Eveline Cruickshanks. The Glorious Revolution. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. 126 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-312-23009-8.

Reviewed by Matthew P. Szromba (Department of History, Loyola University of Chicago)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2001)

The Inglorious Revolution

The Inglorious Revolution

The latest addition to the Macmillan/St. Martin's Press British History in Perspective Series is Eveline Cruickshanks's The Glorious Revolution. The series' widest appeal will be among an informed undergraduate audience and it is especially valuable for each volume's synthesis of newer historiographic material. Underscoring the series' pedagogical qualities are the shorter lengths and focused bibliographies of each volume.

In fourteen chapters and one hundred two pages of text, Cruickshanks sets out to cover far more than the Glorious Revolution^Ö-that is, she begins with the Restoration of Charles II and concludes with the Hanoverian succession, with two chapters dedicated to the impact of the Glorious Revolution on Scotland and Ireland respectively. Cruickshanks's study is particularly good at summarizing the mass of scholarship produced shortly after the tercentenary of the Glorious Revolution. She emphasizes much of her own work [1] and the research of historians such as Jonathan Israel and Dale Hoak, who seek to locate the Glorious Revolution in what they believe is its proper Dutch and European contexts.[2] Cruickshanks claims the European setting of the Glorious Revolution has been "long neglected by insular British historians" who, furthermore, have failed to recognize the substantial contributions of exiled British Jacobites to the history of the Continent (p. 3).

Overall, Cruickshanks' book is decidedly anti-Whig. She chooses not to dismantle piece by piece the Whig historiographic model of the Glorious Revolution, so much as replace it wholesale by focusing on the strategic European concerns of William of Orange. Considered in this manner, William III was the decisive figure in the Glorious Revolution. William's successful invasion should be viewed as a coup d'état, not a grassroots rejection of James II's rule. She maintains that "Ever since 1672 ... William had been obsessed with the French threat" to the Dutch Netherlands (p. 45). Thus, "The Dutch States and their European allies and supporters wished to bring English naval and military power to bear in a war against France, not to defend the rights of Parliament or the Church of England" (p. 25). William did not invade England by popular demand and his sole, secret aim was to seize the English throne. The author asks whether William's invasion was "achieved by what might be termed the most successful confidence trick in British history?" (p. 2). The answer is readily apparent, for Cruickshanks concludes that the "English paid for their own invasion" (p. 40).

Cruickshanks explains the success of William's invasion by stressing the overwhelming size and superb training of the Dutch army, the lack of preparedness of James's forces, and the resolve of Englishmen to avoid repeating the bloodshed of the Civil Wars. The armed invasion of England had a significant impact on the subsequent Revolution Settlement. She writes that, "Although the debates in Parliament on the transfer of the crown were relatively free and untrammelled by the constitutional convention which prevented Members from criticizing the King directly, the reality was that there was a huge Dutch army in and around London, while English troops had been sent away and those who objected were powerless" (p. 40, see also p. 97). Parliament presented William with the Declaration of Rights along side of the crown, not on condition of it. Furthermore, the author reminds us that, in the Declaration's final form, Parliament dropped many of the clauses restricting royal prerogatives.

Cruickshanks concludes that the short-term impact of the Glorious Revolution was "deeply divisive" (p. 97) and that in the long run it led to far reaching instability. Its immediate effect was to cause a bitter struggle over the royal succession, to create irreconcilable feuds between the contending political parties, to produce corruption in government, and to replace the suspending and dispensing powers of the monarch with those of Parliament. In Scotland, the post-revolutionary years witnessed the Highland War, two famines, and the debacle of the Darien Company. And Cruickshanks maintains that today's Irish troubles "arose out of the Glorious Revolution" (p. 100).

The only positive developments of the revolutionary calculus are, first, the financial revolution and its subsequent funding of Britain's world expansion and, second, the establishment of annual sessions of Parliament and, thus, tighter financial control over royal spending. Even here, Cruickshanks paints a rather gloomy picture of post-revolutionary history. "The Bill of Rights enshrined the rights and privileges of Parliament, but left the people as subjects with no basic rights as such. Parliament was an unrepresentative and self-interested body" (p. 101). Readers are likely to conclude that Cruickshanks views the Glorious Revolution as a decisively bad turning point in British History.

For all of its worthy contributions, the book is marred by factual and typographical errors. For instance, Cruickshanks refers to Charles I as the "grandfather" of James II (p. 15) and she includes a painfully confusing paragraph comparing the English Bill of Rights with the American Declaration of Independence, which she incorrectly dates as 1796. Although it is unclear, Cruickshanks is probably referring to the American Bill of Rights (1791) as that document protecting the individual civil liberties of Americans "which had not been secured in England in 1689" (p. 41).

Readers, especially undergraduate and graduate instructors, would probably like to see more balanced coverage of Whig and neo-Whig historiography. Occasionally, the author's rehabilitation of James II is too energetic. She uses John Miller's scholarship to show James's genuine moral commitment to religious toleration, but Miller's work also demonstrates that James's brand of toleration was, at times, curiously authoritarian, clumsy, and hardheaded.[3] While Cruickshanks freely admits that "In his hurry to change the political scene, James and his agents acted not only tactlessly but inefficiently" (p. 18), she gives perhaps too little credit to the unquestionable alarm that James's policies created. General readers might also benefit from more detailed discussion of research suggesting the possibilities for Stuart absolutism in the years leading up to the Glorious Revolution.[4] As overly eulogistic as traditional scholarship on the Glorious Revolution may be, John Morrill's 1991 essay, "The Sensible Revolution," still shows just how instructive a careful, exacting critique of Whig historiography can be.[5]

Given Cruickshanks's thematic and space constraints, it is unfair to expect her to produce a grand synthesis of over one hundred years of research on the Glorious Revolution. This is clearly not her purpose and, instead, she brings to light newer scholarship that properly positions the events of 1688-89 in their European context. With complementary readings, students of later Stuart history will prosper from Cruickshanks's thought-provoking revaluation of the Glorious Revolution.

[1]. A partial list of Cruickshanks' publications includes: Cruickshanks, Political Untouchables: The Tories and the ^Ñ45 (New York: Homes and Meier, 1979); Cruickshanks, ed., Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982); Cruickshanks and Jeremy Black, eds., The Jacobite Challenge (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988); Cruickshanks, ed., By Force or By Default?: The Revolution of 1688-1689 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1989); Cruickshanks, The Oglethorpes: A Jacobite Family, 1689-1760 (London: Royal Stuart Society, 1995); Cruickshanks and Edward Corp, eds., The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites (Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1995); Cruickshanks, Religion and Royal Succession: The Rage of Party (London: Royal Stuart Society, 1997); Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley, and David Hayton, ed., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1690-1715 (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2002).

[2]. See especially Jonathan Israel, ed., The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold, eds., The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688-89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

[3]. See John Miller, James II: A Study in Kingship (London: Wayland Publishers, 1978) and John Miller, "James II and Toleration," in By Force or By Default?: The Revolution of 1688-1689, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1989): 8-27.

[4]. For examples see J.R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution: The English State in the 1680s (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972); J.R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England, Revolutions in the Modern World Series (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972); Angus McInnes, "When Was the English Revolution?" History 67 (Oct 1982): 377-392; and W.A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

[5]. John Morrill, "The Sensible Revolution," in The Anglo Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact, ed. Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 73-104.

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Citation: Matthew P. Szromba. Review of Cruickshanks, Eveline, The Glorious Revolution. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. June, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5217

Copyright © 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.