This chapter offers a historical power analysis from the Saxons to the end of Pitt the Younger’s premiership. In the liminal premiership, the ‘key’ minister/advisor behind the monarch, or Oliver Cromwell during the republic, had serious power, but cannot be considered a prime minister as their power was wholly dependent on the monarch, and the complex machinations of court politics. The important innovation is how the role of ‘lead’ minister developed, with the monarch’s agreement, into the more independent ‘prime’ minister. We contend that only with Robert Walpole’s accession to the office did the power of prime minister become apparent, the primary reason being the monarch’s (George I) reliance on Walpole to control Parliament for spending and the protection of the monarch’s power. However, it was only with Pitt the Younger’s premiership, which truly established more formal parts of the office – particularly the Treasury, the state/economy and the Cabinet – that we see the beginnings of the modern office we know today.

At the end of the sixteenth, and the beginning seventeenth century some communities and countries began experimenting with the new enlightened ideas and put fundamental orders and government instruments in place: precursors to written constitutions that were about to follow suit. Mostly these orders or instruments served as checks on monarchic power and were put in place (granted) by the monarch himself. They constitute the first generation of dedicated, written monarchical constitutions.

‘Law’ and ‘constitution’, like other concepts we use to make sense of the world, have a history.1 In the case of law, part of that history is the ongoing interplay between two different ideas. One is that law concerns what people should, should not and may do. In other words, law is ‘normative’. Another is that law is a product of human activity. Human beings and institutions can and do make and enforce legal norms.

John Milton is a major author in the history of writing the nation in early modern England. A visionary Protestant writer with a keen sense of prophetic vocation, he aligned his authorial identity closely with England as an exceptional ’Nation chos’n before any other’. Yet in his works written before, during and after the English Revolution, Milton agonises over the godly nation’s susceptibility to political and religious servility, so that he vacillates between intense identification with England and strong repulsion. Milton’s evolving relation to the nation thus remains conflicted and volatile. England’s exceptionalism can never be taken for granted: it must be strenuously tested, reassessed and reimagined. Although the late Milton turns away from national exceptionalism and challenges Restoration’s cultural, religious and political values, the 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost, published close to the Glorious Revolution, tells another complex story about the posthumous creation of Milton as England’s exceptional national poet.

This chapter examines Defoe’s various responses to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and how his published works attempt to reconcile support for James II’s removal from the throne with contempt for at least some of the event’s chief instigators. In texts such as The True-Born Englishman (1701) and Jure Divino (1706), Defoe demonstrates his ideological commitment to ‘revolution principles’ while also experimenting with awkward sympathies and rhetorical opportunities. The chapter considers Defoe’s attachment to one particularly provocative analogy between James’s downfall and Charles I’s execution, and asks to what extent he intends his readers to feel genuine pity for the exiled monarch. Ultimately, we can see in Defoe’s attitude towards 1688 the same mixture of conviction and contrarianism that typifies much of his literary career. He was greatly indebted to the Glorious Revolution in many respects, but cannot resist interrogating its motives and its consequences, fixating on the ingratitude of its other beneficiaries.

Chapter 2 considers the archipelagic impact of the 1688 Revolution by examining the the War of the Two Kings in Ireland (1688–91). It analyzes how Irish events were mediated in newspapers such as the Orange Gazette and the London Gazette, both in the news stories and in advertisements for printed works such as maps, Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana (1689) and James Farewell’s The Irish Hudibras (1689). It focuses on how the media event surrounding the relief of the siege of Derry shaped English perceptions of the rest of the conflict in Ireland. The importance of Derry was amplified by the visit of George Walker to London and by thanksgiving services held in churches in London. By examining the representation of the siege in John Mitchelburne’s Ireland Preserv’d (1705), this chapter also assesses how Ireland was subsequently erased from the memory of the so-called “Glorious Revolution” in Britain.

Chapter 1 begins by comparing Gilbert Burnet’s focus on the song “Liliburlero” as the media event of the 1688 Revolution with what contemporary scholars have written about the importance of printed works at the time. It asserts the importance of adopting a multi-media perspective on the 1688 Revolution. It analyzes James II/VII’s shifting use of media in the context of challenges to his throne by the Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Argyll in 1685 and William of Orange in 1688. It assesses William’s Declaration outlining “the Reasons Inducing him, to Appear in Armes in the Kingdome of England” and suggests that the document gained its authority as a printed text by being represented in oral and manuscript forms. It concludes by suggesting that the initial mediation of the 1688 Revolution impacted its later re-inscription as a site of “Glorious” cultural memory when William’s Declaration was reprinted in early eighteenth-century histories of recent events such as those by Edmund Bohun and Abel Boyer.

This chapter argues that Swiftian irony functions in a way similar to the Whiggish model of political revolution: both function “to preserve and to reform,” and both create new commitments based on challenging, revising, and criticizing existing institutions. Swift’s satire functions first and foremost, of course, to highlight weaknesses, defects, and corruptions in its objects; but, in a gesture reminiscent of Burkean conservatism and Rorty’s irony, his parody also serves as a means of preserving while reforming the satirized object, coopting its genuinely admirable qualities and opening up new spaces for indulgence and play. Burke makes explicit a model of ironic politics implicit in Swift’s Tale: political institutions are contestable primarily because they are an ongoing, unfinished project. Each generation must recognize this limitation and adapt institutions to their own needs.

This chapter argues that majoritarian politics was institutionalized in England during the Restoration period and that this institutionalization preceded and was a precondition for the institutionalization of party politics. By 1662 there were already strong signs that majoritarianism had been institutionalized alongside the restoration of the Stuarts. By the early 1670s, at the latest, the institutionalization of majoritarian politics was complete. With this new institution in place, political practice became organized around the securing of majorities. This led in turn to the emergence and eventual institutionalization of party politics in Parliament, because party politics was the form of coordinated political practice best suited to securing those majorities. It is therefore no surprise to see that in England, the elaboration of partisan politics followed somewhat quickly on the first institutionalization of majoritarian practices in a national representative institution. By the end of the Stuart period, majoritarian politics were firmly in the grip of partisan coordination. The partisan structure of politics would of course weaken occasionally over the course of the eighteenth century, but majoritarian decision-making did not. This makes clear in yet another way that it played a more fundamental role in the emergence of modern politics in Britain than the party system itself.

Turning to a series of essays written by Hume in the late 1740s, this chapter moves from the scene of London and Westminster politics to a broader British and indeed Scottish perspective. This chapter shows that the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession remained at the heart of British political debate even a half century later. Writing in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745, Hume concentrated on politics in his native Scotland, and in particular the Scottish version of Toryism, which, as he had stated in his earlier essays, was synonymous with Jacobitism.

This chapter demonstrates the importance of Paul de Rapin-Thoyras (1661–1725) for subsequent discussion of political parties in the eighteenth century. Before his famous Histoire d’Angleterre (1724–7), the Frenchman had already made a name for himself by writing a pamphlet entitled Une Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys (1717), which is the chief focus of this chapter, although the Histoire is also briefly surveyed and contextualised. The chapter examines Rapin’s intervention against the backdrop of his expulsion from France along with other Huguenots in 1685, the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, and the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. By focusing on Rapin’s Dissertation, this chapter demonstrates the centrality of religion and religious denominations in the construction of political parties. In political theory, Rapin’s Dissertation can be regarded as an intellectual milestone, as it was the first clear expression of the idea that balance between parties, as distinct from Machiavelli’s social orders, is recommendable as a way to achieve proper balance in a mixed constitution.