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.

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 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.

III. Quo Warranto Proceedings at Cambridge 1780–1790

1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (03) ◽  
pp. 145-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Cam
Keyword(s):  
Municipal Government ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The revolution by which the municipal government of Cambridge was in the decade 1780-90 transformed from an oligarchy to a dictatorship has this in common with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, that it was made possible by the absence of a written constitution; but whereas it is impossible, as Maitland has said, by any stretch of ingenuity to make the Revolution of 1688-9 a perfectly legal act, the processes of constitutional change at Cambridge a century later were again and again submitted to the scrutiny of the courts. Indeed,Newlingv.Francis, the judgement in which finally established the right of the corporation to revise its own constitution, may be described as a leading case in the law of corporations.

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.

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 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.

‘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’.

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.

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.

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