to correct such an error was parliament. Herbert, in his self-vindication, had protested that if he had been wrong he had nevertheless made the best judgment he could in light of how he understood the law, and would cheerfully submit to parliament's determination ‘whether the ruling he had given was consonant to Law’; indeed, he thought it ‘very fit that this dark Learning… of Dispensations, should receive some Light from a determination in Parliament’.⁶⁹ Similarly, James II himself, when he started to backtrack in the autumn of 1688, had promised he would ‘lay his dispensing power to be determined by the arbitrement of Parliament’.⁷⁰ In 1689, the Lords and Commons did arbitrate on the dispensing power and declared that, as it had been exercised of late, it was illegal. This, in itself, was not constitutionally innovative, although it was done, one must concede, by an assembly of Lords and Commons that had not been summoned by the king and was therefore not technically a legal parliament.

The third resolution of the second half of the Declaration of Rights declared that ‘the Commission for erecting the late Courte of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes and all other Commissions and Courts of like nature’ were ‘illegal and pernicious’. As we saw in Chapter 5, there are good grounds for believing that James's Ecclesiastical Commission was an illegal court, since it was set up in violation of an Act of 1641, confirmed at the Restoration, which had abolished Charles I's High Commission and voided in perpetuity the crown's right to appoint commissioners under the great seal to exercise any manner of spiritual or ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Many contemporaries, as we have seen, firmly believed James's Ecclesiastical Commission to be illegal; indeed, its first victim, Bishop Compton, refused to acknowledge the authority of the court, having been informed it was ‘directly Contrary to Statute Law’.⁷¹

Where the Declaration of Rights perhaps did break new constitutional ground was in declaring that ‘the raiseing or keeping a Standing Army within the Kingdom in time of Peace unlesse it be with consent of Parliament’ was ‘against Law’. There was no law, as such, that explicitly forbade the keeping of a standing army in times of peace without parliamentary consent. Moreover, the Militia Acts of 1661 and 1662 had confirmed the right of the crown to control all armed forces within the country. It should be said, however, that these acts were primarily concerned with the militia (the part-time and unpaid county trained bands mustered by the Lord Lieutenants and their deputies); the framers of the legislation of 1661 and 1662 were not envisioning a large, professional standing army such as James assembled. Contemporaries clearly saw the militia and the standing army as separate issues; in the original Heads of Grievances complaints about the two were listed in separate clauses. However, the legislation enacted in 1660 to disband the republican army provided that all officers were to be cashiered ‘except such… as his Majesty shall thinke fit otherwise to dispose and provide for, at his own Charge’.⁷² This seemed to imply that the king was free to keep as large an army as he could afford. In fact, the framers of the act were probably thinking of a small coterie of personal guards. It was clearly expected at the time of the Restoration that the crown, by itself, would not have the means to finance a large standing army, and that it would need to come to parliament to seek funding for any expenditures on the military. Still, this was only an informal check on the king's power, not a legal restraint; James II showed that the crown could, by itself, finance a large military establishment.

Nevertheless, there were other legal restrictions on maintaining a standing army in peacetime, namely those stipulated by the Petition of Right of 1628, which had provided against the billeting of troops on private householders and the imposition of martial law. Charles II, when he tried to build up his standing forces, found that he had no option but to violate the provisions of the Petition of Right. Parliament took a number of stands against standing armies in the late 1660s and 1670s, and on 1 April 1679 finally resolved ‘that the continuing of any standing forces in this Nation, other than the Militia’ was ‘illegal’, complaining in particular of the fact that Charles's army had been billeted in private houses. This resolution was followed in May by an act disbanding Charles's forces and confirming that it was illegal to force private householders to receive soldiers into their homes without their consent (see p. 188). James nevertheless went on to build up a sizeable peacetime standing army, in spite of the Disbanding Act, and proceeded to billet troops in private houses and impose martial law. There had, then, clearly been legal violations here. The problem was, what was the best way of redressing them?

Here it is important to notice a slight difference in wording between the first and the second halves of the Declaration of Rights. In the draft originally sent to the Lords, the first half of the Declaration identified that one of the means whereby James had endeavoured to subvert the laws and liberties of the kingdom was ‘by raiseing and keeping a standing army in time of Peace without Consent of Parliament’. The Lords insisted that the words ‘and quartering Soldiers, contrary to Law’ be added, as ‘an Aggravation of the Grievance’.⁷³ There is no doubt that, thus worded, the Declaration of Rights was correct in alleging that James had acted illegally. It was clear, in other words, that attempts by both Charles II and James II (particularly the latter) to establish a standing army in peacetime without parliamentary consent had led to violations of the law and of the people's ancient rights and liberties. How was the Convention going to attain the desired ends of vindicating and asserting these ancient rights and liberties in this regard? The solution it came up with was simply to declare that raising or keeping a peacetime standing army without parliamentary consent was illegal. Here one might suggest that the emphasis should be placed more on the verb ‘to vindicate’ than ‘to assert’: such a declaration was indeed the only way to guarantee that the people's rights and liberties would not be violated in future. Although technically the resolution might have enunciated a new position at law, it was done with the intent of vindicating the legal rights that the English people were already believed to possess.

The remaining provisions of the Declaration of Rights are less controversial.⁷⁴ Clause four, which condemned as illegal the ‘levying of money… by the pretence of Prerogative without Grant of Parliament for longer time or in other manner, than the same is or shall be granted’, referred to James's levying of the excise in the first few weeks of his reign, prior to the meeting of the 1685 parliament, which had technically been illegal even though many had accepted it as necessary at the time. Clause five affirmed ‘the right of the Subjects to petition the King’ and that ‘all Commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning’ were illegal – a reference to the seven bishops' case of 1688. (The first half of the Declaration of Rights also listed as one of James's illegal acts prosecuting in the court of King's Bench causes which were ‘Cognizable only in Parliament’, another allusion to the proceedings against the seven bishops.) Clause seven affirmed that ‘Subjects which are Protestants may have Armes for their defence Suitable to their Condition and as allowed by Law’. This was in response to a charge made against James II in the first half of the Declaration of Rights that he had disarmed Protestants at a time when Catholics ‘were both armed and Employed contrary to Law’. (This was probably in particular an allusion to what had gone on in Ireland.) It has been claimed that the Declaration of Rights established a new right to bear arms.⁷⁵ In fact, clause seven does not use the term ‘right’ and seems clearly to state that no new legal privilege is being granted here. It explicitly confirms existing limitations on who was allowed to possess arms and, if anything, should more accurately be seen as a gun-control measure.⁷⁶ Clauses eight and nine state ‘that Elections of Members of Parliament ought to be free’ and ‘that the freedome of Speech and debates or proceedings ought not be impeached or questioned in any Courte or place out of Parliament’. Both were time-honoured principles. The first was a reference to James's attempt to pack parliament in 1688 – the first half of the Declaration of Rights explicitly listed this as a grievance against James II – though some Whigs might have read it as also applying to Charles II's interference in borough franchises in the years of the Tory Reaction. The second referred to the prosecution of Sir William Williams in 1686 for licensing a pamphlet when Speaker in 1680, which King's Bench judged to be a seditious libel.

Only clauses ten to twelve – insisting that excessive bail, and excessive and unusual punishments, ought not to be imposed; demanding that jurors be duly impanelled and that jurors in trials for high treason must be freeholders; and outlawing ‘all grants and promises of fynes and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction’ – alluded to grievances that predated the accession of James II. (In the first half of the Declaration the corresponding clauses are nine to thirteen and are introduced by the phrase ‘And whereas of late years’, to distinguish them from the earlier clauses, which had been introduced as charges specifically against James II.) Clause ten condemned a trilogy of wrongdoings, which had been listed as separate clauses in the first half of the Declaration. The first was the imposition of excessive bail, a reference to the huge sums (anywhere between £10,000 and £60,000) that had been set in the final years of the Tory Reaction and at the time of the Monmouth rebellion as a way of keeping those suspected of disaffection (but whose offences were bailable) in prison – though one must also not forget the £30,000 bail set for Danby's release from prison in February 1684, reminding us that this clause addressed Tory as well as Whig grievances.⁷⁷ The second was excessive fines. Here the framers presumably had in mind the £10,000 fine imposed on Sir Samuel Barnardiston in 1684 for writing seditious letters, the £40,000 meted out to John Hampden in 1684 for his alleged involvement in the Rye House Plot, and the £100,000 imposed on both Thomas Pilkington and Titus Oates in 1682 and 1684 for scandalum magnatum upon the Duke of York, though it should be remembered that even the fines of £500 each imposed on the Whigs Benjamin Harris in 1679 (for seditious libel) and Thomas Dare in 1680 (for sedition) had been regarded as excessive at the time.⁷⁸ The third was unusual punishments, and referred to Oates's being sentenced to two whippings and two stints in the pillory and then to stand in the pillory four times a year for the rest of his life, following his condemnation on two counts of perjury in 1685, and the flogging and pillorying of Samuel Johnson in 1686 for publishing seditious libel – punishments that might well have proved fatal when the crime did not carry the death penalty. Clause eleven, concerning the proper impanelling of jurors (more precisely explained as the returning of ‘partial corrupt and unqualified persons’ in the first half of the Declaration), was aimed at abuses during the years of the Tory Reaction, while the specific stipulation that jurors in trials for high treason be freeholders alluded to the use of non-freeholders in the trials of the Rye House plotters in 1683, notably that of Lord Russell. Existing law was not clear on this last point, though the clause was certainly in the spirit of existing law; Russell's counsel in 1683 had cited an act from Henry V's reign stipulating that jurors in capital offences be forty shilling freeholders (and it was recognized at law that trial jurors at assizes had to be freeholders, with an act of 1665 raising the qualification to the possession of a freehold worth £20 per year), but the prosecution had insisted that Henry V's act did not specifically mention cases of high treason and also did not apply to jury panels in corporations.⁷⁹ Clause twelve, outlawing grants of fines and forfeitures prior to conviction, alluded in particular to the way the estates of some of those Monmouth rebels sentenced to transportation had been promised to bidders before formal conviction. James II had not invented the practice, and the framers were probably also thinking of similar incidents under Charles II (though it should be pointed out that the practice had a long history, and had even been followed by rulers whom the Whigs and commonwealth-men regarded more favourably, such as Queen Elizabeth and Oliver Cromwell). However, it had been denounced by medieval statutes, while the great early seventeenth-century jurist Sir Edward Coke was quite clear that the king had no right to do this.⁸⁰

Clause thirteen of the Declaration of Rights asserted ‘that for redress of all grievances and for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the Lawes, Parliaments ought to be held frequently’. The infrequent meeting of parliament had not been identified as one of the abuses in the first half of the Declaration, and this clause was clearly inserted at the end in the hope of ensuring that no such abuses of executive power, such as had occurred in the 1680s, could be repeated and that the ancient rights and liberties claimed by the Declaration could be guaranteed. It might have been an allusion both to Charles's failure to call parliament during the last four years of his reign (which was technically in violation of the Triennial Act of 1664) and also James's failure to meet with parliament again after November 1685. Yet revealingly there was no attempt to secure the frequent meetings of parliament, even though the country opposition of the 1670s, the Whigs of the Exclusion Crisis and the Rye House and Monmouth rebels had claimed that medieval statutes provided for the annual meeting of parliament; nor was there even a statement that parliaments should meet every three years, as spelled out by the Triennial Act.

The final section of the Declaration of Rights resolved that William and Mary should be declared king and queen of England, France and Ireland ‘and the Dominions thereunto belonging… during their lives and the life of the Survivor of them’, with the exercise of regal power vested in William alone, and that after their deaths the crown should pass to the heirs of the Princess of Orange or, if she remained childless, to James II's second daughter, Princess Anne of Denmark and her heirs. The Declaration then stipulated two new oaths to be taken by all people previously required to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy: one to ‘bee faithfull and bear true Allegiance to their Majesties King William and Queen Mary’; the other abjuring the doctrine ‘That Princes Excommunicated or Deprived by the Pope or any Authority of the see of Rome may be deposed or Murdered by their Subjects’ and declaring ‘that noe foreign Prince, Person, Prelate, State or Potentate hath or ought to have any Jurisdiction, Power, Superiority, Preeminence or Authority Ecclesiastical or Spiritual within this Realme’.

Scholars have disagreed over whether the offer of the crown to William and Mary was conditional upon their acceptance of the Declaration of Rights.⁸¹ Strictly speaking, it was not. The crown was offered at a special ceremony involving the new monarchs and the members of the Convention, which took place at the Banqueting House on 13 February. Halifax, as speaker of the Lords, asked William and Mary for permission to read the Declaration; they agreed, the clerk of the Lords then read it, and after that the crown was offered. However, William replied with a short speech in which he first accepted the crown, and then told the members of the Convention that as he ‘had no other Intention in coming hither, than to preserve your Religion, Laws, and Liberties’, so they could rest assured that he would ‘endeavour to support them’, adding that he would ‘concur in anything that shall be for the Good of the Kingdom’ and do everything in his power ‘to advance the Welfare and Glory of the Nation’.⁸² William did not take a formal oath promising to uphold the provisions of the Declaration. Nor was the reading of the Declaration and the offer of the crown linked to the taking of the coronation oath, as it was to be in Scotland; William took the English oath at his coronation on 11 April. There was certainly no attempt to link the offer of the crown with a request that those grievances which did not find their way into the Declaration of Rights be remedied – again, in contrast to what was to happen in Scotland. Furthermore, we might wonder in what sense the offer of the crown could have been made conditional upon the acceptance of the Declaration if, as has been argued here, the framers of the Declaration did not think they were imposing any new conditions on the crown.

Yet framing the issue like this puts a whole new light on the question. It was not that the members of the Convention were offering the crown to William and Mary on the condition that they relinquish certain royal prerogatives that all previous monarchs had enjoyed. Rather, they were spelling out to William and Mary that the people of England possessed certain rights and liberties that James II had violated, and that there were certain things that English monarchs could not legally do, notwithstanding anything James II had done to the contrary. William and Mary took the crown on the same terms that James II and all previous monarchs were presumed to have taken it – they were supposed to rule according to law. We have to remember, however, that not ruling according to law had cost James his throne. He was taken by the Convention as having abdicated the government, not just by his withdrawing himself, but by his refusal to respect the constitution. The Declaration of Rights did not link James's abdicating the government so explicitly with his subverting the fundamental laws as had the Convention's original resolution on the vacancy, so it was possible to read the Declaration of Rights as meaning either that James had ruled illegally and (coincidentally) also abdicated the government, or that he had abdicated the government by dint of the fact that he had ruled illegally. Yet it was certainly possible to interpret the reading of the Declaration to William and Mary prior to the offer of the crown as a warning that, if they did not rule according to law, they too would un-king themselves.

THE POST-DECLARATION OF RIGHTS SETTLEMENT

The fact that in framing the Declaration of Rights the members of the Convention chose to defer addressing those grievances which would require fresh legislation until after the crown had been settled means that we cannot see the Declaration by itself as the entirety of the Revolution settlement. It was always expected that further reforming legislation would follow once a legal parliament had been called into existence. This was achieved on 23 February when the Convention passed a bill, which received the royal assent, turning itself into a parliament. Although the Tories would have liked fresh elections, William and his Whig allies thought that calling a new parliament would cause a dangerous delay, given the international situation and the necessity of raising money speedily for the impending wars in Ireland and on the Continent.⁸³

The first grievance to be addressed that did not find its way into the Declaration of Rights was the hearth tax – a levy imposed on fireplaces at the Restoration, on the assumption (not always correct) that the more hearths one had the more wealth one possessed, which had been very unpopular. On 1 March, in an attempt to persuade parliament to be more generous when voting supplies, William informed the Commons that he understood ‘the Chimny mony was very grievous and burdensome to his good Subjects’ and that he was content it should be removed. The announcement was well-received in both the House and the nation at large, and the Commons immediately appointed a committee to bring in a bill for the abolition of the tax.⁸⁴

In March Parliament turned its attention to devising a new coronation oath – again, something that had been deemed necessary by the Heads of Grievances – to oblige the new sovereign to rule according to law. In the traditional oath, which James II had taken in 1685, the monarch promised to ‘grant and keep and… confirm to the people of England the Laws and Customs to them granted by the Kings of England’. The 1689 oath removed the notion that the people enjoyed their laws and customs as a grant from the king. Thus at their coronation William and Mary solemnly swore and promised ‘to Governe the People of this Kingdome of England and the Dominions thereto belonging according to the Statutes in Parlyament agreed on and the Laws and Customs of the same’. That part of the traditional oath asking the monarch to ‘keep peace, and godly Agreement… to the holy Church, the Clergy, and the people’ (which was vague and potentially carried Catholic overtones) was also dropped and replaced by an explicit promise ‘to Maintaine the Laws of God, the true Profession of the Gospell, and the Protestant Reformed Religion Established by Law’. The Whigs had wanted to use the words ‘as shall be established’, to allow for the possibility of further reform in the Church, though Tories insisted on their preferred formula and carried the vote by 188 to 149.⁸⁵ On 24 April the Convention passed legislation abolishing the old oaths of allegiance and requiring all civil and ecclesiastical office-holders to take the new oaths prescribed by the Declaration of Rights by 1 August or, after a six-month grace period, face deprivation of office.⁸⁶

On 5 March it was proposed in the Commons that a bill should be prepared for enacting the Declaration of Rights into law and to prevent a papist from coming to the throne.⁸⁷ Partisan disputes, and a preoccupation with other issues (such as funding the war), meant that no agreement had been reached before parliament adjourned for the summer on 20 August. The bill was revived in the autumn, however, and eventually enacted on 16 December. The Bill of Rights, as it is normally known, gave statutory force to the Declaration of Rights, and further asserted that William and Mary ‘did accept the Crowne… according to the Resolution and Desire of the… Lords and Commons contained in the said Declaration’. The wording is again ambiguous: was the ‘Resolution and Desire’ alluded to simply that William and Mary accept the throne, or was it the entire list of premises spelled out at the beginning of the Declaration intended to vindicate ancient rights and liberties? The Bill of Rights nevertheless continued, in this respect, to insist that all the ‘Rights and Liberties asserted and claimed’ in the Declaration of Rights ‘were the true auntient and indubitable Rights and Liberties of the People of this Kingdome’. The Bill of Rights, however, did go beyond the Declaration of Rights by further stipulating that no one could come to the throne who was, or ever had been, a Catholic; that a king or queen might not marry a Catholic; and that any future monarch who came to the throne must take the Test Act oath of 1678. This was because, the Bill states (reiterating the wording of the Commons' resolution of 29 January), ‘it hath been found by Experience that it is inconvenient with the Safety and Welfare of this Protestant Kingdome to be governed by a Popish Prince or by any King or Queene marrying a Papist’. The Bill of Rights also placed further limitations on the dispensing power, stipulating that in future no royal dispensation could be used against any act of parliament that had not specifically included a provision allowing for such.⁸⁸

Some progress was also made towards addressing clause sixteen of the Heads of Grievances – that effectual provision be made for Protestants to have freedom of worship and that Protestants be united in matters of public worship as much as possible. It was widely recognized that something would have to be done to help the Protestant dissenters;⁸⁹ after all, Anglican leaders had already promised the dissenters some form of relief from a future parliament in return for their agreeing not to back James's Declarations of Indulgence. Nottingham proposed a scheme to broaden the basis of the national Church by comprehending the more moderate dissenters, while conceding a very limited toleration to those who remained outside. In the end, however, the plans for comprehension got separated from the provision for freedom of worship. At William's insistence, a Toleration Bill went through parliament fairly quickly in the spring. This did not repeal the penal laws, but gave Protestant dissenters immunity from prosecution for holding their own religious services if they licensed their meeting-houses and kept their doors open when they met (the latter to meet the charge, frequently made during Charles II's reign, that dissenters met in private to plot sedition against the state), subscribed the declaration against transubstantiation (contained in the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678), and took the oath of fidelity and allegiance and that against the pope's deposing power (prescribed in the Declaration of Rights).⁹⁰It was decided, however, that comprehension was a matter more appropriately taken up by Convocation. The latitudinarian divine John Tillotson proposed a certain degree of liturgical reform and a relaxation of the demand for ceremonial conformity as a way of enticing dissenters back into the fold.⁹¹ Yet the High Anglican clergy proved reluctant to make any concessions, their fears for the security of their Church having been heightened by the abolition of episcopacy north of the border as part of the Revolution settlement in Scotland. One Jacobite pamphleteer itemized among ‘the Train of Mischiefs’ that would ‘follow this Revolution’ the ‘Scandal and Change it brings to our Church’. Comprehension and changes in the liturgy seemed likely to follow, something to be particularly concerned about ‘because of what has happened to the Church of Scotland’. The author's dire prediction? ‘We must be more Presbyterian, and our Sacramental Test must be abrogated.⁹² One correspondent, commenting in a letter to the Tory-Anglican Edmund Bohun on the ‘good newes’ of the Scottish government's success in putting down the Jacobite rebellion north of the border in early May 1690, nevertheless expressed his concern that the Scots were ‘of such a restless temper’ that if they were short of things to do at home they would ‘com and help their dear brethren in England (as they once before did) to pull down our popish establishment, and erect their super-fine protestant discipline in the room of it’.⁹³

The toleration established was thus quite limited. Papists and anti-Trinitarians were explicitly excluded from the Act's provisions. Nor was one free to opt out of religious observance altogether: one was allowed not to go to Church on Sunday only if one chose to go to a dissenting meeting instead. This was not religious toleration in our modern understanding of the term. The Test Acts remained on the books (there was an abortive attempt at repeal in March 1689),⁹⁴ which meant that not only Catholics but also nonconformists, including those more moderate types who might have hoped to benefit from comprehension, remained excluded from office. In theory, the state remained as narrowly confessional as ever, although some dissenters were able to gain access to office through the practice of occasional conformity. Quakers continued to be the most vulnerable group, not least because of their refusal to swear oaths; although the Toleration Act allowed Quakers to subscribe the declaration against transubstantiation and the declaration of fidelity to William and Mary and against the pope's deposing power, there remained the problem of oaths that were required to engage in a wide variety of legal and commercial transactions.⁹⁵

Other attempts to secure legal redress for those grievances not covered by the Declaration of Rights, however, came to nought, at least in the short term. The Lords did introduce a bill to regulate the trials of peers, including treason trials, in late February 1689, to address concerns raised by article seventeen of the Heads of Grievances, but it was lost due to disagreement between the two Houses; it was not until 1696 that any reforming legislation was successfully enacted. William personally chose to comply with the request in article eighteen of the Heads of Grievances that judges’ commissions be held on good behaviour, not at royal pleasure, yet so too had Charles II at first; there was nothing at law requiring the monarch to appoint judges on these terms until the passage of the Act of Settlement in 1701, which did not come into effect until the Hanoverian Succession of 1714. In June 1689 the Commons introduced a bill to reform the militia (in accordance with article five of the Heads of Grievances), but this got held up in the Lords and was lost when the parliament was dissolved early in the new year. Parliament also considered various versions of a bill to restore corporations as they had existed in 1675, to meet the demand in article thirteen of the Heads of Grievances that the corporations be restored to their ancient rights, but with the Whigs pressing for the inclusion of a clause that would have barred from office all those who had supported the quo warranto proceedings of the 1680s in the face of opposition from the Tories and also the King, the bill finally was lost when William prorogued and then later dissolved parliament in late January, early February 1690. When discussing the Bill of Rights in November 1689 the Lords, in order to meet the request in the Heads of Grievances that the frequent meeting of parliament be secured (article nine), did consider reviving the Triennial Act of 1641, but again this measure was lost with the dissolution. A Triennial Act was not to be passed until 1694, but even then it did not include the provisions in the 1641 act that guaranteed the meeting of parliament even if the king failed to call one.⁹⁶

The preferred means of keeping the crown dependent upon parliament seems to have been through the power of the purse. Thus Whigs and Tories combined to ensure that the revenue eventually settled on the crown in 1690 was temporary (parliament granted customs for a term of four years) and inadequate (William and Mary received for the term of their lives half the excise given to Charles II and James II), in order to put the people ‘out of fear’, as Sir Joseph Williamson put it, ‘of not meeting the king frequently in parliament’. William had further lost out, of course, by having already relinquished the hearth tax. The end result was that whereas the crown's revenue had been about £2 million per annum during the reign of James II, by 1692–4 it was only £942,179.⁹⁷ Ultimately, however, it was the financial revolution that came in the wake of William's wars, and the resultant national debt which had to be serviced by regular grants of parliamentary taxation, that guaranteed regular meetings of parliament after the Glorious Revolution (see pp. 491–2).

It is hard to agree that the Revolution settlement created a new type of monarchy. Most of the powers of the crown were left intact. Thus, as had been the case before 1689, the monarch had the right to determine all questions of policy (both foreign and domestic), choose his own ministers, veto parliamentary legislation, and determine when and for how long parliament should sit. The Declaration of Rights, in essence, did little more than vindicate and assert what the framers undertook to be ancient rights and privileges. In the short term, only a limited number of those Grievances omitted from the Declaration of Rights because they required reforming legislation were addressed.

It would be wrong, however, to see the Revolution settlement as of limited constitutional significance. The Declaration of Rights, given statutory force with the passage of the Bill of Rights, settled a number of issues that had been matters of dispute between the crown and parliament over the course of the seventeenth century, and settled them decisively in parliament's favour. No longer could the crown claim to be above the law or exploit areas of legal ambiguity in order to exalt its own authority. The Declaration thus provided the sort of legal clarity on a number of points of controversy that would make the types of experiments in royal absolutism that the Stuarts had engaged in impossible in the future. The Bill of Rights, moreover, included the additional provision debarring Catholics from coming to the throne as well as a further limitation on the dispensing power. Nor should we minimize the significance of the Toleration Act. Limited though it might have been, it nevertheless did establish a legal liberty of conscience for those Protestant groups that had suffered persecution during the reign of Charles II and at the beginning of James II's reign, and helped ease many of those religious tensions that had been one of the major sources of political instability during the seventeenth century. When John Somers boasted in 1690 that ‘Our happiness’ stemmed from the fact that ‘our Princes’ were ‘tied up to the law as well as we’, adding that ‘our Government not being Arbitrary, but Legal, not Absolute, but Political, our princes can never become Arbitrary, Absolute or Tyrants’, he was making points which many constitutionalists might have thought were true in theory prior to the reign of James II. The achievement of 1688–9 was to ensure that they would also henceforth be true in practice.⁹⁸

REACTIONS TO THE REVOLUTION

The Revolution settlement in England, then, was a compromise. It was not a victory for one particular party; indeed, Whigs, Tories, high Anglicans, Latitudinarians and dissenters alike would have had reason to feel disappointed in not getting the settlement they desired. Yet at the same time the settlement reached was the product of bi-partisan negotiation. The political elite held together in the face of severe partisan disagreement. No one party decided to walk out of the proceedings of the Convention (as was to be the case in Scotland), and although no one party got everything its own way, no party could feel that they had lost out entirely. So how was the Revolution settlement received? Was it generally welcome to the nation at large? Or was there a significant undercurrent of disaffection, amongst either the political elite, or the mass of the population?

We can get a sense of the mood of the population as a whole by looking at public celebrations and demonstrations. Many contemporaries commented on the widespread enthusiasm for the settlement of the crown on William and Mary in February. The Princess of Orange appears to have been a popular figure. When she arrived in London on 12 February – she had remained in the Netherlands so long not, as some contemporaries insinuated, because William wanted to keep her out of the way until he had achieved both the crown and sole regal authority for himself, but because the bad winter had kept the ports frozen – she was greeted with bells, bonfires and ‘the lofty Shouts and Acclamations of huzzaing Throngs and Multitudes, who doubly rejoiced’, we are told, ‘for her safe Arrival, and for her being declar'd Queen’. There were similar celebrations in London the next day when William and Mary were proclaimed King and Queen, first at Whitehall, then at Temple Bar, Cheapside, and finally at the Royal Exchange. ‘Each Proclamation’, the London Gazette tells us, was ‘Ecchoede with Universal Acclamations of Joy by the Multitudes of People which crowded the Streets, Windows and Balconies.’ Again, the evening concluded with bonfires and bells; Roger Morrice noted there ‘were very great and Universall Bonefires in every streete, and very many in severall, and at many particular persons doors’.⁹⁹ There were bonfires in some provincial towns on the 14th, to celebrate the day of thanksgiving for deliverance from popery and arbitrary government, while there are numerous accounts of joyous celebration throughout the county and market towns of England as the new monarchs came to be proclaimed in the provinces over the course of the next couple of weeks. At Whitehaven in Cumberland, William and Mary were proclaimed, it was said, ‘in the presence and auditory of twenty times as many more people at the least than were present for the proclamation of King James the Second’.¹⁰⁰ The royal coronation on 11 April provided another occasion for London and the provinces to celebrate the accession of the new monarchs to the throne. Luttrell noted the ‘great splendour and joy’ at places such as Oxford, Worcester, Rye, Brecknock, Exeter, Lyme and Coventry.¹⁰¹ A rather elaborate ritual took place at Bath, as young men and women processed through the town to commemorate England's ‘happy deliverance from Popery and Slavery’ to the ‘acclamations of unforced Joy, exceeding what was ever seen in that City’. ¹⁰²

A certain degree of scepticism is needed in dealing with such accounts. The London Gazette, as much the official organ of the new government as it had been of the old, was bound to put the most positive gloss it could on reactions to the proclamations and the coronation, since it wanted to create the impression that the new regime was universally popular. Moreover, these demonstrations were clearly sponsored from above – starting, as they normally did, with a formal solemnity involving local dignatories and civic authorities, who in turn provided money for bonfires and alcohol. To give a typical example, when William and Mary were proclaimed at Hereford, there was a civic display, accompanied by the firing of cannon and the beating of drums by the local militia, and one of the members of the area's leading gentry family, Robert Harley, provided ‘a bonfire… and a hogshead of cyder’.¹⁰³ Often it was the local town authorities who gave money for beer, wine and even tobacco to make sure that the proclamation and coronation were celebrated in the right spirit.¹⁰⁴ This does not mean we should doubt whether such public professions of support for the new monarchs were sincere. In fact, there are plenty of independent, local accounts to suggest that there was a considerable degree of genuine enthusiasm, throughout much of England, for the proclaiming and crowning of William and Mary.

Nevertheless, we also have isolated reports of disaffection. Much of the alleged disaffection came from predictable sources: soldiers in the army who had served under James II, and the high-Anglican clergy. The Whig MP for Cirencester, John Howe, complained in the Commons on 25 and 26 February that he had received letters from his corporation stating that the soldiers quartered there would ‘not let the People make Bonfires at proclaiming the King’ and had themselves proclaimed King James and drunk ‘King William's and Queen Mary's Damnation’. The town clergy had also refused to appear at the proclamation.¹⁰⁵ The Whig MP for Cornwall, Hugh Boscawen, complained in the House on 1 March that he had learned ‘that the Soldiers in Cornwall’ were ‘as bad as the rest; and when the Magistrates rejoiced at the happy change’, they ‘killed a man’.¹⁰⁶ At Oxford, Morrice heard, the University vice-chancellor ‘was very backward and unwilling to proclaime the King and Queene’, though the mayor did so ‘with all readynesse and great solemnity’. Morrice also learned that the clergy in many dioceses refused to keep the public day of thanksgiving for William and Mary's accession to the crown.¹⁰⁷ In Stamford, the mayor sought to frustrate celebrations for the royal coronation on 11 April by cutting the bell ropes of the church and issuing an order to prevent bonfires.¹⁰⁸

Even in London there are hints of disaffection. Laurence Echard, in his early eighteenth-century history, tells us that the ‘Torrents of Joy’ that filled ‘the whole City and Suburbs’ when William and Mary were proclaimed on 13 February ‘totally drown'd all the little Discontents and Murmurings that began to appear upon this Mighty Change’.¹⁰⁹ Not quite totally, it seems. Morrice heard how, in late Feburary, a London divine counselled his auditors ‘to keepe their loyalty untainted… against Dutch against Devill’.¹¹⁰ The London court records provide a number of cases of seditious words in the early months of the new regime. George Smith, who had formerly held a commission under James II, although now he held one from William III, was fined 3s 4d and sentenced to stand in the pillory for saying in Coleman Street in the heart of London on 22 June: ‘God Damn all the Dutch Men, they were but a Handfull, Bake them in An Oven and Broile them on A Gridiron.’ Joseph Sheere was fined £6 8s 4d and sentenced to stand in the pillory for saying, on 19 May, ‘that King James was now in Scotland and had almost conquered it’ and that ‘He hoped to see the same in England’.¹¹¹ In November someone defaced William III's portrait in the London Guildhall ‘by cutting out the crown and scepter’.¹¹² A man called Michael Ferrer allegedly told an acquaintance at the Royal Exchange on 21 November that he was upset ‘King James was turned out’, and felt ‘that he [King James] had not Right done him’. ‘King William set forth in his Declaration, that he came to preserve the Laws’, Ferrer grumbled, ‘but instead of that he had altered them’; he said ‘he came to maintain our Rights, but instead of that he came for the Crown’. In this particular case, there might have been an element of malicious prosecution; Ferrer was at least able to call credible witnesses at his trial the following January to testify to his reputation, and he secured himself an acquittal.¹¹³

To what extent, then, were people able to make their peace with the new regime, and how did they do so? How easy it would prove to embrace the Revolution depended not only upon an individual's political or religious opinions, but also on the meaning one chose to ascribe to the events of 1688–9 and whether one was happy with what one understood to be the outcome.

A major pamphlet controversy arose, designed to influence public opinion over whether or not to give allegiance to the new regime. Some 192 pamphlets relating to the allegiance controversy appeared between 6 February 1689 and the end of 1694. Of these, 89 were Whig, 50 Tory and 53 Jacobite; some 80 appeared in 1689 alone. The 139 loyalist pamphlets embraced a range of different reasons for adhering to the Revolution settlement, which can be split into six broad categories: contractual resistance; possession; abdication/ desertion; conquest; providence; and resistance in extremis. Many pamphleteers used more than one type of argument to try to sell the Revolution to the public.¹¹⁴

As one might expect, it was the Whigs who had least difficulty in accepting the legitimacy of the Revolution. Most willingly embraced contract theory: of the 89 Whig pamphlets, 68 appealed to some form of contractual resistance; naturally no Tory pamphlets did. There were moderate and more radical strands to the way contract theory was used, however. Twenty-three pamphlets took the line that English history showed the contractual roots of the polity and that James had violated his contract by failing to rule according to the constitution; fourteen took the more radical approach of basing the original contract in natural law and arguing that resistance was legitimate because James had violated his subjects’ natural rights. This was the line argued by John Locke in his Two Treatises of Government, a tract which had been drafted in the early 1680s to legitimize the conspiracies of the radical Whigs against the government of Charles II, but which was revised and published (for the first time) in the autumn of 1689 to offer a defence of William and Mary's title to the crown. Regardless of whether one took a historical or natural law approach, Whig contract theorists tended to the view that James had un-kinged himself as a result of violating his contract. Of the 68 pamphlets embracing contract theory, only 22 maintained that James had been deposed. Furthermore, of those 68 tracts, only 34 used contractual arguments alone; the others also embraced other theories to legitimize the Revolution settlement. Among defences of the Revolution as a whole, by contrast, contract theory was less significant. Thus, only 49 per cent of the loyalist tracts (68 out of 139) embraced contract theory, and only 6 per cent (22) argued that James had been deposed. Some 76 per cent (105) appealed to arguments other than contract theory to justify what had transpired.¹¹⁵

Accepting the legitimacy of what had taken place in 1688–9 posed a much greater moral and intellectual problem for Tory Anglicans, since they had for so long upheld the principles of indefeasible hereditary succession, non-resistance and the inviolability of oaths. One Worcestershire cleric wrote that ‘he was amazed at the proceedings of the Convention, that they should depose the King’, since ‘Deposing Kings and absolving subjects from theyr allegiance’ were ‘some of the grand doctrines for which we quarrel with the Papists’.¹¹⁶ In the end, however, very few Tory Anglicans refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchs. Some, it should be said, procrastinated for an awfully long time: William Sherlock did not capitulate until August 1690, though prior to then he continued to lecture in St Dunstan's in the West in London and to offer prayers for William and Mary as de facto monarchs.¹¹⁷ Jacobites were fiercely critical of the apparent hypocrisy of those clergy who took the new oaths: ‘there never was so sudden and so shameful a Turn of Men professing Religion’, bemoaned the Protestant Irish Jacobite Charles Leslie. Indeed, Leslie reported that ‘the Common People’ joked ‘that there was but one thing formerly which the Parliament could not do, that is, to make a Man a Woman: But now there is another, that is, to make an Oath which the Clergy will not take’.¹¹⁸

Tories who threw in their lot with the Revolution inevitably insisted that the Convention had not deposed James II and distanced themselves from resistance theory. They did not eschew resistance theory altogether. As we saw in the previous chapter (and as we shall see again when we look at Scotland and Ireland), some Tory Anglicans were willing to embrace a theory of limited resistance, in exceptional circumstances. Of the thirteen allegiance controversy pamphlets that appeared between 6 February 1689 and the end of 1694 that allowed for resistance in extreme cases, nine were Tory (or 18 per cent of the total number of Tory pamphlets that appeared at this time).¹¹⁹

The majority of Tory Anglicans, however, denied that the people had engaged in any acts of resistance in 1688–9. One solution was to maintain that the Revolution had come about as a result of God's Providence. Care is needed, however, when discussing the use of providentialist justifications. It was quite common for people across the political spectrum to employ some form of providentialist rhetoric when justifying the Revolution. When the Convention proclaimed William and Mary King and Queen on 13 February, the nonconformist Sussex merchant Samuel Jeake wrote in his diary that ‘now, through the mercifull Providence of God, we were freed from the fears of Popery and Persecution’.¹²⁰ The trimmer Sir Richard Temple, in a manuscript tract written in c. 1690 condemning the Whigs for allegedly supporting James II's efforts to overthrow the penal laws and the Test Act, recalled that we were ‘Saved by God's Providence’.¹²¹ The author of the very Whiggish Four Questions Debated, having first maintained that James had ‘totally Subverted’ the government of England by his misrule, that the exercise of the government was therefore dissolved and the people had the right to choose the successor, and that they should not follow the lineal descent but settle the throne on William alone, nevertheless sought to bolster the case for William by appealing to ‘the extraordinary Providence of God’: God's wonders could be seen in how He preserved William and the fleet ‘in the Deeps’ and by ‘what we have heard and seen since he came ashore’, and so it was ‘apparent that the Lord hath sent him’.¹²² Yet a thoroughgoing theory of a divine right of Providence, holding that subjects must acquiesce in the divine interventions of God and that a monarch thus installed was ruler de iure and not just de facto, was regarded as too ‘enthusiastic’, and only 14 pamphlets in the allegiance controversy took such a line – and even then, only 6 were Tory and 8 were Whig.¹²³

Tories tended to salve their consciences by arguing that James had abdicated or deserted and that they owed de facto allegiance to the new monarchs who were in possession of the throne. Sixty-five out of the 139 loyalist pamphlets in the allegiance controversy (47 per cent of the total) sought to justify allegiance by appeal to possession; 38 of these were Tory tracts (76 per cent of the total number of Tory loyalist tracts). Forty-five pamphlets appealed to abdication: 17 were Whig tracts, 28 Tory (with the Tory tracts tending to see abdication as equivalent to desertion). The trouble with the above arguments, however, is that they did not recognize William and Mary as de iure monarchs, simply as monarchs de facto. The way this was resolved was by an appeal to conquest theory, as based on the international law arguments of the Dutch humanist Hugh Grotius. Thus it was argued that William had a legitimate title to the throne because he had won it through conquest in a just war – the reason why the war was just being that James had attempted to defraud William of his hereditary property rights by endeavouring to change the English government and by presenting the supposititious heir to the throne. Since William was an independent prince and head of a sovereign state, international law regulated the relationship between himself and James II; he could therefore use arms to defend his rights and victory conferred a de iure title to the throne. The beauty of this was that the theory was compatible with the view that James II's English subjects themselves had never engaged in any acts of armed resistance.¹²⁴

The theory clearly appealed to the new Williamite regime. The government hack, James Welwood, took this line in his Williamite periodical Mercurius Reformatus. Thus, on 17 July 1689, he insisted that the Prince of Orange ‘had the justest ground imaginable to make War upon a Prince that had so abused his Power, and endeavoured to defraud him and his Princess of their just Right of Reversion to the Crown; and this he might do… since King James and he were upon equal ground, as to a Right of making War one upon another, being both Sovereign Princes, and independent of one another’.¹²⁵ Similarly, the government's chief propagandist Gilbert Burnet published a Pastoral Letter in 1689, in which he argued that ‘it was a just war the Prince of Orange had made against the King, who by going about to change the government of the Kingdom wherein the Prince had an expectancy, and by putting a supposititious heire upon him, had endeavour'd to disapoint his succession’.¹²⁶ It was an argument that was also used by Edmund Bohun (who combined it with a view that James had deserted), and by William Sherlock (who combined it with providential theory) when he eventually decided to take the oaths. A total of thirty-two of the allegiance controversy tracts embraced conquest theory (fifteen were Whig, seventeen Tory), but it has been suggested that it was perhaps this argument, rather than any of the others, that had the greatest effect in bringing people over to the new government.¹²⁷

In fact, the vast majority of English people accepted the validity of the dynastic shift that had occurred in 1688–9. By the end of 1690, most prominent laymen and clergy had sworn allegiance to the new regime. Those who felt a particular bond of loyalty to James – his close political advisers, personal servants, co-religionists and some (at least) who had served him in the armed forces – as well as devout Anglicans who believed in the absolute inviolability of oaths, could not accept the legitimacy of the new regime and persisted as Jacobites or Nonjurors. Some followed James into exile at St Germain-en-Laye near Paris, where they conspired to bring about a Stuart Restoration, the leading figure here being James's erstwhile Secretary of State, the Earl of Middleton. A minority of lay office-holders and about 400 clergymen (about 3.5 per cent of a total clerical estate of about 12,000) refused the oaths and became Nonjurors. This group included ten peers (among them the Earl of Clarendon), sixty-one former or present MPs, and nearly half the episcopal hierarchy (including Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury and Bishop Turner of Ely). Many English Catholics also remained deeply committed to a Stuart Restoration. Nevertheless, despite the existence of some high-profile Jacobites, Jacobitism was not a significant force in England in the immediate aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. It was to become more significant over time, as people grew disillusioned with developments under the post-Revolution regimes, with even some radical Whigs, disappointed by the conservatism of the Revolution settlement, looking to a conditional restoration of James II as a way of implementing some of their much-desired constitutional reforms. However, in 1689–90 the Jacobites did not enjoy anywhere near the level of support necessary to enable them to mount a successful challenge to the post-Revolution regime. Even the majority of Nonjurors were scarcely Jacobites in any meaningful sense – many had opposed James when king and would scarcely have relished his return, and few were willing actively to seek his restoration; they merely believed that their oaths prevented them from renouncing their allegiance.¹²⁸

Thus in England consensus was sustained. Most Tories and Whigs, conformists and nonconformists, made their peace with the Revolution, even if they were able to do so only because the very ambiguity of the Revolution settlement enabled it to be different things to different people. The situation was to be very different in Scotland and Ireland, and the revolutions in both were to take on very different hues as a result.

8

‘The Greatest Revolution that was Ever Known’: The Revolution Settlement in England