On Monday 20 July 1789, Henry Beaufoy, MP for Great Yarmouth, moved the third reading of a bill he had sponsored through the House of Commons for instituting a perpetual commemoration of the 1688 Revolution. The bill was a relatively simple one, seeking merely to insist that in December every year, clergy in the Church of England would read out the Bill of Rights, thereby reminding their congregations of the events that had seen James II expelled and William III and Mary II installed as monarchs.

Beaufoy’s bill had to compete with other rather more urgent measures. These included one for continuing an Act passed in the previous session for regulating the shipping of enslaved people in British ships from the coast of Africa; and another for granting over £20,000 towards defraying the costs of the Warren Hastings trial, which had commenced the previous year and would continue to annoy the House until 1795. Consequently, it was late in the day when Beaufoy got to his feet and, although his motion carried by 23 votes to 14, it was determined that as the House now lacked the requisite 40 members present to make a quorum, the Commons should adjourn.

Next day, Beaufoy tried again. Once more, there was opposition. During the two days when the bill was debated objections were raised by Sir William Dolben and Sir Joseph Mawbey, the latter arguing that Beaufoy was merely mimicking the Whig Club in seeking popularity, while Henry James Pye considered the measure ridiculous as it would result in two commemorative events each year. Others were warmly in favour, though and, when it came to a division, the motion to give the bill a third reading was carried. Following a failed effort by Mawbey to introduce an amendment granting to each clergyman required to read the declaration 20 shillings, the bill was passed and sent up to the Lords. [Commons Journal, xliv. 543-7]

Beaufoy’s bill had its origins in the centenary celebrations of the Revolution, which had been marked across the country the previous autumn. Like his bill, not everything had proceeded smoothly. Not least, there were obvious rivalries between the clubs and societies heading up the various events. There was even disagreement on precisely when to mark the day. The Revolution Society had chosen 4 November, on the basis that this was both William III’s birthday (and wedding anniversary) and the day that he had made landfall. The Constitution Club, on the other hand, chose to hold its entertainment on 5 November, which chimed with the date chosen by John Tillotson (soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury), when preaching his 1689 commemorative sermon. It also echoed celebrations of the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot and this dinner was rounded off with toasts to the ‘three eights’: 1588 (Armada), 1688 and 1788. [Gazetteer and Daily Advertiser, 6 November 1788]

Aside from somewhat petty disagreements about whether 4 or 5 November was most apt, several of the societies also had strikingly different political outlooks and exhibited fierce rivalry. Speaking at the Whig Club, Richard Sheridan concluded his remarks with proposing a subscription for erecting a monument to the Revolution, which appeared to get off to a fine start with £500 being pledged almost at once. The plan was for the edifice to be located at Runnymede, emphasizing the links between the safeguarding of English liberty with Magna Carta, and the completion of the process with William of Orange’s successful invasion.

Not everyone liked the idea of a physical monument, though, and when the proposal was read out at other clubs, it received either muted or downright hostile responses. Speaking at the Constitution Club’s dinner at Willis’ Rooms, presided over by Lord Hood and featuring around 700 diners, John Horne Tooke made no secret of his contempt for the Whig Club’s plan. It was at this meeting that Beaufoy first raised his idea for a day of commemoration to be legislated for by Parliament, though at least one paper reported that his speech had been drowned out by the noise around him.

Elsewhere, there was more harmony. One of the grandest celebrations of 1688 took part at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, where Thomas Coke (future Earl of Leicester) laid on a spectacular firework display as well as mounting a recreation of William’s landing at Brixham having brought in squadrons of horses and loaded them onto miniature ships, which were launched on a canal. Perhaps the most evocative event, though, was one of many held in London taverns, where an unidentified man, said to be 112 years old, was reported to have been in attendance and chaired by the company. According to the paper he was one of ten centurions residing in the French hospital on Old Street, but at 112 he was likely the only one of them who actually remembered the Revolution taking place. [E. Johnson’s British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, 9 November 1788]

All of this was cast thoroughly into the shade by the very unhelpful timing of the king’s illness, which had commenced that summer but become steadily more acute through October and finally reached a crisis on the symbolic date of 5 November. The Prince of Wales had been on his way to Holkham to take part in Coke’s celebrations, but was forced to turn back after being alerted to the king’s deteriorating condition. At a time when the stalwarts of the Revolution Settlement were trying to make the case for the stability it had provided in settling the throne on the House of Brunswick, the prospect of a king no longer able to fulfil his constitutional functions was a disaster.

By the time Beaufoy finally made his motion in the Commons, the king had recovered but that did not ease the progress of what always seems to have been a rather unwanted bill. Having made its way through the Commons, the measure was presented to a thinly attended House of Lords on Thursday 23 July 1789, and a motion for the bill to be given a first reading was moved by Earl Stanhope – a leading member of the Revolution Society.

Stanhope’s motion was objected to by the Bishop of Bangor, who insisted that a prayer was already said for the Revolution in church each year. Stanhope attempted to argue in favour of the ‘pious and political expediency’ of the bill, insisting that the event was not commemorated satisfactorily in church. [Oracle, 24 July] The Lord Chancellor left the wool sack to enable him to offer his own opinions on the matter, backing up Bangor’s view and arguing the bill to be absurd, before a final contribution was made in favour of the proposed measure by the Earl of Hopetoun. The motion for the first reading was then negatived by six votes to 13, after which the Lords resolved without more ado to throw the unwanted bill out. [Diary or Woodfall’s Register, 24 July; The World, 24 July] Sheridan’s wish for a grand monument met with a similar fate, though an obelisk celebrating the centenary was raised at Kirkley Hall near Ponteland in Northumberland, by Newton Ogle, Dean of Winchester, and another at Castle Howe near Kendal in Cumbria.

As far as commemoration of 1688 was concerned this was far from the end of the story. Two centuries on, the tercentenary witnessed an unusual expression of unity from the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock. Moving a humble address to the Queen, expressing the House’s ‘great pleasure in celebrating the tercentenary of these historic events of 1688 and 1689 that established those constitutional freedoms under the law which Your Majesty’s Parliament and people have continued to enjoy for three hundred years’, Thatcher was answered by Kinnock, agreeing that it was: ‘a worthy act, not only because it celebrates a significant advance, as the Prime Minister just said, but because it requires us all to consider the character of our democracy…’

Father of the House, Sir Bernard Braine, was next to speak. He welcomed the rare moment of political harmony and underlined the key principal about what 1688 meant to everyone in the chamber:

‘It is the knowledge that the parliamentary system which we jointly serve is greater than the sum total of all who are here at any one time.’

RDEE

Further Reading:

John Brooke, King George III (1972)

Journals of the House of Commons

Journals of the House of Lords

Griffin is profiled in more detail in our House of Lords 1660-1715 volumes. Published in 2016 and not yet available online, you can find out more about the publication here.

On 22 January 1689, after a space of almost four years, Parliament returned to Westminster following the elections called in the wake of William of Orange’s invasion. Technically, this was not a true Parliament, but a convention, but most of the familiar elements were there in place to settle the crisis. Initially, attention was concentrated on how best to resolve the question of James II’s decision to flee the country: was the throne vacant or not and, if it was, who should occupy it? Gradually, those in favour of a moderate settlement lost ground to more radical voices, and Lords and Commons agreed ultimately that the throne was vacant and that it should be offered to William and Mary jointly. At the same time enquiries were established to look into some of the controversial actions of the 1680s, in particular the convictions and executions of William, Lord Russell, and Algernon Sidney.

While such great matters of state were being addressed, a less obvious drama was also played out. Before fleeing to the continent in December 1688 James II raised Edward Griffin to the peerage as Baron Griffin of Braybrooke. Griffin was the son of a court official to both Charles I and Charles II and had gone on to inherit his father’s office in 1679. He married Essex, one of the daughters of the earl of Suffolk, and gradually built a reputation for himself as an unquestioning supporter of the Stuarts. That said, Charles II found him irritatingly officious and, in spite of supposedly being related to both William Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon (Viscount St Alban), Griffin was believed to be barely literate.

The Revolution proved a trying period for Griffin who had so firmly attached his colours to James II’s mast. He and his son accompanied James to Kent and were deputed to report the news of his departure to William of Orange. On the first day of the Convention, 22 January 1689, Griffin joined his fellow peers in the House of Lords when thanksgivings were ordered for William’s intervention. No objection was made to Griffin’s presence, which was unusual as a new peer appearing in the Lords for the first time. He was back in the chamber on the 23rd and 24th, again apparently without anyone batting an eyelid, or querying why he had not been formally inducted.

It was not until the 25th, on which day there was a call of the House, that Griffin was finally noticed by the earl of Berkeley, who drew the Lords’ attention to the fact that a new member was attending. Griffin stood up and explained the circumstances of his creation, pointing out that his patent was ‘at the door ready to be produced’. The unusual circumstances of Griffin being made a peer prompted a lively debate in the Lords. Some argued that no peer should attend before being formally introduced, while others cited the example of the 1660 Convention, when several Lords, created by Charles II when he was in exile, did precisely that. Most vocal against allowing Griffin his place was Lord Delamer and it looked for a time as if he would not be recognized by the assembly.

Just when it looked as if Griffin might be shown the door, the least likely of supporters emerged in the form of Lord Lovelace, the normally inebriated radical supporter of the Revolution. He sprang forward and – joined implausibly by Delamer – agreed to induct Griffin. Flanked by these two unlikely sponsors, Griffin presented his patent and was admitted to his place as Lord Griffin. According to the earl of Clarendon it was:

the first time, I believe, that ever a peer was introduced, when the King’s authority was pretended to be set aside; and when the Lords did not pretend to be a Parliament

The debates over allowing Griffin to take his place point to the febrile atmosphere in Parliament in January 1689 with the results of the Revolution still a long way off being settled. Griffin was the last person to be made a peer by James II (not counting subsequent ‘Jacobite’ peerages) and although his patent of creation was dated 3 December, several days before James’s first flight from the capital, for the more radical supporters of Revolution there was a lack of legitimacy in someone nominated in those circumstances. Also, at the beginning of the Convention there was no certainty that the result of their debates might not be to invite James back, even if they were to do so with a number of restrictions.

In the event Griffin’s career in the Lords proved to be of short duration. After it was resolved to offer William and Mary the crown Griffin ceased to attend, and he refused to take the new oaths. He appeared in the Lords for the final time at the opening of the next session, on 19 October, only to decline taking the oaths once more. For the next few years Griffin proved a decided nuisance to the regime. He was involved in numerous plots, including the spectacularly ill-conceived ‘Pewter Pot Plot’, and by the mid-1690s had decamped to the court in exile. In 1696 he was outlawed, for failing to appear to answer a treason charge, and stripped of his peerage. In 1708, he attempted to stage a return aboard the Salisbury, the only ship to be captured during James Edward Stuart’s abortive rebellion that year. He was carted off to the Tower, where he died of natural causes in November 1710, after a series of stays of execution. The peerage was eventually restored to his grandson 17 years later.

RDEE

Further reading:

The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon… ed. S.W. Singer (2 vols. 1828)

The History of Parliament: The House of Lords 1660-1715, ed. R. Paley (5 vols. 2016)

The ‘Glorious Revolution’ is the name given to the invasion of England by a Dutch force led by Prince William of Orange in November 1688 in response to a wave of unrest against King James II’s determined attempt to reinstate Catholic worship in the country and the events that followed: the crumbling of James’s army, his flight to France, and the summoning of a new revolutionary Parliament – the ‘Convention’ to decide what to do next. Their debates were imbued with the splits about religion and politics that went back to the Civil War of the 1640s, and the arguments in the early 1680s provoked by James’s Catholicism. The result had been a division between opposing camps, Whigs and Tories, which would run through British politics for the next century or more.

On 28th January, six days after the Convention Parliament first assembled, the House of Commons voted that the King had ‘abdicated the government’ by ‘breaking the original contract between king and people’ and having ‘withdrawn himself out of the government’ he had left the throne vacant.  The Commons vote caused consternation among Tories in the Lords, already aware of Whig plans to formally depose James and to make William and his wife Mary (James’s daughter) King and Queen. Only a handful of them – including the Earl of Clarendon and Francis Turner, the Bishop of Ely – believed that there were any circumstances under which James could resume the reins of government, but all of them,  firmly wedded to the principle of an indefeasible hereditary right, were horrified by the implication that the succession could be determined by parliament.  Over two days of open party warfare in the Lords, carried on ‘with the greatest passion and violence’ and calling up all of the partisan hatreds of the last sixty years (at one point the old Whig Lord Wharton bitterly attacked Clarendon for calling the Civil War a ‘rebellion’), Tories tried to replace the word ‘abdicated’ by ‘deserted’ and rejected the idea that the throne was vacant.  In order to preserve the constitutional niceties they proposed a regency instead – with William, as regent, heading the government during James’ lifetime. One man who did not join in was the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, the intellectual leader of the Tories and hero of the prosecution of the seven bishops the previous year, whose curious passivity in the face of the extraordinary events surrounding him and refusal to attend the Lords was a source of intense frustration to his colleagues.

Their action precipitated a confrontation between the majorities in the Lords and in the Commons. On 3 February the Commons rejected the Lords’ changes, flinging them back to the upper House. The arcane debates about constitutional law in the Lords and Commons were ended only when William himself weighed in. So far he had scrupulously avoided advancing his own claims to the throne, but now, in command of the only viable military force in the country and firmly in control of London, he told a group of senior peers that he would settle for nothing less than the crown in his own right and in that of his wife.  On 6 February the Whigs successfully marshalled their support in the Lords to back him.  In his diary of events of that day, the Earl of Clarendon described how ‘all imaginable pains were taken to bring other lords to the House, who never used to come: as the Earl of Lincoln, who, to confirm the opinion several had of his being half-mad, declared he came to do whatever my Lord Shrewsbury and Lord Mordaunt would have him’.  Edward Howard, the gouty Earl of Carlisle ‘was brought upon his crutches’; even Nathaniel Crew, the Bishop of Durham, previously a staunch Tory, though a man ‘who had been at the House but twice before’ in his life and had not previously attended the Convention was persuaded to attend and vote to agree with the Commons.  The Earl of Montagu, later looking for a dukedom, claimed credit for swinging the vote by persuading the Earl of Huntingdon, Lord Astley and the Bishop of Durham. After the division Clarendon queried Thomas Tufton, 6^th Earl of Thanet, who had previously refused to acknowledge that the throne was vacant, why he ‘came to leave us in this last vote’. Thanet responded that

he was of our mind, and thought we had done ill in admitting the monarchy to be elective; for so this vote had made it: but he thought there was an absolute necessity of having a government; and he did not see it likely to be any other way than this.

In the end, although forty-six peers resisted the idea of vacancy to the end, the margin of victory was large enough. The Lords voted to agree with the Commons in declaring that James had abdicated and that the throne was thereby vacant.

On the 13th, both Houses went together ‘in a body’ to the Banqueting House in Whitehall, where they offered William and Mary the Crown, together with the Declaration of Rights agreed on.  The latter, which in statutory form would become known as the Bill of Rights, laid out the misgovernment of Charles II and James II, and set out the principles which Parliament believed to be fundamental to the law and the constitution of England. It implied that the Revolution had restored an old order: but the feeling that an old order had been profoundly changed was hard to dispel, and few would guess quite how much – driven by the demands of war as much as by the formality of a new constitutional document – the government of England would change in the following quarter of a century.

PS

This blog has been adapted from the History’s short introduction to the history of the House of Lords 1660-1715, published in 2010. The highly illustrated book is still available from Boydell and Brewer: see here for details.

For more on the background to these events, see our Explore article ‘Religion and Politics, 1660-1690‘.

You can read more on the events of 1688-89 in ‘The first meeting of the ‘Provisional Government’ and the signing of the Guildhall Declaration’.