It is certainly easier to see the religious outcome of William of Orange's accession to the throne of England as an abatement in the practice of persecution than as a firm espousal of the principle of tolerance. There remains ample disagreement about the implications of this aspect of the Revolution settlement; but there is relatively little dispute at present about its causes. Jonathan Clark, for example, has recently insisted at some length that the Revolution of 1688 left England as still very much an ancien regime, its national society firmly framed by a state founded upon the political privileges of its first two estates: the clergy of its state church and a landed aristocracy (Clark 1985,1986). How much real light is shed by this comparison, either on the nature of English society itself or on the societies of Europe's absolutist monarchies, is eminently contestable (cf. esp. Innes 1987). But there is at least a measure of demythologizing astringency to the claim that post-Revolution England was every bit as much a confessional state as France had been during the protracted interval between the issuing and Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In contrast with these residual ideological provocations, however, recent historians seem relatively united in their interpretations of the pressures that determined the form of the Revolution's religious settlement: a series of unelevated and provisional political solutions to what were plainly seen as delicate and highly immediate political problems.