Glorious Revolution

EVENTS | 1688

The Glorious Revolution of 1688

The Glorious Revolution, England, 1688-89. It is regarded as the fundamental watershed in the classic interpretation of national history, sometimes referred to as the English Revolution Part Two.

The Revolution cleared the way for the establishment of a stable constitutional monarchy, promoting political liberty, religious toleration, cultural pluralism, and the security of property. This upheaval transformed the British constitution.

Causes and the Crisis of Authority

The Glorious Revolution arose from the third major crisis regarding popery and arbitrary power. The reigning monarch, King James II, who was a Catholic, was determined to remove the disabilities of his co-religionists and promote their interests.

As a deeply sincere Catholic, James hoped for widespread conversions to Catholicism, intending the nation to move gradually in a Catholic direction. James II succeeded in alienating the Tory Anglican majority, upon whom his predecessor, King Charles II, had relied. Furthermore, he failed to secure the necessary trust and support of the Protestant dissenters, who formed the core of the Whig cause.

James II undermined his position by creating a massive authoritarian territorial empire overseas and financing a professional and efficient standing army of between 40,000 and 50,000 men in England. England traditionally maintained an army of merely 2,000 men. James II also declared war on the Mogul Empire in India in 1687, a disastrous military failure.

When Parliament showed reluctance to repeal the Test Acts, James used his dispensing power, a prerogative theoretically reserved for relieving specific individuals from penalties of the law, to illegally suspend the law itself.

This violation was deeply provocative.

James placed four Catholics in the Privy Council, granted his Jesuit confessor a position in the cabinet, and appointed 250 Catholics as justices of the peace. He also appointed Catholic officers to the army and established a Catholic seminary at an Oxford College. In April 1687, the King issued a Declaration of Indulgence suspending penal laws against both Protestant dissenters and Roman Catholics.

Simmering discontent culminated in June 1688 due to two critical events. Firstly, the Queen Mary was delivered of a child, a son, Prince James, which threatened the establishment of a Catholic dynasty with absolutist ambitions. Rumours circulated that the child was smuggled into the Queen's bedchamber in a warming pan to create the appearance of an heir. Secondly, James ordered his Declaration of Indulgence to be read out in all Anglican churches, leading to the indictment and trial for sedition of seven bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. The subsequent acquittal of the Seven Bishops led to widespread public rejoicing.

The Dutch Intervention and the Transfer of Power

The profound alienation from the King led seven leading politicians, later known as the Immortal Seven, to write to William of Orange, expressing fear for their liberties, religion, and property, and inviting him to intervene. William of Orange, Stadtholder of the Netherlands and de facto leader of the Dutch Republic, viewed his intervention as part of his mission to contain the threatened hegemony of the French monarchy of Louis XIV.

A fleet four times the size of the Spanish Armada set sail for England in November 1688, successfully making landfall at Torbay on 5 November AD 1688, carried by the so-called Protestant wind. The force included a 21,000 strong, well-trained Dutch army, supported by troops and resources from Germany and Scandinavia.

Before the invasion, William issued a declaration asserting he was coming to preserve and maintain the established laws, liberties, and customs of England and to investigate the birth of the Prince. The Dutch and their English supporters stressed that the monarchs were invited to defend the Church of England and English liberties from James II's Catholicism and absolutist vision.

King James II, upon encountering the invading forces, inexplicably lost his nerve and withdrew to London, with his army’s leaders eventually defecting to William. James attempted to flee on 11 December, casting the Great Seal of England into the river Thames. He was later allowed to escape to France on 20 December 1688, likely by collusion on the part of William’s supporters, as his absence was crucial for the political process to proceed. William ordered the remaining English troops to withdraw, and Dutch soldiers occupied the English capital for the next 18 months.

The Constitutional Settlement of 1689

Within four months of the landing, a Convention Parliament proclaimed William and his wife Mary, James II's daughter, as co-monarchs. The Convention Parliament met on 22 January 1689. The settlement reflected the composite character of the Revolution, appealing to Whigs and Tories alike. Mary held the crown in her right as a legitimate Stuart heir and Protestant daughter of James II.

The Convention resolved that King James II had broken the contract between king and people, violated the fundamental laws, and, by withdrawing himself, had abdicated the government, thereby vacating the throne. This definition was considered a masterpiece of ambiguity, providing justification through Whig ideology (contract theory) and appeasing Tory sympathy (claiming abdication rather than deposition).

The Convention drew up a Declaration of Rights, enacted later as the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights forbade a standing army in peacetime, taxation, or lawmaking without Parliament’s consent. It guaranteed free speech in and free elections to Parliament. Crucially, the limits placed on royal finances definitively settled who possessed the power of the purse. The document declared that the power of the monarch to suspend laws was illegal. The monarch’s traditional dispensing power was only declared illegal as it had been exercised of late by James II. Roman Catholics were excluded from the crown.

The Toleration Act of 1688 commenced a trajectory that terminated the authoritarian Christian unity prevalent in the Middle Ages. Protestant dissenters were permitted to worship publicly, resulting in the opening of some 9,000 dissenting meeting houses by the end of 1690. Roman Catholics, Unitarians, and Jews were permitted to worship in private.

Nevertheless, the Church of England remained the legally established church, and the Test Acts were retained to exclude non-members from holding public office. The Glorious Revolution launched a new conception of the public sphere as a freestanding domain liberated from any authoritarian creed, marking the beginning of liberty of conscience, a revolutionary concept previously unknown.

Transformation of State and Finance

The Revolution transformed the English Empire from an authoritarian territorial empire, reliant on a large standing army, into a commercial empire focused exclusively on trade.

England was rapidly transformed from an agrarian society into a manufacturing society, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution.

The Crown was voted inadequate income by Parliament, guaranteeing that Parliament would always be needed to grant additional supply. This necessitated annual parliamentary sessions, establishing Parliament as a permanent part of the country’s government. William III was compelled to accept a new and strengthened Triennial Act in 1694, curtailing the royal prerogative by requiring new elections every three years. This era gave rise to an increasingly vigorous form of organised party politics, characterised by the rivalry between Whigs and Tories.

The Financial Revolution was central to the transformation, introducing the practice of honestly paying debts and vastly improving the crown's creditworthiness. The new system, which committed the entire nation to paying public debts, facilitated military spending on an unprecedented scale. This capacity for war funding led to the creation of the modern British state, known as the fiscal-military state, forged under the constant stresses of war, primarily against the French monarchy.

Parliament gained full control of the public purse, voting supply, auditing accounts, and controlling revenue which was thereafter regarded as public, not the monarch's. The Bank of England was chartered in 1694 to raise money for the state, with repayment guaranteed by taxation. An Amsterdam-style stock exchange was established in the City of London in 1698. The public debt, financed by parliamentary pledges, reached £48 million by 1714. The structures and practices of the English state were refashioned to enhance state power while concurrently containing it to safeguard the liberties of the subject.

The refashioning culminated in the constitutional union of England and Scotland in May 1707, forming the single United Kingdom of Great Britain with the Union Jack flag. This Union resolved the security threat posed by the possibility of the Scottish Parliament recognising a Stuart succession.

The constitutional framework established by 1714 included a monarchy run by a Parliament, a confessional state featuring two established religions (the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland), and the toleration of greater religious freedom than was found in any state except the Netherlands.

The political issues that had plagued the seventeenth century, regarding the role of Parliament, effective government finance, and the security of the Protestant religion, were effectively resolved by this period.

The Impact of Jewry on the Glorious Revolution

The Glorious Revolution marks a date of great importance when examining the emergence of Jewish power in the English-speaking world. The transition of power involved critical financial, logistical, and intelligence operations provided by Jewish figures, culminating in the fundamental restructuring of England’s financial institutions to favour creditors.

Financial Sponsorship of the Invasion

The entire campaign of William of Orange was bankrolled from start to finish by Jewish banker Francisco Suasso. Furthermore, the military effort was sustained by Jewish infrastructure, as Jewish weapons contractors Moses Machado and Solomon de Medina ensured that William III's army remained armed and fed.

The initial takeover was predominantly backed by Sephardic Jews, who financed William III in his power-grabs,. Dutch-Jews, having previously ingratiated themselves in English courts under Oliver Cromwell, also functioned as spies who assisted the Dutch invaders by supplying sensitive information concerning defensive troop deployments and movements.

Institutional Capture and Financial Restructuring

Following William III’s consolidation of power in England, the monarch immediately began the process of repaying the Jewish bankers and financiers. This reciprocation resulted in a profound alteration of the nation’s financial architecture:

• The Bank of England:

The establishment of the usurious [[Bank of England]] in 1694 was compelled by the necessity to repay the financial patrons of William's military campaign. Sephardic Jews became the main proprietors of this newly created institution.

• The Stock Exchange:

An Amsterdam-style stock exchange was established in the City of London in 1698. The Jewish money-men who accompanied King William, including de Medina, quickly achieved dominance over this new exchange.

The Rise of Financial Power and Parliament

The Revolution, described as a rebellion by a class implementing the transfer of sovereign power for its own profit, saw the triumph of Parliament, leading to an oligarchical legislative branch holding the real power.

Through this seizure of money power, Jewish finance came to dominate the English and Dutch empires.

The resulting new political structure empowered creditors by introducing financial systems which secured national debt. Parliamentary democracies proved advantageous to bankers because they committed the entire nation to paying public debts, binding the people through their elected representatives who earmarked taxes to creditors.

This security established by parliamentary finance made these new fiscal states more creditworthy than autocratic kings, who often defaulted, thereby shifting military and economic advantage to Northern Europe because of the banking class.

Thus, the banking class, viewing parliamentary democracy as a precondition for providing sound loans to governments, created a framework where national obligations were truly public and binding, irrespective of the reigning monarch. This financial capture and the resulting power of gold were understood to be more influential in deciding political and corporate success than mere objective individual merit. Jewish domination of major institutions operates through a strategy of financial, media, intellectual, and political capture.