Press and Parliament in the Revolution of 1689

1977 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois G. Schwoerer
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Elected Representatives ◽  
The Revolution

The Convention Parliament, the revolutionary tribunal of the English Revolution of 1689, prohibited the printing of news of its affairs and barred the public from its debates. Authors, printers and publishers, however, defied these orders and published unlicensed accounts of speeches, votes, committee reports, and the membership of the Convention. Although the laws and administrative procedures which the later Stuarts had used to restrict the press were still in effect, they were not enforced. During the weeks of political crisis, quantities of news-sheets, newspapers and tracts reporting parliamentary news and political opinion appeared. At a time of growing scholarly and popular interest in the Glorious Revolution, it may be useful to examine the relationship between parliament and press. Although studies of the early press and of parliamentary reporting have been made, no detailed examination of these matters during the months of political upheaval in the winter of 1688–9 has been undertaken. Two central questions suggest themselves. How did the politically conscious public learn about what was happening in Westminster where their elected representatives and the peers of the realm were meeting to resolve the crisis facing the nation? What was the attitude of those representatives and peers to having information about their affairs spread beyond their chambers? The answers to such questions may deepen understanding of the Convention and of one aspect of the part played by the press in the Revolution.

The Mob and the Revolution of 1688

1964 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Sachse
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Urban Population ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Popular Opinion ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Among the major political upheavals which have been called revolutions, the English Revolution of 1688 is generally recognized as extraordinary. Long accepted among moderate Englishmen as “glorious,” a revolution to end revolutions, in more radical quarters it has not been regarded as constituting a true revolution. Contemporary Russian opinion, for example, refuses to bestow upon it this accolade, regarding it as a mere coup d'état. Its conservatism, its legalism, its bloodlessness, the absence of zeal to be found among its protagonists: all contribute to this point of view. That these are characteristics of the Glorious Revolution cannot be denied. More precisely, they characterize the actions of the leaders of the Revolution — of the councillors and legislators and soldiers whose names are known. Of popular opinion and aspiration much less is known, and it is probable that little can be discovered in the surviving evidence. But they can be assessed, to some degree, by following the actions of the mob — or, more accurately, the mobs — as they erupted in London and other parts of the Kingdom.Mob disturbances, like the plague, were more or less endemic in Stuart England. Roger North, in his Examen, asserts that “the Rabble first changed their Title, and were called the mob” in the gatherings of the Green Ribbon Club. Regardless of when the term was first used, seventeenth-century Englishmen were well acquainted with various manifestations of mob activity. England's growing urban population augmented the mob, and before Shaftesbury, Pym had demonstrated that he was aware of the existence of this popular force and of the uses to which it could be put.

Who Dubbed It “The Glorious Revolution?”

1987 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-585
Author(s):  
James R. Hertzler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
William Iii ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Considerable Discussion ◽  
The Revolution

It was not very glorious at first, at least to many English people of the late seventeenth century. With a king of undoubted legitimacy squeezed out and a new, albeit related monarch installed and recognized by Parliament, the transaction shook government, nation and church alike. It left Jacobite and non-juring splinters all round. The Revolution, happening in fulfillment of ideals of exclusionist Whigs, did not entirely satisfy those partisans, who soon learned that they could not control their masterful king, William III. As for the Tories, their consciences ached due to their resistance to a divinely-appointed sovereign. Few highly-placed Englishmen were comfortable with their need to call in a foreigner to help them solve their domestic squabbles. Indeed, one writer, reflecting on the letter inviting the Prince of Orange to invade England, thought it would have been “more glorious … to assist our undoubted Soveraign [sic], then to suffer him to be dethroned, solely because he is a Roman Catholic.”Twentieth-century historians called the Revolution other names than “glorious.” It has been dubbed a “sensible,” a “model,” a “moral,” a “respectable,” a “palace,” and simply the English Revolution. All agreed that it was indeed a Revolution, and they themselves were in agreement with some early writers who were contemporary with the event. The Orange Gazette, at the very end of the year 1688, reported on “the Revolutions that had occurred.” The historian Nicholas Tindal wrote that William of Orange himself, in a speech before the House of Lords, spoke of “this late Revolution.” Considerable discussion ensued in Parliament and in pamphlets as to whether William conquered James, or whether the king had abdicated, or had deserted his kingdom. But little question with contemporaries: there was a Revolution.

Celebrating the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1989

1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois G. Schwoerer
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of ◽  
Centennial Anniversary ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The City ◽  
The Revolution

1988 and 1989 have been vintage years all over the world for centenary celebrations. People have celebrated the centenary of the Eiffel Tower, the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the bicentenary of Australia, the bicentenary of the American Bill of Rights, the quatercentenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the sexcentenary of the battle of Kosovo (this one may have escaped your notice, but it brought over a million people to a gathering in the city of Pristina in Yugoslavia in June 1989), and, of course, the tercentenary of the English Revolution of 1688–89, with which I am concerned tonight. You will have no trouble believing that I have been “concerned with” and “celebrating” the Glorious Revolution for two years now, but I want to confess to you in the intimacy of this festive occasion that it has really been at least ten years, and that sometimes it feels more like three hundred!How did centennial observances start? Why do people go to trouble, take time, and spend money to call to mind an event that happened one, two, or three hundred years ago? What is it about centennial moments that turns serious-minded, scholarly-inclined historians like ourselves into “party people”? What do celebrations tell us about the uses of the past in successive “presents”? The fact is that celebrations, each varying in character, have attended the Glorious Revolution from its beginnings on through each centennial anniversary thereafter — in 1788–89, 1888–89, and 1988–89. The observances at these centennial moments not only celebrated the Revolution itself, but also served, even as they reflected, current political, cultural, and/or economic ideas and goals. In a long perspective, the celebrations are an important part of the political and cultural history of the Revolution of 1688–89 itself. They illustrate how high and low politics may intersect, show how political ideas circulate through society and undergo transformation, and offer an index of changing ideological and cultural assumptions and aspirations over three hundred years.

‘The Rulers now on Earth’: Locke'sTwo Treatisesand the Revolution of 1688

1985 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles D. Tarlton
Keyword(s):  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
William Iii ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

When we believed that Locke had writtenTwo treatises of governmentto justify the Glorious Revolution, we could say a great deal about his purposes in relation to the events of 1688–89. The book served to interpret those events, to disclose their underlying meaning; philosophy and action were joined in such a manner that both gained lustre from the link. But, now we have generally accepted the view that Locke actually wroteTwo treatisesin the partisan heat of the Exclusion debate, and we have stopped saying very much of anything about the book's relation to William III and the events of the year in which Locke anonymously published it.

Fatal Adulteries: Sexual Politics in the English Revolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Samuel Fullerton
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Oliver Cromwell ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
Sexual Histories ◽  
Charles Ii

Abstract This article argues for a reconsideration of the origins of Restoration sexual politics through a detailed examination of the effusive sexual polemic of the English Revolution (1642–1660). During the early 1640s, unprecedented political upheaval and a novel public culture of participatory print combined to transform explicit sexual libel from a muted element of prewar English political culture into one of its preeminent features. In the process, political leaders at the highest levels of government—including Queen Henrietta Maria, Oliver Cromwell, and King Charles I—were confronted with extensive and graphic debates about their sexual histories in widely disseminated print polemic for the first time in English history. By the early 1650s, monarchical sexuality was a routine topic of scurrilous political commentary. Charles II was thus well acquainted with this novel polemical milieu by the time he assumed the throne in 1660, and his adoption of the “Merry Monarch” persona early in his reign represented a strategic attempt to turn mid-century sexual politics to his advantage, despite unprecedented levels of contemporary criticism. Restoration sexual culture was therefore largely the product of civil war polemical debate rather than the singular invention of a naturally libertine young king.

The Continuity of the English Revolution (The Prothero Lecture)

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 121-135
Author(s):  
Lord Dacre
Keyword(s):  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Oliver Cromwell ◽  
The One ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Waves

In our history, the twenty years from 1640 to 1660 are, at first sight, years of desperate, even meaningless change. It is difficult to keep pace with those crowded events or to see any continuity in them. At the time, men struggled from day to day and then sank under the tide. Even Oliver Cromwell, the one man who managed, with great agility, but spluttering all the time, to ride the waves, constantly lamented his inability to control them. When all was over, men looked back on the whole experience with disgust. It was a period of ‘blood and confusion’ from which no one had gained anything except the salutary but costly lesson of disillusion. How different from the Glorious Revolution of 1688: that straightforward aristocratic revolt against a king who had so considerately simplified the issues, and ensured a quick neat result, by seeking to convert the nation, like himself, to Catholicism!

The Fourth English Civil War: Dissolution, Desertion and Alternative Histories in the Glorious Revolution

1988 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. A. Pocock
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Just War ◽  
Political Process ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

EDMUND BURKE, REVIEWING IN 1790 THE EVENTS OF 102-101 years previously, saw no objection to penning and printing the following remarkable words: ‘The Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be just. Justa bella quibus necessaria’. He cannot have meant that the revolution was ‘obtained’, in the sense of ‘secured’, by the wars in Europe which followed from 1688 to 1697, for he speaks of ‘civil war’; nor is it likely that he intended his words to refer to the war in Ireland which ended with the Treaty of Limerick. Burke's Irish perspectives might indeed lead to his viewing this as a civil war rather than a war of conquest, but the context which surrounds the words quoted makes it clear that he is thinking of the ‘Revolution of 1688’ as an English political process and an English civil war. The ‘cashiering’ or dethroning of a king, he is instructing readers of Richard Price's sermon to the Revolution Society, is not a legal or a constitutional process, which can form one of the normal procedures of an established civil society.

Women and the Glorious Revolution

1986 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois G. Schwoerer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The role of women in revolutions has recently excited a good deal of scholarly interest. Innovative studies have appeared on women in the English Civil War, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution that have not only rescued women from oblivion but also modified and enlarged understanding of the revolutions themselves. But for the English Revolution of 1688-89 there has been, aside from biographical studies of the two future queens, Mary and Anne, very little published work on the role of women. My purpose is to remedy that situation, and to broaden the inquiry by addressing four major questions: (1) what role did women from all social groups, lower, middle, aristocratic and royal, play in the Revolution: (2) why, in view of customary restraints, did they enter the public arena; (3) what influence did they have on the Glorious Revolution; and (4) what influence did the Revolution have on women? Underlying these queries is the basic question of what are the contextual conditions that encourage or even make possible women's participation in revolutions?Such a topic requires changes in the questions customarily used in studying political history. If politics is defined in traditional terms simply as the competition for and exercise of power by individuals through their office, voting, and decision making, then there is nothing to say about women in the Glorious Revolution. Women, whatever their social status, had no direct access to the levers of conventionally-defined politics. They did not vote, sit in either house of Parliament, or hold office on any level of government, unless they were queens. In a predominantly patriarchal society, females, except for widows, were customarily subordinate to their fathers or husbands and confined to the sphere of the family and household.

War, Moral Hazard, and Ministerial Responsibility: England After the Glorious Revolution

2011 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary W Cox
Keyword(s):  
Moral Hazard ◽  
Sovereign Debt ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Central Problem ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Credible Commitment ◽  
Ministerial Responsibility ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Douglass North ◽  
The Revolution

I reexamine Douglass North and Barry Weingast's argument regarding credible commitment and sovereign debt in post-revolution England. The central problem that the architects of the revolution settlement had to solve, I argue, was not the king's frequent reneging on financial commitments (a symptom), but the moral hazard that generated the kings' malfeasance (the underlying cause). The central element of the revolution settlement was thus not better holding kings to their commitments, but better holding royal advisors to account for all consequences of the Crown's policies—through what we now call ministerial responsibility.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND FINANCIAL CONTROL AS ‘PATRIOTIC’ STRATEGIES: ACCOMPTANTS AND THE PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMITTEE IN LATE 17TH AND EARLY 18TH - CENTURY IRELAND

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip O'Regan
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Financial Control ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Economic Wealth ◽  
The Public ◽  
Structural Responses ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Early 18Th Century

The decades immediately following the Glorious Revolution in 1688 witnessed a variety of political, social and structural responses to this cataclysmic event. In Ireland, religious conflict and economic under-development, as well as the devastation of war from 1689 to 1691, combined to ensure that the Anglo-Irish body politic found it difficult to capture the fruits of success from an English polity that had gradually accreted to itself much of the political power and economic wealth of the country. By 1704, however, the Anglo-Irish had managed to appropriate to themselves some of the economic and constitutional benefits of the Revolution by exploiting various parliamentary practices and structures. One of their strategies centered around developing and leveraging the role of the Public Accounts Committee as a means of imposing accountability on the executive and its officials. To achieve this the members were required to understand, contest and reconfigure official accounting information.

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