[Militant No. 904, 8th July 1988, p. 8-9]
The events of 1688 had a happy ending for the ruling class. Without any real conflict, the dangerous James II was replaced by the admirable William and Mary. The contending factions, Whigs and Tories, were harmoniously united in adopting the Bill of Rights.
By Lynn Walsh
This sealed a constitutional settlement which marked out the ground on which the fledgling capitalist class could thrive and prosper. Above all, the change was accomplished without arousing any threatening movements of the lower orders.
It was more like a palace coup than a social transformation. But the bountiful results of this easy victory for the propertied classes quickly led 1688 to be called the ‚Glorious Revolution‘.
This year the powers that be are staging colourful celebrations for the tercentenary. They will aim to reaffirm the idea that Britain has been uniquely blessed by the steady growth of cabinet government based on parliament. This, it is claimed, all stemmed from the Glorious Revolution, which established the ’supremacy of parliament‘ and the ‚independence of the judiciary‘.
The British system of government, now supposedly perfect, evolved peacefully through the gradual unfolding of liberal principles and institutions. In this story the class struggle has no place. The steady, almost inevitable, process did not require brute force or the disturbing involvement of mass movements.
In contrast to ‘Glorious’ 1688, the English revolution and civil war, which awakened and mobilised radical plebeian forces, is still regarded as a ‘Great Rebellion‘. The period of Parliamentary and Cromwellian rule, when sweeping changes were carried through, is known as the ‘interregnum’, a regrettable gap between two periods of legitimate rule.
This is the myth which will be taken out for another ceremonial airing in 1988. The capitalist class sought to destroy the memory of its own revolutionary path to power as soon as possible. It perpetuates the mythology in an effort to imbue the populace with a servile respect for the established order of things.
To cut through this we have to examine the real history of the rise of capitalism and its state organisation.
* * *
The Glorious Revolution was the closing act of the English revolution. After the ebb and flow of revolution and reaction, the contending factions of the ruling class reached a compromise. The old landowning aristocracy and the rising capitalist class agreed on a form of the state and broad policy which would secure their joint control of society.
Whigs and Tories united to block James II’s attempt to revive monarchical absolutism. They cemented the crucial early gains of the revolution, secured by parliament in 1640-42, which placed the executive and taxation under parliamentary control.
1688 was ‚glorious‘ because it was peaceful. Had James chosen to fight it out there would have been another bloody round of civil war. Instead, he fled and his support evaporated.
But James II could be chased off in 1688 only because Charles I had been executed in 1649. The peaceful gains of 1688 were made possible by the violent events of 1640-57. Glorification of 1688 was a deliberate effort to bury the revolution through which the new ruling class had gained power. Popular involvement in class struggle was not conducive to respect for the new order.
The parliamentary leaders had not set out to destroy the monarchy. Within the old framework, however, they had no way of controlling the king. The propertied interests who were coming together to form a new ruling class – a bourgeois or capitalist class – were denied decisive control of the state.
Charles I’s refusal to compromise compelled them to go the whole way. The feudal-monarchical structure was incompatible with the development of commercial farming, trade, and manufacturing – the interests which now dominated in parliament.
In order to smash the monarchy, the church and the old landowning class, the parliamentary leaders had mobilised wide sections of the peasantry, rural labourers, artisans, journeymen. and small traders. As in all revolutionary movements, it was the most downtrodden and exploited sections of society who provided the driving force.
In the course of the struggle, more and more radical demands were raised from below. These mainly took a religious form, but they expressed the discontents and aspirations of the plebeian layers. These were the great forerunners of the working class which developed later with the growth of industrial capitalism.
The Levellers, for instance, demanded the vote for all adult males (some included women as well). The Diggers demanded the overthrow of all forms of landed property.
Once they had gained their own objectives, the parliamentary grandees drew back in fear of a flood-tide of radical democracy and social overturn. “Liberty cannot be provided for in a general sense,“ said Ireton , Cromwell’s son-in-law, “ if property (is to) be preserved”.
Cromwell, after purging the magnificent, democratic army which had assured his victories, took power into his own hands. He became the self-proclaimed Lord Protector of the ’nation‘, i.e. of the propertied classes. He was the prototype for Napoleon and the modern military Bonapartists who step into the breach when a revolution reaches deadlock.
After Cromwell’s death there were inevitably moves to restore the monarchy. In 1660 Charles II was handed back the throne. The royal figurehead symbolised the return to law and order, to a stable social structure based on proper rank and hierarchy. Restoration, said Lord Clarendon, “raised up those banks and fences which had been cast down”.
Charles II returned on the terms of the ruling class, and largely contented himself with the trappings of monarchy. But his son, James II, who was a devout Catholic, attempted to reactivate royal powers. His moves to build up an army, secretly financed by Louis XIV of France, raised the spectre of unrestrained counter-revolution.
The ruling circles, with amazing unanimity (reinforced by anti-catholic riots in London) looked to Prince William of Orange for salvation. Patriotism, usually the favourite talisman of the ruling class, took second place to material self-interest.
William’s marriage to James II’s protestant daughter, Mary, gave him the semblance of a claim to the English throne. His home state of the Netherlands would be a valuable capitalist ally against the feudal dynasties of France and Spain. His powerful army (for the services of which William later presented an enormous bill) guaranteed a rapid transition.
The Bill of Rights maintained the fiction that James, through fleeing, had abdicated, thus leaving the throne vacant. William and Mary were invited to assume the throne as joint monarchs, with the succession carefully mapped out. The ‚divine right of kings‘ was finished. William and Mary occupied the throne on the basis of a capitalist contract.
Though William had some independence, particularly in foreign and military policy, the monarchy existed from then on purely to legitimise the executive powers which had been transferred decisively into the hands of the new ruling class.
* * *
Underlying the ‘Glorious Revolution’ was a compromise. The bourgeois revolution was not taken the whole way. The capitalist class had not reached political maturity. and was in any case held back by its fear of popular radicalisation.
The traditional ruling families, an aristocratic oligarchy, were therefore allowed to hold on to their monopoly of political power – and the spoils of office! In return they now based themselves on the needs of capitalist development. This deal was highly profitable for
both parties.
The compromise was clearly reflected in the constitutional settlement of 1688.
Parliament was now ’supreme‘. But this still included the House of Lords, also restored in 1660. This totally undemocratic, hereditary body, with decisive powers of veto over the Commons, guaranteed the interests of the old landowning class. For well over a century the Lords blocked the extension of voting rights, religious toleration and social reform.
Even today the Lords remains as a counter-weight which the ruling class can deploy against any elected government which comes under dangerous pressure from a radicalised working class.
After 1688 the Commons, moreover, rested on an extremely narrow electoral base. There were only about 4.5 million electors, about 15 per cent of the adult population. They were mostly big landowners and gentry, with a few town burgesses.
Through bribery and corruption the oligarchy soon gained complete domination over this electorate , allowing the ruling cliques to manipulate parliament from behind the scenes.
Only 150 years later, through the 1832 reform act, did the industrial capitalists themselves gain the vote. For a brief period parliament exerted a direct influence over the executive.
However, as the capitalist class was forced, step by step, to concede the vote to sections of the working class (in 1867, 1884, 1918 and 1927), parliament was more and more distanced from real power. The executive was once again concentrated into the hands of a ruling oligarchy.
In the eighteenth century it was a coterie of Whig and Tory Iandowners. Today it is an elite based on big business and finance capital.
Another aspect of the 1688 settlement – one which was long ago abandoned – was the prohibition against a standing army in peace time . The ruling class wanted to guard against any return to the rule of Cromwellian major-generals or royalist dictatorship.
In the following period, this limitation was generally observed. Nevertheless, the army was always kept up to the “minimum required for internal police purposes … the soldiers were normally called out to suppress riots or even strikes of discontented workmen.”
Later, when a chasm opened up between the ruling minority and the working class, a large standing army became the norm, regardless of the Bill of Rights.
‘Peace time’, however, was a long time coming after 1688. William’s accession opened up over a hundred years of war, mainly against the French and Spanish feudal empires. Starting with Marlborough’s campaigns, the up-and-coming British capitalists fought for economic domination in Europe.
At the same time, British adventurers, financed by the City of London and backed by the navy, ruthlessly grabbed as many colonial territories as possible from their rivals. In West Africa, the Caribbean and North America, they laid the foundations of a world-wide economy built on barbarous human slavery.
As so often, peaceful compromise at home went with the unstinting use of force abroad – and in Scotland and Ireland, as well.
The Scottish capitalists threw in their lot with their English partners. In return for seats at Westminster and autonomy for the Presbyterian church and the Scottish legal system, they gave up Scotland’s parliament.
Their real gain from the 1707 Union, however, was access to English markets and a share in colonial spoils. The subsequent Jacobite risings (‚Jacobite‘ derives from the Latin version of James II’s name), based mainly on the highland clans, were brutally suppressed.
But it was above all in Ireland where the Glorious Revolution had the most sanguinary results. The bloodshed from this supposedly bloodless revolution has stained three hundred years of Irish/British history.
William’s armies crossed to Ireland. At the Boyne (1690) and elsewhere they scored decisive victories over the Jacobite and Irish forces – battles forever engraved in Irish history and mythology.
In the North, the settlement secured the position of Protestant settlers. This was the ground on which, in a later period, the reactionary Orange Order was built. King Billy achieved the status of a patron saint.
In the South, William’s military victories secured the rule of the so-called Anglo-Irish ‘Ascendancy’. This was based on a tiny minority of English landlords. They accepted capitalism in Britain provided they could keep feudalism in Ireland.
To maintain their grip, these parasitic exploiters suppressed all democratic rights, persecuted Catholics, and trampled on the Irish language and culture.
All the conditions were laid in Ireland, at that time, for the explosive revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The bloody legacy of that ‚peaceful (capitalist) compromise‘ has yet to be overcome by the working class.
* * *
On 20 July the dignitaries of capitalism will assemble at Westminster to congratulate themselves on the 300 years of peace and stability inaugurated by the settlement of 1688-89.
However, the relative stability of British capitalism was not the product of magnificent constitutional scaffolding devised by inspired statesmen. It flowed from the economic success of the system in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the market mechanism and the drive for profit still played an historically progressive role in developing production.
So long as they could secure long-term increases in the living standards of a majority in society, the capitalists could afford to concede democratic rights to the working class.
The parliamentary form of government, with the state and the economy firmly under the control of big business, was generally the cheapest and most effective form of capitalist rule.
This was the basis of social peace and political compromise, though British history was nevertheless punctuated by periods of crisis and intense class struggle.
The era of progressive capitalist development, however, has gone for ever. British capitalism, despite the current, very superficial ‚boom‘, has entered a path of ‚irreversible decline‘.
Despite the temporary, faltering recovery of the world economy (mainly fuelled by the United States‘ budget and trade deficits), the long post-war upswing has exhausted itself.
Events in the next few years, which will trigger tumultuous movements of the working class, will shatter the brittle facade of capitalist stability and harmonious international relations.
The obsolescence of British capitalism is expressed in the policies of Thatcherism.
In a desperate attempt to restore the profitability of the ailing British monopolies, the Tories are ruthlessly clawing back the living standards, welfare services and democratic rights won by the workers in the past.
They have been able to get away with this because of the bankruptcy of the Labour leaders, who are incapable of mobilising the working class against the bosses‘ offensive.
Thatcherism, however, is preparing the ground for volcanic eruptions from within society. Historic pageants and time-honoured constitutional totems will make no difference.
One spokesman of the ruling class, at least, recognised that the Tories‘ complacency is blind. Speaking before the 1983 general election, Roy Jenkins, Labour renegade and Social Democrat, issued a grave warning to the capitalists.
Thatcher might win “for the time being,” he said, but “everything will be put into a hideous melting pot for the future.” Her policies, he warned, would prepare the way for the time when “a change of government would be a crisis of regime” – in other words, the whole political structure and the state (which Jenkins defends) would be called into question.
There would be the danger of a left-wing Labour government which “would mean reversal and upheaval such as we have not seen since the 17th century.” In short, Thatcherism is creating the conditions for revolution.
This observation – whatever the exact time-scale – remains true today. In his sober appraisal of the direction of British society, Jenkins is far more realistic than those revelling in the glorification of 1688.
Even in the 17th century, the dominant property-owning minority was challenged by the radical representatives of those who toiled to produce the wealth. This was before factories and industrial cities had forged them into a modern proletariat.
But today the capitalists face an immensely powerful working class. All that it lacks in order to assume its historic role and take over the leadership of society is consciousness of its own strength and clear socialist aims – and this will be developed through the great events which are on the agenda.
When the capitalist dignitaries and hangers-on assemble to congratulate themselves on their glorious past, they should pause to consider the words of Marx’s friend and collaborator, Frederick Engels.
The British working men and women, he said, are the firstborn children of modern industry – and they will not be the last to undertake the social revolution for the emancipation of working people!
Chronology
Revolution and Counter-Revolution
1629
Charles I dissolves parliament
1634-40
Charles‘ attempt to levy ’ship money‘ provokes opposition
1640
Long Parliament meets
1641
Royal prerogatives abolished, parliament’s powers extended
1642
Civil war begins
1645
New Model Army created
1646
King surrenders
1647
Levellers, Diggers, raise radical revolt within Army and Parliamentary ranks
1648
Second civil war, defeat of King
1649
Trial and execution of Charles II
1649-53
Government by single-chamber assembly, the Rump parliament
1653
Cromwell dissolves rump and rules as Lord Protector
1657
Cromwell nominates an Upper House
1658
Death of Cromwell
1660
Restoration of Charles II and Lords
1685
Succession of James II
1688
William of Orange invades by invitation, James II flees: the ‚Glorious Revolution‘
1689
The Bill of Rights
1690
Battles of the Boyne
1702
Accession of Queen Anne
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