Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Political journalist and historian Barone (Hard America, Soft America) elucidates the template for America's independence movement in this well-written history of its forerunner: England's Glorious Revolution of 1688. The author describes the origins of the revolution, a mostly bloodless change of government, as a mixture of religious, political and diplomatic factors. King James II's Roman Catholicism, hostility to Parliament, and French sympathies alienated an increasing number of his powerful subjects including John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough, who invited Dutch Stadtholder William of Orange and his wife, Mary, James's sister, to intervene. Among the revolution's consequences was a Bill of Rights that limited the monarch's powers and strengthened representative government. A Toleration Act encouraged variant forms of Protestant worship. The creation of a funded national debt and the foundation of the Bank of England laid the groundwork for financial development. Involvement in the long series of wars with France moved England from a country standing apart from Europe to one that took responsibility for maintaining a continental balance of power. It was a Glorious Revolution indeed that laid the political groundwork for the world in which we now live, and Barone's lucid work honors its heritage. (May 8)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by H.W. Brands

Voltaire dismissed the Holy Roman Empire as not holy, Roman or an empire. Historians have long given a similar back of the hand to England's Glorious Revolution of the 1680s. It was glorious, they asserted, mostly in avoiding mass bloodshed, and compared to later revolutions in France, Russia and China, it wasn't much of a revolution.

Michael Barone disagrees. The change in English government as a result of the events of 1688-89 was not simply astonishing on its own terms, he argues, but pregnant with consequences for the English-speaking world. Barone is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, a longtime coauthor of the Almanac of American Politics and an occasional historian of recent American public life. In his current book he digs three centuries into the English past to unearth the roots of contemporary political practice on the Western side of the Atlantic -- the "Our" of his title refers to us Americans.

Some of the digging is not for the easily distracted. To motivate his main story, Barone traces the turbulent politics of mid-17th-century England, France and what became the Netherlands. It's a complicated era, just similar enough to our own to be misleading, and the careless reader risks getting overwhelmed. Thankfully, Barone entices us forward with such tidbits as that Tangerines were veterans of military service in Tangiers before they were little oranges, and that the difference between local time in London and Paris was once measured in days, 10 in the 1680s, because England refused to update its calendar.

Once Barone reaches his actual starting mark, the story snaps along. "A young Prince borne, which will cause disputes," he quotes a diarist of June 1688. The arrival of the heir was crucial, for the fate of England hung on the issue of issue -- namely whether Catholic king James II would be succeeded by a Catholic son or daughter. Religious wars had convulsed Europe for most of the century and a half since the start of the Protestant Reformation; in England the religious disputes had triggered a regicide, a civil war and several lesser eruptions of violence. Protestants insisted on observing the royal birth, suspecting that Queen Mary Beatrice wasn't really pregnant and that a surrogate would be smuggled under the bedclothes. Their attendance hardly settled the case. " 'Tis possible it may be her child," conceded James's estranged daughter Anne. "But where one believes it, a thousand do not."

The prospect of another Catholic king inspired a small group of Protestant worthies -- the Immortal Seven, their admirers called them -- to commit treason against James by inviting William of Orange, the husband of James's daughter Mary, to invade England and seize the throne. William responded by mounting the last successful invasion of England. John Churchill, James's military commander, deserted his patron and defected to William. "I am actuated by a higher principle," Churchill wrote in a letter he left for James: to wit, "the inviolable dictates of my conscience, and a necessary concern for religion." (Churchill neglected to explain why his conscience hadn't troubled him before William arrived.)

Thus William assumed the throne, ruling jointly with Mary. Yet he did so under constraints negotiated with the political brokers who invited him from the Netherlands. These restrictions constituted the "revolutionary"' aspect of what otherwise would have been a coup d'etat: In an age of absolutism elsewhere, the English monarch would defer to Parliament on key questions. A Bill of Rights ensured basic liberties to Englishmen, and the principle of self-government took what Barone rightly calls a "giant step forward."

Barone detects even larger consequences. The settlement of 1689, by marrying Dutch business sense to emerging English constitutionalism, laid the foundation for the 18th-century expansion of the British empire. An offshoot of that empire became the United States of America, whose founders wrapped themselves in the mantle of the Glorious Revolution. The 1689 settlement also fortified Britain to balance what Barone calls the "hegemonic power" of absolutist, then revolutionary, and finally Napoleonic France.

The hegemonic label is important to Barone, in that he traces the effects of the Glorious Revolution into the 20th century and beyond. The United States, he argues, was the continuing heir of the 1689 settlement, its growing strength undergirded by the same elements of law and commerce that had built the British empire. Americans eventually adopted the anti-hegemonic philosophy pursued by William and his English successors. Barone takes pleasure in noting the historical symmetry in the anti-hegemonic -- that is, anti-German -- alliance of the United States and Britain during World War II, the former led by the Dutchman Franklin Roosevelt, the latter by John Churchill's descendant Winston. He might have noted something else. Barone asks what the world would have been like had the United States not acquired the habit of opposing "tyrannical hegemonic powers," and he proceeds to list among the bad guys Louis XIV, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler, Stalin and "the terrorists of Osama bin Laden and the mullahs of Iran." Leaving aside that Osama and the mullahs are hardly in the same geopolitical league as Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, Barone might have mentioned how long it took the United States to reach the stage of peaceful self-government, and how many people died -- in the American Civil War, most conspicuously -- getting there. At a time when the present administration remains committed to establishing democracy in Iraq, the most important lesson of American political history may be that democracy doesn't come easily. William of Orange and John Churchill spared England a war in the 1680s; America in the 1860s wasn't so lucky, and neither is Iraq now.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Crown (May 8, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400097924
• ISBN-13: 978-1400097920
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #218,138 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Badly Edited , June 18, 2007

By	Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I don't disagree with the praise of various reviews, professional and otherwise, but this is one of the more poorly edited books I've come across in the past few years and that's why I give it only 3 stars. I'm not talking about typos or transposed words, though there are enough of those instances.

No, there's a larger problem here: repetition. Two pages after Barone tells us that the fortress of Phillipsburg "spans the Rhine," he repeats the same phrase. Historians he's quoted from are re-identified. Two or three times we hear that Holland was a whirlwind of printing presses and pamphlets which were a chief propaganda tool. The ways in which James tried to pack Parliament are explained more than once in too-similar language, and I could list other examples of unnecessary repetition in a book that's under 250 pages of primary text. They're all annoying.

Almost as annoying is the lack of maps, the quality of what's there, and their placement. Why is the map charting the progress of William's army in England tucked in after an appendix and almost 100 pages after it's necessary? It's not even mentioned in the Table of Contents. Why is there no full map of England with its various counties, since they're so frequently brought up? Not even an Anglophile like myself knows where they all are. Why is the map of The United Provinces so sketchy, so that major towns mentioned in the text don't appear on it? Why is there no map of Europe in that period, so that when mention is made of various principalities and duchies you can see where they are? Had I not just read Jessica Mitford's Frederick of Prussia, I wouldn't know where many of the German states referred to in Barone's text are located. These are not trivial omissions in a book about the movement of armies and the threats to sundry territories.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars When will they put out the edited version?, September 4, 2007

By	George Mole (Bronx, New York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I very much expected to enjoy this book, interested as I am in English history. However, having only reached page 102, I can't help but feel that I'm reading an unedited first draft rather than a finished product. Disappointingly, the book appears to be full of typos, contradictions of fact, and bewildering and clumsy constructions.

To give a few examples:

* On page 6, the author is discussing the populations of various areas at the time of the Glorious Revolution. He writes: "Britain's North American colonies had about 250,000." But then, at the end of the same long and confusing paragraph, he writes, "...Spain's Latin American colonies had approximately 10 million, while the English North American colonies had only 280,000." I kept looking for the signal phrase that would indicate that the numbers 250,000 and 280,000 are meant to refer to different things, but I can't find it.

* On page 24, the author writes that "John Evelyn heard the sermon at the king's chapel...." I don't believe that Evelyn had previously been introduced in the book, and there is no explanation of who he is. He is mentioned at least one other time, again with no clue as to who he is, on page 27. But then, on page 49, the author introduces a quotation from Evelyn's diary with this phrase: "As John Evelyn, a Kent landowner who seems to have known everyone in London, noted in his diary...." Wouldn't it be better to give us that short explanation of who Evelyn was the first time he's mentioned?

* On page 97, the author introduces "one of the most remarkable characters of the period, Robert Spencer, the Earl of Sutherland." However, later in the paragraph, he refers to him not as Sutherland, but as Sunderland. He refers to him once again as Spencer, and then calls him Sunderland from there forward. I had to keep going back to make sure we were still talking about the same guy.

* On page 100, the author writes: "Sarah encouraged Anne to restrict pressure from James and his queen to convert to Catholicism." Shouldn't that be "resist pressure"?

It may be that in one or more of these examples, I've missed some key phrase that would make all clear. But I don't think so. Rather, it appears that the book is just poorly edited. And this apparent sloppiness has made me a bit distrustful of the information I'm getting in the book. The story is interesting, but I hope they put out an edited version sometime soon.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Barone Is Insensitive to the Anti-Catholicism of the 1688 Coup d'Etat, June 29, 2007

By	david ritchie - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As reader Chesapeake's review notes, Michael Barone's Our First Revolution is fundamentally flawed because Barone almost totally ignores the destructive anti-catholic laws that were enshrined by the "Glorious Revolution of 1688." While Barone correctly concludes that the revolution shifted the balance of power between King and Parliament and fostered development of such "liberties" as the right to bear arms, he is simply wrong in claiming (p. 234) that "the Revolutionary settlement was also a step forward for religious liberty." Rather, the 1688 Coup d'Etat was undertaken specifically to prop up the Established Anglican Church and to preserve the Test Act which limited public offices to Anglicans. The Anglican bishops simply could not live with James's April 1688 Declaration of Indulgence, which--while preserving state support for the Anglican Church--afforded liberty of conscience to all Englishmen. So the "Revolutionary Settlement" on Religion was to enshrine anti-Catholicism at the heart of the unwritten English Constitution by depriving all Catholics in the British Isles--even the King and his successors--of liberty of conscience. James's Declaration--not the Anglicans' liberty denying reaction--was the real step forward for religious liberty.

It is not surprising that the Anglicans refused to read that Declaration from the pulpits nor that they supported William's putsch. In the long term, the Anglican Church could not have maintained its privileged position if liberty of conscience were afforded all Englishmen. Truth to tell, their "brand" of Christianity had been rejected even by the nominal head of the Anglican Church, James II. To this day, no Catholic can become King of England for the simple reason that the Anglican Church realized that it would not be able to compete with the Catholic Church if free choice is given to the head of the Anglican Church.

Instead of recognizing through Twenty First Century eyes that the Revolution was simply the Anglicans' successful effort to deprive Catholics of any liberty of conscience, Barone has accepted uncritically the prevailing prejudices of Seventeenth Century England and justified anti-Catholic discrimination by portraying James II as a Tyrant and the Catholics as "inherently subversive" and untrustworthy (pp. 204-5). That, of course, has been the spin that the winners--the Anglicans and their Dissenting Protestant supporters--have used to justify their bigotry for the past 320 years. Unfortunately, Barone parrots the spin without any critical examination of the claims. Some of the claims clearly are makeweights. For example: at p. 97, Barone breathlessly records, as justification for the Revolution, that James II had remade the Militia of Ireland so that 40% of the officers and 2/3 of the men were Catholics. That was hardly an evil absolutist act on James II's part. Well over 2/3 of the population of Ireland was Catholic at the time. Would political pundit Barone call Harry Truman a tyrant for issuing his Executive Order integrating the US Army? Does Barone contend that segregationists would have been justified in a new civil war because of Truman's action? I should hope not.

In making his case that James was a tyrant because he "packed" his Parliaments, Barone also misstates History. Anyone familiar with the term "rotten boroughs" would know that Parliament was not much of a representative institution until well into the 19th Century. Yet Barone claims (p. 192) that King William III was deferential to his Parliament and that no English monarch after James ever packed a Parliament. To the contrary, in 1690, William dissolved the very Convention Parliament that had just appointed him "king" when it failed to give him the Act of Indemnity he was demanding and thereby forced the election of a more compliant Parliament. Likewise, after Princess Anne had succeeded William and had come to distrust John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, she asked Parliament to dismiss him from all his offices but was thwarted by an uncooperative House of Lords. So, in January 1712, she packed the House of Lords by ennobling twelve Tories. The twelve then joined the Tory Minority to form a new majority that did her bidding by dismissing Marlborough. Likewise, when George I succeeded Anne in 1714, the new election gave the Commons majority to the Whigs with whom George was most comfortable, so he got that Parliament to revoke the existing law mandating Parliamentary elections every three years and to replace it with a "Septennial Act" permitting itself and later Parliaments to remain in office for up to seven years.

Yet Barone's most culpable misstatements are his false suggestions (pp. 204-05) (a) that Catholics deserved the discriminatory treatment they received because of experiences like the Popish Plot of 1679; and (b) that the discrimination Catholics did suffer was not so bad anyway. The truth is different: the Popish Plot had been concocted almost out of whole cloth by anti-Catholic protestants, as Barone earlier had admitted (pp. 50, 55), so it hardly can justify the near total exclusion from civic life that English, Irish and Scottish Catholics suffered for the next 140+ years.

Likewise, Catholics were not as well off under William as they had been under Charles II and James II. First, both Charles and James had tried to ameliorate Catholics' plight under the then existing Penal Laws by passing Acts of Indulgence that tried to accord liberty of conscience to them as well as to Protestant dissenters. Those Acts of Indulgence could not withstand the Parliament's Protestant Furies of 1674, 1679 and 1688, but it was not for want of trying by the Stuart brothers. Indeed, James's final effort at giving Christians liberty of conscience in April 1688 led directly to William's Coup d'Etat a few months later. Second and more importantly, the lives of the bulk of Catholics in the British Isles--the Irish Catholics who represented about 20% of all British subjects and 80% of the Catholics--got immeasurably worse under William as the result of the 1695 Irish Penal Laws. Those new penal laws--approved by the very "King Billy" that Barone claims was "tolerant"--imported to Erin's fair isle the infamous long-standing English penal laws and deprived Catholics of any participation in the Irish Body Politic. The new laws even deprived Catholics of the right to own property above five pounds unless they bowed to the Kings' bishops and took Anglican communion.

William's toleration of new forms of Anglican intolerance was visited on English Catholics as well. In 1699 (when he was no longer at war with anyone), William and the Parliament passed the infamous "Act for further Preventing the Growth of Popery" which gave English "priest hunters" the even bigger incentive of a 100 pound bounty on the head of all Catholic priests found anywhere in the Kingdom. That same, very large amount was also offered to any informers who could root out Catholics who had the temerity to send a child to be educated in a Catholic land.

While Barone's appendix usefully gathers together some of the important documents of the Period, even there his omissions seem to be driven by his prejudices. Most importantly, it does not include the most important document to understanding the Revolution: James's April 1688 Declaration of Indulgence. That document really was 100 years ahead of its time. Its assurance of liberty of Conscience would have been the real harbinger of the religious liberty provisions of the US Constitution; the hate-filled actions of the successful protestant putschists, by contrast, were a throw back to the hateful anti-Catholic acts of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Oliver Cromwell.