Tony Claydon

LATITUDINARIANISM AND APOCALYPTIC HISTORY IN THE WORLDVIEW OF GILBERT BURNET, 1643–1715*

Although one of the most influential figures of his time, Bishop Gilbert Burnet has become one of the most neglected. This article outlines Burnets worldview, arguing that it can only be partly understood by labelling him a ‘latitudinarian’ as scholars have hitherto tended to. Alongside Burnets conventionally latitudinarian descriptions of Christianity as a set of rational and simple beliefs that could command very wide assent, the bishop also had a strong sense of history as a providential and apocalyptic unfolding of a battle between ‘true’ and ‘false’ churches, which was characterized by a powerful European dimension and by an identification of Antichrist with religious persecution. The article concludes with suggestions about how such lines of thought might have cohered with the more traditionally ‘latitudinarian’ elements of Burnets philosophy, and about how they might allow historians to re-think the latitudinarian movement more generally.

William III's Declaration of Reasons and the Glorious Revolution

The paper considers reactions to William IIIs Declaration of reasons, the manifesto issued by the prince of Orange on the eve of his invasion of England in 1688. It questions recent historiography, which has argued for the importance of this document in Williams success by claiming that it achieved a virtual hegemony of English political discourse in the period of the Glorious Revolution. The paper first shows that James IIs supporters mounted an effective challenge to the Orange Declaration by reversing its claim that liberties were in danger under the existing regime. It then suggests that William lost control of his manifesto over the winter of 1688–9 by making moves to secure power and authority which were unadvertised in the document. Once this had happened, various groups opposed to Orange ambition were able to adopt the rhetoric of the Declaration and quote it back at the prince in attempts to block his advance. The paper concludes with the irony that the ubiquity of the Declaration in 1688 may have been a result of its failure as publicity for the Orange cause; and by suggesting that scholars should look in places other than the manifesto for an effective Williamite propaganda .

Gilbert Burnet: An Ecclesiastical Historian and the Invention of the English Restoration Era

On the eve of the 1689 Revolution in England, Gilbert Burnet was best known as an ecclesiastical historian. Although he had had a noteworthy career as a Whigleaning cleric, who had gone into exile at the start of James II’s reign and had entered the household of William of Orange in the Hague, Burnet’s reputation had been based on his magisterial History of the Reformation . This had appeared in its first two volumes in 1678 and 1683, and had rapidly become the standard work on the religious changes of the Tudor age. Soon after the Revolution, Burnet also became notable as the chief propagandist of the new regime. He produced a steady stream of works justifying William’s usurpation of James’s throne, and played a major part in organizing such pro-Orange events as the fast days marking William’s war with Louis XIV. This essay explores a key intersection of these two roles. It suggests that Burnet’s explicitly pro-Williamite understanding of church history gave rise to a new division of the past, and effectively invented the Restoration era as a distinct period of British history, running from 1660 to 1689.