Fortunately for d’Avaux the impossible mission was about to come to an end, at least for him. He fell victim to French court intrigue, a game which Mary of Modena turned out to play with some skill. Mary had fallen under the spell of the Duc de Lauzun, the plausible adventurer who had helped her escape across the Thames on that stormy night in December 1688, and it was Lauzun who was now appointed to replace d’Avaux and command the French troops, 7,000 of them, which Louis despatched to join the campaign in Ireland.
From William’s point of view this additional force, and Schomberg’s failure to dent James’s position, made it clear that he could avoid the Irish crisis no longer. William could see himself being dragged ever further from Holland, but his failure to recapture the island was damaging his standing among the English, while James’s gathering strength made further delay impossible. In June 1690, more than a year after James’s landing at Kinsale, William bowed to the inevitable and crossed the Irish Sea.
Queen Mary stayed behind as Regent.
The prospect frankly terrified her. If William had failed to govern English politicians, Mary was still more out of her depth. She had never taken any interest in politics. Her education was limited, her experience of business nonexistent. When she first received the Council William had left for her – a mixed bag of Whigs and Tories, all at daggers drawn – it was the first time she had ever really engaged in government. ‘By nature timorous’,12 she was distraught at the thought she might let her husband down. There seems little doubt that Mary was afraid of her husband, whose bullying way with her attracted widespread disapproval. During their first conversation about marriage, in the garden at Honslaerdyck, William had admitted to William Temple, that ‘he might, perhaps, not be very easy for a wife to live with ... [and] if he should meet with one to give him trouble at home, ‘twas what he should not be able to bear, who was like to have enough abroad in the course of his life’.13 Mary ‘was never known to complain of [William’s behaviour] herself,’ wrote William Legge, ‘but I have heard most of her servants speak of it with great indignation’.14 Despite this (and for reasons best known to herself), Mary seems genuinely to have loved her husband, writing him letters shot through with concern.
‘Everything I hear stir, I think brings me a letter ... I have stayed till I am almost asleep in hopes; but they are vain, and I must once more go to bed and wish to be waked with a letter from you ... Adieu, but do love me and I can bear anything.’15
Government and her husband’s absence would have been anxieties enough for Mary, but the Queen had a still more hideous prospect to contemplate as William departed: the likelihood that her husband and father were about to meet in pitched battle. ‘If either should have perished in the action,’ she wrote, ‘how terrible it must have been to me. These were the cruel thoughts I had upon his going.’16
It was under intense pressure, therefore, that Mary first encountered the harsher realities of government. ‘People are never satisfied!’ she wrote to William in astonishment. She had no confidant. Her face swelled up as a physical sign of the strain she was under. ‘I must hear of business, which being a thing I am so new in, and so unfit for, does but break my brains the more, and not ease my heart.’ She never knew what to say in Council, was convinced the politicans were meeting behind her back (they were), and to top it all had to undergo this baptism of fire in the full glare of royal publicity:
‘I must play [cards] twice a week, nay I must laugh and talk, tho’ never so much against my will. I believe I dissemble very ill to those who know me ... All my motions are so watched, and all I do so observed, that if I eat less, or speak less, or look more grave, all is lost in the opinion of the world; so that I have this misery added to that of your absence and my fears for your dear person, that I must grin when my heart is ready to break, and talk when my heart is so oppressed I can scarce breathe.’17*
Whigs, disgruntled by the 1690 election, did their best to make England ungovernable and blame it on the Tories. Monmouth was the worst (‘I must tell you ... how he endeavours to fright me’), trying to bribe Mary with £200,000 if she would dissolve Parliament, then leaking Council minutes to John Wildman who, she was assured by Russell, ‘was of the Commonwealth party, and his whole design was to make stirs’.18 Meanwhile, England faced invasion as French ships freely cruised the Channel – later in the summer the French would even raid Teignmouth – while for defence Mary had to depend on an army whose officers openly drank King James’s health.
Yet somehow Mary rose to the challenge. She even discovered a vein of waspish spirit to combat the politicians who alternately browbeat and sidelined her. Carmarthen was ‘of a temper I can never like’, she wrote to William, Lord Stuart ‘weak and obstinate’, the Lord Chamberlain ‘too lazy to give himself the trouble of business, so of little use’. Nottingham (the closest to a kindred spirit) was ‘suspected by most as not true to the Government’, while Lord Monmouth (Locke’s friend) ‘is mad, and his wife [Carey], who is madder, governs him ... I will say nothing of Lord Marlborough’, Mary went on, referring to John Churchill, whose wife was the best friend of her sister Anne, ‘because ‘tis he I could say the most of & can never deserve either trust or esteem’.19
In an atmosphere of ‘frequent tidings and great fears’ (as Stephen Towgood biblically described the mood of rumour and panic), orders were given to round up the leading supporters of King James. Samuel Pepys was escorted to the Tower; a warrant was put out for Dudley North. Clarendon was another considered unreliable, but since he was the Queen’s uncle no one in Council dared mention his name. In the end Mary, newly decisive, raised it herself. ‘There was too much against him to leave him out of the list that was making’, she reported to William. ‘I can’t tell if I ought to have said this, but when I knew your mind upon it and had seen his letter, I believed it as necessary he should be clapped up as any.’
Ailesbury was on the list as well, but with some bravado he went to the palace to plead his innocence with Mary, a childhood friend. He was impressed to find her calmly playing cards. The Queen’s facade was evidently more impressive than she thought; from somewhere she had found the strength she needed to cope with the crisis. Indeed, ‘I am so little afraid,’ she wrote to William,
‘that I begin to fear I have not sense enough to apprehend the danger ... for so much a coward as you think me, I fear more for your dear person than my poor carcase.’20
That letter, however, was written on the eve of the very disaster everyone feared. The French fleet outmanoeuvred Herbert’s combined English and Dutch force off Beachy Head, and the result was catastrophic defeat. Worse, it was defeat without honour, for everyone agreed that while the Dutch had fought bravely, the English ships offered them no support. Nothing now stood between the French and an armed landing, and Nottingham wrote to warn William that their army could reach London in days. Not long afterwards, indeed, the Queen received an express that they were disembarking at Torbay. Further defeat was reported from Flanders, where the French won a victory at Fleurus.
It could have spelled the end of everything, but better tidings were already on the way. Clarendon, in the Tower, was deafened by the great guns on Tower Wharf. They were not repelling French ships, but firing salutes. A courier had arrived from Ireland. William had defeated James’s army at Boyne Water, north of Dublin.
The courier might have brought very different news. On the day before the battle, William had been inspecting the lines with some of his staff officers when a Jacobite artillery unit saw them and fired off some sighting shots. A 6-pound cannonball ‘planted upon the right shoulder of the Prince of Orange, and took away a piece of his coat, and struck off the skin’.21 So close did six pounds of metal come to changing history – Mary could hardly by herself have resisted her father’s return. William shrugged off the flesh wound, however; no one ever doubted his physical courage. And at last he was away from English politics, out in the open air, doing what he loved best. ‘He is reported extraordinarily t
o love camps,’ Roger Morrice wrote, ‘and can abide on horseback 30 hours together.’22
He also brought back from the reconnaissance a good idea of James’s position. The north bank which William occupied sloped gradually down to the river, where the ground became boggy. For the past two days James had been taking up positions on the far bank. The main subject of discussion among William’s military advisers was whether James planned to make his stand there, in a position which seemed admirably suited to defence, or would pull back to Dublin. The other subject of debate concerned the relative merits of the two armies. The most striking thing about both was their European complexion. The Boyne may be a key date in British history, but there was nothing very British about the valley of the Boyne on 30 June 1690. Only one of William’s staff officers was able to speak English – their discussions took place in French. William did have English regiments in his army, but Schomberg sensibly planned to keep them in reserve; the men William trusted to fight for him were his stalwart Blue Guards and French Huguenots. About the strength of their opponents much less was known. Lauzun had brought 7,000 French regulars with him, well-trained and well-equipped, but how far his orders permitted him to risk them was less certain. And the thrifty Sun King had not given these regiments for free; in their place he had drafted back 7,000 Irishmen for training in France. They had taken ship with d’Avaux in April, Dillon’s and Feilding’s regiments and three others. Although they did not yet know it, those Irish soldiers would remain in exile forever, the first of the Wild Geese. As for those who stayed behind to form the bulk of James’s army, they were an unknown quantity. D’Avaux had written glowingly of the fighting qualities of the Irish, but their training was limited and they had no experience of European warfare.
What William’s advisers could not even have dreamed of was the disorder in James’s camp. Lauzun was hopelessly unsuited to his mission, ‘a man of no service or merit either in cabinet or camp’, in Ailesbury’s opinion, a General who ‘never had smelled the powder’.23 Perhaps it would not have mattered, if James was still the man who had studied under Turenne and stood firm in the carnage of Sole Bay, but his nerve was gone. On the evening of Monday 30 June the King gave the order to retire. His timing could not have been worse. He could have made the same decision twenty-four hours earlier and moved south unchallenged; he could have stood and fought; this was the worst of all options. ‘Why did he not use the common rules of art military for the strengthening of an inferior army against a superior?’ wrote one of his officers afterwards. ‘How is it possible that such gross errors should be committed in the government of the army?’24 To compound those errors, James did nothing to enforce the order until the following morning, so that when his troops began to withdraw east along the river, they were right under the gaze of William’s army.
Direct in warfare as he was circumspect in politics, William gave the order to attack. What fighting there was at the Boyne was furious, brief and bloody. Schomberg was killed. Soldiers mingled together in the marshy shallows. Without national uniforms to distinguish them, William’s troops wore green twigs for identification, James’s, white paper cockades. It was a fierce enough melée. The untrained Irish did, indeed, justify d’Avaux’s hopes for them – but without support. Lauzun’s troops remained in the rear; French casualties that day would number six. From his position by Dunore Church, James remarked that the enemy were gaining ground to either side. It was the moment Turenne would have committed reserves, or manoeuvred to counter these new threats. The King did neither. Instead, he gave the order to retreat, then climbed into his carriage and drove towards Dublin at full speed.
‘In England,’ he told the wondering courtiers who greeted him at Dublin Castle, ‘I had an army ... which would have fought, but they proved false and deserted me; here I had an army which was loyal enough, but they wanted true courage to stand by me at the critical minute.’25 If he really said such a thing, it was a cowardly apportionment of blame. ‘No fault could be attributed to the army,’ countered one of its officers later, ‘because the army was not tried, and such of it as were did merveilles ... The King’s army would have obtained the victory, if it had been brought to combat at the Boyne ... The King had no solid reason to quit Ireland.’26
But quit Ireland he did. ‘[I] do now resolve to shift for myself,’ he informed his wondering supporters, according to another account, ‘and so, gentlemen, must you.’27 Afterwards the King would claim that Lauzun had begged him to leave the field of battle for his own safety – had even warned him he would not be safe in Dublin, whence his advisers urged him along the coast road to a ship. Whatever the truth, it was a shamefaced King of England who reached Paris a few days later, ‘beaten’, as Evelyn scathingly put it, ‘with the sad tidings of his own defeat’.28 To make matters worse, the French court were still celebrating the Prince of Orange’s death by cannonball when a travel-stained James stepped out of his coach. ‘Very cold, though civil’ was Louis’s reception. On James’s part there was ‘great confusion ... But the court of France could not forbear speaking great disrespect, even in his own hearing’.29
The Boyne was, indeed, a desperate failure by James. There would be times over the next few years when a return to England did seem possible. But never again would he come so close to the man who had taken his throne. He had failed as politician, as general, as leader, as King. In England his supporters were left seeking yet more excuses for him. But it was the Irish who had the most damning word for him. In folksong he would become Seamus an chaca, James who shit himself.
William, meanwhile, had won a famous victory. The Boyne would not, as he hoped, end the war in Ireland immediately. The Irish troops, and leaders like Patrick Sarsfield, proved themselves worthy of far more respect than James had shown them, in a war which would drag on for another year. The immediate threat to his régime was over, however. Had William been killed at the Boyne there can be little doubt that the settlement of 1689 would have disintegrated. Mary would have found it hard to resist her own father’s return. Perhaps James would have taken control again; maybe the ‘fanatics’ would indeed have propelled England into another commonwealth – or civil war. As it was, England had a breathing space.
There would be time, then, to discover what would happen in a nation of competing religious and political interests. Would it achieve balance or sink, as doomsayers predicted, into chaos? The time had come to find out what kind of world the Revolution had created.
VI
‘AN INFINITE DESIRE OF KNOWLEDGE’
PARISHIONER Lord, why don’t you excommunicate the author, and seize upon his books?
DOCTOR Ay, Sir, time was, – but now it seems a man may believe according to his own sense, and not as the Church directs; there’s a Toleration establish’d, you know.1
John Toland, 1696
It was in the very worst days of his exile that John Locke embarked on the study which would be his masterpiece, his Essay on Human Understanding. James’s spies were following the radicals from church to coffee house, English letters brought news of the King’s widening ambitions, while to the exiles, in winter 1686, there appeared not the faintest chance of returning home. So it must have been with relief that Locke turned from a dismal political future to more abstract questions: how we know what we know; how we can be certain of it; how we can find the limits of our own knowledge.
He finished the manuscript on the last day of 1686, and knew, when he looked over it, that the Essay carried the scars of exile: ‘I find the ill effects of writing in patches and at distant times as this whole essay has been’, he wrote to Edward Clarke.
‘Of what use it may be to any other I cannot tell, but, if I flatter not myself, it has been of great help to ... the search of knowledge ... And if it has cost me some pains in thinking, it has rewarded me by the light I imagine I have received from it.’2
That humble assessment of the Essay carried no hint of the storm it would eventually provoke. But for the moment there were
more immediate tempests to ride out. Locke’s manuscript began to circulate – along with a French precis which had appeared in Jean Le Clerc’s Bibliothèque Universelle – just as events were accelerating towards the Revolution. It was hardly the moment for philosophical speculation. The Queen’s pregnancy was progressing through rumour and innuendo; the Bishops were processing downstream to the Tower. When the wrappings fell away from a solid inch of epistemology, most of Locke’s friends made their excuses. Anne Grigg pleaded that her son had borrowed it, and that since the abrégé was in French, ‘till you think fit to make use of your own country language, I cannot speak more particularly’.3 In any case, Anne Grigg’s ‘head and heart’, like those of most of Locke’s correspondents, were ‘very full of what now fills all gazettes’. Political events would keep England’s literati, Locke included, occupied until after William and Mary had been proclaimed. Only then, back in London, did Locke set about publishing his backlog of work. The Two Treatises on Government was licensed on 23 August 1689 and the Epistola de Tolerantia on 3 October. Both were produced by Awnsham Churchill. For the Essay Locke turned to a different bookseller, Thomas Bassett, with whom he signed a contract on 24 May. It earned him about £29, plus twenty-five unbound copies, and he celebrated publication with Edward Clarke. ‘I am at the tavern,’ wrote the learned philosopher to Mary Clarke, ‘with your husband and other blades of his gang as debauched as he.’4 Then he settled down to await the response.
Later Locke would remember with some regret the quiet respect which greeted the first couple of editions. Friends among the international virtuosi hailed it as a breakthrough in knowledge, but most were still busy with politics: the crisis in Ireland, the endless political dogfighting as William attempted the impossible task of persuading Whig and Tory ministers to cohabit. Locke himself was desperately busy in those first months after the Revolution. ‘Although I am not undertaking any public duties,’ he wrote to Limborch,
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