THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

vice, selfishness and pride being the basis of commercial prosperity and therefore, ultimately, of social well-being.
Locke’s concepr of a virtuous citizen as a man of ‘large, sound, round-about sense’, Shaftesbury’s almost bland
assertion that ‘to philosophize is but to carry good breeding a step further’, and the popular immediacy of
Mandeville’s Fable variously serve to suggest something of the contemporary esteem accorded to reasoned argument,
good humour, and common sense as opposed to the disharmony of superstition, spleen, and ‘enthusiasm’. These
moral and social ideals are also reflected in the broader culture of the period, most notably in its music and its
architecture. Classical proportion in eighteenth-century music, embodied in the discipline of sonata form and in the
need for resolution within a closed or framed harmonic pattern, imposed a convention, acceptable to
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composer and audience alike, rather than a constricting strait-jacket of rules. ‘Good breeding’, in music as much as in
the other arts, implied a shared education and shared expectations rather than an insistence on the personality or the
eccentricities of the artist. In English architecture the principles derived from the study of ancient precedent and from
the writings of the Roman theorist Vitruvius had dominated the style of the court since the time of Inigo Jones, but it
was with the gradual triumph in the 1720s of the severer styles imitated from the works of the sixteenth-century
Venetian architect, Palladio, that influential aristocratic patrons and the designers they employed found a common
aesthetic language equally expressive of political and economic power and of the leisure and comfort to enjoy it. The
linkage between what became an essentially Whig style and dominance of Whig politics is perhaps best evidenced in
the dismissal of the ageing Tory, Sir Christopher Wren, from his official government post as Surveyor-General in
1718. Wren’s dismissal effectively marks the end of the idiosyncratic English flirtation with the international baroque
style. English Palladianism, with its emphasis on subdued good taste, balance, and a strict adherence to classical
proportion, as opposed to exuberance, ebullience, and innovation, became the national style of the mid-century. The
symmetry and order of English Palladianism, with its distant echoes of modern Venice and ancient Rome, became
associated with the government of a liberal-minded oligarchy as opposed to royal autocracy. The baroque style
suggested, on the one hand, the spiritual restlessness of earlier generations and, on the other, the suspect
encroachments of continental tyranny in both Church and State. In its architecture, as much as in its politics and its
literature, England took pride in being marked off from European norms and especially from those inspired by the
centralizing tastes and the cultural and religious politics of Louis XIV of France.
English distaste for the policies of Louis XIV was not based purely on military and diplomatic opposition to
French attempts to secure European hegemony or to the King’s persecution of his Huguenot subjects; it was equally
founded on the evolution of a distinctive theory of the government of Britain. By the 1680s it had become evident that
the Restoration settlement had settled comparatively little in English and Scottish political life. James II, who had
succeeded his brother as king in February 1685, managed, with a tactless ineptitude dangerously allied to religious
arrogance, to alienate sections of influential opinion naturally loyal to the Crown. His attempts to secure toleration for
non-Anglicans were received as an affront to the Church; his promotion of zealous Roman Catholics to positions of
national and local power as an attempt to undermine the State. In June 1688 the birth of a son to the King precipitated
events by provoking four Whig and three Tory peers to invite William of Orange to supplant his father-in-law and to
deliver England from his royal oppression. On 5 November William landed at Torbay with a Dutch army, his fleet
having been driven, it was fondly believed, by a divinely granted Protestant wind. William’s rapid advance towards
London was speeded by a
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ground swell of popular support in the shires through which he passed. King James’s failure either to rally his forces
or to take control of the immediate situation later led Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury (1643-1715), to remark in
his admixture of autobiography and anecdote, The History of My Own Times, that this was ‘one of the strangest
catastrophes that is in any history ... A great king, with strong armies and mighty fleets, a great treasure and powerful
allies, fell all at once’. James’s escape from England at one o’clock in the morning on 11 December was deemed to
mark the moment of his abdication of the throne. On 13 February 1689 William and his wife Mary, James’s Anglican
daughter, were declared joint sovereigns of England. The ‘Revolution’ had been bloodless; it was later also
proclaimed ‘Glorious’. The constitutional settlement which evolved in this period, and which was enshrined in the
Bill of Rights of this same February, endured substantially unchallenged until 1829. A temporary expedient, designed
to exclude James II and his immediate heirs from the throne and to secure a Protestant succession, was interpreted by
generations of Whig commentators as a turning-point in the history of the British Constitution.
The Revolution and its subsequent legislation was designed to ensure the rule of law and the dominance of
Parliament in England. In the northern kingdom in 1689 a Convention followed the English precedent in offering the
Crown of Scotland jointly to William and Mary and in passing the Claim of Right. In 1701, however, when the