On June 10, 1688, Queen Mary Beatrice gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward Stuart, the prince who would one day be known as the Old Pretender (see Chapter 19). Rumors immediately shifted from a false pregnancy to a substitute child. And though King James had no way of knowing it at the time, the doubts aroused by the birth of his heir heralded the end of his reign.
The king’s daughter Anne, always ready to promote vicious tales, now spread the story that another child had been secretly brought into the birth chamber and presented as the newborn prince. She had not been present at the queen’s delivery (some historians believe she stayed away deliberately lest she be called to verify the birth) and shortly after wrote to Mary: “My dear sister can’t imagine the concern and vexation I have been in, that I should be so unfortunate to be out of town when the Queen was brought to bed, for I shall never now be satisfied whether the child be true or false. It may be it is our brother, but God only knows, for she never took care to satisfy the world, or give people any demonstration of it.… After all this, ’tis possible it may be her child, but where one believes it, a thousand do not. For my part, except they do give very plain demonstrations, which is almost impossible now, I shall be of the number of unbelievers.”
Mary soon joined the ranks of the skeptics as well. “One hears every day things so strange that it is impossible to avoid having very strong suspicions,” she wrote. At first the princess of Orange had insisted that prayers be said for the baby in her chapel, but these gradually tapered off as Mary’s conviction grew that the child being called the Prince of Wales was in reality a changeling.
Queen Mary Beatrice certainly noticed a puzzling coolness coming from the stepdaughter she loved so much. “You have never once in your letters to me taken the least notice of my son,” she wrote to Mary. Several weeks later, after a stilted response, the queen wrote again: “Even in this last letter, by the way you speak of my son; and the formal name you call him by, I am further confirmed in the thought I had before, that you have for him the least indifference. The King has often told me, with a great deal of trouble, that often as he has mentioned his son in his letters to you, you never once answered anything concerning him.”
Neither Queen Mary Beatrice nor King James was aware that such poisonous tales were being told about the birth of their child. They were horrified when they learned the truth. James was shocked that anyone would believe him so wicked that he “would debar [my] own daughters from the right of succeeding [me], to give [my] kingdoms to a suppositious son.” The king declared that he would rather “die a thousand deaths than do the least wrong to any of my children.”
Whether or not people actually believed a baby had been substituted was irrelevant. The suspicion served as the perfect pretext to toss the autocratic Catholic king off his throne. A group of leading nobles, known as “the Seven,” issued a secret invitation to James’s son-in-law and nephew, Mary’s husband, William, to invade England and restore the rule of law. The prince of Orange was prepared to answer the call. And though it pained her deeply to have to move against her own father, Mary unreservedly supported her husband. She had come to firmly believe that the birth of the Prince of Wales was indeed a fraud—part of a Catholic conspiracy to subvert the Protestant succession and destroy the established church in England.
“The consideration of all this,” she wrote, “and the thought that my father was capable of a crime so horrible and that, humanly speaking, there was not any other means to save the Church and State than that my husband should go to dethrone him by force, are the most afflicting reflections and would not be supportable without the assistance of God and a firm and unshakeable confidence in Him.”
James was doomed. His subversion of the law to promote his faith had so damaged the Catholic cause that even the pope supported William’s invasion. As the prince of Orange prepared his fleet, word of his plans excited the English populace. They waited anxiously for the “Protestant wind” that would carry William’s fleet east to the English coast. “The wind, which had been hitherto west, was east all this day,” John Evelyn wrote happily on October 14, 1688, the king’s birthday. “Wonderful expectation of the Dutch fleet.”
The inevitability of his nephew’s invasion settled on King James, after his desperate reversals of policy achieved nothing. He now became fixated on the large weather vane that stood atop the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace, waiting for the dreaded west wind. Yet despite the dreary forecast, James still held out hope that his older daughter was innocent of any complicity in her husband’s plans.
“I easily believe you are embarrassed how to write me, now that the unjust design of the Prince of Orange’s invading me is so public,” he wrote to Mary in October, after her failure to respond to a previous letter. “And though I know you are a good wife, and ought to be so, yet for the same reason I must believe you will be still as good a daughter to a father that has always loved you so tenderly, and that has never done the least thing to make you doubt it. I shall say no more, and believe you very uneasy all this time, for the concern you must have for a husband and a father. You shall still find me kind to you, if you desire it.”
James never heard back from his daughter. Less than a month after James sent his letter to Mary, William’s Dutch armada—the largest invasion force ever launched against England—landed near the port of Plymouth. The king, once so stubbornly resolute in pushing his own agenda, now crumbled. Fearing disloyalty among his army, he refused to engage William at Salisbury, where his forces had been strategically placed. “What a rejection of leadership,” wrote biographer Maurice Ashley. “What an excuse for cowardice!”
Instead of fighting William, James fled back to London. What he found there was devastating: His daughter Anne had defected to the enemy.‡ “God help me!” he cried. “My own children have deserted me.”
Realizing all was lost, and haunted by the fate of his father, James arranged for the escape of his wife and son to France. Then he too stole away in disguise—tossing the Great Seal of England into the Thames as he went. But the king was recognized before boarding the ship that was to carry him away and was brought back to London a prisoner. It was only a brief detainment, though, as William allowed his father-in-law to escape once again. His was to be a bloodless coup.
James’s supporters had warned him that to leave his kingdom was to abdicate his rights as monarch, but the broken man was determined. “If I do not retire I shall certainly be sent to the Tower,” he said, “and no king ever went out of that place but in his grave.”
Hearing of her father’s ignoble departure, Princess Anne was “not in the least moved,” according to her uncle the Earl of Clarendon, “but called for cards and was as merry as she used to be.” When the earl reproved his niece for her apparent insensitivity, he reported that Anne answered that “it was true she did call for cards then because she was accustomed to play, and that she never loved to do anything that looked like affected restraint.”
“And does your Royal Highness think that showing some trouble for the King your father’s misfortunes could be interpreted as an affected restraint?” her exasperated uncle remonstrated. “Such behavior lessens you much in the opinion of the world, and even in that of your father’s enemies.”
Clarendon’s lesson was lost on his niece: “She was not one jot moved.”
* One of James’s mistresses, Catherine Sedley, was apparently bewildered by his attraction to her. “It cannot be my beauty because I haven’t any,” she said, “and it cannot be my wit because he hasn’t enough of it to know that I have any.”
† The two were more like sisters. James married Mary Beatrice when she was just fifteen and introduced his child bride to his elder daughter by saying, “I have brought you a new play fellow.” Mary Beatrice called Mary her “dear Lemon,” and wrote, “I love her as if she were my own daughter.”
‡ “You have my wishes for your good success in this so just an undertaking,” Anne had written to her brother
-in-law William of Orange before the invasion. She later greeted him upon his arrival festooned with orange ribbons.
15
William III (1689–1702) and Mary II (1689–1694): Joint Sovereigns
He was to conquer enemies, and she was to gain friends.
—GILBERT BURNET
After the flight of James II in 1688, his nephew William of Orange demanded that he be given full rights as sovereign, along with his wife, Mary, who, as James II’s daughter, was closer in the line of succession. Parliament agreed, in exchange for William’s acceptance of the Bill of Rights, which expanded the rights of subjects and limited those of the king (and later served as the inspiration for a large part of the United States Bill of Rights). Thus, William III and Mary II became co-monarchs, with all the authority of the throne resting with William. Mary unreservedly acquiesced to this arrangement, stating that women “should not meddle in government.”
The deposition of James II and the invitation of his Protestant daughter and son-in-law to rule as co-monarchs—with limited powers—became known as the Glorious Revolution. But for William and Mary, it all felt far more laborious than glorious.
William III bitterly resented the curbs on the Crown that had been imposed upon his accession, as well as the constant battles he had to fight with Parliament to obtain what he felt was necessary to rule effectively—primarily money. “The Commons have treated me like a dog,” he once blurted in exasperation.
The Dutch king never endeared himself to the English, who thought him cold and remote. “I see very well that this people is not made for me nor I for this people,” William said. And he never took to England, either, especially London, where the pervasive, coal-fueled pollution sickened the asthmatic monarch.
Mary shared her husband’s misery and, like him, longed to be back home in Holland—far from the fractious, scheming court she came to loathe. She had dreaded the prospect of becoming queen, knowing, she wrote, “my heart is not made for a kingdom and my inclination leads me to a retired quiet life.” But perhaps worst of all, Mary was haunted by the specter of her deposed father in France.
She had been sharply rebuked upon her arrival in England for her apparent indifference to her father’s fate. People thought her much too merry. “She came into Whitehall laughing and jolly, as to a wedding, so as to seem quite transported,” John Evelyn wrote disapprovingly, while the Earl of Dartmouth reported that “she put on more airs of gaiety upon that occasion than became her, or seemed natural.” Even Mary’s admirer Gilbert Burnet was appalled. “I confess I was one of those who censured her in my thoughts,” he recalled. “I thought, at least, she might have felt grave, or even passively sad, at so melancholy a reverse of fortune.”
The new queen was nothing like her insensitive sister, Anne, however—far from it. People didn’t know that Mary had been instructed by William to be cheerful lest anyone assume she was uneasy about the couple’s taking James II’s throne. Gilbert Burnet actually asked her “how it came that what she saw in so sad a revolution as to her father’s person, made not a greater impression on her.” Mary explained that the former king’s unhappy fate did indeed weigh heavily on her, but that she dared not show it. She admitted to Burnet that she went too far in demonstrations of cheer, acting a part that did not come naturally to her. The queen shared her deepest thoughts with her cousin Sophia of Hanover (mother of the future King George I): “Many people have the fortune to be able to talk of things about which I have to be silent. You must not doubt the sincerity of my feelings when I say that I cannot forget my father, and I grieve for his misfortune.”
The taint of usurpation clung to Mary throughout her six-year reign—sometimes in disconcerting ways. On one occasion, when she coolly greeted her father’s mistress, Catherine Sedley, the woman tartly riposted: “Why so proud, Madam? For if I broke one Commandment with your father, you broke another in coming here.” Surely the height of Mary’s mortification came when she attended a performance of Dryden’s The Spanish Friar, unaware of some of the play’s all-too-relevant dialogue. “What title has this Queen but lawless force?” read one devastating line. “And force must pull her down.” All poor Mary could do was shield her face behind her fan as such lines were delivered and the eyes turned from the stage and bore into her.
Mortification was often mingled with genuine danger, as when the deposed James sought to reverse his fortunes and reclaim his crown by first invading Ireland with a French force. William and Mary were told of the former king’s landing the morning of their joint coronation,* which obviously put a bit of a damper on the ceremony, as did a letter Mary received from her father just before she left for Westminster Abbey. “Hitherto, I have been willing to overlook what has been done,” James wrote, “and thought your obedience to your husband and compliance to the nation might have prevailed. But your being crowned is in your power; if you do it while I and the Prince of Wales are living, the curses of an angry father will fall on you, as well as those of a God who commands obedience to parents.”
William sailed to Ireland in June 1690 to meet James’s threat, while Mary suffered from “the cruel thought that my husband and my father would fight in person against each other, and if either should have perished in the action, how terrible it would have been to me.”
The queen needn’t have worried, at least about her father, who kept a safe distance from the clash known as the Battle of the Boyne, and quickly scurried back to Dublin as his forces were defeated by William’s. (Arriving there, he made a critical remark to Frances, Lady Tyrconnel, about the Irish fighters who had scattered after the battle. “Madam,” he said, “your countrymen have run away.” To this she rejoined, “If they have, Sire, Your Majesty seems to have won the race.”) The former king’s hopes to recapture his kingdom militarily were now destroyed, while his decided lack of valor on the battlefield prompted the Irish to dub him Seamus a’ chaca, James the shit.
Mary heard early reports that her father had been captured in the battle and implored her husband to ensure his well-being. “I know I need not beg you to let him be taken care of,” she wrote, “for I am confident you will for your own sake. Yet add that to all your kindness, and, for my sake, let people know you would have no harm come to his person.” Clearly the queen still had some tender feelings left for her father, but they were not to last.
After his defeat at the Battle of the Boyne and rather ignominious flight afterward, James was derided at the French court at Versailles. “He lives always surrounded by friars and talks of his misfortunes with indifference, as if he did not feel them or had never been a king,” one observer wrote; “in this way he entirely lost the respect of the French.” Yet the dethroned king still had some spit in him and, with his cousin and host, Louis XIV, planned an invasion of England set for the spring of 1692.
Foolishly, though, James issued a declaration in which he announced that, once restored to the throne, he would rule exactly as he had before. William was away at the time, and Mary, who ruled quite ably during his absences, seized on the propaganda value of her father’s silly manifesto and had it printed and distributed. Her action had the desired effect of crippling the ex-king’s cause in England, but an invasion by James and the French was nevertheless still imminent. And Mary’s life was in danger. “I was told of dreadful designs against me [by James’s supporters, known as Jacobites],” she wrote, “and had reason to believe if their success answered their expectations, my life was certainly at an end.”
Fortunately for Mary, the French fleet was destroyed in a fierce naval battle and the plots against her came to nothing. Her father, however, was not quite finished, and directly involved himself in a plot to assassinate William. “I have been informed of the business,” James wrote to the chief conspirator. “If you and your companions do me this service, you shall never want.”
The would-be assassin was ultimately exposed, and Mary was urged to publish the details of his trial, in which James was implicated. The queen, howeve
r, was extremely reluctant to make public what she regarded as her shame—“that he who I dare no more name father was consenting to the barbarous murder of my husband.”
Mary was indeed tortured by her father’s actions. “I was ashamed to look at anybody in the face,” she wrote. “I fancied I should be pointed at as the daughter of one who was capable of such things, and the people would believe I might by nature have as ill inclinations. I lamented his sin and his shame.” Most of all, though, Mary worried what William would think—that somehow the plot against his life “might lessen my husband’s kindness for me.”
William was really all the queen had; she was childless, her relationship with her father had been destroyed, and a vicious feud with her sister, Anne (see Chapter 16), alienated her from the only immediate family remaining. Mary adored her wheezy, slightly hunchbacked husband, the cousin she had reluctantly married when she was just a girl of fifteen. Theirs was one of the rare arranged royal marriages that actually worked. Her feelings for him were perhaps best expressed in a scene between them, recounted in her journal, when William was preparing his invasion force to topple James II and encouraged Mary to remarry if anything should happen to him:
I was so much astonished by this proposal that it was long before I was able to reply. He protested that it was solely the concern he had for religion which could make him speak as he did, I don’t remember all that I said. The grief I felt made my answers confused, but I assured him that I had never loved anyone but him, and would not know how to love someone else. And apart from that, having been married so many years without its having pleased God to bless me with a child, I believed that sufficient to prevent me ever thinking of what he proposed. I told him, that I begged God not to let me survive him; if however I should do so, since it had not pleased God to give me a child by him, I would not wish to have one by an angel.
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