Search Results

This chapter argues to the contrary that the Glorious Revolution was a genuinely transatlantic phenomenon, and that the colonial protests against James II's style of government reshaped English policy and American society in enduring ways. The colonial rebels in 1689 shared, with most Englishmen at home, common objections to James's absolutism and to his Catholicism. They were not aiming for independence as in 1776, and many of them welcomed a closer, more collaborative relationship with the post-revolutionary home government. The colonists' settlement with the Crown in the 1690s, while more restrictive than the bargain struck between Parliament and Crown at home, eradicated the most autocratic features of James II's colonial rule, and also bolstered the ultra-Protestant and anti-Catholic character of religious life in English America.

This chapter conducts a case study of spreads on sovereign bonds issued by Japan and Russia, two countries that introduced the gold standard in 1897. It is shown that Japanese spreads were relatively unaffected by the establishment of some of Japan’s most important institutions, including the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889, which explicitly guaranteed the protection of property rights and the rule of law. The only institutional reform that led to an immediate improvement in Japan’s ‘credit rating’ was the adoption of the gold standard. Japan’s war with Russia (1904-1905) and its successful outcome had a far more visible impact on spreads than most institutional reforms. The chapter also conducts a case study of the British-Dutch interest differential around the Glorious Revolution. It shows that developments regarding war and peace had a far greater impact on borrowing costs than institutional reforms.

This chapter examines the ways in which the British and Irish viewed the constitution made between 1689 and 1701, not just during those years, but over the course of the following century. Abundant evidence exists that many of the British and the Protestant Irish saw the Glorious Revolution and associated constitutional developments as distinguishing their countries from the rest of Europe. Yet we can also see that many contemporaries were well aware of Britain's connections with continental politics, and that they envisaged Britain's own constitution as part of a European pattern, the origins of which lay in the Gothic past.

Beginning with the Restoration to the throne of Charles II in 1660, this contextual chapter charts the ideological opposition that emerged in England as the crown endeavoured to centralise the state. It reveals how both Charles II and James II’s attempts to make the crown independent of Parliament caused tensions that led to the Glorious Revolution (1688). These divisions notably manifested themselves in the creation of the Whig and Tory political parties and their accompanying beliefs. The chapter therefore underlines the importance of seventeenth century political and religious opposition in playing a significant role in shaping the state and the British political landscape in the early eighteenth century.

This chapter discusses the concept of ‘popular sovereignty’. Well before 1750 an entrenched, underground tradition existed in Germany and France, proclaiming ‘popular sovereignty’ along the same lines as could somewhat more openly be done in Holland and Britain. Justified resistance and right to revolution had taken root at least as an underground current of opinion and may well have been a stronger force in western culture before 1750 than historians have generally been willing to concede. The Dutch Revolt and the Glorious Revolution for some became part of a new kind of political mythology, exerting a cultural and intellectual impact which extended far beyond the confines of Protestant north-west Europe, imparting a decisive new twist to western European thinking about society and politics.

This chapter uses the witchcraft accusation against John Alden in 1692 as a focal point to show how suspicions against those associated with the frontier, imperial concerns, Indians, and religious heterodoxy coalesced in the last decade of the seventeenth century. Alden symbolized the vices thought to accompany religious heterodoxy, imperial control, and a biracial frontier. Not only had he befriended Anglicans and Quakers, but he had also betrayed his own son in an abortive captive exchange just weeks before being cried down as a witch and had been accused of miscegenation and trading arms to the colony's French and Indian enemies in King William's War. This same set of vices was attributed to the hated royal governor Edmund Andros, who was ejected from Massachusetts in the colony's version of the Glorious Revolution.

A profound alteration of England’s foreign and military policies in 1689 led to a century and more of global warfare with France which ended only in 1815. This reorientation of British priorities was accomplished not by the Glorious or bloodless Revolution of Whig mythology, but by a Dutch invasion of England resulting from the largest joint military and naval amphibious operation ever launched in early modern Europe. The decision to declare the throne of England vacant and to offer the crown to William III, prince of Orange, and thus commit England to a mainland war, was taken by the Convention Parliament while London was under Dutch military occupation. James II, whose courage had been so resolute in earlier military and naval battles, lost heart as his senior officers deserted, and he and his army never offered resistance.

This chapter examines the impact of the revolution on the legal profession in England. It suggests that learned friends and gentlemen were the beneficiaries of the Glorious Revolution. It describes the legal system during the 12th and 13th centuries which showed the earliest traces of individuals performance specialist legal tasks around which the two modern English legal professions were eventually organized. It discusses changes in the practice of law after the revolution and the conflict between the two legal professions.

The years between the coronation of William III and Mary II in 1688 and the death of Anne in 1714 were marked by fierce public debates about the relationship between gender and political authority. In political terms, the Glorious Revolution was crucial in replacing a model of absolute authority vested in the mystical, semi-divine ‘body of the Prince’ with a contract between monarch and subjects. The Glorious Revolution also encouraged expanded freedoms of speech and the press. At the same time, however, many new forms of social regulation developed in this period: the Societies for the Reformation of Manners advocated a wide range of controls, from the regulation of prostitution to government constraints on popular entertainment; the London theatres were unofficially purged of the bawdy language and double entendre so popular after the Restoration; and there was increasing concern about sexual morality, male homosexuality in particular perceived to be a cultural threat. This chapter examines the issues and conflicts these larger political shifts create for late 17th- and early 18th-century women poets, and with the ways in which these conflicts resonate in women's public writings, even in some cases works which may seem not to address political contests directly.

When it came to the issue of religion – and specifically to the relationship between Church and State – Cecilius Calvert was far ahead of his times in his attempt to construct a society that had no state-supported church and mandated an atmosphere of civility and legal tolerance for all Christians. When it came to government, however – and specifically to the relationship between governors and those they governed – Calvert was behind the times, or at the very least unappreciative of the fact that the times were changing, and that his philosophies of government were failing to keep up. This chapter considers Calvert’s Act Concerning Religion, the absolutist approach to authority of the second Lord Baltimore and his son, Charles, the impact of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution on Protestant-Catholic relations in Maryland, and the end of the proprietorship of the Catholic Lords Baltimore.

While Daniel Defoe was experiencing all kinds of tribulations in his business affairs, he was also emerging as an author. His experience of bankruptcy and the various legal actions brought against him introduced him to two powerful and transforming emotional experiences — shame and humiliation. The long discussion of bankruptcy in The Compleat English Tradesman portrays the experience in terms of psychological theatre. Although he wrote only one full-length book during the thirteen-year reign of William III, An Essay upon Projects, this was the period when Defoe emerged as a powerful writer on politics and society in both prose and verse. For someone like Defoe, who grew up with the terror of the possible eradication of Protestantism by Louis XIV, confidence in the permanence of the Glorious Revolution was impossible. Only after 1723, when one more Jacobite plot was easily defeated, was he to relax his propaganda campaigns against the Jacobites. Defoe’s masters in this form of political controversy in verse were Andrew Marvell and John Dryden.

The accession of James II gave Catholics a short-lived ascendancy, until the Glorious Revolution and the defeat of James's Irish supporters by William III. Immediately afterwards the Irish parliament, taking advantage of the war time crisis in government finances, staked its claim to a share in the liberties associated with the Revolution. It also used its new bargaining power to demand penal laws against Irish Catholics. Protestant dissenters had played their part in the Protestant victory, but their rising numbers, due to continued Scottish immigration, created fear within the Anglican ruling class, leading to the imposition of the sacramental test.

This chapter discusses the relationship, in historical and theoretical terms, between capitalism and the state, and between the tax-state and early modern absolutism. The case study of British development from the Elizabethan Age, through the Civil Wars of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution, into the eighteenth-century is considered. The particular model of British constitutionalism – balancing a strong executive state with vibrant parliamentarianism fostering commercialism - is outlined. In a return to historicized theory, the question is discussed of what agency – bourgeoisie, aristocracy, or state – is prior in constitutional modernization.