Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  Few countries have risen to great-power status so quickly and so unexpectedly. Why had the England of Anne succeeded where the England of Elizabeth had failed? The answer can be found in the events that followed the revolution of 1688, which had settled most of the political and religious disputes that had torn England apart since the Reformation.

  But much of the credit must also go to the man Anne abused in her private letters as ‘Caliban’ or ‘the Dutch monster’: her cousin, brother-inlaw and predecessor, William III. It was William who created a new kind of English monarchy, with a new relationship between crown and Parliament, and in doing so transformed Britain from a divided, unstable, rebellious and marginal country into the state that would become the most powerful on the planet.

  I

  Soon after their inauguration as joint monarchs in February 1689, William of Orange and his queen, Mary Stuart, escaped from London to enjoy the country air at Hampton Court. It was love at first sight, and the palace and gardens we know today are essentially their creation.

  But though William and Mary could flee the capital, they could not escape so easily from the quasi-religious rituals that hedged the divinity of the Tudor and Stuart kings. The dour Calvinist king was not impressed. He had mocked ‘the comedy of the coronation’, which was full of ‘foolish old Popish ceremonies’. But his obligation to enact the spiritual dimension of English monarchy did not stop there. Many of these rituals centred on the Chapel Royal and followed the ancient rhythms of the Church’s calendar. A particularly important group of dates clustered round the great feast of Easter, which in 1689 fell on 31 March.

  On the day before Good Friday, the monarch, re-enacting the role of Christ, would wash the feet of as many poor persons as he was years old in the ceremony of Maundy Thursday. Three days later, on Easter Sunday, he would take his place in the Royal Pew, then, at the climax of the service, descend the stairs, process to the altar and receive communion alone to symbolize his unique relationship with God. There was also a clamour for William and Mary, acknowledged now by God and man, to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors and heal the sick by Touching for the King’s Evil.

  William and Mary managed to go through the Easter Day ceremonies, though they thought the practice of receiving communion alone a ‘foolish formality’ and changed it as soon as possible. But William baulked at other, more outlandish ceremonies. On Maundy Thursday he refused to wash the feet of the poor, limiting himself instead to giving them the traditional alms. Even more extreme was his reaction to touching for scrofula. Since the Stuart Restoration in 1660, this ceremony had been the primary point of contact between monarch and subject and the symbol of the divine nature of kingship. Charles II had touched vast numbers of the people. James II had gone beyond Charles’s enthusiasm for the practice and had reintroduced the old Latin Catholic ritual as well. For William, this was to add idolatrous superstition to old-fashioned absurdity and he suspended the practice entirely. ‘God give you better health and more sense!’ he mocked the hopeful afflicted.

  Within days, William’s refusal to continue the old royal rituals was hot news in Paris. It signalled to his French rival and everybody else that here was a different kind of king. For William’s Tudor and Stuart predecessors, the monarchy and its powers, prerogatives and titles was a sacramental trust, committed by God to their ancestors, and, with God’s will, to be transmitted to their descendants. But none of this, despite his own Stuart mother and wife, applied to William. He had come to the throne not through strict lineal succession, but because of the mess of purely human affairs. And since he was childless and with no prospect of offspring, he had no descendants to worry about. Finally, as a strict Calvinist, he didn’t – as his attitude to the coronation, the Maundy and the Touching shows – believe in sacraments, royal or otherwise.

  What William did believe in was predestination or divinely ordained destiny: in particular his own God-given mission to be the champion of Protestantism and the nemesis of Louis XIV’s France. To become king of England, therefore, was only a step to this goal and not an end in itself. This meant that William’s view of kingship was instrumental, in contrast to the jealous sacramentalism of his Tudor and Stuart predecessors. And this meant in turn that for William literally nothing was sacred (following the Dutch custom, he even kept his hat on during religious services). He was not sentimental about the trappings and symbols of monarchy. Nor was he in thrall to the sacred mystique of kingship. So William was willing, if not necessarily happy, to bargain away the powers of the monarchy for the hard cash that was needed to fight his great war against France.

  This, it turned out, was a good thing, since the attitude of William’s subjects to the monarchy had changed as well. The change was neatly summarized for the king by one of his ministers. During the last few decades, kings had known where they stood: the Tory half of the nation supported royal power while the Whig half opposed it. But the revolution that had brought William to power had muddied the waters. For the Whigs, though they were William’s natural supporters, retained their habitual mistrust of monarchy. While the Tories, though remaining theoretically committed to royal power, did not, in their heart of hearts, think that William was the rightful king. They had made solemn and binding oaths to James II, which they were painfully conscious of having broken. And so the Tories mistrusted William at least as much as the Whigs did.

  The result was that, divided in everything else, William’s leading subjects were united in their determination to drive a hard bargain with their new king William. One MP spoke for all when he told the House: ‘If you settle such a revenue as that the King should have no need of a Parliament, I think we do not do our duty to them that sent us hither.’

  Parliament had made this error of rendering themselves useless by granting the king enough money to rule on his own in the Restoration Settlement of 1660 and, even more flagrantly, at the beginning of James II’s reign in 1685. It was not to repeat the mistake again.

  So in 1689 it refused to make any permanent settlement of the revenue at all, postponing it for another year. And even in 1690 it granted William only the Customs (or taxes on foreign trade) for life, while the Excise (or internal indirect taxes) was to be reviewed four years later. In personal conversations, William freely expressed his outrage at such ingratitude, as he saw it. ‘The Commons used him like a dog,’ he would say. ‘Truly, a King of England … is the worst figure in Christendom,’ he moaned at another time. And, in exasperation at the carpings and criticisms of the English, he snapped: ‘The nation entertained such distrust and jealousies of him that he intended to go abroad.’

  But, having vented his frustrations in private, in public (as he had learned to do by bitter experience in the Netherlands) he calmly settled down to bargain. The result was a financial and constitutional revolution far greater in effect than the revolution itself. In 1689 he offered the Commons scrutiny of public accounts. He surrendered his prerogative of calling and dissolving parliaments at his own pleasure in 1694 by agreeing to the Triennial Act, which provided instead for the automatic summoning of a new parliament every three years. And in 1697, by agreeing to a Civil List to cover the expenses of the royal household and peacetime domestic administration, he yielded to Parliament control over the expenditure, as well as the raising, of all revenue for the army and the navy.

  Thanks to this subtle give-and-take diplomacy, Parliament, which in 1690 had been barely willing to finance William’s expedition to reconquer Ireland from a French-financed invasion personally led by a reluctant James II, by the middle of the decade was raising an unheard-of £4 million a year in taxation. And every penny was needed. For the war that William declared against France within days of his coronation was the largest, longest, most expensive conflict England had engaged in since the Middle Ages. John Churchill, duke of Marlborough and after the king himself England’s leading general, predicted that it would last ‘forever’; in sober fact it was to be merely a new hundred years’ war
which was not finally settled till the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

  The scale of the war and the taxation it entailed completed and made permanent the revolution of 1688/89. The result was literally built in stone. The Board Room of the Admiralty in Whitehall, which is still in use, was built to put the administration of England’s hugely expanded navy on a proper footing. The Royal Hospital at Greenwich, founded by Queen Mary in 1692 after the great naval victory over the French of La Hogue, was built to care for invalided and aged sailors. Grander than any royal palace, it became a monument both to England’s naval greatness and, with its lavishly painted interiors, to the Glorious Revolution and William’s own triumphs over France.

  If England was gaining secure and permanent civil and military institutions safely ensured by sturdy buildings, surely the most innovative and durable was the Bank of England, established in 1694 at Mercer’s Hall in the City of London. Its origins had, like much else, less to do with root-and-branch reforms than with William’s pressing need to manage the government debt incurred in fighting the war against France. Copied, once again, from the Dutch model of the Bank of Amsterdam, the bank’s security was based, not on the king’s credit (for kings, including Louis XIV, could and did go bankrupt), but on the guaranteed steady income stream of parliamentary taxation.

  Security of payment meant that English interest rates plunged, while those in France, which stuck to the old system of royal credit and experienced the familiar crises of royal bankruptcy, soared. Thus, though pound for livre the English tax base was smaller than that of France (which is four times as big a country and then had three times as big a population), gearing meant that the English could match or even outspend the French.

  In his own lifetime, William was able only to fight Louis to a standstill rather than inflict the crushing defeat for which he yearned. But he had created the financial, military and political machinery which, as events would show, swung the balance of power decisively in England’s favour. It was an extraordinary achievement, which makes this Dutchman one of England’s greatest monarchs.

  II

  William got little thanks from his subjects at the time, and posterity has been no kinder. For William, with so many great gifts, had few of the small ones that humanize greatness and make it popular, or at least bearable. He had no small talk. He suffered fools not at all. He hated company, preferring instead to unwind with a handful of intimates.

  Secure in the privacy of the suburban or rural royal courts, William was free to carouse with his mainly Dutch male cronies in seclusion. English ministers who were used to a royal court where the king was accessible and business could be conducted face to face were annoyed by William’s reclusive tendencies. Rather than sleep in the magnificence of the State Bedchamber, which was traditionally the buzzing hub of the royal court, William took his rest in a simple private chamber. And it was very private indeed. The king could not be troubled by overly attentive servants, demanding ministers or prying eyes. The locks were on the inside and only one other man had the key, Arnold Joost van Keppel, whose extensive apartment was next door. And Keppel’s good looks and easy and exclusive access to the king fuelled ugly rumours of homosexuality.

  Worst of all, perhaps, William and his favourites remained obstinately Dutch, and that the xenophobic English found intolerable. His wife and joint monarch, Queen Mary, however, deflected much of the bitterness over the fact that England had been conquered by a warmongering Dutch obsessive. Mary represented the unbroken Stuart descent and continuity with the past. Above all she was English. If William had delivered England from a Catholic king and waged war on France, Mary represented English virtue and piety. As far as William was concerned this was a good arrangement. For Mary believed that ruling was a man’s business, and she was no threat to William’s sole exercise of power. At the same time, she was indispensable to him as a figurehead to quell his new subjects’ xenophobia. As William stated: ‘He was to conquer Enemies, and she was to gain Friends.’

  But when Mary died of smallpox in 1694, the Stuart fig leaf was torn from William’s throne. Mary was loved by the people, and her death provoked an outpouring of grief from the country. But William had always been a very unpopular king, nicknamed the ‘Rotten Orange’, ‘Hook Nose’ or ‘The Little Spark’. King Louis and the exiled James II celebrated when they heard of the death of Queen Mary. They did not believe that William could survive long on his own. He was hated by the English, and if he wasn’t deposed or assassinated, then at least he would never risk leaving the country to go and fight France.

  But William was able to face down his enemies. The king’s evidently sincere grief at his bereavement won him some temporary popularity, and his supporters urged the population to respect the memory of the late lamented queen by remaining loyal, as she had done, to her husband. The PR campaign worked. Despite Louis’s and James’s predictions, William was secure enough to leave the country to continue the war against France as usual during the campaigning season. If the English did not love William as they had loved Mary, or even respect him that much, they were at least prepared to tolerate him for all his faults.

  But by the turn of the eighteenth century Parliament had begun to resent William’s aggressive foreign policy and to resent paying for it most of all. The Commons demanded that he disband most of the army and send home his Dutch guards. Once again, the stage appeared to be set for another round in the chronic conflict between king and Commons that had removed two monarchs within living memory. As he had done before, William petulantly threatened to return to Holland and wait until the English came to their senses and begged him to come back to save them from France and James II. He even drafted an abdication speech. For the sake of a few pounds, William said, the English were prepared to reduce the army and invite invasion. ‘It is impossible to credit the serene indifference with which they consider events outside their own country,’ William wrote of his truculent and insular subjects.

  Things got worse as Parliament and king clashed over foreign policy and England’s rights and responsibilities in Europe. But then the rule of the House of Orange came to an abrupt and unexpected end. On 21 February William was hunting in Hampton Court Park when his favourite horse, Sorrel, stumbled at a mole hill, throwing him and breaking his collar bone in the fall. The bone was set successfully but a chest infection set in and William died at his other favourite palace of Kensington on 8 March, aged fifty-one. Five weeks later, on 12 April, he was buried privately at midnight in Westminster Abbey. The Privy Council announced plans for a monument in the Abbey and another in a ‘public place’. But no one could be bothered to build them – least of all his successor Anne.

  Anne was thirty-seven. She had never been a beauty like her sister Mary. But she had a handsome, womanly figure, rather running to seed after repeated miscarriages and stillbirths. Her best feature, however, was her beautiful speaking voice, for which she had received professional coaching in her youth. Above all, she knew how to rise to a public occasion.

  This meant that her first speech to Parliament, only three days after William’s death, was a triumph. She wore a magnificent crimson robe, lined with ermine and bordered with gold. She blushed prettily. And she proclaimed in her thrilling voice that ‘I know my heart to be entirely English’.

  It was a deliberate distancing of herself from William, the foreigner who barely respected England and Englishmen. The English, pleased as they were to be rid of William, loved her for her bullish and patriotic sentiments, and from that moment she became, and remained, as popular as William had been disliked. Her accession seemed like the best of all possible worlds. She was a Stuart, but she was fiercely committed to the Protestant Anglican Church. She was a supporter of the modernized monarchy, but she had an instinctive and inbred regard for the ceremonies and mystique of the ancient monarchy. Touching for the King’s Evil was back in fashion.

  But despite these changes of personal style and belief, the substance of government altered very lit
tle. She would, Anne confirmed in her first speech to Parliament, continue her predecessor’s policies at home and abroad. And that meant, above all, that she would continue with the war against France. She told the Dutch Republic that she would do everything that ‘will be necessary [for] preserving the common liberty of Europe, and reducing the power of France to its just limits’. But this was an English queen speaking, and Anne was determined to cast herself in the mould of historic warrior queens; this would be an English war, and the country would fight it for its own interests and glory, and not on behalf of others.

  For the stalemate peace that Louis and William had been forced to sign in 1697 quickly collapsed. The issue was the succession to the childless King Carlos II, who ruled Spain and her still vast empire in Europe and South America. Among the intermarried royal families of Europe, the choice lay between two remote cousins: the Austrian Habsburg Emperor was one candidate, the other was Philip, the younger grandson of Louis XIV of France. In the event, it was Philip whom Carlos left as his heir on his death in 1700.

  For William the prospect of such a gigantic addition to French power was intolerable and, just before his death, he had reassembled the Grand Alliance against France, consisting of Britain, the Netherlands, the Empire and the German princes. But the declaration of war, on 5 May 1702, was left to Anne. Louis is supposed to have replied mockingly that he must be old indeed if women waged war on him. But oddly it was the fact that Anne was a woman which proved his downfall. For William, as was still commonplace among kings, had acted as his own commander. This was a mixed blessing: he was brave to the point of foolhardiness and indomitable; but he was no general.

  But the man Anne chose to act in her stead as commander was. Indeed, ranking with Caesar and Napoleon, he is the only world-class general that England has ever produced. John Churchill had defected to William during the revolution, but, like many leading Englishmen, he had been pushed aside by the new king’s Dutch intimates. In 1692 he was dismissed from court and deprived of his commands for spreading dissatisfaction in the army against the Dutch generals. Forgiven at last, he was appointed captain of the forces by William near the end of his reign, in 1701. He was retained in this leading post by the new queen, not just for his qualities, but because his wife was the queen’s best friend.