The Glorious Revolution

by Edward Vallance

  6

  SELLING THE REVOLUTION

  Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

  GEORGE ORWELL

  King James the second, having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of the kingdom, by breaking the original contract, between king and people, and by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons, having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of this kingdom, has abdicated the government; and that the throne is thereby vacant.

  RESOLUTION OF THE COMMONS IN THE CONVENTION, 28 JANUARY 16881

  King William is no king, I’ll justify it, he is an outlandish Curr, a Sone of a Whore, he eats the bread out of his fathers mouth.

  HENRY ELLYOTT, RESIDENT OF ST PAUL’S, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON, 16902

  Islanders in the Shetlands had had no account of the events of the Glorious Revolution until a fisherman happened to land on their shores in May 1689. However, his story of the Dutch invasion, James’s flight and the coronation of William and Mary was received as a seditious fantasy and instead he was indicted for high treason.3 Yet by 1689 it was only in such far outreaches of the British Isles as the Shetlands that not even the barest outline of the tumultuous events that had taken place in Westminster had been received. In fact, news had more quickly reached the North American colonies, which received confirmed stories of James’s flight in April 1689, leading to revolts against the current colonial administration in Boston, Maryland and New York.4 Elsewhere the debates and deliberations of the Convention were quickly relayed to the public through news-sheets, illicit (and often inaccurate) pamphlet copies of speeches and via the heated gossip exchanged in coffee-houses and taverns. In this sense the Glorious Revolution was far from merely a ‘swift aristocratic coup’ and, as we shall see, in the capital in particular, popular interventions in the political process had a real impact. In other ways, though, the Revolution was really effected by a very small number of individuals, namely the Protestant wing of the Stuart royal family. In contrast, the Convention acted as little more than a talking shop which rubber-stamped a dynastic usurpation.

  The debates in the Convention on the state of the nation, the declaration of rights and the coronation of William and Mary represented the constitutional climax of the old Whig interpretation of the crisis of 1688–9. Here the Convention formed the crucible for the founding of a new (and yet old) form of government: parliamentary monarchy. Yet to modern eyes the debates in the Convention seem archaic, tautological and confused. They focused not on the question of what sort of monarchy should be established in England but on who should be the effective monarch, William or Mary. The issue of whether James’s eldest daughter, or her husband, should come to the throne had serious implications for the established rules of hereditary succession. For Tories like the Earl of Nottingham, it also raised a genuine dilemma of conscience: how could they accept William as king without breaking their oath of allegiance to James? It was fear for their souls, as well as for their political futures, which led many Tories to refuse to countenance the notion that the Prince of Orange should inherit the crown. As we will see, in comparison to the question of the succession, the idea of outlining the extent of the new monarch’s powers, through a document such as the Declaration of Right, came almost as an afterthought. Even once enshrined in law, the Bill of Rights placed little in the way of fetters on William’s freedom of action. Far from being a product of political consensus, the lack of agreement between Williamites and loyalists, Whigs and Tories, had left the settlement of 1689 open-ended and deeply ambiguous. From the 1690s to the era of Walpole, politics would largely be dominated by a contest over the precise meaning of the Glorious Revolution.

  The last days of 1688 saw a dramatic resurgence in the fortunes of the Whig party, which only three years before had been effectively decimated through its association with popular insurrection and assassination plots. William’s summoning of an assembly of commoners to assist the assembly of peers was more than an attempt to return to normal modes of governance. In picking a body composed of MPs largely drawn from the Oxford Parliament of 1681 (thereby overlooking James’s legally legitimate first Parliament), the Prince virtually guaranteed that the body would be dominated by Whig members. With the addition of members from London’s common council (who had been freed by William from the obligations of oaths and sacramental tests – allowing Protestant dissenters to take up office), it was a body designed to counter-balance the majority of Tories in the assembly of peers. Other events also pointed to the rapid revival of Whiggery. On 28 December came the release of two of the greatest martyrs for the Whig cause, Samuel Johnson and Titus Oates. Oates’s rehabilitation was the most dramatic of all. After his second conviction for perjury in May 1685, he had been fined, defrocked and imprisoned and ordered to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn, and made to stand in the pillory as an annual punishment. During the anti-Catholic rioting in the capital from 11 to 13 December it was rumoured that Oates had been murdered in his cell, a victim, of course, of Jesuit poisoners. On his release ‘the Doctor of Salamanca’ was granted an audience with William at St James’s Palace and restored as a pensionary of the state. Oates continued to peddle his stories of popish plots well into the 1690s.5

  In this atmosphere of Whig triumphalism, some of William’s more militant supporters suggested that it was unnecessary for the Prince, having been granted the title of custos regni, to seek any further public approval before taking the throne.6 The Whig lawyers Serjeant Maynard, Recorder Treby and Henry Pollexfen urged William and Mary to order a proclamation declaring themselves king and queen. They cited legal precedents such as the so-called ‘de facto law’ of Henry VII of 1495, which, it was believed, made it lawful to obey those in possession of the throne as if they were the monarch by right.7 Gilbert Burnet argued in his Pastoral Letter that William had a right by conquest to the English throne, having defeated James in a just war fought on behalf of the people.8 By this stage William was unquestionably eager to have the crown settled upon him as soon as possible. However, exploiting arguments such as these was problematic. They seemed in blatant contradiction to the promise in his Declaration to leave the political settlement to a free Parliament. To take such action would also completely alienate the vast majority of Tory politicians. Moreover, arguments based on conquest drew further attention to the Dutch troops occupying the capital and raised additional questions about how free any new Parliament would be.

  Instead, a new body, the Convention, was summoned to meet on 22 January 1689 to forge a settlement. The elections for the Convention did display evidence of bipartisan cooperation, with several counties electing one Whig member and one Tory member without contest. Elsewhere, however, party feeling was present. William Sacheverell was defeated in Derbyshire for ‘his not appearing for the prince’. In Newcastle there were complaints that no legal choice could be made without the King’s writ.9 From the beginning William made it clear that he expected no unnecessary delays to hold up the Convention’s task, stating that ‘next to the danger of unseasonable divisions amongst yourselves, nothing can be so fatal as too great delay in your consultations’.10

  It was also clear from the opening of the Convention that the majority of members, Whigs as well as Tories, did not wish to see the return of James II as king. In the Lords several bishops omitted the prayer for the King when saying prayers in the House.11 John Sharp, the Dean of St Paul’s, who had raised James’s ire by preaching an anti-Catholic sermon in 1686, now found himself in hot water with the Convention for preaching a sermon on 30 January (the anniversary of Charles I’s execution) which denounced the killing or deposing of kings as a popish doctrine and was prefaced by prayers for King James and Queen Mary Beatrice.12 Francis Gwyn remarked that it was ‘now all over; neither he [James], nor his … [wife and children] are like ever to set foot here again’. Lord Dartmouth’s wife felt that the Commons and Lords had acted ‘as
if he [the King] had never been’. When, on 4 February, James sent a letter to the Convention via his Scottish Secretary of State, the Earl of Melfort, a hated Catholic convert who had joined his master in exile, the Lords refused to read it, rejecting it out of hand as ‘the letter of a private man; for he was no longer King’.13

  Whigs appeared in the ascendant in the Convention, as they had done in the assembly of commoners. The speakers of both houses were Williamites, with the Whig Henry Powle speaker of the Commons (whose opponent for the position, the Tory Sir Edward Seymour, was profoundly shocked at not being appointed) and the Earl of Halifax (who defeated Clarendon) taking the equivalent post in the Lords. Members of the Convention were not required to take the usual oaths of allegiance and supremacy, according to Delamere, because without their removal the Convention could not be regarded as a free assembly. This, as with the elections to the court of aldermen in London, freed up dissenters to take up places in the Commons. Realising that the lower house was dominated by Whigs and supporters of William’s claim to the throne, on 22 January the Tory Seymour attempted to shift discussion of the succession to the Lords, where the loyalists were stronger, on the grounds that not all MPs had yet assembled in Westminster. The motion was successful but the objective of allowing the loyalist Lords to seize control of the debate was thwarted by Halifax, who managed to convince the upper house that they should discuss the succession at the same time as the Commons.

  On 28 January the debate began in earnest. The declaration issued by the Commons aimed at terminating James’s kingship with a blunderbuss shot. There was a nod to Lockeian contract theory in the statement that James had broken ‘the Original Contract between the King and People’; acknowledgement of the idea of a Popish Plot in the phrase ‘the advice of Jesuits’; and reference to notions of an ancient constitution in the claim that he had ‘violated the fundamental Laws’. At this early stage there was already a clear preference among MPs that William rather than Mary should occupy the executive office. The Whig Boscawen stated that, as France was likely to declare war, ‘we have reasons to make use of our best weapon, to chuse a king to go before us and fight our battells (which was the first occasion of kingly government) and that a woman cannot so well do’.14 Boscawen’s remarks underline the importance of the sexual politics of the revolution: despite the deification of Elizabeth I, feminine rule was still seen as an unnatural anomaly. Particularly in times of war, it was vital that states should have virile, martial, masculine rulers. The declaration announcing that the throne was vacant was followed the next day by a further resolution that asserted that it was ‘inconsistent with the Safety and Welfare of this Protestant Kingdom, to be governed by a Popish Prince’.15

  The Lords gave their agreement to this last resolution, effectively ending, at least for the time being, the dynastic aspirations of the Catholic wing of the Stuart royal family. In any case the claims of James’s son, the legitimate heir, were barely discussed by either Whigs or Tories. Clarendon had urged in the Lords’ debate on 29 January that the ‘matter’ of the Prince of Wales should be investigated further, but this was not followed up.16 Some Whigs did raise the issue of the Prince of Wales in order to ridicule the Tory attachment to the hereditary succession. Treby made the point in the committee meeting to discuss the Commons’ resolution: ‘You are persons that usually are, or ought to be, present at the delivery of our Queens, and the proper witnesses to the birth of our Princes. If then your Lordships had known who was on the Throne, we should certainly have heard his name from you, and that had been the best reasons against the vacancy as could have been given.’17 In spite of the promise in William’s Declaration that a parliamentary committee would investigate the circumstances of the Prince of Wales’s birth, most members of the Convention preferred conveniently to forget that a legitimate male heir to the throne, James Francis Edward Stuart, already existed.

  However, hopes of a rapid agreement on conferring the crown on William were quickly thwarted by the Lords response to the Commons’ judgement that James’s actions constituted an ‘abdication’ and that the crown was now ‘vacant’. These debates could be seen as an exercise in pedantry, and there was certainly a fair degree of filibustering involved, but in seeking precise definitions of these terms, peers were coming to the nub of some thorny political issues. ‘Abdicate’ could be taken, in the common, modern understanding of the term, to mean a voluntary renunciation of office (as in the case of Edward VIII’s abdication in order to marry Wallis Simpson). This was also common usage in the seventeenth century and, as applied to the case of James II’s flight, many Tories viewed it as an acceptable description. For the Earl of Pembroke, James’s quitting the kingdom was no ‘more than a man’s running out of his house when on fire, or a seaman’s throwing his goods overboard in a storm, to save his life, which could never be understood as a renunciation of his house or goods’.18 However, there were other, relatively common, usages of the word in seventeenth-century England. It had a long-standing significance in civil law to cover the actions of fathers in disinheriting their children. It could also be used as a transitive verb, meaning to put off or to cast away, and it also had a more obscure meaning, which equated it with deposing from office. It was in its use as a transitive verb that the term was applied by some Whigs. The Whig lawyer John Somers explained in committee with the Lords that

  the word abdicate doth naturally and properly signify, entirely to renounce, to throw off, disown, relinquish any thing or person, so as to have no further to do with it; and that whether it be done by express words or in writing (which is the sense your Lordships put upon it, and which is properly called resignation or cession), or by doing such acts as are inconsistent with the holding and retaining of the thing, which the Commons take to be the present case.19

  So in Somers’s interpretation, echoed by the veteran Sir John Maynard, it was the illegal actions of James II, taken collectively, which amounted to a casting off of kingly office. This was not mere semantics, but made better sense of the Commons’ resolution of 1688, where ‘abdication’ followed the King’s breach of contract, collusion with Jesuits and violation of the fundamental laws.20

  To declare the crown ‘vacant’ appeared to be a violation of the established laws of succession which did not recognise an interregnum (so the reign of Charles II was taken as beginning after the execution of his father in January 1649, rather than in 1660). A further implication of this was that if the throne was vacant, then in debating who should succeed to it, the Convention was turning England from a hereditary to an elective kingdom. There was strong support in the Lords, led by the Earl of Nottingham, for the idea of a regency, with Mary as the preferred regent. The advantages of the regency scheme were that it could put aside deciding whether James had ‘abdicated’ or whether the throne was ‘vacant’. It also offered a possible back door to Mary ruling (as Queen Elizabeth II does) with William as only her consort. If, as was anticipated, James rejected the plan of a regency, the Princess of Orange could be installed as monarch in his place.

  There were also anticipated political and religious advantages to supporting Mary’s candidacy, namely her staunch Anglicanism (in contrast to her husband’s Calvinism) and her connections with some leading Tories, such as Danby. However, the prospect of rule by Queen Mary II again jarred with the patriarchal culture of early modern England. Henry Pollexfen complained that it was ‘not possible, nor ought to be in nature’, that a man, let alone a prince, should be governed by his wife.21 The rule of women over men, and wives over husbands, belonged rather to the nightmare of the world turned upside down, where fish swam through the air, and birds flew through the sea.22 A vote on establishing a regency was lost by a mere three votes, but another motion, to declare William and Mary joint monarchs, was also defeated. However, successful amendments in the upper house replaced the word ‘abdicated’ with ‘deserted’ and removed the clause referring to the throne being vacant.

  At the same time as the peers we
re rejecting offering the crown to William and Mary, at a private meeting at the Earl of Devonshire’s house on 31 January clear indications were given that the Prince was unwilling to accept the role of consort. A Dutch spokesman for William informed the gathering of English peers, which included Halifax and Danby, that the Prince was not content to be ‘his wife’s gentleman usher’. Danby, the leading spokesman for a regency at the meeting, took umbrage at these comments and departed immediately afterwards. The Princess of Orange herself remained in Holland, delayed from coming over first by the frozen state of the rivers and then by strong winds, so there was as yet no clear indication of Mary’s own feelings.23

  While pressure was being indirectly exerted from above to resolve the issue of succession in William’s favour, the practice of mass petitioning was revived to lend pressure from below. Crowds surrounded the House of Lords in great numbers to demonstrate their disgust at the obstructionism of the Tory peers. Lord Lovelace and Anthony Rowe, a former Monmouth rebel, presented a petition for William and Mary to accept the crown to the Lords and Commons. In both cases the petition was not read, as it had yet to be signed. (Lovelace claimed this was because of the disorder gathering subscriptions might provoke.) The rejection of the petition by the Convention led Lovelace to seek signatures from the populace. It was reported that fifteen thousand names had been collected, with the petition circulating in many of London’s coffee-houses, and that ten thousand men would deliver the signed petition on Monday 4 February. However, by this date, following belated pressure from William, the Lord Mayor had ordered that the petition be suppressed as a threat to public order.24 Some Williamites in the Lords were nonetheless explicit in stating that their duty of loyalty to James was well and truly at an end. The hot-tempered Delamere stated that ‘if King James came again, he was resolved to fight against him, and would die single, with his sword in his hand, rather than pay him any obedience’.25