This I’ve found to be the most telling quote from ‘History of England’ so far. Before I give you Macaulay, here is the LA’s own John Kersey. The words below are from his 2013 speech to the Traditional Britain Group:
The first difficulty we face is really more of a historical phenomenon than anything else. It is that where change of a widespread and fundamental nature has occurred, it is then near-impossible to return to the status quo ante. If we look to English history, there are events – such as the Restoration of 1660 – that may seem to look backwards, but in reality constitute the combination of elements of the past and present. The most usual pattern is that of thesis – which in this example is absolute monarchy; antithesis – the Puritan Commonwealth; and then synthesis – the constitutional monarchy that constitutes the Restoration. England is very good indeed at giving the veneer of continuity to what is in fact profound change.
For some reason or other I thought of that paragraph when reading Macaulay’s chapter on the Glorious Revolution. Here is the quote I mean to share:
Thus was consummated the English Revolution. When we compare it with those revolutions which have during the last sixty years overthrown so many ancient governments we cannot but be struck by its peculiar character…
The continental revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took place in countries where all trace of the limited monarchy of the middle ages had long been effaced. The right of the prince to make laws and to levy money had, during many generations, been undisputed. His throne was guarded by a great regular army. His administration could not, without extreme peril, be blamed even in the mildest terms. His subjects held their personal liberty by no other tenure than his pleasure. Not a single institution was left which had, within the memory of the oldest man, afforded efficient protection against the utmost excesses of tyranny. Those great councils which had once curbed the regal power had sunk into oblivion. Their composition and their privileges were known only to antiquaries. We cannot wonder, therefore, that when men who had been thus ruled succeeded in wresting supreme power from a government which they had long in secret hated, they should have been impatient to demolish and unable to construct, that they should have been fascinated by every specious novelty, that they should have proscribed every title, ceremony, and phrase associated with the old system, and that, turning away with disgust from their own national precedents and traditions, they should have sought for principles in the writings of theorists, or aped, with ignorant and ungraceful affection, the patriots of Athens and Rome. As little can we wonder that the violent action of the revolutionary spirit should have been followed by reaction equally violent, and that confusion should speedily have engendered despotism sterner than that from which it had sprung.
Had we been in the same situation; had Strafford succeeded in his favourite scheme of Thorough; had he formed an army as numerous…as was formed by Cromwell; had a series of judicial decisions…transferred to the Crown the right of taxing the people; had the Star Chamber and the High Commission continued to fine, mutilate, and imprison every man who dared to raise his voice against the government; had the press been as completely enslaved here as at Vienna or Naples; had our Kings gradually drawn to themselves the whole legislative power; had six generations of Englishmen passed away without a single session of Parliament; and had we then at length risen up…against our masters, what an outbreak that would have been! With what a crash…would the whole vast fabric of society have fallen!…How many times should we have rushed wildly from extreme to extreme, sought refuge from anarchy in despotism and been again driven by despotism into anarchy! How many years of blood and confusion would it have cost us to learn the very rudiments of political science! How many childish theories would have duped us!…
These calamities our Revolution averted. It was a revolution strictly defensive, and had prescription and legitimacy on its side. Here, and only here, a limited monarchy of the thirteenth century had come down unimpaired to the seventeenth century. Our parliamentary institutions were in full vigour. The main principles of our government were excellent. They were not, indeed, formally and exactly set forth in a single written instrument; but they were to be found scattered over our ancient and noble statutes; and, what was of far greater moment, they had been engraven on the hearts of Englishmen during four hundred years. That, without the consent of the representatives of the nation, no legislative act could be passed, no tax imposed, no regular soldiery kept up, that no man could be imprisoned even for a day by the arbitrary will of the sovereign, that no tool of power could plead the royal command as a justification for violating any right of the humblest subject, were held, by both Whigs and Tories, to be fundamental laws of the realm. A realm of which these were the fundamental laws stood in need of no new constitution.
But, though a new constitution was not needed, it was plain that changes were required. The misgovernment of the Stuarts, and the troubles which that misgovernment had produced, sufficiently proved that there was somewhere a defect in our polity; and that defect it was the duty of the Convention to discover and to supply.
A longish quote. Longer to type out than to read. But it is too good not to share with those who haven’t read ‘History of England’. I tell you, it takes a while to get going and a while to get into, but this is the passage I intuitively felt that I had been waiting for.
For, while I was reading the chapters describing the Bloody Circuit, the attacks on the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Declaration of Indulgence and the Seven Bishops, the Irish chicanery, I was feeling positively anti-James II. Fuelled, also, by Sean Gabb’s ‘A Case for the Landed Aristocracy’, I began to think of how much short-term and long-term progress had been made when it comes to liberty: England had rid herself of a mad, Papist tyrant; England was to be run by benevolent and classically liberal aristocrats for the next hundred and fifty years.
But it was the above quote that helped me to see the sinister side – and there always is a sinister side to events which Whigs cheer on – of the Glorious Revolution. The government, from that day on, had legitimacy enough to burn. Taxes, accordingly, increased as did spending and debt. Britain shortly afterwards went to war with France, too, which costed, according to Jason Jewell of the Mises Institute, £5million per annum (a figure approaching twenty times the total income of James I). James II had avoided a war with France because he was a RC and because Louis was giving him a sum eventually totalling over a hundred thousand pounds on a drip-feed. Under James, we had peace, low taxes, an attempt to give Ireland back to the Irish, and an attempt to establish total freedom of religion in England. Under William of Orange, war, the first central bank, rule of Engand by multiple – albeit rich and already powerful – caretakers…
Anyway, some day soon I shall have to write something serious on this rather than merely regurgitating some Whiggism and then coming round to my own Toryism on the LA blog.
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Well said. However, here is one reason why JIIR didn’t tax very much – he didn’t have time to get his feet under the table. By 1700, he’d have gutted the Common Law and got himself a packed Commons and an Irish army. Then the gloves would have been off, and it would have been back to Ship Money and even the precedents set by Cromwell. By 1687 at the latest, he was working to a very absolutist agenda. CIIR was a better King that Macaulay allowed, but his brother was a beast who was kicked out just in time.
And I agree with you on that. In the short-term, it may have been sensible indeed. However, the method by which James was ‘deposed’ was deplorable; betrayed by Churchill, Kirke, the Bishops, the Hydes, his daughters. Chopping of his head would have been better for everyone. Parliament would have had twenty years of supremacy while young James Francis Edward grew into a man. Perhaps they would have ensured he was raised Protestant. Either way, he would not have been denied his birthright and we would not have lost ‘private government’.
Ship money is one of those iconic things the Lefties like to bring up as proof of something or other. It’s like “children sweeping chimneys”.
It’s worth remembering that Charles only levied it because the Parliament denied him his normal customary income, and they only did that because they wanted a fight.
I’ve said this often enough, I’d have fought for the Royalists at Naseby. The Puritans very nearly destroyed England, and they’re still trying all these centuries later in various guises.
Quite right. On your last point, you’re very similar to Keith Preston and to David Goldman over at The American Interest. I have only recently come round fully to this way of thinking, but now think that many of our problems can be attributed to various Protestant way of thinking and behaving.
Basic rule for British Libertarians: never trust a history written by a whig.
🙂
Macaulay is making a valuable point – by the 17th century most European countries no longer had the old limitations on the power of the monarch. Like Roman Emperors of old most European monarchs could now (not in the pass) levy taxes and “pass laws” (create new laws).
England (to a lesser extent the Kingdom of Scotland) was a “reactionary” land – a throw back to the Middle Ages, where it was still held that law was (ultimately) a matter of the judgements King in PARLIAMENT and taxes could not be levied without the consent of Parliament – there were a few other places in Europe like this, but they were dying out (as the “Enlightened Princes” took over) and it was natural to suppose that such things would die out in England also.
They did not die out – and explaining that is the central task of the historian of the 17th century.
One does not have to be admirer of Cromwell’s military dictatorship (the rule of the Major Generals), or even to admire all the policies of the post 1688 government (for example the National Debt, the Central Bank, the attacks on the private property rights of Catholics in Ireland…..) to understand that the alternative to checking the power of the monarch was much worse.
One need only look over the channel to the regime of Louis XIV (the Sun King) in France, and (for he was just an extreme example of many other monarchs) Kings in France before him – and in many other lands.
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