The minimum of turbulence

Glorious, bloodless, last, perhaps all of those things, but the revolution of 1688 was hardly a revolution at all. It was the neat solution to a succession crisis: how to keep the throne of England secure against a Roman Catholic successor to the Roman Catholic James II. The essential ingredients were the resolve of James’s Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange, to bring Great Britain into permanent alliance with the Netherlands against France and, in the face of that resolve, James’s timidity and eventual flight. The underlying reason that explains how, in the end, James managed to make enemies of the Tories and Whigs, Anglicans and Protestant Dissenters was the long-fermented, ruling fear of the populace that Great Britain might fall victim to ‘popery and arbitrary government’. James’s demise was a repeat, in miniature, of the fall of his father, Charles I.

All this Patrick Dillon makes clear in his excellent, lively account, which uses short chapters that highlight historically obscure personalities to draw the reader into the story.