If one attempts to place the two Revolutions of 1640–60 and 1688–89 in the perspective of the long-term evolution of English history, they appear as dramatic surface eruptions bubbling up out of a century-long pool of turbulence and instability.

For precisely one hundred years, from 1621 to 1721, it was as if a seismic rift had opened up within the English political nation—a kind of San Andreas Fault. The rift first became obvious in the stormy parliamentary debates of 1621, and was finally sealed over with the secure ascendancy of Sir Robert Walpole and the Whigs in...

This kind of government [of the church] God doth not manage according to the wisdom and thoughts, no not of his very people, but wholly according to the counsel of his own will and the thoughts of his own heart: doing things that they must not know yet, but must know afterwards; yea, such things as for the present seem absurd and absolutely destructive.—William Dell,The Way of True Peace and Unity in the True Church of Christ(1651), inSeveral Sermons and Discourses(1709), p. 225.

The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually...

Whether or not what happened in England during the mid-seventeenth century amounted to a revolution and, if so, of what kind, should perhaps be left to other contributors in this volume.¹ Or so it may seem. Nonetheless, it is impossible to discuss changes in the ruling groups without some idea of the range of possible explanations for the events of which such changes formed a part.

Few historical interpretations are strictly logical and pure in form. Most historians are a muddled lot, and certainly do not operate like philosophers. As to the type of explanation favored, we may distinguish between...

In 1644, at the height of the English Civil War, the Earl of Manchester, a leading parliamentary general, observed: “If we beat the king nine and ninety times he is king still, but if the king beat us but once we shall be hanged and our posterity made slaves.”¹ The Earl recognized a crucial motif not just of the English Revolution of 1641 but of those of 1688 and 1776—all three of these British Revolutions were about monarchy, and as a result of them (to go against chronology) one King lost his empire, a second his throne, and a...

Although the Whig interpretation of history is nowadays out of fashion, there are still many historians whose approach to the history of the seventeenth century owes more to the teleological Whig historical framework than they would care to admit, or, perhaps, are even aware of. For it is of the essence of the Whig view that it is those historical figures whose actions conduced toward checking royal power and fostering the growth of representative institutions to whom the historian should look as the true innovators. Conversely, their opponents are the traditionalist resisters of change. It is true that the greatest...

For each of the Revolutions under discussion in this volume, there is one document which may be regarded as encapsulating the aspirations and the political principles of the revolutionary leaders. For the English Civil War, the Nineteen Propositions, issued by the two Houses of Parliament in June 1642 to ensure the supremacy of Parliament, may be selected as such a statement. It enjoyed little success: it was rejected by Charles I and refuted by a far more important statement, Charles I’sAnswer to the Nineteen Propositions,and it precipitated the Civil War which broke out two months later. For the...

To call my paper “Two American Revolutions” is, at the outset, a deliberate arrogance. My purpose in doing so does not stem from a fit of bicentennial chauvinism, but is rather an attempt to redress politely the imbalance which the title of this volume seems to imply. English and British these Revolutions were, but what I seek to explain, in focusing on the colonies in 1689 and 1776, is that they were American Revolutions, too, or that they were both British and American, and that they make more sense when seen in this light. Still, in the light of most...

We come at last to consider a truly British revolution; one which even involves a revolt against being British. In 1641 and 1688 the kingdom of Great Britain did not exist, and the events in Scotland which preceded one English Revolution in 1637 and followed another in 1689 took place in what was still, though it was ceasing to be, an autonomous political culture; while the unsuccessful last stands of the Old Irish and Old English aristocracies in 1641 and 1689 occurred in an Ireland whose political development had not yet reached the point where so sophisticated a term as...

Taken together, several of the other essays in this volume raise again a venerable but still fascinating question: why did the Americans exult over the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 and bitterly reject the results of that Revolution less than a hundred years later? It was the Glorious Revolution, in John Murrin’s words, that established a “permanent role for Parliament in the governance of the realm”; yet few historians would disagree with J.G.A. Pocock’s conclusion that a powerful cause of the American Revolution was the discovery that “sovereignty was legislative and therefore unsharable. . . . Parliament must legislate for...

English radicalism in the age of the American Revolution was a complex, disparate, and often paradoxical phenomenon. Advocacy of some measure of structural political reform, together with support for the North Americans who eventually concluded that it was necessary to sever the umbilical cord between the mother country and the thirteen colonies, was never the exclusive provenance of any single group or the function of any one ideology. Nevertheless such sentiments were predominantly those of men drawn from the middle ranks of society, and they derived their ideological force from a political and religious tradition that was humanist, neoclassical, and...

Americans have always shared one conviction about their Revolution: it was a good thing for the United States and the entire world.¹ The revolutionary generation believed that its principles would benevolently affect social conditions, agriculture, political economy, the fine arts, and even basic demographic trends. Only now are many of these themes being recovered. In the nineteenth century, constitutional questions became increasingly separable from broad social issues in a way that the eighteenth century had never imagined. Thus early chroniclers of the Revolution began to lose some of the movement’s context even while quoting directly from its fundamental documents.

They...