Review: 1688 The First Modern Revolution

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was one of the defining moments of the modern age. Most historians have followed the opinion of Thomas Macaulay that the revolution was notable because as a preserving revolution in the 17th Century, it preserved England from a destroying revolution (mention sotto voce France, 1789). Steve Pincus, Professor of History at Yale, takes a different view: he stands with those who opposed Macaulay and Macaulay's great inspirer- Edmund Burke- men like Dr Richard Price (whose lectures inspired Burke's great Reflections on the Revolution in France), who saw the Revolution as transforming the British constitution. Pincus thinks that it transformed it in three fields: it changed the relationship between the state and the people making the former depend upon the latter for its authority. It changed the way that the British state thought about economics- from relying upon land and empire, to relying upon manufactures and trade- cementing an economic trend that had already begun. And lastly it changed the direction of foreign policy in the UK- the alliance with France that Britain had pursued ever since the reign of Charles II began in 1660 was jettisoned, and the Dutch, against whom Britain had fought three wars in the seventeenth century (1652-4, 1665-7 and 1672-4), became the natural allies of Britain.

In 1685, Charles II died. Charles had come to the throne when his father was executed by Oliver Cromwell et al in 1649, and had formerly taken possession of Britain after Cromwell's death (1658) in 1660. His brother James Duke of York was Charles's heir thanks to the fact that Charles failed to produce a legitimate heir. James was a Catholic and in 1679-81, the opposition Whigs had led a campaign to deprive him of the crown because of his Catholicism. The campaign failed and its leaders (the Earl of Shaftesbury and John Locke included) were driven into exile in the Netherlands. When Charles died in 1685, his brother James II succeeded him to the throne and reigned for three years. The Dutch Statholder William of Orange was himself related to the Stuart dynasty in England and he had married James's protestant daughter, Mary, several years previously. In 1688 alerted by several English noblemen and alarmed by the arrest and trial of leading clergymen, William set sail with 21,000 men to the shores of England. This invasion resulted in the overthrow of James's government- whatever happened when William arrived- the simple truth is that many Englishmen abstained from fighting and others deserted the Jacobite cause, James fled preferring to take his fight (unsuccessfully to Scotland and Ireland). After the Battle of the Boyne in 1693, James was finally defeated and had to rely on the putative assistance of France to recover his kingdom- which he never managed to do.

I offer that brief summary because it is indispensible to understanding Pincus's book and what it represents. To reiterate some historians have seen these events as a truly radical moment within English history- others see these events as pretty mundane. Pincus is in the former camp. He makes his case for the Glorious Revolution being truly revolutionary, based upon a detailed reading of the documents and a thorough understanding of the political culture of the period, because he sees the core dynamic of the revolution as one of modernisation. In this sense, Pincus describes the Jacobite ideal of government as being modern absolutism and on the other hand, a Whig ideal of constitutional and republican liberty. Whigs were radical in one direction, James was a reformer in another. Between them stood the conservative Tories who resisted James in the 1680s and objected to Whig movements in the 1690s. Pincus offers some incredibly thorough and thoughtful discussions, particularly of economic policy, where he shows how the Whigs represented a new set of ideas about the movement of money and the importance of manufacturing. The best section of the book shows us that the Whigs sponsored developments like the Bank of England deliberately, in the belief that wealth was infinite and that if more money circulated freely, more investment would produce more wealth. Fundementally the Whig insight- the basis of John Locke's theory of money and Adam Smith's was the labour theory of value. The Tories though were committed to the idea that wealth was equivalent to land- they wanted to conquer more of an empire, to pursue a wet strategy in foreign policy, neglecting continental armies for ships which would conquer new colonies. The argument would return- but the way that Pincus shows us how Jacobite politics and Tory assumptions were involved in the creation and protection of a National Land Bank and the East India Company, and furthermore how the Bank of England was ultimately preserved by a failed Jacobite assacination of William III. The attempt gave the Whigs impetus at a key moment and the Bank of England survived.

The two other key strands of this argument surround foreign policy- the Whig insistance on fighting a war against the French seriously and in Europe and not on the sea. More controversially Pincus also argues that tolerance became an established value in 1688. As Alexandra Walsham points out in her own book about toleration, reviewed earlier on this blog, James actually advanced a more tolerant system than William ever did. However Pincus points out that such toleration was granted rather than secured via a Parliamentary act: most Whigs accepting a view of liberty which prioritised the state of freedom over a free action, believed that only when toleration had become legal would it be real toleration: to be at the whim of a prince for toleration was to live in a state that was de facto intolerant (Incidentally Pincus never acknowledges the obvious simularity of his Whig concept of toleration to Quentin Skinner's third concept of liberty). At least that is Pincus's view of what the Whigs thought and to some extent it is his view of James's toleration- advanced by grant so it could be recalled by grant immediately as soon as James could make England Catholic. In 1688, Pincus argues that most of the Williamite bishops were themselves tolerant both of Catholics and non-conformists- though theoretical laws still outlawed non-conformity and Catholicism, they were not implemented and they were not important. By 1688, England had become Lockian, in economics, politics and religion.

How seriously should we take these arguments? I am not sure. I have several objections to Pincus's approach- though I recognise that the work is a formidable edifice of scholarly talent- but here are my objections. Firstly Pincus continually plays down religion- he believes that the revolution of 1688 was modern and constitutional- if anti-Catholic only partly so and really directed against James's peculiar Gallican French influenced Catholicism not against the Catholicism of the Pope (who hated both James and Louis XIV). That may be true at a high level- but what Pincus never is able to prove is that outside of the elite circles in London there were many who understood the distinction between good Catholic and bad Catholic. He glosses several quotations as being 'anti-French Catholic' but they could equally as well support an argument which said the revolution was anti-Catholic. Secondly the protagonist who is invisible in all of this is the one who mattered most- William III became King and yet Pincus hardly analyses his reactions to the revolution that in some sense he lead. Pincus has to acknowledge that for the first years of his reign William relied upon Tory, not Whig, ministers and the Tories returned in the reign of William's successor Anne too. If the Tories were conservatives (small c) in this revolution, then the monarchs leading the revolution seemed more willing to work with Harley, Nottingham and Danby than with the radicals that Pincus identifies as the heart and soul of what happened. Thirdly this brings me on to another objection: Pincus says that the revolution of the 1640s was not a revolution because it did not last, and yet he himself says that the Whig interpretation of 1688 had become oppositionalist by 1720: indeed one might argue that save for the late 1690s, the Whigs (as Pincus describes them) never governed England post-revolution. Fourthly Pincus uses the word modern and modernisation with abandon- never really defining precisely what it means. He uses it to mean generating an efficient state- but doesn't really explain why it has to be connected to this concept (why not a modernisation connected say to a discourse of rights- in which case are the Tory objectors to the power of the state the real modernisers in this story?) or why it has to be connected to the concept of revolution.

I don't ultimately quarrell with Pincus's scholarship, I can't but with the way that he has put it together into the book he presents. Its a well researched and important book and save for some copy editing errors (the publisher Yale should be ashamed of the state they have let this book be published in- my edition quite clearly missed words out for example at points), it is written engagingly and interestingly. Like Bernard Bailyn, I beleive the book could be shorter but I also believe that Pincus could have been more disciplined with his ideas. Some of the arguments here are interesting and novel (the economic sections), deserve serious attention (on religion and James's links with France) and they are all exciting. The idea that 1688 was for many a violent and novel event- not a preserving revolution but very much a destroying one- is probably right. For some people it was- for some it was not and recasting the story of eighteenth century England as one of a battle over whether the revolution should become a Revolution is probably something that needs to be done. In that sense Pincus is right, 1688 fundementally changed the way that Britain was governed- whether it was the first modern revolution (why not award that title to Tiberius Gracchus's grain reforms or Solon's constitution or the orange revolution in the Ukraine?) is another point- but Pincus deserves praise for expanding the way that we think about it as an event. I came out of reading him with many many more questions and avenues of thinking to pursue- I didn't agree with everything I read, but my copy is scrawled over with pencil marks denoting strong agreement and disagreement.

Ultimately that is testament enough to Pincus's acheivement- wide reading and deep thought have been accompanied by an interesting thesis and style to acheive something very important and estimable.

Does God have a body?

Adam Kirsch reviews what seems to be an intriguing book from Benjamin Sommer in this week's tablet. Sommer's argument is that God in the Bible seems to have some kind of a body. In Genesis, God is described as forming Adam in his own nature, he even walks in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening, he comes to Abraham as a traveller, he speaks to Moses face to face like a friend, Isaiah says that he saw him standing at his throne. This is an important insight because one of the things that appears to distinguish the Jewish God from the other Gods of the Middle East was his incorporeality. Another such thing is that the Jews explicitly were forbidden from carving an image of their God- and yet there is quite a lot of evidence within the Bible, from Jacob constructing a stone to worship to King Jehoahaz worshipping a pole that the Isrealites beleived that God inhabited their world. More and more, either from Professor Sommer's work or work like that of Professor Momigliano, we are getting the sense I believe that the Jewish religion and its sisters Christianity and Islam emerged out of a particular constellation of thoughts and ideas in the middle and near east in the centuries just before AD. The more we know of Ishtar and Gilgamesh, the more we know of Moses and Jehovah.

20th Century Violence

James Hamilton has an interesting piece about early football violence up at his blog. It concerns a game between Bolton and Glossop in 1908 where the referee was threatened, the stands turned riotous and even the players were fighting on the pitch. Plus ca change, you might think- and indeed scenes from the 1970s and 1980s wouldn't be unfamiliar, by James's account, to your average Edwardian spectator. Furthermore like today, it was not the very poor who indulged in football violence- priced out of the game then and now- but the respectable, stockbrokers and others who went mad on the terraces. What I found most interesting though about James's article was that he brought out a link I had not noticed before- between levels of violence in society and the world wars. Violence in football, he argues, dropped off after World War One and continued after World War Two- indeed if it matched actual crime rates you would find it rising again after 1955. Lots of people I have met over the years who know these facts conjecture that the later rise, with which we are still living, is due either to changing structures of society or changing structures of punishment- but given what James wrote, I wonder whether the history of crime in the twentieth century is related to the history of war in the twentieth century and if so how that relationship works.

I have no idea about this beyond the dates being aligned and the fact that war was a universal experience with violence in the 1910s or the 1940s. It would be interesting to know more.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it over the ocean!

What is a revolution?

Stephen Pincus in his latest volume on 1688 has gone some way to providing an answer to this question and I think it is useful both to describe what his answer is and see what people think and to give my own provisional thoughts on his answer. Pincus thinks of a revolution as a social and political event which lasts perhaps several years- the French Revolution he stretches until the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, the English of 1688 (the subject of his book in which this doctrine makes its appearance and which shall be reviewed here soon) from 1688 to 93 or even to the end of the war of the Spanish succession in 1720. Pincus is perhaps more interested though in why revolutions happen.

For him revolutions happen 'when the political natino is convinced of the need for political modernization but there are profound disagreements on the course of state innovation' (Pincus 1688 34). In all revolutions, he suggests, the ancien regime had already broken down. The France of 1789 had been through the reforms of Necker and Turgot, the England of 1688 was the subject of absolutist experiment by James II, the Russia of 1917 had seen Stolypin make his attempts to create the Kulak class, the Shah of Iran was a compulsive reformer before swept away in 1979- even in less famous revolutions such as that of Mexico, the reforms of Porfirio Diaz preceded the later revolution. Modernization, in Pincus's account, creates two impulses towards revolution: in the first place it creates a group of people who are affected by state policy and disagree with it- a constituency for revolution and secondly it associates the forces of order with radical change. If Kings and Ministers have deserted tradition, then the people will listen to radicals and insurgents and give each competing view of modernisation a hearing. This view has antecedents going back to De Tocqueville and definitely had some truth to it- but are there gaps?

My own view is that there are some interesting reflections to be made upon revolution as an entity. However there are a couple of things to be said first- there may not be a type of revolutions to abstract from. For example you could make a case that James II was never stronger than in 1688, and you could make a sensible case that Nicholas II of Russia was never weaker than in 1917. Military defeat seems to provoke revolution as in Nicholas's case- but the costs of victory are no less dangerous as Louis XVI might attest. Equally revolutionary conditions- modernization affecting a state- might not always give rise to a revolutionary situation (something Pincus accepts)- and modernisation itself is an odd concept. More recently historians have stressed the ways that state efficiency is modern- so Charles I and James II become 'modern' kings, earlier historians though stressed that representative institutions were 'modern' so divine right monarchs were definitely not modernisers by definition. Revolution might be instable- and how also are we to make sense of reactionary revolutions like that of the forty tyrants in Athens or ancient revolutions- was Caesar not a revolutionary? You could have fooled both Cicero and Cato. I have some sympathies with Pincus's viewpoint but also as the paragraph above suggests I'm unhappy with the typology and unhappy with the idea of modernisation, what are other people's views?

Minucia

Fragments in Livy are often as interesting as his main tale. For example he tells us that

This year the Vestal Minucia first attracted suspicion by her dress, which was more elegant than was proper, and was subsequently charged before the pontiffs on the evidence of a slave. She was ordered by their decree to abstain from performing sacred rites and to retain her household slaves in her power, after sentence was passed, she was buried alive near the Colline Gate, to the right of the paved road, in the Polluted Field- a place so named, I believe, from her unchastity. (Livy VIII 15)

There are three interesting things here that I think deserve us to comment or pause. The first is that Vestal Virgins were supposed of course to be the latter- virgins. They were supposed not to have sexual intercourse- proving that they had or had not had sexual intercourse was not easy. You were lucky if a Vestal became pregnant but sex does not have to result in pregnancy and so that was not an infallible test. Consequently Romans on many occasions reverted to thinking about reputations. In a patriarchal society such a stress on virginity of course was tied to a fear of women and particularly women's adornment and sexuality: this is perhaps what we see with the unfortunate Minucia. My second observation is that Minucia was ultimately suspected because she seemed to behave inappropriately: morally forbidding societies like ancient Rome or no doubt some more modern communities tend to have a totalitarian suspicion of their member's activities. The ancient Romans expected Vestals and women in general to behave chastely as well as be chaste- the commandment to be chaste extended to cover dress and behaviour- the moral code justified a moral judgement on the totality of Minucia's life. Thirdly we have the comment about her slaves which reflects Roman practice- slaves must be kept because they might be tortured in law to reveal evidence- consequently it is not unusual to hear that slaves are not freed when a man or woman is jailed. Torture was a sign of not being free and in the Roman conception, to be subject even to the threat of torture was to be a slave.

Lastly I think we have a just so element. We do not know where Livy got his tale from that Minucia was executed in a certain place- but what we can say is that he seems to have linked it to the 'modern' name for the Polluted fields. In a sense what Livy may be doing here is an ex post facto justification- the field is deemed polluted and therefore a reason for the pollution must be found, we do not know where Minucia was executed so why not here.

Crossfire

Crossfire announces itself as a film about racism. A police drama about a man who tries to evade a charge of murder by implicating something else- it eventually comes down to a discussion of who might have a motive to kill the victim. The policeman in charge of the case decides that the only motive within the case is a general one- anti-semitism- and suggests that none of the suspects actually knew the murdered man. He turns out to be right. Crossfire in a sense therefore is a pretty simple film and as a police drama it does not quite work- the acting is good, both Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan do well and Gloria Graham confirms my prejudice that Gloria Graham was one of Hollywood's best underused actresses of all time. Yet again she has a tiny amount of screen time and yet again she makes the most of what she has. The story though is too simple and slow to really make you feel intrigued by the 'thriller' aspect: from the start you can easily guess the murderer, from the start you feel confident that Mitchum's laconic sergeant and Robert Young's intelligent if cynical police officer will solve the case. The suspense just is not there.

There are three things though which make the film worth remembering. All of them relate to the dialogue of the characters. The first is a set of ideas, the second a historical circumstance, the third is a set of motifs which until now I feel have been ignored. Lets start with the ideas. The reason the film has survived is because of its analysis, in particular Robert Young's analysis as Captain Finlay, of prejudice. Prejudice says Young starts as a decision to exclude a race from country clubs or to say that your daughter shouldn't marry a Jew or an Irishman or an immigrant, and it ends in a man walking around to someone's house after he has had a few drinks in a bar and beating the other fellow to death because he doesn't want to share another drink with him. What Young does and the film seeks to do is provide the bridge between different types of prejudice and explain why and how the space for one allows another more murderous prejudice to thrive. Murder in this film is seen as an unconscious consequence of prejudice- it is not something anyone intends- but filled with hate and passion, a violent attack swiftly turns into murder. Prejudice is harmless or if not harmless, not murderous for most, but for some including one character it can easily turn into murder.

Secondly this is one of the few films made in Hollywood in the late forties that is explicitly post war. Almost every major character has served in the army and their service has consequences for them. As Robert Mitchum's character says it has exposed them all to the kind of killing 'for which you get medals', that kind of killing impacts on these men in different ways. It has helped Robert Ryan's character to hate: hatred as another man in the film says must be turned in another direction now the enemy is defeated and curiously for Ryan, it means that he can turn his bitterness on civilians but also ironically on Jews (the victims of the regime he was fighting). Mitchell, another key character, comes out of the war with chronic depression: wandering listlessly across Washington, missing his wife, and straying through drunkenness and tears into sadness and disaster. He evokes pity in most of the characters he comes across, but 'good old Mitch' is as much a victim of the war as anyone else. His character brings up a third aspect of the war, removal from wives and families- Mitchall longs for his, Robert Mitchum's character just feels cut off from his and from his previous life. If the one feels deadened by the absense of family and his presence in the army, the other looks back on his old life as something that has died.

Mitchall wonders through the city and at one point encounters Gloria Graham in a bar- she takes pity on him, dances with him and kisses him, telling him to go back to her flat and wait for her there. Whilst in Graham's flat, Mitchall encounters possibly the most mysterious character of them all: he might be Graham's husband, her boyfriend or her pimp, or he might be all three but we never find out. He delivers two monologues to Mitchall that I think are inspired- they are almost Pinteresque, both in the menace conveyed by ordinary sounding words and in the use of pauses as he finds a new story to intimidate both us and Mitchall. He ends up seeming rather pathetic as he offers to help the police again and again, but in those two little speeches last only about five minutes, I think there is something that later film makers and playwrights would and could take advantage of.

Crossfire is not a great film- it does not succeed in its main task as a suspense thriller but it does succeed in other ways. It has a message element, it reflects a historical situation and it provides a rather intriguing enigmatic character: these don't add up to a good film but they do add up to a historically significant film.