CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

With the recovery of its international context the complexity of the ‘glorious revolution’ and its consequences is increasingly remarked upon. There is something revealing, in this respect, about the domination of recent publication on this subject by collections of essays. As the introduction to one has remarked, ‘no new narrative’ has yet emerged.

This complexity follows not only from the internationality of these circumstances but from the resulting relationship between continuity and change. Between 1688 and 1714 the fortunes of the United Provinces, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, the Habsburg monarchy and Spain were more than ever dependent upon the outcome of the military struggle between them. Like the Thirty Years War in its time this committed resources on a scale unprecedented in European history. The result was to transform not only this European relationship but the internal political and economic landscape of England. This latter transformation was so rapid and spectacular that the word ‘revolution’ is now back in fashion to describe it. Indeed it has been argued that, ‘revisionism’ having cut all other seventeenth-century revolutions down to size, ‘the financial revolution’ survives pre-eminent. By comparison, the revolutionary status of the events of 1688–9 themselves has become unclear.