Blair Worden
Far From Glorious
The Glorious Revolution: 1688 – Britain’s Fight for Liberty
By Edward Vallance
Little, Brown 372pp £20 order from our bookshop
The far Left and the far Right have agreed about few things in English history, but one of them is the iniquity of the Revolution of 1688–9, which mainstream opinion credits with the emergence of parliamentary rule and of constitutional and personal liberties. The Right’s case has been straightforward: the Revolution overthrew the legitimate monarch. To the Left, from radical Whigs in the late seventeenth century to Tony Benn in the late twentieth, the Revolution has seemed a missed opportunity and a betrayal. It failed to make the executive properly accountable, and did nothing for the poor and oppressed. When the dust settled, Stuart absolutism had merely yielded to the rapacious Hanoverian oligarchy.
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