The Last Revolution

Question 1

What is Declaration for Liberty of Conscience?

Answer 1

is issued by the Catholic James II in early 1687. it grants religious freedom for minorities like Catholics, Protestant dissenters, Unitarians, Jews and Muslims. It also suspends the discriminatory penal laws and revokes the required Protestant oaths in civil and military offices.

Question 2

What is the Bishop’s Trial

Answer 2

In April 1688, the Declaration was reissued and James ordered the bishops to have it read in every church in England. The seven ‘petitioned’ to be excused. After the petition was printed and publicly distributed, the bishops were charged with seditious libel and held in the Tower of London. They were tried and found not guilty on 30 June.

The bishop’s trial had united England, ‘brought all the Protestants together’.

Question 3

What made William of Orange’s England invasion inevitable?

Answer 3

The birth of Catholic heir to James (17 June 1688, James Francis Edward Stuart, ‘The Old Pretender) had completely transformed the situation. No longer could he wait for his wife (Mary) to inherit. He needed to act now or see England drift into the orbit of France.

Question 4

How did Jose Penso de la Vega described Amsterdam stock market in his book Confusion of Confusions in 1688?

Answer 4

… one where fortunes made not by tilling the soil, not by selling grain, timber, wool, even luxuries like silk or tea… For those swinging hand-claps sealed bargains not on real goods but on the future. Dealers had name for it - windhandel: trading in the wind.

Question 5

How did de la Vega described risk in his book?

Answer 5

The labyrinth of labyrinths, the terror of terrors. Through risk, wealth was no longer closed and static, but infinite and dynamic… the fall of prices need not to have a limit and there are also unlimited possibilities for the rise in which there were no boundaries.

Question 6

How William’s intention of England “invasion” affected Amsterdam Stock Market?

Answer 6

On 15/25 August 1688, new leaked out that William intended to invade England. The Amsterdam stock market had crashed.

Question 7

How probability theory implemented on insurance?

Answer 7

From the ashes of London after the fire arose Nicholas Barbon’s new terraces of brick houses. Barbon offered fire insurance based on his ability to calculate the probability of fire breaking out. Between 1686 and 1692 his company insured 5650 houses at rates of 2.5 per cent of value for brick houses and 5 per cent for timber.

Question 8

How did French reacted to William’s intention to invade England?

Answer 8

Comte d’Avaux (French diplomat) read out statement telling them that any attack on James would be treated by the Sun King as an attack on France.

In every French port, Dutch ships had been seized and their crews imprisoned. More than 100 vessels had been impounded along with their cargoes.

Question 9

How did France let William to continue his invasion?

Answer 9

Louis launched a military attack on Philippaburg in Centeal Europe. It was another blunder. The Dutch were free to send their own forces abroad. The Prince of Orange had his invitation. The French had turned their attention elsewhere.

Question 10

What did William say on his open declaration of his intention to invade England?

Answer 10

A Declaration of the Reasons inducing (the Prince of Orange) to appear in Arms for preserving of the protestant religion, and for restoring the laws and liberties of the ancient kingdom of England, Scotland and Ireland.

Question 11

Why did King James called elections on 21st of September?

Answer 11

He called elections, but he was no longer looking for a house of Catholics and Dissenters to approve his revolution. What James needed now was the Tory parliament of 1685 which had supported him during Monmouth’s rebellion. He swung between optimism and despair. When William’s Declaration reached London James called the elections off again.

Question 12

When did William’s fleet arrive England?

Answer 12

5 November 1688 the fleet of 300-400 sails landed at Torbay, Brixham near Exeter.

Question 13

How did Lilliburlero became the march of Glorious Revolution?

Answer 13

When William’s troops set off from Exeter the soldiers sang as they marched. As Gilbert Burnet remembered, until ‘the whole army, and as last all people both in city and country, were singing it perpetually’.

Question 14

When James II escaping what happened to The Great Seal?

Answer 14

The Great Seal was the imprint under which all laws in England were made, without which no government was possible.

Somewhere on his way across the river, James threw the Great Seal into the Thames.

Question 15

Why James decided the Queen and the Prince of Wales should escape to France?

Answer 15

James knee perfectly well that the Prince of Wales would be the sticking point in any negotiation.

Question 16

Where did James II captured?

Answer 16

James II captured at Faversham (Isle of Sheppey - Elmley) on 12th December 1688.

Question 17

Where does the term nostalgia come from?

Answer 17

A doctor called Johann Hoefer identified a condition in a peasant woman brought down from the mountains who appeared unable to live normally. Constantly crying, saying nothing but “ich will heim”, “I want to go home”.

He defined the condition as ‘misery resulting from the burning desire to return to one’s own country’.

The name he gave it, nostalgia, was an amalgam of Greek words algos, pain, and nostos, a homecoming.

Question 18

To James why he taught he lost all three of his kingdoms?

Answer 18

He never saw 1688 as a struggle of Protestant and Catholic, or as a diplomatic coup against the growing power of France. To James, it was God’s punishment for his own failings.

Question 19

Why William didn’t claimed the throne de facto, as Henry VII had done?

Answer 19

If he did he would have inherited not working medieval structures of government and taxation but a traumatized system in which kings relied on parliaments for money, but were unable to govern them. For England to fight a modern war in Europe, he would need funding beyond anything Henry VII had required - funding which could only come from a supportive parliament.

They asked William to take on a caretaker administration, and to summon a Convention.

William could not take [England], he had to be given.

Question 20

What were the conclusions of the convention?

Answer 20

They declared William and Mary joint King and Queen.

To William alone was reserved ‘the sole and full exercise of the Regal Power’.

The line of succession was established to keep William on the throne in the event of Mary’s death, and then to descend to her sister Anne.

Question 21

What were the terms of the Declaration of Rights?

Answer 21

That the pretended power of suspending of laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal.

That Elections of Members of Parliament ought to be free.

That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.

Question 22

What did William’s personality looked like?

Answer 22

The King had no charm. He had no small-talk. He listened and gave his painful, dry cough. He did not express opinions.

Meetings were held in a room full of Dutch advisers.

He relied too much on strangers, Germans, Huguenots, and Dutch.

Question 23

What is The Act of Toleration?

Answer 23

The Toleration Act of 1689 made by the Parliament of England gave all non-conformists, except Roman Catholics, freedom of worship, thus rewarding Protestant dissenters for their refusal to side with James II. They had to promise to be loyal to the British ruler and their heirs.

Question 24

What was John Locke’s solution to religious bigotry?

Answer 24

His solution was clear. Religion must be removed from public affairs, and toleration accepted as a principle by every church.

The aim should not be to entrench one central church, however diffuse. Men would always quarrel about religion. There could be no peace without ‘equal liberty for all’.

Question 25

How did Voltaire some thirty years later joked about the plurality of religions in England?

Answer 25

If there were only one Religion in England, there would be danger of despotism, if there were only two they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty and they live in peace.

Question 26

How did John Locke categorized thoughts?

Answer 26

There were simple thoughts - ideas, Locke called them - representing things we saw (or felt, or touched). There were complex thoughts created when simple ideas were plaited together. There were sensitive ideas we received through perception, and introspective ideas which we created by ‘remembering, considering, reasoning etc’.

Question 27

According to Locke, how do we know, and learn?

Answer 27

We know through our experience. Instead of being pre-programmed by God with innate ideas, we only learn by our senses. We come into the world with nothing, our minds ‘white paper, void of all characters, without and ideas’. Human life began with a clean slate, a tabula rasa.

Question 28

What was the role of probability in the 1690s?

Answer 28

John Locke thought probability, not certainty, was an acceptable end. Probability was becoming the natural medium of human thought, and risk, a necessary engagement with the future. Businessmen embraced risk; so did insurers, bankers, philosophers and statisticians.

Question 29

How much was England’s annual peacetime expenditure?

Answer 29

It was roughly £2 million. By October it was £4m, by 1696 it was £5.5m.

Question 30

When the financiers landed money for war how much interest rate they got?

Answer 30

They were getting 8 percent. It was extremely good business. It dropped to 3 percent by 1749.

Question 31

How much did William The Orange asked for the cost of Dutch revolution from the English parliament.

Answer 31

He asked £600.000 almost immediately when the parliament summoned.

Question 32

What is The Million Adventure?

Answer 32

It was a true National Lottery. Tickets would be sold for £10 each. ‘Blanks’ repaid nominal interest of £1 a year for 16 years, although without return of capital. The jackpot, however, was to draw on of the 2.500 special tickets which offered a range of dividends up to £1.000 a year.

Question 33

When and why Queen Mary II died?

Answer 33

She died in 1694 at age of 33 because of smallpox.

Question 34

When did Licensing Act lapsed?

Answer 34

The year 1695 would see perhaps the most crucial extension to freedom of all, for that spring the Licensing Act lapsed and press censorship in England came to an end.

Question 35

What was Newton’s vision of universe was?

Answer 35

Isaac Newton’s vision of universe was a mechanically spinning universe - created by God, but not piloted by him, while most people believed that God intervened daily in the machinery of the world.