A FAMILY QUARREL AND A
GLORIOUS REVOLUTION
The drama of England in the last two months of 1688 might be described as a complex baroque improvisation for two kings, a polyphony of peers, choruses of invading soldiers and rioting Londoners, and an obbligato for printing press. On October 10 William of Orange issued a Declaration of his reasons for his planned invasion. It listed all the “crimes and abuses” of James’s reign, saw in them a grave threat to the established Protestant religion in England, but blamed all this on the king’s “evil counsellors” and called only for the summoning of a free Parliament. The infant prince of Wales was labeled an impostor, but William denied any intent to seize his father-in-law’s throne. Sixty thousand copies of the Declaration were printed, and their distribution in England by various channels began at once. By the end of October William of Orange had assembled at The Brill near Rotterdam a formidable invasion fleet and an army of at least twenty-one thousand, including all the crack Dutch regiments hardened in long years of confrontation with the forces of Louis XIV, and an abundance of cannons, supplies, and horses most unusual in a seventeenth-century expedition.
The fleet made a magnificent show as it sailed in fine weather on October 30, but it soon encountered a severe storm. Barrels broke loose and rolled around belowdecks, and five hundred to one thousand of the four thousand horses were killed, suffocated below battened-down hatches or their skulls smashed where they were tied against the sides of the ships.
The fleet returned to Dutch harbors, was put back into sailing condition with amazing speed, and sailed again on November 12. It was not clear where it was going. Some of William’s leading allies were in the northeast of England, which seemed a likely landing area. But surprise would be greater with a landing elsewhere, and the northeasterners might be able to secure that area on their own. On November 13 the fleet sailed with all flags flying through the Strait of Dover, crowds watching from the cliffs on both sides. The “Protestant wind” that was speeding it forward also was holding the English fleet in its ports, but even when it put to sea, its admiral pursued the invaders slowly, perhaps trimming his political sails.
The east wind was threatening to drive the fleet beyond good harbors on the east coast of Devon toward well-defended Plymouth, but then it shifted, the invaders anchored at Tor Bay, and a fisherman named Peter Varwell carried the small, slight William to the beach and lodged him overnight in his cramped little house. It was November 15 by the Continental calendar, but by the old calendar still in use in England, it was November 5, Guy Fawkes Day.
The first day ashore had been lively, with drums beating, flags flying, and a very happy proprietor at the local alehouse. Several days later at the first town, Newton Abbot, bells were rung and Prince William’s Declaration was read. But the daily work of William’s army was a slog in the cold late-autumn rain through the narrow, muddy lanes of Devon. On November 9 they formed up into a regular parade, with kettledrums and flags flying, to enter the cathedral town of Exeter. William ordered that there be no more prayers for the prince of Wales at services in the cathedral. Outlays for the army’s cloth and provisions made William popular, and he seemed determined to keep his troops under strict discipline. There were several reports of men being hanged for stealing a chicken. In a speech at Exeter on November 15 William used the royal “we” for the first time. On the twentieth he set out again, in terrible weather, with much sickness in the ranks. But there was also good news. Key nobles in the west country had come over to his side, and his allies in the northeast had taken York, Nottingham, and Newcastle. On November 24 King James’s trusted commander John Churchill and the duke of Grafton appeared before William at Axminster. William used the words of King David—“If you be come peaceably unto me to help me, my heart shall be knit unto you”—and Churchill answered with another Old Testament passage: “Thine we are, David, and on thy side, thou son of Jesse. Peace, peace be unto thee and peace be unto thy helpers, for thy God helpeth thee.”
On November 26 William took a day off to go deer hunting. He had more copies printed of his Declaration and a speech at Exeter. He passed the village where his advance guard had gotten into one of the two episodes of combat of the entire invasion, with a total death toll of perhaps fifteen on both sides. On the morning of December 4 he stopped outside Salisbury at Wilton House, seat of the earls of Pembroke, to see the famous paintings by Anthony Van Dyck. The house was magnificent, built by a nephew of the great Inigo Jones, an appropriate seat for a family that had made astute use of positions close to the throne for almost two hundred years, living in the highest style and patronizing the arts. There is a local tradition that Shakespeare and his company gave the first performances of Twelfth Night and As You Like It there. The most splendid of the Van Dycks was of the fourth earl, gentleman of the bedchamber to James I, and his family. The later earls of Pembroke showed some of the options open to the landed aristocracy in the Restoration years. The seventh earl had been convicted of manslaughter and confined in the Tower and had run so deeply in debt that many of the contents of Wilton House had to be sold after he died in 1683. His brother, the eighth earl, a man of deep learning, patron of John Locke, participated in the great debates of 1688–89, served William and Mary in many high offices, revived the family fortunes, founded the famous Wilton Royal Carpet Factory, and bought many fine books and works of art.
Amid all the splendid paintings and the symmetrical stage set rooms of Wilton House, William would have been especially intrigued (if it was there, not in the earl’s London house, and on view) by a smaller, square Van Dyck of the three young children of Charles I. On the left was the future Charles II, old enough to wear miniature adult clothes. On the right was Princess Mary, future wife of William II of Orange and mother of William III himself, in a miniature lady’s dress. In the center, in infant’s long dress, was the future James II, William’s future father-in-law and object of his deliberate advance across the kingdom.
Later that day William made a full-scale formal, triumphal entry into Salisbury, which James had left only ten days before. His troops marched on unopposed, stopping briefly to wonder at the sight of Stonehenge and discuss many odd explanations of it. On December 6 he reached Hungerford, and there on the eighth he received envoys sent by King James to attempt to negotiate a settlement. Time was on his side. The king was desperate. Peers and county leaders all over the kingdom were beginning to come over to William. James might still make something out of the general deference to the monarchy if there was a settlement. William’s strategy was to avoid at all costs meeting his father-in-law or moving toward an agreement with him.
There is no shortage of ways in which England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 has been explained to later generations. It was glorious in that it was almost completely bloodless and in the way it opened the way to the various forms of constitutional government we cherish today. The Declaration of Rights of 1689 established an elected Parliament as supreme in the fundamentals of taxation and legislation and set clear limits to royal power. These beginnings were elaborated on in subsequent centuries not only by parliamentary governments of English heritage in London, Ottawa, New Delhi, and elsewhere but also by parliamentary regimes of varied language and much more mixed lineage in Paris, Prague, and Tokyo and by the non-parliamentary government of the United States.
The Glorious Revolution also has been called, rightly, the culmination of a family quarrel, as William of Orange drove his father-in-law from the throne. We have seen that it was a major turning point in European international relations, crystallizing a long century of Anglo-French conflict. It also was the culmination of a century of dramatic political change in England. English men and women of 1688 frequently expressed their political and religious allegiances by memorializing some great man or event of that century: Guy Fawkes Day was the anniversary of the discovery of a bizarre Catholic plot in 1605 to blow up Parliament; royalists, Catholic and Protestant, solemnly commemorated the anniversary of the execution of King Charles I in 1649; and many a frustrated radical yearned for the days of great dreams of liberty in the 1640s or even for the days of Oliver Cromwell.
The political upheavals of seventeenth-century England were shaped by immense changes in society and culture but above all by patterns of religion and politics that drew very large numbers of English men and women into deciding for themselves what their commitments to king and church were. Protestants could not rely on the authoritative guidance of a universal church. The Church of England was Protestant but hierarchical and under state authority. Those who found it too tainted by its Catholic heritage might try to purify it from within—the Puritan approach—or might reject altogether the idea of a church prescribed for everyone by political compulsion, the Separatist option. In any case every Protestant was in principle called upon to make an individual decision about these matters; his or her salvation depended on it. Debates about religion inevitably spilled over into politics; what were the rights of king and Parliament in making policy for the Church of England? Beyond that, almost everyone accepted the need for a monarchy with real authority, but the Parliament had ancient rights, especially the right to vote on taxation, and was becoming much more inclined to assert and expand them. Ideas of the rights of freeborn Englishmen made all these questions seem the business of anyone who could read or had any political awareness. A new insistence by monarchists on the divine right of kings, especially encouraged by the example of the French monarchy, further raised the temperature of debate. A flood of arguments and refutations arose in Parliament, great country houses, London coffeehouses, and print. Literate Englishmen confronted the terrible choices of politics and religion as members of congregations, societies, and sometimes mobs, but also as solitary readers of pamphlets, newspapers, and printed sermons.
A first major turning point in this drama came in 1629, when the Stuart king Charles I refused to let a Parliament dominated by Puritans interfere with his drive for anti-Puritan uniformity in the Church of England, dismissed Parliament, and managed to rule without it until 1640. Then, as both king and Parliament lurched toward more absolute forms of their claims to final power, civil war broke out. By the end of 1646 King Charles was a prisoner of the parliamentary forces. The wide front of opposition to arbitrary royal rule now splintered. Powerful religious impulses, including millennarian prophecies, led some toward the imposition of Puritan standards of behavior on the whole society and others toward dreams of radical equality and the rejection of all authority. Many who had resisted royal power were alienated by Puritan repression and attacks on traditional customs and social relations. This was the first important case of that modern phenomenon, the capture of a broadly popular revolution by an authoritarian elite, here, as so often, with a formidable army at its core. King Charles was executed by the parliamentary forces in 1649, his head held up to a silent, appalled crowd. The army repeatedly purged Parliament and arranged the appointment of Oliver Cromwell as lord protector of the new Commonwealth. Cromwell was an intelligent and competent politician
who hoped to implement broad religious toleration at the head of a military dictatorship with a narrow political base and limited claims to legitimacy. After his death in 1658 it was only a matter of time until the right combination of military and parliamentary maneuvers led to the return of Charles II to his father’s throne amid widespread rejoicing. The Restoration period under Charles II is famous for its radical reversal of Puritan moral repression, as the king led the way in the acquisition of mistresses and extravagant living. It was obvious that his court was oriented toward the France of Louis XIV and was sympathetic to Roman Catholicism. Dissenters from Anglican orthodoxy suffered under many legal disabilities.
The battles of the Civil War in the 1640s, the sieges of towns and castles, the families divided or deprived of their fathers had given way to sullen repression under Cromwell, then the reversal of the Restoration, and the uncertainties of confiscation and restitution of estates and the settling of old political scores. Paradoxically it was in the Commonwealth and Restoration years that foundations were steadily laid for the emergence by 1688 of an England of unprecedented prosperity, a far more important player in European international politics than it had been at the beginning of the century, with a broad elite accustomed to participation in the shaping of national policy. Religious differences and questions of the rights of crown and Parliament continued to arouse passionate commitment in these years. Landowners worked steadily to improve the productivity of their fields. Mercantilist policies to promote the foreign trade of the kingdom at the expense of that of rivals, especially the Dutch, began under Cromwell and were continued under Charles. Even the famous decadence of the Restoration had its economic uses, as the great peers of the realm and their sons spent all their incomes, and a great deal of borrowed money, on splendid country houses and on mansions and pleasures in London. London became a crucible of early modernity, with coffeehouses where political views could be aired and commercial deals made, a raffish and vibrant theatrical and literary life, and a constant succession of political rumors and dramas recorded in gazettes, pamphlets, and broadsheets.
The man at the center of the new/old order, King Charles II, was one of those rulers who give decadence a good name. His example of high living and many mistresses was avidly followed by many peers and their sons. Charles’s brother, James, duke of York, was an open Roman Catholic. Although personally inclined to Roman Catholicism, often in the pay of the king of France, and more or less committed to pro-Catholic policies, Charles knew that his people were rabidly anti-Catholic. He converted to Catholicism only on his deathbed. The concessions his father had made trying to stay on his throne were still in force; the monarchy had permanently moved quite a distance toward constitutional and parliamentary limitations. But not all of Charles’s canny and cynical maneuvering could paper over England’s deep divisions.
They came to the surface suddenly in 1678, under the immediate stimulus of fantastic revelations of a “Popish Plot” to assassinate the king, massacre Protestants, and install James as king with a council of Jesuits. The anticourt forces won a parliamentary election early in 1679, but when a bill was introduced to exclude James from the succession, King Charles stopped giving way to the extremists in Parliament and dissolved it. The exclusion proposal was truly revolutionary, an interference of Parliament in the affairs of the hereditary monarchy. The Exclusionists organized effectively and elected a majority in the House of Commons, but opposition grew, fueled by reaction against mob hysteria, the vicious executions of Catholic priests on trumped-up charges, and a deep-seated respect for the monarchy. The anticourt, often exclusionist forces controlling Commons began to be called Whigs; those supporting the monarchy, Tories. The polarization that was to produce the Revolution of 1688 had crystallized. Charles II now dismissed Parliament and governed without one until his death in February 1685. In the general prosperity, taxes that he had been granted for life were enough to sustain his government. His military forces were small. He was receiving large payments from Louis XIV of France. In 1682 he began to use his wide powers to remodel municipal corporations, removing political opponents and ensuring that they would elect procourt members of Parliament in the future. The Whigs were in deep disarray. Their most basic problem was that only a few radicals among them were antimonarchical, and if they opposed the succession of James, whom did they favor? James, duke of Monmouth, the king’s bastard son, was popular but not an experienced or reliable leader. In 1683 some radical Whigs were implicated in a plot to assassinate the king and the duke of York at Rye House; some were executed, and the court grew ever stronger.
When James succeeded his brother in February 1685, his position looked strong. A new Parliament granted him life revenues equal to those his brother had enjoyed. A rising in Scotland, and another led by the duke of Monmouth, were quickly crushed. But James had nothing of his brother’s cunning and deviousness. He made no secret of his Catholicism and even expressed publicly his hope that some day all his subjects would be reconciled with the One True Church. As a first step in that direction he sought some way to remove the barrier of the Test Acts that barred Catholics from positions in government or the army. He was angered when Parliament protested mildly against his desire to appoint some Catholic officers to the army. He appreciated the deep royalist sentiments of the Tories, saw the Church of England, to which most of them were deeply devoted, as a ceremonious and authoritarian structure not that different from the Church of Rome, and simply did not understand how their Anglicanism and their vehement anti-Catholicism went together. Rebuffed by Parliament and by the bishops of the Church of England in his efforts to win toleration for Roman Catholic worship and officeholding, he tried with some success to build bridges to Protestants outside the Church of England, who suffered from most of the same legal disabilities as Roman Catholics. He expressed his horror at the excesses of the anti-Protestant campaigns in France.
The Tories in Parliament were even more horrified by James’s general toleration, which included some fairly extreme sects, like the Quakers. Moreover, although everyone recognized the royal power to “dispense” with the enforcement of a law in a particular instance, there were many doubts about the king’s power to order a general suspension of a law that had not been repealed by Parliament. Despite his condemnations of the French anti-Protestant campaigns, it seemed to many of his subjects that he was seeking absolute powers like those of Louis XIV and that this was just what you would expect of a king who gave his allegiance to an authoritarian, absolutist religion. Moreover, James was using the solid life incomes Parliament had granted him to build up a growing standing army, much of it camped on Hounslow Heath near London. To James, a straightforward and thickheaded military man, it made sense to build up a more reliable army than the local militias that had had trouble even dealing with Monmouth’s ragtag forces. To many of his subjects, the troops on Hounslow Heath, many of them Irish Catholics, looked altogether too much like the dragoons that had crushed French Protestantism. Not many understood the impossibility of any military force’s imposing a religion that was followed by only 1 percent of the population.
James could get what he wanted without ambiguity if he could obtain the election of a docile Parliament that would repeal the Test Acts. The Exclusionist Whigs of the late 1670s had led the way in manipulating local politics to obtain, out of a diffuse system of local corporations and county elections, a majority of elected members of a given persuasion. Thereafter Charles and then James had used the powers of the crown to reshape corporations and obtain a docile majority. Now at the end of 1687 James began to demand of potential Tory candidates for county election to Parliament explicit commitments to support the repeal of the acts. Many of these men, his natural allies, resented the pressure and began to turn against him. But in the spring and summer of 1688 he continued his efforts.
In the seventeenth century death was never far away. If James died without a son and heir, his daughter, Mary, wife of William of Orange, would succeed to the throne. William’s strategic opposition to the expansion of French power in Europe often was bolstered by Protestant anti-Catholicism. Holland was the great refuge of radical Whigs and Huguenots. James’s suspicions of his son-in-law’s support for the duke of Monmouth’s invasion had been only partly allayed when William sent to England three English regiments and three Scottish that were more or less permanently stationed in Holland. In 1687 William pointedly refused to support James’s efforts to win toleration for Roman Catholics in England and Scotland. James’s second marriage to Mary of Modena had not been barren, but no son had been born. Thus reports at the end of 1687 that the queen might be pregnant were political intelligence of highest importance. A son born and brought up a Catholic might ensure decades of Catholic grip on the immense power and mystique of the monarchy. James, Mary, and their Catholic courtiers held their breaths in hope. Protestants waited in dread and began to seek extreme alternatives.
On April 27, 1688, King James repeated his 1687 Declaration of Indulgence suspending the Test Acts and ordered that it be read from all church pulpits in his realms. On May 18 a delegation of bishops confronted the king and told him that they would not do so, that he had no power to suspend laws of the realm in this way. The furious king waited three weeks and then, on June 7, had seven bishops sent to the Tower of London.
Europe was not the only part of the world of 1688 that had big cities, but Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire’s great capital of Istanbul were the only places where they were seen as the crucial locations for every act of political or religious significance, the stage sets for every drama of high destiny. Greek debates in the agora, Roman triumphs, medieval processions to the cathedral all had shaped this urban focus. Rulers feared the city mob, but they also courted it, mobilized it. The London crowd of the 1680s was passionately Protestant and capable of violent attacks on “papists” and their churches, but there was surprisingly little of such violence through most of 1688. The people made themselves heard in a different and very moving way in the crisis of the seven bishops. On June 8, the great diarist John Evelyn records, the bishops were “sent from the Privy Council to the Tower, for refusing to give bail for their appearance (upon their not reading the Declaration for Liberty of Conscience) because in giving bail they had prejudiced their peerage. Wonderful was the concern of the people for them, infinite crowds of people on their knees, begging their blessing and praying for them as they passed out of the barge, along the Tower wharf, etc.” On June 10 Evelyn heard the cannon of the tower sounding and the church bells ringing to celebrate the birth of the prince of Wales. On June 15, when the bishops were brought to Westminster for the first phase of the legal proceedings against them, “there was a lane of people from the King’s Bench to the water-side, upon their knees as the bishops passed and repassed, to beg their blessing. Bonfires made that night, and bells ringing, which was taken very ill at Court.”
And so it was that right in the midst of these moving demonstrations of popular opposition to the royal policies the queen gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Almost immediately stories began to circulate that the royal birth was a fake, that someone else’s infant had been smuggled into the lying-in chamber in a warming pan. It was so important to so many people to retain their implicit loyalty to the hereditary monarchy and at the same time to remove the threat of long-run Catholic rule that such stories would have circulated under the best of circumstances. The obtuse soldier king, deaf to his subjects’ fervent anti-Catholicism and expecting that they would accept his good faith in such a personal matter, was baffled and offended. Moreover, he had blundered badly in allowing key Protestant witnesses, including his younger daughter, Princess Anne, to be away from London so that they could not be summoned to witness the birth.
The lines of communication between disaffected grandees in England and William of Orange had remained open. In April William told three important visitors that he would invade England if he received a formal request from important people. By the end of July he had such an invitation, signed by seven eminent men, including one bishop and two earls. Many others, he was told, would support his cause but could not bring themselves to sign, even in code, such a document. Now it was up to William to secure the consent of the Dutch authorities and to prepare his forces.
Since early September it had been clear to King James that his son-in-law William of Orange was preparing forces for an invasion. Alarmed, dismayed, feeling betrayed, he lost his nerve. He spoke to the bishops in a conciliatory fashion but offered no firm change in policy. In August he had finally felt confident enough of the results of his pressure on counties and corporations to issue writs for a new Parliament, to convene on November
27. But now he first declared that Catholics would not be eligible for election and then simply withdrew the writs. He sought military forces wherever he could, bringing about four thousand troops from Scotland and five thousand from Ireland; the latter being mostly Catholic, this only served to raise London’s anti-Catholic hysteria another notch. As soon as there was firm news of William’s landing on November 5, he ordered several of his best regiments to march west and take up positions on the Salisbury plain. On November 11 a Catholic chapel was attacked at St. Johns, Clerkenwell. On November 12 the London mob demonstrated its advanced understanding of the role of the media in politics by stoning the offices of the king’s printer. James took measures to restore order and waited until he was sure that the city would not rise behind him, and then, November 17–19, he went to Salisbury. William’s forces were on the march. James’s army would have stood a good chance if they had advanced to confront them, but his commander advised withdrawal. There was ominous silence from the west; neither nobility nor commoners were making any effort to keep their king informed of the movements of William’s forces. The king suffered day after day from severe nosebleeds because of the terrible stress. He gave orders to withdraw. Lord John Churchill, one of his most trusted courtiers and commanders, rode west to join William. Prince George of Denmark, husband of Princess Anne, did the same. The cruelest blow of all was when Anne and her great friend Sarah, wife of John Churchill, slipped out of London to join their husbands and William.
On November 27 James summoned a council of peers and declared that he was determined to call a Parliament, to dismiss Catholics from office, and to appoint envoys to go to treat with William. The terms William demanded for further discussion were harsh but might have been accepted if they had not reached James in the middle of a rising tide of anti-Catholic hysteria, brought on in part by an anti-Catholic “Third Declaration” in the name of William, which was a fake but did its work in stirring up the mob. James, surrounded by only a small remnant of Catholic courtiers, sent Queen Mary and the infant prince to France and then, on the night of December 11, burned the writs for a new Parliament and sneaked out of his palace, intending to flee the country. On his way he threw the great seal of the kingdom into the Thames.
News of the king’s flight carried the anti-Catholic mobs to new heights. The new Catholic chapel in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was pillaged, and all its furnishings were burned. Books were looted from the shop of the king’s printer and burned. The Spanish ambassador’s residence was plundered, and much damage done to the Florentine embassy and the papal nuncio’s lodgings. A mob was already at work pulling down the organ and decorations in the Chapel Royal in the palace when soldiers arrived to drive them out. The red glow in the winter night sky reminded some of the Great Fire of 1666. Then the next day rumors spread across the city, and soon across much of the kingdom, that the Irish soldiers were slitting every Protestant throat they could lay their hands on. No Catholic was safe from the mob, but the “Irish fear” seems to have been the beginning of the end of the wave of violence.
In the meantime the peers and ministers of the kingdom and the council of the City of London had begun to meet to maintain some form of government in a kingdom that now seemed to be without a king. One of their chief preoccupations was law and order in the city: “Whereas the rabble are grown to an ungovernable height, we, the Peers of this Realm, being assembled with some of the Privy Council, do hereby direct and require you to use your best endeavors to quell and disperse the said rabble; and in case of necessity, to use force, and fire upon them with bullet.” The peers also decided to send a delegation to William, but not yet to invite him to London, and to try to find King James and bring him back. They were hoping for an agreement by which James would agree with William on terms for calling a free Parliament. The City went further, sending a separate delegation that did invite William to London. But then King James was recognized before he could slip across to France, and on the sixteenth he was brought back to London, to much popular rejoicing, and quickly reestablished his court. The fear of disorder and the deep-seated deference to the ruling monarch were on his side. But William held all the other cards and knew it.
On December 17 William ordered his Dutch Blue Guards to march on London and secure the approaches to St. James’s Palace. That night, in a pouring rain, the Blue Guards stood with matches burning, ready to fire if need be, while their commanders secured a peaceful withdrawal of James’s guards. Three envoys sent by William arrived after midnight. James was awakened and told that William advised that he withdraw from London at once. He did so, under Dutch guard. William arrived at the palace, amid many signs of rejoicing, later the same day. James was lodged in a house facing the Medway estuary, the guard was deliberately relaxed, and early on December 23 he slipped away to France.
William had won. James’s flight left the way clear to the throne for him and his wife. The terms were not clear. Had James vacated the throne? Abdicated? How could a Parliament be summoned without a king to summon it or a great seal on the summons papers? On December 26 William convened an informal council of peers and sympathetic members of Parliament. He clearly set the agenda for the meeting but also sought their advice. The Restoration of 1660 provided the necessary precedents. There would be a convention elected in much the same fashion as a Parliament in response to William’s letters of summons.
The convention met on January 22, 1689. Radical Whigs, heirs of the Exclusionists of ten years before, were ready simply to declare William king. But many others could not tolerate the idea of a purely elective monarchy and wanted a role for Mary by hereditary right. Thus it was that the crown was offered to both of them. One peer said to another, “I look upon this day’s work to be the ruin of the monarchy in England, for we have made the crown elective. But there is an absolute necessity of having a government, and I do not see a prospect of any other than this; we must not leave ourselves to the rabble.”
The convention also passed a Declaration of Rights, which was presented to William and Mary at the same time as the offer of the crown. It was a comprehensive reassertion of “ancient rights and liberties,” including freely elected and frequent Parliaments and many limits on pretended royal prerogatives. It became statutory as the Bill of Rights at the end of 1689. William declared that he was not taking the crown on conditions, but the Declaration was read at the beginning of the coronation ceremony of William and Mary on February 13. It could hardly have been clearer that William and Mary had come to the throne by consent of their elected subjects and on terms set by them.
William was not a popular king, and resentment of his heavy-handed rule probably helped solidify the English practices of limiting their monarchs’ powers and asserting their “ancient rights.” Under him, England became the second most heavily taxed realm in Europe, after Holland, and largely on the Dutch model of heavy excises and customs tolls. In 1689 and 1690 the continued presence of Dutch troops caused occasional resentment. The immense commitment of England’s military and naval power to the war against France was not universally popular, but John Churchill, eventually the duke of Marlborough, won some brilliant victories on the Continent. The financing of the wars was facilitated by the English public’s investment in new forms of funded public debts and in such quasi-governmental bodies as the Bank of England and the East India Company. More and more, profit and power walked hand in hand.
If James still was thinking about anything other than his own survival when he fled his kingdom, he was counting on chaos; his burning of the parliamentary writs and throwing the great seal in the river seem to have been intended to make regular legal procedures impossible. Chaos did not come, but James did try to return. In March 1689 he sailed to Ireland with French support. The French were interested mainly in opening a second front that would keep William’s English forces from commitment to the Continent, while James saw Ireland as a stepping-stone to Scotland and England. Local Protestants at Derry refused to acknowledge his authority, and a formal siege was begun. It was raised by forces sent by William in July, and the relief of Londonderry is celebrated by Ulster Protestants to this day. On July 1, 1690, William and James finally confronted each other across the battle lines of their armies along the Boyne River. William’s victory that day marked the end of James’s hopes of return to England and was decisive for the future of Ireland. That too, along with the noble heritage of the Declaration of Right, is with us yet.