My colleague Declan Leary raises some interesting points in his attempt to cast the Glorious Revolution as something less than glorious, but he also makes a few significant mistakes. His characterization of James II as a sincere believer in religious toleration and liberty undone by Protestant bigots confuses the king's short-term political calculations for actual beliefs. His cherry-picking egregious examples of anti-Catholic hysteria in England ignores the very real threat of the Counter-Reformation to Protestant states across Europe. And his narrow focus on the back-and-forth over the Test Act leaves out the larger context of James's persistent attempts to expand the military and royal authority.
Leary reads James's support for the Test Act as a testament to the monarch's noble ideals about religious liberty, uncritically quoting the Declaration for Liberty of Conscience as some sort of proto-Jeffersonian manifesto. This is plainly untrue. James was not an intransigent tyrant, but he was certainly an autocrat in the 17th century mold (more on that later). Historian John Miller writes that James's "main concern was to secure religious liberty and toleration for Catholics. Any 'absolutist' methods . . . were essentially means to that end." James was very happy to wrest customary power from Parliament and concentrate it under the crown.
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