James Welwood: Physician to the Glorious Revolution

This book attempts to bring to life a second-rank figure--physician and author James Welwood (1652-1727)--and to use his biography as a device to guide the general reader through the changes in British politics, religion, society and medicine from the Restoration to the reign of George I. Elizabeth Furdell declares that Welwood "inhabited a rather dangerous world on the cusp of modernity" (24). One could quibble over the Whiggish implications here, but the author does bring to life some of the excitement and radical partisanship of a politically volatile age, riven by extremes of religious and constitutional passion. Welwood fiercely took up the Whig side and was for some years after the Revolution of 1688 as outspoken as Defoe in his public championship of Protestantism and liberty. Not surprisingly, the Whig side was also the one on which his bread was buttered. During his time on the continent, he had acquired an influential friend and patron in Gilbert Burnet, had met and admired the Duke of Monmouth, and had become known to William and to Mary, at whose court he later became a physician. Principle, party and career went together, and spilled over into print, first in his Vindication of the Present Great Revolution in England (1689) and then in his staunchly pro-Revolution periodical, the Mercurius Reformatus of 1689-91, as well as other more occasional writings. It was at the bidding of Queen Mary, and for her private interest, that Welwood first wrote his most substantial and most widely read work, Memoirs of the Most Material Transactions in England for the Last Hundred Years, Preceding the Revolution in 1688, later published in 1700. Furdell is at her best in her account of Welwood the polemical writer, and even a general reader might have welcomed a fuller sample of these minor, but cultured and significant partisan writings.

Welwood's early years in Scotland might also have been even more fully discussed. A witch-hunting craze in Dumfries, which he witnessed as a child, makes a suggestive context for Welwood's later aversion to intolerance (38-42). However, the reader is left with a sense of unanswered questions, as this fascinating early material finds few echoes later in the book. Welwood was the third son of an inveterately Calvinist family, his father a field preacher and his older brothers zealous Covenanters. It would have been good to have had a fuller discussion of just how it was that he emerged as the only member of the family to pursue his worldly career with more enthusiasm than his spiritual concerns, to live permanently outside his native Scotland, and to be an outspoken advocate of toleration and moderation. Welwood's hatred of persecution must undoubtedly have been fostered by his time at university in France, when he witnessed at first hand the forcible 'conversions' and brutal dragonnades practised against the Huguenots (80-2). His revulsion must have been strengthened by his own experience on returning to Scotland, where he was interrogated in the Edinburgh tollbooth for religious unorthodoxy, and fined (85). Soon afterwards, he left Scotland behind him and moved, first to Newcastle (where he was engaged in an acrimonious public dispute with the Tory vicar over the Revolution Settlement) and then to London, to court patronage and a degree of public recognition.

This is a biography written for the "educated layman" (265)--and, let us suppose, for the laywoman too. It should be judged as such, and not as a scholarly monograph, though the book is informed extensively by Furdell's own researches. In popular biography, it seems reasonable to expect a sound scholarly underpinning, clear and interesting writing and an effective structure. There is some room to demur on each of these counts. The scholarship underpinning the book is uneven, notably in Furdell's account of the origins of the 1688 Revolution (88-93) and of a "sexual revolution" after 1660, resting rather insecurely on the authority of Lawrence Stone (213-4). Whig and Tory affiliations in the late seventeenth century are expounded, not through current scholarship, but by anachronistic reference to Samuel Johnson (83). It is more understandable that Furdell should invoke a novel of 1816 by Sir Walter Scott to explain the assassination of Archbishop Sharp by Covenanting extremists in 1679. Scott had researched the period thoroughly, and claimed even to have met "Old Mortality," who wandered Scotland repairing Covenanters' tombs. For that very reason, though, the reference to Scott's novel as The Old Mortality (56) is an odd and potentially misleading typographical error, though unfortunately only one of many, especially in direct quotations. At times Furdell seems to misread her sources and to offer unwarranted generalisations. I can think of no evidence, for example, for her claim that George I particularly disliked Princess Caroline (220). However, Furdell's enthusiasm for the process of research, and the handling of old texts, often comes across quite infectiously (e.g., 23), though the lay reader might not be quite so charmed as she assumes by the full technical details of the scope of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (225-6).

There is some evocative writing, as in the description of the countryside around Reims (61), and there is a great deal of lucid and effective exposition, clearly the work of a teacher of some experience and skill. Furdell's ear for the period does sometimes fail her, as when she describes as "rather fawning" Welwood's signing of a letter with the terse phrase "your humble servant" (96). The writing is also marred at times by strained expressions, and at others by anachronistic comment, as if to prompt the interest of one of her more unengaged students. Both tendencies can be found on page 17, where in one sentence William and Mary "solicited Welwood's stylus (my italics) to reply to unfavorable Jacobite broadsides" [and, incidentally, what other kind would there have been?]. In the next sentence, "Welwood may have been the first true 'spin doctor'!" It is jarring also to be told that Welwood found it prudent "to segue to a more pacifist format for his energetic pen" (160). There are echoes of the classroom in the assertion, early in the book, that this was an Augustan Age, characterised by an admiration for the values of Augustan Rome (the dates of course are precise: 1680-1730). This elderly formulation never explained everything that was interesting about the period through which Welwood lived, and in his particular case it appears to explain little or nothing. Invoking it merely weakens the argument for this biography that, through the medium of one man's experiences and beliefs, the period is looked at in a fresher and more tangible way.

As to the structure of the book, it would have been more accessible to lay readers if Furdell had shaped it much more firmly around what is known of Welwood's life, and even perhaps have confined it to his most flourishing years from around 1680 to 1700. The viewpoint of the book often shifts sharply from the general to the very detailed, new subjects or developments are introduced in a jerky way, and there are fairly substantial sections of the book in which Welwood is effectively lost from sight. The last chapter, detailing Welwood's small role as a mediator in the marital disputes of Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk, the mistress of George II, fits awkwardly with the rest of the book, which might have been more coherent without it. The epilogue, in which Furdell offers a strained account of Welwood as the alleged progenitor of the "Whig interpretation" of history, is unconvincing and rather bitty. These are not fatal flaws in a generally readable and persuasive book, but they do indicate a certain lack of overall integration in the work. The best parts of this book--and they amount to perhaps three quarters of it--are good indeed, and fulfil the aims of the "Signpost Biographies" series of which it is a part. Furdell gives insights into a vanished world through the story of a man who, without either reaching the first rank or even being particularly innovative, lived a full and interesting life in challenging times.