The Glorious Revolution

by Edward Vallance

  Though Perth and Melfort failed to implicate Queensberry in the rioting, the disturbances nonetheless persuaded James that he had lost control of the government and encouraged him to put his faith in the Drummond brothers instead. Queensberry was removed as commissioner for the estates and Melfort put in his place. It led the King to place urban government further under the control of Catholics. The Catholic Duke of Gordon was made governor of Edinburgh because according to James, ‘I thought that necessary at this tyme to make that towne have more regard for my commands and civiler to the Catholicks, by seeing it in the hands of one of that persuasion.’11 As a result of the Drummonds’ influence James was convinced that the new session of his Scottish Parliament would see him win agreement to the repeal of the tests and penal laws. More reliable advice came from members of the secret committee of the Privy Council, led by the Duke of Hamilton, a leading Presbyterian peer. He warned that repeal was unlikely unless it was accompanied by some form of toleration for Protestants. Toleration, however, was looked at askance by the Episcopalian clergy of Scotland, who feared both the threat of a resurgent Presbyterianism, should the arguments of men like Hamilton win the day, and the actions of a popish King who had suspended the Bishop of Dunkeld for expressing anti-Catholic views. As a result of the fears of Presbyterians and the jealousies of the Episcopalians, the second session of Parliament, begun on 29 April 1686, proved far less tractable than the first. MPs were prepared to consider only giving liberty of private worship to Catholics, a mere extension of liberty of conscience, not the full emancipation that James demanded. Their answer to the king’s letter requesting them to consider a toleration, in which they promised to do only as much as their consciences would allow, was suppressed, given its pointed statement that they did not doubt that the King would ‘be careful to secure the Protestant Religion established by law’. Disheartened, James prorogued Parliament on 15 June.

  The methods adopted by James to overcome the obstacles placed in his path by the legislature were essentially the same as those he deployed in his southern kingdom. As in England, James began engineering town councils so as to elect a more pliant Parliament. He also replaced five of his Privy Councillors, installing Dundonald, a Presbyterian, and the Earls of Seaforth and Traquair, both Catholics, made it clear that he would institute a Catholic chapel at Holyrood and ordered judges not to molest his Catholic subjects. A public display of the King’s intentions was made on 23 November 1686 when his yacht arrived from London at Leith ‘with the Popish altar, vestments, images, Priests, and other dependenrs, for the Popish Chapell in the Abbey’. Again, as in England, in the short term James circumvented the failure to achieve a toleration through parliamentary means by effecting religious liberty through the use of his prerogative.

  On 12 February 1687 he issued his Edict of Toleration, which, aside from suspending all penal laws against Roman Catholics, extended freedom of private worship to ‘moderate Presbyterians’ and allowed Quakers to worship in public. James asserted that the Proclamation was effective as law on the grounds of the recognition of the King’s absolute power in the excise act. On 10 March he clarified even this very limited offer of toleration to his Protestant subjects by insisting that in order to benefit from the provisions as relating to Presbyterians, they were to take an oath of non-resistance which also confirmed the King in the exercise of absolute power. However, few were prepared to swear to this, and the need to build bridges with the Presbyterians was evident in James’s rapid extension of the concessions offered. In April the King permitted Presbyterian ministers to preach without taking the oath and in July he granted an unconditional toleration. As Sir John Lauder observed, ‘This was great instability of counsell.’12

  The problem for James was that in Scotland he never succeeded in converting Presbyterians into part of an alliance with Catholics, as he had been able to do to a degree with English dissenters. This led to the impression that the edict was really only a grant of toleration to Scottish Catholics, an impression fostered by the revival of the Order of the Thistle in June 1687, the Scottish equivalent of the Order of the Garter. James gave preference to Catholic peers like the newly converted Drummonds in the granting of this honour.

  Despite the poor reception of his plans for toleration in Parliament, James nonetheless attempted to poll public opinion, as he had done in England concerning the repeal of the tests and penal laws, only to receive equally depressing returns. Balcarres informed him that ‘most of them, though they consented and signed it, yet had such cruel apprehensions of other things further to be pressed upon them, that it kept them in constant concern and uneasiness.’13 Gilbert Burnet alleged that the edict was part of a plan to establish absolute power in Scotland, an accusation which James later refuted. It was taken to mean that he meant ‘either the usurping of my subjects’ property or constraining any body in matters of religion. For the first, nobody can accuse me of ever having done it and for the second everyone can see … that it is not my intention.’14 However, as in England, the process of public canvassing was meant less to test the water for support for repeal than to identify its opponents and prepare the way for political purges that would produce a compliant Parliament. Rumours intensified that the King would be calling for fresh elections.

  Discontent among most of James’s Protestant Scottish subjects remained subdued until the news of the birth of a Catholic heir reached his northern kingdom. There was very little public celebration of the Prince of Wales’s arrival and suspicions concerning his paternity were raised almost immediately. One of William’s spies reported that the ‘business of the new Prince is so much suspected in Scotland that when the news of it were, with great solemnity, made known to the people by the Chancellor, as he was attended with very few of the nobility … so in his acclamations of joy and waving of his hat he was scarce seconded by one of a great multitude of spectators’.15 Despite this very public affront to the King, resistance in Scotland remained muted until James was forced to draw his northern army south in order to counter William’s invasion force. In December of 1688 rioting broke out anew in Glasgow and Edinburgh, with mass pope-burning processions, and crowd attacks on Roman Catholic chapels and mass-houses. Presbyterian mobs also drove around two hundred Espicopalian clergy from their livings in the south-west of Scotland.

  If it was true that James’s Scottish subjects had generally waited until the Revolution was underway in England before demonstrating their overt opposition to the King’s rule, it was also the case that the Scottish were prominent in William’s invasion party. In addition to his chief propagandist, Burnet, William was accompanied by the ‘plotter’ (and future Jacobite) Robert Ferguson, Archibald, 10th Earl of Argyll, William Carstares, the Prince’s chaplain, Sir James Dalrymple, later Viscount Stair, and James Johnston. It was these exiled Scots who suggested to William at a meeting at Whitehall in early 1689 that he should summon a Scottish Convention to decide the political settlement north of the border. As in England, the Convention was so ordered that only a minimum number of those who had sat in James’s Parliament would be included. The Convention met in Edinburgh on 14 March 1689 under Hamilton’s presidency. Claverhouse, now Viscount Dundee, attended for a while before making his Jacobite credentials plain by withdrawing from the Convention and setting up a rival body at Stirling.

  Following a month of fierce debate, the Convention agreed on 11 April 1689 to offer the crown to William and Mary and drafted a Claim of Right, which justified their actions. In contrast to the fudge that was the English Declaration of Rights, the Scottish claim explicitly stated that James had ‘forfaulted’ his Scottish throne through having ‘invaded the fundamental constitution of the Kingdom and altered it from a legal limited monarchy to an arbitrary despotic power’. Unlike the English Declaration, the Scottish claim was also distinctly Presbyterian in character, involving a condemnation of ‘prelacy’. In July 1689 the Convention passed an act abolishing prelacy and in 1690 the Presbyterian ministers who had lost their
livings in 1662 as a result of the Act of Uniformity were restored to their parishes. The Convention’s abolition of episcopacy had the concomitant effect of immediately creating a natural constituency of support for James in Scotland. Support for Jacobitism became strongest in the lowland coastal strip between Fife and Aberdeen, where Episcopalianism was most heavily entrenched. At the same time, the Convention asserted Scottish legislative independence from England by abolishing the Lords of the Articles, through whom English monarchs since James I had managed to control much of the business of the Scottish Parliament. Consequently, although both England and Scotland were now governed by the same Protestant king (and politically the Act of Union was only seventeen years away), the initial effect of the Revolution was to loosen the bonds between the various parts of the British Isles.

  Meanwhile in Ireland events were producing a Jacobite revolution as religiously and politically exclusive as that occurring across the Irish Sea in Williamite Scotland and, as with the revolution in Scotland, it was pushing the Irish nation further towards independence from the British state. The central figure in effecting this Jacobite revolution was Richard Talbot, created Earl of Tyrconnel in May 1685. A former comrade in arms of the King, Talbot had a reputation for duplicity, heavy drinking, lying, swearing and verbal, if not physical, violence (though he was fond of issuing challenges and once had the audacity to challenge the then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Ormonde, to a duel). Tyrconnel’s secretary, Thomas Sheridan, described his master as

  a tall proper handsome man, but publicly known to be most insolent in prosperity and most abject in adversity, a cunning dissembling courtier of mean judgement and small understanding, uncertain and unsteady in his resolutions, turning with every wind to bring about his ambitious ends and purposes, on which he was intent that to compass them he would stick at nothing and so false that a most impudent notorious lie was called at Whitehall and St James’s one of Dick Talbot’s ordinary truths.

  The Earl of Clarendon was equally damning in his assessment:

  I do assure you truth, even in bare matter of fact, will never be known from my Lord Tyrconnel … It is impossible you can believe, unless you found it as we do here, how wonderfully false he is in almost everything he does. What he desires to be done one day, or avers he has done, he will positively deny another, though witnesses can prove him in the wrong: nay, though sometimes his own hand is shown against him; really his passion and rage (we know not for what) makes him forget what he says and does; and when he is convinced that he is in the wrong he is then in such a fury that the like is not usual.16

  During the Monmouth and Argyll rebellions, Tyrconnel used the excuse of the alleged disloyalty of the Ulster Presbyterians to disarm them and purge some from the army. While attempting to hobble the Protestants in the north, Tyrconnel also worked against the newly appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Clarendon, telling the King that his appointment ‘dos soe terreffye your Catholick subjects hear … by lodging your authority in a person from whom they have so little to expect any favour’.17

  When Clarendon arrived in Ireland, Tyrconnel immediately set off for England so that he could brief against the new Lieutenant at court, exhibited articles of impeachment against the Vice-Treasurer of Ireland and even raised charges of a criminal nature about Rochester’s conduct. In this, Tyrconnel was supported by court Catholics such as Sunderland, seeing it as a good way of further weakening the influence of the Protestant Hydes. For his part, Clarendon was exasperated by the appointment of Tyrconnel to oversee military affairs. He wrote to his brother, ‘It is a new method of doing business that all that the King thinks fit to have done should be performed by those in subordinate authority, and he, who is vested in all the power the King can give him, must sit like an ass and know nothing.’18

  Tyrconnel proceeded to replace ‘English’ soldiers with ‘Irish natives’, while Clarendon was instructed to alter the judiciary so as to favour the Catholic ‘Old English’. In private he complained that ‘it was never yet known, that the sword and the administration of justice were put into the hands of a conquered people’.19 Clarendon attempted to soothe English fears by issuing proclamations assuring them that their property was safe and that the terms of the Act of Settlement would not be abrogated. However, Tyrconnel was already urging the King in August 1686 that he had been mistaken in confirming the Act of Settlement. It was clear that Clarendon was out of favour with the King when in October of that year he received a list of ‘five heads’, complaints about his conduct as Lord Lieutenant which Tyrconnel had laid before James. On 8 January 1687 Clarendon learnt that his brother had resigned, that he had been recalled to England and that Tyrconnel was to be appointed Lord Deputy for the government of Ireland.

  The task that James had set for Tyrconnel was similar to that assigned to the Drummonds in Scotland. The end goal was an Irish Parliament that would be dominated by Catholics, a goal the King ‘was persuaded no English peer could effect’. To this end Tyrconnel called the old charters in and remodelled the corporations as had been done in James’s other two kingdoms. Catholics were commissioned as officers in the army and appointed to the government and judiciary. The Catholic Sir Richard Nagel was made Attorney General and in January 1687 Sir Alexander Fitton was made Lord Chancellor (though he had to be released from prison to take up his post as he had been put in gaol for forgery). The Catholic Archbishop of Cashel wrote to the Vatican that Tyrconnel had made ‘the army nearly all Catholics, as well commanders and officers as ordinary soldiers. The royal council in Dublin is for the greater part Catholic. The civil officials, both judges and magistrates, are for a greater part Catholic.’20 The Catholic Church itself in Ireland was given increasing support. Livings in the Church of Ireland were left vacant and the money redistributed to Catholic priests, mass-houses were opened in Dublin castle and the Royal Hospital, while Kilmainham was reconsecrated for Catholic use.

  The policies undertaken in Ireland mirrored those pursued in England and Scotland as, again, for James the objective was the emancipation of Catholics and the creation of a pliant representative body, not the immediate conversion of the whole state to Romanism. To an extent the activities of Tyrconnel were little more than a continuation of the policies undertaken in the 1670s, when restrictions on Catholic trade were lifted in some areas and rumours spread among Protestants that papists were being allowed back into county government as sheriffs and JPs.21 However, Tyrconnel’s objectives diverged from those of either Charles II or James II in two important ways: first, he wished to see the Act of Settlement reversed and English overlordship of Ireland overthrown; and secondly, as a consequence of the first aim, he was not interested in the outcome of the Jacobite struggle in James’s other two kingdoms. As early as 1686 Tyrconnel appears to have been considering what the Catholics in Ireland should do if James should die without leaving an heir. He told Sheridan that the Irish would be ‘fools or madmen if, after his death, they should submit to be governed by the Prince of Orange or Hyde’s daughter or be longer slaves to England’. They should ‘rather set up a King of their own, and put themselves under the protection of France’.22 Here Tyrconnel probably had in mind James’s eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Berwick.

  This vision of an independent Ireland, ruled by a Catholic Stuart king, clashed with the vision of both James and his Catholic advisers in England. Sunderland, though happy to use Tyrconnel as a means to undermine the Hydes at court, had no wish to unsettle Protestant settlers in Ireland, and urged the King to issue a proclamation confirming the titles to land of those then in possession (a request which Tyrconnel managed to have rejected). For James’s English Catholic advisers, a policy of reversing the Act of Settlement was correctly seen as being absolutely disastrous for their project of gaining Protestant assent to the repeal of the test acts and penal laws in England. Similarly, James, fundamentally an Anglocentric monarch who happened also to be King of Ireland and Scotland, did not see the Protestant Irish as
interlopers, colonisers, thieves and oppressors but as his wealthiest subjects within Ireland, who could not be dispossessed without greatly damaging royal revenue. As James advised his son James Francis in 1692, ‘for the good of trade and improvement of that kingdom, the English interest must be supported’, although he warned him that ‘there must be great care taken not to trust them too far, they being generally ill-principled and republicans’.23

  The birth of a legitimate son to James in 1688 removed the need for Tyrconnel to look for an alternative candidate to take the Irish throne should the King die, but in most other respects the Earl’s plans of 1686 were put into effect at the Revolution. In February 1689 Tyrconnel sent an embassy to France led by William Stewart, Lord Mountjoy, a Protestant supporter of James, and chief baron Rice, a Roman Catholic. Mountjoy told James that Ireland was untenable, but Rice denounced his fellow envoy as a traitor and instead conveyed Tyrconnel’s warm imprecations to James to come to Ireland, begging him to consider ‘whether you can with honour continue where you are, when you possess a kingdom of your own plentifull of all things for human life’.24 (There was irony in this appeal to personal honour, with its echoes of similar pressure exerted upon an earlier royal exile to the continent, the Duke of Monmouth.) Mountjoy was imprisoned in the Bastille. The pleading of the Lord Deputy alone might not have been enough to convince James to leave his exiled court at St Germain en Laye, absorbed as he now was in the practice of private Catholic devotion. The King was convinced that the Revolution represented a temporal punishment from God for his own failings and sinfulness, and that his own sincere penance was necessary to assuage the wrath of the Lord.

  James may well have preferred to remain at St Germain in quiet contemplation but Louis XIV saw an opportunity to use a Jacobite revolution in Ireland to open up a second front in the Continental war that he was fighting against William. However, the French king had little interest in James’s using Ireland as a launching pad to reconquer England and Scotland. Firstly, he did not have resources to support such an operation, and secondly, his primary aim to was to divert William from his Continental theatre of operations to deal with problems nearer to home, rather than to recover James’s possessions for him. This was reflected in the limited initial help that James was given by the French. No troops were sent though James was accompanied by French officers, but these clearly remained under French command and were instructed to return to France if they judged that Ireland favoured William of Orange, and that the expedition was untenable. Otherwise, they could give assurance to Tyrconnel and James that French troops would follow the next winter. This emphasis on the preservation of French resources, which was present right through the revolutionary wars in Ireland, severely limited the strategic value of French assistance to James during the conflict.