The Glorious Revolution

by Edward Vallance

  By the summer of 1691 preparations were being made on both sides of the Channel for invasion attempts. The Jacobite intrigues of leading political, military and naval figures had encouraged Louis to believe that there would be domestic support for restoring James by force, with a planned landing of twenty thousand troops at Torbay – the Stuart king would begin the recovery of his crown where William had begun his design to steal it. News of these efforts leaked out to England in April 1692. Easterly winds which kept the invasion force at bay in La Hogue gave time for the English fleet to assemble under Russell with ninety ships and around forty thousand men. Joined shortly afterwards by the Dutch, William’s force now had a distinct numerical advantage, with a combined force of ninety-nine ships, thirty-eight fireships and 6736 guns against forty-four ships, thirty-eight fireships and 3240 guns on the French side. Russell’s guns inflicted such damage on the French flagship the Soleil Royal that she had to be towed off. As the French fleet dispersed in retreat, the British set fire to the enemy fireships and transports in the bay. The threat of invasion of England had been averted but, as with the French after Beachy Head, there was no firm decision as to how this victory should be pressed home. A plan to turn defensive success into offensive advantage, via a ‘descent’ on France, was abandoned as Russell dithered, reluctant to land his ships on the treacherous French Atlantic coastline. La Hogue also brought about a change of strategy by the French. Realising that, outnumbered and outgunned, they could not compete with the English and Dutch in a full-scale naval war, they turned their ships to attacking English trade, with great success. French privateering led to an overall collapse in English overseas trade: by 1693–4 English exports to the Iberian Peninsula, the Canary Islands and the Mediterranean region had fallen by 25 per cent of their pre-1686 levels and colonial merchants also experienced heavy losses of cargoes.34

  William, in any case, believed the crucible of his war against Louis would not be the Channel but on land in Flanders. With the end of the Irish campaign, the King was able to bring another forty thousand English troops into the Low Countries. The King was now engaged in the kind of Continental land war that he and most European generals were familiar with, one dominated by the besieging and bombarding of massively fortified towns, a slow, costly, attritional form of warfare of which the English had far less experience, even after the civil wars. William’s lack of success in the early part of the Nine Years War did not endear the Flanders campaign to the English public either. Heavy rains and flooding which swept away pontoons prevented the King from relieving the French encirclement of Namur and after a month-long siege the fortress surrendered in June 1692. Further defeat was experienced at Steenkirk in July as William attempted to engage the French army in a pitched battle, but in the close fighting the King lost around three thousand men, with around half of the troops in the Scottish regiments of Mackay and Lanier killed. The opinions of the Newcastle nonconformist Ambrose Barnes on the Flanders campaign were not uncharacteristic: ‘Our Revolution has cost us more millions than all our warrs, I had almost said since William the Norman’s time put them together. We have had forces enow to have subdued the world, yet all has ended in marches and countermarches, loyal camps, and the taking and retaking a town or two.’35

  English ministers, particularly Nottingham, felt that war in Flanders would not bring a decisive victory and instead went back to the idea of a ‘descent’. MPs continued to vote William money, agreeing to give him a further £4 million in supply, but largely on the rather negative argument, used by Sir William Temple, that it was at least better that the war was fought in Flanders rather than in England. But William’s war continued to go badly. In July 1693 he suffered another heavy defeat at Landen, which was followed by the French capture of Charleroi. Worse news still came with the French capture of the wealthy Smyrna fleet off the coast of Portugal. As will be shown in the next chapter, this humiliation played a large part in killing off William’s hopes of governing through a joint ministry of both parties and led him to turn reluctantly towards the Whigs.36

  War not only transformed politics and shaped the religious settlement but also altered the constitution, arguably in ways more profound than the Revolution settlement of 1688. William’s wars necessitated a massive increase in government expenditure; while under King James government spending had been about £2 million a year, under King William it was £5.5 million per annum. In part this expenditure was funded by raising taxation to unprecedented levels. In the 1680s taxation had amounted to about 3–4 per cent of national income, but by the first decade of the eighteenth century this was around 9 per cent. The most important of these taxes was the land tax, which accounted for no less than 52 per cent of the government’s tax revenue in 1696. Other major sources of revenue were customs duties, providing around 22 per cent of government tax income in the 1690s, and the excise (a form of sales tax), giving around 25 per cent. In contrast with the early seventeenth century, the vast majority of the Crown’s taxes now required parliamentary approval (the King had conceded further parts of the Revolution financial settlement in 1690) and, in order to smooth the financing of his war machine, William allowed greater and greater public scrutiny of government spending. Commissions of public accounts were established which looked into the State’s budget, routing out corruption and waste. The King’s aim here was to convince the Parliament that the vast costs of the war were not masking peculation by crown officers and that the money was, in fact, going into arms, ships and men.

  Taxation alone was not enough, though, to support the huge costs of major European land war. Tax revenue was consequently heavily supplemented by government borrowing, but short-term loans were not sufficient to make up the difference, particularly given the wariness of creditors about lending money to a regime that had only recently been established and remained under the threat of a Jacobite invasion. Lenders were not encouraged any further by the inability of William and Mary to pay their IOUs. The government was left to resort to new methods to raise credit, including state lotteries such as the Million Lottery of 1694, the prizes for which were to be paid for out of future duties on salt and alcohol.

  By far the most important of these new institutions was the Bank of England, established in the summer of 1694, initially as a private company. A scheme for a joint-stock company, lending money to the crown on an indefinite basis in return for a fixed-interest rent, had first emerged in 1692 from the London-based Scottish merchant William Paterson. Legislation for founding the Bank was presented to Parliament in April 1694 by the Treasury commissioner, Charles Montague, working with Michael Godfrey, its future deputy governor (killed in 1695 at the battle of Namur while discussing Bank business with the King). The Bank would raise a stock subscription of £1.2 million, a sum which would, in turn, be lent by the Bank to the crown for an indefinite period in return for an annual ‘rent’ amounting to 8 per cent interest (6 per cent lower than the rate charged on the ‘Million Loan’ of 1693). The subscription was taken up eagerly by English merchants whose other investments were suffering as a result of war.

  Thomas Addison, the editor of the Spectator, retrospectively portrayed the Bank as one of the founding stones of the Revolution settlement, envisaging ‘public credit’ as as much a part of the English constitution as Magna Carta. Indeed, it has recently been argued that some of those merchants who were the earliest advocates of the Bank were also key players in effecting the Revolution of 1688. Perhaps precisely because its creation was politically charged, set against the downfall of Nottingham’s ministry, not everyone, and Tories less than most, was happy with the creation of the Bank of England. There were complaints that it represented, along with the heavy burden of the land tax, another assault by mercantile capital against the landed interest. Indeed, the Tories attempted to set up a rival institution, the Land Bank, in 1696 in order to create a new source of public credit based on landed wealth. Beyond these arguments motivated by politics and economic self-interest, there were broader,
less partisan complaints about the social and moral implications of the financial revolution. The new world of stock speculation and public lotteries seemed to some to be diverting the energies of merchants and traders away from ‘real’ business into what was little more than state-sponsored gambling. (In fact, conflict in Flanders caused its own betting craze, as vast sums of money were wagered with so-called ‘insurers’ on the outcomes of sieges.37)

  The war itself, which had been the catalyst for these financial innovations, was linked by some individuals to national sinfulness. George Berkeley stated that ‘it is very remarkable that luxury was never at so great a height, nor spread so generally through the nation, as during the expense of the late wars’.38 William’s lack of success in the Flanders campaign was attributed by some to divine disfavour provoked by the nation’s sinfulness. Natural disasters were also interpreted as the product of God’s wrath. The earthquake at Port Royal in Jamaica on 7 June 1692, in which around fifteen hundred people died, and another tremor felt in London in September the same year, were seen as signs of the Lord’s anger with England. ‘O that now Gods judgments are in the earth,’ wrote Abigail Harley from London on the day of the quake, ‘the inhabitants may learn righteousness & not go on presumptuously in sin.’ A pamphlet of the time stated that though the tremor had done little damage ‘who can tell, this is not the last Warning; and that the next time he shall visit us, he will not in his Fiery Indignation utterly consume us, and swallow us up quick?’39 Jacobites alleged that these misfortunes were divine punishment for the unlawful deposition of James II. Williamites urged rather that the Revolution was a divine blessing, but one which might be transformed into a curse if the nation did not mend its ways: ‘God can create destruction upon a People, which he hath created Salvation and Deliverance for, that will not accept of it, nor be saved nor delivered by him.’40

  Concerns about the impact of war on society were combined with fears about the ramifications of the Revolution’s religious settlement upon the public’s faithfulness. Though toleration was limited, at least on paper, some consequences of the Toleration Act raised anxieties that the 1690s were witnessing the rise of irreligion, immorality and atheism. Churchwardens were still theoretically obliged to present parishioners to the church courts who had failed to attend communion but they increasingly failed to do so on the basis that non-communicants might instead be attending services in nonconformist meeting houses. There is certainly some evidence of a decline in communicants after the passage of the Act. In Clayworth in Nottinghamshire perhaps 85–90 per cent of parishioners of an age to communicate did so before the Glorious Revolution but by 1701 figures were perhaps only 55 per cent.41

  The role of church courts in regulating moral behaviour and monitoring religious observance was also undermined by the Act. Though individuals were still being presented for irreligious activity as flagrant (but not fragrant) as pissing in the parish church, punishments such as excommunication were obviously of little worth in the case of individuals who were no longer Anglican worshippers. It seemed to some more logical for these nonconformist churches to apply their own sanctions on recalcitrant followers. However, many churchmen suspected that a large proportion of the public simply used the terms of the Toleration Act as a cover to avoid attending religious services of any kind, instead, it was alleged, spending their time drinking, gaming and whoring. Perceived public religious indifference was all the more worrying as it appeared to form part of a larger movement of intellectual scepticism about religion, headed by freethinkers like John Toland, a close associate of Locke, who argued for the discarding of all parts of Christian faith that could not be supported by reason. Feelings of concern were not limited to Church of England men. There was evidence of disenchantment among Protestant dissenters, in particular Presbyterians, who felt that the Williamite reformation had not gone far enough; popery was tolerated too much, and old members of James’s regime were allowed to slink back into office. The King had failed to foster the Protestant union which was essential to the successful reformation of the nation.

  The apparent threat posed by religious pluralism, moral indifference and atheism was made more palpable by the fact that Protestantism appeared at this point to be under threat internationally. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685, and the harsh persecution that followed, led to the emigration of fifty thousand Huguenots to England. The following year the Duke of Savoy attacked fifteen thousand Protestant Vaudois (Waldenses), killing many, forcing the conversion of others, and leaving the remainder to flee to the safety of Switzerland. In response to these assaults on European co-religionists, the English public gave generously to charitable funds to aid distressed Protestants. Towards the end of the seventeenth century and around the start of the eighteenth century £64,713 was raised for Huguenots, £59,146 for Irish Protestants, £27,606 for the Vaudois, £22,038 for the Palatines and £19,548 for Orange Protestants. These charitable endeavours were encouraged by William and Mary, who gave £39,000 to Huguenots between 1689 and 1693 and prompted a Royal Bounty of £15,000 supplied by Parliament from 1696 onwards.42

  Consequently the 1690s saw a cross-denominational movement to counter public vice and religious ignorance and indifference. As the Toleration Act had tied the hands of the State to act in this regard, these energies were now directed into voluntary societies. Some, such as the Religious Societies, begun by Anthony Horneck, the pastor of the Savoy chapel in London, before the Revolution, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), founded in 1700, were exclusively Anglican. Yet others, such as the Societies for Reformation of Manners, which will be discussed in greater detail below, benefited from the involvement of the Crown, the Church and Protestant dissent.

  William’s more latitudinarian bishops were committed to promoting national moral reformation. In December 1691 they petitioned the King to issue a proclamation for the implementation of the laws against vice, which was published at the end of January 1692. Fifty-three Anglican ministers, among them several bishops, preached to the Society for Reformation of Manners between 1696 and 1739. The societies were particularly linked with low-church figures such as Gilbert Burnet, Simon Patrick, White Kennett, William Wake and Edmund Gibson. Bishops also sponsored moral legislation, Tenison successfully backing a blasphemy act that became law in 1698.43 There was also clear political value for the crown in promoting reformation. The historian Tony Claydon has pointed to the role of the reformation of manners campaign in legitimating William and Mary’s rule. The unprecedented series of monthly fasts which the monarchs established to promote national reformation also reminded the people that God’s cause and King William’s were one and the same. Here they fitted in with the overall Williamite effort to present the new King as a providentially appointed deliverer to rescue the nation from popery. Yet it was also the case that Queen Mary in particular sincerely believed that the campaign for reformation of manners was necessary to avert divine punishment. Mary had been shocked by what she had seen when she arrived in England in 1689: ‘The first thing that surprised me at my coming over, was to see so little devotion in a people so lately in such eminent danger.’44 Burnet claimed that Mary was heavily weighed down by the prospect that divine judgement upon the land might be imminent.

  The first Society for Reformation of Manners was formed in 1690 in Tower Hamlets in London’s East End to deal with the problem of the growing number of bawdy houses (brothels) in the area.45 Prostitutes and prostitution at this time (and perhaps still) were closely linked in the public’s perception with crime and criminality. Josiah Woodward, the first historian of the Societies for Reformation of Manners, stated that the impetus to the Tower Hamlets householders forming a society was that they were

  much perplexed by pilfering People, Pick-locks, House-breakers, and such ill Persons: some of them began to inquire into the Places which were suspected to harbour that sort of People. And by tra
cing out their places of Rest, they soon div’d in to the true Source of their Grievances, namely That these vicious Persons living in shameful Lewdness and Idleness, and having no Income by trade or Estate to maintain them in it, they betook themselves to Robbery, Shop-lifting, Burglery and picking of Locks and Pockets to maintain their expensive Lusts and Lewd Companions.46

  However, the impetus to form these Societies really gathered pace with the intervention of Edward Stillingfleet, who petitioned the Queen on behalf of five prominent gentlemen who had formed a society based in the Strand. Some of these gentlemen had strong links with dissent. Maynard Colchester was influenced by his Presbyterian lawyer grandfather, Sir John Maynard, while the Irish gentleman Sir Richard Bulkeley was influenced by the millenarian group the French prophets. The eccentric barrister turned priest Edward Stephens was a nonconformist critic of the regime, who believed that, in neglecting to punish sin, William had failed to honour the trust placed in him by God. Yet, at the prompting of Stillingfleet, the Crown was pressed into action. In July 1691 Queen Mary issued a letter to the Middlesex bench demanding they implement the laws against vice. The following year William wrote an open letter to Bishop Compton of London saying that ‘as our duty requires, we most earnestly desire, and shall endeavour a general reformation of lives and manners of all our subjects, as being that which must establish our throne, and secure to our people their religion, happiness, and peace, all which seem to be in great danger at this time, by reason of that overflowing of vice, which is too notorious in this as well as other neighbouring nations’. The new monarchs also strengthened the laws against immoral behaviour, passing four statutes against profanation of the Sabbath, swearing and blasphemy.47