The Glorious Revolution

by Edward Vallance

  The Nine Years War had been a conflict of attrition from the beginning and by 1697 a financially and materially depleted France and England were both ready to agree peace terms. In September 1697, after four months of negotiations, hostilities were officially brought to an end by the Treaty of Ryswick. The major political gain for William was that Louis acknowledged him as king of Great Britain par la grace de Dieu and promised not to assist anyone either directly or indirectly who might trouble him in the possession of his kingdoms. Jacobitism in England, heavily dependent on Louis’s military support, was thereby dealt a serious blow. In territorial terms, France kept Strasbourg but restored William’s princely lands in Orange to the boundaries of 1678. Though militarily the war had been a bloody and expensive stalemate, the peace appeared distinctly to William’s credit. French territorial ambitions had been checked and his title to the British throne had been publicly recognised. The end of war was celebrated in England by a great firework display held in St James’s Square on December 1697 but the pyrotechnics got out of control and several spectators were killed.

  The noisy, bloody chaos of the peace celebrations proved ominous. In England peace raised rather than eased political tensions. Between the winter of 1696 and the summer of 1697 the Whig character of the ministry had become more pronounced with the resignation of the Tory Godolphin in October 1696 and the advancement of Somers to Lord Chancellor, Montague to first Lord of the Treasury and James Vernon to Secretary of State in 1697. The Junto Lords, Somers, Russell, Wharton, Montagu and Sunderland, held regular meetings to agree policy. Overall, the impact of the assassination plot had been to see a closing of Whig ranks in Parliament against the Tories, who had now been successfully tainted by Jacobitism.

  Nonetheless, peace presented William with the problem that he wished to retain a large standing army, correctly seeing the treaty secured at Ryswick as little more than a temporary truce, particularly given the unresolved issue of the Spanish succession. In his opening speech to Parliament on 3 December 1697 he said that England could not be ‘safe’ without a significant permanent military presence (in William’s estimation a force of about thirty-five thousand). Many in Parliament, however, associated large standing armies with the threat of royal absolutism and the reign of James II. Aside from their association with tyranny, large permanent military establishments were costly and MPs were eager to see a reduction in the heavy burden of taxation on their constituencies. However, this was problematic as the crown’s indebtedness meant that heavy taxation was necessary just to pay off the national debt, let alone to meet the costs of a standing army. William had to accept large reductions in the size of his peacetime force, as Robert Harley succeeded in getting through a vote in the Commons to cut it down to ten thousand troops (though in the end a lack of funds prevented full disbanding and the army was actually kept at sixteen thousand men).

  The defeat over the army was one sign of a growing loss of control over Parliament, in part caused by the slow disintegration of the Whig ministry. Sunderland resigned his office in December 1697 (he had finally been appointed to a named post, as Lord Chamberlain, in April of that year), to avoid anticipated impeachment proceedings being instigated in the Commons (MPs had attacked Sunderland, viewing him as a key advocate of keeping a large standing army, one describing him as ‘a man who was the standard bearer of despotism in the last two reigns’).48 Another of the King’s ministers, the Earl of Shrewsbury, was incapacitated by illness. William was also frustrated at his ministers’ failure to fully support his aim of retaining a large standing army, rejecting compromise proposals which would have left him with a force of fifteen thousand soldiers. Meanwhile the King complained to Anthonie Heinsius in Holland that Parliament was ‘now engaged in private animosities and party quarrels, and thinks very little of public affairs. God knows when this session will terminate.’49 The King left the country for Holland on 7 July, not returning until five months later, and thereby taking no part on behalf of the Whigs in the general election of that year.

  When he returned the new Parliament again turned its attention to the problem of standing armies. The Commons, incensed that the King had attempted to dupe the House by losing higher than agreed numbers of English troops in the figures for the Irish establishment and officer corps, would support a force of no more than seven thousand, none of them foreigners, meaning that the King’s prized Dutch guards would have to be disbanded. William was infuriated by the Commons’ actions and by his ministers’ continued attempts to get him to compromise by suggesting that he argue for retaining a force of ten thousand. He even spoke of abdication, telling Somers on 29 December that he intended to leave England given that the nation he had saved from popery still viewed him with jealousy and distrust. Somers managed to talk the King out of this course of action and on 1 February 1699 William gave his grudging assent to the Disbanding Bill, but only after having told the Commons that in doing so he left the nation ‘too much exposed’.

  The breach with his Junto ministers which had developed as a result of the debate over standing armies was not repaired. William had sided with the Whigs, viewing them as the most committed party to furthering his struggle with Louis XIV. Constant talk of compromise with the House, however practical, led the King to see his ministers as lacking resolve in this matter. He accepted without demur the resignation of a number of ministers now fearful of Commons’ impeachment proceedings. There were further signs of assaults on William’s government: the Admiralty commission was censured, another ‘place’ bill was framed, Parliament expelled a number of office holders from the Commons and considered again the King’s actions in disposing of confiscated Irish estates to his supporters. The failure of Somers to stop these Commons investigations led William to dismiss him on 27 April 1700. (Somers had already been smeared with promoting piracy as a result of the commission that he, Shrewsbury and Orford had been involved in granting to the notorious Captain Kidd, ostensibly for protecting East India Company shipping from Indian Ocean pirates.)50 William was still feeling isolated, increasingly an outsider in his own kingdom. He felt keenly the loss of his Dutch guards, and the retirement of the Earl of Portland, upset at Keppel’s growing influence, was a further blow. The loss of his principal Dutch adviser was compounded by a Commons bill passed on 10 April 1699 which stated that no foreigners should serve on the King’s councils.

  With Whigs discredited in his eyes, William reluctantly turned to the Tories, though he held ‘country’ figures like Robert Harley largely responsible for the disbanding of his forces. Nonetheless, Harley had impressed the King with his handling of supply through the Commons and William appears to have been brought round to the idea that, pragmatically, a Tory administration, if less committed to his European objectives, might be more effective in managing Parliament. Three Tory peers, the Earl of Jersey, the Earl of Pembroke and Viscount Lonsdale, had already been brought into the ministry. Tory confidence was further boosted by the fact that at this point the political future appeared to belong to them. William was an heirless widower and would be succeeded by the Duke of Gloucester, the Tory Princess Anne’s son. The prospects looked favourable for a long period in the political ascendancy under a succession of Tory monarchs.

  This situation was dramatically changed by the death of the Duke of Gloucester in July 1700 while William was out of the kingdom on another visit to the Netherlands. Robert Harley recounted the sudden death of the heir to the throne: ‘The Duke of Gloucester danc’d on his [eleventh] birth day, was ill the next, fryday Dr Harnes orderd him to be let blood, & blister’d, he had some spots, had eat fruit, small pox was suspected, he had looseness al the time, dyed this morning at one a clock.’51 The issue of the succession was at once again thrown wide open, a situation made more uncertain by the apparent revival of Louis XIV’s dynastic and territorial ambitions. The death of Carlos II of Spain in October 1700 left Louis’s second grandson, Philip of Anjou, the sole inheritor of his lands. The will was accepted by the French kin
g, though this was a breach of the second partition treaty that Louis had signed with William, by which he had agreed to give Spain’s empire (with the exception of its Italian possessions) to the Austrian emperor’s second son. William attempted to broker a compromise in which Philip would take Spain and her American possessions, while the Austrian Habsburgs would gain the Spanish territories in Italy: effectively a reversal of the second partition treaty. However, Louis proved intransigent and the prospect of Britain becoming involved in another European war seemed likely.

  On his return to England William continued to move towards the Tories and appointed Godolphin and Rochester to the government in December 1700 and promised Harley his support in the MP’s campaign for speakership of the Commons. To secure a greater number of supporters for the ministry, fresh elections were held in January and February 1701 which witnessed, according to John Evelyn, ‘extraordinary strivings among the Candidats’ but resulted in no clear majority for either party.52 However, the new ministry did succeed in May 1701 in steering through Parliament the Act of Settlement, which secured the Protestant succession by declaring that the crown would pass to the Lutheran heirs of electress Sophia of Hanover. The Act passed without a single division on a vote, reflecting near unanimity in Parliament over not only the dangers from readmitting the Catholic Stuarts to the succession but also the threat posed by the crown’s being in the hands of another Protestant foreigner. The terms of the Act of Settlement put heavy limitations on the powers of the Hanoverian monarchs: non-native-born kings would not be able to wage war without the consent of Parliament and would not be allowed to leave the British Isles without parliamentary consent (reflecting unhappiness at William’s frequent absences); and foreigners were prohibited from sitting on the Privy Council or in Parliament, holding crown office or receiving crown lands, irrespective of whether or not they were naturalised. All monarchs were obliged to ‘join in communion with the church of England as by law established’.

  However, this success did not ensure the longevity of William’s new alliance with the Tories. In February French troops had occupied the Dutch barrier fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands and Continental conflict appeared inevitable. Yet, rather than make preparations for war, the Commons concentrated on attempting to impeach members of the Whig Junto. Kentish freeholders, who had submitted a petition to the lower house calling for them to supply the King with funds so that he could provide for the security of the nation, were committed to prison. The parliamentary session ended on 24 June 1701 and William spent the summer and early autumn in the United Provinces. In September of that year James II died and Louis explicitly broke the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick by recognising his son James Francis Edward as James III. French aggression allowed William to overcome initial European reluctance and form on 6 September the second Grand Alliance between Britain, the United Provinces of the Netherlands and Austria against Louis XIV. The behaviour of the Commons in the last session, the imminence of war and the advice of Sunderland, still pulling strings behind the scenes, convinced William to turn once more to the Whigs. Elections were called the week after his return. They did not secure the Whigs an overall majority, but the House did vote money for the war and passed a bill requiring office holders to abjure the title of the Stuart Pretender.

  The political fluctuations of William’s last years appear bewildering, but they reflected the King’s overriding concern with defeating Louis XIV in Europe. William chose whichever combination of English politicians appeared best able at a particular time to secure funds from Parliament for his army and navy. Although he had abandoned early in his reign the attempt to govern via a joint ministry, he remained fundamentally unwedded to one particular party. For him the Tories were too tainted with Jacobitism and too strident in their defence of Anglicanism to be fully trusted. Equally, the radical wing of the Whigs led William to view the party as a whole as suspiciously attached to republican principles. His lack of trust in either party was mirrored in a similarly detached attitude towards William among both the general public and Parliament. At key moments of crisis, such as the 1696 assassination plot, in the wake of the Duke of Gloucester’s death and finally, in 1702, with the renewed threat of French invasion, the nation united around its King. However, while these moments of national unity reflected a public belief in William’s ability to defend the country from the threat of popery and French absolutism, they did not reflect the same level of public affection that the King’s wife, Mary, had enjoyed. William remained, in the eyes of the people, a foreigner, and in 1701, at the same time as the nation rallied to the defence of the Protestant succession, they placed further shackles on the freedom of action of future, non-native-born British heads of state.

  CONCLUSION

  THE END OF THE LINE

  King William’s friends say he did all that he could for us, and they are not his enemies who say, he did not all that the necessities of our nation required to be done for us. That Prince left us in a morning strangely overcast with clouds. Our deliverance was not more amazing, than the unaccountable stop put to the success of it.

  AMBROSE BARNES1

  William and Mary (1689–1702)

  Par-li-a-ment made Will-i-am and Ma-ry joint King and Queen.

  For a time all went well

  Ma-ry won all hearts by her bright ways, but Will-i-am was stern and rough.

  THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND MOSTLY

  IN WORDS OF ONE SYLLABLE (LONDON, 1869)

  [A VICTORIAN CHILDREN’S HISTORY PRIMER]

  While William was riding in Hyde Park on 21 February 1702, his horse tripped over a molehill, throwing the King to the ground and breaking his collarbone. Afterwards it became popular with Jacobites to toast ‘the little gentleman in black velvet’ who had succeeded where invasion attempts and assassination plots had failed. However, the King’s riding accident did not immediately look life-threatening and for the next fortnight he appeared to be making a good recovery, but on 5 March 1702 he collapsed while walking in the gallery of Kensington House. His condition deteriorated rapidly and by the 7th the King was convinced that he was dying. Attended by Archbishop Tenison, Gilbert Burnet and his closest friends, Keppel and Bentinck, William died on the morning of 8 March 1702. The true cause of death was pulmonary fever, possibly brought on by the accident and aggravated by William’s long-term respiratory problems. The King was buried in a private ceremony at Westminster Abbey on 12 April. Significantly, plans laid by the Privy Council for monuments to him in the Abbey and in other public places were never brought into effect.

  In Britain the succession passed smoothly to Queen Anne, while in the Netherlands William was thwarted in his hope that his cousin, John William Frisco, would inherit the position of Stadtholder, as republicans blocked his accession and kept the office vacant. In contrast to the public reaction to Mary’s death, deep mourning for the King’s passing was rare. At Worcester there were ‘few mourners’, at Bath ‘so short a sorrow’ and in Buckinghamshire ‘severall expressions of Joy publickely spock’.2 Despite William’s many military, political and constitutional successes, in Britain he has not been much better or more fondly remembered by subsequent generations. In nineteenth-and twentieth-century schoolbooks he was portrayed as miserable, ugly, stand-offish and above all, foreign. A School History of England (1901) stated that William was ‘never popular in England. His cold and formal manner, his affection for his old Dutch friends, and above all, his love for Holland, his own country, together’, it claimed incorrectly, ‘with his slight knowledge of English, made men look on him as a foreigner.’3 Warner and Marten’s Groundwork of British History described William as ‘diminutive in stature, thin and fragile-looking, his appearance was only redeemed by the brightness and keenness of his eyes. His manner was cold and repellent, and his habits unsociable; and the few friends he possessed were all Dutchmen. Moreover, his health was wretched, and inclined to make him irascible and peevish.’4 To employ the idiom of Sellar and Yeatman’s classic 1066 and
All That, William III was a ‘good thing’ but a ‘bad king’.

  Whig historians such as Edmund Burke, Lord Macaulay and G. M. Trevelyan wished to present the Revolution of 1688 as an essentially English affair, fundamentally effected by native politicians. The fact that the nation had to be rescued from popery and arbitrary government by the military intervention of another European head of state did not sit easily with a teleological story of national political self-determination. As Trevelyan remarked, there was ‘indeed a certain ignominy in the fact that that a foreign fleet and army, however friendly and however welcome, had been required to enable Englishmen to recover the liberties they had muddled away in their frantic faction feuds’.5 Recent historiography, though correcting this picture in stressing the importance of the Dutch role in events, has done little to resurrect a positive image of the Revolution in, conversely, viewing the events of 1688 and after as little more than a dynastic power grab.6

  The problems encountered in commemorating William’s death reflected wider difficulties in celebrating the Revolution itself. In the early Hanoverian period a number of equestrian statues of William were commissioned (possibly because the first two Georges were even less charismatic than the Dutch king). One still stands in Queen’s Square in Bristol and another can be seen outside Kensington Palace. Equestrian statues were also raised by public subscription in Petersfield in Hampshire and in Glasgow. A life-size statue of William was commissioned by the Bank of England in 1732 to mark the opening of its first purpose-built offices, in Threadneedle Street. However, these statues themselves became points of contention, particularly as a result of the lionisation of William by Ulster Protestants. A statue of the King erected on College Green in Dublin and unveiled on 1 July 1701, in celebration of his victory at the Boyne, was routinely bedecked with Orange ribbons, with Protestants often accompanying this with a rifle salute across the memorial. The city’s Catholic population exacted its revenge on the statue, stealing William’s sword and baton, and in 1805 covering the whole edifice with thick black grease. After repeated attempts by nationalists to blow it up, the statue was eventually removed. Even in England the linkage between William and Ulster Protestantism made the celebration of this King’s life more difficult than in the case of other monarchs. In commemoration of William’s landing there, a foundation stone for a statue of the King was laid in Brixham in Devon on 5 November 1888. The Dutch royal family contributed £100 to the cost, and the Dutch ambassador, Count de Bylandt, performed the ceremony of laying the stone. At the celebratory dinner after the event Bylandt stated that the current Dutch king hoped that the statue ‘would tend more to cement and strengthen the historical and traditional feelings of friendship and sympathy between the two nations’. The ambassador went on to discuss the importance, from a Dutch perspective, of English assistance in the struggle against Louis XIV. Among William’s ‘many great deeds’ during his ‘too short reign’ might also be included ‘the Battle of the Boyne; but he feared that that would be treading just now on delicate ground, and he believed that foreign representatives had to abstain in the countries where they resided from touching upon questions of home politics which they must only watch with respectful interest’.7