THE SAXON REPUBLIC AND ANCIENT CONSTITUTION IN THE STANDING ARMY CONTROVERSY, 1697–1699

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 663-684 ◽  
Author(s):  
ASHLEY WALSH
Keyword(s):  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Ancient Constitution ◽  
William Iii ◽  
Standing Army

AbstractThe pamphlet controversy caused by the proposal of William III to maintain a peacetime standing army following the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) tends to be understood as a confrontation of classicists and moderns in which the king's supporters argued that modern commerce had changed the nature of warfare and his opponents drew on classical republicanism to defend the county militia. But this characterization neglects the centrality of the Saxon republic and ancient constitution in the debate. English opponents of the standing army, including Walter Moyle, John Trenchard, and John Toland, went further than adapting the republicanism of James Harrington, who had rejected ancient constitutionalism during the Interregnum, to the restored monarchy. Their thought was more Saxon than classical and, in the case of Reverend Samuel Johnson, it was entirely so. However, the Scot, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, adapted neo-Harringtonian arguments to argue that modern politics could no longer be understood by their Gothic precedents. Above all, the king's supporters needed either to engage ancient constitutionalists on their own terms, as did one anonymous pamphleteer, or, as in the cases of John, Lord Somers, and Daniel Defoe, reject the relevance of ancient constitutionalism and Saxon republicanism completely.

War and Peace, 1689–1702

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-172
Author(s):  
Hannah Smith
Keyword(s):  
Political Crisis ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
The Future ◽  
Senior Officers ◽  
William Iii ◽  
Standing Army

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.

1700

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret J. M. Ezell
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Alexander Pope ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Susanna Centlivre ◽  
William Iii

The final section covers the reign of William III after the death of his wife, the literary responses to the situation of Princess Anne following the death of her son, and the continuing tensions in Parliament between the Whigs and Tories. There were increasing literary satires on foreigners in power and the desire to define Englishness. After the death of John Dryden, dramatists including William Congreve and John Vanbrugh continued to resist Jeremy Collier’s desire to reform the theatre. Newcomers such as Alexander Pope and Susanna Centlivre arrived and made their debut as poets and dramatists. Satires against women and marriage continued against a backdrop of famous divorce trials, while writers such as Daniel Defoe called for a reformed society starting with the aristocratic elite.

The Role of King William III of England in the Standing Army Controversy — 1697-1699

1966 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois G. Schwoerer
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Politics ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Land Grants ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
William Iii ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Standing Army ◽  
First Time

During the years from 1697 through 1699, King William III of England was engaged in a struggle with a radical Whig press and a Tory coalition in the House of Commons over the size of England's standing army in peacetime. Both sides regarded the contest as one of particular importance; for the King there was no issue during his entire reign which involved him more deeply in English domestic politics. The parliamentary debates on the matter were notably stormy. For what was at stake, just ten years after the Glorious Revolution, was the relative power of King and Parliament. For the first time Article VI of the Bill of Rights, that is, that Parliament must consent to an army in peacetime, was applied and tested. The army question has intrinsic importance but can also be seen as part of a broader struggle between King and Parliament for power. Among such questions as Irish land grants, “placemen,” foreign advisers, and the Land Bank, the standing army was the most complex and emotion-filled issue between the House of Commons and William. Although some of the political implications of the standing army controversy have been suggested, historians have not investigated the part played by William. The King's role is worth isolating for it casts fresh light on William's talents in dealing with domestic politics, illustrates the relationship between a King who, at the end of the seventeenth century, still retained power and a House of Commons which increasingly claimed power, and shows that, however disparate the strength of the two sides in the standing army controversy, a genuine contest took place.

scholarly journals 3. The Memoirs and the Standing Army Controversy

1978 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 39-55
Keyword(s):  
Whig Party ◽  
The Creation ◽  
William Iii ◽  
Standing Army ◽  
Final Confirmation

In 1697 the pattern of political allegiances in England was profoundly affected by the Treaty of Ryswick. Despite the return of peace, William III was determined to retain the bulk of the land forces which had been used against France. His resolve provoked the ‘standing army controversy’ which raged from 1697 to 1699. The debate cut across Whig-Tory divisions and—as Toland was quick to point out—made possible the creation of an effective ‘country’, or anti-court, alliance. The controversy revealed the extent of the mistrust of William's constitutional intentions held by backbench M.P.s, and showed how widespread was the anxiety about the uses to which a standing army might be put by William's successors. It also brought into the open tensions within the Whig party which had been growing since 1693–4. The Whigs were held together before 1697, and were to be held together again after 1699, by fear of France. In the interim, however, the support given by Somers and his fellow ‘junto’ Whigs to the retention of William's land forces seemed to ‘country’ Whigs a final confirmation of the junto's apostacy from the revolutionary principles of 1688–9.

The Politics of Providence in Dryden's Fables Ancient and Modern

2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Williams
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Arbitrary Power ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
Political Allegory ◽  
William Iii ◽  
Standing Army

The politics of Dryden's Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) are at once transparent and obscure. These poems speak the idiom of late seventeenth-century political debate, introducing into, or simply discovering in the fictions of Chaucer, Ovid, Homer, and Boccaccio, the language and concepts of patriotism, abdication, passive obedience, arbitrary power, and political flattery. They seem to invite political reading on account of their subject matter itself – their narratives of tyrants, wronged parents and children, dynastic disputes, and usurpation. Moreover, they have been shown to incorporate numerous topical reflections on contemporary political issues: there are clear allusions to the standing army debates in Sigismonda and Guiscardo and Cymon and Iphigenia; to contemporary controversy over moral reformation and satire on Puritanism in The Cock and the Fox. Yet although the seventeenth century, and the 1690s in particular, saw an outpouring of explicitly political fables, Dryden's translations frustrate the application of sustained political allegory, as numerous critics have found.1 They offer contradictory signals: so, for example, we are invited to identify the conquering Theseus at the beginning of Palamon and Arcite as a type of William III, but by the end of the translation he has become a stoic figure offering a humanist consolation on loss and love.2 The collection as a whole tends to deny us the consistent political allegory that it invites us to make through its vocabulary and topical allusion.3

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