A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  In one respect, which would in the end prove critical in 1688, James and William differed radically: the value they placed on printed propaganda. Here, their backgrounds told. Although he had come to power over the bodies of the De Witts and was restored as Captain and Admiral General, William still had to contend, over sixteen years, with the complicated, interlocking, highly decentralized institutions of the Dutch Republic. It was no good simply blustering and bullying his way to leadership, because in the last resort money, not princely mystique, spoke loudest in a country that was the prototype of a modern polity, a place where decentralization rather than the concentration of power worked best, where the marketplace of ideas as well as commodities required religious pluralism. Knowing the Dutch Republic’s reputation for toleration, James actually tried to trade on it. When, during their many exchanges of correspondence, James tried to represent his own Declaration of Indulgence as a commitment to toleration, he was shocked to find William actually defending the Test Act as a regrettable necessity for Anglican peace of mind about the future of their Church establishment.

  William’s response suggests that in the summer of 1688 he and his Chief Minister, Grand Pensionary Gaspar Fagel, were paying as much attention to the public-relations end of their enterprise as to military planning. The manifesto, of which a massive 60,000 copies were printed both to herald the arrival of the Dutch army and to justify its presence, carefully avoided the slightest suggestion that William and Mary were coming as conquerors to set themselves up in James’s place. The aim, repeated over and again, was a restoration, not a revolution: the restoration of Church, of orderly parliamentary government, of the rule of law, in fact the restoration of a true English monarchy instead of the Catholic ‘tyranny’, ruled by Jesuits, arbitrary courts and Irish troops that James was in the process of instituting.

  As in 1066 and 1588, though, strategy was the prisoner of providence, otherwise known as the weather. It was three months before the enormous armada and its huge cargo of troops, many of them the cream of the Dutch army, were able to sail from Scheveningen. The chosen landing place, perhaps influenced by the most influential of the English sponsors, Danby, was the northeast coast (where Henry Bolingbroke had begun his campaign against Richard II), far enough from James’s concentration of troops in the southeast to be able to establish some momentum before meeting the king’s army. Danby had promised that a supportive rising would begin in his own county of Yorkshire. But while the Protestant winds of late October were kind enough to William’s fleet, they blew him the wrong way, from the strait of Dover towards western rather than northeastern England. Eventually God stopped being coy and revealed himself to be a Protestant gentleman, for it was on the anniversary of the deliverance from the Gunpowder Treason, 5 November, that William made landfall near Torbay in Devon.

  When he had taken in the full seriousness of his position, James II went from disbelief to consternation. In panic, he threw into reverse almost everything that had given offence. The Declaration of Indulgence was withdrawn; a new election was called, for which Roman Catholics were not to be eligible; the most senior officers of Church and state who had been dismissed were reinstated. But it was much, much too late. As far as the huge coalition of the disaffected was concerned – and especially the Tory gentry and the Church – only the presence of William’s army and the prince himself could possibly guarantee that James would keep his word and neutralize his pet standing army. In fact, had he shown some presence of mind, James might still have been able to control the situation or at least contain the damage, for on paper at least his troop strength was easily twice that of the Prince of Orange. But those 40,000 men were dispersed around the country, and James had collapsed back into a realm of ancient nightmares in which nothing, especially not the physical safety of a royal family, could be taken for granted. So he kept at least half his available troops in the south back in London. It was far from certain, moreover, whether the rest of the army sent southwest towards Salisbury would fight when it came to it. Mutinies against Catholic officers were reported as commonplace. And then came another massive blow, which seemed to shock the king more than anything since hearing of the Dutch fleet passing the strait of Dover: his younger daughter, the Lady Anne, had disappeared, re-emerging as a defector in the camp of her brother-in-law.

  James now led what was left of his army into Wiltshire. His own condition did not inspire confidence. Insomniac and suffering from chronic nose-bleeds, he seemed as disoriented by his predicament as his army, which lacked any kind of maps. Supposing he decided to tackle William head-on, no one had much idea of how to find him. And James was so nervous of having left the queen and the Prince of Wales behind in a capital depleted of troops that in the end he gave up looking for William and retreated from Salisbury back to London. Before he got there he learned of the defection of the general in whom he had placed most confidence, John Churchill. It was a betrayal he never forgave or forgot.

  Free to advance, his army swelling daily, William played his hand with great care and subtlety. He would advance his army to no more than 40 miles west of London, he let it be known, it being understood that James would withdraw his troops a like distance east. In between, the parliament could deliberate on the fate of the kingdom, free of any kind of intimidation. The moderation of these demands was, in fact, deceptive. As the royal position disintegrated, the Whigs could hardly refrain from the opportunity, not just to disadvantage James but be rid of him altogether. And it was equally impossible for William not to be tempted by his amazing run of luck into seeing himself as something more than an arbitrator. But to keep the Tories in the camp meant making at least a show of sweet reason and hoping that James, true to form, would spurn it. James’s only ploy at this point was to call William’s bluff and accept the terms. But in the first week of December he was haunted by memories of his father falling into the hands of the enemy, losing all freedom of action and, inevitably, his life. James was, if anything, even more anxious about the Prince of Wales’s safety, for in the person of the baby boy lay the eventual redemption of his cause. So he prevaricated just long enough to see the queen and the Prince of Wales safely off to France. A few hours after he had told a meeting of lords that he would remain and continue negotiations with William, James himself made his escape. It was 3 a.m. on 11 December 1688. Burning with furious chagrin at his plight, driven by absurd passions, he enacted one last childish gesture of malice. The writs for the new free parliament were brought to him along with the Great Seal. The writs were promptly burned, the Great Seal dropped into the Thames as he crossed to the south bank. He might just as well have lowered his throne into the muddy water.

  For the Whigs, of course, this completely unanticipated turn of events was better than anything they could have imagined in their wildest dreams. Initially, the Tories were appalled, for throughout the campaign they had been in denial that they were in the business of dislodging James from his throne; rather, merely making him heed the law. Before long, however, the most thoughtful Tories realized that the abrupt exit of the king had actually let them off the hook of their own conscience. It remained abhorrent to think of themselves as in insurrection against their anointed monarch. But what if the throne could be said to have been vacated – opening a void that nature and the state abhorred? The argument had been used before, speciously, in 1399 when Richard II’s vacation had been spent mostly in the Tower. But this time James had indeed gone on his travels. If they did not want – heaven forbid – England to relapse into a Commonwealth, a royal solution had better be found, and quickly.

  For a moment, all these calculations were thrown into disarray by the improbable return of James to London. When he was almost on board ship, he had been recognized (though as a fleeing priest, not as a king), searched and physically harassed. In fact, such was his pathetic condition that it actually inspired sympathy from the London populace for the first time in years. Fortunately for William and the Whigs, James was not listening to the
cheers. His only thought was to get out of the country again as quickly as possible, and in this, of course, his captors were only too delighted to assist. This time he did not come back.

  With the throne now well and truly vacant, the second Convention Parliament in thirty years debated the future of the realm. Despite the fact that both Whigs and Tories (the latter returned as a minority but a substantial one) and the country thought of the assembly as a free parliament, it actually met under the conditions of a foreign occupation, with Dutch troops patrolling Westminster, Whitehall and most of the City of London. And, needless to say, William’s ambitions had grown and hardened as his military position in England had become unchallengeable. James’s presence in France had altered the dynamic of their conflict in ways that no longer allowed for sentimental niceties. For James was there, not just as a guest, but as an ally in an international war that had already ignited across Europe. So some sort of half-baked provisional arrangement – of the kind that parliament presented to him – might not be enough security for the kind of test he would imminently face. In fact, the Convention had divided. The Whig majority in the Commons was all for William and Mary becoming monarchs right away, and doing so on the grounds that James had demonstrably violated his coronation oath and had dethroned himself by breaking his contract with the people. The Tory majority in the House of Lords, however, refused to acknowledge any such contract and instead took refuge in the ‘vacancy’ argument, by which the throne must needs be filled without altering its divine-right sovereignty. The compromise was that William and Mary would be made regents until the death of James, at which point they could ascend the throne as his already designated lawful heirs. No mention was made by either side, of course, of the inconvenient existence of the Prince of Wales.

  But it was precisely the fact of the Prince of Wales – and the possibility that as time went on his legitimacy would seem more, not less, credible – that made William realize, with his peerless sense of timing, that if he failed to seize the moment, he would squander an advantage that might never return. So, with the Dutch Blues on the streets, he simply rejected every overture short of the crown itself. He knew, of course, that in the last resort the Tories had no alternative. Veiled threats that if the matter were not settled he would depart forthwith sent them into a tizzy of anxiety. On 6 February, the House of Lords capitulated.

  A week later, on 13 February 1689, William and Mary were declared king and queen. At their coronation on 11 April, before the crowns were set on their heads a reading took place of the Declaration of Rights, passed by the Convention. The moment was not just ceremonial, but profoundly significant for the future of the monarchy in Britain. For it solemnized the Crown’s commitment to the reforms of the Long Parliament and the Protectorate as a condition of its authority. No more standing armies; no dispensing power; no resort to extra-parliamentary taxation; no resurrection of special courts and tribunals, ecclesiastical or civil; freedom to petition guaranteed; free elections; annual parliaments. Later in the spring an Act ofToleration was passed. It fell a long way short of the promise of its billing, not extending to all Christian sects (those, for example, who denied the Trinity). But, as John Locke wrote to a friend in the Dutch Republic, ‘Toleration has now at last been established by law in our country. Not perhaps so wide in scope as might be wished for by you and those like you who are true Christians and free from ambition or envy. Still, it is something to have progressed so far. I hope that, with these beginnings, the foundations have been laid of that liberty and peace, in which the Church of Christ is one day to be established.’

  Whatever else it was, the English state of 1700 was unquestionably not the Stuart monarchy of 1603 or 1660. But William’s government did have a true predecessor – and that was the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. For the regime that had been all too briefly established in 1657 – of a ‘single person and [a bicameral] parliament’ guaranteeing regular elections and limited toleration – looks like the authentic blueprint of what actually came to pass after 1688. In this sense, at least, the real ‘Interregnum’ might be seen as 1659–87! Just as the government sketched out in the Humble Petition and Advice had corresponded to what a majority of the country’s ruling landed elites wanted then, so the Williamite government corresponded to it a generation later.

  This was not what old Edmund Ludlow, the last of the regicide republicans, had foreseen when, at the age of seventy-one, he left his Swiss exile on Lac Leman for England to see first-hand if William was indeed, as he hoped, the new ‘Gideon’. Ludlow took with him bitter memories of comrades assassinated in Lausanne, or dying sad and poor in exile, or of soldiers of the ‘Good Old Cause’, such as Algernon Sidney in England, betrayed and hanged. But Ludlow fondly imagined that the issue in 1689 was the same as it had been forty years before, namely ‘whether the king should govern as a god by his will and the nation be governed by beasts, or whether the people should be governed by themselves, by their own consent’. Once in London, though, aside from congenial evenings spent with the survivors of countless republican débâcles, such as John Wildman, Ludlow was doomed to disenchantment. William had no interest whatsoever in encouraging a government based on popular consent. He was neither a crowned republican nor Gideon. He was, for Ludlow, the worst of all reincarnations: a second Cromwell. It was not long before indignant noises were made in the Commons about the presence of so notorious a regicide as Edmund Ludlow – indignation endorsed by the new king. Before worse could happen, Ludlow returned his old bones to the limbo from whence they came.

  Future Ludlows would have to travel a little further in search of their elusive Promised Land: across the Atlantic, in fact, where many of those seeking a truly new world, such as William Penn the younger, could find space to make it. The ‘Revolutionary Settlement’ turned out to be neither. But that, paradoxically, was its greatest strength and accomplishment. The unsettlement of 1689 – and with it the creation of a polity within which mutually conflicting views on what had happened and why could be sustained – was a measure not of failure but success. For a kingdom of debate had been created, in which it was possible for fierce arguments about the constitution and government of the state to be conducted without necessitating outright civil war.

  Thomas Hobbes – who had survived to see the Popish Plot – had insisted that the containment of argument was impossible short of the surrender of liberties to an omnipotent adjudicator, the Leviathan. But if William were indeed powerful, he was certainly not omnipotent. It was a back-handed compliment to the rough-house ebullience of party politics that the king was so shocked and vexed by it. He had imagined he would lead a grateful and united nation into the European war, which he assumed to be as much in English as Dutch interests. Instead, he discovered that what he had effected had developed a political momentum that refused to march in lock-step with military obedience. The more he pressured, the more trouble he got. In the 1690s, with the country at war, the first parliamentary Committee of Account, to which government officials were obliged to report, was established. And the Triennial Act (another revival of 1657) ensured that parliamentary oversight would be a permanent, not an intermittent, feature of the English political system. However irksome for the king, William would learn to live with these inconveniences. For it turned out that what the country needed was not, after all, a Leviathan, but a Chairman of the Board.

  Nothing like this peculiar regime, in which viable government coexisted with party polemics, existed anywhere else in Europe. However puffed up with self-congratulation, Macaulay was justified at the end of volume III of his great History of England in seeing the implanting of a genuine parliamentary system as the precondition for avoiding the later fates of absolute monarchies, destroyed by much fiercer revolutions: ‘For the authority of law, for the security of property, for the peace of our streets, for the happiness of our homes, our gratitude is due, under him who pulls down nations at his pleasure, to the Long Parliament, to the Convention and to William of Orange.
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  But who, exactly, were laying flowers on the bier of William of Orange? The English, naturally. For Macaulay neglected to add in this anthem that English liberty was won over Irish and Highland-Scottish corpses. That if 1689 were a triumph for England, it was a tragedy for Britain. And that outside England, lawlessness, insecurity of property, war in the streets and bitter domestic sorrow were as much the enduring legacy of what Cromwell and his reincarnation, William, wrought as any of the glories of the Glorious Revolution.

  For although Ireland may be at the western edge of Europe geographically, it can never escape the inexorable effects of the Continent’s wars. Not for the first or last time, it found itself fighting a European war by proxy and paying, as a result, a terrible price. When William set out on the enterprise of England he knew very well that his campaigns were unlikely to stop at the Tweed or the Irish Sea. His pessimism served him well. In March 1689, a month before William and Mary were crowned, James arrived in Ireland, supported by 20,000 French troops under the command of the Duc de Lauzun. Tens of thousands of Irish Catholics streamed to volunteer for his army. In May in Dublin, James and the ‘Patriot Parliament’ rescinded Cromwell’s Land Settlement (perpetuated by his brother Charles), restored confiscated lands to their original owners and brought Catholics back into every branch of government. For the first time since the wars against Elizabeth, Ireland was in the hands of native Irish (Macaulay’s ‘aboriginals’). Unfortunately it was also in the hands of James II and the French, neither of whom were especially interested in what the Irish wanted except as a stepping stone to the reconquest of England and the re-establishment of an authoritarian Stuart monarchy there. James formally anathematized the constitutional settlement in England as ‘contrary to the law of God, nature and the nation’. In return, the Irish parliament produced a reassertion of divine-right kingship categorical enough even for James, who in 1692 would candidly instruct his son that his only proper recourse was to a Catholic court, guarded by a Catholic army. ‘Your Majesty’s right to your Imperial Crown is, originally, by nature and descent of blood, from God alone by whom kings reign and not from your people, not by virtue of any contract made with them or any act of your estates on their behalf . . . neither the peers nor the people, collective or representatively have or ought to have any coercive power over the persons of the kings of this realm.’