Henry Purcell was busy for the coronation, writing a new anthem, Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem (and mourning the loss of his right to sell tickets in the organ loft). Back in control of the royal kitchens, apparently happy to feed any King, Patrick Lamb was busy preparing ‘Dutch beef’ (cured like a ham then boiled until tender).* Busy, too, was the usual army of carpenters and other craftsmen, stretching ‘two breadths of blue cloth’4 over the way to the Abbey, and erecting stands, just as they had four years before. On the day itself Gregory King was assigned ‘the fatiguing task of calling into order the peers and peeresses’.5 It was easier than last time, for there were all too many gaps in the ranks. Nonetheless Danby was there, newly made Marquess of Carmarthen, to lead the dignitaries as Lord President of the Council, and Halifax accompanied him as Lord Privy Seal. The Earl of Shrewsbury carried the curtana, as he had four years before. Much seemed just the same as ever. But not all. In the north transept of the Abbey a special stand had been erected. By tradition parliaments were dissolved when a King died. This time, though, it was Parliament* which had assigned the crown, and its members would be present to watch it placed on the new King’s head.
What did the MPs see as the music swelled and they looked down on the King from their stand? Something less than had processed up the Abbey four years before. The crown was the same, so were sceptre and orb, buskins and pall; but beneath them was only a man. The ceremonial robes had been stripped off James in the Queen’s Arms at Faversham and what was left, a middle-aged man in a black half-wig, had deserved no veneration. His successor would be courted, obeyed, respected; but that was all. ‘It were almost incredible to tell you,’ wrote Colley Cibber,
‘at the latter end of King James’s time ... with what freedom and contempt the common people, in the open streets, talk’d of [him] ... yet in the height of our secure and wanton defiance of him, we, of the vulgar, had ... a satisfied presumption, that our numbers were too great to be mastered by his mere will and pleasure.’6
Monarchy had been damaged by the events of the past four years. It was damaged by the Convention. God had not brought William to the altar step, even though Henry Compton dipped holy oil from the ancient ampulla to anoint him.‡ ‘Les roys peuvent être déposés’;7 that was the lesson the Huguenot Pierre Jurieu took away from the Revolution. For the second time in forty years the English had removed a rightful monarch. ‘If Princes may be this roughly treated,’ the Jacobite Jeremy Collier would write as pamphlet warfare continued after the Convention, ‘their birth is a misfortune to them; and, we may say, they are crowned rather for sacrifice than empire. At this rate the people must e’en govern themselves, for the throne will be a place of too much danger to sit on any longer.’8 Just four years earlier Bohun had proudly edited Robert Filmer, but there was little left of Filmer’s patriarch in Westminster Abbey. ‘Men wrote and spake of the King’, he wrote later that year, ‘with as little respect or ceremony as of the constable of the parish.’9
The new King damaged the monarchy by his own behaviour. William liked to tell Tories that ‘the crown should not be the worse for his wearing it’. Rochester replied, apparently, that ‘he had made it little better than a night-cap’.10 That first impression of a distant figure hurrying into the palace had been born out often enough in the past weeks. William was in charge; Dutch soldiers walked their beats outside his palace; but the new King himself was invisible. Visitors waited, were brushed off with appointments, and kept them only to hear the King had gone hunting. Tuesdays and Fridays were ‘letter-writing days’. Meetings were held in a room full of Dutch advisers. Favouritism was already being whispered as a complaint. ‘We blame the King,’ Daniel Defoe wrote at the end of William’s reign,
‘that he relies too much
On strangers, Germans, Huguenots, and Dutch ...
The fact might very well be answered thus:
He has so often been betrayed by us.’11
There were particularly ugly rumours about the new King’s relationship with William Bentinck, Earl of Portland. The King had no charm. He had no small-talk. He listened and gave his painful, dry cough. He did not express opinions.
And he wasn’t there. The new King and Queen were negotiating with Nottingham to buy Kensington Palace, and there, pleading his cough, William apparently intended to live (once its rooms had been redecorated in the modern style). Workmen would soon be busy at Hampton Court as well, even further from Westminster. Were the politicians supposed to move out of town and cram into tiny apartments to watch Mary pray and William discussing politics in Dutch? Hardly. Which meant no evenings at court, no glittering display at St James’s. ‘He was apt to be peevish’, wrote Gilbert Burnet, a preacher at the coronation,
‘[Ill health] put him under a necessity of being much in his closet, and of being silent and reserved; which, agreeing so well with his natural disposition, made him go off from what all his friends had advised, and he had promised them he would set about, of being more visible, open, and communicative.’12
‘Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern this people of England ... according to the statutes that Parliament agreed on and the laws and customs of the same?’
These were not words to which James had ever assented. What kind of government did they prefigure? One thing all the watching peers and MPs could agree on: only pragmatists had got what they wanted from the Convention. Two ideals had crystallised in the struggles around James’s reign: the Tory dream of a paternal monarch commanding total obedience, and the Whig model of contract government. Neither survived the Revolution intact, and neither was upheld by this ceremony. ‘They have made a King,’ wrote one radical after the Convention, ‘but have not made it impossible for that King to be like the Kings that went before him, he having the same power over the Rights of the People, and they lying as open to the mercy and stroke of ambition, and arbitrary power as before.’13 For their part, Tories felt just as disillusioned, for the coronation of a usurper, a man elected by parliament, spelled the end of every principle they held dear.
Gilbert Burnet delivered a sermon.* So did William Lloyd, Bishop of St Asaph, and Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, who had trembled as he read James’s Declaration for Liberty of Conscience and was now eager to make peace with the new régime. Back in Westminster Hall the King’s champion made the challenge, as if this monarch faced single combat rather than the armies of Louis XIV. Because everything was running late the heralds were not allowed to carry out the ceremonies appropriate to service of Patrick Lamb’s second course. It must have been a relief to Gregory King when the dignitaries tucked into their pigeons, peas, artichokes and fish, and he could finally relax.
But when the MPs, eating separately in the Exchequer Chamber, had finished comparing their coronation medallions (‘very mean’14 was John Evelyn’s verdict when he saw one), the table talk loosened by flowing wine could only have revealed the depths of their anxiety.
Tories found themselves sharing tables with men their fathers had fought and they had exiled. They did not know that England’s last revolution was over and that there was never going to be another civil war. John Wildman was still a Commonwealthman, Thomas Papillon a ‘fanatick’. They had seen the Privy Council William had put together, and to John Evelyn’s mind there was no doubting its ‘Republican spirit’.15 They would gloomily have agreed with the new King’s own assessment that Commonwealthmen formed the largest political bloc in England, and few Tories doubted that the underlying programme of all Whigs was ‘levelled against the crown and the pulling down the monarchy’.16
‘Rampant’ was Roger North’s comment on the ‘fanatics’ in that early part of 1689, and vindictive with it. ‘The old faction thought they had the ball at their toe, the town was their own, and who should contradict them?’ Exiles like Thomas Papillon and Patience Ward had scores to settle, and ‘the righting of wrongs’ was top of their agenda. The opening ceremony for William’s first parliament was delayed by an unusual but effective act
of sabotage when the robe-keeper absconded with the official robes, but, after business began, almost the first grievance to be debated was Dudley North’s illegal appointment as Sheriff. Roger loyally climbed to the gallery at St Stephens’s chapel to watch his brother face their enemies. In the end Dudley, nerveless as always, stonewalled his way through the hearing, but there was no escaping bitter reminders of the Exclusion Crisis. There among the spectators was Titus Oates, with his long chin and fluting voice, who, when Dudley was dismissed, ‘being, as I suppose, frustrated of his expectations, cried out, Aw Laard, aw Laard, aw aw! and went his way’.17
Quite apart from anxiety about their fanatic opponents, however, Tories were worried about what they had done themselves. James’s reign had kicked away the twin supports on which their whole world rested. By obeying James they would have betrayed their Church; by feasting at William’s coronation they were betraying their King. William and Mary were King and Queen, yet not even Danby could bring himself to say they were ‘rightfully so by the constitution’.18 And from such dilemmas Tories could no longer hide, for with the new monarchs crowned, they had to decide whether or not to swear oaths of loyalty to them. William had done what he could to ease their discomfort, watering down the oath to make it palatable even to men who could only accept William as King de facto. Evelyn thought the new oaths must have been written by ‘the Presbyters & Commonwealth party’,19 while Ailesbury was there when the Bishop of Peterborough delivered the new wording to Nottingham with the odd but vivid dismissal, ‘I have obeyed your commands; after all I regard it like a plate of cucumbers dressed with oil and vinegar and yet fit for nothing but to throw out of the window, and as for my part I cannot nor will not take it.’20 Every Tory, though, had to come to terms with conscience and common sense in his own way. Nottingham took the oath. So did Henry Compton and the new Marquess of Carmarthen. For these pragmatic men, there was no other way forward for England or their church. Ailesbury took the oath with a garbled half-justification to himself, his bravado hiding shame and the charge that he was swearing only to escape the penalty of double taxes. Clarendon decided to refuse two days before the first deadline passed. He had not gone to hear the new monarchs proclaimed, nor did he see them crowned.
Archbishop Sancroft refused the oaths as deadlines were extended again and again. Lambeth Palace soon became the centre of Tory opposition to the revolution. On Edmund Bohun’s visits, he saw his friends mouthing sly prayers to the King (without naming names) and showing an elaborate, stilted loyalty to the departed monarch. He was unimpressed. These men had done nothing to help James when he needed them. Sancroft and his followers seemed to have forgotten James’s attack on their own church. Bohun found their new attitude ‘so hypocritical that I hated it’.21 Bohun, in fact, had just produced the first history of the revolution, and he was one of the few to try and reconcile Tory principles with a change he knew was for the best. At his first departure James had deliberately ‘relinquished the throne’, Edmund Bohun decided, then dissolved government by destroying the Great Seal. That was enough for him. ‘We were legally discharged of our allegiance to James the Second,’ he wrote, ‘the Eleventh of December last past.’22
For some reason Edmund Bohun thought Sancroft would welcome this justification for rebellion, and took his first such paper to the Archbishop in the naïve belief that Sancroft would agree with it.
‘[Archbishop Sancroft] received it with great joy and pleasure; mentioning my other pieces with high commendations to the company; but presently fell to discourse of the Prince of Orange and the Convention in such manner that I wished I had my paper again; for I saw I had lost him. He said, “Next time you come you shall have my judgment of it.” But I went not for it: I saw what would follow; and from thenceforth he never gave me one kind word or look.’23
Bohun only went to Lambeth Palace once more. No one talked to him. No one drank with him or offered him food. He saw a servant whispering to his companion that he was not welcome and at the end of dinner everyone rose from the table without a word and turned their backs on him.
Troubled the Tories might have been at William and Mary’s coronation feast, but oddly enough the greatest strain of all would have been written on the faces of their Whig opponents.
John Evelyn might have thought William’s Privy Council republican. To Whigs, it had a very different complexion. Carmarthen as Lord President? Halifax as Lord Privy Seal? These men were Tories. Nottingham, one of the Secretaries of State, was an intimate of the High Church – it was in his nature to ‘infuse ... prerogative notions into the King’.24 Whereas the whole purpose of the Revolution was to eradicate such notions. They had ousted Danby at the Exclusion Crisis; how could he be brought back by the Revolution? But there he was, feting William’s coronation, dripping poison into his ear. Their revolution seemed to have been stolen from them.
‘PERICULOSA. It is worth serious consideration ...whether Toryism hath not the great ascendant upon our counsels and whether our navy at sea be not in Tories’ hands. And whether the late King’s army ... be not under the command of Tories. And whether the list of Deputy Lieutenants be not generally Tories. And whether the civil power be not put into the hands of Tories ... And whether Westminster Hall be not in the hands of Tories ... And by consequence whether all the power military by land and sea, civil, judicial and ... ecclesiastical ... be not in the hands of Tories.’25
So wrote Roger Morrice on 23 March, three weeks before the feast at Westminster (his complaint about the judiciary focused on a certain Mr North). He had had a foreboding the winter before that Tories would use William as a Trojan horse to re-establish their supremacy (Tories, conversely, feared the Prince would let in Commonwealthmen). Nor would it have comforted the Whigs, as they discussed their new monarch during the Coronation banquet, to hear William’s own views. Whigs would always want more, he told his wife later. The Tories were ‘the party [which] alone will support the throne’.26
This was not the outcome London radicals had endured exile for. In London, 1688 really had summoned up the ghosts of rebellions past, and, for returning exiles, 1689 seemed like a homecoming. The Revolution, they all supposed, meant final victory in the long-running struggle which went back to the Exclusion Crisis and beyond. Yet even London was not immune from Tory resurgence. When Sir John Chapman’s death left the capital looking for its fourth mayor in a year, the Tories actually put forward the arch-conservative Sir John Moore as their candidate. Roger Morrice thought that distinctly ‘impudent’ when Moore was being investigated ‘for the subversion of the government of the City of London’.27 Perhaps it was a mixture of anger and anxiety that drove London’s Whigs to turn the installation of the eventual new Mayor, the radical Thomas Pilkington, into a celebration of the Revolution – not Carmarthen’s revolution, or Henry Compton’s, certainly not the King’s, but theirs, the Glorious Revolution to restore English liberties. The installation, on 29 October, would be ‘London’s Great Jubilee’, and it would remind the new King and Queen once and for all why the Revolution had been fought.
The river was covered with boats. Music blared from bands. After a reception at Whitehall the King and Queen processed past balconies draped with flags to a specially built viewing platform at the Angel Inn on Cheapside. Among the marchers in the parade Roger Morrice was particularly struck by the City volunteers, ‘richly and gallantly accoutred’.28 John Locke’s friend Lord Mordaunt, now Earl of Monmouth, rode at their head. It was as well, once again, that Londoners could not read William’s mind; he had already asked Halifax whether ‘my Ld Mordaunt’s Regt. in the City perhaps [is] for a commonwealth’.28 The parade was well-seasoned with allegory, in case the King failed to get the point. Wisdom was mounted on a panther, Government dressed ‘in armour of silver and an helmet; in the right hand, a gold truncheon’.29 These, presumably, were the ‘hiero-glyphical representations’31 mentioned in the Gazette. Honour, Peace, Concord and Innocence acted as a revolutionary chorus. The ‘ship Perseus a
nd Andromeda’ arrived on wheels from the Levant, ‘inward bound ... laden with spices, silks, furs, sables, panthers and all manner of beasts, skins hanging in the shrouds and rigging’ (the representations were being paid for by the Skinners Company). The Sheriffs, both radicals, were knighted. The ceremonies were all very long and very pointed. By the time William had sat through the welcoming ode at the Guildhall –
‘Come boys, drink an health to the chiefs of the City,
The loyal Lord Mayor and the legal committee’32
– he was probably wishing he had stayed in Holland. But London had not finished making its point. 4–5 November would see processions for William’s birthday, the gunpowder plot, and the anniversary of the Torbay landings; on 18 December, the first anniversary of the Prince’s entrance into London, a huge street party would spread ‘a 1,000 lights’ from the Tower to Temple Bar, and burn effigies of George Jeffreys and the jury leaders who had condemned Russell and Sidney.* All this was London’s attempt to place a radical stamp on the events of 1688.
And it was from London radicals that a last effort would be made to overcome the disappointments of the Convention. In March 1690 a committee of Whigs, John Wildman, Thomas Papillon and Patience Ward among them, prepared a draft for the new City charter. Here at last was a document which might have cheered the exiles of the Croom Elbow coffee house, but it came too late. All through the winter of 1689–90 the tide continued to turn against the Whigs. In January the Convention parliament met for the last time. William saw the Whigs’ faces ‘change colour twenty times’33 during the speech which dissolved them. A year after the revolution, he had decided publicly to throw his weight behind the Tories.‡
The election of 1690 would be the hardest fought England had ever seen, and the result was a dramatic swing to the Tories (the irony being that it was caused as much as anything by William’s own unpopularity). In London, four Tories were elected in place of the Whig Convention members. June saw the Tories recapture Common Council, and Whig lieutenants replaced by ‘the most violent Tories in the City’.34 Under James II, Londoners had resented royal interference and sympathised with the exiled Whigs. Now their mood shifted to anger against the Dutch occupation and Dutch King. The radical charter was lost. London’s Revolution was over.
The Last Revolution Page 27
