The Last Revolution
Page 20
The King reached Salisbury on 19 November, but visitors to his chambers were turned away. The King had collapsed. He was bleeding freely from his nose and doctors were unable to staunch the flow.
XXIII
‘IT LOOKS LIKE A REVOLUTION’
‘All the eminent nobility & persons of quality throughout England declare for the Protestant Religion & Law, & go to meet the Prince ... The great favourites at court, priests & Jesuits, fly or abscond. Everything (till now concealed) flies abroad in public print, & is cried about the streets ... The Popists in offices lay down their commissions & fly. Universal consternation amongst them: it looks like a Revolution.’
John Evelyn, 2 December 1688
James’s first wife, Anne Hyde, died of cancer in March 1671. It was a lonely as well as a painful death. A Catholic convert, like her husband, Anne refused to admit Anglican clerics to her deathbed. Her brother, the Earl of Clarendon, stayed away. Only James was there to hear her gasp out her final words: Duke, Duke, death is terrible, death is very terrible.1
Cavalier, emotional and loyal, the Earl of Ailesbury arrived at Salisbury to find the King ‘in his bedchamber in a great chair, his nose having bled for some time’.2 Doctors put a key against the back of James’s neck, the traditional cure for a nosebleed. Did James think of his wife’s death as he sat with his eyes closed, feeling the cold metal on his neck? In his later years, he would spend days on retreat at the monastery of La Trappe, where monks slept in winding sheets and passed one another with the words, We must die, brother, we must die.3 Every day, at Whitehall, he passed the spot where his father had been executed. Was that the fate he now foresaw for himself?
The last time he saw his father, Charles I was being held at Hampton Court. It was autumn 1647 and James was also in the hands of the parliamentary Government, living in gilded captivity first at Syon House, then at St James’s. On the night of 20 April 1648, attendants robed him in stockings and a dress, and brushed his hair out long. He was led out through an unlocked gate to a barge waiting at Westminster. In the early hours of the morning they drifted downstream with James hidden in the cabin. He was fourteen years old, dressed as a girl, and twelve long years of exile had begun. He was in Paris when he received the news that his father had been killed.
It is impossible to enter the mind of a long-dead King. The attempt cannot be avoided altogether, however, for amid all the chances, the multiplying probable and improbable options of 1688, much hinged on James’s reactions in the dying weeks of the year. What, then, of a man whose mother omitted ‘no opportunity to express her undervalue of him where she thinks she may do it secretly’?
‘She lately told a lady that ... the King [Charles II] ... was of better nature than the Duke of York, with much more of great bitterness. All which being reported again to the Duke of York ... I leave it to you to consider what impressions these things may make in each of them.’4
James sought a father-figure in Marshal Turenne; he gravitated naturally towards the discipline and structure of army life. Both played their part in his conversion to Rome. But James also found in the Catholic church a rod for his own back. ‘I abhor and detest myself,’ he wrote in his devotional papers, ‘having lived so many years in almost a perpetual course of sin.’5 James had always been sexually promiscuous; Bonrepaus reported obscure women being shown into his rooms up back stairs. Yet he lacked the willpower to free himself from temptation. Guilt, Burnet wrote, was ‘a black thing [under which] he could not support himself’.6 His mistress, Catharine Sedley, was banished at the Queen’s behest, only to return soon afterwards to her house in St James’s Square, where James resumed his joyless visits to her. Religion led him into gloomy byways of self-loathing. He despised himself for being too weak for ‘those penances and mortification, which would be requisit, to shew the abhorance and detestation I have for my past offences’.7
‘If he had the empire of the whole world,’ Lauderdale said of James before he came to the throne, ‘he would venture the loss of it, for his ambition is to shine in a red letter after he is dead’8 – in other words, to become a Saint. Perhaps, as he sat bleeding in his bedchamber at Salisbury, James saw royal martyrdom, his birthright, coming nearer to him. Perhaps he doubted his own strength to face it. As a child in capitivity he had been threatened with the Tower. Now its battlements reared up again in his imagination. ‘No King’, he whispered to Ailesbury, ‘ever went out of that place but to his grave.’9
Ailesbury found the whole camp poisoned by James’s defeatism. Senior advisers counselled the King not to fight. Everyone was jumpy. At the end of the week a post boy’s report of troops to the south-west triggered immediate panic, with the King hurried into a coach and driven away. Only afterwards did it emerge that the soldiers were James’s own men. The King, meanwhile, showed every symptom of acute stress. His nosebleeds continued. Instead of poring over maps, James spent his time trying to manage a foraging dispute with locals.
Meanwhile the desertions continued. John Churchill, one of James’s close personal circle, owed everything to the King. It was Churchill whose cavalry had so terrified Stephen Towgood and the Monmouth rebels, but on 23 November he rode west with 400 horse.* Worse was to come. Anne’s husband was the dullard Prince George of Denmark (of whom Charles II famously told Dartmouth that, ‘he had tried him drunk and sober but ... there was nothing in him’.10) Two days after Churchill, he too rode off to join the Prince. The next morning, in London, Anne’s attendant, Mrs Danvers, rose from her bed to wake the Princess as normal. There was no reply from the bedchamber; minutes later, courtiers waiting downstairs were startled by ‘a sudden outcry of women, which upon ... running out to [discover] the occasion of it, [they] found it to be an universal cry among the ladies that some or other had carried away the Princess’. On closer investigation, they found an unlocked door which gave onto a staircase used by cleaners, and the sentry at the bottom revealed ‘that in the dead of the night, about 2 or 3 a clock, a coach with six horse and one lady in it, came thither, and after very little stay took up two ladies’.11 Presumably his orders were to keep rebels out, not royalty in. Then Sarah Churchill was found to be missing as well, and it came out that Henry Compton had planned their escape with the assistance of his gardener, George London. At that moment Henry Compton was galloping north alongside the Princess’s coach, pistols and swords in his belt, ‘a veritable embodiment’, as Winston Churchill memorably put it, ‘of the church militant here on earth’.
Anne wrote a hypocritical letter to the Queen blaming divided loyalties and forbearing to mention her own close and continuous correspondence with the Prince of Orange. Mary herself was to be observed, meanwhile, attending endless church services at the Hague with a ‘tranquil and content’ expression which, d’Avaux commented, ‘the calmest people could not watch without astonishment and indignation ... She might have been giving thanks for a victory, rather than praying for the success of a conspiracy against her own father.’12
‘God help me,’ James burst out when he was told of Prince George’s defection, ‘my own children have forsaken me!’13 To a man whose private writings contain so much self-hatred, the desertions can only have cut deep; it seemed that everyone else hated him too. By the time he returned to London, the King of England could no longer see a political dilemma which he might resolve. As he climbed out of his coach at Whitehall it was the spectre of his father’s scaffold which filled his thoughts. Even such desultory action as he took was coloured by defeatism. An extraordinary meeting of peers was called. ‘It scarce ever did any good,’ James wrote in his memoirs, ‘[But I] assembled them accordingly.’14 The Earl of Clarendon, who was present at the meeting, found the King a nervous shadow, obsessed with death. ‘The Prince of Orange came for the crown,’ he told them, ‘but ... he would not see himself deposed ... he had read the story of King Richard II.’15 Clarendon joined the other peers in pointing out the obvious: James must treat with the Prince. And he must play his last card – a joker �
�� by announcing a free parliament. James characteristically squandered the political effect of that announcement by hesitating for twenty-four hours, ‘and thereby he has lost the grace of the thing’, as Roger Morrice commented, ‘but divers of that line have always lost the kindness of their actions in the manner of doing’.16 The atmosphere at court meetings was poisonous. Halifax and Nottingham were both in correspondence with the Prince. The nerves of even the most loyal Tories were cracking. As the King dismantled his Catholic project, Tories had dreamed that the country would stabilise around Church and loyal Parliament. But the King’s army was crumbling; the position seemed ever more volatile; suddenly it looked as if there might be no such point of equilibrium, and the Whigs and fanatics would pour back into the capital. Ailesbury watched Clarendon fly into ‘an indiscreet and seditious railing, declaiming against popery, exaggerating fears and jealousies’, and lecturing the King ‘like a pedagogue towards a pupil’.17 No one was surprised when two days later Clarendon, too, packed his bags and rode off to join the Prince of Orange.
Clarendon’s arrival at Hindon soon sobered him. Alighting from his carriage, the Tory earl found himself face to face with the political enemies of an entire lifetime, John Wildman and Robert Ferguson among them. The Prince greeted him cordially enough (Henry Hyde was his wife’s uncle, after all, as well as another high-profile scalp for his cause), and even reassured Clarendon that he had no plans to go beyond the terms of his moderate declaration about restoring English liberties: ‘My Declaration shall be punctually observed.’ Likewise, William Bentinck, a childhood friend of the Prince of Orange, airily dismissed rumours that the Prince aspired to the crown as ‘the most wicked insinuation that could be invented’. The mood of Englishmen around the Prince seemed ominously different, however. Lord Abingdon, another Tory, told Clarendon ‘he did not like things at all ... he did not like Wildman’s and Ferguson’s being in the Prince’s train’, and there followed a moment of worrying revelation from Gilbert Burnet, who dismissed Clarendon’s suggestion of a parliament ‘with his usual warmth’, saying, ‘“It is impossible! There can be no parliament: there must be no parliament; it is impossible!”’18
James, however, had issued writs for a parliament to meet on 15 January 1689, and appointed three men, Halifax, Nottingham and Godolphin, to negotiate with William. Clarendon watched these commissioners arrive at the Vine Inn, Hungerford, on Saturday 8 December. They gave the Prince a letter, which he opened and read out loud. ‘It was in French,’ Clarendon recalled, ‘upon which he said, (and I thought it came with great tenderness from him)’ – uncharacteristic though such an emotion would have been from William – ‘this was the first letter he ever had from the King in French; that he always used to write to him in English, and in his own hand’. The question was how the Prince would respond to the suggestion of a parliament. Clarendon then witnessed a moment of political theatre as the Prince solemnly folded up the letter and announced that the future of England was in English hands. He himself would withdraw from the meeting. ‘You see now, my Lord,’ Abingdon whispered to Clarendon as they sat down, ‘here are people with the Prince will bring all into confusion if they can.’ For the Tories, a moment of truth was coming. Just as they feared, the meeting voted that James’s election writs should be suspended.
In Clarendon’s view, that vote finally unmasked the ambition of the ‘fanatics’. The Prince’s pose of disinterest was also unmasked, however, when the politicians’ deputation reached him at nearby Littlecote House with Clarendon in angry attendance. William overruled their decision. ‘We may drive away the King,’ he told them, ‘but perhaps we may not know how easily to come by a parliament.’19 The Prince would need a parliament to sanction any new constitutional arrangements, and only James could issue writs for one. Besides, he was taking a wider view than his English followers. Before leaving, William had written to the traditionalist Emperor Leopold with an explicit promise:
‘I have not the least intention to do any hurt to his Britannic Majesty, or to those who have a right to pretend to the succession of his kingdoms, and still less to make an attempt upon the crown, or to desire to appropriate it to myself.’20
Somehow he had landed an army on English soil, and was dictating terms. He had got thus far entirely by his own efforts, unbeholden to Danby (five of whose ingratiating letters he had by now ignored) or to anyone else. Somehow he had maintained without serious challenge the fiction that he was in England simply to restore order. He could see no reason, as yet, to give up the moral high ground.
So how would the crisis resolve itself? Not on the battlefield, but in unseen manoeuvres of which most ordinary Englishmen would know nothing until afterwards. Up in Nottingham, the English rebels were slowly recruiting their own army. ‘Very raw & defective of good officers’,21 Henry Compton thought them. One of the new recruits was a comedian called Colley Cibber, who would later be one of England’s most celebrated actors (and most derided playwrights). At the banquet to welcome Anne to Nottingham, he was squeezed into livery and drafted in to help serve. Colley Cibber thought this was his chance to hear at the high table what was really going on in England. When Princess Anne opened her mouth he leaned forward eagerly – but all he heard were the words, some wine and water.
‘At this crisis [he wrote in his memoirs] you cannot but observe, that the fate of King James, and of the Prince of Orange, and that of so minute a being as myself, were all at once upon the anvil: in what shape they would severally come out ... was not then demonstrable to the deepest foresight.’22
William was certainly not ready to reveal his hand. The terms which Halifax, Nottingham and Godolphin carried back to London were ones to which almost nobody could object: the dismissal of Catholics from office, the recall of proclamations against William, and withdrawal of troops from London. When Clarendon had blandly told Gilbert Burnet that he hoped a treaty would follow, however, ‘the Doctor interrupted me, saying in great heat, “What treaty? How can there be a treaty? The sword is drawn: there is a suppositious child which must be inquired into.”’23
There, indeed, was the insuperable obstacle to any settlement which kept James on the throne: the Prince of Wales. William could see that, even if most of the English chose not to. William would hardly have hazarded the security of the United Provinces unless it was to ensure an England permanently Protestant, permanently allied to Holland, and generous in its provision of men and money for war with France. Unless James dispossessed the Prince of Wales – which he would never do – there was no outcome which could justify the enormous risks the Prince of Orange had taken.
But in that case, what exactly was William’s ambition? What did William have in mind for the future? What of his uncle and father-in-law?
Clarendon had not missed the slip William had made at Littlecote House: we may drive away the King. Others were reaching the same conclusion. As Halifax climbed into the coach to return to London, he turned to Gilbert Burnet. What, he asked, would be the Prince’s response if the King were to depart England of his own volition? Burnet’s reply was simple. ‘There is nothing’, he told the “Trimmer”, ‘so much to be wished.’24
XXIV
‘OUT OF THE REACH OF MY ENEMIES’
On Sunday 2 December Francesco Riva, Mary of Modena’s Italian Master of the Robes, was summoned to a private closet in the Queen’s apartments. He found the King himself waiting. Riva was to be told a secret – a secret known only to one other, the Comte de Lauzun (another of those shifty mediocrities for whom James had such an odd taste). James had decided that the Queen and the Prince of Wales should escape to France the following Tuesday.
James knew perfectly well that the Prince of Wales would be the sticking point in any negotiation. The day before he despatched his Commissioners, he had written a letter to Dartmouth at Spithead:
‘’Tis my son they aim at and ’tis my son I must endeavour to preserve ... therefore I conjure you to assist Lord Dover in getting him sent away in the ya
chts, as soon as wind and weather will permit, for the first port they can get to in France ... I shall look upon this as one of the greatest pieces of service you can do me.’1
Dartmouth was a close friend of James – but he was also a Church of England man, and Admiral of a navy whose loyalties were no longer secure.* Emotionally, ‘with the greatest dread and grief of heart imaginable’, Dartmouth refused to help. The men on whom James could depend were a dwindling band. In closing, Dartmouth reminded James ‘how prophetically I have foretold you your misfortunes, and the courses you might have taken to have avoided them’.2
On the same day Melfort, James’s abrasive and unpopular Secretary of State, absconded to France, leaving debts of several thousands of pounds. Roger Morrice thought that a turning point. ‘If fools play on the game,’ he thought, ‘they will play it very foolishly.’3 The Prince of Wales had been brought back to London by 9 December. On that evening, Francesco Riva dressed as a sailor. About an hour after midnight he took a back stair to the King’s room. There he found the Queen and her baby, two nurses and the Comte de Lauzun.
Four years earlier the choirs of Westminster Abbey had praised Mary of Modena to Purcell’s music: