by Allan Massie
William never achieved popularity; the English regarded him as a necessary expedient. The Tory squires resented his determination to involve the country in expensive wars, from which they derived no benefit. Nor, outside Protestant Ulster, where, as King Billy, he enjoys the status of a hero, has posterity remembered him with much pleasure. But for Macaulay he was the greatest of kings, and the Whig historian’s verdict is worth quoting:
His name at once calls up before us a slender and feeble frame, a lofty and ample forehead, a nose curved like the beak of an eagle, an eye rivalling that of an eagle in brightness and keenness, a thoughtful and somewhat sullen brow, a firm and somewhat peevish mouth, a cheek pale, thin, and deeply furrowed by sickness and by care. That pensive, severe, and solemn aspect could scarcely have belonged to a happy or a good-humoured man. But it indicates in a manner not to be mistaken capacity equal to the most arduous enterprises, and fortitude not to be shaken by reverses or dangers. Nature had largely endowed William with the qualities of a great ruler; and education had developed these qualities in no common degree…
The audacity of his spirit was the more remarkable because his physical organization was unusually delicate. From a child he had been weak and sickly. In the prime of manhood his complaints had been aggravated by a severe attack of smallpox. He was asthmatic and consumptive. His slender frame was shaken by a constant hoarse cough. He could not sleep unless his head was propped by several pillows, and could scarcely draw his breath in any but the purest air. [For this reason, he found it intolerable to take up residence at Whitehall or St James’s Palace, preferring Kensington or Hampton Court, distant from the oppressive and foetid air of London.]
Cruel headaches frequently tormented him. Exertion soon fatigued him. The physicians constantly kept up the hopes of his enemies by fixing some date beyond which, if there were anything certain in medical science, it was impossible that his broken constitution could hold out. Yet, through a life which was one long disease, the force of his mind never failed, on any occasion, to bear up his suffering and languid body.3
Macaulay admits that William ‘passed for the most cold-blooded of mankind’; nevertheless he asserts that ‘to a very small circle of friends, on whose fidelity and secrecy he could absolutely depend, he was a different man from the reserved and stoical William whom the multitude supposed to be destitute of human feelings. He was kind, cordial, open, even convivial and jocose, would sit at table many hours, and would bear his full share in festive conversation.’
The historian does not deny William’s deficiencies. ‘His manners were altogether Dutch’; he had little interest in literature, art or science. He granted favours in a grudging manner, and refused them bluntly. Though he disapproved of religious persecution, and practised a politic tolerance, his own faith was the narrowest and bleakest Calvinism. ‘The tenet of predestination was the keynote of his religion. He often declared that, if he were to abandon that tenet, he must abandon all belief in a superintending Providence, and must become a mere Epicurean.’ There was however no danger of him doing so.
Macaulay’s is the portrait of a hero, all the more convincing because he is ready to admit William’s limitations, the narrowness of his mind and his disagreeable manners.
William is usually characterised as a dour Dutchman, fairly enough, even though he had almost no Dutch blood. Yet in his long and intense rivalry with Louis XIV, a rivalry that amounted to obsession, he displayed the obstinate single-mindedness of his grandfather Charles I and his uncle James VII and II. In his case, unlike theirs, it did not lead to disaster because the policy he pursued was practical and found support in both the Netherlands and England.
Yet his position in England was never easy. Parliament responded to the attempts by his predecessors to govern without its consent by imposing restrictions on the monarchy. The Bill of Rights (1689) declared the dispensing and suspending powers as employed by James to be illegal. Charles had governed without Parliament for the last four years of his reign. James had not summoned a Parliament after 1685. Now the necessity for Parliament to meet every year was ensured by the passing of a Mutiny Act (1694), which was required to be renewed annually; without this act, maintenance of a standing army would be both illegal and well nigh impossible, since there would be no lawful provision for enforcing military discipline. With regular parliamentary sessions thus guaranteed, it was made clear to William that an active foreign policy could not be pursued without parliamentary approval. Though the King retained great powers, and was still, in fact as well as name, the head of the government, free to select and dismiss ministers at will, practical politics now required these to have the approval of Parliament and the support of a majority of the House of Commons. William’s reign may therefore be seen as a period of transition between monarchical and parliamentary government. This was not perhaps immediately apparent, principally because William was as cautious as he was strong-willed, and did not push his prerogative beyond acceptable limits. But the incapacity, for one reason or another, of his successors would accelerate the process over the next century.
William could never feel secure as King of England. There were frequent Jacobite plots, either to assassinate him or take him captive. His own agents at St-Germains were able to obtain sufficient intelligence to thwart them. Nevertheless, Jacobite agents were always active in England, and the possibility of a successful plot could not be discounted. Equally disturbing was the uncertain loyalty of English politicians. Many of them, Whigs as well as Tories, remained in communication with the exiled James; at best this was an insurance policy against his eventual return should the revolution settlement be reversed, at worst outright treason to William. In 1691, for instance, Marlborough and his closest associate, Godolphin, met with a Jacobite agent, Henry Bulkeley, son of an Irish peer, even though Godolphin was at that time First Lord of the Treasury. According to Bulkeley, whose daughter would later marry James Fitzjames, Duke of Berwick (the exiled King’s illegitimate son and also Marlborough’s nephew), Godolphin was cautiously uncommunicative, but Marlborough surprised him by appearing ‘the greatest penitent imaginable’. He begged Bulkeley ‘to go to the king [that is, James] and acquaint him with his sincere repentance, and to intercede for mercy, that he was ready to redeem his apostasy with the hazard of his utter ruin, his crimes appearing so horrid to him that he could neither sleep nor eat but in continual anguish’. Bulkeley may have exaggerated, as secret agents tend to do. Evidence of his report is to be found only in the Jacobite Life of James II, and may for this reason be dismissed as unreliable. Yet there is other evidence of Marlborough’s dealings with St-Germains, and he remained on good terms with his nephew Berwick, who was, for his part, utterly loyal to his father. In any case the willingness of so many leading men in England to remain in communication with the exiled court meant that William could rely on the absolute loyalty of few but his fellow Dutchmen. Eventually he had to take Marlborough back into his favour (after the Earl had been briefly imprisoned in the Tower), first because he was the most able man and soldier in England, second because his wife Sarah was the bosom friend of the heir to the throne, William’s sister-in-law Anne.
William never visited his ancestral Scotland and showed no inclination to do so. Scottish regiments had served in his wars against France and he had close Scottish friends, notably Burnet (who, as an Episcopalian, was made Bishop of Salisbury) and the Presbyterian divine, William Carstares. Carstares had suffered imprisonment and torture under the old regime before escaping to the Netherlands, where he became one of William’s chaplains and most trusted advisers. He was principally responsible for the settlement in Scotland that restored Presbyterianism and abolished the office of bishop in the Scots Kirk. Indeed he had so much influence with William that the Jacobites, with resentful mockery, called him ‘Cardinal Carstares’. William trusted him, and where he gave his trust, he did so without reservations.
The King was, however, no more popular in Scotland than in England, and indeed
his indifference to the country made it impossible that he should be so. His reign was marked by the atrocity known as the Massacre of Glencoe. After Dundee’s death at Killicrankie saw the immediate Jacobite threat fizzle out, the Scottish government resolved that all Highland chiefs should be required to take an oath of loyalty to the new King and the new regime. One McIan, or McKean, of Glencoe, chief of a small clan who were a sept of the more powerful MacDonalds, delayed doing so. He was an old man, and after hesitation made his way with difficulty in wintry weather to Fort William to take the oath. But he was late, and since his little clan had a notorious reputation as thieves and troublesome brigands, the Scottish Privy Council resolved to make a fearful example of them. A detachment of Campbell soldiers was sent to Glencoe. They were received with hospitality and remained there as guests for some days till the order to exterminate the McIans was confirmed. Then, at night, they set upon their hosts. Some escaped to the snowy mountains, but others, including the chief, were killed. Not only the murders but the breach of hospitality appalled many. William had no share in the planning of this crime, but he had signed the order for it, and must be held ultimately responsible. According to Burnet, he signed it indifferently. Disliking paperwork, he had the habit of allowing it to pile up, and then disposing of it often without proper consideration. While other chiefs took note, as was intended, of the severity with which the government would punish those suspected of treasonable disloyalty, the atrocity deepened the hatred felt for the Whig Campbells and confirmed many in their resentment of the new regime.
More serious was William’s role in the failure of the Darien Scheme. Scotland was still a poor country, and the 1690s, years of weather vile even for a Scottish summer, saw a succession of poor harvests, and famine in several counties. It was not surprising that, with the economy foundering, there was an enthusiastic response to a project proposed by William Paterson, an imaginative entrepreneur who had been the moving spirit in the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 and the Bank of Scotland the following year. This was for the creation of the ‘Company of Scotland’ and the establishment of a Scottish colony at Darien on the Isthmus of Panama. The location would enable the company to set up a trading post, which would serve as an entrepot for trade between east and west, the Pacific and the Atlantic. Superficially attractive, Paterson’s scheme met with an extraordinary response in Scotland. One-third at least of the available liquid capital of the country was invested in the new company, and the first colonists set off with high hopes. Paterson and his fellow projectors had however failed to take obstacles into account. First, Spain considered Panama to be within the orbit of its American empire. Second, the City of London was hostile. Trade with the east was the monopoly of the East India Company, and they had no intention of seeing that monopoly broken or even threatened. Add to this the fact that the goods the first colonists brought for sale were quite unsuitable for a tropical climate, and the failure of the scheme was all but certain. It was indeed a disaster, and brought ruin to many who had invested all they could raise in the company. William was held responsible, in part at least. He was King of Scotland, but in this great Scottish enterprise he had sided with the City of London, failed to give the colonists the protection of the Royal Navy, and so doomed the most ambitious scheme of economic regeneration ever to be launched in Scotland. Resentment festered. Hostility to William and the English was intense. It is no wonder that William’s advocacy of a more complete union between England and Scotland met with no response. Only the Jacobites could be happy.
In 1694, Queen Mary died, of smallpox. She had been more popular than her husband, if only because she was a member of the Church of England as he was not. She had never been a significant political figure, but as a native-born Englishwoman had smoothed the King’s relations with some at least of his subjects. (William spoke English, but with a strong accent and often incorrectly; his closest friend, Bentinck, never mastered the language, despite being given an English peerage and, with it, membership of the House of Lords.) Mary’s death therefore left William more isolated than before. In her last years she had experienced guilt, intermittently at least, on account of her role in the rebellion that had driven her father from his throne. The Jacobites were delighted by her death, assuming it would weaken William’s position. But their hopes were as usual disappointed.
Though William achieved no significant victories in battle, his Grand Alliance had fought France to a standstill, and Louis was happy to make peace in 1697. The strain and expense of continual war had come close to exhausting his resources, and though he continued to offer hospitality to King James, he was now prepared to acknowledge William as King of England, Scotland and Ireland. The peace was popular in England. The war had been expensive. The National Debt, invented to finance it, was high. Interest on the debt, paid for by a land tax, imposed burdens on the Tory squires. Only the City men (who had invested in the debt) seemed to have benefited from the war. People looked forward to a prolonged period of peace.
Peace had been made principally because Louis had been checked. He was in financial difficulties and his country had been impoverished by the war fought for his glory. Moreover, he was now almost sixty, on the verge of old age, and since his clandestine marriage to Madame de Maintenon had become notably devout. Yet it would not be long before occasion for a new war arose.
Spain, not for more than half a century the dominant power in Europe, scarcely indeed to be ranked as a Great Power, remained at the centre of a huge empire. It consisted of Spanish America, the Spanish Netherlands (modern Belgium), where so much of the fighting in the war just ended had taken place, and in Italy both the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily and the Duchy of Milan. But now the King of Spain, Charles II, was dying. In point of fact, his death had been expected for years; he was undersized, deformed, always sickly, and of mean intelligence, ignorant even of the extent of the empire he nominally governed. Nevertheless, he had survived since he assumed the throne from his father in 1665. He had neither children nor brothers to succeed him. One of his sisters had married Louis XIV, another her cousin, the Habsburg emperor. For the whole inheritance to pass to either a French prince or a Habsburg would tilt the balance of power alarmingly. So diplomats came together to negotiate a partition of the empire. There were in fact two partition treaties, because a Bavarian prince who had been granted the bulk of the empire in the first treaty suddenly died. The second treaty, signed by France, England and the Netherlands in 1699, transferred most of the empire to the Austrian archduke, reserving only Italian territories for the French prince – evidence that Louis wished to avoid another war.
Not surprisingly, the Spaniards resented this proposed dismemberment of their empire. Just before his death in 1700 the King was persuaded to make a will, and in it he left the whole empire to Louis’s younger grandson, Philippe, Duc d’Anjou, with the proviso that if he refused this inheritance, the empire, complete and unpartitioned, should pass to the Austrian Archduke Charles. Louis was in a dilemma. Should he accept the throne on behalf of his grandson? Should he refuse it, and see the reunion of the two branches, Spanish and Austrian, of the Habsburg family, which would then encircle France as it had done in the sixteenth century? Or should he stand by the treaty he and William had signed, but which the Austrians, wanting the whole empire, had like the Spanish refused to accept? After some hesitation and close debate in his Council, Louis preferred the will to the treaty. He can scarcely be blamed, given the Austrian attitude, though his announcement that the Pyrenees no longer existed was provocative.
At first it seemed he might avoid war. Neither England nor the Netherlands seemed ready to fight for the treaty. Indeed, both countries in February 1701 addressed the young French prince as King of Spain. But the next month, old James VII and II had a stroke, after suffering another nosebleed, and by September he was evidently dying. He did so in exemplary and impressive fashion, publicly forgiving the nephew who had driven him from his throne and the daughters who had betray
ed him. As he lay there, his wife, Mary of Modena, implored Louis to recognise her son, the thirteen-year-old James Edward, nominally Prince of Wales, as his father’s successor and the legitimate King of England, Scotland and Ireland. Her pleas were seconded by Madame de Maintenon, and though the King’s Council advised that it would be folly to antagonise England by such an act, Louis could not resist the temptation to make a grand and selfless gesture, and did as his wife and the exiled Queen of England had asked. It was only four years since, in the treaty made at Ryswick, he had accepted the verdict of the revolution in Britain, and recognised William as King. Moreover, his gesture towards the Stuarts seemed an insult, not only to William but to the English parliament, which only three months previously had passed the Act of Settlement, fixing the succession, after William’s sister-in-law Anne, on the nearest Protestant heir, Sophia, Electress of Hanover (the last surviving child of Elizabeth of Bohemia) and her son and heir George Augustus. Now it seemed that the French king in his insufferable arrogance was not only breaking his word but presuming to say who was the rightful King of England. So the mood changed, and Parliament, which had so recently been for peace, was now eager for war. (Few seem to have remarked that ever since the Hundred Years War between England and France, the kings of England had been styling themselves kings of France also.)
