The Glorious Revolution

by Edward Vallance

  If, owing to his essential ‘foreignness’ and the linkage of the Orange cause with the Irish Troubles, William has been denied a cherished place in the national memory, his Catholic Stuart rivals have fared rather better in the popular consciousness. After the naval defeat at La Hogue, James had largely abandoned the notion of personally regaining his kingdoms, instead choosing an existence of quasi-monastic retreat at St Germain (though there, as throughout his life, he could never quite shake off the temptations of the flesh and continued to keep several mistresses). The former King viewed the setbacks of 1691, 1692 and 1696 as divine judgements for his ‘almost perpetuall course of sin’.8 Towards the end of the 1690s his health visibly declined, one commentator in 1698 describing his appearance as ‘lean and shrivelled’. He endured a stroke in 1701 which paralysed his right side and he became subject to frequent fainting fits. He suffered a final fit on 22 August of that year. After his death on 5 September James’s body, as befitted a man now, ironically, whispered of as a suitable candidate for sainthood, was dismembered and his parts sent to various Catholic churches (his brain went to Paris, his heart to a nunnery at nearby Chaillot).

  However, though, by the end of his life, James may have given up on recovering the British crown himself, his son, James Francis Edward Stuart (the ‘Old Pretender’, recognised on his father’s death as James III by Louis XIV) and grandson, Charles Edward Stuart, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, headed serious Jacobite rebellions in 1715 and 1745 respectively. These uprisings, and the strength of Jacobite feeling throughout the eighteenth century revealed the shaky foundations upon which the Hanoverian monarchy in England rested. Some groups were never able to reconcile themselves fully to the Revolution for conscientious and/or ideological reasons. Although, as the Williamite regime became more established, a number of non-jurors conformed and took the oaths to the new monarch(s), others, such as Charles Leslie and Luke Milbourne, continued to produce masses of pamphlet literature attacking the legitimacy of the Revolutionary regime. Some non-jurors conformed only after decades of soul-searching. William Higden, rector of Shadwell and prebend of St Paul’s, took the oath to Queen Anne in 1708 after years of debating with himself and others his original decision to refuse giving allegiance to William and Mary.9

  On the opposing side of the political and religious spectrum, for radical dissenters and republicans and commonwealthsmen, the Revolution had clearly failed to fulfil its promise either to instigate national reformation or to effectively safeguard the liberties of the subject and limit the powers of the crown. Most threatening of all to the post-Revolutionary regime were those who continued to regard the exiled Stuarts as the legitimate ruling dynasty. A significant number of Tory MPs were active Jacobites, while many others continued to have divided loyalties.

  By the time Queen Anne ascended to the throne she was already a very sick woman. Her seventeen pregnancies had seen only five children born alive, with the remainder either miscarried or stillborn. The death of her only surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester, in 1700, left the Queen seriously weakened both physically and mentally. By the 1690s she was seriously affected by rheumatism, obesity and gout and by the new century could barely walk unaided. Not without reason did Sellar and Yeatman commemorate her as ‘the memorable dead queen, Anne’. Her physical status as an invalid, unable to produce healthy Protestant Stuart heirs, encouraged the pursuit of the restoration of her half-brother to his rightful throne, by either peaceful or violent means. A Jacobite invasion attempt was launched in 1707 which was intended to exploit dissatisfaction with the union with England. The expedition, however, turned into a fiasco as James Francis’s departure for Scotland was delayed for a week by a bout of measles, giving English and Dutch spies time to alert the authorities in Britain. The French fleet itself, commanded by a man with no faith in the success of the mission, missed the entrance to the Forth by some distance and sailed home without landing troops.

  In the early years of her reign and later, during the negotiations between 1711 and 1713 to end the War of Spanish Succession, English politicians made overtures to the exiled court at St Germain, offering the tempting prospect of inheriting the British crown in return for James Francis’s conversion to Protestantism. The sincerity of these promises is debatable, and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, may well have made them simply to play along Tory-Jacobites while preventing military preparations being made by the exiled court in anticipation of Anne’s death. Moreover, the ‘Old Pretender’, like his father, never thought England ‘worth a mass’, and refused this expedient. Queen Anne herself, driven by the same ambition and self-belief which had permitted her to betray her father, was less malleable than her poor health indicated. She resisted the efforts of her former favourite, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, to exclude the Tories from office. The dispute between the two formerly close friends became increasingly bitter. Sarah promoted rumours circulating at court that the Queen was engaged in a lesbian relationship with one of her servants, Abigail Hill, who was also Sarah’s first cousin. The breach between the two widened as the decade progressed, and only the importance of the Duke of Marlborough as a commander kept the Queen and the Duchess on speaking terms. Anne and Sarah’s last meeting came on 6 April 1710. When the Queen refused to respond to any of the Duchess’s questions, Sarah left, telling Anne that ‘God would punish her, either in this world or in the next, for what she had done to her this day’.10 Her ‘liberation’ from Sarah’s ‘tyranny’, according to some contemporaries, made the Queen even more intractable. Jonathan Swift remarked that ‘after the usuall Mistake of those who think that they have often been imposed on’, the Queen ‘became so very suspicious that She overshot the mark and ered in the other Extream’.11

  Towards the end of Anne’s reign the threat of Jacobite insurrection appeared to have dissipated. English Jacobites under the last Stuart Queen, many of whom were Protestants, had faced a difficult political choice between acquiescing in the rule of the Anglican Anne, an Englishwoman born and bred, or chancing everything on supporting the cause of a Catholic Prince who had spent virtually all of his life in the France of the absolutist monarch par excellence, Louis XIV. The Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession, forced the Catholic Stuarts to leave France. However, there remained a strong well of support for the ‘Old Pretender’, with around eighty Tory MPs elected to Anne’s last Parliament being convinced Jacobites. Pressure over the issue of the succession was further exerted by the House of Hanover itself, which in April 1714 formally requested that Prince George be admitted to Parliament under his English title of Duke of Cambridge.

  Anne fell seriously ill on 30 July. Most saw that she would not recover, and the Privy Council quickly put security measures in place, seizing Catholic arms, closing ports, moving troops to London and bringing the representatives of the House of Hanover into the government’s discussions. The Queen died on 1 August, aged forty-nine. The Privy Council breathed a sigh of relief as there was no active attempt to resist the implementation of the Act of Settlement or dispute the proclamation of George as the new monarch. As a contemporary remarked, ‘All the nobility attended the proclamation, and there was not the least disturbance, The Parliament met, and the Lords and commons took the oaths. Thank God everything is quiet.’12

  The initial peace surrounding the accession of George I was shattered first by the vindictiveness of the Whig party, newly restored to government by the elections to the new King’s first Parliament. Former ministers such as Oxford, Bolingbroke and Ormonde, who were suspected of Jacobite intrigues during the peace negotiations, were lined up for impeachment. Oxford stayed to face down his accusers and was released from the Tower because not enough evidence could be gathered against him. Bolingbroke and Ormonde, however, fled to the continent and with the Pretender and his half-brother, James Fitzjames, Duke of Berwick, began to plot a Jacobite insurrection in England and Scotland. The exiled court was encouraged by news of rioting in thirty towns in southern and western En
gland, which, it was said by some, had been raised to ‘try the affections of the people and discover the pretenders fire’.13 Their plans were cut down by the death of Louis XIV and the establishment of a regency under the government of Philippe, Duc d’Orléans. The regent refused to countenance giving any aid to the conspirators, aware that the fortunes of the French Bourbon dynasty hung by a thread (three of Louis XIV’s heirs had died in quick succession, leaving only the sickly two-year-old child king Louis XV as a barrier against the Spanish monarch, Charles V, inheriting the throne). Without foreign aid or a popular uprising, a Jacobite rebellion was unlikely to succeed. The English conspirators were thrown into further confusion by the independent decision of the Earl of Mar to declare for the Pretender at Braemar on 6 September 1715. Though this caught the Hanoverian government unawares, stringent security measures had already been put in place as a result of anxieties over George’s succession, leaving English Jacobites effectively powerless. The Pretender admitted in September that his dynastic ambitions had ‘a very melancholy prospect’.14 Ormonde’s attempt to land in the West Country, that favoured site for rebellious amphibious expeditions, was thwarted by customs officers. A small rising in Northumberland did manage to link with Scottish forces under the Earl of Mar, but this tiny army surrendered unconditionally to government troops at Preston on 13 November, signalling the end of the ‘’15’ in England. The rebellion sputtered on in Scotland, with an inconclusive battle being fought at Sherrifmuir on the same day as the engagement at Preston. False reporting of this skirmish as a crushing Jacobite victory encouraged James Francis to leave France, and he landed at Peterhead on 22 December 1715. A Jacobite Privy Council was formed incorporating Mar and some of his followers, and the Pretender moved south with his entourage as far as Perth, where one observer recorded a very negative description of the would-be James III and VIII, reporting him to be ‘a tall lean blak man, loukes half dead alredy, very thine, long faced, and very ill cullored and melancholy’.15 Establishing the semblance of a royal court there, James Francis was already convinced of the hopelessness of the military situation and this gloomy outlook did not help to inspire support from those around him. The news of the surprise advance of a government force towards Perth at the end of January 1716 convinced the Pretender that it was now time to flee. On 3 February, giving no warning to his Jacobite commanders, James Francis boarded a waiting French vessel and left Scotland.

  James Francis’s humiliating flight to France not only permanently discredited him in the eyes of English and Scottish Jacobites but also seriously weakened the Tory party politically. The complicity of some Tory politicians in the rebellion allowed Walpole and his allies to tar the whole party with the same brush. Combined with the preference of the new king for the Whig party, the linkage between the Tories and the Jacobites allowed Walpole to get through the Septennial Act of 1716. This act extended the life of Parliaments from three to seven years, providing greater opportunities for the Whigs to increase their control of the executive through government patronage. By 1717 pressure exerted on France had forced James Francis first to seek refuge in the papal enclave of Avignon and finally to relocate the Jacobite court to Rome. Further Jacobite plots hatched in 1719 and 1722 proved stillborn.

  By the 1730s the ‘Old Pretender’ had abandoned any hope of personally leading a Jacobite rebellion to recover Britain for the Stuart dynasty. Instead, he passed the baton of military leadership to the ‘Young Pretender’, his son, Charles Edward Stuart, the charismatic ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’. In the early 1740s Charles Edward began to cultivate his image as a serious pretender, adopting Highland dress to appeal to the main remaining base of Jacobite support, the Highlands and islands of Scotland. In the winter of 1743 a French invasion attempt of England was being planned which, if it were to prove successful, would see the subsequent installation of Charles as regent. The Young Pretender made his way to Paris, narrowly evading capture by the Royal Navy en route, in anticipation of this scheme being put into effect. He arrived there on 8 February 1744, only for Louis XV to pour cold water on the plan once it became clear that British intelligence had been tipped off (possibly as a result of Charles’s departure from Italy). The invasion attempt was formally called off on 11 March, much to the anger of Charles Edward, who decided to attempt to force the French to come to his assistance by making an independent landing in Scotland. Raising loans with the help of his father, the Young Pretender was able to amass a considerable cache of weapons, and on 22 June 1745 he set sail from Nantes aboard the frigate Du Teillay to rendezvous with the man-of-war Elizabeth. However, the Elizabeth was badly damaged in an encounter with the Royal Navy and was forced to return to France with most of the Jacobites’ weapons and supplies on board. In spite of the loss of this ship, Charles decided to press on towards Scotland and landed at Ericksay on 23 July.

  It was not until late August that Charles was able to amass an army of any considerable size, but rather than wait to gather more troops, it was decided that this force would march south as soon as possible to prevent giving the Hanoverian government time to mount an effective military response. By 15 September the Jacobites had reached Edinburgh and by the 17th, after the city’s negotiators with the army had left the gates open (perhaps deliberately), the Scottish capital was theirs. Although Charles’s propaganda adopted a pro-Scots, anti-union tone and his public image stressed the Stuart dynasty’s Scottish roots, the Young Pretender was aware that the military strength of the Hanoverian state made any plan of simply remaining in Scotland unfeasible, particularly as the government was already recalling troops from Europe to combat the Jacobite invasion. Charles managed to secure an agreement to continue the march south towards London, though by only one vote.

  With the English militia in disarray and hastily raised volunteer defence forces proving a wholly inadequate substitute, the Jacobites made rapid progress. Carlisle was taken on 15 November, Manchester on the 23rd and Preston on the 26th. By 4 December they had reached Derby. At this point, however, anxiety set in among the Young Pretender’s mainly Scottish supporters. The Jacobites did not know that London was poorly defended by an army of only two thousand regular troops, or that the French had begun, as the Prince had hoped, to form an invasion fleet to come to his assistance, nominally headed by Charles Edward’s brother, Henry Benedict. Charles could provide his supporters with no firm evidence that either French support or an English Jacobite uprising was in the offing. Against the Prince’s wishes, it was decided that the army would retreat to Scotland, and on 6 December they turned north again. His hopes thwarted, Charles sank into depression and drink, leaving the task of marshalling his army’s retreat to his general, Lord George Murray. Murray’s advice, exaggerating the scale of desertion from the army, led the Jacobite forces to fall back to their Highland strongholds on reaching Scotland.

  To defend the last major city, Aberdeen, that the rebels held, the Jacobites fought a pitched battle against the troops commanded by George II’s son, the Duke of Cumberland (later known as ‘the Butcher’ for his brutal suppression of the rebels) on 16 April 1746. The Duke’s troops outnumbered the Jacobites almost two to one and were more heavily armed. The Jacobites sustained a massive artillery assault for ten to fifteen minutes before making a suicidal charge at the Hanoverian infantry lines. Those not mown down by grapeshot or impaled on bayonets (which proved far more effective than the Jacobites’ broadswords) were caught by the Duke’s cavalry on their retreat. In all 3600 Jacobite casualties were recorded, the vast majority being fatalities. In the following days, after Cumberland’s orders to give no quarter to remaining rebels, many survivors were tracked down and summarily executed. Prince Charles himself narrowly avoided capture, but only by taking extreme measures, including disguising himself as the Irish servant girl, Betty Burke, of a Jacobite sympathiser, Flora MacDonald, in order to escape to the Isle of Skye. After virtually six months of playing hide and seek with government hunting parties, Charles finally managed to leave Scotland
aboard a ship for France on 20 September.16

  Despite the crushing defeat at Culloden, Charles continued to actively pursue invasion plans in the 1750s, travelling Europe incognito (often dressed as a priest) in his attempts to drum up support. However, when these schemes came to nothing Charles gradually succumbed to despondency and became increasingly reliant on alcohol. His drinking in turn crippled his health and led him to make violent attacks on his wife, Louisa. Charles suffered a stroke in January 1788 and died on the 30th of that month. With his passing, his brother, Henry Benedict became the next Stuart claimant to the British crown. Yet Henry, made Cardinal of York by Pope Benedict XIV in 1747 (much to the anger of Charles, who wished to distance the Jacobite cause from Catholicism), had carved out for himself in the Catholic Church a successful alternative career to that of royal pretender, becoming papal treasurer in the 1750s and a leading figure in Roman literary and artistic circles. On his brother’s death Henry nonetheless adopted the title of Henry IX and touched for the King’s evil to stress the thaumaturgical powers attributed to the Stuart royal dynasty.17 By this point he was a man of considerable wealth and status, but all of this was lost in the French Revolutionary Wars. He invested virtually all of his personal wealth in attempting to aid the Pope in resisting Napoleon’s invasion of the papal states. Unable to hold back Bonaparte’s forces, Henry fled to Venice, seeking sanctuary in a monastery. Left a homeless and penniless old man, he became the object of a rather unexpected source of charity. Through the British envoy in Rome, Sir John Coxe Hippisley, the Prime Minister, Sir William Pitt, was alerted to Henry’s plight. On 7 February 1800 the last Stuart claimant to the British throne was informed by letter that George III had decided to grant him an annual pension of £4000. As a gesture of gratitude Henry left the remaining royal jewels to the King on his death on 13 July 1807.