The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  William, however, had no need to rely on them. He had to keep his Tory supporters content; the Whigs he could take for granted. Perhaps most important of all, he had to say as little as possible about what he intended to do, or exactly what outcome he sought. That was the great silence at the heart of his Declaration. It was a silence which shrouded his correspondence with England as well. Zuylestein had returned early in August with another sheaf of supportive letters, but none of them made it clear exactly what they asked of the Prince of Orange. To ‘intervene’, to ‘come over’, to offer ‘protection’ or ‘assistance’ – but with what end in view? Did English politicians imagine William standing over his father-in-law while James signed away Liberty of Conscience? Was James expected to disinherit his Catholic son? To abdicate? Was the King, dangerous precedent, to become a kind of constitutional monarch, with William tapping his foot overseas at any sign of misconduct? Or if Mary of Orange became Queen, what exactly would William’s role be? None of these questions was asked in the months before the revolution began. As England and the United Provinces prepared for war, a thick gloom descended over the North Sea, a precipitation of reality in which facts, traditions, allegiances all began to fade from sight.

  But would the Prince ever manage to cross that sea? ‘And truly what’s the present news’, piped up Public Occurrences on the Friday after his Declaration, ‘but an universal current talk of a bold neighbour now crossing the herring pond to make us a bolder visit!’9 The Burgomasters of Amsterdam knew better than to talk so lightly of what they had taken on. It was already autumn. No one knew better than a Dutch merchant the risks of embarking a fleet after the winter storms began. Gregorio Leti was hardly exaggerating when he paid tribute both to the achievement of the United Provinces in preparing the armada, and to the risk they were taking on:

  ‘No great power on earth – including the Romans – has ever put so powerful a fleet, of more than four hundred sail, to sea so quickly and so well provisioned ... This Republic [is] openly entrusting its liberty, its blood, its military power, and prosperity to the pitiless sea in the harshest season of the year – and exposing itself still further to the caprices of the English, whose moods are as inconstant as the waves – against a King who lacks neither force nor support both at home and abroad. Why are they doing all this? Why are they exhausting wealth and land to prepare this fleet? Why ... fearlessly exposing themselves to such great perils and risks just to save others?’10

  XX

  ‘WONDERFUL EXPECTATION OF THE DUTCH FLEET’

  Edmund Bohun spent the early part of summer 1688 back in Suffolk, relishing the slow pace of country life after hectic London. He was no longer on the magistrates’ bench. He was no longer listening to the gossip of London’s coffee houses. Even so, there was little secret about what was coming.

  ‘During the time that I was below [in Suffolk], I spoke often and so seriously of the coming of the Prince of Orange, that I was in some danger for it. But all men seemed then to desire nothing more. As for me, I knew nothing of it, but by conjecture from the present state of affairs, which seemed to need it.’1

  There was open discussion in London of William’s mission to the German Princes. Except, it seemed, around the King. When Bonrepaus was despatched to London by Louis in the first week of September, he found the English court in a state of ‘surprising lethargy’. On 6 September the King went so far as to tell Barillon that ‘[He] and his principal ministers do not believe that the Prince of Orange dare make a landing in England.’2

  Louis’s attack on Philippsburg on 17/27 September, leaving the United Provinces free to act, extinguished that complacency overnight.

  John Evelyn travelled into London the next day. ‘I found the court in the utmost consternation,’ he wrote, ‘upon report [rumour] of the Pr[ince] of Orange’s landing.’3 In a panic James hurried back from Windsor. The Earl of Clarendon attended his levee, where the King told him

  ‘the Dutch were now coming to invade England in good earnest. I presumed to ask if he really believed it? To which the King replied with warmth, “Do I see you, my lord?”’

  ‘“And now, my Lord,” said he, “I shall see what the Church of England men will do.”’4

  James had rushed out his own Declaration when news of William’s intentions finally hit home:

  ‘We have received undoubted advice that a great and sudden invasion from Holland, with an armed force of foreigners and strangers will speedily be made in a hostile manner upon this our Kingdom. And although some false pretences relating to Liberty, Property and Religion ... may be given out ... it is manifest ... that no less ... is proposed and purposed, than an absolute conquest of these our kingdoms, and the utter subduing and subjecting us and all our people to a foreign power.’

  The Earl of Clarendon sensed the change in the wind. Suddenly James needed friends, and Tories like Clarendon were welcome at court again. He visited the Queen, who abandoned hauteur to exert on him the force of her considerable beauty and charm, asking beguilingly why he didn’t visit court more often, and then, turning the subject to Holland, ‘She asked me what I heard? I said I was out of all manner of business ... She then looked upon her watch, and went into the withdrawing room ... What can this be? She seems to have a mind to say something; and yet is upon a reserve, and ... says nothing.’5 George Jeffreys’s attempt to charm him back into the fold was a less pleasant experience, but when Clarendon crossed the river to Lambeth Palace he heard that Archbishop Sancroft had also been approached. The rumour was that James now planned to call the Hydes, Sancroft ‘and some others of his old friends’ back to court.

  On 21 September the King called elections, but he was no longer looking for a house of Catholics and Dissenters to approve his revolution. What James needed now was the Tory parliament of 1685 which had supported him during Monmouth’s rebellion. He swung between optimism and despair, pulled first by Tories, then by his Catholic advisers. He was ‘much disturbed and ... very melancholy’, Princess Anne told her uncle, Clarendon. When William’s Declaration reached London James called the elections off again. One moment he promised to return everything to the constitutional position of 1685; the next, ‘all was nought’, as an exasperated George Jeffreys told Clarendon; ‘some rogues had changed the King’s mind ... he would yield in nothing to the bishops ... the Virgin Mary was to do all’.6

  Sunderland thought James ‘could do nothing in his present state but escape the best way he could, for he had no hope of outside aid, and he might well be driven from England in a week’. In the end James had no choice but to back down. An order was sent out to restore Tories to their posts up and down the country. James’s old companion George Legge, Earl of Dartmouth – the man who had first warned him about William – was given command of the fleet over the head of the Catholic Roger Strickland. George Jeffreys ‘spent that night in drinking healths and prosperity to the Tories’.7 Anglican clergymen thronged the Court for the first time in two years. At a meeting with bishops, including four men he had sent to the Tower just months earlier, there was no talk of the standard of rebellion. That incident would be ‘buried in perpetual oblivion’, the King assured them, insisting, ‘that the Church of England had always found favour from the crown, and had always given full proof of its loyalty, and he knew they would do so still’. Henry Compton would be restored. He would ‘give the Church without delay further special pledges of his favour to them’.8

  Cautiously the bishops responded with a list of demands which would ‘restore all things to the state in which he found them when he came to the crown’. James had no choice but to submit. In two weeks the King skidded precipitously back down the mountain he had climbed so painfully over the past three years. The Ecclesiastical Commission was dissolved. The dispossessed fellows of Magdalen were recalled. Roger Morrice watched George Jeffreys drive along Cheapside with a roll of parchment hanging out of his carriage in a very public display of returning London its charter. Morrice thought Jeffreys expected
to be cheered. If so, the public response might have warned him of trouble ahead. ‘Several people when they saw it looked at the coach and said, There was the fellow that took away their charter, they could expect no good from him. There was the rascal that took away their charter &c.’9* It was vital to secure London, but the task was complicated by the absence of a Lord Mayor – Sir John Shorter, the ‘odd, ignorant mechanic’ whose installation had so upset Evelyn, having died after his horse reared on his way to open Smithfield Fair. George Jeffreys offered the Mayoralty to Sir William Prichard, the staunch Tory who had driven Thomas Papillon into exile, but Prichard dragged his feet. That would become familiar enough to James over the coming weeks, and so would the manner of Prichard’s refusal: first he pleaded ill health, then asked for legal advice. Tory reluctance to help the King showed at every level of politics. Sir John Bramston, an Essex gentleman, was approached to return to the fold. He pleaded age, then objected to the Catholic Lord Lieutenant James had installed, but even when the Lord Lieutenant was replaced, stubbornly clung to his retirement. The conversation he had with the new Lord Lieutenant hardly suggested Tory enthusiasm:

  ‘I told him he would find gentlemen not forward to take commands; some would think one kick of the breech enough for a gentleman. [The Lord Lieutenant] said, we had all been ill-used; and he believed, this turn served, we shall be set aside again; but let us take our fortune together.’10

  At the prospect of renewed political crisis, many in the English establishment took to their beds. William Sancroft was ill the day the King summoned Tory bishops to Whitehall, and his illness was obviously contagious. It was through a veritable epidemic of coughs, sneezes and minor domestic accidents that England’s élite was dragged into their Glorious Revolution.

  The 14 October was the King’s birthday, but everyone was awaiting news of a Dutch landing. ‘No guns from the Tower as usually’, Evelyn wrote in his diary,

  ‘The sun eclips’d at its rising. This day signal for the victory of William the Conqueror against Harold near Battle in Sussex ... wonderful expectation of the Dutch fleet.’

  ‘You will find the Prince of Orange a worse man than Cromwell’, James assured the bishops who attended him two days later for an answer to their demands. For his part, James wanted them to issue a formal ‘abhorrence’ of the Prince’s designs. But with James retreating so effectively under the threat of invasion, it was hardly the moment to shore him up, and the bishops stalled. Perhaps they would have felt more accommodating if he had not just named the Pope as his son’s Godfather. In fact, Sancroft doubted whether the Dutch were really serious about their invasion, and he was not the only one. ‘I must confess I cannot see much sense in their attempt,’ Dartmouth wrote to James from the Gunfleet, ‘with the hazard of such a fleet and army, at the latter end of October.’11 From his cabin window he could see nothing but grey waves heaving in a fierce October westerly. There was only the slightest chance of good weather allowing the fleet to scramble across to England in safety. The Dutch were well aware ‘how dangerous it was to put a fleet to sea in that season’.12 Even if the weather moderated, England was safe so long as the prevailing west wind kept the Dutch ships pinned against their own coast.

  In Dartmouth’s mind, it was as well they didn’t come. It had been a struggle to prepare the fleet for sea. Unlike William, backed by English Whigs and underwritten by the States-General, James was chronically short of funds. He could neither trust Parliament to supplement them, nor rely on the fractious City of London. There was a widespread report that the financier Sir Charles Duncomb had turned the King down for a loan of £100,000. The fifty-five-year-old Samuel Pepys toiled eighteen hour days at the Admiralty to put the neglected ships in order. The Rupert and Dreadnought were ‘weakly manned and leaky’. Sir John Berry reported, ‘There is not any round shot come to the Elizabeth (nor sheet lead), she wants seventy-nine tons of beer and some bread. I have no flags to answer signals, nor pendants; they have sent me only two blue flags, what they mean by that I know not.’ As for men, neither press-gang sweeps of the London docks nor an embargo on the sailing of merchant vessels filled enough berths. Edward Poulson, captain of the fireship Speedwell, complained that of his skeleton crew of twenty, no fewer than thirteen were unfit for service. Somehow Dartmouth, in his flagship, the Resolution, tried to reconcile this chaos with the King’s instructions ‘to lose no time to get out from among the sands as fast as you can’.13 Even with well-prepared ships, that was less easy than it sounded. Haunted by the Dutch attack on Chatham twenty years before, Pepys had ordered all navigation buoys in the Thames estuary to be lifted.

  Morale was no better in the army. ‘I grow stronger every day at land’,14 James boasted to Dartmouth; he had sent for more Irish and Scottish troops. But antagonism grew between these foreigners – James’s Catholic dragoons – and the people they were there to protect. An Irish soldier let off his musket in a Portsmouth churchyard (‘some say into the church’) and ignited riots which left eighty dead. It was reported ominously that English soldiers ‘took part with the townsmen’.15

  And despite Dartmouth’s doubts, the news from Holland was of relentless build-up. On 18/28 October the States-General published their official statement of reasons for supporting the Prince. The next day, as French soldiers captured Philippsburg, the wind swung round to the east and William’s fleet put out to sea.

  For the first time in a hundred years, England faced invasion by a foreign power. It faced it, though, not in a spirit of lion-hearted Elizabethan patriotism, but in apathy and mutual distrust. ‘It was very strange,’ wrote Sir John Reresby,

  ‘and a certain forerunner of the mischiefs that ensued upon this invasion that neither the gentry nor the common people seemed much afeared or concerned at it, saying, the Prince comes only to maintain the Protestant religion; he will do England no harm.’16

  Whigs didn’t trust the Prince, Tories didn’t trust the King, and Dissenters didn’t trust the Tories. No one trusted the Earl of Sunderland, who was sacked in the last week of October, said to have leaked naval treaties. ‘I hope’, said James as he left the Council, ‘you will be more faithful to your next master than you have been to me.’*17 ‘To such a strange temper,’ wrote John Evelyn in his diary, ‘& unheard of in any former age, was this poor nation reduc’d, & of which I was an eye witness.’18

  On 22 October the King published the details of the Queen’s childbirth, and soon afterwards his proclamation To Restrain the Spreading of False News. The veteran propagandist Roger L’Estrange was much seen at court. Rumours filled the gaps in the official Gazette. Father Petre had fled London; he had ruined himself by lending £60,000 to the Earl of Shrewsbury, who was now with William. People in the country arranged for Londoners to write them newsletters. ‘Lampoons’, wrote one of them, ‘growing too numerous I am not willing to transcribe every paper which I meet with.’19 Desperate to control the spread of news, James issued a decree to ban the circulation of William’s Declaration, which Caspar Fagel had printed in several languages and smuggled across the North Sea. There was a certain grim comedy in the trial of a Captain Langham, who was caught handing it out and charged with spreading perjury. Jurymen returned an ignoramus verdict on the grounds that they were not allowed to read the Declaration and so could not tell whether it was perjury or not. Both the legal hairsplitting and the decision – we do not know – were typical of English reaction to the impending invasion.

  A storm drove the Dutch ships back into port, but even that good news was mishandled by the King, who immediately called a halt to his reforms. ‘NOTA’, Roger Morrice wrote in his Entring Book, ‘This is very instructive to let us know that the restoration proceeds not from inclination but from necessity.’ 28 October was the feast day of St Simon and St Judas – the brother of James, not Iscariot, although the King might have been forgiven for wondering. This feast was scarcely more propitious: St Jude was ‘the Saint to pray to in hopeless or desperate cases’. It was also the traditiona
l date for the swearing in of the new Lord Mayor. Sir John Chapman, a protégé of George Jeffreys, had accepted the office. Londoners showed their feelings by taking to the streets. It was in 1688 that the term mobile vulgus, ‘excitable herd’, was first shortened to mob. They targeted the city’s Catholic chapels. Crowds ‘went from their bonfires to the masshouse in Bucklersbury and broke into it and defaced it, and took out many of their vests, copes, ornaments and trinkets ... and burnt them. The Lord Mayor and sheriffs came in person but could neither by persuasion nor by force suppress them.’20 Riots occupied all attention for the next twelve hours. So busy were Londoners in rioting, indeed, that they failed to notice the far more ominous change which occurred that day. With a creak of weathercocks on City churches, the wind swung round to the east.

  Out at sea, the Resolution and the rest of the fleet were anchored inshore of the Gunfleet in an east-southeast gale blowing ‘so very hard that we were forced to strike all our yards and topmasts, and ride with two cables and a half out’. Beyond the men-of-war, three frigates tossed against a leaden November horizon. Dartmouth had tried to set sail a few days before, but run into the same storm which drove the Dutch back. With every shortening day, the Prince’s gamble seemed more perilous. Intelligence reports from Holland said the Dutch had shipped only ten days’ supply of water. ‘You can best judge by the winds which have been since,’ the King wrote to Dartmouth, ‘what they can do ... in such a blowing season as this is ... Their coming out with so small a quantity of victuals and water ... ‘tis next to a madness.’21