Crown & Country: a History of England Through the Monarchy
“But we have forgotten, or do not care to remember, that, 600 years later, England was also conquered by another William. William of Orange was Dutch, rather than Norman, and, while there’s no doubt that the Norman Conquest changed England radically, the consequences of the Dutch conquest of 1688 were similarly profound, and not just for this country but, arguably, for the whole world.It began to heal the breaches of the Civil War, which the Restoration of 1660 had tried but failed to do. It tur...ned England from a feeble imitator of the French absolute monarchy into the most powerful and most aggressively modernizing state in Europe.In short, it invented a modern England, a modern monarchy, perhaps even modernity itself.IAll this would have seemed like the dream of a madman only a few years previously in 1685, when James II had succeeded to the throne. Then, England was a country still shaped by Henry VIII’s religious settlement and the vast dynastic mural of Henry, which showed him as head both of his family and the Church, was still one of the wonders of Whitehall Palace for the new king to admire and to imitate.MoreLess
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