Religion, Politics, and Oaths in the Glorious Revolution

1948 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 462-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles F. Mullet
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Religious Convictions ◽  
The Law ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

Although at the end of the seventeenth century men were shifting their political terminology from the spiritual to the secular, from God to nature, they still invoked the absolutes of history, law, and scripture. They did not lightly overturn their monarch, but when the necessity for such action arose they sought absolution in concepts which the most rigorous and learned mediaeval theologian would have understood. They appealed to the law of nature but they meant the law of God; and the shift involved no betrayal of absolute standards, no withdrawal from the same ethical doctrines that had nourished their forebears. The time was soon to come when secular phrases expressed a secular outlook, but in 1689 they continued to cover the religious convictions of centuries. As soon as the bars were down and men grappled in hectic controversy, the secular side of their politics diminished and the ethical and spiritual aspects became pronounced.

The People, the Law, and the Constitution in Scotland and England: A Comparative Approach to the Glorious Revolution

1999 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Harris
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
The People ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Despite the growing interest in recent years in taking a British approach to the problems of the first half of the seventeenth century, Restoration historians have been slow to follow the trend. Instead, the historiographical traditions for Charles II's and James II's three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland have remained largely independent; rather than coming closer together, if anything they seem to be growing further apart. We see this in particular with the historiographies of the Glorious Revolution in Scotland and England, which have become curiously “out of sync.” It used to be the case that the Revolution in England was seen as a most unrevolutionary affair, a bloodless palace coup brought about as much by the Tories as the Whigs; by this account, James was not overthrown for breaking his contract with the people, but was regarded as having abdicated, and the framers of the Revolution settlement simply sought to vindicate ancient rights and liberties (as they put it in the Declaration of Rights), rather than assert any new constitutional principles. If the Revolution in England tended to be seen in a conservative, perhaps even Tory context, the radical, Whig revolution was still to be found, but north of the border, in Scotland. For it was in Scotland where the Whigs were unequivocally the architects, where James was seen as having forfeited his crown by his arbitrary and tyrannical style of government, and where a truly revolutionary settlement in church and state was established.

John Company Armed: The English East India Company, the Anglo-Mughal War and Absolutist Imperialism, c. 1675–1690

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Vaughn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

During the 1670s and 1680s, the English East India Company pursued an aggressive programme of imperial expansion in the Asian maritime world, culminating in a series of armed assaults on the Mughal Empire. With important exceptions, most scholarship has viewed the Company's coercive imperialism in the later seventeenth century and the First Anglo-Mughal War as the results primarily, if not exclusively, of political and economic conditions in South Asia. This article re-examines and re-interprets this burst of imperial expansion in light of political developments in England and the wider English empire during the later Stuart era. The article contends that the Company's aggressive overseas expansion was pursued for metropolitan and pan-imperial purposes as much as for South Asian ones. The corporation sought to centralise and militarise the English presence in Asia in order both to maintain its control of England's trade to the East and in support of Stuart absolutism. By the eve of the Glorious Revolution, the Company's aggressive imperialism formed part of a wider political project to create an absolute monarchy in England and to establish an autocratic English empire overseas.

‘The Idol of State Innovators and Republicans’

2018 ◽  
pp. 149-185
Author(s):  
Paulina Kewes
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Direct Attack

This chapter explores the seventeenth-century afterlife of the most daring political tract of the Elizabethan era, A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594/5) by the Jesuit Robert Persons. The chapter begins by explaining what is distinctive about A Conference, notably its direct attack on the hereditary principle and on the pre-eminence of the monarchy itself, and gives an overview of its transmission, reception, and appropriation. It goes on to trace the text’s signal and varied influence on Protestant writers from Henry Walker and Henry Parker during the Puritan Revolution and John Somers and Algernon Sidney during the Exclusion Crisis, to the defenders of the ‘Glorious’ Revolution. It thus invites a rethinking of the republican and Whig traditions in English political thought by revealing their dependence on the work of an Elizabethan Jesuit.

Stair, James Dalrymple, Viscount (1619–95)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott C. Styles
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Civil Court ◽  
Active Life ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

An outstanding lawyer, senior judge, politician, and the founding father of modern Scots Law, Stair is also an interesting, if minor, philosopher of law of the seventeenth century. Stair believed that law is an inherently rational discipline and that its content can be derived from the principles of natural law which are self-evident to all humans. Stair led an active life at the heart of public affairs in seventeenth-century Scotland, finishing up as the chief judge of the supreme civil court. Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, he became a teacher at Glasgow University in 1641, was called to the Bar in 1648, became Judge in the Scots Cromwellian Court 1657, Vice President of the Court of Session 1660, Lord President of the Court of Session (Scotland’s most senior judge) 1671, exiled to Holland 1682, and reappointed Lord President in 1689 subsequent to the ‘Glorious Revolution’.

Power and Authority in Seventeenth Century England

1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Tuck
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
The People ◽  
The Law ◽  
Power And Authority

Many English political theorists of the mid-seventeenth century reveal in their writings an awareness that new political terminologies were needed to cope with the apparent breakdown of traditional ideologies. Such an insight is of course famously displayed by Thomas Hobbes and the early Hobbists such as Dudley Digges, in their treatment of orthodox Natural Law doctrines - ‘if we looke backe to the Law of Nature, we shall finde that the people would have had a clearer and more distinct notion of it, if common use of calling it Law had not helped to confound their understanding, when it ought to have been named the Right of nature’ wrote Digges in 1643.

Church Life

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
Church Life ◽  
The Rich ◽  
John Owen ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Pastoral Theory

These original essays from ten leading experts in early Dissenting history, literature, and religion address the rich, complex, and varied nature of ‘church life’ experienced by England’s Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians during the seventeenth century. Spanning the period from the English Revolution to the Glorious Revolution, and beyond, they examine the social, political, and religious character of England’s ‘gathered’ churches and reformed parishes: how pastors and their congregations interacted, how Dissenters related to their meetings as religious communities, and what the experience of church life was like for ordinary members as well as their ministers, including notably John Owen and Richard Baxter alongside less well-known figures, such as Ebenezer Chandler. Moving beyond the religious experience of the solitary individual, often exemplified by conversion, this volume redefines the experience of Dissent, concentrating instead on the collective concerns of a communally-centred church life through a wide spectrum of issues: from questions of liberty and pastoral reform to matters of church discipline and respectability. With a substantial ‘Introduction’ that puts into context the key concepts of ‘church life’ and the ‘Dissenting experience’, these studies offer fresh ways of understanding Protestant Dissent in seventeenth-century England: through differences in ecclesiology and pastoral theory, and via the buildings in which Dissent was nurtured to the building-up of Dissent during periods of civil war, persecution, and revolution. To do so, they draw on a broad range of printed and archival materials: from the minutes of the Westminster Assembly to the manuscript church books of early Dissenting congregations.

What's New About the Restoration?

1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Harris
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Excellent Work ◽  
Modern Textbook ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

When I first began my researches into later Stuart history as a graduate student back in 1980, the Restoration was a relatively underdeveloped field of inquiry. Although there were a number of scholars producing excellent work in this area, there was not the same depth of scholarship as characterized study of the first half of the seventeenth century: wide gaps in our knowledge existed, and for some of the most crucial episodes of the period we were dependent upon a limited range of studies and dated works. The best general entrée into the period was still David Ogg's classic two-volumeEngland in the Reign of Charles II, first published in 1934! A suitable modern textbook did not emerge until 1978, with the publication of J. R. Jones'sCounty and Court: England 1658–1714, a book that had neither Ogg's range nor lively analytical style. For our understanding of why the monarchy was restored we were reliant upon a study that had come out in 1955, which was supplemented only in 1980 by Austin Woolrych's book-length “Historical Introduction” to volume seven of the Yale edition of theComplete Prose Works of John Milton. On the Exclusion Crisis we had J. R. Jones'sThe First Whigs, which had appeared in 1961, although for the first Tories we still needed to use Sir Keith Feiling's 1924History of the Tory Party. For the Glorious Revolution we had a book written by a man who tragically died (at a young age) before he could complete the work, and another self-consciously thought-provoking work designed to raise questions and suggest future avenues of research—both excellent studies in their own right, but hardly the plethora of monographs that we possessed for the mid-century revolution.

The Last English Civil War

Daedalus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 147 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Fukuyama
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Rational Choice ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
English History ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Normative Factors ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

This essay examines why England experienced a civil war every fifty years from the Norman Conquest up until the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, and was completely stable after that point. The reasons had to do with, first, the slow accumulation of law and respect for the law that had occurred by the seventeenth century, and second, with the emergence of a strong English state and sense of national identity by the end of the Tudor period. This suggests that normative factors are very important in creating stable settlements. Rational choice explanations for such outcomes assert that stalemated conflicts will lead parties to accept second- or third-best outcomes, but English history, as well as more recent experiences, suggests that stability requires normative change as well.

Sea of Thought

2020 ◽  
pp. 79-96
Author(s):  
Jonathan Scott
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
World City ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
Liberty Of Conscience ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

This chapter demonstrates how ideas motivated the movement of people across early modern Europe, the North Sea, and the Atlantic. Some of these migrants were refugees, others political and religious exiles, and others adventurers and pilgrims. The chapter identifies three transnational migrations of constitutive importance to the Anglo-Dutch-American process. The first involved Protestants fleeing from sixteenth-century Germany and France into the Netherlands, and then in some cases from the Netherlands into England. The second saw early seventeenth-century Scots and English Protestants sheltering in the Netherlands and then crossing the Atlantic alongside other Scots and English migrants to Ireland and the American colonies. Finally, after 1660, English dissenters seeking liberty of conscience in the Netherlands and the American colonies overlapped with French Huguenots fleeing to the Netherlands and England, feeding, after the Glorious Revolution, into a more general migration of European Protestant people, culture, and capital into a world city.

Comprehension in the Later Seventeenth Century: A Postscript

1965 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 342-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. G. Horwitz
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Modus Vivendi ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Politics ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Established Church

Within the last decade, the history of the often obscure efforts made to reach some modus vivendi between the Established Church and the Protestant Nonconformists after 1662 has attracted renewed scholarly attention.1 Recent works have stressed that during the generation dividing the Stuart Restoration from the “Glorious” Revolution, proposals for both comprehension and toleration were repeatedly mooted—sometimes in combination, and at other times in opposition to one another. But it was a scheme of limited toleration which was enacted by the “Convention” Parliament of 1689, while plans for comprehension were shelved by the Houses. Thereafter, as the late Dean of Winchester put it, “Comprehension…faded out of the realm of practical politics with the Non-juror schism and the consequent inaction of Convocation in 1689.”2

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