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The Mask of Guy Fawkes

Daniel Defoe declared that, in England, “there were a hundred thousand country fellows . . . ready to fight to the death against popery without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.” On Owen Stanwood’s showing, a lot of these belligerent bigots lived in England’s American colonies. There, as in England, antipopery pervaded politics—so much so that, Professor Stanwood asserts, the resistiveness of the colonists in the 1680s, culminating in “the coup that became known as the Glorious Revolution” (p. 1), was owing to the imperial authorities’ inadequate response to purported popish plots. After 1689, the failure of the revolutionary regimes to carry the war to Catholic New France led to a reaction in favor of empire. The restored royal executives “used the promise of security, couched in the language of centralization and the fear of popery, to build a popular movement for empire. By the eighteenth century . . . Anglo-Americans embraced their identity as the subjects of a powerful [and, surely, one must add, Protestant] English monarch” (p. 20). Evidence for this conclusion is necessarily negative. Stanwood presumes a popularity for empire that, given the paucity of popular testimony, can only be deduced from outcomes. Yet the results of the Glorious Revolution actually repressed the antipapist populace and empowered a relatively rational elite. The revival of royal government was part of the process of domestic pacification and foreign war by which the turbulent seventeenth century became the stable eighteenth in less than a generation. Piety was replaced by order. Piracy was put down. Merchants were enriched. Mercantile wealth was enlisted in the cause of a constitutional monarchy by national recoinage, bank, and debt. State-sponsored capitalism underlaid national military strength. Marlborough’s victories supported the union with Scotland, which created Great Britain and a “Greater Britain,” as well, for the peace settlement licensed American expansion of British empire. Stanwood’s shorthand version of this stabilization is that the deposition of the Francophile Catholic, King James II, and his replacement by William of Orange—the military champion