The Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 has been regarded primarily as an episode in English domestic politics and has rarely been considered as a European event. Since the tercentenary of the Revolution, a lot has been done to correct this picture. Now it is clear, for example, that without Prince William’s powerful military intervention, which was carried out with the full support of the States General of the United Provinces, the Revolution would have been impossible. It should also be pointed out, however, that if William had succeeded in organising a powerful anti-French alliance during the early 1680s, he may not have intervened in England at the end of the decade. The timing and circumstances of William’s intervention can only be understood within the context of European events, which should not be confined to Western Europe. This article seeks to explain the interrelationships between the parallel events of the 1680s in the eastern and western parts of the Continent. It argues that the Thököly Uprising played a major part in frustrating William’s plans of organising a powerful anti-French coalition and delayed the Nine Years’ War (King William’s War) against France until 1688.
According to the “ancient constitution” of the Kingdom of England, the overseas dominions fully belonged to the king’s prerogative (dominium regale). For that reason, the legal structure of the seventeenth century American colonies was shaped independently by the Crown. The first Stuarts limited themselves only to establish the legal frames of the private colonies, making them nearly sovereign entities. In order to strengthen the navigation system, introduced by the republican government (1651), Charles II created the base for the centralized royal Dominion in America. Subsequent Crown’s endeavors managed by the Committee of Privy Council for Trade and Plantations (Lords of Trade), which was organized in 1675, brought to the settlement of James’s II Dominion of New England (1686–89). This process was suddenly broken by the events of the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89, which led to the fall of the Dominion of New England and significantly diminished the Crown oversight of the colonies. As far as this paper is concerned, in opposition to the situation in England, the constitutional effects of the Glorious Revolution in America were not longstanding. Because the victorious Parliament was aware mainly for maintenance of the navigation system, the colonies were left under the king’s prerogative. Owing to that, in 1696 William III nominated royal Commissioners for Trade and Plantations (Board of Trade) to govern the overseas dominions. In that way, Parliament consented for the exclusion of the American colonists from the privileges guaranteed by the new constitutional rules. Such a policy occurred to be the cause for their future mutiny, which led to the fall of the First British Empire.
James II inherited the throne from his elder brother Charles only because there was not any male heir. Even the Parliament wanted to exclude him from succession, that was the exclusion crisis of 1679-1681. The Tory propaganda published Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha to argue for the primogeniture principle, i.e. for the James’s title to the throne. That work introduced patriarchalism in which overlap the concepts of family and society and the authority of a father and the monarch. Therefore the monarch as the father of the nation ruled over the society that was considered to be a great family. He demanded unconditional obedience from the society just as the father demands it from the members of his family. Since Sir Robert Filmer’s name was connected to James’s right to the throne and to the conservative royalist Tory propaganda, my incentive was to examine whether James himself applied patriarchalism and the Filmer’s concepts in his political writings. This is the law (norms) in books if we apply the terms of the law in effect to the past. However, the aim of this article is to compare these norms with the practice found in the James’s declarations, proclamations, and deeds. The result of this comparison would be the law in action. Thus, the aim of this comparison is to reveal patriarchalism in James’s writings and after that to examine whether any characteristics of it can be found in his deeds and decrees of his administration. I mean especially three deeds: his coronation, the cure of the King’s evil (scrofula), and the practice of giving mercy to victims. Among the decrees I mean particularly the decrees issued during putting out the revolts against his reign. In the first two cases he was successful, however, he lost the throne to William of Orange and was expelled from it.
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