3. ‘You Will See Who They Are that Revile, and Lessen Your . . . Glorious Deliverance’. The ‘Memory War’ about the ‘Glorious Revolution’
Revolutions tend to create new pasts, or, in the words of Melinda Zook: 'Revolutionaries of modern times often imagine themselves not only as creators of a new future, but also as constructors of a new past'. Memories of the Revolution itself and of the events immediately preceding it soon became the subject of memory politics and of controversy. The newly established regime of William III and Mary II sought legitimacy by influencing memories. This chapter analyses attempts of state as well as pressure groups to shape public memory of Glorious Revolution. It examines how distinct narratives of the Revolution refer to different political and/or religious identities. In the course of a 'memory war' that began during the reign of Anne (1702-14), memories of 1688-89 were used as political weapons by rival parties. It is important to note that this development took place within the camp of supporters of the Revolution.Keywords: 'memory war'; Anne; Glorious Revolution; Mary II; Melinda Zook; religious identities; William III
The 1688 Landing of William of Orange at Torbay: Numerical Dates and Temporal Understanding in Early Modern England*
In 1932, the eminent English historian Sir Charles Firth (1857–1936) addressed some remarks to schoolteachers about the importance of dates to the study of the past. While conceding that memorizing “important dates” was perhaps “old-fashioned,” Firth nonetheless argued that familiarity with them supplied the “pegs upon which larger pieces of knowledge can be suspended.” One technique he recommended was to use “the anniversary of a great event [as] it is possible to make a class realize it better and remember more about it.” An even more useful aide-memoire was where anniversaries coincided; to illustrate this point Firth gave the example of Prince William of Orange (later England’s King William III) for whom “4 November 1650 was the date of his birth, 4 November 1677 the date of his marriage, and 4 November 1688 the date when his fleet anchored in Torbay.”1 Yet the established and widely accepted date of “William the Deliverer’s” arrival and landing on the south coast of England was actually November 5, 1688, not November 4.2 Given that Firth was only a day out, and that, as his fellow historian A. L. Rowse later said of him (quoting Horace), even “Homer occasionally nods,” it might be wondered if the faulty mnemonics of a self-confessedly “old
Chronological Writing: Its Concepts and Development
The eighteenth century, commonly hailed as the era of the birth of modern historiography, is less noted as the age also of the demise of chronology as a traditional historical form. In the past two hundred years, the modern theory of historiography has so firmly established itself that it has virtually obliterated the ancient historical techniques and assumptions of chronology and has relegated most chronological writing to the musty pigeonholes of theogony and antiquarianism.' In the very period of its decline, however the pre-Gibbonian decades of the eighteenth century and afterward chronology was so lively an invalid as to give the appearance of perfect health; its NeoClassical supporters little imagined that the kind of historical outlook they termed "universal" and the form of writing they called "true history" were in their last throes. The widespread interest in chronology during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may be traced from Archbishop Ussher to Hales, Marsham, Pezron, Bossuet, Chevreau, Jackson, Kennedy and scores of others who published chronologies.2 And the genre was praised by such illustrious men as Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, Lord Clarendon, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, and William Congreve. John Locke, in Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study, recommended chronology as the proper study for gentlemen wishing to improve their minds and understanding. Lord Chesterfield later urged his son to "study and benefit" from the pages of chronology. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the literary and moral goliath of the last half of the eighteenth century, not only praised the advantages of a "factual"