This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  Meanwhile, further south, the French were beginning to dominate the sea-lanes in the English Channel (or La Manche, as the French would prefer). Yet the French did not have exceptional flexibility in the unpredictable seaway that was subject to variable winds until the predominantly south-westerlies settled in the autumn. There was good opportunity to harry the English coast particularly as, after Scotland, William was preparing to fight James in Ireland. Equally, many French resources were reserved for landing James in Ireland and keeping him and his troops (mostly French) resupplied and generally acting as guard ships. The considerable support of the French and the Catholic Irish was not enough to save England for James at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690. By some accounts it was far from being one of the famous set-piece engagements in European military history, especially considering what was at stake – not only the Crown of England but the future religious and constitution pattern, too. It was an altogether casual affair that ran into a second day. Bit by bit, William’s guards and cannon scared the Jacobites away, rather than the great slaughter of many earlier royal encounters. James escaped, or was allowed to. Immediately, he demanded the French give him safe escort for his escape to France.

  Had James stayed longer in Ireland, the French frigates would have been bettered deployed interrupting William’s supply lines – all of which were seaborne. Instead, the Battle of the Boyne set William III’s rule over Ireland not James II’s. Moreover, with James dealt with, William could now use the British soldiers for his original purpose – not to chase off James II, but for his own pursuits in Continental Europe, more exactly, in the Nine Years’ War, also known as the War of the League of Augsburg. It was a war fought by a coalition of, among others, German princes who were determined that Louis of France’s march through Europe should cease. William III’s determination was second to none, and so with his British and Dutch troops in a not altogether happy alliance, he led the charge. But William was lacking one of his most able commanders, one who was eventually called genius: John Churchill, by now Earl of Marlborough. William had replaced him partly because he wanted his Dutchmen, under Count Solms, to direct the campaign, and partly because he didn’t trust Marlborough’s links with James. The result was disastrous. Solms was never in the same league as a commander as Marlborough. Parliament proclaimed its disgust. Never again, said the Lords, should a Dutchman command the English contingent. King William’s contempt for the English was endorsed when the Commons accepted, nevertheless, the argument that Solms had been the best man available and even voted more money for more war. But like a more famous battle to come, William’s demand was a close run thing. The war chests were all but empty.

  Two years earlier one of the Lords of the Treasury had proposed a government loan of £1 million which was accepted and became known as the National Debt. That same financier had another idea, but one for which an altogether more complicated arrangement was needed: a company was set up. It had 1,268 shareholders and together they raised £1,200,000 which they then loan to the government. They charged the government 8 per cent interest a year and for good measure charged another £100,000 a year to administer the loan. But it was illegal to lend the King money without the agreement of Parliament so it was decided to pass an Act that would give these moneylenders a legitimate charter.

  In 1694, a Royal Charter was issued. Its title was ‘The Governor and Company of the Bank of England’, which is why we have a Bank of England today and why its director is called the Governor. The man who invented the National Debt and the Bank of England was a Whig by the name of Charles Montagu.

  The throne was as ever financially supported by Parliament as well as by the private landings and rents of the Royal Household. This support, more carefully organized, is what is commonly known as the Civil List. Although an Act of Parliament for the Civil List was not passed until 1697, it had, in practice, existed for some time. It was always controversial. For example, a speech by Sir Charles Sedley in the Commons, six years earlier, made it clear that the debate sometimes heard today is little different from the one taking place 300 years ago. He said the Commons provided for the navy, for the army and now for the Civil List. ‘Truly, Mr Speaker,’ bemoaned Sir Charles, ‘it is a sad reflection that some men should wallow in wealth and places [large houses], whilst others pay away in taxes the fourth part of their incomes.’

  Much of the money went not to royalty but to the senior officers of the Crown. The first Great Officer was the Lord High Steward of England, or Viceroy; then the Lord High Chancellor; then came the Lord High Treasurer; the Lord President of the King’s Privy Council, an office dating back to King John; the Lord Privy Seal; the Lord Great Chamberlain; then the Constable; the Earl Marshal; and the last of the Great Officers of the Crown, the Lord High Admiral, so trusted that the holder was often the King’s son or near kinsman. And they, and theirs, were always well paid.

  William’s inner circle was a chain of remarkable men, mostly unremarked in history. Apart from a couple of great deeds, Sidney Godolphin (1645–1712), gambler, racehorse breeder at Newmarket and the man who would become Lord Treasurer, is barely remembered. Likewise Thomas Wharton (1648–1715), the Comptroller of the Household and the author of the dirge-cum-ditty, ‘Lilly Bolero’. The words are Irish but the song was contemptuous of the papists and, among the soldiers of the time, was as popular as, say, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ was among twentieth-century troops. It lives on as the signature tune of the BBC Overseas Service news bulletin. There was also Charles Talbot, the Duke of Shrewsbury (1660–1718), who was William’s Secretary of State, and even John Churchill, the Earl of Marlborough, is hardly known until later when he became perhaps the most remarkable general in English history. This is not simply a ready reference for names who served William. These men were noteworthy figures whose lives are well-worthwhile remembered to better understand the phenomenon of what was happening in the reign of William and Mary – one of the too much overlooked periods in the history of these islands.

  Some are never remembered outside historical reference, but their legacy survives into the twenty-first century. For example, Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland (1640–1702) made a contribution to the way in which English government works, which has survived to this very day. Sunderland was an opportunist and, like many who swayed perilously on the upper boughs of the tree of State, he was a survivor, a man who could change religions and courtly allegiance with remarkable dexterity. He understood court politics and, most usefully, European politics. He became an ambassador and then Charles II’s Secretary of State. Then he supported the attempt to exclude James, Duke of York, from succeeding Charles, and promoted the Protestant cause of William of Orange.

  When James became King, Sunderland claimed that he too was a Roman Catholic and he was soon reappointed Secretary of State, and helped James in his attempt to establish Catholicism in England. When James was chased out of the country Sunderland came back, abandoned Catholicism, reverted to Protestantism, became William’s closest adviser and, through his own skills of intrigue and political management, convinced the new King that it was possible to govern with a small inner group. Sunderland’s idea of a small inner group has had an influence that has lasted to this day. The Earl of Sunderland, an all but forgotten figure, was in fact creating what is now called Cabinet Government.

  Here, then, was a small group who would influence not only the King, but would set the basis for English government. In their own time, they had more immediate concerns than posthumous legacy. They were truly worried about the succession: William and Mary were childless. The anxiety increased when, shortly after Christmas 1694, Queen Mary died. Apart from being the daughter of the deposed James II, she is rarely mentioned for doing anything at all. It’s almost as if the monarch had a hyphenated name: William-and-Mary. And yet without Mary, William would not have been King. She was beautiful and graceful in contrast to her husband who was not a physically appealing character. They married for political reasons
and it was only later that William appears to have recognized the importance of his wife in much that he did, and they grew to love each other.

  Bishop Burnet, in his memoir of the times, says Mary was gracious, modest and gentle. But this ignores the determined way in which she broke with her sister, Princess Anne, and Anne’s confidante, Sarah Churchill, the wife of the Earl of Marlborough, when William fell out with Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark. On 28 December 1694, all thoughts of reconciliation between the daughters of James II disappeared. The thirty-two-year-old Queen was dead from smallpox. She had come to the throne during warfare, and she had died while much of Europe was still at its conflicts that would continue in that phase until 20 September 1697 when France signed, the Treaty of Ryswick with England, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and the Netherlands. But the Peace of Ryswick was not peace in Europe. It was a truce.

  What happened in England is what always happens at the end of a long confrontation; nowadays the term is ‘peace dividend’. At the end of the seventeenth century, the jargon was different, but the sentiment the same: cut back the numbers of troops, save money. It was perfectly understandable. As ever on these occasions, the nation was fed up with paying taxes for a war not everyone was convinced was in the people’s interest. Taxes had been raised in the easiest ways, including a levy on birth, marriages and funerals. In 1697, the seventeenth-century peace dividend had to be paid. The army of nearly 90,000 men was to be cut to fewer than 10,000. The navy was to be reduced to a point where it could hardly defend the shores. Demobilization, just as it was in 1918 and 1945, became an almost unmanageable process. Certainly seventeenth-century Britain did not have a system for coping with sudden change. Sending home tens of thousands of troops presented a social conundrum to a government and a country which was, just as it would be more than two centuries later in 1945, poor from paying for war. One result was a large increase in crime: many soldiers became footpads and highwaymen. Even before the war an Act of Parliament described these outlaws as an infestation. The Act was not simply to put robbers outside the law – that is, to declare them outlaws – but to encourage the population to catch them. This was necessary because it was believed – with good reason – that many of the people supported them.

  Inevitably, England became isolationist. Not that William wanted it to, it was simply that Parliament and the people were fed up with paying for a war that by and large they didn’t want. There had been fears of a French invasion and it might even have happened while James II was still trying to get his throne back, but it didn’t. William realized that if, instead of showing his contempt for the English and their ruling classes, he had tried to use the political system then he would have had the support he wanted for his crusade against the French. But he did not and in the end, the two parties, the Whigs and the Tories, proved that they were now far more powerful than he had ever understood they could be. Parliament was now determined to take an even stronger hold on the powers of the English monarchy. For a start, there was the matter of who would succeed not only William, but also Anne. The Act of Settlement declared that through a line descending from the daughter of James, the throne should pass to the House of Hanover. More importantly, it declared that every sovereign had to be a member of the Church of England. Furthermore, and after the experience of William, the Act stated that no foreign-born monarch could go to war without Parliament’s absolute permission.

  The next test came while William was still alive. And it came about not because of the ambitions of William, but because of a crisis in the future of the Spanish monarchy. This was not some simple domestic dispute: Spain had an empire. But more important to Europe than the Spanish possessions in the so-called New World was that part of the Spanish Empire that included parts of Italy and the southern Netherlands – what is now called Belgium.

  The King of Spain was Charles II. The reason for the dispute was that Charles was childless. There were three claimants to his throne: the first was France, through either the Dauphin or his second son, Philip, the Duke of Anjou, Louis XIV’s grandson; the second was the Emperor of Austria, Leopold, who had visions of reviving the grander days of the Habsburgs; and the third claimant was the Emperor’s grandson, the Electoral Prince of Bavaria.

  William and Louis produced a plan, the Partition Treaty of 1698, to share the empire. They said they would recognize the Prince of Bavaria, but the young Prince of Bavaria died, suddenly. Another treaty was produced. The Emperor’s second son, the Archduke Charles, was selected by William and Louis, but not by the King of Spain. A decision had to be reached. However, on 1 November 1700 Charles died and his will stated that his throne was to go to the Duke of Anjou. What was Louis XIV to do? Endorse the treaty and stand alongside the British and the Dutch? If he ignored the terms of the treaty and preferred the will he would have to go to war with anyone who challenged his grandson’s claim. He chose to support his grandson and part of the reason for doing so was his inability to judge if the English would support him. In that, he was probably wise.

  The English were not to be trusted. Moreover, the English had good reasons not to join forces with the French. They had never trusted them, nor would they ever properly do so – not even when they were on the same side during the two world wars of the twentieth century and the political European wars of the twenty-first century. Secondly, there was evidence that the French were thinking of invading England to help James II regain his throne. James II was still alive at his Jacobite court at St Germain. But he was not to linger and when he died at the age of sixty-eight in 1701, his son, James Edward Stuart, was proclaimed by his father’s court as James III of England and VIII of Scotland. That was no surprise, of course, but the significant point is that Louis XIV of France announced that he recognized the son, the Old Pretender as he became known, as King of England. Here was evidence for the English that they had been so right not to trust the French. Louis’s support for the Pretender was a declaration of hostility if not direct war. William was never to see the war through. On 20 February 1702, he fell from his horse and broke his collar-bone. He was a tired, weak man and in this second year of the eighteenth century medicine had no remedy.

  So Anne became Queen and the long-term significance of England’s involvement in the War of Spanish Succession was that England, a reluctant player, was led into a decade of war. It was a war of ruthless battles, and a war that gave Britain the island of Minorca and also a tiny colony: Gibraltar.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  1702–6

  Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs, came to the throne in 1702. She was the daughter of James II; her mother was his mistress, Anne Hyde, whom he married. Anne married Prince George of Denmark and, although she was pregnant eighteen times, they had no surviving child. She has been described as unhealthy, dull-witted and, like her father, a bigot, although Anne was a Protestant whereas James was, of course, a Roman Catholic. Her connection with and affection for John Churchill, whom she made Duke of Marlborough, developed while she was still Princess Anne. Marlborough’s wife, Sarah Churchill, was her lady of the bedchamber – her closest confidant. Anne, like her sister Mary, was quite disloyal to her father. During the 1688 revolution, Anne joined the rebellion at Nottingham.

  Yet if this all sounds like disaster for England, it wasn’t. Close to the throne were the two most able people of the new century: the first Duke of Marlborough (1650–1722), perhaps one of the most celebrated army commanders in English history, and Sidney Godolphin, who had served Charles II and James II and who, until 1707, had control of the Treasury and the ear of the Queen. His support was crucial to Marlborough’s military appetite for resources to fight the War of Spanish Succession. Marlborough had believed that if England didn’t join the war, Louis would win it. There was another matter: Marlborough (and the Whigs were with him on this) believed that whichever power had military domination of Europe could, and even would, have control of the distant colonies. Trade with far away Newfoundland was well-establ
ished; smuggling from Continental Europe was already big business and the Royal Navy was already deploying squadrons in Canadian waters. Importantly, the foundations of the British Empire in India were now dug by the hard work (and profits) of the English East India Company whose origins lay in the East Indies cargoes first shipped back to England in 1603.

  The new Queen’s mind was occupied with far more than a strategic understanding of what war might mean for her people. Having lived through one rebellion and even taken part in it, she was well aware of the possibility of another such uprising. Furthermore, like Marlborough and Godolphin, the Queen was a high Tory and strong Anglican. This conviction in her religious persuasion was seemingly the single comfort in her guilt at having usurped her father’s position. Anglicanism must reign above Catholicism. Catholicism was synonymous with France and it was clear that the Catholic Louis believed that with the death of King William, the English resolve to join the Grand Alliance against him was weakened. This war was crucial to the history of these islands. If Marlborough could command the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV and beat him, then the threat to Europe of dangerous domination by one nation would recede. Also, while Louis remained uncurbed, there continued to be a real threat of invasion. There is little doubt that one of France’s ambitions during the War of Spanish Succession was to invade Britain on behalf of the Catholic Pretender to the throne, James Edward Stuart.

  In May 1702 the Grand Alliance of England, the Dutch Republic and the Holy Roman Empire in support of the Habsburg, Charles III, declared war on the France–Spanish Alliance. In September Bavaria joined the French. Later, the Portuguese and the Germans, or some German States, since Germany wasn’t united then, joined the Grand Alliance. But by 1703 (the year Samuel Pepys died), in spite of initial success, the Grand Alliance was losing ground to the French and here was the beginnings of the French and Spanish advance on Vienna. The English and Dutch armies were on the defensive in the Netherlands. Many of the Alliance leaders grumbled that Austria was too far away for them to worry about. Marlborough didn’t think so: he saw the survival of Austria as essential to the Alliance and its fall as the main ambition of the French.