1 - The Politics of Coercion: Maintaining Truth

Summary

Historical understandings of the press after the Glorious Revolution are almost exclusively committed to an analysis of opposites. On the one hand, historians have characterised the king and his godly court as committed to promoting its own providential message. Precisely because of the problems with William's legitimacy as monarch, he promoted his invasion as favoured by God, proceeding to a divine plan and furthering the unfinished English Reformation. Whilst historians have been sceptical about the originality and influence that providence really had, with one historian dismissing it as ‘little more than the expression of a devotional platitude; it did not change men's minds’, most have accepted the basic premise behind it. William and his advisers, most importantly Gilbert Burnet, were convinced of the need for propaganda and readily engaged the public. On the other hand, where historians have considered how and why William and his advisers controlled public debate, they have focused on how supporters of Jacobitism were ruthlessly pursued and punished, so their message did not reach the wider public. To be sure, the Williamite government often presented the supporters of the previous king as their most dangerous opponents; the government executed a Jacobite printer in 1693 and sought new treason legislation in 1694.

Yet astute observers of late Stuart politics suggested that, to survive, all governments needed to place correct limits on debate and to engage the public. In that sense, then, early Williamite governments replicated the attitude to the press of the regimes of Charles II and James II but with one crucial difference. Whilst they continued to acknowledge that the Anglican Church was responsible for promoting moral virtue throughout the country, William's close advisers increasingly empowered various Anglican voluntary movements, the Societies for the Reformation of Manners and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, to change behaviour, through restraint, coercion and exhortation. In fact, these movements for moral reformation promoted a vision of society in which sin was controlled precisely because it endangered the life of the individual, the community and the country in much the same way Sacheverell was to argue in 1709.