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BRITANNIA RULES

WILLIAM III, MARY II AND ANNE

TWO YEARS BEFORE her death in 1714, a statue of Queen Anne was placed equidistant, as wags said, between her two favourite places, St Paul’s Cathedral and a brandy shop. Whether the queen’s preference was for the bottle or the building, certainly St Paul’s was the setting for the high points of her reign.

The queen herself came to the cathedral in solemn procession in 1704 to lead the service of thanksgiving for Blenheim, the great victory won over Louis XIV of France by her general John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, husband of Anne’s favourite, Sarah, who rode in the queen’s coach and accompanied her every move.

The last monarch to come to St Paul’s for a victory service had been Elizabeth I, and the parallels between the two queens were invoked in the celebrations:

As threatening Spain did to Eliza bow

So France and Spain shall do to Anna now.

But whereas the dire state of Elizabeth’s finances had never allowed the defeat of the Armada to be followed up with a crushing offensive campaign against England’s enemies, each year of Anne’s reign brought fresh victories and another state procession to St Paul’s, until, by 1712, the year Anne’s statue was erected, Britain could name her own terms for peace with France.

And by then it was no longer England, but Britain. She was the dominant power in Europe. Fifty years later, another victorious war was celebrated at St Paul’s. The country’s crushing defeat of France in Europe and the Americas marked Britain’s emergence as the world power.

Few countries have risen to great-power status so quickly and so unexpectedly. Why had the England of Anne succeeded where the England of Elizabeth had failed? The answer can be found in the events that followed the revolution of 1688, which had settled most of the political and religious disputes that had torn England apart since the Reformation.

But much of the credit must also go to the man Anne abused in her private letters as ‘Caliban’ or ‘the Dutch monster’: her cousin, brother-in-law and predecessor, William III. It was William who created a new kind of English monarchy, with a new relationship between Crown and Parliament, and in doing so transformed Britain from a divided, unstable, rebellious and marginal country into the state that would become the most powerful on the planet.

I

Soon after their inauguration as joint monarchs in February 1689, William of Orange and his queen, Mary Stuart, escaped from London to enjoy the country air at Hampton Court. It was love at first sight, and the palace and gardens we know today are essentially their creation.

But though William and Mary could flee the capital, they could not escape so easily from the quasi-religious rituals that hedged the divinity of the Tudor and Stuart kings. The dour Calvinist king was not impressed. He had mocked ‘the comedy of the coronation’, which was full of ‘foolish old Popish ceremonies’. But his obligation to enact the spiritual dimension of English monarchy did not stop there. Many of these rituals centred on the Chapel Royal and followed the ancient rhythms of the Church’s calendar. A particularly important group of dates clustered round the great feast of Easter, which in 1689 fell on 31 March.

On the day before Good Friday, the monarch, re-enacting the role of Christ, would wash the feet of as many poor persons as he was years old in the ceremony of Maundy Thursday. Three days later, on Easter Sunday, he would take his place in the Royal Pew, then, at the climax of the service, descend the stairs, process to the altar and receive communion alone to symbolize his unique relationship with God. Acknowledged now by God and man, there was also a clamour for William and Mary to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors and heal the sick by Touching for the King’s Evil.

William and Mary managed to go through the Easter Day ceremonies, though they thought the practice of receiving communion alone a ‘foolish formality’ and changed it as soon as possible. But William baulked at other, more outlandish ceremonies. On Maundy Thursday he refused to wash the feet of the poor, limiting himself instead to giving them the traditional alms. Even more extreme was his reaction to touching for scrofula. Since the Stuart Restoration in 1660, this ceremony had been the primary point of contact between monarch and subject and the symbol of the divine nature of kingship. Charles II had touched vast numbers of the people. James II had gone beyond Charles’s enthusiasm for the practice and had reintroduced the old Latin Catholic ritual as well. For William, this was to add idolatrous superstition to old-fashioned absurdity and he suspended the practice entirely. ‘God give you better health and more sense!’ he mocked the hopeful afflicted.

Within days, William’s refusal to continue the old royal rituals was hot news in Paris. It signalled to his French rival – and everybody else – that here was a different kind of king. For William’s Tudor and Stuart predecessors, the monarchy and its powers, prerogatives and titles was a sacramental trust, committed by God to their ancestors, and, with God’s will, to be transmitted to their descendants. But none of this, despite his own Stuart mother and wife, applied to William. He had come to the throne not through strict lineal succession, but because of the mess of purely human affairs. And since he was childless and with no prospect of offspring, he had no descendants to worry about. Finally as a strict Calvinist, he didn’t – as his attitude to the Coronation, the Maundy and the Touching shows – believe in sacraments, royal or otherwise.

What William did believe in was predestination or divinely ordained destiny: in particular his own God-given mission to be the champion of Protestantism and the nemesis of Louis XIV’s France. To become King of England, therefore, was only a step to this goal and not an end in itself. This meant that William’s view of kingship was instrumental, in contrast to the jealous sacramentalism of his Tudor and Stuart predecessors. And this meant in turn that for William literally nothing was sacred (following the Dutch custom, he even kept his hat on during religious services). He was not sentimental about the trappings and symbols of monarchy. Nor was he in thrall to the sacred mystique of kingship. So William was willing, if not necessarily happy, to bargain away the powers of the monarchy for the hard cash that was needed to fight his great war against France.

This, it turned out, was a good thing, since the attitude of William’s subjects to the monarchy had changed as well. The change was neatly summarized for the king by one of his ministers. During the last few decades, kings had known where they stood: the Tory half of the nation supported royal power while the Whig half opposed it. But the revolution that had brought William to power had muddied the waters. For the Whigs, though they were William’s natural supporters, retained their habitual mistrust of monarchy. While the Tories, though remaining theoretically committed to royal power, did not, in their heart of hearts, think that William was the rightful king. They had made solemn and binding oaths to James II, which they were painfully conscious of having broken. And so the Tories mistrusted William at least as much as the Whigs did.

The result was that, divided in everything else, William’s leading subjects were united in their determination to drive a hard bargain with their new King William. One MP spoke for all when he told the House: ‘If you settle such a revenue as that the King should have no need of a Parliament, I think we do not do our duty to them that sent us hither.’

Parliament had made this error of rendering themselves useless by granting the king enough money to rule on his own in the Restoration Settlement of 1660 and, even more flagrantly, at the beginning of James II’s reign in 1685. It was not to repeat the mistake again.

So in 1689 it refused to make any permanent settlement of the revenue at all, postponing it for another year. And even in 1690 it granted William only the Customs (or taxes on foreign trade) for life, while the Excise (or internal indirect taxes) was to be reviewed four years later. In personal conversations, William freely expressed his outrage at such ingratitude, as he saw it. ‘The Commons used him like a dog,’ he would say. ‘Truly, a King of England … is the worst figure in Christendom,’ he moaned at another time. And, in exasperation at the carpings and criticisms of the English, he snapped: ‘The nation entertained such distrust and jealousies of him that he intended to go abroad.’

But, having vented his frustrations in private, in public (as he had learned to do by bitter experience in the Netherlands) he calmly settled down to bargain. The result was a financial and constitutional revolution far greater in effect than the revolution itself. In 1689 he offered the Commons scrutiny of public accounts. He surrendered his prerogative of calling and dissolving parliaments at his own pleasure in 1694 by agreeing to the Triennial Act, which provided instead for the automatic summoning of a new Parliament every three years. And in 1697, by agreeing to a Civil List to cover the expenses of the royal household and peacetime domestic administration, he yielded to parliamentary control over the expenditure, as well as the raising, of all revenue for the army and the navy.

Thanks to this subtle give-and-take diplomacy, Parliament, which in 1690 had been barely willing to finance William’s expedition to reconquer Ireland from a French-financed invasion personally led by a reluctant James II, by the middle of the decade was raising an unheard-of £4 million a year in taxation. And every penny was needed. For the war that William declared against France within days of his coronation was the largest, longest, most expensive conflict England had engaged in since the Middle Ages. John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough and after the king himself England’s leading general, predicted that it would last ‘forever’; in sober fact it was to be merely a new hundred years’ war which was not finally settled till the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

The scale of the war and the taxation it entailed completed and made permanent the revolution of 1688–89. The result was – literally – built in stone. The Board Room of the Admiralty in Whitehall, which is still in use, was built to put the administration of England’s hugely expanded navy on a proper footing. The Royal Hospital at Greenwich, founded by Queen Mary in 1692 after the great naval victory over the French of La Hogue, was built to care for invalided and aged sailors. Grander than any royal palace, it became a monument both to England’s naval greatness and, with its lavishly painted interiors, to the Glorious Revolution and William’s own triumphs over France.

If England was gaining secure and permanent civil and military institutions safely ensured by sturdy buildings, surely the most innovative and durable was the Bank of England, established in 1694 at Mercer’s Hall in the City of London. Its origins had, like much else, less to do with root-and-branch reforms than with William’s pressing need to manage the government debt incurred in fighting the war against France. Copied, once again, from the Dutch model of the Bank of Amsterdam, the bank’s security was based, not on the king’s credit (for kings, including Louis XIV, could and did go bankrupt), but on the guaranteed steady income stream of parliamentary taxation.

Security of payment meant that English interest rates plunged, while those in France, which stuck to the old system of royal credit and experienced the familiar crises of royal bankruptcy, soared. Thus, though pound for livre the English tax base was smaller than that of France (which is four times as big a country and then had three times as big a population), gearing meant that the English could match or even outspend the French.

In his own lifetime, William was only able to fight Louis to a standstill rather than inflict the crushing defeat for which he yearned. But he had created the financial, military and political machinery which, as events would show, swung the balance of power decisively in England’s favour. It was an extraordinary achievement, which makes this Dutchman one of England’s greatest monarchs.

II

William got little thanks from his subjects at the time, and posterity has been no kinder. For William, with so many great gifts, had few of the small ones that humanize greatness and make it popular, or at least bearable. He had no small talk. He suffered fools not at all. He hated company, preferring instead to unwind with a handful of intimates.

Secure in the privacy of the suburban or rural royal courts, William was free to carouse with his mainly Dutch male cronies in seclusion. English ministers who were used to a royal court where the king was accessible and business could be conducted face to face were annoyed by William’s reclusive tendencies. Rather than sleep in the magnificence of the State Bedchamber, which was traditionally the buzzing hub of the royal court, William took his rest in a simple private chamber. And it was very private indeed. The king could not be troubled by overly attentive servants, demanding ministers or prying eyes. The locks wore on the inside and only one other man had the key, Arnold Joost van Keppel, whose extensive apartment was next door. And Keppel’s good looks and easy and exclusive access to the king fuelled ugly rumours of homosexuality.

Worst of all, perhaps, William and his favourites remained obstinately Dutch, and that the xenophobic English found intolerable. His wife and joint monarch, Queen Mary, however, deflected much of the bitterness over the fact that England had been conquered by a warmongering Dutch obsessive. Mary represented the unbroken Stuart descent and continuity with the past. Above all she was English. If William had delivered England from a Catholic king and waged war on France, Mary represented English virtue and piety. As far as William was concerned this was a good arrangement. For Mary believed that ruling was a man’s business, and she was no threat to William’s sole exercise of power. At the same time, she was indispensable to him as a figurehead to quell his new subjects’ xenophobia. As William stated: ‘He was to conquer Enemies, and she was to gain Friends.’

But when Mary died of smallpox in 1694, the Stuart fig leaf was torn from William’s throne. Mary was loved by the people, and her death provoked an outpouring of grief from the country. But William had always been a very unpopular king, nicknamed the ‘Rotten Orange’, ‘Hook Nose’ or ‘The Little Spark’. King Louis and the exiled James II celebrated when they heard of the death of Queen Mary. They did not believe that William could survive long on his own. He was hated by the English, and if he wasn’t deposed or assassinated, then at least he would never risk leaving the country to go and fight France.

But William was able to face down his enemies. The king’s evidently sincere grief at his bereavement won him some temporary popularity, and his supporters urged the population to respect the memory of the late lamented queen by remaining loyal, as she had done, to her husband. The PR campaign worked. Despite Louis’s and James’s predictions, William was secure enough to leave the country to continue the war against France as usual during the campaigning season. If the English did not love William as they had loved Mary, or even respect him that much, they were at least prepared to tolerate him for all his faults.

But by the turn of the eighteenth century Parliament had begun to resent William’s aggressive foreign policy – and to resent paying for it most of all. The Commons demanded that he disband most of the army and send home his Dutch guards. Once again, the stage appeared to be set for another round in the chronic conflict between king and Commons that had removed two monarchs within living memory. As he had done before, William petulantly threatened to return to Holland and wait until the English came to their senses and begged him to come back to save them from France and James II. He even drafted an abdication speech. For the sake of a few pounds, William said, the English were prepared to reduce the army and invite invasion. ‘It is impossible to credit the serene indifference with which they consider events outside their own country,’ William wrote of his truculent and insular subjects.

Things got worse as Parliament and king clashed over foreign policy and England’s rights and responsibilities in Europe. But then the rule of the House of Orange came to an abrupt and unexpected end. On 21 February William was hunting in Hampton Court Park when his favourite horse Sorrel stumbled at a mole hill, throwing him and breaking his collar bone in the fall. The bone was set successfully but a chest infection set in and William died at his other favourite palace of Kensington on 8 March, aged fifty-one. Five weeks later, on 12 April, he was buried privately at midnight in Westminster Abbey. The Privy Council announced plans for a monument in the Abbey and another in a ‘public place’. But no one could be bothered to build them – least of all his successor Anne.

Anne was thirty-seven. She had never been a beauty like her sister Mary. But she had a handsome, womanly figure, rather running to seed after repeated miscarriages and stillbirths. Her best feature, however, was her beautiful speaking voice, for which she had received professional coaching in her youth. Above all, she knew how to rise to a public occasion.

This meant that her first speech to Parliament, only three days after William’s death, was a triumph. She wore a magnificent crimson robe, lined with ermine and bordered with gold. She blushed prettily. And she proclaimed in her thrilling voice that ‘I know my heart to be entirely English’.

It was a deliberate distancing of herself from William, the foreigner who barely respected England and Englishmen. The English, pleased as they were to be rid of William, loved her for her bullish and patriotic sentiments and from that moment she became, and remained, as popular as William had been disliked. Her accession seemed like the best of all possible worlds. She was a Stuart, but she was fiercely committed to the Protestant Anglican Church. She was a supporter of the modernized monarchy, but she had an instinctive and inbred regard for the ceremonies and mystique of the ancient monarchy. Touching for the King’s Evil was back in fashion.

But despite these changes of personal style and belief, the substance of government altered very little. She would, Anne confirmed in her first speech to Parliament, continue her predecessor’s policies at home and abroad. And that meant, above all, that she would continue with the war against France. She told the Dutch Republic that she would do everything that ‘will be necessary [for] preserving the common liberty of Europe, and reducing the power of France to its just limits’. But this was an English queen speaking, and Anne was determined to cast herself in the mould of historic warrior queens; this would be an English war, and the country would fight it for its own interests and glory, and not on behalf of others.

For the stalemate peace that Louis and William had been forced to sign in 1697 quickly collapsed. The issue was the succession to the childless King Carlos II, who ruled Spain and her still vast empire in Europe and South America. Among the intermarried royal families of Europe, the choice lay between two remote cousins: the Austrian Habsburg Emperor was one candidate, the other was Philip, the younger grandson of Louis XIV of France. In the event, it was Philip whom Carlos left as his heir on his death in 1700.

For William the prospect of such a gigantic addition to French power was intolerable and, just before his death, he had reassembled the Grand Alliance against France, consisting of Britain, the Netherlands, the Empire and the German princes. But the declaration of war, on 5 May 1702, was left to Anne. Louis is supposed to have replied mockingly that he must be old indeed if women waged war on him. But oddly it was the fact that Anne was a woman which proved his downfall. For William, as was still commonplace among kings, had acted as his own commander. This was a mixed blessing: he was brave to the point of foolhardiness and indomitable; but he was no general.

But the man Anne chose to act in her stead as commander was. Indeed, ranking with Caesar and Napoleon, he is the only world-class general that England has ever produced. John Churchill had defected to William during the revolution, but, like many leading Englishmen, he had been pushed aside by the new king’s Dutch intimates. In 1692 he was dismissed from court and deprived of his commands for spreading dissatisfaction in the army against the Dutch generals. Forgiven at last, he was appointed captain of the forces by William near the end of his reign, in 1701. He was retained in this leading post by the new queen, not just for his qualities, but because his wife was the queen’s best friend.

Losing her mother at the age of only eight and quickly separated from her father because of his conversion to Catholicism, Anne became shy, reserved and lonely. She had found consolation in a series of close friendships with women. Much the most important and long lasting was that with Sarah Churchill, and testimony to it are the countless letters they wrote each other under the levelling pseudonyms of Mrs Freeman (Sarah) and Mrs Morley (Anne). Back in 1692, when the Churchills had been disgraced, William had demanded that Anne dismiss Sarah and John from her household. But Anne won the lasting hatred of her brother-in-law the king when she refused. Anne had pledged herself to Sarah as follows: ‘never believe your Mrs Morley will ever submit, she can wait for a Sunshine Day, and if she does not live to see it, yet she hopes England will flourish again.’ Now, with William’s death, the Sunshine Day had arrived – for England and, especially, for the Churchills.

Within a week of her accession, Anne had delivered her person and her kingdom to John and Sarah. Sarah was made Groom of the Stole and head of the royal bedchamber. The office was known, after its official symbol, as ‘the key to the prince’, and it controlled access to the queen’s private apartments, her jewels and robes, and her personal cash. At the same time, John was appointed captain-general, master-general of the ordnance and ambassador extraordinary to the Dutch Republic, which in turn appointed him its own captain-general with the elegant Mauritshuis in The Hague as his residence.

His occupation of the Mauritshuis, which had belonged to the junior branch of the House of Orange, emphasized that John had now inherited William III’s role as joint commander of the Anglo-Dutch alliance. Indeed, in military terms the Dutch were still the senior partner, as they had once been in trade and public finance. Their army was professionally drilled and equipped with the most modern weapons, like flintlock muskets with fixed bayonets, while the Dutch logistics and commissariat were the most efficient in Europe.

But the English, as in other areas, copied them, and, thanks to their superior resources, soon outdid them. In all this Marlborough was the beneficiary of William III’s pioneering efforts. But he achieved what William had only dreamed of doing. In 1702–03 he freed the Dutch Republic from the French stranglehold. That won him the dukedom of Marlborough. In 1704 he shattered the French threat to the emperor, the other key member of the Grand Alliance, with the victory of Blenheim on the Danube. The French commander was captured, along with 13,000 of his men, and 20,000 were killed. It was a crushing defeat for France, and England’s greatest victory since Henry V’s at Agincourt.

Marlborough scribbled the news to Anne on the back of a tavern bill and was rewarded with the royal estate of Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Here a vast palace – grander by far than any of Anne’s own – was built for him and his wife at public expense. Called Blenheim, it is a temple to Marlborough’s series of victories in the 1700s. Its every feature memorializes his triumphs: Blenheim itself; the victory at Ramillies in 1706 which drove France out of modern Belgium; and Oudenarde, the victory in 1708 which opened up the door to France itself.

But, despite Marlborough’s triumphs, there remained profound tensions in Britain. For the issue of the succession had reopened. Back in 1689, the full implications of dethroning James II, whose general Marlborough had once been, had been masked because the House of Stuart would, it seemed, continue in the persons of his daughters and their issue.

Indeed, that very July Anne, despite her unfortunate tendency to miscarriages, had had a son who lived. He was christened William, created Duke of Gloucester and became the apple of his uncle William III’s eye. The succession would continue – and it would be through a male, a Protestant, a descendant of the direct Stuart line and an Englishman. The people could be reassured that the rule of a foreigner was only a temporary sacrifice. But in 1700 the boy died. Who should now replace him in the succession after Anne?

There was always the possibility of reverting to the male Stuart line, still temptingly near in their exile in France. The dethroned James II died in 1701 but was succeeded by the ‘warming-pan baby’, James Francis, whose birth in 1688 had started it all. Known to history as the Old Pretender, he was recognized by Louis XIV as King James VIII of Scotland and James III of England immediately on his father’s death.

The Old Pretender was brave, moderately intelligent and charming – one to one at least. But he had his father’s stiffness of public manner, his arrogance and his unyielding rigidity in his commitment to Catholicism. In short, the Old Pretender was the kind of man to arouse loyalty but, almost invariably, to disappoint it.

A few English and more Scots remained devoted to the cause of James III and were known, from the Latin form of his name, as ‘Jacobites’. But, overwhelmingly, the English elite remained opposed to a Catholic king. Instead, Parliament – Tories as well as Whigs – passed the Act of Settlement in 1701. This reaffirmed the principle of the revolution that a Roman Catholic should never be king. The problem was that they had to look very far to find a Protestant in the line of descent from the Tudor and Stuart dynasties. Parliament passed over fifty other Popish claimants who stood legitimately in the line of succession, including the Old Pretender. At last, it gave the succession, after Anne, to the impeccably Protestant Sophia, granddaughter of James I and Electress Dowager of the insignificant north German principality of Hanover. It was a link with the royal line, but a very distant one.

Two months after the passing of the Act of Settlement an English embassy arrived in Hanover to honour the future dynasty. They presented the widowed Electress Sophia with a copy of the Act of Settlement and her son, Georg Ludwig, with the Garter. (Georg was ruling prince of Hanover, because there, unlike in England, women were prevented from reigning in their own right.) Five years later, Sophia’s grandson, the electoral prince, Georg August, was also made a Knight of the Garter and created Duke of Cambridge as well.

But though Anne was happy to shower honours on her successors, she refused absolutely to allow any member of the electoral family to set foot in England. Successors were a magnet for opposition – as the queen knew, for she had been a difficult heir herself. Anne, wisely, was taking no risks. In England the choice of the House of Hanover was widely welcomed. But in Scotland, which shared a monarch with England but not a parliament, it precipitated an immediate rupture in relations with its southern neighbour. It was not automatic that the House of Hanover would succeed to the throne of Scotland. The spectre of renewed hostility between the two kingdoms raised its ugly head once again.

Would Marlborough have to break off the greater ambition of taking on Europe, in order, like that earlier captain-general Cromwell, to subdue the rebellious northern kingdom?

III

In March 1703 the Scottish Parliament was opened with the customary ‘riding’. The mounted procession set out from Holyrood Palace, rode up the High Street, past St Giles Cathedral, and turned into the Scottish Parliament House. First came the nobles in their robes; then the barons representing the shires; and finally the town burgesses. The members were accompanied by their armed retainers and rode through a lane of citizens, also armed.

The carrying of arms was traditional. But, on this occasion, the atmosphere was feverish with barely suppressed real violence: ‘our swords’ were in our hands or at least our hands were at our swords’, one leading member remembered. And the object of this impassioned feeling was England.

Before the revolution, the Scottish Parliament was a poor thing, managed for the absentee monarch by a committee called the Lords of the Articles. But the revolution liberated Parliament in Scotland as well as England. Freed from royal management, it could take an independent line against the Crown – and a Crown that was seen, above all, as the prisoner of its English ministers. Indeed, there was now talk of actual independence – or at least of selling freedom dearly.

The bargaining counter was the Hanoverian succession. The English Act of Settlement, which gave the Crown to the House of Hanover, had been passed without consulting the Scots. Now the Scots would play the English at their own game and settle their succession independently too. The Scottish Parliament of 1703 did so in the Act of Security. This provided that, after Anne’s death, the next monarch of Scotland should be a Protestant and of the royal line, but need not be the same person as the successor to the English Crown. The English Parliament had actually named who the successor would be. This was to ensure that none of the fifty or so Catholics who stood in the line converted to Protestantism in order to fulfil the obligations of the Act of Succession and claim their right. As the Scots framed their Act of Security, there was nothing to stop the Old Pretender, the so-called James VIII of Scotland, from converting to Protestantism to claim the throne, and then switching back to Catholicism when circumstances suited. The British Isles would once again have two monarchs facing each other with mutual enmity.

Anne refused to give her consent to the Act of Security for almost a year, until overwhelming pressure forced her to yield. A few days later, news of Marlborough’s great victory at Blenheim reached London. Freed from the immediate threat of a French-sponsored Jacobite invasion of Scotland, the English Parliament could now respond in kind to the Scottish.

The result was the Aliens Act, passed in spring 1705. All Scots, except those resident in England, were to be treated as aliens, and the major Scottish export trades to England banned unless, by Christmas 1705, significant progress had been made to agreeing a union of the two kingdoms.

The Aliens Act aroused predictable outrage in Scotland. But the deadline did concentrate minds. Two sets of commissioners, thirty or so on each side, were appointed to thrash out an agreement. The commissioners began work in April 1706 in government offices in what had been Henry VIII’s cockpit at Whitehall. To soothe Scottish sensibilities, the two sets of commissioners met in separate rooms, communicated by written minutes only and strictly avoided socializing with each other.

On 22 April, the English room sent the following proposal to the Scottish:

 That the two kingdoms of England and Scotland be for ever United into one kingdom by the name of Great Britain. That the United Kingdom of Great Britain be represented by one and the same parliament, and that the succession to the monarchy of Great Britain [be vested in the House of Hanover].

On the 25th, the Scottish commissioners came back with a counter-proposal. They would accept union and the Hanoverian succession but on condition of freedom of trade, not only within the United Kingdom but also within ‘the Plantations’. The English replied promptly that they regarded such mutual freedom of trade as a ‘necessary consequence of an entire Union’.

It had taken only three days to work out the bones of an agreement. For both sides had got what they wanted. The English wanted Scotland unshakeably onside during their newly embarked-upon geopolitical struggle with France; while the Scots, having tried but failed catastrophically to establish a colonial empire of their own, wanted free access to the English ‘Plantations’ as a way out of their own desperate national poverty.

The ‘Plantations’, or colonies, largely in North America, were the great English success story of the previous hundred years, as, in spite of civil strife at home, the English had built an empire abroad. By Anne’s reign, indeed, America seemed a separate realm and appears symbolically as such on the base of Anne’s statue outside St Paul’s, alongside figures representing her three other kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland. Henceforward, this American realm was to be as much Scottish as English. Or rather, like the empire itself, it was to be British.

And it was to St Paul’s that Anne, wearing the combined orders of the English Garter and the Scottish Thistle and accompanied by 400 coaches, came to celebrate Union on 1 May 1707, the day that it came into effect. It was, she said, even among so many victories, the day that would prove the true happiness of her reign.

The Union was a nice mixture of the conservative and the radical. Most that was distinctively Scottish (or indeed English) was preserved, and along with ‘the most ancient and most noble order of the Thistle’, Scotland kept its own law and law courts (complete, at the outset, with the torture that was an intrinsic part of its criminal law), its universities and educational system and, above all, the intolerant, monopolistic Presbyterian Kirk that had been restored in the religious upheaval that was Scotland’s peculiar contribution to the Glorious Revolution.

But equally, the institutions of the United Kingdom were new and were framed with the innovative, rational methods of Anglo-Dutch political economy. Most pressing, however, was the issue of Scottish representation in the Union Parliament at Westminster. It could be determined either by population or (since the principal business of Parliament was to vote taxation) by taxable wealth. Using the former basis would have given Scotland eighty-five MPs; using the latter (since Scotland’s wealth was only a fortieth of England’s) only thirteen. Eventually the commissioners compromised at forty-five, and honour was more or less satisfied.

Nevertheless, there were no celebrations for Union in Scotland. But, as the intellectual and economic transformation of eighteenth-century Scotland would show, the Scots probably got the better deal.

On 19 August 1708 Anne processed once more to the spiritual home of her reign, St Paul’s, to give thanks for Marlborough’s victory of Oudenarde. Accompanying her in her coach, as etiquette demanded, was Marlborough’s duchess, Sarah. There had been much resentment at the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough’s influence over the queen. Sarah was a committed Whig, contemptuous of princes and princesses, proudly atheist and opposed to the Anglican monopoly. She believed that it was her job to keep Anne from the Tories, whom the queen instinctively supported. Many detested Sarah as the malign power behind the throne.

All this came to a head on the way to St Paul’s. En route, the two women had a terrible quarrel because Anne, who hated cumbrous clothing, had refused to wear the rich, heavy jewels that Sarah, as Groom of the Stole, had put out for her. As they stepped out of the coach, Sarah was heard to hiss ‘Be quiet’ to the queen, lest (she claimed) others overheard their quarrel. It seemed to confirm Sarah’s unnatural power over the monarch. But more importantly, Anne never forgave the insult to majesty and the long and fraught friendship was over.

The quarrel was in fact only the straw that broke the camel’s back. For Sarah had fought her own war at home – against the Tory leaders whom she accused, not altogether wrongly as it turned out, of being secret Jacobites. Aware of James III’s insidious charms, Sarah campaigned, with all her husband’s relentlessness but none of his panache, for the Tories to be removed from government and for her Whig friends to retain power. But Anne, desperate to preserve her freedom of action between the competing political parties, refused. The result was that Sarah’s company became increasingly disagreeable to the queen, who resented the political lectures and nagging. Lonely, unwell and in need of friendship, she transferred her affections to another courtier, Abigail Masham, who, unlike the domineering and high-handed Sarah, was demure and undemanding. Abigail was also close to the Tories, and her favour with the queen threatened to break the Whigs’ monopoly on power. Sarah, outraged in turn, then accused the queen, in barely concealed terms, of lesbianism.

Sarah’s loss of favour dangerously exposed Marlborough on the home front. For in any case, Anne, and much of the nation, was getting sick of the war, the deaths and the spiralling taxation. The turning point was Marlborough’s last great set-piece battle of Malplaquet. It was an English victory of sorts. But the casualties were enormous and the French, faced with the invasion of their own soil, dug their heels in to fight a patriotic war. Marlborough’s reaction was to demand the captain-generalship for life, like Oliver Cromwell. Anne’s was to exclaim, ‘when will this bloodshed ever cease?’ and to decide that Marlborough must go.

Marlborough was dismissed in December 1711 and his Whig allies were replaced with a Tory ministry determined to make a unilateral peace with France. Secret negotiations were opened and agreement quickly reached. Louis XIV’s grandson Philip would retain Spain and her American Empire, but renounce any future right to France. England would be granted huge exclusive commercial concessions in the Spanish Empire, including a thirty-year monopoly on the slave trade. The Tories also had a secret plot. They had provoked outrage in Europe by abandoning their allies. One very important loser in this matter was Georg Ludwig, the Elector of Hanover and heir to Sophia, who stood to inherit the English Crown. Once on the throne, Georg would be unlikely to forget or forgive this gross betrayal. The outcome of the Act of Succession would be to place the Tories in danger. The leaders would therefore dump Hanover and offer the Crown to the Old Pretender, provided he renounced Catholicism.

The separate peace was formally agreed at Utrecht in 1713 and celebrated with yet another grand thanksgiving service in St Paul’s. And there was much to celebrate, since the peace, despite its consciously moderate terms, marked England’s eclipse of the two powers that, only half a century before, had overshadowed her: England was now more powerful militarily than France and more commercially successful than the Netherlands.

And she had found her own unique way to modernity. At the root of this success was a new relationship between monarch and Parliament, in which the sovereign reigned, but for the most part the ministers ruled. Forged in the revolution of 1688, developed under William and consolidated under Anne, this new constitutional monarchy had proved more than a match for the absolutist political model represented by France. Over the coming centuries it would do so time and again.

But Anne, despite her passionate personal support for the peace, was too frail to attend the ceremonies. On Christmas Eve she fell suddenly and dangerously ill. She made a recovery of sorts. But it was soon clear that she had only months, if not weeks, to live. The Tory ministers now made a secret offer of the Crown to the Old Pretender, subject only to his conversion. But James III had inherited his father’s arrogance as well as his unyielding commitment to Catholicism. He now calculated that the Tories had so alienated Hanover that they would have to bring him back, conversion or no conversion, and refused point blank to change his religion.

That was the end of the Pretender’s chances – and, it turned out, of the Tories’ as well.

IV

On 30 July Anne suffered two violent strokes, which left her able to say only yes or no. Two days later, at the age of only forty-nine, she was dead, and Marlborough and his duchess, who had gone into ostentatious voluntary exile in disgust at the peace, returned in triumph to London.

Anne’s reign was a paradox, between public power and popularity and personal physical weakness. The latter was unsparingly described by one of the Scottish Union commissioners in his account of an audience with the Queen:

This was possible, of course, only because of the machinery of England’s new constitutional monarchy, in which the queen was a powerful figurehead, but the actual government was left to ministers.

Nevertheless, a woman who could resist and finally face down Marlborough and his formidable duchess was nobody’s tool. Likewise the peace with France was hers, as much as the Tories’. But her most important contribution was to remain steadfastly loyal – after her own fashion – to the Hanoverian succession. And so, England and Scotland were likely to get another female ruler, Sophia of Hanover. But Sophia died before she could inherit, and the heir to the British Crown was her son, Georg Ludwig.

When Anne died shortly after, the two principal claimants were both several hundred miles from London: Georg Ludwig in Hanover and the Old Pretender in Lorraine, where he had been forced to withdraw after the peace with France. If he had made a dash for it, the Old Pretender could have given the Hanoverian a run for his money. But James III did not do dashing.

Instead, correctly confident in the machinery of the Act of Settlement, George, as he now signed himself in English, took a leisurely six weeks to arrive in England. He landed at Greenwich on 18 September at 6 p.m. Accompanied by his son, Georg August, and a great crowd of nobles, gentry and common folk, he walked through the grand colonnades and courtyards of the Royal Naval Hospital to the Queen’s House in the park, where he spent his first night in England.

The following morning, in the Queen’s House, George held his first English court. He made plain his high regard for the leaders of the Whig party and he administered a very public snub to the Tory leader: he allowed him to kiss his hands but said nothing to him in return. If George had anything to do with it, the sun, it was clear, would shine on the Whigs, while the Tories were destined for the wilderness.

And George did have a lot to do with it, despite the constitutional nature of the monarchy. And royal influence, combined with distaste at the Tories’ slitheriness about the Hanoverian succession, helped win the Whigs a comfortable majority in the Commons. They now turned the Tory defeat into a rout by impeaching the former Tory ministers for the treachery in the peace negotiations at Utrecht. One was sent to the Tower; the other fled to the Old Pretender to encourage his bid for the throne.

But at this moment, Louis XIV of France, the inveterate enemy of the new English monarchy and the principal casualty of its success, died and was succeeded by a regency that was committed to good relations with England. Deprived of French active support, a Jacobite rising conducted by northern English Catholics was easily defeated at Preston. But in Scotland, though the rebels were held back from the Lowlands by the drawn battle of Sherrifmuir, they took the Highlands and occupied Perth.

After lengthy delays and disguised as a French bishop, the Old Pretender finally set sail for Scotland, where he landed just before Christmas 1715. At first, it was a triumphal progress: the magistrates of Aberdeen paid him homage; he made a state entry into Dundee; and proclaimed his forthcoming coronation as King James VIII and III at Scone. He then took up residence at Scone Palace and kept his court with the royal state of his ancestors.

But, after this good start, things began to crumble. With his shy, cold public manner, James couldn’t even keep the loyalty of his existing followers, let alone recruit new ones. ‘If he found himself disappointed with us’, one of his soldiers wrote, ‘we were tenfold more so in him.’ It was no basis on which to stand and fight the government forces that were marching on them through the snow of winter.

After retreating to Montrose the Old Pretender took ship secretly to France on 3 February 1716, abandoning his army to their fate. He never saw Britain again. The House of Hanover had seen off the Stuart dynasty.

The arrival of George I and ensuing triumph of the House of Hanover were also commemorated in the Painted Hall at Greenwich, a few paces from where George actually landed.

But that was the only realistic thing about the painting. Done in grisaille (or shades of grey) to imitate a Roman stone relief, it shows George arriving in a Roman triumphal chariot, while personifications of Tyrannic Power and Rebellious Despair quail before his harbinger, Liberty, with her cap.

The reality had been very different as the painter, James Thornhill, who had been an eye-witness and shows himself as such at the edge of the composition, well knew. It was night, he noted. George’s clothes were unworthy of the event. And most of the receiving peers were Tories, which was the wrong political party. Hence, he explained, his decision to go for high-flown allegory.

But the sober reality had been right. George was a modest man and would preside over a modest monarchy. No British king would ever again inhabit a palace as large as Greenwich or hold court in a space as splendid as the Painted Hall. And if more and more of the globe would indeed be British, it was not the king but his ministers who made it so.

Nevertheless, Thornhill’s vast swirling allegories were not wholly disproportionate to the events they represent. For the Revolution and its aftermath in the Hanoverian Succession were glorious. By good luck, as well as good management, Britain had freed herself from political and religious absolutism and in so doing freed herself for the rapid and most significant expansion of any European power since Rome. No wonder Thornhill, like most subsequent commentators on the British monarchy, was uncertain of what language he should use to describe the limitation the Crown and the triumph of the Nation.