Prerogative revolution and glorious revolution: Political proscription and parliamentary undertaking, 1687–1688 (original) (raw)

1990, Parliaments, Estates and Representation

Despite the polemical incursions of Marxist and revisionist historians, over the preceding 40 years, on the historical high-ground defended by protagonists of a 'Glorious Revolution', the Whig interpretation of seventeenth-century political developments still retains much of its authenticity for a popular readership. Events in 1688-9, and the legislative aftermath of 1690-1714, represented a seminal stage in British history, fundamentally altering the constitutional balance of power between Crown and Parliament, by freeing the latter from many forms of prerogative control. They provided incontrovertible proof, if proof were still needed, of the indissoluble and pernicious alliance of Catholicism and absolutism, with the natural corollary of a denial of civil and religious liberties. Only the statutory guarantee of Parliament's greater independence, of a significant adjustment of executive and legislative power within the existing polity, could effectively safeguard the subject's proprietorial rights. It was to effect and maintain such a protection that parliamentary pronouncements and numerous legal enactments were secured, from the Declaration and Bill of Rights to the Act of Settlement, often in the face of royal displeasure and despite internecine party conflicts. The prolonged, domestic impact of European war, accompanied by threats to the political integrity of Great Britain from the exiled Stuarts, alone produced the necessary awareness of danger to override temporarily the potentially disastrous repercussions of factional strife.' My purpose in writing this paper is twofold. Firstly, I would wish to suggest that the reign of James II, if assessed in its own terms and not as a mere harbinger of succeeding events, constitutes a distinct, separate, indeed a unique, regime, effectively divorced from political and religious developments occurring before the monarch's accession and after his flight. His aims in church and state embodied priorities more genuinely revolutionary than anything produced by the Revolution Settlement. Such an appraisal is strengthened when James's frustrated intentions are equally considered in conjunction with his partial achievements. A necessary corollary of the above contention must therefore incorporate a diminution of the Glorious Revolution's political significance. It now appears, by comparison, little more than a successful counter-revolution, planned and mounted to thwart James's policies at the precise moment when events appeared to herald their successful realisation. A stark, but realistic, fear motivated the conspirators of June 1688. They believed that an unprecedented centralisation of monarchical authority, reared on the basis of dynastic continuity, a professional bureaucracy, standing army and religious toleration, would dispossess them of their hereditary patrimonies vested in a monopoly of local and central power.