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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 examines the history of the March during reigns of Richard I and John. The fortunes of the Braose and Lacy families changed greatly between the death of Henry II in 1189 and that of his son King John in 1216. On the other hand, the Cliffords, Monmouths, and Mortimers held their ground and, during the tumultuous events of John's reign, positioned themselves advantageously for the future by developing closer links to the Crown. Richard I's reign was marked by a turning away from the policy of royal control and containment of Marcher ambitions which Henry II had pursued since 1172. This in effect licensed the magnates of the south-eastern March to resume their ambitions for the conquest and domination of neighbouring Welsh regions. John's reign in turn was marked by the rise of one of these magnates, his favourite William III de Braose, to even greater heights of landed power, in the most dramatic exercise of patronage by that king.

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 pursues the story of Whig verse during the reign of William III (1689-1702), and examines the way in which Whig writers responded to the Revolution, and the militarism of William's reign. From 1688 onwards, the nature of party-political discourse changed significantly: the accession of William III brought many Whigs back into public life, and Whig poets became, largely, the defenders of the regime rather than its critics. This chapter explores some of the implications of the Revolution and the wars which followed, arguing that the Revolution presented two major new challenges for Whig writers: firstly, to legitimise the unconstitutional and unprecedented events of 1688-9, and secondly, to celebrate William's military campaign on the Continent.

In the Convention of 1689-90 the Whigs condemned the new charters of the 1680s and sought to debar those who had actively procured them (mostly Tories, in 1682-5) from municipal office. They failed and William III resolved disputes about charters on their merits, without seeking to interfere systematically in the towns' affairs. In the 1690s party divisions were fierce at times, especially in Bristol, but not all-pervasive: in many towns Whigs and Tories worked together to restore ordered government after the disruption of James II's reign. Meanwhile, religious persecution (of Protestants) more or less ceased, after the Toleration Act.

On February 15, 1700, Daniel Defoe celebrated the coming of the new century by publishing a poem, The Pacificator, on the state of wit and poetry in England. The poem is actually about the politics of poetry, since the literary quarrels that had divided the nation were often allied to political and social disputes. Defoe borrowed from Sir Richard Blackmore the opposition of the ‘rich Sense’ that dominates genuine satire from the ‘empty Malice’ that lies behind the products of the Wits. Everything that Defoe wrote during 1701 was directed toward getting England involved in what was to be called the War of the Spanish Succession. In January 1701 Defoe published The True-Born Englishman, his first popular success and the most frequently reprinted poem of the reign of Queen Anne. Defoe went on to state that it was this work which brought him to the attention of William III.

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.

This chapter argues that Dryden uses the occasion of writing a history of satire, designed to introduce translations of Juvenal and Persius, to produce his longest dedication and critical essay, The Discourse of Satire (1692), with a potentially unflattering portrait of his old patron, the earl of Dorset, and William III's court carefully lodged at the center in the oddly prolonged trial of critical judgment between Horace and Juvenal. The length and difficult progress of this essay signal yet conceal the personal story behind the history. To Horace, Dryden assigns qualities of effeminate sycophancy and compromised accommodation to a usurping monarch, Augustus Caesar, qualities the poet must distance from himself, once the Stuarts' hired pen, but may attach subtly to Dorset — like Horace the courtier of a usurper. Dryden awards first prize in satire to the exile Juvenal whose masculine freedom of rage and digression the poet claims as his own.

Daniel Defoe chose to retain his identity as a Whig while accepting the policies of what was looking more like a Tory government with each passing day. A crucial moment came with the attempted assassination of Robert Harley by Antoine de Guiscard. In pursuit of his duty, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was wounded by a French spy, and all of the concern about Louis XIV’s attempts to assassinate William III, about French perfidy, and about the safety of Queen Anne created an outpouring of sympathy for Harley that restored his power, brought him the post of Lord Treasurer, which had remained vacant after Sidney Godolphin’s resignation, and raised him to the peerage as Earl of Oxford and Mortimer. Henry St John, whose behaviour during the assassination attempt was equivocal, received a setback in his pursuit of power that was to prove fatal to his career. The possibility that Guiscard had intended to poison the Queen gave a new strength to her friend Harley and to his group of court Tories and court Whigs.

This chapter examines seven of De Hooghe’s eighteen satires on the events surrounding William III’s invasion of England and associated diplomatic and military campaigns. These satires, which were produced between the autumn of 1688 and summer of 1690, followed the events of the Glorious Revolution as they unfolded and represent not only key political-historical events but also the development of De Hooghe’s satirical strategies. William III is featured as the sober and valiant defender of Protestantism against the Catholic kings, James II and Louis XIV, who appear as a darkly comic duo, misguided adherents of a primitive religion committed only to their own aggrandizement. This discussion examines the iconography of the foreign satires, providing detailed interpretive analysis and translation of many of the texts into English for the first time. It will be demonstrated that De Hooghe responded almost immediately to the rapid unfolding of events that constituted the Glorious Revolution, highlighting the need to consider them in terms of the speed with which they were produced and their serial nature. It is often possible to determine the month in which a satire was made and, in certain cases, the timeframe can be narrowed to weeks. This dramatic imbrication in a particular historical moment is characteristic of political satire to this day.

When William III died in March 1702, Daniel Defoe knew that he had lost a patron of a character he would never see again. In his autobiographical Appeal to Honour and Justice of 1715, Defoe expressed his sense of abandonment in what may seem like an accent of self-pity. For Defoe, William was the living embodiment of the Glorious Revolution in every way: toleration for Dissenters, rights and liberties for every Englishman clearly stated and firmly established, a Protestant succession for England forever. Defoe’s satire carries him to a variety of topics, including a fierce attack upon slavery and the colonialism practised by the early Spanish conquistadors. Dissenters would have to be regarded as parody in the neutral sense of pure ventriloquism, but clearly much more was intended. In July, he appeared in court to be charged with libel. The indictment stressed his action in writing and publishing The Shortest Way with the Diseenters as a direct affront to Queen Anne.

William III immediately took Britain into the Nine Years’ War against the French. This chapter examines how William purged the army of James VII and II’s supporters in order to fight the war. However, William was never certain of his new army’s political loyalties. Nor could he trust its British senior officers, some of whom, such as John Churchill, the future duke of Marlborough, had joined William in 1688 but had become alienated from him. William’s relations with parliament were equally troubled, and never more so than during the biggest political crisis after the end of the war, the standing army debates over the peacetime army.

The arrival and coronation of William III were a cause for great optimism and trepidation in the realms of English religion and politics. John Toland believed that the Revolutionary Settlement of 1689 would remove the veil of mystery from the Church of England and usher an era where politics would be freed from party sentiment hoping that this environment might provide him a chance to participate in the nation's governance. Matthew Tindal wrote strong defences of the new king against the Jacobites and High Church Tories, whom he saw as impediments to the advancement of England under William. Both Tindal and Toland anchored their interpretations of 1689 with similar conceptions of God and theological beliefs. Conservatives feared the outcome of 1689 and pointed to the writings of Toland and Tindal as evidence of the danger posed by permitting too much toleration in matters of religion. The deists inserted themselves into the impending political events and used theology as the basis for their arguments. It was against this backdrop of religious uncertainty that the deists wrote and in their own way, attempted to help England chart a new course in politics and theology.

The question of the successor to William III occupied the minds of many during the early years of the eighteenth century. As per the Act of Settlement, Queen Anne, daughter of James II, came to the throne. John Toland joined the debate early in 1701 with his Anglia Libera, in which he supported the passing of the crown to the House of Hanover. His Hanoverian enthusiasm and pro-Whig arguments made him the topic of political gossip abroad and the target of many High Church Tories at home. Tindal's involvement in debates regarding the requirements for fellows reflects the great extent to which deism and national politics were intertwined. This college matter demonstrated how fragile the religious peace in England was. The deists sought to help England chart a course into smoother political and theological waters, which avoided the waves caused by High Church policies. Other deists too attempted to find a place within the fast-moving events of the day through their political writings.

The book’s introduction provides an overview of the genre of political satire, a brief biography of Romeyn de Hooghe, and a summary of the contents of the individual chapters. It considers the key characteristics of political satire, among them: its assumption of the forms of other genres, the engagement of the viewer in an unresolved moment, the promise to unveil the ‘truth’ and suggestion of moral correction, and deep imbrication in a specific historical context. A brief review of the existing literature on De Hooghe contextualizes this study and provides the necessary background for understanding the reception of the satires.

The collection’s concluding chapter chronicles how William Blackwood’s successors strove to preserve his magazine’s trademark Toryism and miscellaneity amid fierce competition from a wave of imitators and rivals. Deploying a wide-angle lens, it traces how Blackwood’s met the challenges of longevity by repeatedly reinventing itself over the course of the Victorian age. Accordingly, it not only models the insights to be gained through the diachronic study of a single serial but also underscores how nimble any given periodical needed to be in a century of rapidly morphing audiences, formats and technologies.

Like the Puritan Revolution of 1640 to 1660, the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution took place in an Anglophone political culture profoundly shaped by Reformed Protestantism. The political sermons of revolutionary clergy bore the marks of Protestant Bible politics, and the language of slavery and deliverance was ubiquitous. In America, Patriots exploited the Exodus story and politicized the New Testament’s language of liberty and redemption. New Englanders saw the Revolution as the culmination of a noble tradition of Calvinist revolts. Washington, like Cromwell and William of Orange before him, was compared to Moses.