‘At his right hand shall stand the Queen all
Glorious within, her clothing is of wrought gold.
She shall be brought unto the King in raiment
Of needle-work.’
Now Mary took off jewels, fine robes and trinkets, and dressed in the disguise Riva had prepared for her. About two o’clock the party stole down a back stair, and at the gate of the Privy Garden found the coach which Riva had earlier borrowed from his friend Teriesi, the Florentine agent in London. The Queen and her companions climbed inside; Riva himself clambered onto the box. ‘So we set off, and having got through Westminster safely reached the place called Hossferye, where I had hired a boat for the crossing.’ Riva’s cover story for the boatman was a dawn hunting expedition, a yarn which must have seemed increasingly thin as he handed aboard three women and a small baby, mercifully silent. Fortunately, perhaps, ‘the night was so dark that we couldn’t even see each other’. God was on their side, not least in hushing the five-month-old Prince of Wales. After a river crossing ‘which gusting wind and continual rain made exceptionally difficult’, Riva helped his bedraggled party ashore on the Lambeth bank.
Unfortunately the carriage he had arranged was nowhere to be seen. Lauzun took the Queen and her party to shelter from the wind against the wall of St Mary’s church while Riva set off in search of it, eventually tracking the carriage down to a local inn buried among the shipyards and workshops which sprawled along the Lambeth shore. However, London was full of rumours about Papists fleeing the court, and when the carriage rumbled out of the inn yard, Riva saw a man collect a dark lantern and set off after it. It was a dangerous moment. As he followed the cone of light thrown by the pursuer’s lantern towards the spot where the Queen waited, Riva realised that he had to stop him at all costs.
‘Pretending I wanted to get past I ... knocked against him so hard that we both fell ... Since we both ended up in the mud we made our reciprocal apologies for the “accident” and he went back to the inn without his light.’
Riva, meanwhile, directed the carriage to the Queen and helped her on board. Miraculously the guard-post on the outskirts of the Borough let them through. Just west of Gravesend, the Queen carried the Prince of Wales, the future ‘Old Pretender’, onto a yacht for France.
‘That Monday,’ Ailesbury thought, ‘the King was most thoughtful.’4 James sat down to compose a letter to Dartmouth. ‘Tomorrow by noon,’ he wrote, ‘they will be out of the reach of my enemies. I am at ease now I have sent them away.’5 It was clear whither his own thoughts were turning. He ‘well remember[ed]’, James wrote in his memoirs, ‘how the King his father and several of his predecessors had been used on like occasions ... and saw plainly by the Prince of Orange’s answer which he receiv’d that night [the Hungerford commissioners had just returned], that nothing but the crown would satisfy his ambitious nephew and son-in-law’.6 Later on the same day he sat down to write two more letters, to Dartmouth again, and to Feversham. ‘Things being come to that extremity,’ he wrote to his General,
‘that I have been forced to send away the Queen, and my son the Prince of Wales ... I am obliged to do the same thing, and endeavour to secure myself the best I can ... If I could have relied on all my troops, I might not have been put to the extremity I am in, and would at least have had one blow for it ... I hope you will still retain the same fidelity to me, and though I do not expect you should expose yourselves by resisting a foreign army, and a poisoned nation, yet I hope your former principles are so enrooted in you, that you will keep yourselves free from associations, and such pernicious things. Time presses, so that I can say no more. JR.’7
Ailesbury knew what was coming. He waited until they were alone together before the King ‘went up the steps into his closet, and ordered me to shut the door’.
‘And what follows is as true as particular, and I will relate it in as few words as the nature of the thing can permit. I being well informed that the King was to go away after my separating from him, I fell on my knees with tears, humbly beseeching him not to think of going.’
‘He answered, “That is a coffee house report, and why can you imagine it?”’
‘I replied, “For the love of God, sir, why will you hide it from me that knows, that your horses are now actually at Lambeth and that you are to ride on bay Ailesbury,* that Sir Edward Hales is there to attend you, Mr Ralph Sheldon your equerry, Labadie, page of the back stairs, and Dick Smith your groom?”’8
The King was taken aback that his plans were so widely known. After a moment he said to Ailesbury: ‘If I should go, who can wonder, after the treatment I have found? My daughter hath deserted me, my army also ... and if such betrays me, what can I expect from those I have done so little for? I knew not who to speak to or who to trust.’ They argued for some time, Ailesbury characteristically urging his King to a last stand, suggesting that he call Anne’s bluff by moving to Nottingham, or that he aim for Yorkshire – James had himself wondered about asking Danby for protection (a move which, with hindsight, might have saved his crown). Nothing Ailesbury said made any difference, however. Eventually James ‘told me he would speak to me in the morning and so with tears I retired’. Ailesbury knew there would be no change of heart. He put a watchman at the bottom of the King’s back stair. Half an hour after the end of their interview the man came to tell him that the King was gone.
As James left the palace did he think of his first escape, fourteen years old, dressed in a woman’s skirt? In a moment he turned from the Imperial King of three crowns into a fugitive. A coach was waiting at Whitehall Gate. They drove to the Horse Ferry and found the boat which Hales had arranged to carry them across the river. Afterwards the boatman reported that the three men were carrying gamashas, over-boots for riding. Rumour added that James took away large sums of money from the treasury. By contrast he had left behind him neither council of state, nor instructions for an interim Government. On the contrary, England’s King planned to leave his country in exactly the state of rudderless chaos William most feared. His private papers were sent for safe keeping to Teriesi, the Florentine agent. He burnt the election writs. Some days earlier he had made Lord Chancellor Jeffreys move into Father Petre’s apartments at Whitehall, and late on Monday night ordered him to hand over the Great Seal.
The Great Seal was the imprint under which all laws in England were made, without which no government was possible. It was to the law, that tenuous thread of shared legitimacy, that all Englishmen looked to extricate them from their crisis.
Somewhere on his way across the river, James ‘threw the [Great] Seal into the Thames’.9
XXV
‘VENGEANCE, JUSTICE’
Kingless and lawless, England abandoned itself to its demons. ‘The rabble are now pulling down the mass houses everywhere,’ Philip Frowde wrote to Dartmouth, ‘and burning the appurtenances, which at this instant make the sky so very red that I can see it out of the rooms here at the Post Office.’1 Catholic hangings, furniture, pictures were all dragged out of the chapels and set alight. A pyre blazed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The holiest symbols of Catholicism were ‘carried ... in mock procession and triumph ... with great lighted candles in gilt candlesticks’. From chapels, the rioters turned to other symbols of the collapsing régime. Harry Hills, the King’s printer, had already fled. Now rioters smashed down the front of his shop and from inside dragged out presses, trays of type, and unsold books ‘and burnt [them] ... near Fleet Bridge’.2
The rioters knew as well as anyone that this was a war of information and interpretation. On the very day the King departed, uncensored newspapers appeared on the streets: the Universal Intelligence, the London Courant and English Currant, all of them lacking the telltale legend, WITH AUTHORITY. Such an outpouring of uncensored information had not been seen since the days of the Civil War. Indeed, to many Londoners on the streets that night it must have seemed as if civil war had returned. They sacked the mansion of the loyalist Earl of Salisbury, then moved on to W
ild House, residence of the Spanish ambassador, Don Pedro de Ronquillo. Many wealthy Catholics had tried to remove their goods into foreign houses for safety. In vain – the damage at Wild House was afterwards valued at over £15,000. D’Adda, the Papal Nuncio, escaped attack by pinning a notice on the door reading This House is to be Let. Others were less fortunate. Francesco Riva’s friend Teriesi, the Florentine Resident, cowered inside his home, terrified, listening to ‘all discharging firearms, drums beating rapidly, and women, for greater noise, beating warming-pans, pots, and frying-pans, and such things’.3
The rioting spread. Late in the afternoon of 12 December, peers who had foregathered at Guildhall to cobble together an emergency administration were informed that a crowd was closing in on St James’s. Troops reached the palace to find looters already ‘clambering up to pull down the organs and deface the chapel’. They were driven back, but crowds now packed every street from Whitechapel to Tothill Fields. They chanted slogans – an Orange, an Orange – and paraded ‘oranges on the tops of swords and staves’. The trained bands, called out to restore order, broke ranks and mingled with them. Daylight brought no end to the disturbances. Roger Morrice dutifully recorded the looting of the ruined buildings: ‘They were pulling up the ground joists on Tuesday night about midnight, and multitudes carrying away bricks in baskets, so that they have left scarce anything but the bare walls.’4
With James’s departure, all the paranoia of the Popish Plot frothed to the surface again. Rumours swept the capital. Titus Oates had been poisoned in the Tower by Popish agents; gunpowder had been discovered in a Catholic house in Soho. All over the country, in a spontaneous outburst of hatred and rage, Catholic houses and chapels were ransacked and burnt. To make matters worse, on 30 November the Whig propagandist Hugh Speke had published a phoney ‘Third Declaration’ of the Prince of Orange (who did his best to disclaim it), which warned of Catholic plans to massacre Protestants and urged supporters to treat Catholics ‘not as soldiers and gentlemen, but as robbers, freebooters and banditti’.5
For its Catholic victims, these were days of terror. ‘The Papists’, wrote Roger Morrice, not without compassion,
‘[were] greatly confounded, running into all holes to hide themselves, weeping and crying for fear of their lives ... carrying their good[s] away in bundles to one Protestant’s house and then to another, and very few durst receive them.’6
Many Catholic gentlemen kept stocks of arms for their own protection. Obeying Speke’s Declaration, villagers near the Earl of Peterborough’s house at Drayton, Northamptonshire, searched it for arms and, finding none, arrested his steward, and tortured him – one report had the man tied to a stake in obscene imitation of an inquisition. To save his life, the steward revealed a cache hidden in a fishpond, thereby provoking further outrage.
Members of the old régime were also targeted. Father Petre had already escaped, but Dr Watson, loyalist Bishop of St David’s, was spotted in disguise and ritually humiliated, ‘mounted ... on a paltry horse without saddle or bridle’.7 No one was hated more than the Lord Chancellor, George Jeffreys, who was reported in Wapping disguised as a seaman and trying to board a collier for Newcastle. The constables who came to arrest him
‘had information given them that he was hard by, at a little peddling alehouse a-taking his farewell pot, where accordingly they found him, being the sign of the Red Cow in Hope and Anchor Alley ... in Wapping, from whence they immediately hurried him in a coach guarded with several blunderbusses to the Lord Mayor’s, where the crowd was so great and the rabble so numerous, all crying out together Vengeance, Justice, Justice, that the Lord Mayor was forced to come out on his balcony, and with his hat in his hand desired the people to go away, and keep the peace.’8
The Lord Mayor, Sir John Chapman, was a protégé of Jeffreys. The sight of the arrogant Chancellor reduced to a prisoner was too much for him; he suffered a stroke as they sat at table together. While doctors treated him, Jeffreys himself was bustled into a coach bound for the Tower. It was a pitiful end for the man who had snarled his way into history at the Bloody Assizes.
‘To keep [the mobile] from violence, he put his head several times out of the coach ... He said, It is I, it is I. I am in your custody and at your mercy ... Thus the Chancellor, that vomited out such rude, unmannerly, and brutal language ... against all men, is a sad subject of counter-passion, and the mobile pour out the same vomit upon him.’9
Anger had fuelled the disturbances against Catholic chapels and houses. But sometime in the night of Wednesday 12 December that anger thinned into fear. A hundred years later, in the summer of the French Revolution, a wave of causeless panic would sweep across the French countryside. Something of the same sort happened in England in the week after King James’s flight. It appeared as a kind of mass hysteria, a neurotic reaction to the disappearance of the régime (although various Williamites, Hugh Speke among them, later claimed to have orchestrated it). John Locke was wrong about the collapse of governments. The state of nature was not a rational place after all; it was the haunt of nameless terrors.
‘About three of the clock on Thursday morning,’ the London Mercury reported,
‘we were strangely alarmed with a report that the Irish, in a desperate rage, were approaching the City, putting men, women and children to the sword as they came along, upon which, in an instant, all arose, placing lights in their windows from top to bottom, and guarded their own doors.’10
Lights filled every window, candles flickering behind the new sashes in Soho and the crooked casements of the older buildings, hundreds of candles lighting up straight modern streets and narrow alleys. The Earl of Ailesbury was woken by the sound of drums and trumpets at one in the morning. ‘My servant ... told me that they were bawling before my house because it was not illuminated, for that the Irish were cutting all the throats of the Protestants ... Mr Cox, the door-keeper of the Council Chamber, said he had orders to speak to me, and told me the Lords were assembled ... and expected my attendance.’11 The Peers had, indeed, gathered in the middle of the night, in the Whitehall Council Chamber. There, like Roman senators awaiting the barbarians, they sat through the night in a city ablaze with lights. Only when dawn broke, and one by one the candles guttered out, did it become clear that the rumours of an Irish army were groundless.
The terror was not confined to London, however. At Wendover in Buckinghamshire, news of approaching Irish soldiers ‘caused ... dreadful outcry, hurry and confusion ... some running one way and others riding another, expecting their throats cut every moment’.12 Nearing London from the south-west, John Whittle’s regiment was told that the Irish had burnt Kingston-upon-Thames. The residents of Ampthill barricaded the entrances into town on rumours that Bedford and Luton were alight. Panic spread west and east. Yeovil, well within the area controlled by William’s forces, was alarmed with a story that Irish soldiers had burned Portsmouth. Villagers in coastal Lincolnshire fled inland on the rumour that the Irish were about to sack the east coast of England like latter-day Vikings.
Was there any substance to these fears? Woken from his slumber, Ailesbury robustly told the peers’ messenger he would join them at ten, rolled over and went back to sleep. Roger Morrice thought all the fuss grounded ‘upon the prolific fantasy of some hypochondriacal persons, who naturally believe all the dangers to be real that their distempers can suggest to them’.13 But he knew ‘many wise men’ who believed every word of it, and there was, besides, a germ of truth in the stories of Irish troops roaming the countryside. At James’s army headquarters the Earl of Feversham had interpreted the King’s final instruction to cease hostilities as an order to disband the army. He omitted to disarm them first. Unpaid and undisciplined, miles from home in a country exhorted to treat them as bandits, some probably did cause trouble. John Whittle reported intruders threatening the minister of Tyleshurston, ‘stripping his rings off his fingers, with the skin and flesh [and] threatening his wife in bed’.14
More common were frightened
groups of hungry Irishmen convinced they were about to be murdered. Roger Morrice saw James’s terrifying dragoons disarmed in London, ‘dismounted, uncloathed and dismissed, and ... when their coats were taken from them [many] had nothing to cover their backs, some having no shirts, others no waistcoats, and those that had ... they were very ragged and full of holes, few of them having sixpence apiece in money’.15 At Maidenhead a group of them dragged guns across the bridge to try and defend it, but ran away as soon as they were approached. In Portsmouth, Dartmouth wrote: ‘I hope they will find mercy. They are I think willing to do anything or go anywhere, poor wretches.’16*
London was not razed to the ground. There was no massacre of Protestants, and the Irish Terror subsided as mysteriously as it had arrived. One overwhelming emotion, though, was left in its wake: the desire for order to be restored as quickly as possible. And with the King gone, there was only one man in England who could supply that order. To the Prince of Orange all parties now turned their attention.
William soon received news of James’s flight. Dining with Schomberg, ‘he was very cheerful,’ that night, Clarendon reported, ‘and could not conceal his satisfaction at the King’s being gone’. He had every reason to be cheerful. Without bloodshed, without being forced to cross any constitutional Rubicon, William was master of English affairs.
English politicians, meanwhile, struggled to make of the King’s flight what sense they could. For the close circle around William it was a triumph. The Bishop of St Asaph shocked Clarendon by telling him that James’s flight meant abdication. ‘I asked what he meant? He replied it can be nothing but a cession. God bless me!’17 By contrast, ‘my own heart has been almost breaking’, Dartmouth wrote to Feversham as he sat in the great cabin of Resolution, contemplating Tory disaster. ‘Oh God, what could make our master desert his Kingdoms and his friends?’ He sent a messenger to the Prince, then wrote another letter to James in which he described the sense of personal betrayal felt by loyalists all over the country:
The Last Revolution Page 21
