“The Glorious Revolution” is one of those phrases Catholics like to put quotation marks around. The dominant narrative of James II’s deposition, the installation of William III and Mary II, and all that followed, weaves together various issues: political, religious and nationalist. Sometimes there’s a suggestion that the Revolution’s claim to be a Good Thing rests on stuff that, you know, no-one can have a problem with: representative democracy, the rule of law among free citizens, religious toleration.
Do Catholics have a problem with any of those? No? Well, then. The Glorious Revolution it is. Yet at the same time, these non-confessional, non-partisan “goods” are given a confessional tinge. They are linked to Protestantism by an alleged correlation, which slips into causation. The defeat of Catholicism is one and the same as the triumph of toleration, the path to democracy, etc.
One response is simply to reverse the argument. James II was a champion of religious toleration, a moderate ruler, the best monarch England never had. Nor is this without factual basis: James was, after all, the first English monarch to propose religious freedom for all Christians. And his tyrannies were exaggerated by his opponents, in ways which historians have sometimes accepted almost, it seems, at face value.
In Making Toleration: the Repealers and the Glorious Revolution, the historian Scott Sowerby put a magnifying glass on James II’s project to get an Act of Toleration through Parliament – and on its supporters. Because James knew that he couldn’t establish toleration by royal fiat; he needed it properly voted through Parliament as a Bill which he could sign into an Act. The King developed a coalition of “Repealers” – those who wanted repeal of the penal laws. Many were Protestant Dissenters, as well as Catholics; a few were Anglicans, supporting on principle a movement that would (by establishing equality) see them lose power. They wanted a “new Magna Carta” of liberty of conscience, binding on all future monarchs and parliaments.
It was claimed, then and afterwards, that James was insincere: toleration was the Trojan horse by which he would bring in Catholic supremacy, outlaw Protestantism and re-light the fires of Smithfield. There is no actual evidence that James had any such plan; and if he first entertained the idea of toleration for his own co-religionists’ sake, he came to sincerely support it. He appointed many Catholics to the public offices from which they had been excluded, but he also appointed Protestants, and believed that it was best to share out the highest offices between Protestants and Catholics.
One could argue, though, that James II’s critics claimed to fear Catholic supremacy, but in truth, disliked toleration for Catholics regardless of whether it led to them taking over. They also refused to credit James’s commitment to toleration because by this time it had become a sort of article of Protestant faith that Catholics persecute and Protestants are tolerant. James II had to go: not only was religious freedom for Catholics unacceptable, but a Catholic king leading the way in religious toleration just did not compute. Better to pretend that it never happened.
Sowerby’s extensive research on the “Repealer movement” demonstrated that James II did not intend to impose toleration simply by his will; he made himself the leader of a movement which sought to persuade the nation of the benefits of religious toleration. This movement had support across the country: it drew people from varied confessions and it made its case in print, for different audiences, and in different ways.
James II’s problem was assembling a Parliament that would vote for an Act of Toleration. As King, he could dissolve parliament and call a new one. But would the new one be any different in membership, or inclination? To ensure pro-toleration MPs, James had to change the voters’ minds, change the voters, or both. He made valiant attempts at the first, but by 1688 was clearly pursuing the last option.
However, James II rated representative government somewhat lower than he rated his project for religious toleration.
He was autocratic; he didn’t believe that, as King, he should do what the nation’s political representatives wanted, if what they wanted was wrong. While he did not think that kings should govern on a whim, he did think that – to achieve the right results when it mattered – he could set certain things aside.
For example, Members of Parliament were elected by a selective franchise, delimited by various rules in different constituencies. Many towns depended on a royal charter for their right to return an MP; so James cheerfully seized on the royal prerogative to “regulate” half the boroughs in the kingdom, both limiting franchises to members of local government (town councils) and then dismissing council members and appointing new ones whom he hoped would elect pro-Repeal MPs. Careful, town-by-town research suggests that the king and his agents had some, but not complete, success in producing local bodies that would support Repealer candidates.
Along with this, James applied the stop-gap of toleration by decree: suspending the operation of laws against both Catholic and Protestant dissenters with his Declaration of Indulgence. Overriding parliamentary law by royal fiat allow-ed the King’s opponents to claim that tyranny, not toleration, was the problem. The Church of England hierarchy suggested that they would support religious toleration if enacted properly, by consent of the political nation. At least, that’s what they seemed to say in an appeal to Protestant Dissenters, dissuading them from alliance with the Papists. Looking closely, they offered freedom of worship for Protestant dissenters, but not civic equality, and nothing for Catholics. The aim was to concede enough to keep Protestant dissenters on Team Protestant, rather than forming Team Toleration with the Catholics.
Sowerby’s work showed, first, that James II led a genuine movement for toleration; and, second, that that movement remained a minority. Such representation of the people as there then was (no one was suggesting the one adult, one vote sort) opposed the King’s agenda, and the small sub-section of electors was probably not far off the opinion of the actual majority of people. If the nation was not agitating for James’s deposition in November 1688, they did support an end to his tolerationist agenda; and if that meant replacing him with William III, they’d take William III. In that sense, James II’s overthrow was a triumph of democracy. In 1689, the Act of Toleration gave the dissenters that limited religious freedom, without inclusion in public office, which James’s Anglican opponents had promised – in return for abandoning James and disavowing his Repealer project. Catholics got nothing except double land taxes, added to the existing penal laws.
The post-1688 settlement can indeed be read as promoting representative government, freeing other branches of law and government from Crown interference and limiting royal prerogative. It can, in that respect, be seen as part of a progression towards a polity of free citizens under the rule of law with democratic government. But that settlement was openly founded on sectarian prejudice; it was founded to prevent religious toleration. Religious freedom and democracy are the most trumpeted (if not always practised) virtues of modern society. But in 1689, they stood opposed to each other. All the Good Things don’t fit in one box.
In 1687 a Protestant nonconformist, William Petty, was involved in James II’s campaign, meeting him personally to discuss Petty’s policy proposals on toleration: a public Oath to replace the Test oaths that excluded non-Anglicans from office. All officials, from the King down, would instead swear “to promote and preserve the said Liberty of Conscience as the inherent and indelible Right of mankind”. Can one imagine an 18th-century Britain built on that principle? But that wasn’t what the people wanted, and the people got their way.
Dr Lucy Underwood-Healy is a novelist and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Warwick.
This article first appeared in the February 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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