The English Revolution 1688-1689

"Yes. Trevelyan made his name writing about Continental history. He was a distinguished historian of Italy as well as having written a history of Anne’s reign. Like Macaulay, he was deeply immersed in the politics of his age, in his case the 1930s. His account of The English Revolution – the foregrounding of the word English in the title is important – was to distinguish the changes that had gone on in Britain in the 17th century from the rise of fascism on the Continent which he very much despised. He was a critic of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. Again, it was a dialogue between past and present. However, in terms of length and depth, Macaulay’s study and Trevelyan’s stand in complete contrast. Trevelyan did no new archival research. He was basically interpreting facts that were relatively well known. It doesn’t read like a book where he’s telling the reader things they should be surprised about. He was making the story understandable and pointed, for his own time. He’s pointing out the significance of things the reader already knows. He did this remarkably successfully. It’s a short book, immensely readable, something someone could easily consume in an evening. His view is that the English were sensible. There were all sorts of political issues, and reasons to be unhappy with the regime, but unlike what was going on in Germany and Italy, and in Spain, the English ruling classes saw that they needed to get rid of a bad ruler, but not go to extremes. His point was that England was different precisely because the ruling classes acted sensibly: Rather than pursuing an extreme right-wing version [ie fascism] or an extreme left-wing version [ie the Russian Revolution] of political change, they sought moderate and gradual change. The significance for him of England’s Revolution was its moderation. The political classes knew that political change was called for, but they also knew that they could do so in a moderate as opposed to an extreme fashion. The lesson of England’s Revolution was that moderate change had extremely beneficial long-term outcomes. Exactly. For Trevelyan, the point was that what one needed to do to fix a polity was to rely on established ideas, not to try to innovate for the sake of innovating. One could draw on one’s tradition, on ideas that had developed over a long period of time – like the common law, for example – to get rid of a bad ruler and a bad polity. No, it’s not. But it is easy to summarise what Macaulay and Trevelyan both believed in, which was a commitment to slow and progressive change as opposed to revolutionary change. There’s also a notion of Protestant triumphalism, that Protestant polities are superior to Catholic polities. It’s no accident, in the case of Trevelyan, that he’s contrasting England with Catholic polities: Spain, Italy and Nazi Germany (where a lot of the intellectual firepower came from the Catholic south). These are contrasts that for Macaulay are absolutely central. There’s also the notion that social and economic change does not cause political change, but that what matters is top-down changes from the political elite. In some sense, it’s an elitist form of history. It’s partly true. Part of what I say in my book is that one needs to take Catholicism much more seriously than people have done in the past. Catholic Europe was no more consensual than Protestant Europe. Just as there were divisions between Lutheran and Calvinist states, so there were deep divisions in Catholic Europe. On one side was Louis XIV’s France, which insisted on the absolute sovereignty of the prince with respect to both religious and political affairs, and the need, therefore, of the state to forcibly convert its Protestant dissenters, by the sword if necessary. On the other side you have the view of the pope and his political allies that sovereigns were not, in fact, absolutely sovereign. The pope should have more authority with respect to religious affairs than any secular king and therefore there were necessarily limits on royal power. Pope Innocent XI was extremely sceptical of the forcible conversions that were happening in France and he thought seriously about excommunicating Louis XIV. Why this is important is that James II was reconciled to the Catholic Church by French Jesuits. As a result, he took the point of view about Catholicism that was associated with Louis XIV’s court. That earned him the enmity of Pope Innocent XI and a lot of Catholics in Europe, as well as a lot of Catholics within Britain. The British Catholic community was divided as much as the European Catholic community was. There was an ambivalence among a lot of Catholics about James. There were also divisions within the Protestant community. Some Protestants believed that the king did have absolute authority. This was the position of a number of Anglican bishops, for example. They were willing to support James in whatever he was doing. There were many Protestants who supported James and many Protestant Jacobites throughout the 18th century. There were also a number of Catholics who supported the revolution. It wasn’t straightforwardly a Protestant-Catholic struggle in Britain itself."