Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  He needed a decent justification for action, however. He took the birth of Prince James to be an act of aggression against him on James’s part: ‘there hath appeared, both during the Queen’s pretended bigness, and in the manner in which the Birth was managed so many just and visible grounds of suspicion’. In view of these, William was compelled to take action because ‘our dearest and most entirely beloved Consort the Princess, and likewise ourselves, have so great an interest in this matter, and such a right, as all the world knows, to the Succession of the Crown’. He was, in short, fighting not for his own selfish ends, but for his wife’s rights and the rights of the English people.

  William made his preparations on two fronts: in England and in the Netherlands. Learning from the mistake of Monmouth’s puny expedition, he realized that he must invade in overwhelming force. During the course of the summer, he assembled a formidable armada on the Dutch coast, consisting of 60 warships, 700 transports, 15,000 troops, 4000 horses, 21 guns, a smithy, a portable bridge and, last but not least since it enabled the pen to assist the sword, a printing press.

  William also benefited from Monmouth’s experience in England. Monmouth had struck too soon, before the extent of James’s intentions had become apparent. William, instead, reaped the fruits of the mounting disillusion with the king, which united Tories with Whigs in resistance to the crown and reached its high-water mark with the controversial birth of James Francis. The result was that, on 30 June, three weeks after the birth of James Francis, four Whig peers and gentlemen and three Tories signed an invitation to William to invade Britain, since ‘nineteen part of twenty of the people … are desirous of a change’. They exaggerated, of course. But their sense of the popular mood was right.

  But none of this would have been possible but for a fateful decision taken by Louis XIV. There were two crisis points in Continental Europe in 1688: one in Cologne, where the pro-French prince archbishop had been replaced by one hostile to Louis, and the other much further south, where the Habsburg Emperor Leopold was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the Ottoman Turks, who had laid siege to Vienna. If Louis decided to strike against Cologne, which lay near the Dutch border, William could not risk denuding the republic of troops for his English expedition. Instead, in late summer, Louis resolved to pile the pressure on Leopold by invading southern Germany. The fate of James, Louis’s English would-be pupil in absolutism, was sealed.

  But at first the weather seemed to offer James the protection that Louis XIV had not. William had intended to sail on the first high tide in October. Instead he was first bottled up in port for several days by adverse winds and then driven back to shore by a storm. Meanwhile, James was still clinging to Divine Providence. ‘I see God Almighty continues his Protection to me,’ he had written on 20 October, after learning that the storm had driven William back to shore, ‘by bringing the wind westerly again.’

  But then the wind turned easterly and stayed that way. It blew hard due east, giving William a smooth voyage down the Channel and bottling James’s fleet up in port. It was not lost on people that, a hundred years before, Protestantism had been saved by the destruction of the Spanish Armada. Now, for the hotter Protestants, England would be delivered from Catholicism by a very different sort of armada. But again, it was done by a wind. In 1588, the Armada medals were inscribed ‘God’s winds blew and they were scattered’; in 1688 the breeze that blew William towards England was called ‘the Protestant wind’.

  William landed at Torbay in Devon on 5 November – another auspicious date for Protestants – and marched through cheering crowds to Exeter, where he set up camp and his printing press to churn out carefully prepared propaganda. The ‘Protestant wind’ that blew William to England also blew away James’s confidence and with it his authority as the signs, which for so long had been in his favour, turned against him. On 19 November, he arrived in Salisbury, intending to stiffen his army with the presence of their undoubted monarch. Instead, he underwent a psychosomatic crisis and succumbed to repeated heavy nosebleeds. Incapacitated and depressed, on 23 November he decided to retreat to London, his army and his subjects’ loyalty untested.

  That night, his up-and-coming general, John, Lord Churchill, fled to join William, whither he was followed twenty-four hours later by James’s other son-in-law, Prince George of Denmark, husband of Princess Anne.

  Behind every great man, it is said, is a strong woman. John Churchill’s strong woman was his wife, Sarah. But Sarah was also, as Princess Anne’s principal courtier and closest friend, a power behind the throne. When Churchill and Prince George deserted to the enemy, James immediately ordered the arrest of their wives, Sarah and Anne. But Sarah was ahead of him and she and Anne fled secretly from Whitehall late at night on 25 November. Their flight went undetected for seven hours, and when James re-entered his capital on the afternoon of the 26th he was greeted with the news that his youngest daughter too had joined the rebels. ‘God help me,’ he cried, ‘my very children have forsaken me!’

  Abandoned by his God as well as his children, James’s only thought now was for flight. He believed wrongly that history was repeating itself and he was in the position of his father, Charles I. His enemies would execute him and murder his beloved baby son. It was clear that he was suffering a mental crisis and was incapable of judging the true nature of the situation. Outwardly, he conducted negotiations with William. But they were only to provide a cover for his real purpose. He contrived to bungle even this. The escape of the queen with the prince of Wales had to be postponed several days and took place only on 10 December, when she left Whitehall disguised as a laundry woman. James himself quit the capital next day, first flinging the matrix of the Great Seal into the Thames. After his embarrassing capture by the fishermen on the Kent coast, he was taken as a prisoner to Faversham, whence he was rescued by a loyal detachment of his guards and escorted back to London.

  There he received a rapturous welcome and, for a moment, thought of making a stand. Many believed that if William ever tried to use force to snatch the throne, the army would rally behind James. This was never put to the test. James’s resolution crumbled when William sent a powerful detachment of his army to occupy London, seize Whitehall and order James to withdraw from the capital. The ultimatum was delivered to James in bed at midnight. Twelve hours later he was sent under guard to Rochester, whence, on 23 December, he was allowed to escape to France. This time, with his son-in-law’s connivance, he succeeded.

  As James left London for the second time, William entered it. In six weeks, and without a shot being fired, England was his. But on what terms?

  IV

  A late-seventeenth-century engraving shows William the Conqueror swearing to the laws of his sainted Anglo-Saxon predecessor, Edward the Confessor, and thus preserving the traditional rights of the English.

  Faced with their own William the Conqueror, the men of 1689 determined to tie him down even more firmly; others were resolved not to have him as king at all. As part of the propaganda for his invasion, William had committed himself, irretrievably, to be everything that James apparently was not: a friend of English law and liberties, of England’s religion, and, above all, a supporter of Parliament. He could do nothing, therefore, without a free parliament. The assembly – in the event called a Convention since only a king could legally call a parliament – met on 22 January 1689, a month after William’s entry into London.

  The Tories retained a small, but weighty, majority in the Lords. But the Commons was made up of the men of the last parliaments of Charles II’s reign, who had voted to exclude James from the throne in the first place and had subsequently been marginalized during the Tory ascendancy.

  For the first fortnight of the Convention, the two Houses fought over the implications of the extraordinary last few months, which had left James still very much alive, if not in full possession of his mental faculties or indeed present in the country itself. Faced with these facts, the Commons made up of James’s Whig enemies an
d under the chairmanship of Richard Hampden, son of Charles I’s implacable enemy, made a bold resolution. It was also a daring constitutional innovation. James II, they declared, had broken the ‘original contract’ between king and subjects. He had also violated the ‘fundamental laws’ of the realm. And, most importantly, by removing himself from the country, he had abdicated the throne. The country had not been conquered by William; James had not been deposed. The king had deserted his people, not the other way round. It was a piece of fiction, but it was a very convenient one.

  Nevertheless, the Tory-dominated Lords hestitated long and hard before they accepted it. But swallow it they did. James II having been disposed of, the key issue was now the succession. What was to become of the monarchy, now that there was no one on the throne? The Tory peers were determined to preserve the principle of Stuart hereditary right by denying William the title of king – a title to which they believed he, as fourth in line, had no right. He must wait his turn, and let the next in line take the throne. But the next in line was the baby Prince James Francis, the so-called ‘pretended Brat’. The implication of sticking to indefeasible hereditary succession was yet another Catholic monarch.

  The Whigs were not so wedded to such unyielding principles of monarchy. The Commons neatly sidestepped the problem of James Francis by declaring that it had been found ‘by experience’ that it was impossible for England to have a Catholic monarch. Whether the baby was legitimate or a changeling did not now matter. It was his Catholicism which rendered him ineligible to inherit the throne. The next Protestant in line for the succession was, of course, Mary. But it was clear that William would not accept being second string to his wife. The only realistic solution was to have William the saviour of the country as king, whether it was constitutionally correct or not.

  In the event, it took William himself to break the deadlock. The Tories hoped to string out the debates so that they could preserve the principle of monarchy. William threw cold water on their endless constitutional nit-picking. He would act neither as regent for his self-exiled father-inlaw, James II, nor as consort for his wife Mary; instead, he would be king or he would return to the Netherlands and leave England to constitutional squabbles, anarchy and the possibility of a restored James II. Even Tories found that, even if they would rather do without King William, in practice England could not do without the Dutchman now that the country had no legitimate ruler.

  Faced with his ultimatum, Lords and Commons agreed to a face-saving compromise. William and Mary would rule as joint king and queen to give the impression that the Stuart line of descent was still valid. But in practice, the exercise of sovereignty would be vested solely in William.

  But having given William the crown he wanted, Whigs and Tories united to limit the powers that he or any future monarch could exercise by drawing up the Bill or Declaration of Rights. The rights in question are not so much those of the individual against the government; rather they are ‘the ancient rights and liberties’ of the nation as represented in Parliament against the crown.

  So, the Bill declared, the crown could not dispense with or suspend laws made in Parliament; it could not raise taxation except through Parliament and it could not have a standing army without the consent of Parliament. On the other hand, the crown should allow elections to Parliament to be free and parliaments frequent. Finally, and above all, the Bill declared it ‘inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom’ for the monarch to be Papist or to be married to a Papist.

  The principle of the Royal Supremacy, that the English should have the religion of their king, had been stood on its head. It was a revolution indeed.

  All was now ready for the formal offer of the crown to William and Mary in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. Mary, who had arrived in England only the day previously and, it was widely felt, had stepped into Mary of Modena’s apartments, her possessions and her very habits with indecent glee, joined her husband under the Cloth of Estate. The Lords on the right and the Commons on the left, led by their Speakers, approached the steps of the throne; the clerk read out the Bill of Rights and a nobleman offered William and Mary the crown in the name of the Convention as the ‘representative of the nation’.

  William then accepted on their joint behalves, promising in turn to do all in his power ‘to advance the welfare and glory of the nation’, and they were proclaimed king and queen to the sound of trumpets. Two months later, William and Mary were crowned in Westminster Abbey, with the ceremony and the oath in particular having been transformed to reflect the new realities of power.

  Each in turn swore to govern ‘according to the statutes in parliament agreed on’; to maintain ‘the Protestant reformed religion established by law’ and to do ‘justice in mercy’ with no damn nonsense about ‘discretion’ as previously. Just as innovatory was the coronation sermon. Ever since the coronation of Henry VIII’s young son, Edward VI, when Archbishop Cranmer had proclaimed that oaths could not bind the boy king nor holy oils add anything to his inherent, God-given sanctity, preachers at the coronation had vied with each other to elevate the monarch-cum-Supreme Head of the Church to an almost God-like plane.

  In 1689, however, all this changed. ‘Happy we,’ the preacher proclaimed prosaically, ‘who are delivered from both extremes: who neither live under the Terror of Despotick power [as in Louis XIV’s France], nor are cast loose to the wildness of ungovern’d multitudes [as England had been during the Civil War and Commonwealth].’

  As the preacher finished, the congregation broke into ‘infinite applause’. They were responding as though the ancient mysteries of the coronation had transmuted into the inauguration ceremonies of a popular prince-president of a middle-of-the-road republic – as of course William was, in effect, in his native Holland. But not only was the monarchy brought down to a merely human level, so too was the Church, which, since the Royal Supremacy, had been its most stalwart supporter and mouthpiece.

  William’s propaganda had promised, and the Convention speedily enacted, freedom of conscience, of worship and security from persecution to all outside the Church of England – Roman Catholics as well as Protestant dissenters – who would live ‘as good subjects’, recognize William and Mary as king and queen and repudiate the temporal authority of the pope.

  The effect, and on the part of the Whigs the intended effect, was also to diminish the Church of England. The Church remained uniquely privileged and only its members could hold public office, from the throne down. Nevertheless, it had ceased to be a monopoly and become one church among many.

  The Church split over the changes between diehard Tories and Whigs, such as Gilbert Burnet, the preacher at the coronation, who not only accepted the new dispensation but also understood that the Church would have to argue for Christianity, not in the old voice of absolute authority, but by reason and persuasion. Chance and taste played their part too. William (among his many other ailments) was asthmatic and detested the urban, riverside position of Whitehall Palace with its fogs and mists. So too did Mary, who felt able to see nothing but ‘water or wall’. Within a few months, therefore, the royal couple bought Nottingham House, with its extensive gardens and pleasant suburban situation on the edge of Hyde Park, and rebuilt it at breakneck speed as Kensington Palace. The result, described by a contemporary as ‘very noble, though not great’, was exactly the kind of residence that William was used to as stadholder and prince in the Netherlands.

  Meanwhile, Whitehall, called ‘the largest and ugliest palace in the world’ by the duc de la Rochefoucauld, and seat of all English kings since the time of its builder, Henry VIII, was abandoned for all save ceremonial occasions. Neglected and forlorn, like so many underused buildings, it burnt down in 1698 and was never rebuilt.

  Perishing in the flames and ruins was the great dynastic mural of Henry VIII and his family, which, more than any other single image, represented the awesome powers of the Royal Supremacy over Church and state. The painting had survived the destruction
of the Supremacy and the royal absolutism it had entailed by less than a decade.

  Chapter 21

  Britannia Rules

  William III, Mary II and Anne

  TWO YEARS BEFORE HER DEATH IN 1714, a statue of Queen Anne was placed equidistant, as wags said, between her two favourite places, St Paul’s Cathedral and a brandy shop. Whether the queen’s preference was for the bottle or the building, certainly St Paul’s was the setting for the high points of her reign.

  The queen herself came to the cathedral in solemn procession in 1704 to lead the service of thanksgiving for Blenheim, the great victory won over Louis XIV of France by her general John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, husband of Anne’s favourite, Sarah, who rode in the queen’s coach and accompanied her every move.

  The last monarch to come to St Paul’s for a victory service had been Elizabeth I, and the parallels between the two queens were invoked in the celebrations:

  So France and Spain shall do to Anna now.

  As threatening Spain did to Eliza bow

  So France and Spain shall do to Anna now.

  But whereas the dire state of Elizabeth’s finances had never allowed the defeat of the Armada to be followed up with a crushing offensive campaign against England’s enemies, each year of Anne’s reign brought fresh victories and another state procession to St Paul’s, until, by 1712, the year Anne’s statue was erected, Britain could name her own terms for peace with France.

  And by then it was no longer England, but Britain. She was the dominant power in Europe. Fifty years later, another victorious war was celebrated at St Paul’s. The country’s crushing defeat of France in Europe and the Americas marked Britain’s emergence as the world power.