The Mother of All Revolutions

Robert Spencer 'The Seed of Revolution' 1928

Frederic Maitland said in 1887 “we must treat the 1689 Revolution as a revolution, a very necessary and wisely conducted revolution, but still a revolution”. Why? Because … “We cannot work it into our constitutional law”. There was no legal precedent for what happened. On 11 December 1688 James II dropped the great seal into the Thames as he fled to safety in France. It was interpreted that at the moment of discarding the great seal (the symbol of his authority) and leaving his country, James II in effect “abdicated”. But in fact he had not abdicated. Furthermore, a properly constituted parliament was needed to depose or proclaim a king. There was no sitting parliament because James dissolved it in 1688. 

The most unconstitutional -- therefore revolutionary -- thing was that a foreign monarch, William Prince of Orange, called the ‘Convention’ that summoned a new parliament into being for the express purpose of proclaiming him, with his English wife Mary, “joint sovereigns”. It was therefore an “irregular assembly” not properly summoned as well as not properly constituted. It excluded half the eligible parliamentarians, and it included ineligible councillors of the city of London. From Maitland’s lawyerly perspective this could only be called a ‘revolution’, though it was a small one effected in a manner that looked more like a legal proceeding than uncivilised rabble revolt. Technically and morally it was made to look a justifiable little revolution. Yet, technically, it was a coup. Had they failed the revolutionaries would have been found guilty of treason. On the other hand, points out Christopher Hill, “the beauty of 1688 was that kings had been changed without the state collapsing, in refutation of Hobbes”. 

The brave gentlemanly elite of the Glorious Revolution, Whigs and Tories, hitherto sworn enemies, joined common cause with an illegally-imported two-bodied male-female sovereign to prevent their nation from succumbing to French-style arbitrary absolutism. They seized the crisis-window of opportunity, an unprecedented vacancy of the throne lasting two months. In these special circumstances they could dictate conditions which formally altered the balance of power between king and parliament. The Declaration of Rights was a vague and gentle compromise, and agreement to it was not even a formal condition of William’s enthronement, yet it was a sufficient base from which to achieve the victory over royalty which parliament had sought since the 1620s. The powers of the king were finally irrevocably limited. The separation of powers in 1689 and the consequent rapid succession of complementary and supplementary bills and statutes forever changed the English interaction of economy, law, administration, and representation.

A radical new phase in the maturation of the English state was unleashed within a decade of the revolutionary settlement in 1689, yet there is debate about the ‘revolutionary’ character of this institutional transformation. First of all, as indicated, the supremacy of parliament was not achieved overnight. For example, the king retained legal powers (prerogatives), which he was expected to use, and his own cabinet ministers continued to meddle in parliamentary affairs. The fundamental reshaping of the English state occurred during the 20-30 years after 1689. Secondly, most importantly, it is justifiably argued that 1688-89 was only a somewhat more decisive (though quantifiably smaller and more peaceful) skirmish in a long revolution dating back to the 1640s, or even to the 1620s. 

Mark Knights sums it up: “it is easy to exaggerate the ‘Glorious Revolution’ as the key turning-point. There was a coup in 1688–9, but a revolution process spanning at least from 1640 to 1720”. This was the century of revolution; either it was one long revolution, or two or three short sharp revolutions. Others like Derek Hirst who perhaps deploy the more precise or conventional definition of ‘revolution’ simply say “1648-9 brought the only revolution in English history”, notably the execution of Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, and the refusal of half of England’s common law judges to recognise the new order. The fact that a revolution fails or is reversed does not invalidate calling it a ‘revolution’. 

Compare Hirst’s statement with that of Steve Pincus: “The English Revolution of 1688-89 was the first modern revolution”. Why is one ‘modern’ and the other not? Not the intensity, since Pincus is keen to emphasise that 1688-89 was “popular, violent, and divisive”. His concern is to explain why 1688-89 was not a restorative or conservative revolution, but rather the result of state modernisation initiated by restored monarchies after 1660. Ten of the fifteen chapter headings in Pincus’s book contain the word ‘revolution’. Yet despite his mild chastisement of those -- like Hill -- who he claims exaggerated the long-term impact of mid-century as compared with late-century upheavals, Pincus comes, in the end, to the long view: “the revolution as a process set in motion in the wide-ranging crisis of the 1620s”. 

Surely it matters little whether one or another period of the 17th century England is called ‘revolutionary’. It is certainly invaluable to distinguish the special characteristics and intensity of particular phases, as historians including the ones mentioned here have done superbly. What would be useful, in addition, is to identify the kernel of a keenly and visibly felt, continuously transformative institutional impulse from 1620 to 1720, an impulse that captures both the separation of powers and the interactive economic, administrative, and representational dynamics over the course of a whole century of multi-dimensional modernisation. If there was a sequence of discontinuous crisis-induced changes adding up continuously (two steps forward, one step back) to a huge transformation then we should have it spelled out. Call it a revolution if you will. 

A relatively neglected dimension of ‘big history’ perspectives is the legal-constitutional domain, which is why I began with Maitland. The logic of his ‘revolution’ was purely legal. By implication, the mid-century innovations were not revolutions because -- formally -- they were properly sanctioned by parliamentary procedure. Half the lawyers may not have much liked what occurred, but the other half made sure the execution of Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords were done by the book, strictly according to the rules.   

Let’s agree that from a global perspective England’s 17th century was exceptionally ‘revolutionary’ in spirit and in effect. From an English perspective, however, i.e. from the piecemeal perspective of people who in-between wild displays of fireworks shaped the 17th century by obsessing about correct procedure, there probably really was only one short revolution. It was, furthermore, a small, elitist, consensual, and peaceful revolution, namely the unfortunate and blatant but necessary deviation from the constitution, which, in December 1688, permitted a foreign monarch to summon a kangaroo parliament. It was a techno-instrumental revolution, hardly worth the historiographical hot air. 

Real dramas -- waves of economic crisis and hints of future prosperity, the time-wasting religious irrelevancies, the energising proto-ideologies, the libels, anxieties, wars, executions, restorations, betrayals, flatteries and favours, imprisonments, impeachments, and all of the myriad financial, fiscal, and organisational innovations  -- swirled about and were contained within stunningly formal procedural actions simplified to the nth degree. The overall 17th century continuity looks stubbornly pedantic and predictable. Which makes it all the more surprising. A thing that big, of such incalculable global effect, a positive process recurrently punctuated by unruly explosions and repeatedly interrupted by arbitrariness, how could it have been the result of something so mundane as a persistent intention to maintain rules-based governance?

Michael G. Heller ©2014