INTRODUCTION: THREE PROCESSES

The loyalist reaction that ended the crisis of 1678–83 is the subject of chapter 19. The principal force informing this too was the progress of public memory. The result was, on the face of it at least, that by 1685 the domestic struggle against royal popery and arbitrary government had disappeared. The first elections of the new reign produced the most loyalist parliament of the century.

Thus the return of the troubles only three years later was extraordinary. By the second half of 1688 England faced all its familiar features: a collapse of confidence in and obedience to the government; anti-catholic rioting and ‘tumults’, particularly in London; a collapse in the enforcement of religious uniformity and of censorship, resulting in the most substantial effusion of printed argument since 1678–83. Jonathan Israel has suggested that, ‘far from banishing ideology and philosophizing from the scene, the English revolution of 1688–9 was arguably the most intensely ideological … of all major episodes in English history’. In fact it was simply a continuation of that ideological process called the troubles.

This was only one of the remarkable occurrences of 1688–9. The second was the dramatic intervention within that context of a foreign invasion. As in 1640 this supplied the military challenge that delivered a helpless king to his enraged English subjects.