Introduction

Summary

THE last volume closed with the acceptance of the crown by William and Mary in February 1689. This volume explores their reigns up to April 1691, when the Entring Book ends. Much of the importance of Morrice's record of the post-Revolutionary period is outlined in the general introduction in Volume I. What is worth emphasising here is that the final section of the work is integral to his overall narrative. Rather than providing the epilogue to a successful revolution, it instead shows how many of the themes that preoccupied Morrice prior to 1688 continued to shape his outlook after the transfer of the crown. Indeed, in many ways, his reportage of the early 1690s represents quite the opposite of what we might expect. Rather than reading the account of a man sure that popery and arbitrary government had finally been defeated, we find one suffused with deep-seated anxieties about their continued prevalence and influence. With the benefit of hindsight 1689 can seem a turning point, when England renounced tyranny and embraced parliamentary government; but to Morrice it represented another chapter in an ongoing struggle that he had been charting in detail since 1677 and which his historical work showed to be part of a very long reformation and revolutionary crisis in church and state. 1688 did not remove his fears but rather heightened them by placing them in a new context. On 5 May 1689 England declared war against the most powerful Catholic power in Europe. Louis XIV backed the exiled James II, whose supporters fought in Scotland, in Ireland, and, Morrice feared, in England too, to regain their power. The Revolution seemed to rest on the precarious life of William III, who, for Morrice, appeared to be the victim of evil advice from the very ministers responsible for the problems that had wracked the nation since the 1670s. It would be wrong, then, to see the period 1689–91 as anything less than a continuation of the story that Morrice had so carefully been recording.