Nor had more direct Jacobite activity ceased, although so far it had achieved little concrete success. Ailesbury thought his Jacobite friends ‘so flashy that if they did but dream that King James was coming over, they imagined it when they awakened’. One major plot had come to nothing when James’s former Secretary of State, Lord Preston, attempted the journey to St Germain in the winter of 1690 to prepare for an invasion the following year. The Government had been tipped off and a boat was waiting to intercept him. Ailesbury thought Preston ‘had good learning and tolerable parts, but given so much to the bottle that it dulled much of the good understanding that God had endowed him with’.4 Several bottles resolved him to die heroically, ‘but by next morning that heat went off; and when he saw death in full view, his heart failed him’.5 Preston’s evidence would damn former Bishop Turner, Clarendon, and Dartmouth, who fell ill in the Tower and died soon afterwards.
Jacobite hopes were kept up, however, by the possibility of William’s own death. Just weeks after Preston’s journey, William lost his way at sea while trying to get ashore in Holland for a meeting of the League of Augsburg, and spent sixteen hours drifting through fog in an open boat. The merest chance of current or tide could have drowned him and opened England to the return of King James. Meanwhile, there were always signs of public disaffection to encourage plotters. The theatre was one stage for demonstrations. Dryden’s libretto for King Arthur seemed innocent enough – but was it really all it seemed?
‘My Britons brook no foreign power,
To Lord it in a land, sacred to freedom.’6
Was that barb directed at the French, or at England’s Dutch King? Roger Morrice reported an audience in another play packed by Jacobites who cheered every mention of a king ‘returning home’.
On the political front, meanwhile, William was finding the new landscape of competing parties increasingly hard to manage. His attempts to force Whig and Tory ministers to cohabit seemed to create only confusion. ‘You say you do not understand the present scheme,’ Hampden told the rising Whig politician Robert Harley in November 1690, ‘I don’t know who does, and that which is most melancholy and discouraging is that there seems to be no scheme at all.’7 Never had the régime looked so unstable. ‘Contempt and an aversion for [the Dutch]’, wrote Gilbert Burnet, ‘went almost to a mutiny.’8 When the King suspended habeas corpus under the invasion threat, radicals must have wondered whether it was for this they had supported a revolution.
The threat would again be faced by Queen Mary alone. In 1692, for the third year in a row, William spent the fighting season abroad, this time with his armies in Flanders, where every summer brought renewed confrontation with the French. Mary’s only comfort was that she felt more confident, now, in holding the reins of government. She had embarked on a course of reading in English history, while William’s approval of her past regencies had made her blossom.
‘Judge ... what a joy it was to me to have your approbation of my behaviour, and the kind way you express it in is the only comfort I can possibly have in your absence. What other people say I ever suspect, but when you tell me I have done well, I could be almost vain upon it.’9
As panic spread, Jacobite suspects were rounded up as usual. Ailesbury was staying at a Jacobite safe house in Soho Square, and awoke one morning to the sound of a Proclamation being called out under his window. He started up, but ‘being drowsy and the bed pretty low’ tore off his fingernail on a rusty nail – the resulting infection would lay him low for the next three weeks. But in any case, thanks perhaps to Mary’s friendship, his name was not on the list this year. Ailesbury retreated to his estate, to wait for a change in the wind just as Williamites had waited four years before. ‘Bricklayers that were building a wall told my servants that I had always my nose in the air. It was very true, for I watched the weather-cocks continually.’10 So did all Jacobites, and they watched them in a mood of triumphant expectation. ‘King James was a coming’, an Ipswich man taunted his landlord. ‘If he would not declare for him now, he would be glad to do it two months hence, for he was a coming ... they were sure of the major part of the fleet.’11
The climax came on 19 May. Ailesbury was back in Soho Square, by then, and heard the bells of St Giles’s begin to ring. A moment later a servant ran upstairs, shouting the news. James’s return would have to wait another year. The French had been defeated in a great battle at sea.
As always, Queen Mary took the victory as a commentary on her own piety. ‘The 19th of May,’ she wrote, ‘[I] happened to be more than ordinarily devout, which I take particular notice of.’12 Out at sea, Edward Russell, Admiral of a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet, was aware of no such divine aid when he sighted the French ships off La Hogue. The battle was a muddle of drifting smoke and shifts in the wind. ‘I can give no particular account of things,’ he reported that evening, ‘but that the French were beaten ... I saw in the night 3 or 4 ships blow up but I know not what they are.’ The messengers who brought news of the victory could add vivid descriptions of the carnage of war at sea. One ‘saw a French man-of-war of about 70 guns blow up, and another three-deck ship on fire’,13 while another reported ‘that for 2 leagues together, the sea was full of wrecks of ships’.
It was not the end of the war. Russell failed to press home his advantage; in Flanders the French took Namur, and a battle at Steenkirk was bloodily unsuccessful. La Hogue did, though, end James’s hopes for an early return. The Jacobites would have to re-examine the alternative they offered.
In the spring of 1693, Ailesbury finally journeyed to the court in exile at St Germain. It was far from easy. First he had to go into hiding with a farmer in Romney Marsh, whose inhabitants seemed no better than Harry Moon and his friends – Ailesbury was warned not to leave a good horse in the marsh overnight. As for the farmer’s hospitality, ‘he had a runlet of thin gut wine from Calais, and sour so I was forced to boil it; once or twice a fisherman brought some small flounders dressed with base butter; once he gave me a cat instead of a rabbit; in fine I suffered more than I can express’.14 Boiled cat was only the beginning of trials which would include violent sea-sickness brought on by the smell of sailors grilling mackerel; it would be more than a fortnight before Ailesbury finally rode up the drive towards the old chateau of St Germain-en-Laye.
The palace stood near cliffs above the Seine. A new chateau had been constructed on the cliff-edge, with hanging gardens tumbling down to the river, and a parterre laid out by Le Nôtre. The old chateau which James inhabited was a medieval foundation with modern construction raised above it – not unlike his own monarchy. St Germain had been Louis’s principal residence before he enlarged Versailles. The architect Hardouin-Mansart had divided old from new with an odd-looking balcony which corseted the building at second-floor level; baroque corner pavilions had been added to disguise the awkward plan, and provide the innumerable antechambers and closets which a modern monarchy required. The additions were clever, but not quite successful either architecturally or for court etiquette. Hence Louis’s decision to start afresh at Versailles.
As soon as he arrived Ailesbury sensed the fractious atmosphere. The court was ‘filled with curious persons, and knaves, and spies, and the former as dangerous as the latter’.15 It was overwhelmingly Catholic; only sixteen Protestants remained among the hundred-odd courtiers in James’s immediate household. The Protestants, moreover, felt persecuted both by court intrigue against them, and by Louis’s refusal to permit Protestant worship of any kind on his territory – including funerals. These were the complaints with which Ailesbury was overwhelmed as soon as he arrived. Among the courtiers he found familiar faces, including Melfort, the aggressive Secretary of State who had caused so much trouble in Ireland. Others of James’s old inner circle were gone, though. George Jeffreys had not long survived his own taste of imprisonment, dying in April 1689 in the Tower, where he was buried. ‘He had drunk very much sherry and brandy since he was prisoner,’ Roger Morrice reported, ‘sometimes enough in one day
to have killed 5 or 6 men.’16 Sunderland had betrayed his master and returned to England. Father Petre had sought a Cardinal’s hat, but Louis had told his own confessor, Père La Chaise, ‘that Father Peters might go to the Devil, for a reward of the mischiefs he had done in England’.17 He had died in March 1691. Nonetheless St Germain was crowded, and beyond the château itself lived a ragged outer circle of Jacobite refugees, adoring but penniless, who had left estates and livelihoods behind them to follow James into exile. The Royal couple themselves were not badly off – Louis gave them a pension of 600,000 livres a year – but life at St Germain was not cheap, for it seemed essential to maintain the rituals of an English court, with separate kitchens, gold tableware and armies of servants. More than once Mary would be forced to sell off jewels to pay the bills.*
Things were not all bleak. Ailesbury rather fell in love with Mary of Modena, as people usually did after she had lost the airs and graces of Whitehall. Mary had given birth to another child, a girl. She maintained a thriving and cultured court. Francesco Riva was still with her. Innocenzo Fede had followed from the Catholic Chapel Royal at Whitehall to head the court’s musical life. Beautiful, pious, dignified in defeat, Mary was generally popular at Versailles. ‘That’, Louis once said of her approvingly, ‘is how a Queen ought to behave both in person and manner, keeping her court with dignity.’18
As for the King, Ailesbury found him increasingly descending into religious gloom. Most visitors to St Germain remarked the court’s sombre temper. ‘Agreeable flirtation,’ wrote one, ‘even love-making is severely prescribed in this melancholy court.’ James’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Berwick, wrote that he never showed ‘greater patience, greater tranquillity, or greater joy, than when he thought or spoke of death’.19 The King liked to wear an iron chain, and aimed (as he rather regally put it) ‘to live as mortified a life as one’s calling will permit’.20
Visiting Versailles, Ailesbury found that the French King treated his fallen cousin with something more than duty. The English King and Queen visited every couple of weeks, and Dangeau’s description of one such entertainment suggests the magnificence of the French court:
‘A great supper party was held under the peristyle for seventy-five ladies, who were joined by the King and Queen of England. They came by the Canal, where all the orchestra remained. Arriving in gondolas and chaloupes, they landed at Trianon, which was brilliantly illuminated; they walked in the gardens; then supper was served at five tables.’21
All the same, there was a good deal of awkward history between the two Kings. Louis had allowed the Exclusion Crisis to run. He had been furious that James permitted his daughter’s marriage to William of Orange, and the English King’s denial of French alliances in 1688 had been treated by Louis as a personal insult. And for all Louis’s never-failing courtesy, what his courtiers whispered among themselves was another matter. Louvois, the powerful Minister for War, was openly sceptical about the Stuarts’ political value; Madame de Lafayette’s more personal verdict on James was damning:
‘A man obsessed with religion, abandoned to the Jesuits to an astonishing degree. In the Court’s eyes that was no great fault, but he was weak as well, and seemed to endure his misfortunes more through lack of feeling than courage.’22
For the squabbling, bombastic, poverty-stricken courtiers at St Germain, meanwhile, the French could barely even muster courtesy. James’s followers did him immeasurable harm. Few had the talents or credentials to serve a major court – as James himself admitted. A deluge of wildly optimistic ‘intelligence’ poured from them (James himself assured Louis, quite inaccurately, that ‘there are ten who would not take oaths of fidelity to the Usurper, to one who has taken them’23), and St Germain was notoriously leaky as a repository of secrets. ‘I would not have given a shilling’, Ailesbury wrote, ‘for all the scribbling Jacobites wrote to the court of St Germain.’24 One such piece of wishful thinking had damaged Louis at La Hogue, where he had been assured the English Admiral Carter was ready to defect as soon as the French fleet was sighted. He would never again trust Jacobites as a source of intelligence. Meanwhile, the longer the war continued in stalemate, the greater was the long-term threat to St Germain – as its more sober inhabitants were starting to realise. Any eventual truce between Louis and William would have to include settlement of the English throne, and such a settlement could only exclude James. In war, James was an asset to his cousin; in peace he would become a liability.
In 1693, however, the war was still in full flow, and Ailesbury’s business was to debate the future course of Jacobitism. Should the King ‘compound’ with supporters of the new constitution in England, or hold out for the principles of divine right monarchy? So far the ‘non-compounders’ had had the upper hand – hence the harsh tone of the 1692 declaration. After the failure of 1692, however, moderates led by James’s former Secretary of State, Middleton, urged him to accept that England’s political revolution was permanent: if James wanted to return, he, like William, would have to swallow the Declaration of Rights. And he would have to abandon his Catholic followers.
It was to argue against this sell-out that Ailesbury had suffered the hospitality of the Romney Marsh farmer. He was one of those who ‘desired his Majesty not to make any further engagements to the Republicans, whose designs ... in the bottom were to destroy the monarchy, or at least make the King of England no more than a Duke of Venice’.25 The tide was against him, however. It was Louis who now dictated Jacobite policy, and Louis was for pragmatism. Ailesbury had a face-to-face meeting with the Sun King (two and a half hours, he proudly wrote in his memoirs ) during which he informed Louis of something he probably already knew: that in England ‘son nom n’était pas en bon odeur parmi le peuple’.26 But his plea for another French fleet to catapult James across ‘the Sleeve, in French la Manche d’Angleterre’ was politely declined. Ailesbury’s trip had come too late. As Ailesbury knew, despite James’s ineffectual denials, a revised declaration had already been agreed.
Its tone, ominously for William, was no longer of retribution.
‘We do hereby assure all our loving subjects that they may depend upon everything that their own representatives shall offer, to make our kingdoms happy. For we have set it before our eyes, as our noblest aim, to do yet more for their constitution than the most renowned of our ancestors.’27
Arguably James had already achieved that, although not quite as he intended. Now he promised that Parliament would be called ‘with all speed’, and the past would be buried ‘in perpetual oblivion’. The Declaration could almost be read as an apology for James’s career on the throne. Universities would be safe; he would never try to remove the Test. ‘We declare also that we will give our royal assent to all such Bills as are necessary to secure the frequent calling and holding of parliaments: the free elections and fair return of members; and provide for impartial trials.’ All laws passed by the Convention and its successor parliaments would be endorsed.
This was far more dangerous to William than French armies. Catholics and Frenchmen united the English; this could only divide them. ‘Very reasonable,’ John Evelyn thought when he read it, ‘& much more to the purpose than any of his former.’28 After all, there was little reason for anyone to feel much enthusiasm for the events of 1688. In November 1689 John Hampden had called the upheaval a Glorious Revolution. Few in England agreed with him now. Whigs were kept out of office, while Tories could never whole-heartedly support this illegitimate régime. Radicals were disenchanted. No one had got what they wanted from the Revolution. And the world into which it had propelled the country hardly looked like a promised land, with its endless foreign war, its taxes, its factions, its speculators, gamblers and dangerous philosophers, its teeming, anarchic capital. The prospect of a chastened James can only have been tempting.
It must have been still more tempting when the summer brought disaster for England in the form of a shattering blow to the economy. John Evelyn had little doubt why God had inflicte
d this catastrophe on the nation – in punishment for ‘our late injustice and disobedience, & the still reigning sin among us’. In May 1693 the ‘Turkey fleet’, four hundred ships heading in convoy for the Middle East with cargoes worth £im, lost contact with its escorting warships. In July they were intercepted by the French. It was ‘the greatest blow which was ever given the City since the fire,’ wrote Evelyn, ‘& affecting the whole nation, & that by our wretched imprudence or treachery ... ill success in all our concerns, forerunner of destruction for our folly & precipitous change &c. God avert the deserved consequences.’29
The immediate consequences were grim enough for a Government which was already struggling with the burdens of the war. It was to harness English wealth that William had embarked on his adventure. Now he had to ask whether he could wage war any longer against the richest nation in Europe.
XI
‘THE WHOLE ART OF WAR IS REDUCED TO MONEY’
‘War is quite changed from what it was in the time of our forefathers, when in a hasty expedition and a pitch’d field, the matter was decided by courage; but now the whole art of war is in a manner reduced to money; and nowadays that Prince who can best find money to feed, clothe and pay his army, not he that has the most valiant troops, is surest of success and conquest.’1
Charles Davenant, 1698
Tenacious though he was, brave though he was in action, William of Orange was not the greatest general of his day, nor the most inspiring leader. One reality of modern warfare, however, he grasped better than any other general in Europe: that war now was infinitely more expensive than war had ever been before.
His schooling in that lesson had come from Amsterdam, and as if to confirm that he had learnt it, almost his first act as King had been to request repayment of the £600,000 the English project had cost the Dutch. ‘I am confident your generosity will have as little bounds towards them, as theirs had towards you,’ he told his first parliament, ‘of which our account shall be given to you.’ A good bargain, thought The New Observator. ‘It is not to be parallel’d in history, that ever a Revolution so great and so extensive as this in England was brought about at so little charge.’2 Whether they agreed or not, Parliament could hardly refuse to pay; without Dutch intervention they would not have existed. But they paid with a distinctly less generous hand when it came to William’s own funding. There must have been many in St Stephen’s Chapel who recalled the generous settlement on James II – Dudley North’s settlement – as a mistake; they had not been summoned again for the next four years. And unlike James, William had a war to pay for, a war which he must have assumed, whatever he said in public, would be prolonged – his last struggle with Louis had gone on for six years and ended against his will – a continental war which no English monarch had undertaken on such a scale for generations. On 29 December 1688 William visited the treasury and found it contained less than £1,000.
The Last Revolution Page 36
