Page 11 - History 2020

7. What were the consequences of 1688, short and long term?
In the short run the 1688 Revolution did nothing to end the political instability of the
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17 century. A new rivalry developed between two factions, the Whigs and the
Tories. They were originally derogatory terms*: Whiggamore, meaning a drover or
horse-thief, was a Scottish word applied to Presbyterian rebels; Toraigh, meaning an
outlaw or bandit, was an Irish word applied to Catholic rebels. These terms were first
used during the 1679 “Exclusion Crisis”; the Whigs tried to have James excluded from
becoming King because he was a Catholic. The Tories supported James becoming King
despite him being Catholic because he was the legitimate heir.

After this, Whig and Tory became names for the two broad political factions in British

politics; Whigs favoured parliament and religious Dissenters and Non-Conformists,
and had a certain leaning towards rebellion (1688 was a Whig project); while Tories
favoured the Stuart monarchy and the Established Anglican Church (and a degree of
tolerance for Catholics) and had a general leaning towards established authority.
These were loose factions not formal political parties, which in the modern sense
only began in the 1860’s.

* A useful modern analogy might be mods and rockers*. Obviously, Tories mods, Whigs rockers.

After 1688 the political rivalry between the Whigs and Tories grew ever more bitter;
“the rage of party”. The new regime was thought to exclusively favour the Whigs,
though this changed over William’s reign, and Queen Anne later fell out with her
Whig ministers for personal reasons. When the new King George I arrived from

Hanover in 1714 he was furious with the Tories for making peace with France; he
immediately dismissed the Tory ministry. The incoming Whig ministers tried to have
them impeached by parliament for treason (the last occasion on which this was
attempted) and even sent Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford to the Tower. The rage of
party didn’t seem to be subsiding.

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And yet, it did. As we’ll see in the next session, the instability of the 17 century gave
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way to stability in the 18 . We need to discuss how and why this remarkable change
occurred.

Conclusion: how “Glorious” was the Revolution of 1688?
The greatest significance of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was not that it
guaranteed parliamentary supremacy over the monarch. It was simpler than that:
1688 got rid of our last ever Catholic monarch. The 1701 Act of Succession then
guaranteed that there would never be another. As Richard Tombs says (“The English

and their History”, 2014), these two events “removed at a stroke the main cause of