1 - In Search of the Mot Juste: Characterizations of the Revolution of 1688–9

Summary

The Revolution of 1688-9 has always had a tendency to attract adjectives. The most familiar is ‘glorious’, but others which have enjoyed some vogue at different times include ‘bloodless’, ‘conservative’, ‘reluctant’, ‘accidental’, ‘sensible’, ‘aristocratic’, ‘elite’, ‘respectable’, ‘bourgeois’, ‘popular’, ‘whig’, ‘moral’ and ‘modern’. Most of these words have something to offer as thumbnail definitions of the character of the Revolution. They feature prominently in examination questions; examiners commonly invite candidates to discuss how far any one of them might appropriately be employed to describe the Revolution of 1688-9. The various epithets are indeed illuminating. They constitute a sequence of mini-interpretations of a complex episode. Some of them have been fashionable, and have defined the historiography of the Revolution for a generation or more. It is instructive to consider the main arguments for and against each appellation. Inevitably, perhaps, we should start with ‘glorious’.

The term ‘the Glorious Revolution’ has become formulaic. It has lost its resonances of resplendent honour, virtue, heroism and triumph. It now represents, by an accident of language and usage, the events of 1688-9 in the British Isles. The concepts embodied in the word ‘glorious’ were not, however, meaningless to contemporaries such as John Hampden, M.P. for Wendover in the Convention, who said in November 1689 that he thought that those who planned the Rye House plot in 1683 had laid the foundations of ‘the glorious revolution’. The marquess of Halifax was reported as dismissing the language of Hampden's claims ‘very wittily’.