There followed negotiations and farewells. James thanked his captors, ‘saying, I forgive you all, even Moon too, which Moon, [even] after the King was discovered, cursed him to his face’.3 Feversham asked where he would be taken. The King, suddenly brave again, replied, ‘I resolve to go to London. My Father there suffered martyrdom for the Church of England, and I can be content to suffer martyrdom there for the Church of Rome by the Church of England.’4
When he re-entered his capital two days later, however, there was a surprise. Instead of calling for James’s head, the crowds cheered him.
Edmund Bohun went out into Fleet Street to watch. He thought people had gathered out of curiosity more than anything else, but enough dispassionate observers recorded James’s reception that Sunday afternoon to leave no doubt about the ‘huzza[s] as his Majesty went along the streets’.5 James was still the man whom the Archbishop of Canterbury had crowned King of England. And few, yet, imagined a future without him. The London Mercury saw no contradiction between the King’s welcome and the preparations simultaneously being made to receive the Prince of Orange at St James’s (the trained bands, it reported, ‘intend to have orange ribbons in their hats’6). William’s protestations of disinterest had been almost too successful.
To the Prince himself, though, the bizarre twist of James’s capture and return was the end of a stunning run of good luck. The Mayor of Faversham later applied to Gilbert Burnet for a reward, only to be told, ‘Mr Napleton, how can you expect a reward for doing an action that might have spoilt all our measures?’7* If the King’s flight had played into William’s hands, his return called the Prince’s bluff – and William knew it.
The peers had written to apprise William of the King’s capture and their action in sending troops to escort him home. ‘We hope’, ended this letter from servants of two masters, ‘this ... will have your Highness’s approbation.’8 It did not. William wrote back in fury, adding that he had sent Zuylestein to try and stop James on the road, and that he would arrive in London as soon as he could. He then put a foot wrong for the first time by arresting the Earl of Feversham, who arrived as an envoy from James bearing passports and an invitation to a meeting at St James’s. Feversham’s imprisonment was contrary to all diplomatic niceties. The clear-cut situation of 48 hours earlier had suddenly become horribly confused.
Others, too, were discomfited by this latest turn in events. The London Whigs met on the day of James’s return to discuss whether they ought to celebrate with the usual fireworks. The radical George Treby, newly reinstalled as Recorder, held London to its earlier invitation to the Prince. Further, Treby pointed out the new realities of English politics:
‘It is true the King had legal authority, but the Prince they had invited had power ... And there was another power, though it were very unwarrantable, that the mobile had.’9
Loyalists, meanwhile, were thrown into utter confusion. Archbishop Sancroft removed himself from the fray with another political illness, while Dartmouth struggled to make sense of the wild rumour arriving in the post from his London correspondents:
‘Just now we are assured the King has declared the Prince of Orange Generalissimo by sea and land ... God direct you for the best. I cannot say but that I now wish the King had not come back. We have made no application to the Prince as yet, though all other officers have, and what we shall do, God knows.’10
Tory strategists scrambled for the least worst outcome they could now hope for. Bishop Turner thought James might accept a sort of ghost monarchy, ‘even to be reduced to the state of a Duke of Venice, committing all the power of war and peace ... to the Prince for his lifetime’.11 But if such notions passed through James’s head, he did nothing about them. Indeed, he did nothing at all. The cheering crowds of Sunday afternoon produced a brief spike of energy, but the next day, Ailesbury recalled, ‘was a melancholy one ... The King ... dined and supped in public but all conversation was dry.’12 His moods continued to see-saw. The King ‘seemed most merry,’ at a meeting with Thomas Sprat, Turner and some other loyalists, but just before the meeting ‘he was as much indisposed ... as ever in his life, and had been crying just before’.13
The King had not, though, become any more skilful a politician. On the night of his return John Evelyn went to court, only to find it crowded with Catholics. It was hardly surprising Catholics would flock back to the King after what they had just been through, but James seemed unaware of the political impression created by the French ambassador at his elbow and a Jesuit saying grace. Perhaps he did not care. As George Treby had suggested, real power no longer resided in King James’s court. While the King dined and dithered, his person was being disposed of by a group of peers at Windsor chaired by the ubiquitous ‘Trimmer’, Halifax. Some wanted James in the Tower; others wanted him simply to resume his flight to France. Delamere shocked Clarendon by declaring that ‘he did not look upon him as his King, and would never more pay him obedience’.14 Whatever most people in England expected, the men around William were looking to a future without James. ‘My opinion’, wrote one gloomy Earl to Danby’s wife ‘is the King will be deposed and the Prince’s favourites will push him on to a crown.’15
Perhaps that was inevitable. William announced that he would enter London on Tuesday 18 December. ‘I thought it was the most melancholy day I had ever seen in my whole life,’ wrote Clarendon as he arrived in town the evening before. About 11 o’clock at night, James heard the sound of a key scratching on the door of his closet, Ailesbury’s signal to request admittance. Ailesbury ushered in the Earl of Craven, Colonel of the Whitehall Guard, to reveal that Dutch soldiers were marching into St James’s Park, three battalions of infantry and some horse. The slow-match of their muskets could be seen winking among the trees.
In a seething passion, Craven related that he had been ‘ordered’ by their commander, Count Solms, to withdraw his troops from Whitehall Palace. James sent for Solms, who showed him the Prince’s orders. One report said his manner ‘was somewhat positive’.16 The octogenarian Craven was all ready to start the fourth Anglo-Dutch war, but James had no fight left in him. That night the King of England went to bed surrounded by Dutch guards.
He did not sleep long. At one in the morning he was woken to be told three men were outside with a message from the Prince. His aide ushered in the Earls of Halifax and Shrewsbury, and Lord Delamere.
Halifax handed James a paper. It was a message from the King’s son-in-law:
‘We do desire you ... to tell the King that it is thought convenient, for the greater quiet of the City and the greater safety of his person, that he do remove to Ham [House], where he shall be attended by guards, who will be ready to preserve him from any disturbance. Given at Windsor, the 17 day of December 1688, G[uillaume] Prince d’Orange.’17
In such terms was the King of England banished from his throne. ‘He said he would comply,’ Halifax wrote to the Prince about half an hour later,
‘and we desired him, that he would remove tomorrow morning ... We took our leave of him, and by that time we had gone the length of 3 or 4 rooms we were called back, and then he told us, that he ... desireth that he may rather go to Rochester, it being the place where your Highness would have had him stay ... and wished that we would represent it to your Highness.’18
There was no mystery about why James would want to go to Rochester, only a few miles from his previous starting-point for France. An express messenger rode through the night to Syon House, where William was staying, to obtain the casual agreement of the Prince, who expressed himself ‘indifferent if he was in one place or the other’.19 As morning broke, news spread across London of the King’s departure. ‘The English who saw him leave were very sad,’ Barillon reported, ‘most of them having tears in their eyes ... The same sadness appeared in the consternation of the people when they knew the King was leaving surrounded by Dutch guards.’ James himself was angry by now, complaining that ‘he was chased away from his own house’.20 An escort of 80 Dutch so
ldiers had been assigned to him. About 11 o’clock he descended into his barge. A cold wind blew along the Thames; it was raining. Did Ailesbury stop to remember Monmouth’s mournful face as he climbed those same steps on the way to his death three years earlier? Now he watched Dutch troops piling into rowing boats, but they took so long about it that it was almost low water by the time they were ready to move into position around the royal barge. These were dangerous conditions in which to pass through London. In his daredevil youth, Dudley North had shown off by swimming London Bridge at low water ‘which showed him ... intrepid,’ wrote his brother, ‘for courage is required to bear the very sight of that tremendous cascade, which few can endure to pass in a boat’.21 ‘The shooting of the bridge’, Ailesbury remembered, ‘was hideous, and to myself I offered up many prayers to God Almighty.’
A little further downstream, though, there was comfort. Patrick Lamb, the master cook who four years earlier had prepared lobsters for the King’s coronation feast, had unexpectedly shown up among the servants attending him. Now ‘an hour after our great escape on shooting the bridge ... [he] asked [the King] if he would eat. He was surprised at the question, by reason that in the barges there is no sort of conveniency, nor any place to make a fire; however that expert man gave the King an excellent meal, and we had the honour to eat with him.’ The King told Patrick Lamb to give something to the Dutch commander, Colonel Wycke. ‘The Earl of Arran ... mumbled out pretty low, “Rather throw him into the Thames!” The King warmly replied, “My lord, you are a good subject, but a very bad Christian; he is a man of honour and doth his duty.”’22 Meat and a bottle of wine were passed from boat to boat. And so the King and his guard ate together as they rowed past merchant ships anchored off the docks, past the shipyards and warehouses of a great trading city whose bustle was frozen by strife. They passed Greenwich, and London disappeared into the rain.
The city already had a new master. Just after noon, the Sheriffs gathered at Hyde Park Corner in full ceremonial rig. The road to Kensington was lined with Dutch Blue Guards; all English troops had been ordered out of the capital. Londoners, though, had turned out in force to catch a first glimpse of their liberator. Piccadilly and the Strand were packed, and among the crowd was Edmund Bohun, doing his best to ignore cold wind and the steady downpour. He sensed mixed emotions in the people around him.
‘[On] Tuesday ... the Prince of Orange entered London, and was received with such transports of joy as I never saw; the people putting oranges on the ends of their sticks, to shew they were for him. For my part, I was yet not resolved any way; but stood gazing what would be the event.’
‘But a clergyman that stood by me, frowning, said, “I don’t like this.”’
‘Another said, “How was the King [James] received [on his return]?”’
‘“Coldly.”’
‘“Why, then there is no pity for him”, said the other.’
‘This’, Edmund Bohun thought with foreboding, ‘gave me occasion to fear we might divide.’23 There was no doubt that William had lost the moral high ground. The last 24 hours had made it clear that he was not there to do what he had said: negotiate with the King to reestablish Britain’s ‘ancient constitution’. ‘It is not to be imagined’, Clarendon wrote next day, ‘what a damp there was upon all sorts of men throughout the town. The treatment the King had met with from the Prince of Orange, and the manner of his being driven, as it were, from Whitehall, with such circumstances, moved compassion even in those who were not very fond of him.’24 And yet there were cheers when the troops finally came into sight. Another eyewitness thought it ‘no unsurprising spectacle to see (if I may so phrase it) a foreign enemy in an hostile manner march through the metropolis of the Kingdom with no other diversion than the repeated huzzas and loud acclamations of the inhabitants’.25 Roger Morrice chose his vantage point up in the City.
‘An orange woman without Ludgate gave divers baskets full of oranges to the Prince’s officers and soldiers, as they marched by ... Divers ordinary women in Fleet Street shook his soldiers by the hand, as they came by, and cried, Welcome, welcome. God bless you, you come to redeem our religion, laws, liberties, and lives. God reward you, &c. I heard and saw these two passages myself.’26
At least the first regiments to march up the road from Knightsbridge were British, from the red squadron commanded by Mackay. The rain poured steadily down. As always on such occasions, it must have seemed forever before horsemen and coaches signalled the arrival of the notables. Among them was a four-wheeled calabash containing a small unsmiling man in a white cloak. He was sharp-eyed and pallid; neither then nor at any other time did William of Orange look like a conqueror.
Nor did he know how to behave like one. Louis XIV would have devised some brilliant theatre for this moment, but William ‘never loved shows nor shoutings’. Instead of continuing along Piccadilly, where ‘all the houses from St James’s to the Park Corner were filled with people looking out at the windows, expecting the Prince would have come that way; and the road was so crowded, that many were forced to run through the dirt up to the middle-leg’,27 William directed the cavalcade to turn right through the high wall of St James’s Park, and so disappeared. Rain darkened the banners hanging over London streets. The foreign soldiers settled into their new billets. ‘It tends highly to the diminution of the reputation of the Prince and his army,’ wrote Roger Morrice, ‘that he did not make a public magnificent entry into London according to the expectation of the people who were ready to receive him with all possible expressions of joy.’28 Abandoned by one ruler and ignored by the other, soaked to the bone, the crowds went home, leaving crushed oranges and sodden flags in the gutters. It was an inauspicious start to the new era.
XXVIII
‘NOSTALGIA’
Ten years earlier, a young doctor called Johann Hoefer had been casting about for a subject for his thesis, and latched onto a condition which had never previously been studied:
‘Suddenly I remembered the story of certain young men in danger of wasting away if they were not immediately taken back to the countries they came from.’
He identified the condition in a peasant woman brought down from the mountain who appeared unable to live normally but lay supine, ‘constantly crying out and groaning, saying nothing but ich will heim, ich will heim, nor giving any reply to any question but that same, I want to go home.’’1 He defined the condition as misery resulting from the burning desire to return to one’s own country. The name he gave it, nostalgia, was an amalgam of the Greek words algos, pain, and nostos, a homecoming.
All the exiles in the United Provinces had felt it. In England, Anne Elisabeth Fontaine cooked French food at their little house in Barnstaple, in the early days, and homesick Huguenots ‘who were not used to English fare, were happy to come and eat [our] soup and bread’.2 Transported Monmouth rebels felt it on their plantations in Barbados; so did the slaves shipped from West Africa by the Royal African Company. In an expanding world, more and more people felt the pain of displacement from their homes.
Some also knew the joy of return. Sir John Holtham, a baronet and former MP, had spent two years in exile in the United Provinces. On Friday 21 December he finally came home to Scarborough. A Custom House boat ferried him across the Humber. As he neared the north bank Sir John saw a crowd waiting for him. Church bells began to ring; the garrison fired cannons. As the early winter evening drew in, ‘the people set out great numbers of lights in their windows, and at their doors, receiving him with loud acclamations of joy, bells ringing, and bonfires’.3
Hoefer described what happened when people were wrenched from what they knew:
‘If young men are too strongly impressed with the customs of their own country, they are unable to adopt others when they go abroad. Many ... then cannot survive without calling the delights of their home to mind. And so by the continual desire of recovering their homeland they can sink to a dangerous condition if not quickly repatriated.’4
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But perhaps that sense of alienation went wider than longing for a place; perhaps there could be pain not only for lost homes but for lost worlds: for the lost world of religious certainty, where Kings governed wisely and their people obeyed them; pain for the loss of hierarchy and order, the loss of boundaries rather than ever-expanding horizons, harmony not dynamism, stability not restless change. Old simplicities of belief and power had been refracted, like white light through Newton’s prism, into their several parts. Perhaps in nostalgia for unity lay the sorrow and neurosis of the new age.
On the way down to Rochester the King stopped for the night at Gravesend. Ailesbury bedded down in the King’s coach, but he was awoken by the coachman’s ‘repeated oaths’. Listening, Ailesbury heard him ‘whipping his horses, [and] crying out “God damn Father Peters!”’
‘I said to him, “Dixie, what harm hath he done you?”’
‘“Damn him!” he replied again, “but for him we had not been here.”’5
In Rochester, James lodged in the house of Sir Richard Head. The back door of the house was not guarded, ‘which confirmed him in the belief he was of before, that the Prince of Orange would be well enough contented he should get away’.6 At Mass on the first morning he was surprised to be joined by half his guards. Only then did the irony intrude on him that William’s army contained far more Catholics, Dutch and German, than his own. From London came news of events from which James now seemed strangely remote. Roman Catholics had been banished from the capital. The Lords had been summoned to gather on Christmas Eve. A Dutch guard had been killed in a brawl near Long Acre.
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