8 - The Revolution of 1688–1689

Summary

Historiographical orthodoxy has long maintained that in 1688 the Scots were the ‘Reluctant Revolutionaries’. Having devoted the majority of their intellectual energies since 1660 to refuting extreme presbyterian fanaticism, by 1688 many politicians and writers apparently found that they lacked the mental resources to confront an arbitrary and papistical monarch. Hence the reported birth of the Prince of Wales in June 1688 evidently ‘occasioned little interest north of the border’, despite heralding the prospect of a perennial Catholic succession. William of Orange’s proclamation addressed to the Scots in October of that year also ‘fell on equally deaf ears’. Nor were any formal political discussions about the revolution conducted until the Convention of Estates met in Edinburgh on 14 March 1689, three months after James’ flight to France in December 1688.

Assertions of initial political apathy have in turn generated a historiographical tendency to denigrate ‘the poverty of political theory in the Scottish Revolution of 1688–90’. Contrary to such interpretations, however, this chapter demonstrates that although the narrative political history of the Revolution still awaits detailed reconstruction, a clearly articulated body of political literature did exist, offering active ideological justifications of, as well as objections to, the sequence of revolutionary events in Scotland. Such works inevitably varied in quality and purpose: one writer condemned, for instance, ‘the number of these Scribblers, who now a dayes fill the Press, with every little Product of their Empty Brains’. Another observed how ‘these things are so much talk’t of by every Body’ that ‘the Itch of Writing is so Universal’. If nothing else, the events of 1688–90 unquestionably provided the opportunity to apply the elements of monarchical political theory discussed in previous chapters to rapidly changing political circumstances. Hence Scottish reaction to the collapse of James VII & II’s authority spawned a wide spectrum of different political theories, ranging from defences of individual rights of resistance against a vicious king to unequivocal Jacobite opposition to events, based on James’ divine right to rule and the duty of his subjects to obey his authority without reserve. Hence this chapter establishes, for the first time, the extensive nature of a Scottish allegiance debate. Although historians such as Mark Goldie, John Kenyon and Gerald Straka have previously examined the allegiance debate generated by the Williamite Revolution in England, the extent of political debate that occurred north of the border has never hitherto been fully explored.