The London Revolution Society and Commemorative Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

On a summer evening in 1788 a committee of seven men gathered at the Paul’s Head Tavern in London. After formally declaring their shared reverence for the ‘glorious Revolution of 1688’, they resolved not only that this ‘most important & interesting Event […] ought to be commemorated by every Friend to our Country & public Liberty’, but that there was a particular imperative to mark its forthcoming centenary with ‘Zeal & Spirit’. The minutes of this meeting constitute one of the earliest surviving records of the Society for the Commemoration of the Glorious Revolution, an organisation which would go on to play a crucial role in English popular politics in the years that followed. Although it is now well known to historians, the Society appears, at this point, to have been a small and relatively obscure private dining club. But the approach of the centenary in November 1788 stimulated an extraordinary burst of commemorative activity across Britain, and the Revolution Society (as it soon became known) evidently saw an opportunity not only to play a leading part in the nation’s celebrations, but also to promote its own, distinctly reformist political and religious agenda. Word quickly spread within dissenting circles that the Society intended to mark the 1788 anniversary ‘with greater eclat than common’. Its meeting of November 4, 1788 was indeed an ambitious event. Following a sermon by the presbyterian divine and minor literary celebrity Andrew Kippis, attendees converged on a public dinner including ‘many persons of rank and consequence’ as well as some particular guests of honour. Just as significantly, the Society decided to publish formal accounts of its history and proceedings to complement the widespread press coverage its 1788 meeting had already attracted. The occasion was undoubtedly one of the largest and best-publicized of the centenary celebrations, and the Revolution Society’s fame—and indeed its notoriety—continued to grow in the years that followed.