by Andrew Marr
Though James had a bigger army and the support of most of the southern landowners, he had been in a state of abject funk for weeks. His daughter, the chatty Princess Anne, was among those who now abandoned him for William and her sister Mary. So too had Anne’s closest friend Sarah Churchill, wife of the Duke of Marlborough (the two were so close they used nicknames for one another – Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman). The regime was crumbling from within. James had already made one attempt to flee to France six days earlier, deliberately dropping the Great Seal in the Thames from his rowing-boat. He had done this because no Parliament was lawful without it, and he hoped thereby to create a constitutional crisis. He did, but the Lords, pragmatic as ever, formed a provisional government anyway, until James was finally packed off by the Dutch to Rochester. A few days later he left for France, his guards having been quietly instructed to let him go. For the next few months all British regiments were ordered not to go within twenty miles of London while the Dutch and Germans set up their camps inside the capital, at Kensington, Chelsea and Paddington.
The British do not, in general, make much of this invasion. Even quite well educated people believe that England has not been invaded since the Normans arrived in 1066. The impression has been left that William was more or less invited in, to sort out some small constitutional issues. This was not so. William had taken a massive military and personal gamble because the Dutch Protestants were desperate. Had James not panicked and fled, or had the wind veered a little, William might have lost everything. Instead, with his wife, Princess Anne’s confidante and older sister Mary, he became part of the only joint monarchy in modern British history. But the reign of William and Mary was not yet secure. A major attempt to win back the crown for the Stuarts and Catholicism erupted in Ireland (and to a lesser extent Scotland), and was only thwarted in battle. So this was not even, quite, a ‘bloodless revolution’. But 1688 was truly a turning-point in European history because it established a different way of ruling.
William of Orange had assembled his army and navy, and had taken that gamble, because he felt he had no alternative. When his sister-in-law fed him the gossip about Queen Mary’s pregnancy, it seemed obvious that the British succession had been settled and the London court would stay Catholic. This was terrible news for Protestant Holland, with her north German allies, leaving them exposed to the most dangerous enemy they had, Louis XIV. The Sun King was squeezing them. He had dramatically increased taxes on Dutch exports to France, and banned the import of the pickled herrings so many Dutch fishermen and traders depended on for their livelihood. He had impounded three hundred Dutch trading vessels. His armies seemed unbeatable.
The Dutch had despaired, years earlier, at the failure of Charles II to come to their aid. But the succession of James II, a Catholic like Louis, made their plight worse. The arrival of his son, whether the boy had been smuggled into the birth chamber or not, was the final blow. William of Orange either had to invade Britain and neutralize the threat of a British–French alliance, or watch his Protestant trading nation, brimming with enterprise, science and middle-class prosperity, be choked to death. So he launched an invasion, one that has been described as ‘mounted in defiance of all common sense and professional experience’.5 As the historian Lisa Jardine has conclusively shown, what happened in 1688 happened because the Dutch decided it must, not because the British asked for it to happen.
Yet its consequences went far beyond anything William could have imagined. Once James had gone, and despite his Dutch Blue Guard, William’s position in London was not entirely safe. Strictly speaking, he was only fourth in line to the throne. Most of the big landowners had sat on the fence and waited to see who would win before committing themselves. The army and navy were unhappy, to say the least. Having marched through London, how would he actually establish his authority?
Meeting as a Convention, since in the absence of the Great Seal they could not be a Parliament, the Commons and Lords debated what to do. They would simply declare new constitutional principles as they went along. James had not been ousted, but had deserted his country, thus breaking his contract. (‘Contract’? What contract? a traditionalist would have asked.) James and his son were then cut out of the succession on the novel principle that they were Catholics, and that they had been found ‘by experience’ to be impossible rulers.6 Next, the peers and MPs offered the crown to Mary alone, a Stuart by blood. This, said William, was not acceptable. He would rather return home with his wife and leave the British to squabble amongst themselves. At which, the MPs backed down and announced a joint monarchy in which William, now William III, would exercise the real authority.
This was a great victory for the Dutchman – or would have been, except that the Commons insisted on something in return. They drew up a Bill of Rights. Agreeing to this meant that William also agreed that in future no British monarch could raise taxes, or have a standing army, without the agreement of Parliament; that he had to allow free and frequent elections; and that he could not be a Roman Catholic. As compared with the absolutist pretensions of continental monarchy, this was the real, the permanent, British revolution. A monarch who controlled neither money nor troops, and whose people dictated his religious views, was no proper monarch at all.
The British parliamentarians had rejected the monarchical tyranny of Charles I and the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. They had little time for James’s Catholic-absolutist dreams, but nor were they prepared to allow themselves to be squashed under the heel of a Protestant Dutchman. They would have monarchy, but on their own terms only; and for a major power this was something entirely new. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ would be the cornerstone of British politics and power for more than three centuries to come. The rights and liberties secured by Parliament gave freedom to publish, argue, probe and experiment. This was the unequivocal, world-changing answer to Rome.
Out of it would come the great thinkers of the British Enlightenment and a flourishing inquiry into nature – what would later be called ‘science’. Isaac Newton, who published his Principia Mathematica the year before William’s fleet sailed to Devon, enjoyed his greatest years as a public figure under the new monarchy. Like Galileo, he was firmly convinced that the heliocentric principle was correct, and like Galileo he combined mathematics and practical experiments in a wide range of fields. He produced the first reflecting telescope, for instance, for which he ground his own lenses. Like his colleagues the chemist Robert Boyle, the polymath Robert Hooke – who invented the word ‘cell’ for the basic building-block of life – and Christopher Wren, he never had to worry about religious orthodoxy or the attentions of the Inquisition.
Under the leadership of the Royal Society, formed during Charles II’s reign, these thinkers argued and disputed constantly, but over the meaning of their discoveries, over who invented what first, and over patents – not over divine authority. They were part of what for a time became more of an Anglo-Dutch milieu than a purely British one. Among the Dutchmen who soon made the trip to London was the same Christiaan Huygens who had picked up and partially solved the problem of measuring longitude with an accurate clock, the man that Galileo had been kept away from by the Catholic Church.
Galileo had been fascinated by microscopes as well as by telescopes, and in Rome in 1624 had shown off the multitude of giant insects revealed by his own compound microscope.7 In London and Leiden, an even greater sense of tiny new worlds being uncovered was experienced when Hooke, Huygens and the renowned Antonie van Leeuwenhoek squinted through their lenses and published some extraordinary pictures of lice, mould and other wriggly, nightmarish tiddlers. If, despite the anxieties aroused by the Inquisition, Galileo did finally arrive in a Christian Paradise, he must have looked down and shaken his head in frustration at being born too far south and a little too early.
What, meanwhile, of that terrible gossip Princess Anne, whose letters had triggered rather more than she bargained for. She became, in good time, plump and stately Queen Anne. Like the Habs
burgs, this last of the Stuart monarchs became an unhappy symbol of dynastic weakness: of her eighteen or nineteen pregnancies, all but three produced dead babies – stillborn, miscarried or died very soon after birth. This horrible toll, compounded as a personal tragedy by the death in childhood of the three survivors (two from smallpox) suggests some profound genetic problem. Yet if Anne did not give birth to a successor, her reign does mark the true birth of a modern nation. In 1707 she became the first monarch to rule over the constitutionally united realms of England, Wales and Scotland – or as it became known, Great Britain. The Scottish Parliament, after a ruinous attempt at creating an empire in central America, had bankrupted the country. It accepted London’s bail-out terms and dissolved itself, thereby creating a single British Parliament. Queen Anne’s friend Sarah Churchill became one of the most influential women in the land, and it was her husband, the Duke of Marlborough, who would lead British armies across Europe, finally freeing the Netherlands from the French and beating back the Catholic threat.
After this, Britain would begin the process of acquiring the greatest empire in the world and, on the back of her original contribution to politics, royal ‘moderatism’ rather than ‘absolutism’, achieve the first industrial revolution too.
The Bourbons of India: From Babur to Bust
The history of India can seem a tangled blur of confusing, romantic names, hidden in thickets of unreliable source materials. We last left her in the political confusion that followed the empires of the Buddhist Mauryans and then of the Hindu Gupta dynasty, which was a golden age for Indian art, architecture and writing. But Hindu India would not be able to maintain its political dominance. The same violent disturbances that shook Eastern Europe, central Asia, Russia and China erupted into India too. The Mongol invaders, coming on the heels of Muslim Turkic armies, would stamp Islam across the northern territories and would dominate the subcontinent until the arrival of the British.
This need not confuse us too much. There are useful parallels between the history of Europe from the 1200s to the 1600s, and of India at the same time. After all, the huge peninsula of Europe and the giant wedge of India are two similarly sized tongues jabbing out from the Eurasian landmass. During this half-millennium both suffered a long conflict between a would-be centre and local or regional identities; and then a long struggle between rival religions which prevented either of these subcontinents achieving political unity.
Europe’s would-be centre was the papacy in Rome, working alongside the Holy Roman Empire and other Catholic monarchies. In India, the would-be centre was Delhi under the Muslim Turkish Khalji and Tughluq dynasties, whose dominance was challenged just as vigorously as Rome’s. Rome faced heretics and Protestant revolt: the Delhi Muslim dynasties were confronted by Hindu kings and rebel peoples of the west, centre and south. The Muslims wrecked many of the glories of Hindu civilization, smashing old temples and art, just as the Protestants destroyed monasteries and Catholic religious art. If the one contained countries as diverse as Scotland, Lithuania, England, Poland and Hungary, the other had Malwa, Orissa, Vijayanagara, Jaunpur and the Rajput states.
In some lights they even looked a little the same: one can certainly compare the elaborate carved stone architecture of India during this period with the cathedrals and castles of European rulers. And India can offer up individuals as idiosyncratic as England’s Henry VIII or a Borgia pope, and just as well remembered. There was the great Muslim ruler from Delhi, Ala-ud-din, with his regiments of elephant-mounted soldiers and his Turkish cavalry, who drove deep into the south, extracting glittering tribute – almost an Aladdin’s cave of the stuff – and who repulsed even the Mongols. There was the poet, intellectual, patron of the arts and mathematician Muhammad Bin Tughluq, sultan of Delhi, whose ferocious treatment of rebels and of those who displeased him became legendary. One such was flayed alive, then his skin was stuffed with rice mixed with his minced flesh and served to his family – behaviour to rival that of the Christian Prince, and warrior, Vlad.
Indian history from the Middle Ages to early-modern times is therefore no more outlandish than European. We find a comparable procession of sieges, marches, dynastic cat-fights and regional rebellions, below which an impoverished peasantry and heavily taxed city traders struggled. What we do not find is any popular breakaway from the rule of kings and princes; there was much Indian philosophy and natural science, but there was no Indian enlightenment, nor (in this period) much political experimentation. Or so we believe. Unfortunately, Indian history outside the Muslim courts is relatively poorly recorded. One modern historian laments: ‘Unenlivened by the gossipy narratives beloved of Muslim writers, the contemporary history of Hindu India has still to be laboriously extrapolated from the sterile phrasing and optimistic listings favoured by royal panegyrists.’8
Yet Hinduism could not be stamped out, any more by Muslim imams than later by Christian missionaries. Muslim rulers defeated Hindu rulers, but rarely tried to oppress Hinduism itself or any of the other religions. There were individual atrocities galore, but not the cruel mass burnings, forced conversions, torture of heretics or wars of extermination that Europe knew. And unlike its European equivalent, Indian seamanship was largely coastal and based on trade, not war or exploration. There had been warlike fleets, particularly under the Chola dynasty of southern India during the medieval period, when Indian fleets reached China; but not for centuries. On land, too, Indian rulers occasionally mustered armies to push north through Afghanistan towards Persia, or east towards China, but never developed the global ambitions of Portugal, France or Britain, all of whom established early footholds in India.
Indian history really coheres with the rise of the great Mughal empire, at around the same time as the Reformation in Europe and the Spanish arrival in Peru. That starts as an astonishing adventure story in the wilds of central Asia, and ends as a lesson in the dangers of absolute monarchy.
Properly called Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad, but generally known by his nickname ‘Tiger’, or Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty was a descendant of both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Babur had been born in Uzbekistan in 1483, the same year as Raphael and Martin Luther. The son of a modest local ruler, he won his first major military victory, the capture of Samarkand, when he was just fourteen. Struggling against desertions, revolts and the threat posed by much larger enemies, Babur slowly built up a power base in Afghanistan before descending on northern India with the new weapon of the age, the musket. His armies defeated the Muslim Lodi dynasty, capturing Delhi in 1526, and then overwhelmed the proudly independent Hindu Rajput rulers too. Dying in 1531, he left behind exquisite gardens (not least, the one in Kabul, where he is buried), the first Muslim ruler’s autobiography, a reputation for building pillars out of the heads of his decapitated enemies, and a remarkable dynasty.
The trouble with dynasties, however, is that they produce weaker members as well as stronger ones. Babur’s son lost the empire and then regained it, but it was his grandson, Akbar the Great, who really expanded Mughal rule. Akbar, roughly contemporaneous with Elizabeth I, the first Tokugawas and Ivan the Terrible, would rule for half a century. His military victories, featuring mass elephant attacks and cannon, increased the size of his empire to about a hundred million souls, compared with around five million English and the forty million Europeans of the time.
These victories were often hideously bloody, as bad as anything Ashoka had perpetrated. At the siege of Chittor, a Hindu Rajput fortress, in 1567–8, the soldiers chose the traditional death of a suicide charge, while their women and children burned themselves to death rather than be captured alive. Yet thirty thousand civilians survived for long enough for Akbar’s forces to massacre them. Akbar, though, is like Ashoka in that he has been remembered more for his peaceful qualities than for his military savagery.
Akbar was a less extreme case than Ashoka. He maintained a vast army, sustained by heavy taxes on the peasantry, but he also created an efficient and relatively fair imperial burea
ucracy and was notably open-minded about religion. After founding a new capital city, Fatehpur Sikri, combining gorgeous Islamic, Indian and Persian architectural styles, Akbar had religious rivals take part in open debates with one another, as he sat and listened. The mingling of columns and arches of different styles was echoed by a mingling of world views, as Muslim Sunnis and Shia, Sufis and Hindus, Jains and Sikhs, and even Portuguese Christians, exchanged their ideas about the nature of God. Akbar seems not to have intended himself to convert to any new faith, but instead wanted to bind the faiths together into something fresh, and suitable for his multi-faith empire. In the end this ‘something’ may have amounted to little more than loyal and pious admiration for Akbar himself. Like the new capital city – short of water, too near to rebel kingdoms – it did not survive, except as the long-remembered possibility of a more tolerant Indian politics.
Akbar was succeeded by his son, Jahangir. This short statement must be followed by an admission: the Mughal habit of sons revolting against fathers and sons fighting sons creates a story too complicated to be related here. The Mughals were as bad as Plantagenets or Ottomans. Suffice it to say that Jahangir, another religiously tolerant man and a great patron of art and architecture, was also an alcoholic, and he ruled jointly with his far sharper wife, who had coins minted in her name. Jahangir was, in due course, ousted by one of his sons, who also disposed of his brothers; he then reigned from 1628 to 1658 as Shah Jahan.
Shah Jahan will always be remembered. He left behind him the most successful architectural emblem in world history. His wife, Mumtaz Mahal, died giving birth to their fourteenth child. Her death drove him in his grief to commission the greatest building India has ever seen, the Taj Mahal. Floating in the dawn, or at dusk, outside the city of Agra, its luminous beauty checkmates the clichéd reproductions in restaurants and advertisements around the world, trumping even the smoky, sprawling industrial town that now encircles it. This fundamentally simple monument to married love is also evidence of the extravagance of scale the Mughal dynasty could then deploy. Shah Jahan’s marblemania materialized in the form of beautiful buildings across much of Delhi, Agra and other cities, astonishing contemporary observers.
