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. The method does not lend itself to depth of historical analysis. Half-buried are the tortuous windings of high politics and the constitutional wrangles of James’s reign. A small loss: they can be found elsewhere. The gain is that the reader is given a front-row seat to hear the babel of chatter, the rumours, sentiments, grievances, bits of information and misinformation —what the Dissenting clergyman, Stephen Towgood, called ‘the frequent tidings and great fears’ — that reverberated in coffee-houses and gave life to the ebbings and flowings of the political crisis.
Small things are noticed: that in 1688, for example, the phrase ‘mobile vulgus’, used of anti-popery rioters, was first shortened to ‘mob’, and that a few years earlier ‘nostalgia’ was coined by a young doctor who observed among young men the ‘misery resulting from the burning desire to return to one’s own country’.
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