The Literature of the Standing Army Controversy, 1697-1699

Abstract

THE PROBLEM of providing for national security and at the same time protecting individual liberties has been a lively issue in twentieth-century America. But the debate over this question has never raged here as it did in England from I 697 to I 699, when, following the Treaty of Ryswick, men became locked in a controversy over the nation's wartime forces. Then arguments were sharply debated in Parliament and in a quantity of contentious pamphlet literature. The parliamentary decisions to reduce the victorious army to IO,OOO men in I697, to cut it further to 7,000 English-born subjects in I698, and in I699 to deny King William his Dutch Guards are well known; and the ideological and political significance of these decisions has been, at least, indicated by historians of the period.1 The men who wrote the tracts which figured in the controversy have

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.