WE ALL KNOW that England was conquered by William the Conqueror in 1066. But we have forgotten, or do not care to remember, that, 600 years later, England was also conquered by another William. William of Orange was Dutch, rather than Norman, and, while there’s no doubt that the Norman Conquest changed England radically, the consequences of the Dutch conquest of 1688 were similarly profound, and not just for this country but, arguably, for the whole world.
It began to heal the breaches of Civil War, which the Restoration of 1660 had tried but failed to do. It turned England from a feeble imitator of the French absolute monarchy into the most powerful and most aggressively modernizing state in Europe.
In short, it invented a modern England, a modern monarchy, perhaps even modernity itself.
I
All this would have seemed like the dream of a madman only a few years previously in 1685, when James II had succeeded to the throne. Then, England was a country still shaped by Henry VIII’s religious settlement and the vast dynastic mural of Henry, which showed him as head both of his family and the Church, was still one of the wonders: Whitehall Palace for the new king to admire – and to imitate. For successive monarchs had tried to exploit the vast powers of the Supremacy to build up power and wealth and rule unfettered by influence from Parliament.
And towards the end of his reign, it looked as if Charles II had finally succeeded. Bolstered by the support of the High Anglican Tories (as well as secret subsidies from his cousin Louis XIV) Charles managed to rule without Parliament for the last four years of his reign, although the cost was a passive foreign policy that gave France a free hand in Europe. And when Charles unexpectedly died in February 1685, aged fifty-five, the strength of the Stuart monarchy he had restored was underlined by the unchallenged accession of his brother James to the throne.
Just a few years earlier James’s position as his brother’s rightful heir had been in grave jeopardy following his open conversion to Catholicism. Yet together they had ridden out the storm, even if Charles, acutely aware of the power of anti-Catholic sentiment, had been heard to prophesy that James would be king for no more than three years.
But no one paid much attention, least of all James himself. Now, as he was proclaimed king on 6 February, crowds of Londoners toasted him in free wine and cheered. The fellows and undergraduates at Oxford ‘promised to obey the King without limitations or restrictions’. There were similar oaths throughout the country and no sign of resistance to the first openly Catholic monarch since Bloody Mary. It seemed a miracle. And such James devoutly believed it to be.
That a convert to the Church of Rome could nonetheless become head of the Church of England was testimony to the power of the idea that underlay the Royal Supremacy: that the highest religious duty of an Anglican was to obey the king, who was God’s anointed Vice-regent on Earth.
The smoothness of James’s accession was underscored by the magnificence of his coronation. It took place on St George’s Day and it was the king’s command to do ‘All that Art, Ornament and Expense could do to the making of the Spectacle Dazzling and Stupendous’. Henry Purcell, Master of the King’s Music, composed and directed the music, which culminated in his great anthem ‘My heart is inditing’. Samuel Pepys, as one of the Barons of the Cinque Ports, helped support the canopy over James in the initial procession from Westminster Hall to the Abbey. The final grand firework display centred on a blazing sun, the emblem of the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV of France, while the great crowned figure of Monarchia (‘Monarchy’) strongly suggested that England was going the same way.
Not everyone was happy, of course, in particular a group of Whig exiles in the Dutch Republic. They had been the architects of the parliamentary attempts to keep James from the throne, and they had been forced to flee when they had lost the political battle to Charles’s Anglican Tory supporters. Now James’s accession and the election of a complaisant Tory parliament that seemed ready to do James’s bidding were the fulfilment of their worst fears. Only an armed invasion, they thought, could save England from Catholic absolutism. Its natural leader was Charles II’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, who, unsatisfactory as he was, had been the Whig candidate for the throne during the Exclusion Crisis.
Monmouth, who had come to enjoy the ease of a comfortable exile, took some persuading, however. But eventually he felt honour bound and, on 24 May, he set sail from Amsterdam with a pathetically small force of three ships and eighty-three men. They made for Lyme Regis in Dorset because this was an area where the Good Old Cause of English republicanism lived on. It was also a stronghold of dissenting Protestantism. And Monmouth’s manifesto, which even seemed to leave the issue of the monarchy open, was designed to appeal to such men. He promised to free the English from the ‘Absolute Tyranny’ instituted by his uncle. He accused James of responsibility for the Papal Plot against Charles, the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey and even of Charles II. Given the success that Titus Oates had enjoyed in working up the country to a pitch of anti-Catholic hysteria, and the popularity of the Exclusion parliaments, Monmouth believed that the country would be eager to rebel against the new Catholic king. But just three thousand at most joined his ranks. And they included no gentlemen.
Desperate to win over such leading figures in society – the so-called ‘better-sort’ – Monmouth had himself proclaimed king. It was intended to give his cause the veneer of legitimacy and demonstrate that a successful outcome of his rebellion would be nothing more radical than a restored Protestant monarchy. The result was to alienate his existing supporters without gaining any new ones. It also meant that, as a rival king, he could expect no reconciliation with his uncle. James II, for his part, worried about his hold on both Scotland and London, was able to spare only two or three thousand troops against Monmouth. They were badly led but at least they were professional soldiers. And that proved decisive.
The showdown came at Sedgmoor in Somerset on 6 July 1685. Boxed in by the royal army, Monmouth decided that his only chance was to launch a surprise night attack. The tactic made sense but his scratch forces were incapable of carrying it out and, once day broke, were routed by the king’s troops: 500 were killed and 1500 taken prisoner.
By then Monmouth had already fled, disguised as a shepherd. But it was only two days before King James II of England, as he called himself, was found hiding in a ditch in his disguise, captured and taken to London. There was no need for a trial, since he had already been condemned as a traitor by an Act of Attainder rushed through by the Tory Parliament. Nevertheless, Monmouth humbled himself by begging for his life on his knees before James. At once his boastful claims to majesty disappeared as he pleaded that he had been forced against his will to declare himself king. His uncle, appalled at such cowardice, was implacable. Monmouth was brought to Tower Hill for execution on 15 July.
Monmouth’s death, like his life, was a mixture of tragedy and farce. The two Anglican bishops who accompanied him to the scaffold tried to force a public acknowledgement of guilt out of him. He reluctantly said ‘Amen’ to a prayer for the king but refused absolutely to swear to the Anglican shibboleth of non-resistance to royal power.
Finally, the wrangling, widely felt to be indecent in the face of death, stopped, and Monmouth prepared himself for execution. He begged the executioner not to mangle him and bribed him heavily. Then he knelt down. But the first blow merely gashed him, and he turned his head as if to complain. Now thoroughly unnerved, the headsman took four further strokes but still failed to kill him. At last, he severed the duke’s head with a knife. Many of Monmouth’s supporters followed him to a bloody end at the hands of the public executioner.
The Whigs had another martyr and James, so he thought, another miracle. But the challenge to James’s monarchy was to come not from the divided and dispirited Whigs but from the apparently all-powerful and all-loyal Tories. The Tories had given James rock-solid support throughout the Exclusion Crisis; now in return they naturally expected that he – Catholic though he was – would be equally unwavering in his support for the Church of England. And, at first, it looked as though he would be.
Things got off to a good start with James’s speech to the first Privy Council meeting of his reign. He spoke off the cuff. But an official version was worked up and published with royal approval:
I have been reported a man for arbitrary power; but that is not the only story which has been made of me. I shall make it my endeavour to preserve this government, both in church and state, as it is by law established. I know the principles of the Church of England are for monarchy, and the members of it have shown themselves good and lawful subjects: therefore I shall always take care to defend and support it.
His audience applauded and James basked in their approval. Parliament voted him a vast income. Few kings had come to the throne with such wealth, loyalty and goodwill.
In fact, there was misunderstanding on both sides: the Tories thought that James had promised to rule as though he were an Anglican; James assumed that the Tories and the Church would continue to support him whatever he did. Both were quickly disillusioned.
For James was a man with a mission. The last Catholic monarch to rule in England was Mary Tudor. The piety, the sacrifices and the vicissitudes of his ancestor gave James hope. Like James, Mary had succeeded to the throne against overwhelming odds, which she took to mean that God had given her a mission to reconvert England to the true faith. The new king had overcome the full force of Parliament and the country’s inbred hostility to Catholics. Divine purpose must lie behind these miracles. What clearer sign could God give that he supported the Catholic cause? The king also believed that he was on a personal journey of salvation. He had sinned by sleeping with innumerable women of easy virtue. He had to atone for those sins, and the one sure way of doing so was to fulfil his mission. James, we know from his own private devotional writings, was driven by this burning sense of divine purpose: ‘ ’T’was the Divine Providence that drove me early out of my native country and ’t’was the same Providence ordered it so that I passed most of [the time] in Catholic kingdoms, by which means I came to know what their religion was …’ ‘The hand of God’ was demonstrated in the failure of the attempt to exclude him from the throne: ‘God Almighty be praised by whose blessing that rebellion [of Monmouth] was suppressed …’
Such was James’s mission. But what of the method of Catholic conversion? Was Britain to become Catholic within his lifetime, or was this the beginning of a long process of counterreformation? Would it be by coercion? Or persuasion?
Here memories mattered. Bloody Mary had used the rack and the stake and, thanks to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the memory was still fresh in England. So too were the stabbings, drownings and defenestrations of Protestants in the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve, the pogrom of Protestants which had occurred in Paris during the French Wars of Religion in 1572. Now these memories, which had scarcely faded, were reanimated in the most dramatic possible fashion by Louis XIV of France, the outstanding contemporary Catholic king and James’s model and mentor.
For on 22 October 1685 Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes, which, by granting toleration to French Protestants, had brought the Wars of Religion to an end. News reached England quickly and the effect was dramatic. John Evelyn recorded in his diary:
The French persecution of the Protestants raging with the utmost barbarity … The French tyrant abolishing the Edict of Nantes … and without any cause on the
sudden, demolishing all their churches, banishing, imprisoning, sending to the galleys all the ministers, plundering the common people and exposing them to all sorts of barbarous usage by soldiers sent to ruin and prey upon them.
In fact James, who was no lover of persecution, protested, albeit discreetly, to Louis. But in vain. From now on, every move James made to ease the burdens on English Catholics and bring them back into political life would be read against the background of the events in France. Only six months after his accession, James’s honeymoon was over.
II
Could something like the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes happen in England? A Catholic army harass English Protestants and compel them to convert or to emigrate? Circumstances in England made it infinitely improbable. But James, by his single-minded determination to allow Catholicism a level playing field in England with the established, Protestant Church, did his best to make the improbable seem a real possibility.
In response to Monmouth’s Revolt, James had recruited a professional army 20,000 strong. And included in the officer corps were a hundred Roman Catholics. This was acceptable in an emergency; it was a red rag to a bull once the revolt was suppressed, since the employment of Catholics in the army, as in all public posts, was forbidden by the Test Act, which had been passed under Charles II in response to James’s own conversion to Catholicism.
This was the background to the recall of Parliament, which James opened on 9 November 1685, just as the first wave of French Protestant refugees, numbering several thousand, reached London.
Like his father, Charles I, the king came to Parliament ‘with marks of haughtiness and anger upon his face, which made his sentiments sufficiently known’. Then, with characteristic bluntness, James tackled the issue of Catholic officers head-on in his speech from the throne, when he vowed that nothing would ever make him give them up: ‘to deal plainly with you, after having had the benefit of their services in the time of danger, I will neither expose them to disgrace, nor myself to the want of their assistance, should a second rebellion make it necessary.’
This was to fling down a challenge to both Houses of Parliament. In the Commons, a backbencher invoked the spirit of the Long Parliament in 1641, on the eve of the Civil War: ‘I hope we are Englishmen and not to be frightened from our duty by a few high words.’ He was arrested and sent to the Tower for his disrespectful words. There were other, more influential voices being heard. In the Lords, the Bishop of London declared that the Test Act was the chief security of the Church of England.
Furious and frustrated, James dismissed Parliament. He would have to get round the Test Act some other way. The only other body whose authority remotely compared with that of Parliament was the judiciary. During the period of his personal rule, James’s father, Charles I, had used the judges to authorize the collection of taxes that Parliament refused to grant; now James turned to the judges to get round the Test Act that Parliament refused to repeal.
First the bench of judges was purged of waverers; then a test case was brought on behalf of a Catholic army officer to whom James had granted a royal ‘dispensation’ or waiver from the requirements of the Test Act.
The Lord Chief Justice read the verdict on behalf of his almost unanimous colleagues. It could hardly have been clearer. Or more subversive:
We think we may very well declare the opinion of the court to be that the King may dispense in this case … upon these grounds:
- That the Kings of England are sovereign princes.
- That the laws of England are the King’s laws.
- That therefore ’tis an inseparable prerogative of the Kings of England to dispense with penal laws in particular cases, and upon particular necessary reasons.
- That of those reasons and those necessities the King himself is sole judge.
- That this is not a trust invested in … the King by the people, but the ancient remains of the sovereign power and prerogative of the Kings of England.
This ruling transformed Parliament into a mere sleeping partner in the constitution: it might pass what laws it liked; whether and on whom they were enforced was purely up to the king.
But, most of all, the judges’ ruling was exquisitely uncomfortable for the Tories since it turned one of their fundamental beliefs, in the unconditional nature of royal power, against their other, in the sanctity of the Church of England. And James’s subsequent exploitation of the judges’ ruling only impaled them on the horns of the dilemma more cruelly.
James made the most of the intellectual quagmire in which the Tories found themselves. Their loyalty to the monarchy, they said, was unlimited, and they preached against any form of resistance. How far could this be pushed? James was convinced that Protestantism flourished in England only because it had banished religious truth by monopolizing education. If Catholic thinkers were only given equality with Protestants, the country, he believed, would learn that they had been lied to, and that the truth resided in Roman Catholicism. Then his mission of conversion would be possible. He therefore ordered the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, to elect a Catholic master. The fellows had vowed to obey their king in everything. Now they were being ordered to break the law of the land and their own college’s statutes and acquiesce in the destruction of the Anglican monopoly on education. They refused James’s order, arguing that it was illegal. The king, outraged that his loyal churchmen should defy him, went in person to Oxford. ‘Is this your Church of England loyalty?’ he demanded of them. ‘… Get you gone, know I am your King. I will be obeyed and I command you to be gone.’
James did not understand – or affected not to understand – the distinction that Anglicans were beginning to make between resistance and obedience. Although they had sworn oaths not to rebel against the king, many were coming to believe that this did not necessarily mean that they were obliged to aid James’s policies. Moreover, this was especially true when they felt that he was breaking the law. They believed that this was not just a matter of letting a handful of Catholics serve as army officers or academics, but rather that it presaged a full-scale assault on the Church, the laws and the nation itself.
For James saw the dispensing power, which enabled him to exempt individual Catholics from the Test Act on a case-by-case basis, simply as a first step. Instead, his Holy Grail was to secure a recognition of the suspending power, which would enable him to abrogate the laws against Catholics (and Protestant dissenters too) in their entirety. This would have the effect of the king’s repealing, unilaterally, legislation that had been agreed by all three elements of the Crown-in-Parliament – king, Lords and Commons.
French kings could do this, as Louis XIV had shown with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. English kings could not. They were supposed to seek the consent of their subjects and respect the permanence of the law. But if any English king had the potential to go down the path of French absolutism, it was James, with his ample tax revenues, his standing army, his iron will and his sense of divine mission. England was at a dividing of the ways.
James chose his ground with care. First he issued the Declaration of Indulgence, which tried to press all the right buttons. It invoked the ‘more than ordinary providence’ by which Almighty God had brought him to the throne; and it offered universal religious toleration as a guarantee of Dutch-style economic prosperity – as opposed to Louis XIV-style religious persecution, which ‘spoiled trade, depopulated countries and discouraged strangers’.
It was powerful bait. But would the Church of England be prepared to sell its monopoly position for a mess of pottage?
On 27 April 1688 James ordered the clergy to read the Declaration of Indulgence from their pulpits. The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, who, only three years before, had crowned James in the magnificent ceremony at Westminster Abbey, summoned his fellow bishops to a secret supper party at Lambeth, where seven of them signed a petition to the king against the Declaration.
In it, the bishops contrived both to have their Tory cake and to eat Whig principles. On the one hand, they invoked ‘our Holy Mother the Church of England [which was] both in her principles and her practice unquestionably loyal [to the monarchy]’, and, on the other, they argued like good Whigs that ‘the Declaration was founded on a dispensing power as hath often been declared illegal in Parliament’.
It was a frontal and – as the petition was soon circulated in print – public challenge to royal authority.
James determined to slap the bishops down by prosecuting them for seditious libel. But the bishops showed unexpected courage and a surprising flair for public relations. First, they stressed their loyalty. When James accused them of rebellion they recoiled in horror. ‘We rebel! We are ready to die at your Majesty’s feet,’ said one bishop. ‘We put down the last rebellion, we shall not raise another.’ Then, by refusing to raise securities for bail, they got themselves imprisoned (rather briefly) in the Tower. It was a terrific coup: crowds of Londoners cheered them from the river banks as they were taken there by water; the soldiers of the garrison received them on their knees and the governor treated them as honoured guests.
Even more importantly, the bishops’ trial, in the huge space of Westminster Hall, turned into a public argument about the legality of the dispensing power itself. Decorum broke down as the spectators cheered counsel for the bishops and booed and hissed the royal lawyers, and even the judicial worm turned against the king as one of the bench declared in his summing up that, if the dispensing power were allowed, ‘there will need no Parliament; all the legislature will be in the king, which is a thing worth considering’.
‘I leave the issue to God and your consciences,’ he concluded to the jury. The jurors stayed out all night in continuous deliberation. Then, the following morning, they returned the verdict: ‘Not guilty’.
Instead, it was James’s government which had been condemned.
III
James II’s zealous desire to legitimize Catholicism in England had brought him into open conflict with Parliament, the bishops and now the courts. But it was an unexpected event that took place at St James’s Palace which finally brought matters to a head, an event that would under other circumstances have been an occasion for national rejoicing. Mary of Modena, James’s second, Catholic wife, came from famously fertile stock. And she duly conceived frequently. But all the babies either miscarried or died in infancy, leaving James’s Protestant daughters by his first marriage, Mary and Anne, as his heirs presumptive.
In the late summer of 1687, however, James went on pilgrimage to Holywell while Mary took the waters at Bath. Both medicine and magic seemed to work, and in December her pregnancy was officially confirmed. James was elated. The Jesuit monks who surrounded the pregnant queen promised that she would give birth to a boy. Now, with a Catholic heir on the way, the programme of converting the country could be continued long into the future.
The news was a disaster for English Protestants. There was sheer disbelief that the pregnancy could be genuine. Surely it must be another Catholic plot to subvert the laws and religion of the country? And the most important among these disbelievers were the members of James’s own, Protestant first family: his daughters Mary and Anne and his son-in-law, William of Orange. William had expected that his wife Mary would eventually inherit the throne, thus bringing England on to his side in his struggle against Catholic France. They were now, by the pregnancy, to be dispossessed and disappointed.
Anne, who was still resident at her father’s court despite her marriage to Prince George of Denmark, had also taken a hearty dislike to her stepmother’s airs and graces when she became queen. Now she played a key role in endorsing and disseminating the malicious rumours about her pregnancy. It all looked suspiciously trouble free. Mary of Modena was too well. James, bearing in mind his wife’s previous disastrous gynaecological history, was too confident. And he was too confident in particular that he would have a son.
Anne wrote to her sister Mary to tell her that the queen was only pretending to be pregnant. There was, she said, ‘much reason to believe it a false belly’. Even so, the supposedly fake pregnancy ran its full course. The queen’s pains began at St James’s on the morning of 10 June 1688, and, after a short labour impeded only by the crowd of witnesses crammed into her bedchamber, she gave birth at about 10 a.m.
The baby, christened James Francis after his father and maternal uncle, was indeed the prophesied boy and – once his doctors had stopped feeding him with a spoon on a gruel made of water, flour and sugar, flavoured with a little sweet wine, and allowed him human milk from a wet-nurse – he was healthy and destined to live.
But was he the king and queen’s child or a changeling?
Normally, the birth of a Prince of Wales would have crowned James’s attempt to reassert royal authority and re-Catholicize England. When, for instance, such an attempt had been made a century before, under Mary Tudor, it had been shipwrecked by the queen’s failure to produce a child and so guarantee the permanence of her legacy. But the birth of James Francis had the opposite effect. Faced with the prospect of a Catholic succession, James’s opponents decided that they could tolerate the course of his government no longer. Before the birth of a healthy prince, at least James’s actions were reversible when his solidly Protestant daughter, with her husband William at her side, came to the throne. But now they must instead bring him to heel – or even bring him down.
The first step was to develop the rumours about the queen’s pregnancy into full-scale assault on the legitimacy of James Francis. The pregnancy, the story went, had been suppositious all along, as Anne had said, and therefore the child must be a changeling, smuggled into the queen’s bed in a warming-pan by the cunning Jesuits after a carefully stage-managed performance of childbirth. It was all nonsense, of course. But Princess Anne believed it. She persuaded her sister Mary in the Netherlands to believe it. And her brother-in-law, William of Orange, found it convenient to believe it too.
By 1688, William, now in his late thirties, was a hardened general and politician. But his goal – to unite the Netherlands and England in a Protestant crusade against the overweening Catholic power of Louis XIV’s France – remained unchanged. Bearing in mind his position as both James’s nephew and son-in-law, he had every reason to suppose that Mary would inherit England naturally. But James’s Catholicizing policies and, still worse, the birth of a Catholic son and heir threatened to rob him of the prize. William would not let it go without a struggle.
He needed a decent justification for action, however. He took the birth of Prince James to be an act of aggression against him on James’s part: ‘there hath appeared, both during the Queen’s pretended bigness, and in the manner in which the Birth was managed so many just and visible grounds of suspicion.’ In view of these, William was compelled to take action because ‘our dearest and most entirely beloved Consort the Princess, and likewise ourselves, have so great an interest in this matter, and such a right, as all the world knows, to the Succession of the Crown’. He was, in short, fighting not for his own selfish ends, but for his wife’s rights and the rights of the English people.
William made his preparations on two fronts: in England and in the Netherlands. Learning from the mistake of Monmouth’s puny expedition, he realized that he must invade in overwhelming force. During the course of the summer, he assembled a formidable armada on the Dutch coast, consisting of 60 warships, 700 transports, 15,000 troops, 4000 horses, 21 guns, a smithy, a portable bridge and, last but not least since it enabled the pen to assist the sword, a printing press.
William also benefited from Monmouth’s experience in England. Monmouth had struck too soon, before the extent of James’s intentions had become apparent. William, instead, reaped the fruits of the mounting disillusion with the king, which united Tories with Whigs in resistance to the Crown and reached its high water mark with the controversial birth of James Francis. The result was that on 30 June, three weeks after the birth of James Francis, four Whig peers and gentlemen and three Tories signed an invitation to William to invade Britain, since ‘nineteen part of twenty of the people … are desirous of a change’. They exaggerated, of course. But their sense of the popular mood was right.
But none of this would have been possible but for a fateful decision taken by Louis XIV. There were two crisis points in Continental Europe in 1688: one in Cologne, where the pro-French Prince Archbishop had been replaced by one hostile to Louis, and the other much farther south, where the Habsburg Emperor Leopold was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the Ottoman Turks, who had laid siege to Vienna. If Louis decided to strike against Cologne, which lay near the Dutch border, William could not risk denuding the republic of troops for his English expedition. Instead, in late summer, Louis resolved to pile the pressure on Leopold by invading southern Germany. The fate of James, Louis’s English would-be pupil in absolutism, was sealed.
But at first the weather seemed to offer James the protection that Louis XIV had not. William had intended to sail on the first high tide in October. Instead he was first bottled up in port for several days by adverse winds and then driven back to shore by a storm. Meanwhile, James was still clinging to Divine Providence. ‘I see God Almighty continues his Protection to me,’ he had written on 20 October, after learning that the storm had driven William back to shore, ‘by bringing the wind westerly again.’
But then the wind turned easterly and stayed that way. It blew hard due east, giving William a smooth voyage down the Channel and bottling James’s fleet up in port. It was not lost on people that, a hundred years before, Protestantism had been saved by the destruction of the Spanish Armada. Now, for the hotter Protestants, England would be delivered from Catholicism by a very different sort of armada. But again, it was done by a wind. In 1588, the Armada medals were inscribed ‘God’s winds blew and they were scattered’; in 1688 the breeze that blew William towards England was called ‘the Protestant Wind’.
William landed at Torbay in Devon on 5 November – another auspicious date for Protestants – and marched through cheering crowds to Exeter, where he set up camp and his printing press to churn out carefully prepared propaganda. The ‘Protestant wind’ that blew William to England also blew away James’s confidence and with it his authority as the signs, which for so long had been in his favour, turned against him. On 19 November, he arrived in Salisbury intending to stiffen his army with the presence of their undoubted monarch. Instead, he underwent a psychosomatic crisis and succumbed to repeated heavy nosebleeds. Incapacitated and depressed, on 23 November he decided to retreat to London, his army and his subjects’ loyalty untested.
That night, his up-and-coming general, John, Lord Churchill, fled to join William, whither he was followed twenty-four hours later by James’s other son-in-law, Prince George of Denmark, husband of Princess Anne.
Behind every great man, it is said, is a strong woman. John Churchill’s strong woman was his wife, Sarah. But Sarah was also, as Princess Anne’s principal courtier and closest friend, a power behind the throne. When Churchill and Prince George deserted to the enemy, James immediately ordered the arrest of their wives, Sarah and Anne. But Sarah was ahead of him and she and Anne fled secretly from Whitehall late at night on 25 November. Their flight went undetected for seven hours and when James re-entered his capital on the afternoon of the 26th he was greeted with the news that his youngest daughter too had joined the rebels. ‘God help me,’ he cried, ‘my very children have forsaken me!’
Abandoned by his God as well as his children, James’s only thought now was for flight. He believed wrongly that history was repeating itself and he was in the position of his father, Charles I. His enemies would execute him and murder his beloved baby son. It was clear that he was suffering a mental crisis and was incapable of judging the true nature of the situation. Outwardly, he conducted negotiations with William. But they were only to provide a cover for his real purpose. He contrived to bungle even this. The escape of the queen with the Prince of Wales had to be postponed several days and took place only on 10 December, when she left Whitehall disguised as a laundry woman. James himself quit the capital next day, first flinging the matrix of the Great Seal in the Thames. After his embarrassing capture by the fishermen on the Kent coast, he was taken as a prisoner to Faversham, whence he was rescued by a loyal detachment of his guards and escorted back to London.
There he received a rapturous welcome and, for a moment, thought of making a stand. Many believed that if William ever tried to use force to snatch the throne, the army would rally behind James. This was never put to the test. James’s resolution crumbled when William sent a powerful detachment of his army to occupy London, seize Whitehall and order James to withdraw from the capital. The ultimatum was delivered to James in bed at midnight. Twelve hours later he was sent under guard to Rochester, whence, on 23 December, he was allowed to escape to France. This time, with his son-in-law’s connivance, he succeeded.
As James left London for the second time, William entered it. In six weeks, and without a shot being fired, England was his. But on what terms?
IV
A late-seventeenth-century engraving shows William the Conqueror swearing to the laws of his sainted Anglo-Saxon predecessor, Edward the Confessor, and thus preserving the traditional rights of the English.
Faced with their own William the Conqueror, the men of 1689 determined to tie him down even more firmly; others were resolved not to have him as king at all. As part of the propaganda for his invasion, William had committed himself, irretrievably, to be everything that James apparently was not: a friend of English law and liberties, of England’s religion, and, above all, a supporter of Parliament. He could do nothing, therefore, without a free parliament. The assembly – in the event called a Convention since only a King could legally call a parliament – met on 22 January 1689, a month after William’s entry into London.
The Tories retained a small, but weighty, majority in the Lords. But the Commons was made up of the men of the last parliaments of Charles II’s reign, who had voted to exclude James from the throne in the first place and had subsequently been marginalized during the Tory ascendancy.
For the first fortnight of the Convention, the two Houses fought over the implications of the extraordinary last few months, which had left James still very much alive, if not in full possession of his mental faculties or indeed present in the country itself. Faced with these facts, the Commons made up of James’s Whig enemies and under the chairmanship of Richard Hampden, son of Charles I’s implacable enemy, made a bold resolution. It was also a daring constitutional innovation. James II, they declared, had broken the ‘original contract’ between king and subjects. He had also violated the ‘fundamental laws’ of the realm. And, most importantly, by removing himself from the country, he had abdicated the throne. The country had not been conquered by William; James had not been deposed. The king had deserted his people, not the other way round. It was a piece of fiction, but it was a very convenient one.
Nevertheless, the Tory-dominated lords hestitated long and hard before they accepted it. But swallow it they did. James II having been disposed of, the key issue was now the succession. What was to become of the monarchy, now that there was no one on the throne? The Tory peers were determined to preserve the principle of Stuart hereditary right by denying William the title of king – a title to which they believed he, as fourth in line, had no right. He must wait his turn, and let the next in line take the throne. But the next in line was the baby Prince James Francis, the so-called ‘pretended Brat’. The implication of sticking to indefeasible hereditary succession was yet another Catholic monarch.
The Whigs were not so wedded to such unyielding principles of monarchy. The Commons neatly sidestepped the problem of James Francis by declaring that it had been found ‘by experience’ that it was impossible for England to have a Catholic monarch. Whether the baby was legitimate or a changeling did not now matter. It was his Catholicism which rendered him ineligible to inherit the throne. The next Protestant in line for the succession was, of course, Mary. But it was clear that William would not accept being second string to his wife. The only realistic solution was to have William – the saviour of the country – as king, whether it was constitutionally correct or not.
In the event, it took William himself to break the deadlock. The Tories hoped to string out the debates so that they could preserve the principle of monarchy. William threw cold water on their endless constitutional nit-picking. He would act neither as regent for his self-exiled father-in-law, James II, nor as consort for his wife Mary; instead, he would be king or he would return to the Netherlands and leave England to constitutional squabbles, anarchy and the possibility of a restored James II. Even Tories found that, even if they would rather do without King William, in practice England could not do without the Dutchman now that the country had no legitimate ruler.
Faced with his ultimatum, Lords and Commons agreed to a face-saving compromise. William and Mary would rule as joint king and queen to give the impression that the Stuart line of descent was still valid. But in practice, the exercise of sovereignty would be vested solely in William.
But having given William the crown he wanted, Whigs and Tories united to limit the powers that he or any future monarch could exercise by drawing up the Bill or Declaration of Rights. The rights in question are not so much those of the individual against the government; rather they are ‘the ancient rights and liberties’ of the nation as represented in Parliament against the Crown.
So, the Bill declared, the Crown could not dispense with or suspend laws made in Parliament; it could not raise taxation except through Parliament and it could not have a standing army without the consent of Parliament. On the other hand, the Crown should allow elections to Parliament to be free and parliaments frequent. Finally, and above all, the Bill declared it ‘inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom’ for the monarch to be Papist or to be married to a Papist.
The principle of the Royal Supremacy, that the English should have the religion of their king, had been stood on its head. It was a revolution indeed.
All was now ready for the formal offer of the crown to William and Mary in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. Mary, who had arrived in England only the day previously and, it was widely felt, had stepped into Mary of Modena’s apartments, her possessions and her very habits with indecent glee, joined her husband under the Cloth of Estate. The Lords on the right and the Commons on the left, led by their Speakers, approached the steps of the throne; the clerk read out the Bill of Rights and a nobleman offered William and Mary the crown in the name of the Convention as the ‘representative of the nation’.
William then accepted on their joint behalves, promising in turn to do all in his power ‘to advance the welfare and glory of the nation’, and they were proclaimed king and queen to the sound of trumpets. Two months later, William and Mary were crowned in Westminster Abbey, with the ceremony and the oath in particular having been transformed to reflect the new realities of power.
Each in turn swore to govern ‘according to the statutes in parliament agreed on’; to maintain ‘the Protestant reformed religion established by law’ and to do ‘justice in mercy’ – with no damn nonsense about ‘discretion’ as previously. Just as innovatory was the coronation sermon. Ever since the coronation of Henry VIII’s young son, Edward VI, when Archbishop Cranmer had proclaimed that oaths could not bind the boy king nor holy oils add anything to his inherent, God-given sanctity, preachers at the coronation had vied with each other to elevate the monarch-cum-Supreme Head of the Church to an almost God-like plane.
In 1689, however, all this changed. ‘Happy we,’ the preacher proclaimed prosaically, ‘who are delivered from both extremes: who neither live under the Terror of Despotick power [as in Louis XIV’s France], nor are cast loose to the wildness of govern’d multitudes [as England had been during the Civil War and Commonwealth].’
As the preacher finished, the congregation broke into ‘infinite applause’. They were responding as though the ancient mysteries of the coronation had transmuted into the inauguration ceremonies of a popular prince-president of a middle-of-the-road republic – as of course William was, in effect, in his native Holland. But not only was the monarchy brought down to a merely human level, so too was the Church, which, since the Royal Supremacy, had been its most stalwart supporter and mouthpiece.
William’s propaganda had promised, and the Convention speedily enacted, freedom of conscience, of worship and security from persecution to all outside the Church of England – Roman Catholics as well as Protestant dissenters – who would live ‘as good subjects’, recognize William and Mary as king and queen and repudiate the temporal authority of the Pope.
The effect, and on the part of the Whigs the intended effect, was also to diminish the Church of England. The Church remained uniquely privileged and only its members could hold public office, from the throne down. Nevertheless, it had ceased to be a monopoly and become one church among many.
The Church split over the changes – between diehard Tories and Whigs, like Gilbert Burnet, the preacher at the coronation, who not only accepted the new dispensation but also understood that the Church would have to argue for Christianity, not in the old voice of absolute authority, but by reason and persuasion. Chance and taste played their part too. William (among his many other ailments) was asthmatic and detested the urban, riverside position of Whitehall Palace with its fogs and mists. So too did Mary, who felt able to see nothing but ‘water or wall’. Within a few months, therefore, the royal couple bought Nottingham House, with its extensive gardens and pleasant suburban situation on the edge of Hyde Park, and rebuilt it at breakneck speed as Kensington Palace. The result, described by a contemporary as ‘very noble, though not great’, was exactly the kind of residence that William was used to as stadholder and prince in the Netherlands.
Meanwhile, Whitehall, called ‘the largest and ugliest palace in the world’ by the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, and seat of all English kings since the time of its builder, Henry VIII, was abandoned for all save ceremonial occasions. Neglected and forlorn, like so many underused buildings, it burnt down in 1698 and was never rebuilt.
Perishing in the flames and ruins was the great dynastic mural of Henry VIII and his family, which, more than any other single image, represented the awesome powers of the Royal Supremacy over Church and state. The painting had survived the destruction of the Supremacy and the royal absolutism it had entailed by less than a decade.