Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  Her death of course left her sister Anne in a singularly difficult position; she was now heir apparent who had in fact a better claim to the throne than its present occupant. It was incumbent upon William to pay his respects to her after a decade of neglect. Anne herself had come wholly to rely upon her principal lady-in-waiting, Sarah, countess of Marlborough, and upon Sarah’s husband, the first earl of Marlborough. Here were the makings of a court in waiting and, soon enough, the fortunate pair became duke and duchess.

  Even while the abbey was covered in drapes of black for the late queen parliament acted, or rather failed to act, on a measure that would have incalculable consequences for the future state of the nation. In the spring of 1695 a resolution for ‘regulations of printing and printing presses’ was allowed to lapse, almost by oversight, and that chance led ineluctably to the emergence of what became known as ‘the fourth estate’. It was, in retrospect at least, a momentous change that emancipated English letters for ever from government control.

  The public had previously been forced to be content with the official London Gazette. It was established in February 1665, and continues to this day as the official newspaper of record, although Captain Bluffe in Congreve’s The Old Bachelor (1693) claims, ‘Why, sir, there are not three words of truth, the year round, put into the Gazette.’ But, as a result of the lifting of prohibitions, the public prints were quickly in demand in a party-dominated and war-oppressed age.

  Within a fortnight of the end of censorship, a paper entitled Intelligence, Domestic and Foreign began to circulate; this was followed by The English Courant, The Post Man, The Post Boy, The Weekly News-Letter and others. Some of them left blank spaces so that the reader might fill in more current news before passing on the publication to friends or neighbours; many of the printed items were accompanied by the phrase ‘this wants confirmation’ or ‘this occasions many speculations’ or ‘time will discover the event’. The affairs of the world were very uncertain.

  In the succeeding reign of Queen Anne more than forty news-sheets were distributed on the streets and in the coffee-houses of London, many of them also finding their way to the provincial towns and cities. It took a full day to read only the most important of them. We may speak for the first time, therefore, of a politically aware nation, with the concomitant rise of the ‘journalist’ and the ‘essayist’. The power of the new press quickly became apparent and, in a letter from Lemuel Gulliver that opens his Travels, the celebrated if fictional surgeon recalls the remark of his cousin that ‘people in power were very watchful over the press’.

  The first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, was issued on Wednesday 11 March 1702; it is printed on one side of a single sheet with news from Naples, Rome, Vienna, Frankfurt and elsewhere; the majority of its news paragraphs concerned the progress of the war and, in a postscript, its editor disparaged ‘the impertinences of ordinary news-papers’. It opened in a characteristically dry style with a report from Naples that ‘on Wednesday last, our new viceroy, the duke of Escalona, arrived here with a squadron of the galleys of Sicily’. The sheet was sold next door to the King’s Arms tavern at Fleet Bridge, and in the vicinity, very close to the neighbourhood that had already earned the soubriquet of ‘Grub Street’.

  From the beginning these newspapers were largely business ventures, although some of them were in part subsidized by the political managers of the time who wished to create a discernible volume of ‘public opinion’ on any particular matter. The public prints relied largely upon advertisements and upon circulation, and so became part of that commercial society that was even then taking shape.

  A few weeks after the death of his wife the king wrote to a colleague in 1695 that ‘I feel myself to be no longer fit for military command’; yet he added characteristically that ‘I will try to do my duty’. His duty compelled him to attempt the recapture of Namur, the most important fortress in the Spanish Netherlands; the citadel looked over a fruitful plain and two rivers, the Sambre and the Meuse, and it had never before opened its gates to an enemy. Three years earlier, however, the French besiegers under the command of Louis himself had broken the spirit of the town after eight days; it was the lowest point for England and its allies in the campaign against the French.

  William knew well enough that it would be a signal victory to retrieve Namur after its occupation. After a series of feints and skirmishes he marched straight upon the town at the beginning of July 1695, and there began a series of bloody assaults and battles that endured until the total surrender of the citadel two months later. This is the conflict in which Uncle Toby, of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), injured his groin; he modelled the outworks of the citadel in his garden. The excitement and anxiety aroused by the campaign animated the London crowds, who flocked for news to the booksellers and coffee-houses. The king’s success was one of the most important victories of the Nine Years War, all the more significant because it had been conducted on land; it was the first major victory of that kind since Cromwell’s ‘battle of the dunes’ in 1658. On his return William engaged in a summer tour, ostensibly in triumph, but his reserved and suspicious nature was in evidence. He did not frequent the well-travelled roads and, in Oxford, refused a dinner for fear that it had been poisoned.

  3

  The idol of the age

  The jubilation of victory was in any case short-lived. Despite the success in the Spanish Netherlands the war itself was becoming too lengthy and too costly to be easily endured. It had procured very little benefit for England itself. At the end of 1695 the exiled king, James II, issued a proclamation from his French court that did ‘fully authorize, strictly require and expressly command our loving subjects to rise in arms and make war upon the prince of Orange, the usurper of our throne . . .’. He did have supporters in England who were ready to obey the command, but they could not or would not move without the aid of a French invasion. Such an invasion, however, was a step too far for Louis XIV who already had continental entanglements to deter him.

  Some conspirators were willing to act alone. Anne, a proper Stuart, would of course reign in the event of the king’s death; this prospect seems to have been the spur for a plot engineered at the beginning of 1696. As the king drove home to Kensington Palace after his weekly hunt in Richmond Park, he was obliged to pass through a narrow lane by the river at Turnham Green. Here he was to be surrounded by armed men and killed. Like most such plots it foundered on whispers and betrayals; William cancelled the hunt, but not before making use of it as an instrument of state. His disclosure of the conspiracy to parliament, in February 1696, caused a sensation and prompted members to form an association in the king’s defence not unlike that established to protect Elizabeth I against Spanish plotters.

  The general mood, however, was still one of war-weariness. After the victory at Namur, the land war continued with no great victories and no signal defeats. It had become a war of attrition in which both parties were in danger of fighting one another to an expensive impasse. Yet a detached observer, if such existed, might have arrived at certain conclusions. William III had proved to be more than a match for Louis XIV; the energy and perseverance of England’s king, together with the support of his allies, had been able to check the progress of the Bourbon empire. The new-found financial strength of England could also prove formidable in future conflicts.

  A treaty between the parties was drawn up and signed after five months of negotiation. The Peace of Ryswick, concluded in the autumn of 1697, seems to have favoured William; Louis surrendered much of the territory he had gained and, perhaps more importantly, recognized William III as the rightful king of England. This might seem to have been a significant blow to James II and the Stuart cause, but the promises of a king were not always to be trusted.

  After nine years of a bloody and costly war, however, the bells of London rang in celebration on news of the treaty. William himself declared that ‘it is impossible to conceive what joy the
peace causes here’. The seas would once more be safe, and the merchants might trade with impunity. The burden of taxation, or so it was hoped, would be immeasurably lightened; 75 per cent of the revenue had, after all, been devoted to the costs of war.

  As soon as parliament opened, at the beginning of December, a debate commenced on the necessity of preserving a standing army. The king favoured the measure as a way of keeping check upon the French, but the preponderant opinion of the members was for an unarmed government. That was part of the old polity of England. It was now agreed that all the land forces enrolled since September 1680 should be forthwith disbanded and that there should be no bigger force on English soil than that which had obtained in the reign of Charles II. This would amount to some 7,000 men. The country gentlemen were not willing to pay taxes for an imposed army and, in particular, for foreign recruits. It was agreed, therefore, that the army of 7,000 should be comprised only of the king’s English subjects; as a result his Dutch bodyguards and his regiments of French Protestants were disbanded. William, hardly dissembling his anger, remarked that parliament had achieved a feat that the French had failed to accomplish in nine years. A victorious monarch could scarcely be more ignobly treated. It is no wonder, perhaps, that he was always pining for his homeland.

  Parliament pressed home its supremacy when, at the beginning of 1701, an Act of Settlement was passed utterly debarring the Stuart dynasty from the throne. In the summer of the previous year Prince William, the last surviving son of the seventeen pregnancies of Princess Anne and her husband Prince George of Denmark, had died from fluid on the brain. When Anne assumed the throne, she would have no heir absolute. Although William had died at the age of eleven, he had already been hailed as the new Protestant champion. The king wrote to Marlborough that ‘it is so great a loss to me as well as to all England that it pierces my heart’.

  The Jacobites had naturally been delighted at the news, hoping that James or his son would be rightfully reinstalled as rulers of the kingdom. But parliament had other ideas. It turned to Germany and, in particular, the only surviving granddaughter of James I. Sophia electress of Hanover was the daughter of the ill-starred ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth, whose rule as queen of Bohemia had lasted for a year before she and her husband were ousted by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor. So by the strange serendipity of dynasty and fortune Sophia was set to become the next queen of England; if she was unwilling or unable to take the throne, she had a healthy Protestant son by the name of George Ludwig (George Louis) of Hanover.

  The clauses of the Act of Settlement, dictated by parliament, made other demands. Every sovereign must be part of the communion of the Church of England. If a king was born beyond the shores of England, no English force would be obliged to defend his native soil. No king was to leave England, or Scotland, or Ireland, without the consent of parliament. These were all measures designed to obstruct any pretensions that the house of Hanover might claim. They might be German, but they would be obliged to rule as English sovereigns.

  William knew that the Peace of Ryswick was by no means the end of hostilities, and that the French king’s overweening appetite for glory would encourage him in fresh fields of action. Spain proved to be the spur. The Spanish emperor, Charles II, better known as Charles the Sufferer, had endured a life of long disease. He was incapacitated and mentally incapable; his tongue was too large for his mouth, and he drooled continually. He had a huge and misshapen jaw, so that the rest of his face seemed to be in a kind of pit. His body was crooked and his mind more or less unhinged; he believed himself to have been bewitched since childhood, in which opinion most of his court and country concurred. He even allowed himself to be exorcized. He was the last of the Habsburg rulers of Spain, and the overwhelming evidence of inbreeding may have been the occasion for his manifold mental and physical weaknesses. He was an embarrassment in life, yet in death he would become a problem. He ruled Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, now largely consisting of Belgium, and he controlled the empire from the Americas to the Spanish East Indies. It looked more powerful on paper than it did in reality, but still it was grand enough to lure rivals.

  In the spring of 1700, when he was months from death, there had been attempts to divide his legacy between the principal claimants. The greed of men, and the mischance of events, left any proposed arrangement in disarray. The Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I of Austria, claimed the inheritance on behalf of his son in a series of elaborate genealogical calculations; they depended upon the particular clause of a particular marriage contract. No box that Pandora ever opened could contain so much dissension. Louis XIV looked with horror upon an alliance between Madrid and Vienna; it would mark an arrow through French domains. Charles the Sufferer had in fact named as his successor Philip, duke of Anjou, who happened to be the grandson of Louis XIV. William III could not contemplate a union between Paris and Madrid: this could not be allowed. So great a Bourbon empire had never yet been seen.

  Yet Louis was not to be diverted. Towards the end of November 1700, three weeks after the death of Charles, the French king proclaimed his grandson to be Philip V of Spain and true successor to the throne; he also took the precaution of interdicting trade between England and the Spanish Netherlands. Such a commercial and political offensive was followed by what might be considered a more private insult. In the middle of September 1701, James II died in the odour of sanctity, having been seized with paralysis while attending Mass in his chapel at Saint-Germain. His perpetual companions had been the austere monks of La Trappe, and he pleaded with his son and heir to follow the precepts and practices of the Roman Church. The French king, who had made vows at the deathbed of the dying king, now kept his promise to his cousin by recognizing the ‘Old Pretender’, the ‘King over the Water’, the ‘Old Chevalier’ – as he was variously known in England – to be James III.

  This was a provocation too far. It violated the Peace of Ryswick, when Louis had solemnly agreed to recognize William III as the rightful king of England. It threw into doubt all the French king’s promises and avowals, and aroused all the old fears that Louis was about to impose by force popery, tyranny and universal monarchy.

  At the beginning of June 1701 William had appointed Marlborough to be commander-in-chief and plenipotentiary in all negotiations concerning the security of England and its allies. The king recognized that Marlborough, already the ensconced favourite of Anne, would be by far the single most important figure and commander of the new regime; he wished above all else for continuity in his struggle against the French. By the end of the year a ‘treaty of grand alliance’ had been sealed between Holland, England and Austria. So began ‘the War of the Spanish Succession’.

  William made his decision only just in time. He had for some months been afflicted by shiverings, headaches and nausea, but his quietus was delivered by a humble mole. In February 1702 he was riding through the park of Hampton Court when his horse stumbled on a mole-hill; the king fell and broke his collar bone, the complications leading to his death. For many years afterwards the Jacobites toasted ‘the little gentleman dressed in velvet’ who had supplied the coup de grâce in the park.

  William was not greatly mourned, for he had not been greatly loved. He had been, for many, the least bad alternative. He had kept out the Stuart monarchs and their papist pretensions. Yet his legacy was in fact far more substantial than might at first appear. He had defied French power and limited its continental ambitions; he had successfully removed all the memories of the weakness and pusillanimity of the Stuart kings in thrall to money from Versailles. He and his advisers had also been able to place England on a far more advantageous financial footing, with the prospect of public credit stretching onwards. A new dynasty, a new foreign policy and a new economic dispensation, were not negligible achievements.

  On 8 March Anne, at the moment of William’s death, became queen of England, Scotland and Ireland. She was perhaps not the most prepossessing of monarchs, but she had endured many calamities. She
was thirty-seven years of age, and in the last sixteen of them she had suffered twelve miscarriages; of her five other children, four died in very early life. The oldest survivor, as we have seen, expired at the age of eleven. The years of mourning and frustrated pregnancy had affected both her appearance and her character. Her gout was so extreme that she was often to be found swathed in bandages. One Scottish commissioner, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, came to Kensington Palace in order to pay his respects and was alarmed to discover her ‘laboring under a fit of the gout, and in extreme pain and agony’; he added that her face was ‘red and spotty’, her dress ‘negligent’ and her foot ‘tied up with a poultice and some nasty bandages’. This was not an image of majesty.

  Her discomfort, and the disorder about her, were not helped by her evident reticence and shyness in company. At court receptions the foreign ministers and ambassadors would often sit around her in total silence. Her principal lady-in-waiting, Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, recorded that she never really cared for visitors; she was reluctant to ask questions, and even more unwilling to answer them. She confined her conversation to pleasantries of the lightest sort. How long have you been in town? How do you find our weather? She was neither clever nor witty, and upon matters of state ‘she never spoke but in a road’ or in a leaden, laborious and carefully rehearsed way.

  There were reasons for her reticence. She was cautious by temperament, never wholly trusting her own judgement or that of others. Jonathan Swift, who observed her at court, remarked that ‘there was not, perhaps in all England, a person who understood more artificially to disguise her passions’. But there were matters for which no disguise was necessary. She was a fervent supporter of the high Anglican Church and, as one devoted to ritual, she was also addicted to protocol. She would remonstrate with a courtier or lady who wore a ruffle or a periwig or a coat out of place.