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hawkwing_lbBooks 2010: 44
non-fiction
44. Edward Vallance, The Glorious Revolution: 1688 - Britain's Fight for Liberty, London, 2006.
The title would lead you to believe this book is a work of sectarian history of the worst kind: that this might be a book about "how William of Orange saved good Protestant England from that nasty Catholic tyrant James."
It's not. It's a surprisingly well researched, well balanced discussion of the circumstances surrounding the so-called "Glorious Revolution" and the installation of William and Mary as joint monarchs, and how that "revolution" was then framed in political and historical discourse. For context, it discusses in brief the exclusion crisis in the reign of Charles II, and the whole of James' reign. Vallance is also careful to discuss the "revolution" in Ireland and Scotland, where its myth as a bloodless, Parliamentary achievement is shamefully false. (I direct your attention to, in Ireland, the actions of Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, and in Scotland, the treatment of Iain MacIain of Glencoe and his people.)
It's very interesting: I found it put in context, for me, the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and the continuing Jacobite feeling in Scotland, as well as the increasing parliamentary limits placed on royal prerogative even before the first Hanoverian George ascended to the British crown. (Leading to the party politics of the 18th centuries, where eventually a leading Whig or Tory could exert as much or more influence over affairs of state as could the monarch.)
I enjoyed it, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who is interested in the fall of the Stuarts.
Climbed tonight. I'm out of practice, and damn, I hurt. Mandating that one cannot stop en route without being lowered back to the ground makes it necessary to exert that much more effort and concentration. And on a first day back after nearly two weeks?
Ouch, says I. Ouch.
non-fiction
44. Edward Vallance, The Glorious Revolution: 1688 - Britain's Fight for Liberty, London, 2006.
The title would lead you to believe this book is a work of sectarian history of the worst kind: that this might be a book about "how William of Orange saved good Protestant England from that nasty Catholic tyrant James."
It's not. It's a surprisingly well researched, well balanced discussion of the circumstances surrounding the so-called "Glorious Revolution" and the installation of William and Mary as joint monarchs, and how that "revolution" was then framed in political and historical discourse. For context, it discusses in brief the exclusion crisis in the reign of Charles II, and the whole of James' reign. Vallance is also careful to discuss the "revolution" in Ireland and Scotland, where its myth as a bloodless, Parliamentary achievement is shamefully false. (I direct your attention to, in Ireland, the actions of Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, and in Scotland, the treatment of Iain MacIain of Glencoe and his people.)
It's very interesting: I found it put in context, for me, the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and the continuing Jacobite feeling in Scotland, as well as the increasing parliamentary limits placed on royal prerogative even before the first Hanoverian George ascended to the British crown. (Leading to the party politics of the 18th centuries, where eventually a leading Whig or Tory could exert as much or more influence over affairs of state as could the monarch.)
I enjoyed it, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who is interested in the fall of the Stuarts.
Climbed tonight. I'm out of practice, and damn, I hurt. Mandating that one cannot stop en route without being lowered back to the ground makes it necessary to exert that much more effort and concentration. And on a first day back after nearly two weeks?
Ouch, says I. Ouch.
