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The Fourth English Civil War: Dissolution, Desertion and Alternative Histories in the Glorious Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

J. G. A. Pocock
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Extract

EDMUND BURKE, REVIEWING IN 1790 THE EVENTS OF 102-101 years previously, saw no objection to penning and printing the following remarkable words: ‘The Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be just. Justa bella quibus necessaria’. He cannot have meant that the revolution was ‘obtained’, in the sense of ‘secured’, by the wars in Europe which followed from 1688 to 1697, for he speaks of ‘civil war’; nor is it likely that he intended his words to refer to the war in Ireland which ended with the Treaty of Limerick. Burke's Irish perspectives might indeed lead to his viewing this as a civil war rather than a war of conquest, but the context which surrounds the words quoted makes it clear that he is thinking of the ‘Revolution of 1688’ as an English political process and an English civil war. The ‘cashiering’ or dethroning of a king, he is instructing readers of Richard Price's sermon to the Revolution Society, is not a legal or a constitutional process, which can form one of the normal procedures of an established civil society.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1988 , pp. 151 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1988

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References

1 Pending the completion of the current Oxford edition of Burke’s writings, there is no standard edition of the Reflections on the Revolution in France. I may be permitted to cite my own: Indianapolis and Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Company, 1987, pp. 26–27.

2 Goldie, Mark, ‘Edmund Bohun and Jus Gentium in the Revolution Debate, 1689–93’, Historical Journal, xx, 3, 1977, pp. 569–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Fletcher, Anthony, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, London, 1981.Google Scholar

4 Speck, W. A., ‘The Orangist Conspiracy Against James II’, Historical Journal, XXX, 2, 1987.Google Scholar

5 Thomas May, History of the Parliament of England... Book III, 1647, pp. 29–31.

6 David H. Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North: Aspects of the Revolution of 1688, Hamden, Conn., 1976.

7 This article may understate the extent to which Locke insists that the ‘appeal to heaven’ is issued when the prince is already ‘at war’ with his people, but that it is the people who judge whether such a state of war exists. Second Treatise, op. art., 232, pp. 241.

8 The former is the title of a tract by Anthony Ascham, the latter that of one by Sir Robert Filmer, both dated 1648.

9 A System of Politics, IV, 18; Pocock, J. G. A. (ed.), The Political Works of James Harrington, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 838.Google Scholar

10 James Farr and Clayton Roberts, ‘John Locke on the Glorious Revolution: a Rediscovered Document,’ and Tarlton, Charles D., “‘The Rulers Now on Earth’; Locke’s Two Treatises and the Revolution of 1688,”, both in Historical Journal, XXVIII, 2 (1985), pp. 385–98, 279–98.Google Scholar