Abstract
The Glorious Revolution led to a stronger contemporary emphasis on exceptionalism that has been of considerable importance since. The Whig tradition made much of the redefinition of parliamentary monarchy in which Parliament met every year, of regular elections (as a result of the Triennal Act of 1694), the freedom of the press (as a consequence of the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695) and the establishment in 1694 of a funded national debt. The Revolution Settlement was seen by most commentators as clearly separating Britain from the general pattern of Continental development. Indeed, to use a modern term, it was as if history had ended, for if history was an account of the process by which the constitution was established and defended, then the Revolution Settlement could be presented as a definitive constitutional settlement, and it could be argued that the Glorious Revolution had saved Britain from the general European move towards absolutism and, to a certain extent, Catholicism. In Strasburg in 1753 Voltaire told William Lee, a well-connected English tourist, that he came from ‘the only nation where the least shadow of liberty remains in Europe’.1
When Britain first from Monkish Bondage broke,
And shook off Rome’s imperious galling yoke,
When truth and reason were no longer chained
In Popish fetters, and by Priests explained,
Then wit and learning graced our happy Isle’ …
epilogue spoken at the opening of the New Theatre in Goodman’s Fields, London, Weekly Journal: or, The British Gazetteer, 8 November 1729
Hail Britain, happiest of countries! happy in thy climate, fertility, situation, and commerce; but still happier in the peculiar nature of thy laws and government. Examine every state in Europe, and you will find the people either enjoying a precarious freedom under monarchical government, or what is worse, actually slaves in a republic, to laws of their own contriving.
[Oliver Goldsmith], ‘The Comparative View of Races and Nations’, The Royal Magazine’s or Gentleman’s Monthly Companion, June 1760
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Notes
Black, ‘Meeting Voltaire’, Yale University Library Gazette, 66 (1992) pp. 168–9;
J. S. Bromley, ‘Britain and Europe in the Eighteenth Century’, History, 66 (1981) pp. 394–412, offers an excellent summary of the period.
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M. Duffy, “The Noisie, Empty, Fluttering French”. English Images of the French, 1689–1815’, History Today, 32, September 1982, pp. 21–6, a volume in the series ‘The English Satirical Print 1600–1832’; Black, ‘A Stereotyped Response? The Grand Tour and Continental Cuisine’, Durham University Journal, 83 (1991) pp. 147–53.
R. Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England1700–1830 (1992) p. 124.
There is no good general study of the eighteenth-century Continental press. The first chapter of J. Popkin’s News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac’s ‘Gazette de Leyde’ (Ithaca, 1989) is very useful.
J. Israel (ed.), The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge, 1991).
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A. M. Wilson, Diderot (New York, 1972) p. 463;
H. Honour, Neo-classicism (1968) p. 21;
T. E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1985);
J. Pappas, ‘The Revolt of the Philosophes against Aristocratic Tastes’, in P. Dukes and J. Dunkley (eds), Culture and Revolution (London, 1990) pp. 71–80;
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C. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester, 1993).
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A warning about the need to use terms such as radical and conservative with care is offered by C. Condren, ‘Radicals, Conservatives and Moderates in Early Modern Political Thought: A case of Sandwich Islands Syndrome?’, History of Political Thought, 10 (1989) pp. 525–42.
The literature on Burke’s, the Reflections and the subsequent controversy is vast. F. P. Lock, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1985)
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The most recent edition can be found in L. G. Mitchell (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. VIII: 1790–1794 (Oxford, 1989),
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A. Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979);
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P. A. Scholes, God Save the Queen! The History and Romance of the World’s First National Anthem (1954).
Auckland to the Foreign Secretary, William, Lord Grenville, 26 November 1792, London, British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Additional Manuscripts (hereafter BL. Add.), 58920 fols 178–9; J. R. Western, ‘The Volunteer Movement as an Anti-Revolutionary Force, 1793–1802’, English Historical Review, 71 (1956) pp. 603–14;
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A. Mitchell, ‘The Association Movement of 1792–3’, Historical Journal, 4 (1961) pp. 56–77;
D. E. Ginter, ‘The Loyalist Association Movement of 1792–93 and British Public Opinion’, Historical Journal, 9 (1966) pp. 179–90;
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A. Booth, ‘Popular Loyalism and Public Violence in the North-West of England 1790–1800’, Social History, 8 (1983) pp. 295–313;
J. E. Cookson, ‘The English Volunteer Movement of the French Wars, 1793–1815: Some Contexts’, Historical Journal, 32 (1989) pp. 867–91;
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A. Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century (2nd edn, London, 1960), though see p. xiv;
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For the notion of ‘a general crisis’ also affecting European colonies and the Asian and Islamic world, C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 (Harlow, 1989), pp. 164–92.
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Black, J. (1994). 1714–1815. In: Convergence or Divergence?. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23345-8_5
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