A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  But – as so often before in this story of the British wars of religion – having registered all these caveats, it is equally important to understand what the Whigs got right. Their suspicion that James’s benevolence in extending toleration beyond Catholics to the ‘fanatick’ Nonconformist sects was a tactical rather than a wholehearted gesture was not unfounded. Suppose, those sceptics might have argued, the king’s dispensation of the Test Act allowed full and open Catholic practice and teaching, so that the Roman Church would (as James made no secret of hoping) be in a position to reconvert England by persuasion; what would such an England actually look like? Was Louis XIV’s France, for God’s sake, internationally famous for its tolerant atmosphere? Was France a kingdom where all manner of Christians could peaceably profess their confession? All the sceptics had to do was to point to the most infamous act of Louis’s reign, which took place in the same year as James’s accession (and together with the usual French hand-out to the Stuarts): the uprooting and expulsion of the entire Huguenot community of France. This was not something that was seen in England as a remote and unimportant act. The saga of the cruelly treated Huguenots, together with their exodus to Protestant lands – especially the Netherlands – was an event which actually defined allegiances in the mid-1680s and that seemed to point towards the inevitability of another pan-European war. Among the places in which the Huguenot diaspora settled with its immense treasury of wealth, skill and talent was, of course, London. It was not just fellow Dissenters who made them welcome. Henry Compton, the Bishop of London – who incurred so much of James’s displeasure that he had him removed from his diocese – was the foremost organizer of relief for the stricken refugees. And, of course, their story was told and retold over and over again in the pathetic images produced by the Dutch engravers and writers.

  Not surprisingly, then, Nonconformists were not at all united in gratitude to James for his efforts on their behalf. Presbyterians in particular warned against accepting favours from the king who, in the end, was committed to a Church and an absolutist style of monarchy that was to its very marrow deeply intolerant. In Ireland, where he had a free hand politically, toleration of Protestant dissent was actually banned. And James’s virtual declaration of war on the traditional English institutions that presumed to oppose his will – the universities, the bishops and the judiciary – and the ferocity with which he fulminated against them did not suggest a prince who was truly interested in a tolerant, spiritually pluralist commonwealth. ‘Get you gone!’ he told the Fellows of Magdalen College, when he expelled them from their fellowships after they had opposed his nomination of a Catholic to be their President. ‘Know I am your King I will be obeyed, and I command you to be gone. Go and admit the Bishop of Oxford, Head, Principal, what do you call it, of the College . . . I mean President of the College. Let them that refuse it look to it. They shall feel the weight of their sovereign’s displeasure.’

  There was a middle way open to James (as there had been for Charles I), and it was urged on him by William Penn. Settle for de facto toleration without insisting on the formal repeal of the Test Act, he pleaded, and all those whom you have dangerously alienated in Church and shires will return to their natural loyalty. But James II had, in effect, decided to ditch them in the belief that somehow a coalition of opposites – Catholics, ultra-monarchists and Dissenters – could see him through the crisis. He doubtless imagined that he was imitating his brother’s firmness in 1680–81. In that instance, however, Charles had drawn to him the majority of the political country, while James was in the process of alienating it. It had been Shaftesbury who had boxed himself into an untenable corner through his inflexibility. Now it was James’s turn to do the same, with equally calamitous results. In hindsight it seems incredible that the king could have seriously hoped to offset the enormous power of both the Whig and Tory gentry and aristocracy by so improbable an alliance of Catholics and Dissenters. But his trump card, he must have believed, was the potency of the royal mystique. By invoking the supreme authority of the Crown, which the Tories had for so long themselves trumpeted, James hoped at the very least to divide them and to take enough of them along with him to dispense with the Test Act, pass his new Declaration of Indulgence, without parliamentary approval if necessary, and agree to accept Catholic officers in the army. And, in fact, the idea was not so fabulously far-fetched. The Marquis of Halifax had been dismissed in October 1685 for refusing to go along with the pro-Catholic plans, but Sunderland stayed. The tug of loyalty to the Stuarts for which so many old Cavalier families had fought and suffered was very strong, and had James exploited it with more cool intelligence and a modicum of flexibility he might yet have prevailed. But something told him, disastrously, that for all their belly-aching the Tories would in the end come round to his way of things. Where, after all, could they go?

  The answer was, of course, to the Dutch Republic and to William. This was the critical difference between the failed revolt of 1680-85 and the success of 1688–9. All the Whigs had in play in the earlier crisis, as an alternative to the legitimate heir, was the conspicuously illegitimate Duke of Monmouth. But James’s own daughter, Princess Mary, was another matter entirely. And her husband the Prince of Orange was by now legitimate in an entirely different sense: the symbolic figurehead of the European resistance to French domination. Not that it was in the mind of the ‘Seven’ who turned to William in 1688 to have Mary replace James on the throne. Had that been mooted, Tories like Danby would never have dreamed of going along with the plan, nor could they have carried the gentry with them. Rather, they wanted to bring William and his troops in to make James cease his unlawful behaviour. On just what constituted unlawful the Whigs and Tories had some measure of, but not complete, agreement. They could agree, for example, on the illegality of the dispensing power, on the need to force James to liquidate his standing army and its Catholic officers. But while that, together with the retention of the Test Act, was good enough for the Tories, the Whigs wanted to have him accept the ‘fundamental law’ of parliamentary government: that parliament was an equal partner in government, not merely a disposable source of advice.

  And what about William himself? What did he want? First and foremost, whatever was good for the Dutch Republic. Seen from the perspective of purely British history, the revolution of 1688 seems something spontaneously and indigenously generated. The Victorians, especially Macaulay, saw the event as one of those moments that expressed the glorious peculiarity of the English tradition of liberal parliamentarianism, as if somehow the island itself had choked on Catholic despotism, coughed it up and been returned to health, to normality, courtesy of William and Mary. But the truth is different and altogether more European. As so often in the past – in 1066 for example – a turning point in English history was decided by the forces of international, not national, history. It took an immense foreign armada of possibly 600 vessels, carrying perhaps 15,000 Dutch and German troops, to bring about the fall of James. And even this would not have been decisive without the victory at the battle of the Boyne in Ireland two years later. What happened there was essentially the Irish theatre of a huge international conflict. It was fought mainly between non-English Europeans – the French under the Due de Lauzun on one side, and on the other a force of 36,000, two-thirds of whom were Dutch, German and Danes, and were commanded successively by Field Marshal Schomburg and, when he fell, by King William. The only actor in this military drama who had any decisive effect and who was indisputably English was John Churchill, whose defection in November 1688 from King James to Prince William was crucial, and whose violent destruction of Irish resistance two years later was even more decisive. So it was not surprising that, ennobled as the Duke of Marlborough, he would succeed William as the great commander of the European war against Louis XIV.

  The critical event of 1688 is better described as the invasion it undoubtedly was, rather than as a ‘revolution’. It had been contemplated by William in the Netherlands long before he had a
n official invitation. William was shrewd enough to know that it would be a gamble. But by the spring of 1688 he had come to believe that it would be worse not to embark on it. The controlling imperatives were all Dutch. The rampjaar or year of disaster in 1672 had been the unforgettable moment that defined William’s identity as it had scarred for ever the memory of Dutch history. The republic had come close to being wiped off the face of Europe as an independent power through an encircling alliance of France and England, and whatever it took to prevent that from recurring William would do. His marriage to Princess Mary had seemed to militate against a repetition of the Treaty of Dover. But although her father was now on the English throne, William was not so sure. James was, of course, on the take from Louis XIV just as his brother had been. And if he were unable to get his way with the relief of Catholics, it was all but certain that he would look to French military as well as financial aid. Moreover, William was well aware that, as far as ruining the Dutch Republic was concerned, Louis XIV knew that there was more than one way to skin a cat. The Dutch could be struck at through economic and systematic (though undeclared) naval actions, preying on their colonial trade. Massively dependent on imports of grain and timber from the Baltic, they were critically vulnerable to a concerted attack from both French and English ships. So during the mid-1680s Louis XIV and his more bellicose ministers repudiated their agreements signed at the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1679 and began to let privateers loose. Either way, Louis must have reckoned, he couldn’t lose. Either the arrogant Dutch commercial empire would piece by piece fall apart, or else the republic would be forced back into a war that once again it would have to fight on two fronts.

  William was perfectly aware of this and, resigned to the coming conflict, set about putting the republic in the best possible position to fight it. The campaign in the field had to be preceded by a campaign of persuasion, and that too had to be fought on two fronts. At home he needed to convince the previously peace-inclined commercial cities, especially Amsterdam, that unless they accepted his war policy they would suffer irreversible harm from French economic and maritime aggression. Then William went on a diplomatic offensive among the German princes, and especially with the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, emphasizing that the incorrigible expansionism of Louis XIV represented so paramount a threat to the stability of Europe that it cut across old lines of confessional allegiance.

  There was, of course, yet a third front for William in the public-relations war that had to be won before his military plans could be made operational, and that was the domestic crisis in England itself. Here, his best ally was James II. For by the beginning of 1688 James had committed himself to a collision course with all the good and great who had stood by his brother and himself a decade before. Brushing aside any moderate advice, and dismissing any ministers who had the temerity to offer it, James was reinforced in his own myopic obstinacy by men like Sunderland, who saw in grovelling loyalty a way to make themselves arbiters of power and were prepared, if necessary, to publicize their own conversion to the Catholic Church. Persuasion was abandoned for intimidation. The size of the standing army available to James was almost doubled, much of it drawn from Irish troops commanded by Catholic officers. In April, the king ordered his Declaration of Indulgence to be read on successive Sundays from the pulpit. When a group of bishops, including Sancroft, attempted to explain their refusal to authorize the readings, James exploded in a storm of rage, declaring their objections to be ‘a standard of rebellion’. All those who were not now unreservedly for him were, in effect, to be considered and treated like traitors. The most prominent of the objecting bishops were arrested and tried in what turned into a public-relations disaster for the beleaguered king. They were acquitted, but not before one of the justices had delivered his own stinging verdict on the manifest illegality of the dispensing power. The liberated bishops emerged from confinement to find themselves celebrated up and down the country as the champions of the country’s liberties and the guardians of the Reformation. Bonfires were lit, and effigies of the Pope, and of James’s confessor, Father Petre, fed to the flames.

  None of this affront caused James to hesitate for a moment in his headlong sprint off the cliff. Let the bishops have their day, for he had something incomparably more powerful going for him: a Prince of Wales. For, after years of disappointments, Mary of Modena had actually been delivered on 10 June of a healthy baby boy, baptized with Roman rites as James Francis Edward Stuart. Predictably, and notwithstanding the queen’s visible pregnancy over the previous months, the infant was immediately denounced by James’s now innumerable enemies as a fraud: some other baby, perhaps produced by one of the royal mistresses, and now deposited in the royal crib to thwart the succession of Mary and her husband, Prince William. At any rate, the shock of the news immediately accelerated the timetable of the Dutch military operation. Just a week after the announcement of the royal birth, and doubtless prompted by the Dutch ambassador Dijkvelt, the ‘Seven’ sent their formal invitation to the Prince to come to England, not as conqueror but as the protector of Protestantism and liberty. It was exactly a century since the launching of the Spanish attack on Elizabeth’s kingdom, a fact not lost on the defenders of the queen’s legacy. But this would be the Good Armada, and the Protestant wind, this time, would be kind to its ships.

  Looking on with increasing dismay and disbelief at what was happening in England, Louis XIV had in fact already offered James military help, but had been brushed off by the Stuart king’s unfaltering sense of righteous invincibility. Now, when James could have used it, it was too late, for Louis had committed a sizeable army to the Rhineland where William had made sure the troops would be tied down. But, even at this critical juncture, James was held back from switching his own military resources from domestic intimidation to a posture of national defence. He could still not bring himself to believe that his daughter Mary would allow her husband to launch a full-scale invasion against her own father. And though this seems, in hindsight, a pathetically naïve delusion, the family ties winding about the two chief protagonists of this great drama did, in fact, bind them closely together. James was not just William’s father-in-law, he was also his uncle. His sister (also called Mary) had been married to William’s father (also called William). And despite the historical divide, which would, after 1688, always separate them, they had much in common beside shared blood. Both were orphans of political upheavals. A year after Charles I had been executed, William’s father, the Stadholder William II, had marched on Amsterdam to bend the city to his will – a tactic right out of the Stuart manual on political persuasion. Not long after this coup William II died, just before the birth of his son. His political enemies seized the opportunity to revenge themselves and, to preclude any further attempt at Orangist aggrandizement, made William III a ward of state and proceeded to abolish the Stadholderate. The prince had grown up as both pupil and captive of his political enemy Jan De Witt who attempted to turn him into a good republican, in much the same way that there had been talk during the Protectorate of making the youngest Stuart, the Duke of Gloucester, a ‘safe’ king.

  Both James and William, then, had gone through the experience of loss and humiliation. Both had leaned on surrogate fathers – De Witt and Clarendon – about whom they felt at best ambivalent. Both ended up leading guarded, somewhat secretive lives, hardening themselves against adversity. As Duke of York, of course, James had had an incomparably easier time of it than William III in the Stadholder-less republic. But his position was not so strong that it could protect him against ejection from office as a result of the Test Act or from being sent out of England during the Exclusion crisis (to Scotland, where he inflicted as much damage as possible on the Presbyterians). The two of them ended up as taciturn, habitually suspicious personalities, despising courtly banter and putting little faith in political negotiation unless backed up by the hard facts of military force.