When the penny finally dropped, James’s ambassador, D’Albeville, was taken aback by the scope of the Dutch scheme: ‘An absolute conquest is intended under the specious and ordinary pretences of religion, liberty, property and a free parliament and a religious, exact, observation of the laws; this and a war against France, they make account, will be but a work of a month’s time.’7 It was not until 10 September that James began to be persuaded that something was afoot and only on 24 September that he was finally convinced that the Dutch were really going to invade. On 28 September news of the Dutch invasion plans was relayed to the public via royal proclamation. Fundamentally, the King appears to have been unwilling to accept that his daughter and son-in-law could be plotting against him. The betrayal was probably made worse by the evasive replies that James and Queen Mary had received from the Prince and Princess, which, if not outright lies, were certainly economical with the truth. In July Mary Beatrice had reproached the Princess of Orange for her lack of affection towards the newly born Prince of Wales: ‘since I have been brought to be, you have never once in your Letters to me taken the least notice of my son, no more than if he had never been born.’ The Princess’s reply was a neat piece of casuistry: ‘all the King’s children shall ever find as much affection and kindness from me as can be expected from children of the same Father.’8 Her choice of words was deeply loaded, given that by now Mary Stuart, through correspondence with her sister Anne, had become deeply suspicious about the paternity of James’s reputed heir. Her measured response to the Queen’s letter, and the cessation of prayers for the Prince of Wales in the Princess’s chapel, also hinted at deeper intrigues. William meanwhile responded with half-truths to James’s questions concerning rumours of a military build-up in the Netherlands, stating that ‘the States-General hath not the least thought of being the aggressors at this juncture and would only act defensively’.9 This was correct in the sense that William had, at the time of writing, yet fully to convince the States General of the case for war. However, the Prince’s own intentions were clearly more belligerent.
Despite the poor intelligence the King was receiving and his own unwillingness to believe his family capable of such a betrayal, Britain was not caught unawares by the Dutch invasion plans. As a precautionary measure, James had in August already ordered the navy to patrol the North Sea on the watch for any suspicious movements and cancelled all leave for the army. The permanent military establishment in England was now larger than it had been under any previous Stuart monarch and there were further permanent forces in Ireland and Scotland which could be recalled should the Dutch succeed in making a landing. The King, however, was now caught between two schools of thought. The Catholic hardliners at his court, such as his Jesuit confessor, Father Petre, attempted to convince him that he could beat the Dutch in the field and that he should make preparations for a military confrontation with William. The Earl of Sunderland, however, urged James to attempt to win back support in England by making a number of concessions to Anglican-Tory opinion. Sunderland himself was now gripped by panic and despair: the need to disown the debacle instigated by Skelton had cost him the confidence of the French and he was reviled by English politicians for his politic conversion to Catholicism. If he lost the King’s support he would be left defenceless. However, as he conceded to the French ambassador in private, Sunderland felt James’s situation was hopeless and that ‘the King could do nothing in his present state but escape the best way he could, for he had no hope of outside aid and he might well be driven from England in a week’.10
Initially James fell in with his chief ministers’ advice to make concessions to Anglican-Tory opinion. This represented an uncharacteristic move for the King. He had been convinced that it was his father, Charles I’s, lack of resolution which had cost him his life. If he was not the most loved monarch that had ever sat on the British throne, James did at least enjoy a reputation for plain dealing which neither Charles I nor Charles II had enjoyed. At this moment of crisis, however, he backed away from his opponents. The writs for his new Parliament, issued on 21 September, were cancelled four days later. On 22 September James agreed to consult the bishops and peers on what further measures to take to answer their grievances. On 24 September he invited nine bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, and three others who had been prosecuted for seditious libel, to meet him and offer some recommendations as to what should be done in the situation. Meanwhile Sunderland dissuaded James from issuing an order for a general arrest, similar to that sent out during the Monmouth rebellion, of those suspected of complicity in the Orangist conspiracy. Instead, he convinced the King to issue a general pardon to his opponents.
Sunderland’s advice here was seriously mistaken. In contrast to 1685, when the gentry and lords had conspicuously stayed at home, the Dutch invasion was accompanied by a serious domestic insurrection in the north that was being planned by a combination of Whig and Tory Lords. In September 1688 the Earl of Danby wrote to the Earl of Chesterfield with news of the planned Dutch armada, which he wrongly anticipated would land that month in the north-east. Danby appeared certain that the issue would now come to blows but expressed his determination to ‘rather lose my life in the field than live under an arbitrary power, and see our laws and religion changed, which is now visibly the King’s intention’.11 It was clear that the Earl was preparing for the worst, making his will in the first week of October.12 With Danby leading the rebels in Yorkshire, the Whig peers the Earl of Devonshire and Lord Delamere coordinated risings in Cheshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.13 The issuing of a royal proclamation on 28 September ordering all subjects to arm for the defence of their country provided a convenient pretext for many conspirators to equip themselves. The Catholic Lord Fairfax raised some suspicions in early October concerning the activities of Danby, but these were dismissed by the governor of York, Sir John Reresby. The one attempt made by the government to arrest a conspirator, Lord Lumley, ended in farce as the agent sent out to apprehend him, John D’Arcy, was one of Lumley’s co-conspirators.14
On 3 October the bishops offered their list of recommendations to the King. The first urged that the government should be put in the hands of Anglicans and the charters restored in the corporations, a recommendation which led to the restoring of borough charters surrendered on quo warranto writs since 1679, an order for the dismissal of all officers who had been put in post after that date – which caused chaos and consternation in the localities – and finally the dismissal of Sunderland on 27 October. The recommendations also demanded the suspension of the ecclesiastical commission, which had already been adjourned since August on Sunderland’s advice. The King agreed to this and also reinstated Henry Compton to his ecclesiastical functions. It was further requested that the King should not employ his dispensing power and that he should restore the Fellows and President of Magdalen College, to which James again consented. In the Church, the Anglicans petitioned the King ‘to call a Parliament where the Act of Uniformity might be settled and provision made for a due liberty of conscience’, to stop the four foreign bishops from invading the spiritual jurisdiction of the Anglican hierarchy, and to fill the vacant bishopric of York. The bishops also pleaded with James to convert to Protestantism, a request which the King stated was out of the question.
Contemporaries doubted the sincerity of these concessions and with good reason. On 4 October James summoned a meeting of his Catholic courtiers and reassured them that he would not agree to anything that would be to their disadvantage. As he saw it, the main aim of these concessions was to undercut the justifications for the Prince of Orange’s intervention and consequently point up the ulterior motives for the Dutch invasion, conquest of England and seizure by force of his throne. The bishops themselves gave a lukewarm response to the King’s request that they produce public prayers on the subject of the invasion. The wording of the prayer offered urged God to ‘preserve that holy Religion we profess, together with our Laws and ancient Gove
rnment’, ‘and unite us all in … one and the same Holy Worship and Communion’.15 It did not escape James’s notice that this appeared more to be a prayer for the success of William’s design than for its failure. On 16 October he earnestly pressed the bishops to ‘declare an abhorrence of the invasion itself’ but they refused.
Meanwhile the King continued in his attempt to rebut the charges made in the Prince’s declaration. On 22 October he launched what amounted to an extraordinary public enquiry into the circumstances of his son’s birth. Forty witnesses swore on oath that they had witnessed the birth of the Prince of Wales and their depositions were published for public consumption. James told those summoned that he had called them, as he expected to meet the Prince of Orange on the field of battle and that he did not wish there to be any uncertainty about the succession in the event of his death. Such public testimonies to the legitimacy of James’s heir were too late to shift the opinion of the King’s eldest daughter, Mary, who by October had ceased to reply to either her father’s or her stepmother’s letters.
James himself appears to have been worried to the point of paranoia about the potential impact of William’s propaganda, burning all copies of the Prince’s declaration that he could find. At meetings to respond to the declaration selected portions were read but the King would not allow anyone to see his full copy. The Earl of Clarendon had to borrow Princess Anne’s copy in order to get a full sight of it, only to find out that this was actually James’s one and only copy, which he had lent to his daughter. However, the King’s own propaganda initiative was not without its own success. James increased the circulation of the London Gazette, encouraging its editors to highlight stories favourable to his cause and playing down William’s successes and ordering the devotion of the first columns of each issue to royal declarations. Added to this, James’s royal proclamations (particularly those publicising the concessions which undercut the grievances in the Prince’s declaration) were printed and heavily circulated and he sponsored special prayers condemning the sin of rebellion. His propaganda frequently raised the spectre of civil war that the Dutch invasion might bring in. There is evidence that the fear of political anarchy was bringing some people to the King’s side. A correspondent of John Ellis recorded that many of the ‘richer’ and ‘soberer’ sort of people, were afraid that the current events were ‘like to entail war upon the nation’.16
James persisted in his attempts to get the bishops to condemn William’s invasion plans and in particular to refute the claim that the Prince had been invited to intervene by some of the English nobility. On 1 November the King had asked Henry Compton whether he had been involved in calling the Prince over, to which question the Bishop of London offered a flat lie by denying he had anything to do with the letter. The following day Compton and four other bishops were again questioned about their involvement and again protested their innocence, with Sancroft stating that he could not believe any prelates were involved in the design. Nonetheless, they continued to refuse to issue a statement making clear their abhorrence of the Dutch invasion. At one final meeting on 6 November, the day after William’s forces had landed in the south-west, James asked them if they had prepared a paper condemning the Prince of Orange but again they offered nothing, Sancroft first complaining that it was not certain that the declaration was authentic. More pointedly, the Archbishop stated that the clergy had got into trouble before for involving themselves in political matters and were not keen to do so again. Despite further pressure from James, the prelates were unmoved. Losing his patience, James attempted to assert himself: ‘I am your King. I am Judge of what is best for me. I will go my own way. I desire your assistance in it.’ The bishops, however, would only go so far as agreeing to issue a public statement of their innocence, printed under the King’s authority. However, James insisted that it should be published by the bishops as this would have more credibility, the public, he said, now being ready to believe the very worst of him, even that he would impose a fraudulent son upon them as his heir. Again, however, the bishops demurred, stating that they would only comply with his demands in a free Parliament. Seeing that further argument was fruitless, the King drew the audience to a close: ‘I will argue no further. If you will not assist me as I desire I must stand upon my own legs, and trust to my self and my own arms.’17
To this end James had been making strenuous efforts to increase the strength of both his army and navy. By the end of October the fleet numbered thirty-seven men-of-war and eleven fireships, but there were reported problems in getting men to serve. In the summer the King had already had to visit the fleet to quell a near mutiny over the open celebration of mass by some Catholic officers.18 In the meantime James and his admiral, Lord Dartmouth, waited on the wind; if it blew easterly, Dartmouth would be pinned down in the mouth of the Thames, while William could set sail. To monitor the prevailing breeze, James had an enormous weathercock mounted on the roof of the Banqueting Hall, where he could see it from his apartments.
To strengthen the English army, troops from Ireland and Scotland were drawn back to England and orders were given for fresh forces to be raised. However, the new men were raw recruits and the raising of Irish troops was counter-productive, heightening fears among the English population about the threat of massacre of Protestants at the hands of armed ‘papists’. On 11 October a newsletter reported that in Portsmouth, where most of the Irish soldiers were based, there were complaints that the ‘rude Irish have caused many families to leave that place, having committed many robberies’.19 In another incident it was reported that Irish soldiers had assaulted some English officers after an argument in an alehouse, killing a number of them.
Efforts to raise the militia as a second line of defence revealed the near-complete erosion of trust between local and central government that James’s attempts to ‘pack’ Parliament had effected. The new Lord Lieutenants and Deputy Lieutenants who had been appointed were often individuals with insufficient local clout to raise any men. James had not called a muster since the outbreak of the Monmouth rebellion, and the militia’s performance had been so dismal, with several units defecting to the rebels, that the King could be forgiven for seeing it as more of a liability than a help. However, the militia’s long abeyance caused problems. Demands for the militia to be raised anew often met with negative responses. The Earl of Lindsey, one of the northern conspirators, stated pointedly that as ‘musters are not pleasing to your majesty, they have met but once since your coronation’.20 The situation was not helped by James’s diversion of the funds for it into his professional army. The Earl of Bristol informed Sunderland that ‘the Militia having beene for some time laid aside, the people charged are unprovided of Armes & Coates … the souldiers must all be new listed and sworne, and … it will take up two or three months to make a new regulation’.
Some of the King’s supporters made bullish assessments of the impending conflict. Nathaniel Molyneux wrote to Roger Kenyon that the King now had a ‘great army’ which was ‘in good equipage … that such an ocasione requires for carryinge all warlike instruments to destroy theis fooles, forraingers and strangers that cannot be soe wyse as to stay in their own countrye’. He ended his letter promising to give further news when ‘theis madmen invade us, and then … [I] will tell you both of their landinge and sending home again (if not well mannered).’21 The Imperial envoy, on the other hand, gave a far more pessimistic assessment of James’s position: ‘the King of England has against him all the clergy, all the nobility, all the people, all the army and navy, with few exceptions.’22
These preparations left James with around forty thousand men in arms. Though the field army camped at Hounslow Heath numbered only around twenty-five thousand men, as many others remained stationed in ports and garrisons as a result of the uncertainty as to where Prince William’s armada would land and the desire to protect royal magazines and fortresses from the threat of domestic insurrection. There has been some debate among historians as to the size of the oppos
ing force led by William of Orange. The long-accepted view was that the Prince had an army of around fifteen thousand, but it has recently been suggested that his forces may have numbered more than twenty-one thousand, placing them at only a slight numerical disadvantage to the King’s army. Contemporary estimates are also at variance. John Whittle, an English chaplain with the Dutch forces, wrote that when the troops disembarked at Brixham, ‘The number of all his [William’s] Forces and Souldiers [was] about fifteen thousand four hundred and odd men.’23 The intelligence that the crown was receiving from the west placed the Dutch forces at sixteen thousand infantry and five thousand horses (the ‘horse pretty good, but the foot very ordinary, and much inferior to ours’).24
To some extent this debate over numbers is academic as the two armies never met on the field of battle. What is clear, however, is the degree of confidence that William had in the ability of his army to carry off his plan. The units selected constituted the crack battalions of the Dutch army and were far more battle-hardened than those that James had to deploy. Unlike the Duke of Monmouth, for whom domestic support was an absolute necessity, the Prince had little need of or interest in securing military aid from English rebels once he had landed. As William made clear in his rather disgruntled speech to the south-western gentry when they finally publicly came out in support of him, what the Dutch required was not their ‘military assistance’ but their ‘countenance and presence’. Public support from the English for his intervention was valuable in that it validated the claims made in William’s propaganda that he had only landed on British shores at the invitation of the English people, to secure them from tyranny and popery. How ever, as we will see later, William was less than willing to arm or otherwise support the English rebels in the north for fear that this might later create a challenge to the total military hegemony of the Dutch.
The Glorious Revolution Page 13
