Secondly, the King’s brusque and authoritarian personality did not inspire the confidence that he was a monarch who was intent on ruling according to law. He seems to have transferred from his earlier career as a naval commander the same method of dealing with subordinates, but what might have been an appropriate way to address a naval ranking was less apposite for a bishop or peer of the realm. James lacked his brother’s ability to negotiate and to conceal his own intentions. His belief that a lack of conviction had cost his father his life led James to feel that if his policies were being criticised the correct response was to press harder and crush his opponents rather than concede ground. This intransigence was exacerbated by the King’s sense that he was the providential instrument of a Catholic God’s will, a belief confirmed, it seemed, by the many occasions when James had avoided dire calamity: in the 1640s to escape Parliament’s clutches, in the 1660s in naval engagements with the Dutch and in the 1680s from the threat of plot and insurrection. Added to these personality traits was the fact that a number of James’s actions as king were of dubious legality: the commission for ecclesiastical causes appeared to be an infringement of the act of 1661, the judgement in Godden v Hales was only secured after James had dismissed half of the original judges, the issuing of royal indulgences had been declared illegal by Parliament on numerous occasions81 and the actions against the Fellows of Magdalen seemed to be an attack, not only on the Anglican monopoly on education but also on private property, invading the legal freehold of the fellowships.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, James’s actions in England were viewed in the context of his rule in Ireland, Scotland and the American colonies, and against the background of events occurring in France. In Ireland James had replaced the Protestant Earl of Clarendon as Lord Lieutenant with the Old English Catholic Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel. Tyrconnel set about filling the ranks of James’s army in Ireland with Catholics, who by September 1686 constituted 67 per cent of its privates and 40 per cent of its officers. Catholic judges were also appointed, and these romanising policies accelerated after January 1687, when Tyrconnel became Lord Deputy. Quo warranto writs were used to give Catholics a two-thirds majority in most corporations, ensuring that a future Irish Parliament would be overwhelmingly Catholic. Revenues of the Church of Ireland were redirected to fund Catholics. Similar policies were adopted in Scotland, where Catholics were again placed within the army. The King dissolved the Scottish Parliament for failing to agree to religious toleration and instead in February 1687 issued a proclamation granting freedom of worship to Catholics and Quakers but not Presbyterians, whom James saw as his main political opponents. This was followed in June by a Declaration of Indulgence issued, the document said, by the King’s ‘absolute power, which all our subjects are to obey without reserve’ that allowed complete toleration and admission to office for Catholics and rights of private worship and a relaxation of the penal laws for Presbyterian conventiclers.
In the American colonies James planned to do away with charter government and colonial legislative assemblies, and to carve up British North America into three or four vice-royalties, based on the Spanish model of government in Central and South America. The first step in this project was the creation of the new dominion of New England, under the direct control of the Crown through its governor, Sir Edmund Andros. The new dominion did away with representative assemblies, taxed without the colonists’ consent and enforced the Navigation Acts.82
Fears of arbitrary government were heightened further by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by Louis XIV, which brought about the loss of religious freedom and legal equality for France’s one million Huguenots (Calvinist Protestants). Fifteen hundred were sent to serve as galley slaves, while between fifty thousand and eighty thousand fled to England with horrific stories of their sufferings. James was ambivalent towards these refugees, permitting them to set up their own French churches but only if worship was conducted according to Anglican rite, a measure that, it was widely reported, was designed to encourage the Huguenots to leave England and seek sanctuary elsewhere.83 James, like his brother, favoured a pro-French alliance for commercial as well as politico-religious reasons. James was director of the Royal African Company and believed that England’s future lay in colonial expansion, seeing the Dutch as a threat to British trade and empire-building. Combined, these factors created the very strong impression, if not the reality, of an attempt to erect an absolute Catholic monarchy on the French model in England.
The situation that James faced in the summer of 1688 bore considerable similarities to the circumstances that his father, Charles I, faced in the summer of 1640. Then, as now, unpopular royal policies had led to an almost complete breakdown in the functioning of government at a local level. Then, as now, the opponents of royal policy nonetheless lacked the independent military power to resist the government. In 1640 Charles’s critics had resorted to colluding with the Scots, urging them to invade and force the King to call Parliament. In 1688 James’s critics entered discussions with William of Orange to intervene militarily in England and force the King to reverse his policies. However, even by the summer of 1688, when his alliance with dissent was breaking down, James still possessed a far stronger hand than his father had done. Increased trade meant that James was by far the most financially independent Stuart monarch and the power of Parliament over the royal purse strings had been considerably weakened. Moreover, unlike Charles, James had a large, well-trained and well-paid standing army with which to defend himself. Thirdly, the King’s programme of political management was likely to prove so successful that there would have to be significant revisions in electoral procedures for a ‘free’ Parliament to be produced. The English crown was, then, James’s to lose, rather than William’s to win.
4
THE DUTCH INVASION
On the 5th day of the 9th Month, the land was invaded by a vast body of men of a strange language, having for their General the Prince of Orange, who in a few days marched through the land with vast preparations for war.1
On 28 April 1688 William Coward wrote to the Earl of Sunderland from Wells with news from the Somerset quarter sessions. He reported that ‘one Elias Bragge alias Clarke’ had been committed to the gaol there for speaking treasonable and seditious words, having referred to ‘a design of an intended invasion from Holland and other foreign parts upon the account of the late Duke of Monmouth’. Coward thought it his duty ‘with some other Justices of the Peace to take Bragg’s examination’ and transmit it to Sunderland, ‘for though it be but a strange sort of account that Bragg gives and very incoherent and improbable in itself, yet the country being filled with a general discourse of it,’ he presumed to send the King’s minister a copy.2
Bragg’s rumour would soon turn out to be correct, though the actual reasons for the Dutch invasion had nothing to do with Monmouth’s rebellion. For the Dutch Stadtholder, William of Orange, military intervention was necessary to secure his wife’s patrimony from a legitimate Catholic heir and gain an anti-French Parliament which would bring Britain into a European alliance against his greatest enemy, Louis XIV. For the merchants of Amsterdam, who held the real political and economic power in the United Provinces, bringing Britain into an anti-French alliance would help break the economic stranglehold Louis had placed on Dutch trade. Dutch propaganda produced for British consumption presented William’s expedition as a crusade to liberate the isles from popery and arbitrary government. Similar literature produced for Europe-wide consumption stressed the need for the Dutch intervention to check the seemingly limitless ambitions of the Sun King. However, as with more recent conflicts, a war sold as a mercy mission was really instigated for reasons of geopolitical and economic self-interest.
For his part, James appeared remarkably unconcerned by rumours of the kind sent to the Earl of Sunderland. Even when more concrete information filtered through, he appeared unwilling to treat it with much seriousness. Partly this was a result of poor intel
ligence. The French had a good inkling that the Dutch were preparing an armada to invade England as early as May 1688. However, James’s ambassador at The Hague, the Marquis D’Albeville, did not become aware of the preparations until the third week in September. Moreover, the ambassador’s dispatches were not, in any case, coming directly to the King but were going first to Sunderland instead. Nonetheless, James had already been warned of the danger by the French diplomat Usson de Bonrepos on 25 August and by Ferdinand d’Adda, the papal envoy, on 31 August.3 Yet, late into the summer of 1688, his correspondence with his son-in-law presented the image of a monarch in blissful ignorance of the preparations being made against him. Writing from Windsor on 31 August, the King told William, ‘this place itself affords little news’, adding, ‘What news from your side of the water?’4
What William didn’t tell his father-in-law was that he was assembling an invasion force approximately four times the size of the armada sent by the Spanish in 1588. Aside from the massive logistical effort required, William was also engaged in a frenetic round of diplomacy, designed to secure troops both for the invasion force and to guard the borders of the Dutch Republic from French forces, should they launch an attack on the United Provinces while the majority of its army was in England. A key figure in this diplomatic alliance was the young Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, heir to William’s estates and personal fortune. By September William had secured Frederick’s agreement to secure the Republic’s frontiers along the Rhine, as well as some of the Elector’s troops for the invasion of England. Other German princes quickly came on side in reaction to the election of Louis’s nominee, Cardinal Wilhelm von Fürstenberg, Bishop of Strasburg, as Archbishop-Elector of Cologne. In response, the Dukes of Zell and Wolfenbüttel promised to furnish William with four thousand men and the Duke of Hesse-Cassel offered three thousand. The contest over the archbishopric of Cologne represented one part of the French king’s schemes for increasing his power in the Holy Roman Empire. Louis now saw himself as presented with a small window of opportunity to extend his territories in Germany. The Habsburg Emperor Leopold, on 6 September, had recaptured Belgrade from the Ottoman Turks (who had not so secretly been supported by the French king) and Louis feared that, if he delayed acting, the Emperor might be able to conclude a swift peace, allowing Leopold to turn his attention westwards. If, as Louis anticipated, William was going to get bogged down in a new civil war in England, this would also remove one of the French King’s most formidable enemies from obstructing his plans. Without Dutch support, it would be easier to coerce German states into accepting French claims to parts of the Palatinate and other lands which Louis had annexed since 1678. Louis’s preoccupation with Germany significantly weakened James’s position. There would be no immediate military assistance from France in the form of either men and arms sent to England or a diversionary attack on the Netherlands.
Aside from winning over other European states and principalities, William also had to convince the Dutch elite, through their federal Parliament, the States General, that his proposed invasion of England was in the United Provinces’ best interests. For them the war was more about saving Dutch trade, particularly the herring industry, than rescuing the English people from popery and tyranny. As Admiral General, William could decide on the strength of the Dutch fleet without their approval and raise customs duties without consent to pay for any enlargement. However, he could not go to war without the approval of the States General, which was dominated by the rich bankers, merchants and traders of Amsterdam. This obstacle encapsulated the conundrum at the heart of the Dutch state: it was a federal republic, dominated by a commercial elite, rather than a landed aristocracy, but it had a territorial princeling as its head of state. These two political forces, the burgomasters of Amsterdam and the Princes of Orange, were often at loggerheads. The few occasions when they acted in concert were those when the whole survival of an independent Dutch state appeared to be in jeopardy. The States General were suspicious of the Prince of Orange’s motives in intervening in English affairs. The prominent burgomaster Nicolaas Witsen wondered whether ‘considering the proximity of the Princess [Mary] to the crown, he thought some higher reward than labour might be in store for him’.5
However, the Amsterdam elite were increasingly open to the need for some sort of military action as a result of the growing damage the rivalry between the Dutch and the French was doing to trade. Commerce between the two countries was now even worse than it had been during the crisis of 1672, when the Dutch had been forced to breach their dykes and flood the land, in order to halt the advance of French forces. Louis XIV’s aggressive actions pushed the States General further into accepting William’s policy. A ban on the import into France of herrings from the Netherlands crippled the Dutch fishing industry. In late September Louis ordered the general arrest of all Dutch ships in French ports. With support from the former English ambassador at The Hague, Bevil Skelton, on 30 August, the French ambassador, D’Avaux, also warned that any act of aggression against England would be deemed a breach of the peace between Holland and France. The implicit threat of military retaliation was a hollow one (and Skelton was sent to the Tower by the King for his presumption), but it encouraged the belief in Holland that the Dutch were now seriously in danger from an Anglo-French alliance.
The States General was finally convinced to support the war after appeals were made by the ailing Grand Pensionary Gaspar Fagel on William’s behalf. He acknowledged that William did have a personal interest in the invasion, but urged that he was motivated not by a desire for personal aggrandisement but by a wish to keep the English Crown in the hands of Protestants. The dangers of not intervening in English affairs were grave, Fagel said. Domestic rebellion against the King’s policies was inevitable, and, if James won, the country would fall to Catholicism and into an even deeper alliance with France. If James lost, England would become a republic again – and he reminded them what an enemy to Dutch trade the Commonwealth and Protectorate had been in the 1650s.
Final consultations with other European heads of state to seek their consent or at least acquiescence in William’s design revealed that the deposition of James was already being discussed, at least by the Prince of Orange’s ministers. The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold had already been persuaded that the Prince was only intervening on behalf of the people of England, but William’s chef de cabinet, Simon van Pettekum, put the issue in a nutshell. ‘Would it not,’ he said, ‘be very advantageous for the Emperor to have a King of England completely in agreement with the House of Austria about France’, to which the Imperial envoy Kramrich replied that this was certainly the case but that the ‘Emperor would not wish the price of so great an advantage to be such a black action as that of a prince dethroning his uncle and his father-in-law’. ‘Oh really,’ said Pettekum bluntly, ‘what does it matter to the Emperor if the King of England is called James or William?’6
The scale of the Dutch invasion force meant that it was impossible to keep the preparation completely secret, although it was widely rumoured in Europe that the massive armada was being built for an attack on France. The fleet consisted of forty-three men of war, four light frigates and ten fireships, as well as seven light yachts to act as messenger. However, the gunships were designed to protect the troop transports, made up of over four hundred flyboats, for fifteen thousand soldiers, eighteen battalions of infantry and 4092 cavalry, rather than to directly engage James’s fleet. The armada carried arms for twenty thousand soldiers, three hundred tons of hay, tin pontoons for crossing rivers, wagons, corn, flour biscuits, medicines and hospital stores, bridges to embark cavalry, four tons of tobacco, one thousand pairs of boots, fifty hogsheads of brandy, six hundred hogsheads of beer and six thousand guilders’ worth of salted herring.
In addition to stores for the troops and sailors, the ships carried vast amounts of propaganda to be distributed in England, to convince the English population of the good intentions of the Dutch forces. Around sixty thousand cop
ies of William’s Declaration were printed in English amid great secrecy by specially commissioned printers working simultaneously in The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Portable printing presses were carried as well, to produce further pro-Williamite literature after the fleet had landed. William had already used the English press to his advantage in the 1670s when he had sponsored pamphlets against Charles II’s pro-French foreign policy. Before William landed his advisers had given him extensive guidance on the content and distribution of tracts and he had established contacts with printers and publishers in England.
Key elements of this Williamite propaganda initiative were the Prince’s two declarations, issued on 10 and 24 October (the first of which had been drafted as early as August 1688). The first declaration made reference to two rumours which would later assume great importance in public debate: first, that James’s baby son was not his own and secondly that the King’s government in Ireland was a model for his government in England. Copies were posted through the penny post and additional copies were produced by English printers. Staged ritual endorsements of the declaration rammed home the way in which it was a test of support for the Prince. In Plymouth the garrison came over to William when the governor of the town read out his manifesto and asked individual officers and battalions to declare for it. This propaganda was also relatively cheap. Some tracts sold for as little as a penny, and many were read aloud or passed around to those who had not bought them. Visual as well as written propaganda was important to the Orange cause. Playing cards were manufactured with images depicting key events in the Revolution, and forty-nine prints and thirty-one medals made in support of William’s cause have been found. Fourteen of these prints referred to the rumour that the Prince of Wales was illegitimate, sired by a Jesuit priest or a miller, by showing fake coats of arms for James’s son featuring a windmill (for the miller) and a lobster (symbol of the Society of Jesus).
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