The Glorious Revolution

by Edward Vallance

  A dose of ‘sympathetic ash’, prescribed by a local apothecary, stopped the King’s bleeding, and sensing the need for a clear plan of action, James summoned a council of war on 22 November. His commander in chief, the Earl of Feversham, argued that the army should withdraw back to London. Yet James’s second in command, Lord Churchill, stated that it would be madness to turn back. Churchill, whose wife Sarah (a close confidante of Princess Anne) was staunchly Whiggish in her political opinions and an implacable enemy of popery, had already resolved to defect to William when the time was right. James, probably now fixed on fleeing the country, supported Feversham’s reasoning and the foot and artillery prepared to make an immediate retreat.

  The next day, 23 November, the King found that both Churchill and the Duke of Grafton had gone. Once Churchill’s defection was known, it was widely suggested in Catholic circles that the King’s illness was providential in source, in that, had he not been incapacitated, James might have been delivered into the Prince’s hands by his own commanders. Churchill, for his part, always insisted that he had wished that the King might have come to a negotiated settlement with William, a stance that seemed strangely at odds with his public advice to James. For the King the news of the desertions was a bitter blow. ‘If my enemies only had cursed me,’ he said, ‘I could have borne it.’ Yet, the flow of defectors to the Prince continued apace. News soon came that Colonel Percy Kirke, renowned for his brutality in the wake of the Monmouth rebellion, was now refusing to follow orders. Later the same evening Princess Anne’s husband, the Prince of Denmark, and the Duke of Ormonde absconded. At the news of the former’s departure, James wryly replied with the same phrase that Denmark had used on hearing of every previous defection: ‘Est-il possible?’ The King left for London with his camp falling into chaos, as the rank and file also began to desert and local people started to panic about the looting and worse that the AWOL troops might commit. However, when he arrived in Whitehall he was to find that not only his commanders had betrayed him but his youngest daughter as well.

  As King, James had a reputation as a resolute and authoritarian character. However, his confidence now appeared to disintegrate in the face of betrayal by his people, but more crushingly, by his family. Even had James decided to meet William in combat, it is questionable whether the outcome in 1688 would have been much different. The almost complete breakdown of communication between central and local government created by the campaign to ‘pack’ Parliament meant that the King’s control over the localities was seriously diminished. This was reflected in the ease with which a serious rebellion in the north, led by a combination of Whig and Tory peers, was able to be planned and raised, effectively cutting off the option of bringing back royal troops from Ireland to help suppress the Dutch invasion force. The strength of William’s own forces was reflected in his clear confidence in the ability of this smaller force to overcome James’s numerically superior army. The Dutch leader also knew the full extent of the Orangist conspiracy against the King, which reached not only Parliament and the army but also the royal family itself.

  Here there was a clear contrast with the behaviour of the Stuart dynasty during the Civil War. Then the royal family had remained united, resisting attempts by parliamentarians to install one of Charles’s sons as a puppet monarch. In 1688, however, the family split along confessional lines, with the Catholic members continuing to support James and the Protestants siding with William. Public opinion seemed to have swung decisively towards James’s opponents, with serious anti-Catholic rioting in London and other cities. In contrast, Williamite propaganda succeeded in drawing over thousands of people to the Prince’s cause. James still had cards that he could play, William had yet to announce publicly a desire to take the British throne and most English politicians were unwilling to consider actually deposing their lawful King. However, though James would retain his belief in his own absolute authority, his shattered nerves and disintegrating army would mean that he had neither the will nor the means to shape events to his benefit.

  5

  PANIC AND FLIGHT

  One thing I must say of the Queen, which is that she is the most hated in the world of all sorts of people; for everybody believes that she pressed the King to be more violent than he would be of himself; which is not unlikely, for she is a very great bigot in her way, and one may see by her that she hates all Protestants.

  PRINCESS ANNE TO THE PRINCESS OF ORANGE, 9 MAY 1687

  I am fully persuaded that the Prince of Orange designs the King’s safety and preservation, and hope all things may be composed without more bloodshed, by calling a Parliament.

  God grant a happy end to these troubles, that the King’s reign may be prosperous, and that I may shortly meet you in perfect peace and safety; till when, let me beg of you to continue the same favourable opinion that you have hitherto had of your most obedient daughter and servant.

  LETTER LEFT BY PRINCESS ANNE TO THE QUEEN ON 25 NOVEMBER 1688, EXPLAINING HER FLIGHT FROM WHITEHALL1

  The King had been betrayed by his bishops, his lords and his leading officers. On the desperate return march to the capital he learnt that his youngest daughter, Anne, had deserted him too. Anne’s husband, the stolid George, Prince of Denmark, had already absconded from James’s army, and on the night of 25 November, the Princess herself slipped out from her apartments in Whitehall. Anne had already given a clear indication of her approval of the Prince of Orange’s intervention in a letter sent to her sister a week earlier. However, her antipathy to her father’s romanising policies, and especially to her Catholic stepmother, had been evident much earlier. A rift had already opened up between James and Anne, in part as a result of his attempts to secure her conversion to the Catholic faith. However, this growing divide was also a result of the political realignment of the court after James’s second marriage. The Anglican Princess Anne, with her Lutheran husband Prince George, had become the main focus for Protestant courtiers in England, with the King’s second wife, Mary of Modena, seen as presiding over the Catholic faction at court.

  By 1687 Anne was convinced that the King’s advisers, if not her father himself, were intent on returning England to popery. She wrote to her sister Mary that Sunderland was ‘working with all his might to bring in popery. He is perpetually with the priests and stirs up the King to do things further than I believe he would of himself.’ Things had, she told Mary, come ‘to that pass now, that, if they go on much longer, I believe in a little while no Protestant will be able to live here’.2 It had been Anne who had first sown the seeds of doubt in Mary’s mind concerning the paternity of the Prince of Wales. Moreover, though the influence upon Anne of her brilliant, staunchly Whig, favourite, Sarah Churchill, was considerable, it is worth noting that Anne’s comments concerning Mary Beatrice were always far more vituperative than those expressed by Sarah.3 For Anne the driving factors behind her decision to abandon her father were her hatred of popery and, most importantly, her desire to protect her own and her children’s claims to the succession which had been threatened by the birth of the Prince of Wales.

  Henry Compton, the Bishop of London, had already been in contact with Lady Churchill concerning plans for the Princess’s escape, should it prove necessary, giving her details of his secret address in Suffolk Street, just north of Whitehall. In the early hours of 26 November these plans came into effect as Anne and Sarah, using a recently installed back staircase to leave Whitehall unnoticed, met up with Compton and his nephew, Lord Dorset, who had a hackney coach ready to take them across London to a safe house in Aldersgate Street. The timing of their departure was fortuitous. Soldiers had already been placed outside Sarah Churchill’s lodgings (though these were rendered ineffective by the back staircase, which communicated directly with the Princess’s quarters) and at three in the morning an order came from the King that Anne was to be placed under guard. However, the Princess’s lodgings were not checked until ten. When news of Anne’s disappearance reached her, Mary Beatrice reportedly c
ried ‘as if she had been mad’.

  With the return of the King imminent, the capital could not provide a safe haven for long and immediate preparations were made to leave. The next morning the party left London through Epping Forest (Compton wearing the distinctly unecclesiastical garb of buff coat and jackboots topped off with a sword and pistol), stopping off at the village of Loughton and then proceeding to Dorset’s mansion at Copt Hall. After a short stay they went on (without Lord Dorset) through the countryside, reputedly stopping at an inn to take refreshment, where, according to local custom, they ‘sat in a cart saying that but for their flight it [i.e. to sit in a hangman’s cart] might have been their lot’. The roads west of London were now clogged with the King’s soldiers making their bedraggled way back from the camp at Salisbury, so the only way for Anne to effect a reunion with her husband was to follow a roundabout route, first heading north to join up with Compton’s Orangist co-conspirators in Nottingham. At Castle Ashby they were joined by a force of cavalry recruited by the Earl of Northampton, and with this added protection their journey northwards began to take on the character of a royal progress. On reaching Market Harborough the Princess, who had now made her identity public, was greeted by a full civic entertainment as the mayor and alderman laid on two banquets for their unexpected royal guest.4

  Anne’s flight revealed the increasingly complex nature of political alliances during the revolution. Her presence in the Midlands attracted loyalists who were not prepared to actively support William but were drawn to the Princess simply to safeguard her person: men such as the Earl of Chesterfield, Sir Henry Every, Sir Gilbert Clarke, John Dalton of Derby, Robert Burdett of Foremark and Gilbert Thacker of Repton, a number of whom refused to take the Association to the Prince of Orange, regarding it as an act of treachery. Chesterfield made it clear that he attended Anne only out of concern for her personal safety, not because he supported William’s intervention in English affairs, stating that he was ‘come a purpose (if there were occasion) to defend her person with my life against any that would dare to attack her; but as to my being of her council, I did beg pardon for desiring to be excused because I had the honour to be a privy councillor to the King her father: and therefore I would not be of any council for regulating troops that I perceived were intended to serve against him’.

  By 3 December they had reached Nottingham, now safely in Orangist hands, and Compton wrote to Danby seeking further military protection for the Princess and advice as to what course of action to take next. In a letter to the Bishop, Danby expressed the hope that Anne might come to York ‘both for her security and the great addition it would give to our interest in these parts’. For the Earl the presence of the Princess in Yorkshire would considerably strengthen his political influence and ability to operate (as he hoped) as a powerful negotiator between the King and the Prince of Orange. However, Compton refused to act without the approval of William, and the Prince was clearly unwilling to allow Danby the opportunity to create an independent power base in the north. On 8 December he issued instructions to Compton for he and the Princess to return south to Oxford.

  James arrived back in London on the night of 26 November to find that his daughter had disappeared. Though the desertion of her husband had already alerted the King to her potential disloyalty, the King was nonetheless shattered by the news. ‘God help me!’ he was said to have exclaimed. ‘My own children have forsaken me.’ The following day he invited all the peers to London to advise him how to proceed, with forty in total attending the meeting. The Earl of Rochester urged James to call Parliament as ‘the only remedy in our present circumstances’. The peers advised James that he should enter into a treaty with the Prince of Orange and make such concessions as offering free elections, promising to desist from exercising the dispensing power, and giving a general pardon to ‘all the Lords who are now with the Prince of Orange and who are up in the other counties and all the gentlemen who are engaged might have free liberty to be chosen and to come to parliament as if these stirs had never been’. To the last concession the King was resistant, demanding that Churchill at least should be made an example of: ‘Churchill whom I raised so high, He and he alone has done all this. He has corrupted my army. He has corrupted my child. He would have put me into the hands of the Prince of Orange but for God’s special providence.’ Reminded by the lords that, having lost the opportunity to defeat William militarily, he now had to rely on the goodwill of the people, James was brought to reconsider. The following day instructions were issued for a new Parliament to meet on 15 January. James further agreed to send three peers, Halifax, Nottingham and Godolphin, as emissaries to the Prince of Orange, and sent out a proclamation not only giving pardon to those in arms against him but also rendering them eligible to stand in the new elections. William’s supporters were not even required to lay down their weapons to gain the benefit of these concessions. However, some members of the Orangist conspiracy were now in an aggressively triumphalist mood. Clarendon remarked that James’s offer of a royal amnesty to the rebels was met with mirth among the Prince’s supporters. ‘They wanted no pardon, they said, They would make the King ask pardon before they had done with him.’5

  Yet the King now little expected that such overtures would win back the people’s trust and affection. He had already made clear before the peers that he felt that flight was perhaps his only option: ‘he saw he must either retreat or fly beyond seas, but he hoped if he was forced to ye last, God would restore him as he had once his brother.’ He was now preoccupied by the belief that William sought his throne, ‘that it would appear that the Prince of Orange came for the crown, whatever he pretended: but that he would not see himself deposed: that he had read the story of Richard II’.6 Privately James told the French ambassador that he had agreed to the peers’ suggestions simply to buy time in which to organise the escape of his wife, son and finally himself to France. The King said to Barillon that he could no longer expect any loyalty from his troops, except those from Ireland, and they were too small in number to resist the enemy. Were he to place himself at the mercy of a free Parliament, James expected they would seek to make him no more than the shadow of a king, ‘which I could not endure, I should be forced to undo all that I have done for the Catholics and to break with the King of France’.

  As a further preparation for his imminent exit, James also moved Lord Chancellor Jeffreys into Father Petre’s apartments in Whitehall (Petre having already fled to France) in order to have the Great Seal close to him. Instruments affixed with this carried the force of law and could only be repealed by act of Parliament. Having the seal so close to him would, James hoped, allow him to dispose of it in the event of the crisis coming to a head and thereby throw the country into administrative confusion. The issuing of writs for a new Parliament had the additional benefit that it removed the main justification for the Dutch invasion, thereby adding weight to the Jacobite charge that William was no more than a foreign usurper.

  The Prince of Orange was now keen to reach London as soon as possible in order to exert maximum influence over any political settlement. Apart from a couple of minor skirmishes, there was no resistance to the Dutch army’s eastward march. As James had correctly surmised, only his Irish soldiers appeared to show any willingness to stand their ground. An advance troop of William’s army entering the town of Wincanton encountered 120 Irish soldiers under Captain Sarsfield. Outnumbered, the troops under the command of Lieutenant Campbell were only saved by news that the whole of the Prince’s army was shortly approaching.

  Elsewhere towns fell to pro-Orangist forces. In December Newcastle was taken by Lord Lumley, proclaiming for the Protestant religion and a free Parliament, while the Duke of Norfolk secured Norwich with some three hundred armed men and declared for the Prince. In Gloucester the dashing Lord Lovelace, freed from gaol by the city’s inhabitants, hastily organised a cavalry force which he led to Oxford. Meanwhile at Berwick William was approached about a treaty with the King and also recei
ved the news that James had called for a new Parliament to meet in January. Clarendon, at this point a visitor to the Prince’s camp, was assured by William that he would keep to the terms of his declaration, and the same message was repeated by his Dutch favourite, Hans Willem Bentinck, and Churchill. However, Gilbert Burnet’s response to the same news revealed some of the difficulties James’s concessions gave to the Orangist camp. Burnet now used the same argument earlier employed by the King, that no Parliament could meet while the country was in such confusion, to demonstrate that it was necessary to forestall sending out writs until the nation was secured. On 4 December William entered Salisbury to a semi-regal welcome, but he could no longer afford to waste his time enjoying English civic hospitality.

  Events in Europe had made the need for a resolution of affairs in England even more urgent. Louis XIV had a fortnight before formally declared war on the United Provinces, while the death of Caspar Fagel had also robbed the Prince of his main supporter among the powerful urban elite of Holland. As his army pressed on they encountered further resistance from James’s Irish soldiers. On 7 December there was a bloody skirmish at Reading as an advance guard of the Prince’s army some 250 strong ran into a troop of six hundred Irish dragoons, with William’s soldiers getting the best of it (which perhaps shows that the Prince was correct to feel confident in the ability of his numerically inferior forces to overcome the royal army). The following day James’s commissioners, Halifax, Nottingham and Godolphin, attended William. Halifax later reported a conversation with Burnet in which Burnet enthusiastically endorsed the idea of James taking flight as the best solution to the complicated political situation.