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
II. Burke and the Ancient Constitution—a Problem in the History of Ideas
The intention of this paper is to inquire into Burke's doctrine of traditionalism—as it may be termed—from a point of view not quite identical with that usually adopted. The aspect of Burke's thought thus isolated may or may not be the most important or the most characteristic, but it is the most familiar and that with which the student first becomes acquainted. Burke held—to summarize what may be found in a hundred text-books on the history of conservatism—that a nation's institutions were the fruit of its experience, that they had taken shape slowly as the result, and were in themselves the record, of a thousand adjustments to the needs of circumstance, each one of which, if it had been found by trial and error, to answer recurrent needs, had been preserved in the usages and established rules of the nation concerned. He also held that political knowledge was the fruit of experience and that reason in this field had nothing to operate on except experience; from which it followed that, since the knowledge of an individual or a generation of individuals was limited by the amount of experience on which it was based, there was always a case for the view that the reason of the living, though it might clearly enough discern the disadvantages, might not fully perceive the advantages of existing and ancient institutions, for these might contain the fruits of more experience than was available to living individuals as the sum of their personal or reported experience of the world. It also followed that since the wisdom embodied in institutions was based on experience and nothing but experience, it could not be completely rationalized, that is, reduced to first principles which might be clearly enunciated, shown to be the cause of the institutions' first being set up, or employed to criticize their subsequent workings. There was, in short, always more in laws and institutions than met the eye of critical reason, always a case for them undiminished by anything that could be said against them.