Revolution

WILLIAM'S INVASION AND THE COLLAPSE OF JAMES'S REGIME

James was not oblivious to the military build-up in the United Provinces, but seems to have thought it inconceivable that William would contemplate an offensive campaign so late in the season or over the winter, or indeed that his own nephew and son-in-law would act against him. As late as 8 September, Sunderland could report that despite ‘the noise of the preparations made by our neighbours’ the King remained ‘very well assured’ that there was no design against him.⁴ James therefore continued with his plans to secure a parliamentary repeal of the penal laws and Tests. On 24 August he had announced that parliament would meet on 27 November, and government agents busied themselves trying to drum up support for religious toleration.⁵ It was not until after the electoral writs had been issued on 18 September that James began to sense the degree of danger he was in. From the 21st he started sending out instructions to increase the size of existing regiments in his army and issuing commissions for the raising of new regiments. He also began making concessions on the domestic front. On the 21st he issued a proclamation designed to assuage Anglican doubts about his plans for toleration, promising he would ‘inviolably… preserve the Church of England’ and confirming that Catholics would remain barred from sitting in the Commons. The following day he wrote to the Lord Lieutenants inviting them to restore those deputy Lieutenants and JPs who had recently been removed from office, though the fact that the King spoke in terms of hoping to secure their support in the forthcoming parliament reveals that, even at this late stage, James was not anticipating a Dutch invasion that might cause him to put his domestic programme on hold. It was only from the 24th that James began to speak of the invasion being imminent. On the 27th he sent for military reinforcements from Ireland (some 2,800), ordered the standing army in Scotland (another 3,700) to march south into England, and the next day issued a proclamation recalling the parliamentary writs and inviting his English subjects to assist him in opposing the Dutch.⁶

In a desperate attempt to build up more support at home, James now made a complete U-turn. In a meeting at Whitehall on 28 September, he informed the bishops that he was willing that ‘things past should be buryed in perpetuall oblivion’, and pledged to restore the Bishop of London, readmit the dismissed fellows of Magdalen College, terminate the Ecclesiastical Commission, restore the corporations and allow the dispensing power to be determined by (a regularly elected) parliament, which he would call immediately.⁷ His first gesture came on 2 October, when he restored London's charter (which had been taken away in 1683 during the height of the Tory Reaction).⁸ On the 3rd the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of Bath and Wells, Chichester, Ely, London, Peterborough, Rochester, St Asaph and Winchester presented the King with an address in which they outlined their demands for reform. Picking up on James's promises of 28 September and adding their own refinements, they asked that James place the government of the counties in the hands of those qualified by law, annul the Ecclesiastical Commission and promise never to set one up again in the future, stop all dispensations and cancel those granted since he came to the throne, restore the president and fellows of Magdalen College, suppress the Jesuit schools, ‘desist from the Exercise of such a Dispensing power, as hath of late been used, and to permitt that point to be freely, and calmly debated, and argued, and finally settled in parliament’, stop the quo warranto proceedings against the corporations and restore the old charters, and issue writs for a free and regular parliament, ‘in which the Church of England’ might ‘be secur'd according to the Acts of Uniformity’ and provision be made ‘for a due Liberty of Conscience, and for securing the Liberties, and properties of all your Subjects’. In short, the bishops asked James ‘to restore all things to the State in which he found them when he cam to the Crowne’.⁹ Morrice observed how the government seemed ‘now to be like a Vessell tossed up and down at sea, and ready to sinke’; the bishops had ‘given the Vessell a Twigg to take hold on whereby it may draw it selfe to Land’, but they seemed ‘yet to keepe the Hatchet in their own hand, by which they can cut off that Twigg at their pleasure’.¹⁰

James immediately began to comply. He abolished his Ecclesiastical Commission on 5 October; on the 11th he instructed the Bishop of Winchester, the visitor of Magdalen College, to settle the College ‘regularly and statutably’, and on the 17th he issued a proclamation restoring the corporations (with certain exceptions). He also began restoring JPs who had been on the bench in 1687 and even (in a few counties) removing some of the recently appointed Catholic and non-conformist magistrates.¹¹ It appeared that the bishops had brought James to heel. If their programme had been carried out in full, there would have been an Anglican revolution that would have effectively resulted in a return to the status quo ante (though with some degree of religious toleration established by parliament) and which would have left James on the throne. This attempted Anglican revolution was scuppered, however, by William of Orange's invasion and the consequent collapse of James's government.

There has been endless debate over whether or not the Prince of Orange had always intended to seize the English throne (and thus also the Irish and Scottish thrones) for himself. In fact, William's number one priority was to make sure that England was not only detached from France's orbit but also brought into his continental alliance (the League of Augsburg) against Louis XIV. He may, for a while, have thought that he could achieve this without necessarily having to set himself up as king of England, Scotland and Ireland in James's stead, though it seems unlikely that he still believed this by the autumn of 1688. He needed to be careful, however, about how he justified his invasion to British Protestants, so that he could sustain their support and not frighten them into rallying behind James II in the face of a foreign threat. He would need a very carefully worded invasion manifesto.

William's English friends sent him such a draft manifesto in late August, which was primarily the work of Danby and which laid out the grounds for the invasion in a way designed to appeal to the broadest possible cross-section of the population. The manifesto concentrated on developments that had happened since the accession of James II in 1685, turning a blind eye to any alleged abuses of royal power under Charles II. The draft provoked considerable debate when it reached William in The Hague. Danby was, of course, a Tory Anglican, and it was the Tory Anglicans whose loyalty to the crown had been dislodged as a result of James II's political and religious initiatives. Many of those with William in the Low Countries, however, were Whigs who had been forced into exile during the years of the Tory Reaction or in the aftermath of the Argyll and Monmouth rebellions. They included English radicals, such as John Wildman, as well as more extreme Whig peers, such as the Earl of Macclesfield and Lord Mordaunt. There were also more moderate influences, such as Gilbert Burnet, a Scots-born clerical Whig who put the interests of the Anglican Church first. Then there was a group of dissident Scots, including Sir James Dalrymple of Stair and William Carstares. Wildman objected to Danby's draft, and urged that William's manifesto should rehearse grievances not just against James but also against Charles, implicating Tory Anglicans in the process and thereby limiting the appeal specifically to Whigs and dissenters; he believed that ‘as the Declaration was [currently] penn'd, all the Tory party would probably come in and be receiv'd by the Prince’, and the chance of more far-reaching reform would be lost. Burnet, among others, argued that Wildman's proposal would be a tactical mistake, since it would undoubtedly alienate those who had sacrificed so much in standing up against James's innovations and thereby seriously jeopardize the success of the expedition. In the end William and his advisers decided to accept Danby's draft, with slight modifications.¹²

William's Declaration… Of the Reasons Inducing him to Appear in Armes in… England was published in The Hague on 30 September. It was, in essence, a catalogue of all the allegedly illegal acts committed by the crown during James II's reign, though instead of attacking James himself it blamed the King's counsellors, accusing them of overturning ‘the Religion, Laws, and Liberties’ of England, Scotland and Ireland, promoting ‘Arbitrary Government’, and endeavouring to introduce ‘a Religion which is contrary to Law’. To advance this design, these evil counsellors had, it was claimed, invented the king's suspending power; purged the judicial bench to get a ruling in favour of the dispensing power; procured the appointment to public office of Catholics, who were rendered by law ‘Incapable of all such Employments’; set up an Ecclesiastical Commission against law; turned out the President and fellows of Magdalen College ‘contrary to Law’; promoted Catholic worship against ‘many expresse Lawes’; set up several Jesuit schools; purged the lieutenancy, magisterial bench and town corporations of those who refused to agree to a repeal of the Tests and penal laws; and attempted to interfere with the freedom of parliamentary elections. ‘The dismall effects of this subversion of the established Religion, Lawes and Liberties in England’, the Declaration continued, were even more apparent when one looked at Ireland, where ‘the whole Government’ was currently in ‘the hands of Papists’, and where the Protestant inhabitants lived in daily fear ‘of what may be justly apprehended from the Arbitrary Power which is set up there’. These evil counsellors had also supposedly ‘prevailed with the King to declare in Scotland’ that he was ‘clothed with an Absolute power’ and that all his subjects were obliged ‘to obey him without Reserve’, thus enabling James to assume ‘an Arbitrary power’ over both ‘the Religion and Lawes of that Kingdome’. From all this it was apparent what was ‘to be looked for in England’. The Declaration predictably condemned the supposititious Prince of Wales, who it claimed ‘was not born by the Queen’. It insisted, however, that William's design was ‘no other’ than ‘to have a free and lawfull Parliament assembled as soon as possible’, so as to address the grievances identified. William would also secure the calling of a parliament in Scotland, ‘for the restoring the Ancient Constitution of that Kingdom, and for bringing the Matter of Religion to such a Settlement, that the people may live easy and happy’, and ‘study to bring the Kingdome of Ireland to such a state, that the Setlement there may be religiously observed’ and ‘the Protestant and British Interest there… Secured’.¹³ Following his invasion, upon establishing a power base in the West Country, William issued a second declaration, adding the charge that James had formed a private league with France, which William claimed he had not mentioned earlier merely out of deference to James, who had publicly avowed that he had done no such thing.¹⁴

In the face of the Dutch invasion, some people rallied behind their beleaguered king. In early October, the grand jury for the county of Cumberland drew up an address against the Dutch, and similar addresses followed from the city of Carlisle and the common council of Exeter. Several members of the nobility and gentry pledged their support for James, offering to raise men on his behalf, though for some this was merely a subterfuge: the London Gazette announced that one of those who had pledged was Danby.¹⁵ One manuscript poem, which circulated in the West Country and seems to have been designed to appeal to dissenters, urged ‘Good people’ to ‘Throw the Orange away’, since it was ‘a very sowr fruit’: ‘Lob, Pen and a Score / Of those honest men and more’, the rhymester predicted, ‘Will find this same Orange exceedingly sowr’.¹⁶ What impresses, however, is the speed and ease with which William gained control over England following his landing. It would certainly be wrong to imply that the English immediately, and en masse, went over to William. There were many whose instincts were to be loyal to their king and who tried to do what they could to resist the Dutch invader; there were even more who initially were unsure how to act and were reluctant to engage in an act of treason by declaring themselves for William until they could see which way the tide was turning. Rather, we should think in terms of an expedition that quickly developed a momentum of its own: William's initial successes, together with early manifestations of support for him, soon induced more and more people to declare their sympathy or go over to his cause, until in the end James himself came to realize that there was no way he could halt the Dutch advance.

William did not, of course, just invade and hope for the best. He and his agents had been conspiring for some time with leading dissidents in England to ensure that he would meet with limited resistance from James's armed forces and that leading members of England's politically and economically important classes would rally to his cause. Such was the disillusionment with James among the English merchant community that many helped provide funds to finance William's invasion, pouring some £200,000 into William's coffers in just six weeks in July and August 1688.¹⁷ A Williamite conspiracy within the navy was designed to ensure that William met with limited resistance as he attempted to cross the Channel. Arthur Herbert, the former admiral whom James had replaced with the Catholic Roger Strickland, had gone over to William in the summer and was to lead the Dutch invasion force; he was also able to ensure that many of the sea captains who had previously enjoyed his patronage pledged not to fight William. In the end, the fruits of the conspiracy were never put to the test, since unfavourable winds meant the English fleet was unable to get out of the Thames estuary and engage the Dutch.¹⁸ Disaffected nobility in the north of England were also conspiring to secure the north of the kingdom for William.¹⁹ However, again, the wind dictated that William's armada did not head up the east coast to link up with these dissidents, but instead sailed down the English Channel. William also came over with a sizeable contingent of discontented English and Scottish exiles – ‘disgruntled peers, redundant MPs, proclaimed traitors, escaped spies, fugitive rebels, suspected republicans, renegade officers, and mischievous divines’ – among them lords Cardross, Leven, Macclesfield, Mordaunt, Shrewsbury and Wiltshire, Sir Rowland Gwynne, Sir John Hotham, Sir Robert Peyton, Sir William Waller, Sir James Dalrymple of Stair, Gilbert Burnet, Robert Ferguson, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, John Locke, Edward Russell, Henry Sidney and John Wildman, to name but a few.²⁰ This was not merely a foreign invasion force, akin to the Spanish Armada of 1588. Rather, this was a British conspiracy in which discontented English and Scots utilized the resources available to a man who, although head of a foreign state, was nevertheless married to the next-in-line to the English, Scottish and Irish thrones (barring the supposedly supposititious Prince of Wales) and who was third-in-line himself, in order not to subject the three kingdoms to foreign rule but rather to free them from perceived tyranny, in accordance with the desires of the vast majority of British Protestants. To claim that 1688 should be seen ‘as an instance of what had last been seriously attempted a century earlier’ is to get it seriously wrong.²¹

Upon landing, William managed to secure control over the West Country fairly easily. He gained Exeter on 9 November, and although the magistrates of the recently restored corporation tried to stop him from entering and the clergy subsequently refused to read his Declaration in their churches, the ordinary citizens gave him a tumultuous reception.²² William was to stay at Exeter until the 21st, ‘to refresh the Army after it had been so long on Shipboard, and to recover the Horses to their former Strength, as also for the Gentlemen of the Country thereabout to come and join his Highness there’, as one of the chaplains of his expeditionary force put it.²³ He was soon joined by the Whigs Lord Colchester, Lord Edward Russell and Thomas Wharton (the sons and heirs of the Whig peers Earl Rivers, the Earl of Bedford and Lord Wharton), and the Tories Sir Edward Seymour and William Portman. To cement support for William across the nation, Burnet, at the instigation of the Tory MP Sir Edward Seymour, penned an Association for ‘pursuing the ends of the prince's declaration’, which was then printed and circulated for general subscription. Edward Russell and Lord Leven negotiated the surrender of the garrison at Plymouth from the Earl of Bath on 18 November, Bath himself going over to the Prince, while Shrewsbury was sent to secure Bristol. With William's rear now safeguarded, the way was clear for a march on London.²⁴ Lord Lovelace was foiled in his attempt to bring some seventy ‘well appointed men’ to link up with William by the Gloucestershire militia under the command of the Duke of Beaufort, the only Lord Lieutenant to make any concerted effort to stop supporters from joining the Prince; they came to blows, and a couple of the militia men were killed and half a dozen more were injured, but Lovelace and thirteen of his followers were taken and sent to Cirencester jail and, subsequently, Gloucester castle.²⁵ However, in Dorset, the local nobility and gentry began to organize the militia and the collection of taxation for the benefit of the Prince, while ‘many of the greatest quality and estates’ in Somerset and Devon also joined with William, as did the local populace.²⁶

By the end of the third week in November it was said that William had enlisted some 12,000 recruits, so great an army that he wished many would offer ‘to repair home’ until he told them they were needed.²⁷ What he wanted was not civilians but deserters from James's army, as promised in the letter inviting him to invade, and he expected much from a Williamite conspiracy brewing amongst certain army officers. The first of the major desertions occurred on 12 November, when Viscount Cornbury, Clarendon's eldest son and commander of the royal dragoons, and Thomas Langston, with the Duke of St Alban's regiment of horse, deserted the royal army at Salisbury Plain and crossed into enemy lines, although in fact they carried few of their troops with them. Others began to run from their colours over the next few days. The most significant blow came in the third week of November: in the early hours of Saturday the 24th, Lord Churchill, the Duke of Grafton and Colonel Berkeley crossed into enemy lines, and they were rapidly followed by the young Duke of Ormonde (the grandson of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland who had died in July 1688), the Duke of Northumberland, Prince George of Denmark (the husband of James's daughter, Anne) and Lord Drumlanrig. The total number of desertions was not particularly large. The effect on morale within the army camp, however, was devastating, as no man could be sure of the loyalty of his neighbour or of his commanding officer.²⁸ The mood of the army was further swayed by the publication, in October 1688, of Thomas Wharton's anti-Irish song ‘Lilliburlero’. Although originally written in early 1687 in condemnation of Tyrconnell's appointment as Lord Deputy of Ireland, it was now printed for the first time and enjoyed enormous popularity. A sequel was immediately published, making direct references to the events of the autumn of 1688, while supporters of James II even wrote some anti-Dutch words to the tune, although the attempt to appropriate the song for the government seriously backfired since it only served to remind the public of the original. Burnet, despite thinking ‘Lilliburlero’ ‘a foolish ballad’, nevertheless admitted that it ‘made an impression on the [King's] army that cannot be well imagined by those who saw it not’, and observed that ‘the whole army, and at last all people both in city and country, were singing it perpetually’. Wharton himself boasted that the tune ‘sung a deluded Prince out of three kingdoms’.²⁹

There was a series of risings in support of William in the north of England, where William had initially been expected to land. Lord Delamere raised a regiment of some 300 ‘Noblemen and divers Gentlemen of great Quality’ in Cheshire and declared for the Prince on 15 November; ‘great numbers’ of countrymen and freeholders apparently volunteered to join with him, but Delamere sent them home, ‘promising to give them notice’ if he had ‘any further occasion of their service’. Not that the upper-class nature of his regiment meant that it acted in a particularly respectable way; according to one report, Delamere took to riding about the country ‘like a mad man’, seizing horses belonging to Catholics and despoiling their chapels. The Earl of Devonshire raised his tenants and marched into Derby on 17 November, where he declared for a free parliament, before proceeding to Nottingham, which he entered on the 20th and where he was joined by Delamere the following day. On the 24th Delamere and his supporters headed south to join up with the Prince, passing through Lichfield, Birmingham and Worcester, before arriving at Bristol (which was by now under Williamite control) on 2 December. Devonshire remained in Nottingham, where he was joined by reinforcements from the south Midlands (particularly Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire) on 29 November and then, on 2 December, by James's own daughter, Princess Anne, and Bishop Compton of London (who had fled the capital a few days earlier). On 22 November, Danby seized York and declared for ‘a free parliament and the Protestant religion and no Popery’, and by the beginning of December he had also secured the capitulation of the important garrison at Hull. Other areas followed suit. On learning the news of William's landing, William Rowland of Hexham in Northumberland gathered together a band of Protestants and proceeded to disarm all the papists’ houses in the vicinity. Rowland then went off to London, presumably to assist in the campaign against popery in the south. In East Anglia, the Duke of Norfolk raised the militia for William and took Norwich and King's Lynn, ‘whereupon the Tradesmen, Seamen and inferior sort, put Orange Ribbons in their Hates, shouting and echoing Huzzas for the Prince of Orange and the Duke of Norfolk’. On the Welsh borders, Lord Herbert of Cherbery and Sir Edward Harley, together with ‘most of the gentry of Worcestershire and Herefordshire’ entered Worcester and seized Ludlow castle. Everywhere the insurgents took measures to disarm the local Catholics.³⁰

Others joined in the demand for a free parliament. Those close to the King saw it as the only hope for a peaceful solution to the crisis. Thus on 17 November, seven bishops (including the Archbishop of Canterbury) and twelve temporal peers (among them Clarendon and Rochester) petitioned the King for a free parliament as ‘the only Visible way to preserve your Majesty and this your Kingdom’ and avoid ‘the Effusion of Christian Blood’; the King replied that he could not call a parliament while there was an invading army in the West, but he would do so ‘as soon as the present troubles were appeas'd’.³¹ Similar addresses came in from across the country: from Westmorland and Cumberland and Lancashire in the north, to Norwich in the east, and Gloucestershire and Devon in the west.³² By early December, as the Countess of Huntingdon put it, the nobility and gentry were up ‘in all Counties’, having all declared ‘for a free parliament and the protestant religion and many for the Prince of Oreng’.³³

How did those who had orchestrated the uprisings on William's behalf justify engaging in active resistance against their king? For Whigs this was fairly straightforward, since they had always held that tyrants who broke the law could be resisted. Justifying his active resistance in a speech to his tenants in Cheshire in November 1688, Delamere proclaimed that he had to choose whether he would be ‘a Slave and a Papist, or a Protestant and a Freeman’; if the nation were to be delivered, ‘it must be by force or by miracle’, he said, but ‘it would be too great a presumption to expect the latter, and therefore our Deliverance must be by force’.³⁴ In their declaration, the nobility, gentry and commons assembled at Nottingham claimed that although it was rebellion ‘to resist a King that governs by Law… he was always accounted a Tyrant that made his Will the Law; and to resist such an one’ was ‘no Rebellion but a necessary Defence’.³⁵

For others who joined with the Williamite resistance movement, however, the situation was a little more complicated. Let us take Gilbert Burnet, for example. He was one of William's chief propagandists and thus clearly a Whig in his politics. Yet he was also a churchman who, after earning his MA in his native Scotland, had served as a licensed preacher in the Scottish Episcopalian Church and then as Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow before moving to England, where he had been a royal chaplain and then chaplain to the Rolls Chapel and a lecturer at St Clement Danes, London, before falling out of royal favour and opting to withdraw to the Continent upon the accession of James II. Under William he was to become Bishop of Salisbury. A self-appointed apologist for the Church of England against the errors of Rome, back in December 1674 he had even preached a sermon entitled Subjection for Conscience Sake Asserted.³⁶ One of the first to hint at the necessity of resistance to James II in print, in the autumn of 1688 he produced his Enquiry into the Measures of Submission to complement William's invasion manifesto of 30 September. It was quite overtly an Anglican resistance tract.

Burnet began by asserting that all men were ‘born free’ and had a ‘duty of Self-preservation’. Although ‘Considerations of Religion’ did indeed ‘bring Subjects under stricter Obligations, to pay all due Allegiance and Submission to their Princes’, they did ‘not at all extend Allegiance further than the Law carries it’. Under the English system of government, the king's authority was limited: if he acted ‘beyond the limits of his Power’, subjects lay under no obligation to obey; and if any, acting illegally in the king's name, sought to ‘Invade our Property’ they were ‘violent Aggressours’ and the principle of self-preservation allowed for ‘as Violent a resistance’. Burnet was also adamant that England was ‘a free Nation’ with ‘its Liberties and Properties reserved to it by many positive and express Laws’; if ‘we have a right to our Property, we must likewise be supposed to have a right to preserve it… against the Invasions of the Prerogative’.³⁷

The difficulty was that there were ‘many express Laws’ that made it ‘unlawful upon any pretence whatsoever to take Arms against the King, or any Commissioned by him’, and that all office-holders in Church and state had sworn an oath to this effect. ‘And since this had been the constant Doctrine of the Church of England’, Burnet continued, in a vein designed to reveal his own sincere commitment to the teachings of the Anglican Church as well as his intent to reach out to those with Anglican convictions, ‘it will be a very heavy Imputation on us, if it appears, that tho we held those Opinions, as long as the Court and the Crown have favoured us, yet as soon as the Court turns against us, we change our principles’. There was a tacit exception, however, Burnet insisted: whenever liberty and resistance came into conflict, liberty took priority. ‘The not resisting the King’ applied only ‘to the Executive Power’, that is, we could not resist upon ‘pretence of ill Administrations in the Execution of the Law’. But this did not extend ‘to an Invasion of the Legislative Power, or to a total Subversion of the Government’, for the law ‘did not design to lodge that Power in the King’. It followed that if the king tried ‘to Subvert the whole Foundation of the Government… he annuls his own Power; and then ceases to be King, having endeavoured to destroy that, upon which his Authority is founded’. Burnet then went on to consider whether the foundations of the government had been struck at under James, and concluded that they had, rehearsing in full the case made against James by William's invasion manifesto.³⁸

For Danby, who led the resistance movement at York, the problem was especially intellectually taxing. In effect, Danby had been the original Tory: the founder of the Church and King party under Charles II in the mid-1670s and, as the leading minister at the time of the Popish Plot, he was the focus of the Whigs' wrath during the earliest phase of the Exclusion Crisis. His motives are easy to understand. In the mid-1670s, he had sought to tie the crown to a pro-Anglican and anti-French policy; he had arranged the marriage between William of Orange and James's daughter, Mary, to whom he expected the succession would pass after James's eventual demise; and he had even proposed limitations on a popish successor to guarantee the Church would be safe should James inherit the throne. James's policies as king had undermined his entire political agenda. He had also been made a sacrificial lamb in the wake of the Popish Plot, when the Commons had tried to impeach him for allegedly trying to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical form of government, and although he had escaped impeachment, he had spent five years in the Tower and was not to regain royal favour after his release. Yet back in 1675, Danby had sought to impose a non-resistance oath on those who sat in the Lords and had launched a propaganda offensive designed to promote the English sovereign as a divine-right, absolute monarch. One might think this should have made it impossible for him later to contemplate active resistance to James.³⁹

A justification of Danby's northern resistance movement appeared in print in 1689. Published anonymously, it has been attributed to Danby himself, and it was certainly intended to offer a vindication of the justice of the undertaking that could appeal to Tory-Anglican consciences. Laws, the author states, were supposed to be supportive, not destructive, of man. When a man cannot defend himself by law, ‘he may by the Law of Nature… smite his Adversary to save his own life’. If some set about trying ‘to destroy the Rest’ it was ‘lawful by the Laws of God and Man, for the injured to defend themselves’. ‘Arbitrary Princes’ might have ‘a Political power to treat a Subject cruelly and inhumanely’, but this was not true of those supposed ‘to rule by Laws made for the Publick Good, and such as render the Subjects Freemen, not Slaves; such as secures their Religion, Liberty and Property’. If such princes, ‘contrary to Law’, imprison their subjects or seize their estates, ‘they do it unjustly, without God's Warrant, or any Political Authority, and may be resisted’. The author accepted that government was ordained by God; but God had left it to the people to decide which type of government to erect. If the governor tried to assume more power than his people had given him, then ‘Subjects may by the Laws of God and Man deny to yield to it’. In answer to the Pauline injunction that ‘the powers that be’ were ordained of God and thus could not be resisted, the author maintained that governments had ‘God's warrant to proceed according to the Frame of the Government, to the End of the Government, which is the publick Good’, but ‘if the Governor proceed neither according to the frame of the Government, nor to the End, but against it, such Process cannot be the Ordinance of God’. It did not follow that ‘because I may not resist the Ordinance of God, that I may not resist the powerless and inauthoritative, unjust, Attempts of Superiors upon me’. Thus ‘resistance (for the Publick Good) of Illegal Commission'd Forces, is not resisting the King's Person, but his Forces; not his Power, but his Force without power’. One certainly should not wittingly or wilfully kill the king, however, even if he joins with wicked men. Regicide was not an option.⁴⁰

The author then proceeded to direct his argument more specifically to the English context. England had a limited monarchy, where the king was bound, by his coronation oath, ‘to Govern by the Laws’. If a king acted against law, and not for the public good, then he was guilty of injustice. ‘Illegal force… must be resisted’, though resistance must be a last resort, and only engaged in if the cause is good and can achieve the desired end. It is not rebellion, however, because ‘Rebellion is resisting the just Power of the Government’. To the objection that only the king possessed the power of the sword, the author insisted that ‘If force be offered that wants Political Power, who ever does it, does it but in the Nature of a Private person, and Private persons may resist such.’ As for our oaths of allegiance, the author maintained that we swore to give allegiance to the frame of the government and that our allegiance was therefore ‘bounded by our Laws’, to which the king also owed allegiance, having sworn to observe them in his coronation oath. Although the king undoubtedly possessed prerogative powers, the royal prerogative could not be used against the frame of the government or the public good. ‘A Prerogative therefore cannot destroy a Law, but it may supply its defects, pardoning a Condemned innocent, or a hopeful penitent, or dispensing with a Law, to one, that by particular Accident, the Law in its rigour would undo.’ (Danby himself, of course, had received such a royal pardon back in 1679.) ‘But no Prerogative’, he continued, ‘can Impower the King to destroy the people's Liberty or Property. That dispensing Power, that… casts all the Laws asleep’, he was adamant, in allusion to James's Declarations of Indulgence, ‘is no Prerogative belonging to the Crown of England’. ‘Resisting Illegalities, and Misgovernment’, he concluded, was therefore ‘the way to preserve Government’, as long as the king remained safe.⁴¹

THE CROWD AND THE REVOLUTION OF 1688

Along with the uprisings in the north and Midlands, and the desertions to William amongst the nobility, gentry, merchants and armed forces, there was also an outbreak of anti-Catholic rioting in the autumn. There had been periodic unrest earlier in the reign, revealing that in many communities tensions between Protestants and Catholics lay not far beneath the surface. Thus, as we saw in Chapter 5, there were riots in London and a number of provincial towns in the spring of 1686 upon the first opening of public Catholic chapels (see p. 200). A serious incident happened at York on Shrove Tuesday 1688. It started innocently enough, when some youths gathered in the Minster Yard to indulge in the traditional holiday pastime of throwing at cocks – a rather barbaric pastime whereby participants took turns at throwing a club at a cock that was tied by one leg to a stake in the ground (the winner, i.e., the one who killed the cock, got to take it home for dinner). A local Catholic homeowner came out to complain about the noise and the dispute escalated when the man assaulted a couple of the youths and they replied by throwing stones, breaking the window of a Catholic chapel which happened to be inside the man's house. Whether this was a premeditated attack on a Catholic mass or holiday high spirits that got out of hand depends on which account one reads. The homeowner, however, believed that he was being victimized because of his religion and sent for the Catholic troops that were stationed in the city: these not only proceeded to arrest some of the youths and a number of citizens who were innocent bystanders, but made their detainees ride the wooden horse – a military punishment that should not have been inflicted on civilians.⁴²

Anti-Catholic agitation escalated dramatically as James's regime plunged deeply into crisis in the final months of 1688. Trouble erupted in London on 30 September at the chapel in Lime Street, when the Jesuit priest Charles Petre (the brother of James's Jesuit privy counsellor) spoke disparagingly of the King James Bible in his sermon. A large crowd quickly assembled. They pulled Petre from the pulpit, smashed the altar, and would have gone on to demolish the chapel completely had not the Lord Mayor taken swift action to restore the peace.⁴³ The respite was only temporary. The following week an angry crowd once more forced its way into the chapel, causing considerable damage before the Lord Mayor and local constables managed to restore order; in addition there was a violent assault on the Catholic chapel in Bucklersbury and on the friary in Lincoln's Inn Fields.⁴⁴ The Lime Street chapel was the scene of further trouble two weeks later, when a group of youths began to torment a couple of Irish soldiers who happened to come by even though the chapel was shut. The soldiers charged at the youths with their swords, whereupon a large crowd assembled and chased the soldiers off. The Irishmen then ran into a nearby church, causing mayhem: the congregation shouted ‘massacre’ and immediately fled the church in panic, some of them leaping out of windows; one individual broke his leg in the fall.⁴⁵ On Lord Mayor's day (Monday 29 October), traditionally a public holiday in London, ‘the Mobilee went from their Bonefires to the Masshouse in Bucklersbury’, broke in and proceeded to deface it, removing vestments, copes, ornaments and trinkets, which they burned in the street.⁴⁶ The King ordered the Lord Mayor and sheriffs to make sure nothing like this happened again, and the following Sunday the trained bands were out in force to stop the youths from assaulting the Catholic chapels in Lincoln's Inn Fields and Lime Street.⁴⁷ However, there was further violence on Sunday 11 November, occasioned by the spread of a rumour that ‘gridirons, spits, great cauldrons’ and other ‘very strange and unusual instruments of cruelty’ intended for use on Protestants were being stored in the recently opened Benedictine priory in Clerkenwell. A crowd of youths stormed the building and tried to pull it down, and with the city authorities finding it impossible to hold the crowd at bay, the horse guards were sent for, who fired into the crowd, killing about four of the rioters and injuring many more.

James at last realized he would have to back down. Following the trouble on the 11th, he immediately ordered the closure of all Catholic chapels in London, except those belonging to the royal family and foreign ambassadors. Even this gesture was not enough to bring quiet to the streets. When the monks of Clerkenwell began to remove their effects for safe-keeping on the 12th, a crowd of youths seized three cartloads of their goods in Holborn and burned them publicly in the streets, and it took extensive policing of the establishments that remained open to ensure that no further attacks happened over the next couple of weeks.⁴⁸ A heavy armed presence did at least prevent a planned pope-burning on 17 November (the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's accession): the apprentices, it was reported, had divided themselves into three regiments with banners bearing the inscription ‘No Pope, No Popists’, and had even planned to attack the houses of Lord Salisbury and other Catholic converts around London, but the trained bands and king's guards were out in force that day and managed to prevent any disturbances.⁴⁹

There were also attacks on those associated with James's policies. In early October, Solicitor-General Sir William Williams, one of the prosecutors in the trial of the seven bishops, had the windows of his chambers in Gray's Inn smashed and ‘reflecting inscriptions’ fixed over his door.⁵⁰ The house of the King's printer, Henry Hills, was attacked on three different occasions in the first two weeks of November, on the last by a crowd of over a thousand, who broke his windows and threatened ‘to do him more mischief’, before the King finally ordered the Lord Mayor to station a strong guard outside Hill's establishment to prevent any further trouble.⁵¹

Similar unrest broke out in the provinces. In Norwich on 14 October (James's birthday), a crowd of about a thousand people, mainly adolescent males, attacked a Catholic chapel and used the priest ‘very ill’ before being dispersed by the mayor and sheriffs.⁵² At the end of the month a group burned the Catholic chapel in Birmingham and proceeded, we are told, to ‘secure the Papists’, making sure they could not be a threat, while in Oxford on 5 November (Gunpowder Treason Day), although there were no riots, there were ‘more bonefiers at Colleges and in the streets’ than ever before ‘in spite to the papists’.⁵³ The risings of the Williamite peers in the north and Midlands also brought in their wake anti-Catholic violence, as the insurgents ransacked the houses of local Catholics in the search for priests, arms and horses, and destroyed places of Catholic worship. News reached Oxford on 26 November that Delamere ‘was about Northampton burning all popish chapel stuffs and defacing popish chappells’ and would soon be in Oxford, which caused several of the University's Catholics to decide that the time had come to get out of town as quickly as possible.⁵⁴ On Friday 30 November, a crowd in Cambridge broke into Father Francis's chapel in Sidney Sussex College and carried away vestments and all the ornaments for saying mass, which they then publicly destroyed in a bonfire in the street. They also went after a priest in Bennett's College, who had to hide ‘in a bogg house’ to ‘escape their fury’, made a Catholic ‘dance naked in a ditch till he promised to change his religion’, pulled ‘divers new Converts… through the dirt’, and smashed all the windows of the house of the Catholic former mayor, whom they dragged out of bed and whose scarlet gown they ‘burnt… upon a Pole’.⁵⁵ At Oxford on the afternoon of 4 December a crowd of 200 people, mainly boys, went to every popish house in town and smashed the windows, starting first with the Mitre Inn, whose owner had openly condemned those who had gone over to William and stated that ‘he hoped to see Oxford in ashes before Christmas’.⁵⁶ By the beginning of the second week of December many urban centres had witnessed attacks on Catholic chapels and the residences of Catholics: in addition to London, Northampton, Norwich, York, Oxford and Cambridge, we could add Bristol, Bury St Edmunds, Gloucester, Hereford, Ipswich, Newcastle upon Tyne, Shrewsbury, Stafford, Sudbury, Wolverhampton and Worcester.⁵⁷

The general anti-Catholic fever was further fuelled by the publication of a spurious third Declaration issued in William's name – dated 28 November but published in London on 4 December and dispersed ‘over most Parts of the Kingdom’ - alleging that ‘great Numbers of Armed Papists’ had lately made their way towards London either to fire the city or massacre the inhabitants, calling upon all magistrates to take speedy action to disarm Catholics, and warning that any Catholics found in possession of arms or in any military or civil office would be treated by the Williamite forces as ‘Robbers, Free-booters and Banditi’. The Whig Hugh Speke later claimed to have written the Declaration, together with ‘another Gentleman’, though other contemporaries believed this a vain pretence; John Oldmixon thought it had probably been penned by Samuel Johnson. William, although disowning it, nevertheless ‘seem'd not at all displeas'd with the Thing’, while most soon realized ‘it did his Highness's Interest a great deal of Service’.⁵⁸ In London, the phoney Declaration was brought to the Lord Mayor, who was asked to execute it, while at the Middlesex sessions at Hickes Hall a grand jury drew up a presentment against the earls of Sunderland, Salisbury and Peterborough ‘and all other English Papists that were reconciled to the Church of Rome as Guilty of High Treason’ (though they were subsequently persuaded to let it drop).⁵⁹ The Declaration had the effect of terrifying Catholics, and many Catholic office-holders immediately laid down their commissions and fled, prompting the diarist John Evelyn to remark ‘it lookes like a Revolution’.⁶⁰ It also prompted ‘Protestants everywhere’ to stand ‘on their Guard’ and to proceed ‘in most Places’ to disarm ‘the Papists’ so that ‘ever after that’, Speke boasted, the Catholics did not ‘make any shew of Resistance in any Part of England’.⁶¹

James was clearly unnerved. Initially hoping to contain William in the West, he dispatched troops to establish a forward position at Salisbury Plain, which he appointed as the general rendezvous of all his forces, and set off from London on 17 November to join them, arriving two days later. Yet faced with open revolt in the west and in the north, anti-Catholic rioting in London and some provincial towns, and desertions within the army, he panicked. By now suffering from frequent nosebleeds and clearly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he accepted the advice of a council of war held on 23 November that he should order his army to withdraw and retire behind the Thames to Reading. Churchill was still in favour of advancing, but Churchill, as we have seen, had other motives; it was on that night that he and some other army leaders were to go over to the enemy. James's nosebleeds might possibly have saved him from what would have been an audacious attempt to deliver him into the hands of the Dutch invaders: one London newswriter reported that Churchill had been planning to seize the King and carry him off to the Prince of Orange when James reviewed his troops on the 22nd, ‘but was disappointed by his Majesties Bleeding at nose that night’, so that the review was undertaken by Lord Feversham instead. James ordered the retreat to begin on the 23rd and himself arrived back in London on the 26th. The following evening he summoned the bishops and nobles about town to Whitehall to ask them what he should do. Halifax advised calling a parliament immediately, and James issued a proclamation to this effect on 30 November.⁶²

Desertions within the army continued, and William and his troops were able to continue their slow march to London largely unimpeded. The campaign saw a few minor armed skirmishes. The first was at Wincanton, on 21 November, when an advance guard of William's army, foraging for transport, had been confronted by 120 Irish soldiers under the command of Colonel Sarsfield, leaving perhaps 30 dead. In revenge, the Duke of Schomberg in William's army refused to offer quarter to a party of King's Horse it stumbled on outside Dorchester, killing fifty-three. The last incident was when Dutch troops took Reading early on Sunday 9 December, killing some thirty to fifty Irish troopers.⁶³ With an attempt to reach an accommodation with William on 8–9 December having failed – James had offered to do anything William desired to secure the meeting of a freely elected parliament if William and his men stayed out of London – effectively the game was now up.⁶⁴ In the early hours of Monday 10 December the Queen made her escape to France disguised as a laundry woman, taking her infant son with her.⁶⁵ At three o'clock on the morning of the 11th, after further unrest the night before, which had seen the destruction of the Catholic chapel in the Tower, James fled the capital himself, accompanied by Sir Edward Hales and another Catholic, Ralph Sheldon. He had seemingly contemplated heading north and throwing himself on the mercy of the rebellious lords and gentlemen up there, who, he was assured, would never harm his person; instead, ‘the Papists and priests prevailed with him to quit his kingdoms to make their fall appear more glorious’. He therefore made for the Kent coast where he intended to take a boat to France. James explained to Lord Dartmouth that he was ‘resolved to venture all rather than consent to anything in the least prejudicial to the crowne’, but ‘having been basely deserted by many officers and soldiers’ in the army and finding ‘the same poysone is gott amongst the fleet’ he felt he could no longer expose himself to what he ‘might expect from the ambitious Prince of Orange and the association of rebellious Lords’; he had therefore ‘resolved to withdraw’ until this ‘violent storme’ was over, which he predicted would be ‘in God's good time’. At his departure, he deliberately tried to create a government vacuum, dropping the Great Seal into the Thames and giving orders for the disbanding of the army.⁶⁶ Following James's flight, the lords spiritual and temporal who were in London at the time immediately established themselves as a provisional government, and resolved to assist the Prince of Orange in obtaining a free parliament to secure ‘Our Laws, Our Liberties and Properties’ and ‘the Church of England in particular, with a due Liberty to Protestant Dissenters’, as well as ‘the Protestant Religion and Interest’ more generally ‘over the whole World’.⁶⁷

The King's departure became the cue for further rioting. On the night of the 11th huge crowds, numbering several thousand, attacked all houses in London where they suspected mass was said or priests were lodged, including not only those that had recently been closed but also the residences of foreign ambassadors. They levelled the Catholic chapels in Lincoln's Inn Fields, Clerkenwell, Bucklersbury and Lime Street, ripping out the wainscotting and seats, and carrying out all the furnishings and paraphernalia for saying mass ‘in mock procession and triumph, with oranges on the tops of swords and staves’ and ‘great lighted candles in gilt candlesticks’ to be committed to a huge bonfire outside. They demolished the Spanish ambassador's residence at Wild House, destroying furniture, pictures, books, plate, three coaches and other valuables in the bargain, and afterwards ‘marched down the Strand with Oranges upon their Sticks, crying for the Prince of Orange’. What could not be accomplished that night was reserved for the next. On the evening of the 12th they attacked the Florentine ambassador's residence in the Haymarket, burning ‘every thing but the walls’, saying it was ‘a Mass House, where many Catholics daily performed their Devotion, and that they would now eradicate the Tree and Roots of Popery'. They also entered the French ambassador's residence, though a combination of the presence of the trained bands and monetary gifts from the ambassador's landlord succeeded in inducing the crowd to desist. The houses of those who served the crown were also attacked. Crowds did considerable damage to Henry Hill's printing house in Blackfriars and the residence of James's electoral agent, Robert Brent; they threatened the Earl of Huntingdon's town house and pulled down some private houses in and about the capital, including two large country houses just outside Southwark that belonged to Catholics. Some 5,000 people gathered outside the London residence of the Catholic convert Lord Salisbury as it was searched for arms, and another group went to attack the home of the Catholic privy counsellor Lord Powis, although ultimately they decided to leave it alone because he had been against sending the bishops to the Tower. In the early hours of the 12th Lord Chancellor Jeffreys was seized by a crowd in Wapping, disguised as a seaman and trying to make his escape to France, and handed over to the Lord Mayor. Jeffreys was sent to the Tower and placed under a heavy guard to protect him from the mob, who threatened ‘to pull him to peces before he be brought to public justice’. At Canterbury a crowd besieged Sir Edward Hales's house as soon as they learned he had fled with the King, entirely destroying his great library and everything else that was valuable, and also seizing several Jesuits and priests who were making their escape.⁶⁸

Catholic peers had their country homes raided by mobs searching for secret stores of weapons. In Hertfordshire, the ‘country Mobile’ rose and demolished the house of the Catholic Lord Aston, where they had heard he had ‘stor'd up great quantities of Provisions’, and set fire to all the furniture. The Cambridge ‘Mobile’ joined up with ‘their Brethren’ of Bury St Edmunds to attack Lord Dover's house at Cheveley, and after having demolished the chapel and inflicted considerable damage on the house, furniture and deer park, they went to Balsham in search of the Bishop of St Davids, Thomas Watson – who was also still rector of Burrough Green, Cambridgeshire, and who had shown himself to be a committed supporter of James II – whom they seized and led back to Cambridge ‘in a triumphant Manner’ on ‘a paultry Hourse, without Saddle or Bridle’, to be secured in the castle. In Bury it was said that ‘the poor Mobile that had nothing to hazard or loose’ styled themselves ‘the Protestant Reformers’ and went ‘rambling about Town and Country, sometimes in a formidable Body, and sometimes in Parties, imposing on some Taxes, Rifling both Papists and Protestants, Test-men and Anti Test-men, without any Distinction’, and plundered the houses of several eminent Catholics. In Northamptonshire ‘the Rabble… demolished all the Papist Chappels, and most of the remarkable Papist Houses’, before finally setting upon the Earl of Peterborough's house at Drayton. Here they seized the Earl's steward, tying him to a stake, ‘piling Faggots and other combustible matter about’, and threatened to burn him if he did not reveal where his lordship had hidden his sizeable cache of arms. The crowd actually set fire to some of the loose fuel before the steward finally revealed he had thrown them in the estate's fishponds. In Caernarvonshire, local constables defaced the private Catholic chapel of Robert Pugh of Penrhyn Creuddyn.⁶⁹

The way in which James had disbanded his troops merely served to contribute further to the general mayhem. Those Irish soldiers who had been brought over as reinforcements had no option but to try to make their way back to their homeland as best they could. As they journeyed from where they had been stationed in the south and east (mainly Portsmouth and Tilbury) towards the seaports on the Irish Sea, still in possession of the weapons with which they had been issued, rumours began to fly that the Irish had risen and were committing all manner of outrages. The alarm reached the metropolis late on the night of 12 December and in the early hours of the 13 th, with reports coming in from the countryside of ‘the Irish being up in a great body, burning and killing all as they came along’, prompting Londoners to leave their beds, illuminate their windows, and take to the streets with whatever weapons they could lay their hands on. Soon much of the kingdom was in a state of panic. By midnight on the 12th, the inhabitants of Ampthill in Bedfordshire, having been informed by messengers on horseback that Irish papists had fired the nearby towns of Bedford, Luton, Dunstable and Woburn, barricaded the five entrances into town with overturned carts, so ‘senseless and affrighted’ were they that they did not stop to wonder why they could not see any smoke in the air. At Wendover in Buckinghamshire the locals were alarmed with reports of ‘some thousands of Irish Soldiers being… within a few miles of the place, Robbing, Burning, and Murdering Man, Woman, and Child’, which caused panic for several hours until they were eventually informed it was a false alarm. On the 13th, the Earl of Ailesbury encountered workmen at Rochester cutting down the wooden bridge, ‘to hinder the Irish Papists from cutting their throats’, they having heard that nearby Dartford ‘was on fire, and the streets ran with blood’. As he passed through Chatham and Sittingborne, Ailesbury saw women ‘crying at their doors… with their children by them’, preferring, so they said, ‘rather to be murdered there then in their beds’.⁷⁰

One correspondent reported how once ‘the Irish part of the King's army’ that had been at Reading had ‘got some considerable distance from the Prince's [army]’ they began ‘to plunder, kill and destroy’. The city of Oxford received a similar report that ‘a great Body of Irish were coming… to Plunder’ the place, upon which the locals immediately took to arms, closed the drawbridge, and secured the avenues leading into the city. Soon a rumour was flying that Birmingham had been burned and that the Irish were heading off to Wolverhampton to continue their acts of terror, and before long news had spread from town to town across the Midlands ‘that the Irish were Cutting of Throats’, with Lichfield in Staffordshire on fire and nearby Burton ‘attempted upon’. The reports were false, but an enraged rabble seized a local Catholic gentleman, together with his priest (both of whom were lucky to escape with their lives) and proceeded to burn his new chapel to the ground and turn out all his deer. ‘A great concourse of Country People’ who lived along the Lincolnshire sea coast flocked into Lincoln on the 14th, ‘upon an Alarm, That a great Number of Irish were landing upon them’. By the 15th the northern counties were ‘universally alarmed’ by reports that ‘the disbanded Irish Papists would cut all their throats’: someone brought the news to Wakefield that they had fired Birmingham and slain men, women and children; another that Nottingham had been fired. In the early hours of the 19th, the residents of Yeovil in Somerset heard ‘that some thousands of the Irish were coming Westward’ and ‘had burn'd Portsmouth, Lymington, and Basingstoke’; the whole county, as far as Taunton, was up in arms, before it was finally revealed to be a false alarm. The fright hit East Anglia. At Bury St Edmunds, a rumour that some Irish were ‘approaching with Fire and Sword’ resulted in more than 500 local inhabitants appearing in arms ‘in an instant’, ‘Fortifying and Barricading the Town Gates and Avenues leading thereto’. There was also trouble in Wales. In Pembrokeshire, angry crowds thwarted the efforts of disbanded Irish troops to cross the Irish Sea, while at Dolgellau in Merionethshire local inhabitants mistakenly fired on some excise commissioners believing them to be Irish soldiers. Not that the Irish soldiers were always totally blameless. They committed ‘some small Rudeness and Outrages… in some places’, one correspondent wrote, in attempts to get food. Yet imaginations clearly ran riot as to what the demobbed Irish might be up to, especially when they were known to be nearby but not quite within immediate view.⁷¹

Many observers were shocked by the unruliness and violence of the anti-Catholic crowds. The Essex JP Sir John Bramston thought some of the participants in the London disturbances of 11 December were ‘common theeves’, and it was they who ‘set the boys to work’, while one pamphleteer insisted that anyone who tried to justify the ‘base and villainous Actions’ of that night ‘must be degenerated from common Humanity’.⁷² Historians have also condemned ‘the indiscriminate orgy of looting and destruction' unleashed by James's flight, and have tended to convey a picture of an anarchic mob, fuelled by anti-Catholic bigotry and reinforced by members of the criminal underworld, bent on pillage and destruction.⁷³ In fact, a closer examination shows that there was a considerable degree of structure and discipline behind much of the rioting and that the crowds were clearly seeking to make specific political points. This is not to sanitize the crowd. The spectacle of large numbers of people roaming the streets of densely populated urban centres, pulling down timber-framed houses and burning everything they found within, was undoubtedly terrifying. The scale of the destruction was extensive: some £400 worth of damage was done to the altar furnishings of the chapel in Bucklersbury on 29 October, while the Spanish ambassador is reported to have suffered losses amounting to between £15,000 and £20,000.⁷⁴ Yet the crowds acted in ritualized ways, removing the furnishings from the buildings and burning them in the open street. They were making a public statement. It would be naïve to assume that there was no indiscriminate plunder, although according to some contemporaries, at least, there was remarkably little. Thus the contemporary Whig historian John Oldmixon (who was fifteen in late 1688 and living in London, and may well have been a participant in the riots) tells us that such was the ‘justice’ shown by the crowds that if anyone did try to purloin something, ‘they were immediately taken hold of, and us'd in a worse manner than the Law uses Pilferers’. Burnet also commented on the discipline of the crowds, even those in London on the night of 11 December, writing that ‘Never was so much fury seen under so much management’, since ‘none were killed, no houses burnt, nor were any robberies committed’.⁷⁵

In fact, rather than seeing the crowds as seeking to take advantage of the collapse in royal government to loot and pillage, we can almost view the attacks on Catholic chapels as law-enforcement riots. The verdict in the trial of the seven bishops had seemed to confirm that the King did not possess the suspending power. If so, then the Indulgence that was based on this supposed prerogative was nullified, and the laws against Catholic worship remained in force. Furthermore, the Restoration government had on occasion ordered the destruction of houses that were known to host religious conventicles outlawed by law. What we see happening in England in the autumn of 1688, then, is crowds appropriating a government sanction against religious assemblies that, following the trial of the bishops, were widely believed to be in violation of the law. William's invasion manifesto of 30 September, as we have already seen, had specifically alleged that the attempts to set up churches and chapels for the exercise of the Catholic religion had been against the law. Significantly, two juries, which sat to consider the shooting of some of those who attacked Catholic chapels in London on 11 November by the King's soldiers, concluded that the rioters were ‘loyal persons’ and the Catholics ‘traytors and enemies to the nation’ who met ‘contrary to the Lawes of this Land’.⁷⁶ Indeed, the fact that James himself ordered all Catholic chapels (except those belonging to the royal family and foreign ambassadors) to be closed down following the disturbances on 11 November, appeared almost tantamount to an admission by the King that his promotion of Catholic worship had been illegal. Subsequently, an indictment was brought against the Earl of Craven, the Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex, for protecting popish priests and ‘suppressing the well meaning Mobile and murdering 2 or 3 of them’.⁷⁷

If such an interpretation is valid, how then do we account for the attacks on the foreign ambassadors' chapels following the King's flight on 11 December? Foreign ambassadors undoubtedly were allowed to keep chapels for their own private worship, and many contemporaries saw the crowd attacks as a violation of the law of nations. However, it was widely known that the ambassadors' chapels were being employed not just for private use but for public worship, and this was illegal. In addition, a number of court Catholics had chosen to store their valuables in the residences of the foreign ambassadors, hoping that they would be safe from the fury of the mob. In a sense, the attacks on the ambassadors' chapels were really attacks on the King's evil counsellors, who had been responsible for various illegal acts committed by the government under James II, and might be seen on a par with the attacks on other servants of the crown committed at this time. Finally, William's third Declaration – the authenticity of which no one at the time had cause to doubt – further seemed to sanction the crowds' actions in disarming Catholics: the crowds were, in effect, acting upon what they believed were William's instructions following the flight of their own king.

What we see in the crowd unrest of the autumn of 1688, in other words, is a rejection of the men and measures of James II. However, this was not necessarily tantamount to a rejection of James himself. Support for William of Orange was unquestionably widespread,

but William had come to rescue English liberties and the Protestant religion; he had given no public intimation that his ultimate goal was to seize the crown for himself. To be sure, there were some committed Orangists who wanted James off the throne. Thus when Lord Lumley took Newcastle in early December, for example, the statue of James that stood on a lofty marble pedestal was pulled down and thrown into the Tyne.⁷⁸ However, not everyone anticipated the fall of the King. Indeed, there was to be one last show of support for James before he finally escaped to France.

James, who had failed in most of what he had set out to accomplish during his reign, was even unsuccessful in his last act of desperation. His party was stopped by seamen at Faversham in Kent at about eleven o'clock on the night of the 11th as they waited onboard their vessel while it took on ballast. The seamen were on the lookout for escaping Catholics and thought they had found some likely suspects. Indeed, they recognized one of the men in the party – Sir Edward Hales, who was a local man – but they failed to recognize the King himself, who was wearing a minimal disguise. Taking James to be Hales's Jesuit confessor, they called him an ‘old Rogue’, an ‘ugly, lean-jawed hatchet-faced Jesuite’, and a ‘popish dog', and even pulled down his breeches to see if he had any treasure concealed about his person. It was only when the would-be escapees were taken back to a local inn that the King's true identity was revealed. Realizing their mistake, the crowd gave the King back what they had taken, though in a final act of generosity James distributed all his gold amongst the local inhabitants.⁷⁹ At the behest of the provisional government that had set itself up in London following James's flight, the Earl of Winchelsea and various other leading gentry went to Kent to provide a military escort to bring the King back to the capital. James entered the City to a rapturous reception on 16 December. ‘Multitudes of people’, most accounts agree, lined the streets, cheering at their King's return. Ailesbury recalled how the streets from Southwark to Whitehall were so crowded, ‘there was scarce room for coaches to pass through, and the balconies and windows besides were thronged’. The day concluded with ringing of bells and bonfires. James was later to write that it was ‘liker a day of triumph’; even Burnet was taken aback by the ‘expressions of joy’ from such ‘great numbers’, and could only conclude that ‘the multitude’ was a ‘slight and unstable thing… and so soon altered’.⁸⁰

Some contemporaries tried to downplay the show of support for James. Oldmixon recalled that he remembered it well, but was rather dismissive, stating ‘that there was some shouting, by Boys, and that some of the Guards bid them hollow’. Edmund Bohun, in a work written in defence of the Revolution, claimed that ‘a Set of Boys’ followed James through the City, ‘making some Huzzas, whilst the rest of the People silently looked on’; in his autobiography he wrote that ‘there was much gaping but no rejoicing'. One London-based newsletter writer claimed that it was ‘the Papists’ who made the bonfires that night. Yet we do not necessarily have to conclude either that the crowd was fickle or that contemporaries misrepresented the enthusiasm with which James was welcomed back to his capital. The riots and demonstrations of late 1688, indeed the whole of the resistance movement to James, including (ostensibly) the Williamite invasion itself, had been directed against the illegal acts committed in the name of the crown and promoted by the King's evil ministers. The struggle had not necessarily been to overthrow James himself, but to bring him to terms, and make him rule in a way that would guarantee the security of the Protestant religion and protect the liberties and rights of the people. As the Essex JP Sir John Bramston wrote in his Autobiography, ‘the people huzzainge as he came, put hopes into his Majestie that the anger was not at his person, but at his religion’. For the author of a congratulatory poem written to commemorate the King's return to Whitehall, evil ministers were to blame: ‘Let Achan fall, the Troubler of the Land’ and ‘Dagon tumble’, he implored, ‘but let Cesar stand’. The poet also hinted that the King was given such an enthusiastic reception because it was anticipated that his return would lead to a restoration of law and order after days of rioting. Indeed, as soon as he got back to Whitehall, James issued a proclamation against riots.⁸¹

James's return had been an embarrassment for William, however. Indeed, the retrospective Jacobite Life of James II alleged that William ‘was in such a surprise… at the joyfull reception [James] met with at his arrival, as made him stand at a gaze in some doubt with himself what was next to be done’, apprehending ‘extreamly this sudden change and the unsettled genius of the people’. William refused James's request for an interview, but instead, on the evening of the 17th, sent some of his own Dutch troops to ‘take the posts’ at the royal palace at Whitehall, where the King was now staying. Again according to the Life, James ‘now perceivd he was absolutely the Prince of Orange's prisoner’. Shortly after midnight James was awoken by the Earl of Middleton with a message from the Prince, the substance of which was ‘That to avoid the disorder which his Majesty's presence might cause in London’, he should leave the capital that very morning. William's suggestion was that James should retire to Ham House. James objected on the grounds that the place was cold in winter and unfurnished, but he offered to go to Rochester instead. William agreed, but sent some of his own troops to make sure that James reached his destination. James's party left London by barge, but, delayed by the tide, had made it only as far as Gravesend by the evening. Forced to stop for the night, the King found that William's troops ‘kept very strict watch about the house’ where he stayed. When he reached Rochester on the 19th, however, James found his guards ‘were not So exact’, which led him to conclude ‘that the Prince of Orange would be well enough contented he should get away’. In the early hours of 23 December, James managed to slip away quietly to France, where he arrived on Christmas morning. He recognized that if he had chosen to remain it would have made things more awkward for the Williamites, who might have found it more difficult to dethrone him, but by now he clearly did not trust the Prince and feared for his own life: he did, after all, have the precedent of what had happened to his own father in 1649 to think about. As James explained in a paper he left behind: ‘How could I hope to be safe, so long as I was in the Power of one, who had not only done this to me [i.e. sent his guards to take the posts at Whitehall], and Invaded my Kingdoms without any just occasion given him for it, but that did by his first Declaration lay the greatest Aspersion upon me that Malice could Invent, in that Clause of it which concerns my Son’.⁸² The desertion was at last a reality; England was without a king.

James's departure from London had enabled William to enter the capital on the 18th. He too received a rapturous reception from ‘vast crouds of people’ who had gathered in the streets, and this despite the appalling weather on that day. Bishop Compton of London rode at the head of a troop carrying the motto ‘Nolumus leges Angliae mutari’ (‘We are unwilling to change the laws of England’) on its banner. In Ludgate, just outside the city walls, an orange woman ‘gave baskets full of Oranges to the Prince's Officers and soldiers as they marched by to testifie her affection towards them’, and various other ‘ordinary women… shooke his soldiers by the hand as they came by and cryed, “Welcome, welcome, God blesse you, you come to redeeme our Religion, Lawes, Liberties and Lives, God reward you.”’ Again, the day concluded with bells, bonfires, and even the burning of popes, with ‘such shouts and Huzzas as are not to be Expresst’. Evelyn concluded that ‘all have now it seems submitted’, and thought the bells and bonfires proclaimed ‘as much Joy and Satisfaction, as those are capable of, who have beheld so many changes and Revolutions, without being able to divine how all this will conclude at last’.⁸³ On 21 December a contingent of Anglican clergy, led by the Bishop of London, together with four nonconformist divines, presented an address to William thanking him ‘for his great and noble Attempt to deliver them from Popery and Slavery’ and promising him ‘their utmost assistance’ to help him achieve that end. Although some of the clergy had wanted the address to include a clause imploring the Prince ‘to have speciall respect to the King And to preserve the Church of England Established by Law’, ominously the bishop chose to omit the words ‘Respect to the King’ and ‘Established by Law’.⁸⁴

The question was, what would happen next? Even a diehard Anglican such as John Evelyn could look forward with some optimism to what the ‘approaching Revolution’ might bring; yet he also remained sceptical as to whether there would be any ‘Improvement of mankind in this declining Age’. ‘A Parliament (Legaly Cal'd) of brave, and worthy Patriots, not Influenced by Faction, nor terrified by Power, or Corrupted by selfe Interest’, he had no doubt, ‘would produce a kind of New-Creation amongst us.’ But he feared things might ‘dissolve to Chaos againe, unless the same stupendious Providence (which has put Opportunitie into men's-heads, to make us happy) dispose them to do Just and righteous things, and to use their Empire with Moderation, Justice, Piety, and for the publiq good.’⁸⁵ It is to a consideration of exactly what sort of ‘New-Creation’ the anticipated ‘Revolution’ brought about in England, Scotland and Ireland that we must now turn.

7

The Desertion