Maybe there were other reasons, however, for the good humour of Dissenters like Stephen Towgood. If the Anglican Church suddenly found itself losing power, it was not only because of Toleration. It faced an equally debilitating challenge from within, for the Revolution divided the church from top to bottom. When it became clear that Archbishop Sancroft and seven other bishops would refuse to swear allegiance to the new régime, and that hundreds of Anglican clergymen would follow suit, the Church of England, champion of religious unity, found itself in schism.
The first deadline for taking the oaths was set for 1 March 1689. William had no desire to make martyrs. It passed, and so did a second, and four days later Clarendon heard ‘that those Lords who did not appear ... to take the oath, were passed gently over’.15 A June limit went by without action, and then one in September, and another the following year; and still the old Archbishop sat on in self-imposed exile in Lambeth. The high-minded circle about him had no doubt of their own purity. Once they had been lordly masters of the Church; now they were the persecuted few. ‘The pure Church of England,’ wrote George Hickes, one of the so-called ‘non-jurors’ who refused the oath of allegiance, ‘with her pure worship, may be seen and heard like the church of Jerusalem, in the first persecution of Christianity, in the upper rooms.’16 Non-jurors saw themselves as the conscience of the Tory party. Eight bishops (five of whom had been sent to the Tower by James) would refuse to take the oaths, and four hundred-odd clergy. For two years William Sancroft remained in Lambeth Palace, a ghost at the Revolution feast, a sulky reproof to anyone crossing the river to Westminster.
William waited as long as he could before filling the vacant sees. Only in 1691 did John Evelyn, Sancroft’s friend, report the arrival of a nervous Sheriff who found the palace occupied only by Sancroft’s nephew, who ‘refusing to [give up the palace] upon the Queen’s message,* was dispossessed by the sherriff & imprisoned’.17 Before he left for Suffolk, Sancroft had given Roger North his old bass-viol as a keepsake. Roger North kept it ‘as a sacred relic of his memory’.18 Roger North insisted to his dying day that he was attorney to the See of Canterbury and went on stubbornly issuing legal documents in Sancroft’s name. He would refer to Sancroft’s successor as a ‘pseudo-Archbishop’. Contrary to general expectation, that successor was not Henry Compton, who would perhaps have mollified the less extreme non-jurors. Lambeth’s new occupant enraged them even more. John Tillotson was an intellectual, a friend of John Locke, who came from a Dissenting background and – adding insult to High Church injury – had married Oliver Cromwell’s niece. ‘Null and invalid and schismatical’,19 spat one non-juror when Tillotson’s appointment was announced. The resulting schism would diminish the church’s authority quite as much as the Toleration Act. Thirty years later Voltaire would famously joke that the English were a nation of many faiths but only one sauce. ‘If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of despotism, if there were only two they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty and they live in peace.’20 On the ruined outer walls of the Church of England something like a free market in religion sprang up, in which worshippers could make their choices without coercion. Like its political prospect, England’s religious landscape after 1689 would be one of diversity and competition, with simple and clear relationships being replaced by competing alternatives, and central authority giving way to an unending struggle in which no faction could ever wield total control.
In religion, as in politics, that was a prospect no one had set eyes on before. In October 1690 the veteran radical Sir John Maynard died. Maynard’s life encompassed the struggles of an entire century. He had been born only a year after Elizabeth I died. He had watched Charles I dissolve parliaments, fought in the Civil Wars, seen the King executed and lived through the Commonwealth. He had watched the Restoration in 1660, and taken part in the Exclusion Crisis. He had played an active role in the Convention. His last public task had been to draw up a Regency Bill to empower Mary while William travelled to Ireland to meet the threat from James. Maynard’s description of that challenge summed up the whole adventure, political and religious, on which England had now embarked. He called it ‘making a map of a country we have never seen’.21
Tories had always said that diversity could only lead to anarchy. It would soon become clear, moreover, that the challenge which disunited Christians faced was more serious than had at first appeared, for it came not even from within Protestantism, not even from within Christianity. ‘This Revolution’, wrote William Stephens, ‘has wonderfully increased men’s prejudices ... against the truth of religion itself.’22 The new intellectual world raised questions about the very fundamentals of belief. Without a united church to defend it, Christianity was about to be put through a test it had never encountered before.
V
‘THE SAD TIDINGS OF HIS OWN DEFEAT’
A week after the Coronation, John Temple, son of William Temple, the former ambassador to the Hague, took a boat just west of London Bridge. The boatman paid him little attention: he saw a well-dressed young man who settled himself in the stern and started writing on the back of a letter. Shooting London Bridge had tested nerves when James fled London. The boatman had to concentrate as they swooped between the narrow arches. Then he looked round to make some comment – and found that his boat was empty.
His passenger had left a suicide note on the seat:
‘My folly in undertaking what I was not able to execute hath done the King great prejudice. May his undertakings prosper and may he have an abler servant than I.’1
John Temple, a diplomat rising in his father’s footsteps, had assured William that he could solve the problem of Ireland. An Irish prisoner-of-war, Lieutenant General Hamilton, was convinced he could bring James’s Lord Deputy, Tyrconnel, over to William’s side, and had persuaded Temple to send him to Ireland as an envoy. Once there, however, Hamilton first delayed, then declared for James. John Temple had been duped. The whole plot was simply a means of giving Tyrconnel more time to prepare. Virtually the whole island of Ireland was now under James’s control, and from it he threatened a return to reclaim his other two kingdoms.
For the moment any talk of a long-term future either religious or political seemed premature. Indeed, the Revolution faced danger on every side. James had issued a declaration from Dublin where he held court, summoned a parliament, and counted his swelling army. Louis had promised troops and military advisers to support him, and despatched none other than the Comte d’Avaux, that old foe of the Prince of Orange, as personal envoy to the English King. Scotland had also slid into rebellion. Initially the Revolution had seemed to go smoothly there, with an offer of the crown and a ‘Claim of Right’ along the lines of the English settlement. But then Dundee had raised the standard of King James and at Killiecrankie, in July 1689, had defeated the Williamite army under Mackay. Dundee himself had been killed in the final moments of the battle, but the counter-revolution burned on. It flared up all over England, as well, in defiant pamphlets and marks of dissent, in soldiers drinking confusion to the Prince, in clergy refusing the oaths and Archbishop Sancroft holding Lambeth Palace against all change. Roger Morrice suspected the Tories of doing all they could to encourage public discontent.
Some took more active measures. A Panton Street pewterer called Taylor was given a piece of lace to solder into the false bottom of a smuggler’s brandy pot, but when he unpicked the lace he discovered naval documents, details of the King’s speech, and cyphered correspondence. They were destined for the court in exile. On the Prince of Wales’s first birthday, 10 June 1689, Roger Morrice heard bells and, going to investigate, was told by the bellringers that a group of strangers had approached them, paid them to start ringing and then disappeared. A statue of the new King was erected at Guildhall; someone hacked off the sceptre. A Jacobite plot was launched in Scotland by Sir James Montgomery (‘perhaps the worst and most restless man alive’2), who, after being passed over for Secretary of State, co
ntacted James with a plan to have him recalled by the Scottish parliament. Ailesbury knew of Jacobite meetings at an inn in Drury Lane. Feversham and Dartmouth, James’s old captains, met in Covent Garden Piazza, at the house of a mercer called Rigby. Jacobites were also discovering that much of the English establishment, particularly the Anglican Church, was far from solid in its support for the new régime. Humphrey Prideaux, in Ipswich, tried to deal with a Jacobite preacher in his parish, ‘but found him backed by men of that power both in Church and State that I durst not meddle with him for fear of drawing them upon myself’. When he referred the matter up to his bishop, he ‘found his Lordship as cautious in the matter as myself’.3
Abroad, affairs seemed scarcely more positive for William and Mary. France and England were now formally at war (France had earlier declared war on the United Provinces) and at the end of April 1689 a French fleet defeated Admiral Herbert in Bantry Bay, precipitating invasion panic. French ships cruised the Channel, French armies readied themselves in Flanders, and the Revolution had few friends to call to its aid. Sir John Reresby angled for a diplomatic posting but Halifax told him not to bother because so few countries had accepted the new régime. For months after the coronation the Emperor Leopold refused to swallow William’s insult to the institution of monarchy. He eventually signed the letter recognising him with tears in his eyes.
Add to this a political climate which worsened all through the winter of 1689–90 to produce, John Evelyn thought, ‘as universal a discontent, against K. William ... as was before against K. James’,4* and the King almost reached a desperate resolution.
‘He thought he could not trust the Tories, and he resolved he would not trust the Whigs: so he fancied the Tories would be true to the Queen, and confide in her ... He therefore resolved to go over to Holland, and leave the government in the Queen’s hands.’
‘Many tears were shed’, apparently, in persuading William to stay. The 1690 elections were supposed to remedy the situation, but, as Burnet went on, they ‘went generally for men who would probably have declared for King James, if they could have known how to manage matters for him’. The Whigs acclaimed William but he didn’t trust them; as for the Tories ‘there was as wise and honest men [in England] as were in any part of the world,’ the King told his favourite Portland, ‘(and fetched a great sigh) but they are not my friends’.’5 They were not, indeed. The new Tory parliament refused to enact an oath abjuring James II. John Evelyn compared the wet and windy winter to ‘such as went before the death of the usurper Cromwell’.6 The need to launch a military campaign in Ireland almost came as a relief. ‘The going to a campaign’, William told Burnet as he packed his bags, ‘was naturally no unpleasant thing to him: he was sure he understood that better than how to govern England.’7
The only comfort William might have drawn, had he but known it, was that affairs in Ireland were going even worse for James than they were for him.
The Comte d’Avaux was unimpressed by Ireland. Kinsale could muster only ten horses and three broken-down carts to take the royal party to Dublin. He had worried about his mission from the moment James boarded a French warship, the Saint Michel, to make the crossing. Louis XIV had provided detailed instructions: d’Avaux was to bring Irish Catholics behind James while reassuring English Protestants, and at the same time contriving ‘to reconcile the different interests of those around the King of England so that they all work together unanimously for the good of their master’s service and the happy outcome of his designs’8 – something they had signally failed to do in 1688. To make matters worse it was clear that none of the protagonists in the Irish war had any more interest in Ireland than d’Avaux. James saw it as a stepping-stone back to London, Louis hoped it would divert the Prince of Orange from Flanders, while William simply regarded Ireland as a highly unwelcome distraction from affairs in mainland Europe. None of them had the least interest in the island or its inhabitants.
Finally, James’s ragbag of advisers, their orders ‘badly given and still worse executed’, did little to make d’Avaux’s job easier, and, as a crowning misery, the man he was there to help proved aggravating almost beyond belief.
‘The one thing, Sire, which will trouble us most, is the irresolution of the King of England, who is always changing his mind and doesn’t always reach the best decisions. He also has a habit of becoming embroiled in detail and spending all his time on it, while passing over far more important matters.’9
Neither his experience at Faversham nor his expulsion from London had changed James. The character d’Avaux reported back to Louis was irritating in every conceivable way: stupid, stubborn, vacillating, irrational, vain, cowardly, unrealistic, and – perhaps most shocking of all to a servant of the Sun King – unprofessional. Louis XIV wrote detailed memos on Irish wool imports. James was unable even to mount his own horse guard, and when d’Avaux pointed it out he was rewarded with a silly joke from Melfort, James’s bullish Secretary of State, about putting them on carthorses. There were endless, pointless meetings with James and Melfort. ‘We talk but reach no decisions and since we always come back to the same subjects, I have begged the King that the moment he has made a decision, Mylord Melfort should straightaway issue a written order and have it carried out.’ After his frustrating experience in Holland, d’Avaux was determined that this time no diplomatic evasion would obscure his message.* Every frustration was reported back to Louis. Eventually he would resort to putting his remonstrances to James in writing simply to distance himself from the mounting chaos.
For what soon became apparent was that this mission was more rather than less complicated than d’Avaux had feared. For while James was now an object of pity, the underlying problems with his reign had not gone away. And nowhere brought them so sharply into focus as Ireland.
Ireland was all James had ever asked for – a Catholic country, Francophile, which accepted him as King. Unfortunately, Catholicism and Francophilia were exactly the qualities which made James unacceptable to Protestant England. The more he relied on Irish Catholics and French money, the less likely he ever was to regain the Kingdom which mattered to him. Ireland was a neat encapsulation of the conundrum which had made his rule impossible in the first place.
‘I know’, Ailesbury wrote loftily, ‘that King James repented often the calling of the [Dublin] parliament, who behaved themselves rudely enough, because that King James would not do all things that those poor and violent heads had in their little brains.’10* There was no unanimity of any kind in the Irish parliament which d’Avaux watched assembling in the summer of 1689. They were divided between ethnic Irish and English, between ‘Old English’ Catholics like Tyrconnel and ‘New English’ incomers. There were divisions again between all of these and James’s remaining English and Scottish advisers, themselves split, as his court ever had been, between Catholics and Protestants.
There were gulfs here which a better politician than James could not have bridged. Some of the Irish would have been quite content to let England go – much good had it ever done them – and promote an independent Ireland under the protection of France. Meanwhile English Tories still wanted Ireland as a vassal state. No sooner had the Dublin parliament met than it launched into bitter arguments about land: Cromwell had seized land from Catholics and given it to Protestant settlers; Charles II had confirmed that settlement; some had then sold their land on to different Catholics. It was an impossible tangle and James, who was at least sensible enough to know that every word spoken in Dublin was read in London, could see exactly what England would say if he redistributed Protestant land to Catholics.
At the same time, he made matters no easier for himself. More than once the ambassador of the Sun King found himself teaching James the basics of parliamentary politics; on one occasion he physically stopped James climbing into his coach and ‘remonstrated with him as forcefully as I could that it neither suited his dignity nor interest to commit himself [too early], and that he should only allow his exact wishes to b
e known when he is certain of having them obeyed’.11 To any student of James’s reign, in short, most of what happened in Dublin was depressingly familiar. James threatened to dissolve Parliament; Irish MPs countered that they would not follow him to war – frightening talk which d’Avaux also heard among common soldiers in the street. And war in Ireland was now inevitable. Northern Protestant towns like Londonderry and Inniskillen were holding out against siege, and William’s general, Count Schomberg, landed in the late summer of 1689 to support them. Despairing, contemptuous, d’Avaux watched the English King fail to head off these developments, fail to defuse the political situation, and fail to prepare his own forces. James would not read d’Avaux’s memo on the expedition’s finances. When the envoy explained patiently that Louis’s funds would not last forever, Melfort casually asked him to write home for more. James blustered that he needed no more troops; d’Avaux drew from his pocket the order for eight new battalions which the King had just signed. Before long the King’s nose started to bleed again.
The Last Revolution Page 29
