THE LAST REVOLUTION
1688 and the Creation of the Modern World
PATRICK DILLON
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © Patrick Dillon 2006, 2016
First published in 2006 by Jonathan Cape
This edition published in 2016 by:
Thistle Publishing
36 Great Smith Street
London
SW1P 3BU
www.thistlepublishing.co.uk
In memory of my father
CONTENTS
Illustrations
Quotations
Preface
PART ONE: Revolution
I
‘A Monarchy Depending On God’
II
‘Rebels And Traitors’
III
‘A Favourite of the People’
IV
‘The Richest City in the World’
V
‘The High and Mighty States of the United Provinces’
VI
‘A More Considerable and Dangerous Enemy’
VII
‘Such a Monarchy as Other Monarchs Have Not Even Considered’
VIII
‘The Fifth Great Crisis of the Protestant Religion’
IX
‘The Mode of Living of the Chinezes’
X
‘All Engines Now at Work to Bring in Popery Amain’
XI
‘The True Bounds Between the Church and the Commonwealth’
XII
‘Matters of Mere Religion’
XIII
‘The Prince of Orange’s Opinion’
XIV
‘What Passion Cannot Music Raise and Quell’
XV
‘A Total Reconstruction of all Human Knowledge’
XVI
‘Annus Mirabilis Tertius’
XVII
‘To Come and Rescue the Nation’
XVIII
‘Among Speculators’
XIX
‘Pro Religione Protestante, Pro Libero Parlamento’
XX
‘Wonderful Expectation of the Dutch Fleet’
XXI
‘A Vast Body of Men in a Strange Language’
XXII
‘The Miseries of a War’
XXIII
‘It Looks Like a Revolution’
XXIV
‘Out of the Reach of my Enemies’
XXV
‘Vengeance, Justice’
XXVI
‘I Thought a King to be a Brave Thing’
XXVII
‘A Foreign Enemy in the Kingdom’
XXVIII
‘Nostalgia’
PART TWO: Revolution Principles
I
‘The Throne Vacant’
II
‘An Occasion of Amending the Government’
III
‘A Curtail’d Mungril Monarchy, Half Commonwealth’
IV
‘Equal Liberty For All’
V
‘The Sad Tidings Of His Own Defeat’
VI
‘An Infinite Desire of Knowledge’
VII
‘One Hundred Per Cent Immediately!’
VIII
‘Things Have no Value’
IX
‘The Idle and Gay Folk of The Town’
X
‘Reports of an Invasion’
XI
‘The Whole art of War is Reduced to Money’
XII
‘A Blind Obedience is What a Rational Creature Should Never Pay’
XIII
‘The Enemies of Religion’
XIV
‘Nothing Is More Fantastical Than Credit’
XV
‘A National Reformation of Manners’
XVI
‘The Evening of the World’
XVII
‘A New Era’
Notes
Bibliography
ILLUSTRATIONS
James II by Largillière (copyright © National Maritime Museum, London).
The murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (copyright © The Trustees of the British Museum).
The Duke of Monmouth (National Portrait Gallery, London).
Soho Square (copyright © The Trustees of the British Museum).
William of Orange engraved by Schenck (private collection).
James II at prayer by Trouvain (Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge).
Jaques Fontaine (Huguenot Library, University College London).
Page from Jaques Fontaine’s memoirs (University of Virginia Library, Special Collections).
Pistols made by the Huguenot Pierre Monlong (courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Armoury).
The Declaration for Liberty of Conscience (British Library 816.m.3/21).
Title page of Newton’s Principia.
John Locke by Sylvester Brounower (National Portrait Gallery, London).
Isaac Newton in 1689 by Kneller (by kind permission of the Trustees of the Portsmouth Estates).
The Seven Bishops (National Portrait Gallery, London).
William’s secret code (The National Archives, ref. SP8/2).
The infant Prince of Wales after Kneller (National Portrait Gallery, London).
Caspar Fagel (private collection).
The Resolution in a gale by Willem van de Velde (copyright © National Maritime Museum, London).
William’s flagship by Ludolf Bakhuysen (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).
The departure from Hellevoetsluis and the landing at Torbay (British Library Maps 32683/24).
Map of Torbay by a French officer (British Library Maps 56.d.5).
William at Torbay by Jan Wyck (copyright © National Maritime Museum, London).
James II’s armour (courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Armouries).
James’s first flight (Hulton Archive/Getty Images).
The arrest of Lord Chancellor Jeffreys (Hulton Archive/Getty Images).
Playing cards: burning the mass houses (Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, collection at Guildhall Library, City of London).
The ‘Abdication and Vacancy’ resolution (Parliamentary Archives HL/PO/JO/10/1/403A).
William’s speech accepting the throne (Parliamentary Archives HL/PO/JO/10/10/403F).
James II’s reception by Louis XIV (Hulton Archive/Getty Images).
Mary’s arrival from Holland by Willem van de Velde (copyright © National Maritime Museum, London).
The Battle of the Boyne (courtesy of the Council of the National Army Museum).
The Earl of Nottingham by Rysbrack (V&A Images/Victoria & Albert Museum).
Archbishop Tillotson (National Portrait Gallery, London).
Mary in 1685 by Willem Wissing (National Portrait Gallery, London).
John Locke in 1697 by Godfrey Kneller (The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg).
Share prices in Houghton’s Collection (British Library 522.m.11/2).
Cornhill with the Royal Exchange, 1778 (courtesy of the Mercers’ Company Archives and Art Collection).
Playing card: ‘Insurance on Lives’ (copyright © The Trustees of the British Museum).
Gamblers in Young Man’s coffee house.
Henry Purcell by John Closterman (National Portrait Gallery, London).
Colley Cibber as Lord Foppington (National Portrait Gallery, London).
Thomas Savery’s steam engine (British Library RB.8.a.229).
QUOTATIONS
Seventeenth-century spelling and punctuation has generally been modernised.
PREFACE
1688 has had a curious time of it in the past few years. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ u
sed to be a date every schoolboy knew, as important as the Norman Conquest or the Spanish Armada. Yet in recent years it has rather sunk into oblivion – quite often in working on this book I have been asked what happened in 1688. Fortunately, the Revolution’s escape from British mythology has also emancipated scholars of the period, who, over the past few decades, have vastly extended our understanding of it. Readers familiar with their work will recognise it often enough in the pages which follow. I hope they will take the bibliography as acknowledgement of it.
Both for help given and for suggestions which did not, in the end, find space in the text, I would like to thank David Dabydeen, Sir John Guinness, Willem Hoogsteder, Charlotte Mitchell, Stephen Taylor, Andrew Walkling and Thomas Woodham-Smith; also the Cornell Early Music Circle, the Mercers’ Company, the staff at the British Library and London Library, and Dr Williams’s Library, who gave me access to Roger Morrice’s Entring Book and by whose kind permission quotations from it are included. My agent, Andrew Lownie, has been, as always, a tower of strength, while Will Sulkin and Jörg Hensgen, at Jonathan Cape, could not have offered more encouragement and enthusiasm. What I owe my wife, Nicola, is too great to be expressed in the words of a preface. My final debt is to two early readers whose advice made this a far better book than I could have produced by myself, Johnny de Falbe and Philip Watson.
‘The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the revolution of 1688 is this, that it was our last revolution.’
Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England, vol. ii, chapter x.
PART ONE
REVOLUTION
I
‘A MONARCHY DEPENDING ON GOD’
‘England is under a monarchy and has been so beyond the memory of all records, and it is a ... monarchy ... depending upon none but God Almighty. Nor can any power upon earth set the least limitation to it ... without Treason, and Rebellion, and Perjury.’1
Edmund Bohun, 1685
The costumes were splendid, the music superb. The day chosen for the coronation – St George’s Day, 23 April 1685 – spoke of English unity and the slaying of dragons. Ever since dawn the crowds had been gathering along the blue broadcloth path to Westminster Abbey. A grandstand had been constructed over the churchyard of St Margaret’s. The constables at the Westminster watch-house had been given a hogshead of claret to share with their families. Inside the House of Lords the peers had been waiting since eight o’clock in the morning. The tapestries they gazed at to while away the time represented The Spanish Invasion anno 1588. No subject could have been better chosen to induce patriotic thoughts: a nation united against a foreign invader, English mastery of the sea, Protestantism saved from the threat of Rome. The centenary of that triumph was only three years away.
Gregory King was among those employed to herd the peers into ranks for the procession. A thirty-seven-year-old Lichfield man who had worked with the renowned printer and mapmaker Wenceslaus Hollar, he was to help with the official record of the Coronation Day, a lavish folio volume which would include lists of those participating and plates of the ancient regalia. Others were busy behind the scenes as well. A committee had planned every detail of the ceremony, from tickets and chairs to cotton wool to wipe off the holy oil with which the King would be anointed. Patrick Lamb, the most celebrated cook in England, had been toiling for weeks over the 1,445 dishes of the coronation feast. As soon as the procession left Westminster Hall his assistants were ready to set tables with as much attention to eye as to palate, ‘all the provisions served in dishes of proper sizes ... which were set upon stands of several heights, and all so equally mixed, that it made an extraordinary good appearance’. Lobsters and french beans, artichokes, ortolans, even – should the King feel a taste for novelty – ‘twenty four puffins, cold’, while for the Italian-born Queen, Mary of Modena, there would be bologna sausages and bottarga, parmesan and olives. It would be, as Gregory King’s record confirmed, ‘every part of it most delicious and admirable food’.2
At last it was time for the peers to move on to Westminster Hall. The tapestries there carried a more ambiguous message – the civil war of Caesar and Pompey – but there was little time to digest it before the spectators outside began to cheer and the procession moved off. First along the blue broadcloth path came flower-girls, Mary Dowle, ‘strewer of herbs in ordinary to his Majesty’, with six assistants, scattering ‘nine baskets full of sweet herbs and flowers’. Musicians followed, then minor dignitaries and the Aldermen of London. Next could be heard the fluting voices of twenty choirboys, backed up by the choir of Westminster ‘in surplices with music-books in their hands’, and the musical élite, the Gentlemen of the Chapel – among them Henry Purcell, organist to Westminster Abbey, who had composed some of the music for the coronation service. Privy Councillors came next, then the peers in ascending order of rank. Perhaps the Westminster constables pointed out famous faces for their families: the Earl of Danby, a veteran of politics from Charles II’s day, the French-born Earl of Feversham, the King’s friend and general, and, two rows behind Feversham, a rising courtier already talked of for his ambition, Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland. A little further back came the great officers of state: the Earl of Halifax, known as ‘The Trimmer’ for his cautious covering of all political angles, and the two Hydes, brothers of the King’s first wife, Henry, Earl of Clarendon, and Laurence, Earl of Rochester. The Hyde brothers were expected to wield the greatest influence at court.
After these dignitaries came the regalia: the great swords of the Kings of England, the swords of justice to the church and justice to the people, and the curtana, the sword of mercy whose point was ritually blunted. And behind them, at last, the royal canopies came into sight. No one could have been disappointed in what they saw there: the Queen stately and beautiful, the King a dignified man of fifty-one with military bearing and a long, commanding face. Loyal servants surrounded them. The front near-side pole of the King’s canopy was carried by his Secretary for the Admiralty, Samuel Pepys. The King had a long association with the navy, and had twice, famously, fought in sea-battles against the Dutch. As the royal canopies reached the Abbey the choirs burst into Henry Purcell’s setting of Psalm 122, I was Glad When they Said unto Me. More superb music followed as the ceremony took shape. Purcell’s great anthem My Heart is Inditing swelled out as the crown was placed on the Queen’s head. When the King himself was crowned, the spectators craned their necks to see the crossing of the Abbey, where so many English Kings had been anointed over the centuries. A golden ampulla in the shape of an eaglet held the holy oil. As John Blow’s anthem, Behold O Lord Our Defender, burst from the choirs in the galleries, the King was solemnly touched with a spoon on palms, breasts, shoulders, ‘the bowings of both his arms’ and the crown of the head. One by one, he was robed in the ceremonial vestments – supertunica and colobium sidonis of cloth of gold, armilla, buskins and sandals, a pall ‘of gold and purple brocaded tissue, lined with rich crimson Florence taffeta’ – as if he was being clothed in the aura of monarchy itself. At three o’clock precisely the crown of England was placed on his head.
Then it was time for his leading subjects to come and swear their oaths of loyalty. First to perform the ceremony was the elderly Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft. Approaching the King’s throne, he knelt and intoned the following words:
‘I, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, will be faithful and true, and faith and truth will bear unto you, Our Sovereign Lord, and your heirs, Kings of England ... So help me God.’3
This was an oath never to be broken, and in the heart of the Archbishop, a timid-seeming man who nonetheless possessed great depths of stubbornness, the words reflected not just ritual but passionate belief. Only recently, Sancroft had commissioned a new edition of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, the bible of English monarchists. The editor he had chosen, a Suffolk gentleman and scholar called Edmund Bohun, had done a fine job, and perhaps the words of his preface ran through the Archbishop’s head as he knelt at the King
’s feet: ‘England must continue a monarchy to the end of the world: or they that go about to alter it will be Rebels and Traitors.’4 Patriarcha described a world of divine certainties, and this oath of allegiance reaffirmed it. Kings ruled and protected their subjects as fathers did their children, and should likewise expect absolute obedience from them. The new King standing at the altar of Westminster Abbey was descended from Adam, first father and first King, and his monarchy was blessed, and those around him were his children – and thus, by links of patriarchal authority, was everybody in the Abbey and outside it welded together into the great chain of being which led upwards to Almighty God.
Was the new King aware of his place in the chain as he stood there sweating under robes and crown? There can be little doubt he was. But perhaps he was thinking of the past instead. For not everything in England was quite as secure as this ritual seemed to suggest. Only thirty-six years ago, James’s own father, Charles I, had been executed not a quarter of a mile away from where he stood, and ‘Rebels and Traitors’ haunted the memories of every man and woman in the Abbey. Maybe the King was thinking not of the past, however, but of the future. It was as well that he could not see it. Otherwise the walls of Westminster Abbey might have melted away to reveal a night not four years from now when his crown would be replaced by a black halfwig, and his golden pall by a dirty coat, while instead of the acclamations of peers he would hear the insults of Kent fishermen.
Even had the new King been vouchsafed such a moment of prophecy, he would probably not have believed it; imagination was never one of James Stuart’s qualities. But then neither were decisiveness or command, despite what his military bearing promised. And if the King had an element of sham about him, so, in fact, did the Coronation Day itself. The records of past coronations had been ‘lost in the late war’;5 today’s ritual was designed by a committee. Their holy oil had been purchased from an apothecary called James St Amand. The ampulla, the little eaglet which contained it, was the only surviving part of England’s ancient regalia, for the rest had been melted down under the Commonwealth, and when James’s brother, Charles II, had been crowned in 1660, London jewellers had made hasty replicas. The more one examined this coronation, in fact, the less satisfactory it seemed. The constables in the Westminster watch-house may have pointed out the peers in the procession – but did they also whisper the names of those who were not present? Many English and Scottish radicals were now in exile in Holland, among them London dignitaries like Patience Ward and Thomas Papillon, Lord Mayor and Sheriff just a few years before; and with them was the dead King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth.
The Last Revolution Page 1
