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Religion, Politics, and Oaths in the Glorious Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Charles F. Mullet
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Extract

Although at the end of the seventeenth century men were shifting their political terminology from the spiritual to the secular, from God to nature, they still invoked the absolutes of history, law, and scripture. They did not lightly overturn their monarch, but when the necessity for such action arose they sought absolution in concepts which the most rigorous and learned mediaeval theologian would have understood. They appealed to the law of nature but they meant the law of God; and the shift involved no betrayal of absolute standards, no withdrawal from the same ethical doctrines that had nourished their forebears. The time was soon to come when secular phrases expressed a secular outlook, but in 1689 they continued to cover the religious convictions of centuries. As soon as the bars were down and men grappled in hectic controversy, the secular side of their politics diminished and the ethical and spiritual aspects became pronounced.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , October 1948 , pp. 462 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1948

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References

1 The oaths were incorporated in the Declaration of Right which had been accepted by William, and Mary, on February 13, 1689Google Scholar, and which was subsequently enacted as the Bill of Rights, “An Act declaring the rights and liberties of the subject and settling the succession of the crown,“ on December 16, 1689. The Declaration recited in detail the crimes—political, religious, financial, and constitutional—of James and his evil counsellors, stated that James had abdicated, affirmed the Protestant succession, specified the conditions under which William and Mary must take the throne, and defined the succession.

2 Of these nine prelates five were among the “Seven Bishops” prosecuted by James in 1688. Concerning the nonjurors, see Hawkins, L. M., Allegiance in Church and State: the Problem of the Non-jurors in the English Revolution (London, 1928).Google Scholar

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39 For a discussion of this, see my article, “A Case of Allegiance: William Sherlock and the Revolution of 1688,” Huntington Library Quarterly, X, 83–103. “Some Paradoxes of the Glorious Revolution,” Ibid., 317–22, reveals from a slightly different viewpoint the intensity of contemporary feeling.Google Scholar