The evolution of Britain: from Restoration to "Glorious Revolution", 1660-1690

More notes on the evolution of the political economy of Britain, again drawn from Simon Schama’s highly readable “A History of Britain 2: The British Wars, 1603 – 1776”.

The death of Oliver Cromwell destabilised the new gentry/merchant-dominated Republic, depriving it of an authority figure to hold the competing interests together. The Restoration of the monarchy was an attempt to place Charles II in this role, i.e. to pick up where Cromwell, not his father, had left off.

The Restoration saw the repeal of an act of the post-Cromwell parliament requiring triennial elections. Presbyterian Calvinism was stamped out, and there was a general crackdown on the press and public debate. Charles’ reign was, after an initial honeymoon period, beset by a series of crises; the plague (1665), the Great Fire of London (1666), and then upheaval of a political nature.

First, the Dutch conducted an audacious raid up the Medway, destroying the English fleet and humiliating Charles. Then Charles made a secret pact with Louis XIV of France which involved easing the restrictions on Catholicism in England (Charles had Catholic sympathies, and his mother and brother were confirmed Catholics) and collaborating militarily with the French. The pact led to an Anglo-French war on Holland, giving Charles the opportunity to avenge the humiliation of the Medway as both countries sought to destroy their Dutch rival. But after early successes, the war turned into a disastrous quagmire.

A weakened Charles was now forced to defer to his Parliament, led by Lord Danby. Danby clamped down yet harder on Catholicism in public life, but also, later on, in an effort to assert authority, appealed to the divine right of kings as providing legitimacy for his imposition of discipline on Parliament.

The restrictions on dissent in formal politics led, ironically, to an expansion of political debate and activity outside of it, in taverns and coffee houses, on the pages of newspapers and political pamphlets. Amidst this general flourishing, the beginnings of party politics became faintly discernable. On the one hand we have the “Whigs”, who favour what they see as a tradition of collaborative rule in England; a contract between church, aristocracy and the crown. On the other hand we have the “Tories”, asserting the divine rights of kings and the supremacy of the crown.

A wave of anti-Catholic hysteria and (metaphorical) witch-hunting brought a Whig parliament to the brink of confrontation with Charles. By 1681 the monarchy had prevailed, or at least survived the challenge, thanks largely to Charles being able to engage in the sort of pragmatic deal-making that was an anathema both to his father and later his brother, and which contributed to his keeping his crown where they had lost theirs.

While these events were unfolding, the idea espoused by John Locke of government as a contract with the governed took the opportunity to reemerge on the political scene. The thwarted Republican plotter Algernon Sidney [pictured] wrote, on the eve of his execution in 1683, that “God had left Nations to the Liberty of setting up such Governments as best pleas’d themselves” and that “Magistrates were set up for the good of Nations, not Nations for the honour of Magistrates”.

But back to the deal struck by Charles with the Whig parliament. Under its terms, Charles had secured the succession of his Catholic brother James who, in return, would accept limits to his powers in accordance with the fact that he would be ruling an decidedly Protestant nation. But in the event, the new King James II was having none of this, aggressively asserting his divine right to rule and working to advance the rights of Catholics in Britain. James had apparently learned nothing from the demise of his serenely, self-destructively self-righteous father, and whatever else they disagreed about, both Tories and Whigs were united in their fear of the damage the new king might do to the stability of the realm. The Dutch aristocrat William of Orange, husband of James’ daughter Mary, was called in first to pressure James into seeing sense and backing down, and then, when James fled London altogether, to rule in his place.

Thus the perennial political questions of he seventeenth century – the contract between the king and parliament versus the absolute rule of the sovereign, and the quandry of how a crypto-Catholic-sympathiser monarch could tenably rule over a staunchly Protestant country – were finally settled, as the avowedly Protestant William delivered the coup de grace over Catholic James at the Battle of the Boyne. The “Glorious Revolution” – part quiet and consensual conquest by a Dutch noble and his army, part contracting-out of the job of monarch by the ruling classes of England – was now complete.