Inventing Revolution: 1688 and Eighteenth-Century Popular Politics

Abstract

The Revolution, the Glorious British Revolution, which the Americans have rejoiced in, and will ever rejoice in as the pride of the age in which it was brought about, and the admiration and blessing of succeeding times, must be looked up to with reverence as a precedent, the grandest precedent, that modern times have exhibited for the justification of any people insulted, plundered, or in the least manner oppressed by the unfeelingness of arbitrary power; it having legalized the natural right of resistance. [Public Advertiser, November 1, 1788]Over a decade ago, Tom Nairn alleged that lack of a populist potentially revolutionary nationalism in England was due in large part to the effective co-option of seventeenth-century upheavals by ruling elites. From his perspective, the Revolution of 1688 constituted only an episode in the “long, successful counter-revolution of the propertied classes” against the subversive ideological potential of the first English Revolution that has continued to the present day. This provocative and unrepentant neo-Marxist reading of English history has, ironically, become part of the new orthodoxy on 1688 that has emerged in the revisionist, anti-Whig historiography of the past fifteen years. The series of events once heralded as the foundation of modern parliamentary democracy is now presented as but a troubled and confusing hiatus in patrician politics, unrelentingly “conservationist” in ideological and political effect, in which Whig and Tory leaders managed to rid themselves of an unacceptable monarch without recourse to the political or ideological extremism of Charles I's reign.