Opening
The last volume, and the destination of the whole journey: the fall of England's last Catholic king and the revolution the Whigs called Glorious. Lingard chose to end his History exactly here, at the settlement of 1688–89 — the moment when, on the Protestant reading, English liberty was secured for ever.
The History in This Volume
The closing years of Charles II: the aftermath of the anti-Catholic Popish Plot hysteria, the Exclusion Crisis and the birth of the Whig and Tory parties, and the king's deathbed reception into the Catholic Church; the accession of the openly Catholic James II, the crushing of Monmouth's Rebellion and the "Bloody Assizes", James's Declaration of Indulgence and the trial of the Seven Bishops; and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 — the invitation to William of Orange, James's flight, and the offer of the crown to William and Mary under the Declaration (Bill) of Rights, where the History closes in 1689.
Lingard's Reading
This was the supreme test of Lingard's impartiality, and he knew it. The Revolution of 1688 was the founding myth of the Whig interpretation of history — Protestant liberty delivered from popish tyranny — and its villain was a Catholic king. Lingard neither defends James II's blunders nor accepts the triumphalist gloss; he narrates the king's misjudgements and the nation's fears alike from the record, ending not on a note of celebration or lament but on the documents of the settlement. That a Catholic priest could close his great history at the Protestant tradition's holiest moment, with neither special pleading nor surrender, is the final proof of the method the whole work had advanced.
Why This Volume Matters
As the last volume it is the History's destination and its boldest stroke: the Catholic counter-narrative carried right up to, and through, the event the Whig story was built upon. It is also the end of this collection's nine-volume run — and a standing reminder of the single absent volume, IX (A.D. 1660–1680), which alone would make the set whole.