Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers

Book by Barone Michael

Chapter 1
The Improbable Revolution

The First Revolution: what is generally known as the Glorious Revolution. In recent years Americans have been devouring books on our nation’s Founding Fathers—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton—some written by academic historians, others by gifted professional writers. As these writers help us understand, the Founders did not spring from a historical vacuum. Before the break with the Crown, they regarded themselves as Englishmen, as inheritors of the system of government and the traditional liberties of England. As they moved daringly into a revolutionary and republican future, they looked back on a heritage that was shaped by many historical events. Not least among them was what most Englishmen referred to as the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. This term referred to the series of events that resulted in the ouster of King James II and the installation of King William III and Queen Mary II, and in changes in English law, governance, and politics that turned out to be major advances for representative government, guaranteeing liberties, global capitalism, and a foreign policy of opposing hegemonic powers on the European continent and in the world beyond.

The First Revolution, as it will be called here, was a reference point, an example, indeed a glowing example, for the American Founders. The Founding Fathers began their rebellion not by rejecting the achievements of the Glorious Revolution, but by arguing that Parliament and King George III were denying them their rights as Englishmen that were gained in that Revolution and the revolutionary settlement—the laws passed in 1689 and the 1690s. It is true that as the Founding Fathers created their own revolution and formed their republic, they did not fully accept the Revolutionary settlement—the set of laws and customs established during and immediately following the Glorious Revolution. The new nation would have no monarchy or titled nobility, no religious tests for public office, and no national established church. But the founders also self-consciously copied some features of the Revolutionary settlement, from yearly sessions of Congress to the establishment of a national bank and a funded debt to the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

The Glorious Revolution has long been recognized in Britain as a founding event that has shaped the character of the nation ever since. But this First Revolution has gotten much less attention in the United States. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, academic historians in this country as well as in Britain have devoted much more attention to the events of 1641–60, events that brought to the fore radicals who could be seen as ancestors of the Marxist revolutionaries of the twentieth century. The Glorious Revolution was seen, in contrast, as something in the nature of a coup d’état brought off by royals and nobles, a shuffling of power between dead white males (never mind that important parts were played by Princesses Mary and Anne, Queen Mary Beatrice, and Sarah Churchill). But there is a strong argument that the events of 1641–60 were less than consequential in shaping the English polity and what would become the American inheritance than was the Revolution of 1688–89 and the Revolutionary settlement that was worked out in the 1690s. Those changes proved to be far more enduring.

The Revolution of 1688–89 was the first change of government in England that was at the time called a revolution. Twentieth-century historians often refer to the events of 1641–60 as the English Revolution,1 but this complicated series of events—described by recent historians as three separate civil wars and a republican interregnum—was not called a revolution in the seventeenth century.2 In contrast, the events of 1688–89 were the first to be widely, almost universally, labeled a revolution by contemporaries.3

The First Revolution was a tremendously consequential event and a tremendously improbable one. “I cannot forbear remarking,” wrote the Cumberland landowner and regional political magnate Sir John Lowther in his Memoirs of the Reign of James II, “how wonderfullie this thing succeeded in opposition to so many visible and apparent accidents, anie one of which whereof they had happened, the whole design must certainly have miscarried.”4 It was, writes historian J. G. A. Pocock, an “amazing and unpredicted transaction,”5 or, as the historian Paul Rahe writes, it “was by no means inevitable. It more nearly resembled a freak accident.”6 William of Orange, stadholder of the Netherlands, assembled an army variously estimated at 15,000 to 20,000 men and a flotilla of five hundred ships, crossed the English Channel in the usually wind-tossed month of November, then pushed James II to order his army to retreat without a battle. Princess Mary, William’s wife, and Princess Anne cooperated in the ouster of their father, James II. It was, as Pocock continues, “a spectacular display of reason of state rising above the restraints of common morality; daughters dethroned their father, even the sanitized version of King Lear was hard to perform for many years, and what William of Orange and John Churchill severally did is still enough to take your breath away if you think about it.”7 Or, as the Calvinist and usually humorless William said to the Anglican clergyman Gilbert Burnet after his troops successfully landed in England, “Well, Doctor, what do you think of predestination now?”8

The First Revolution happened in an England and a Europe very different from today’s. This mostly bloodless revolution occurred after more than a century of religious wars. In England, Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church when denied a divorce, and in 1532 was declared the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Under Henry and his young successor Edward VI, the Church of England adopted many Protestant doctrines: the king was the Supreme Head of the Church, monasteries were closed, English translations of the Bible and an English Prayer Book were introduced.9 Edward died at 16 and was succeeded in 1553 by his older sister Mary I, who returned England to Catholicism and executed some 300 Protestants. She died in 1558 and her Protestant sister Elizabeth I reestablished the Church of England.

Despite the established Church of England, many forms of belief persisted under Elizabeth and her successor James I (1603–25). There were Puritans, a loosely defined group who wanted to simplify Church ritual and belief, and Presbyterians, who believed that the Church should be governed by elders selected by congregations rather than by bishops selected by the king. There were, living secretly and also in the open, Catholics who remained loyal to the Church of Rome. Religious differences played an important role in the Civil War that broke out between Charles I and Parliament in 1642 and that resulted in the execution of the king in 1649. The parliamentary governments led by Oliver Cromwell and others banned Church of England clergy from preaching, ordered Catholic priests out of the kingdom, and stripped churches of ornament and paintings and broke stained-glass windows. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, the Church of England was again established. But in the years since Charles I was executed, there had grown up Dissenting Protestant sects that would in time be known as Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers. The treatment of these Dissenting Protestants and of Catholics became lively political issues in Charles II’s reign and that of his brother James II (1685–88). 10

These religious struggles in England went on simultaneously but not in close connection with the struggles between Protestantism and Catholicism in continental Europe. Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg in 1517 and defended his doctrines at the Diet of Worms, summoned by the young Emperor Charles V in 1521. Lutheranism and other forms of Protestantism spread in what is now Germany, Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary through much of the sixteenth century. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 was based on the principle of cuius regio eius religio: the ruler of each state would determine its religion. Protestantism seemed to prevail over about half of Christian Europe.

The Catholic Church responded to this Reformation with a Counter-Reformation. The Council of Trent, concluded in 1563, reaffirmed traditional Catholic doctrine and ordered internal reforms of the Church. Counter-Reformation Catholicism was characterized by a rigorous faith, elaborate ceremony with incense and inspiring music, beautifully decorated baroque churches to inspire awe and to make the Mass an emotionally moving experience. The baroque churches still found today from Rome to France and Germany, Bohemia and Poland, Spain and the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America are concrete evidence of the confidence and verve of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church.

In different countries Catholics went on the offensive. In France, leading Protestant Huguenots were murdered in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572; after the Huguenot Henri IV became king in 1589, he faced civil war and converted to Catholicism, concluding, “Paris is worth a Mass.” In what is now Germany, the Catholic Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperors went on the offensive in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), and Protestantism was extirpated in what are now the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, and large parts of Germany. The treaties of Westphalia ended this conflict in 1648, recognizing the independence of states, including those within the Holy Roman Empire, and the right of their rulers to determine their religion. The United Provinces of the Netherlands, which had been fighting their...