This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  And across the sea, the thin, asthmatic, hump-backed Prince William of Orange still watched. He was son-in-law to the King of England and, should James fall, his wife would have a right to the English throne.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  1687–8

  It’s a truism that there’s no believer so dogmatic, so intolerant, so narrow-minded as a convert, perhaps particularly a religious convert. But James II had crossed the line between devotion and unbending evangelism. Many Catholics understood this and some of them saw that the King would bring about catastrophe rather than the return of the nation to Rome. Now there would be open rebellion, and James would be the last Catholic King of Britain.

  His people believed that what was happening in England was part of the wider return of Catholicism and that it was a symptom of the advance of France’s Catholic Louis XIV. Indeed, Charles II had made secret agreements with Louis, and he had been converted to Rome – albeit on his deathbed and doubted even at the time. Louis’s power had grown in less than a decade and had given many Protestants in England cause to believe that what they saw taking place on the Continent could spread to England. England was vulnerable. It was not powerful. It had few friends in Continental Europe, whereas Louis of France was confident enough to believe that he was successor to the power of the Charlemagne empire. He fell to war with the Popes and flayed the Huguenots, the French Calvinists, of whom so many fled to England and Ireland that it could be said that the biggest migration en bloc into these islands came from the Walloons and Huguenots. Louis organized the Church, its priests, coffers, authority and, most significantly, patronage.

  It was now assumed by some that the British King presented the same uncompromising determination. This was the James, once Duke of York, whose succession to the throne had been opposed but who, when the Whigs were routed, had been cheered in the streets. This was a King who had been crowned with vows of religious tolerance and who now swept them away. And so by 1688, the islands were so divided in what they expected from the throne that the nation was once more on the brink of civil war.

  During the previous twelve months, sides had been taken. In April 1687 James had made a Declaration of Indulgence. This was a decree which suspended the laws against dissenters and Roman Catholics. He was probably quite successful in taking some, perhaps many, dissenters into his camp. Even the Quakers, who had refused to acknowledge a similar Indulgence of Charles II, were among the eighty or so groups which proposed formal addresses of thanks to the King. Even Whigs supported the King, including James Vernon, Francis Winnington, Lord Brandon and William Sacheverell who had opposed his right to succeed his brother. Others had good reason to give thanks to their monarch. William Williams, for example, had been made Solicitor General. Thomas Cartwright and Samuel Parker had been made bishops. But they were exceptional. William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, attacked the Indulgence; he believed it would lead to a law that could never be repealed.

  There was also a strong group of moderates, led by the Marquess of Halifax and the Earl of Nottingham. Halifax was known as the Trimmer, so great was his reputation as a moderate. He was obviously good at balancing political weights because later he became Lord Privy Seal and the chief minister. The group most impatient to be free of the King was headed by Charles II’s former chief minister, the Earl of Danby. This was the very man who had been impeached for his part in negotiations with, of all people, Louis XIV, and sent to the Tower. Danby joined the conspiracy to bring Prince William and an army to England.

  Yet James II believed he had his own army on his side. But did he? What about Churchill, his general and agent? Or Kirke, who had been with Churchill when Monmouth’s rebellion had been put down in the West Country? Were they disillusioned or could they see the writing appearing on the wall of constitutional change? And when the bishops challenged his authority, James was furious and demanded that the bishops should be sent for trial on the grounds of seditious libel. But even Judge Jeffreys thought that trying bishops was going too far. James would not listen and the bishops were sent to the Tower.

  And then, on 10 June 1688, an event occurred which Danby and his friends believed was the moment they’d been waiting for. The Queen gave birth to a son who later became known as the Old Pretender. The significance was obvious: the Catholic line would be continued. It was now that Danby and his group of conspirators wrote to Prince William of Orange. He, through the line of his wife Mary, was offered the throne – without anyone actually saying so, of course. But with this document, British history twisted in another direction. For William of Orange to plan, or to agree to a plan, to usurp the throne of his wife’s father was not to be taken lightly. But William of Orange was a Protestant and Protestant desperation was high.

  The Protestants really did believe that the newborn Prince was not the son of the King and Queen. It was even suggested, and believed for many a year after, that the baby had been smuggled into St James’s Palace in a warming pan. James, it was said, must have an heir, by any means. Danby’s letter to William of Orange was signed by, among others, Shrewsbury, Devonshire, Russell, Sidney and the Bishop of London. And it was written on the day that the seven bishops who’d been taken from Westminster Hall were found not guilty. The people cheered the news. Surely, William would hear those cheers?

  But William’s own lands were threatened by the French. If they gave any sign of attacking, there was no way in which William’s own Parliament, the States-General of the Netherlands, would allow him to sail for England. The Prussians supported William and Marshal Frederick Schomberg (1615–90), said to be the most able soldier in Europe, was sent as his second-in-command and indeed was to remain at William’s side for the battles in Ireland that drove James II into exile. Spain, a Catholic State, made no real objection to dethroning an avowed Catholic monarch because they saw him as a political and eventually as a military threat. This sense of realpolitik established what in our day of instant global communications would be seen as a major European crisis.

  Imagine what it must have been like at the time. Most people could remember back forty years or so, or they had parents who could. In that time alone, they had seen Charles I have his head chopped off in Whitehall (or at least heard about it); witnessed Cromwell’s Roundheads ruling the country in the name of a Republic, a Commonwealth; and then seen, and cheered, the return of the monarchy in the form of Charles II. They had heard all sorts of stories about papist plots to kill that King and then they had celebrated the arrival of a new one, James II, even though he was a Catholic. And now the country was about to be pulled apart by yet another civil war and the King was trying to make his kingdom a Catholic State. He wasn’t trying to hide what he was doing. He had put Catholics in prominent positions, including in the army and the navy.

  Thus the chessmen of Europe had to be in exactly the right positions before William had the clear line he needed to take the King, and everything depended upon the French. If Louis decided to strike at the German coalition rather than the Netherlands, then that freed William.

  Ironically, the solution to the dilemma was in James’s hands, not Louis’s. The French, if they were to invade the Netherlands, would need the English on their side. If James had aligned himself with Louis, then he might have saved himself, because then William would probably not have left the country. But James did nothing.

  By now there was so much dissent and uncertainty, together with rumour of war, that by the late autumn of 1688 even the unbending Judge Jeffreys tried to persuade James to reverse his reforms. He had, for example, banned Protestant dons at Oxford whom he saw as political as well as religious agitators; there were now Catholic-only schools; the county lords-lieutenant were disbanded; the ‘wrong’ type of magistrates were banned from the benches. The country was on the edge of panic. James had no option but to heed Jeffreys and reverse these so-called reforms. James had given in, but he was hopelessly late in doing so. The people in high places knew that the matter of William of Orange was
advanced and that little could stop a Dutch invasion to unseat the King. The signatories to the invitation to William had tried to protect themselves from implication in any plot (still a treasonable matter), but the King’s men knew perfectly well what was happening, hence the efforts to change. Intelligence reports had been flooding from the Continent ever since September 1688. They had reported troops being gathered, ships being stored, anchorages being cleared. This was an armada: sixty warships; 500 smaller vessels; 14,000 men made up of Dutch, Scandinavian, Scottish and English regiments, and displaced Huguenots. By the third week of October, William of Orange had put to sea.

  William planned to land in the north of England but the elements took control. A gale blew up and the fleet had to sail through the Dover Straits and then west, not so far from where Monmouth had made his landing three years before. The fleet got as far west as Torbay before putting its army ashore. Even then, James had hoped to stop his son-in-law, not by diplomatic persuasion – he knew it was too late for that – but by sheer force. James had a large army, perhaps 40,000 men, but they were in different parts of the country. Also, the London garrison had to stay where it was to protect the capital. This still left the King with approximately 25,000 men.

  By 19 November, two weeks after William’s landing, James joined his army at Salisbury. But many officers, already seeing the way the military wind was blowing, began to move towards William’s camp. Churchill, at whose home the young Princess Anne, the future Queen, had been staying, had already pledged his intentions to William. In a letter written to the Prince in Holland, he made clear his treasonable intent:

  Mr Sidney will let you know how I intend to behave myself; I think it is what I owe to God and my country [and to Churchill]. My honour I take leave to put into your Royal Highness’s hands, in which I think it safe. If you think there is anything else that I ought to do, you have but to command me, and I shall pay an entire obedience to it, being resolved to die in that religion that it has pleased God to give you both the will and the power to protect.

  Churchill wasn’t a major player in what followed but he was typical, and somewhat influential. He had also clearly chosen to usurp the power of his monarch to whom he had sworn complete loyalty and obedience: realpolitik was not the prerogative of the Continental power players. James might have followed his instincts and had Churchill arrested but he did not. In any case, by this time it would have made little difference to the outcome and would not have frightened those against him. Such an action may even have strengthened resolve. By the end of the year it was all over. England didn’t want James. There was no question of another regicide: he had been allowed to escape from England and, for the moment, he was still King. Two years later James landed in Ireland with French troops and laid siege to Londonderry. About 30,000 Protestants were trapped, but they held out for three months and were rescued, an occasion still celebrated in Ulster. Later James was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne (see Chapter Twenty-Nine) and retreated to France where he relied on a pension from Louis XIV. He died in France on 6 September 1701.

  When William of Orange landed in England in 1688 not everyone intended that he should be King even though he had been in the thick of the conspiracy to remove James. The Whigs, the party formed to fight for the exclusion of James, as a Catholic, from his right to the Crown, were not unexpectedly on William’s side. The Tories were the party of the Crown. Even the Anglican Tories were not all for William’s accession, although they welcomed his invasion.

  But once William had arrived in London, and once James had escaped (probably with William’s help: he needed his father-in-law out of the way, but not as an assassinated or executed martyr), there seems little doubt that William wanted to be King – he certainly wanted the English army to help fight his own battles. And the solution was obvious: William’s wife, Mary, would be Queen and William could be Regent. Better still, Mary could insist that they should rule together: King and Queen. Perhaps that had been the Dutchman’s idea all along. For all his weak appearance, humped back and sickly nature, William of Orange had considerable cunning. He was a Calvinist but he wasn’t single-minded. He was on good terms with the Pope. He took advice from Catholics. He is said to have hated the French Catholics, but perhaps not because they were Catholics but because they were French. Besides, William could very well say that his actions were solely on behalf of his wife. After all, he would hardly have undertaken them for the English, the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots. He didn’t like any of them.

  William’s adroitness and timing were very obvious during the first few weeks after he arrived in England. Conspirators against King James II implied to William that he could be King (although some of them, including Danby, denied this). What they really wanted was a compliant and Protestant monarch. William worked quickly: James left England on 23 December 1688 and arrived in France on Christmas Day. On Boxing Day William called a meeting in London. In front of him were some of the surviving members of Charles II’s last Parliament. Joining them were the aldermen, the Lord Mayor of London and men from the common council of London. William didn’t invite the Tories from James II’s Parliament, which meant that the group was dominated by Whigs – the people who didn’t want James to be King in the first place.

  One month later a Declaration of Rights was made which offered the Crown to William and Mary. And twelve months after that the Declaration became an Act of Parliament. But what about lawful succession? During the winter of 1688 bishops didn’t mind James being King as long as he was legally bound to the Church. But in January 1689 the Tories decided that they wanted William’s wife, Mary, to rule as Regent, but on James’ behalf, so that James remained King. That proposal was defeated, but only just. Then the Tories said that James’s flight from the country amounted to abdication and since too many people believed that James II and Mary of Modena’s son, also James, was not actually theirs, then James II’s daughter Mary was the obvious successor. It was then that William showed his intentions. He didn’t want to be, as he called it, ‘a gentleman usher’ to his wife. The Declaration of Rights provided the form of words for Mary to declare that she wished to rule as Queen with her husband, William, as King. So the succession was arranged because, whatever the feelings towards James, his daughter was still next in line. But there was something else to be resolved: perhaps, just perhaps, the most important section of the Declaration of Rights. It declared that, in future, no Catholic could be monarch. The issue remains sensitive to this day, even when it does not involve a Catholic. When Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten became engaged to Princess Elizabeth, the Archbishop of Canterbury advised that although the future husband of the future Queen was Greek Orthodox, it would be better if he were received into the Church of England. Just two weeks before the wedding, in 1947, he was.

  So William, who had little regard for these islands and their peoples, was to be King of England, Ireland and France. It would seem that William accepted, indeed wanted, the Crown for two reasons. Firstly, as his wife, Mary, the beautiful daughter of James II, had a hereditary claim on England, then she (and he) should exercise it. Secondly, England’s wealth and military power would be an invaluable weapon in his real ambition: the submission of France.

  King William was regarded as an oaf, a bore, an uncouth King. Yet he was well-educated, could speak six languages, including fluent Latin, and bewildered London society by his artistic learning. As William of Orange, he had used a mixture of cunning, astute diplomacy and military nous; he had rid his country of the French by 1674, formed an Alliance with Lorraine, Brandenburg and Spain to deter the French, and had become the head of what was then called the United Provinces. But the steady march of Louis XIV was yet to be checked.

  Seventeenth-century London did not really understand the dangers as William saw them. Given the character of the new King and what he regarded as his special sense of vision it was inevitable that William thought so little of his new people. And just imagine how this new regime went down with
a society that still remembered, with some fondness perhaps, the easy going times of the Merry Monarch, Charles II. And, also, think what it must have been like to see armed Dutch infantry, not English soldiers, around the capital of England.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  1689–1702

  James was now in France and plotting to return to England with French help. The French thought that was a very good idea. War by proxy is often attractive. James, with French help including officers, men and supplies, landed in Ireland in March 1689. Not unnaturally he was welcomed by many of the Catholic Irish. He had his headquarters in Dublin and an Irish-Catholic army of tens of thousands. Only the Protestant north of the island kept its distance from what were now called the Jacobites – from Jacobus, the Latin for James. The support for James was not confined to Catholic Ireland. The most widespread support for the King, or more accurately, his cause, was in Scotland. William’s arrogance – at best, insensitivity – towards the Scots did not help his popularity. In the year William and Mary came to the throne, the Jacobites mounted a rebellion.

  On 27 July 1689, John Graeme of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, led his Jacobites against William’s men at the Pass of Killiecrankie. The King’s men retreated, but Dundee, a veteran of Charles II’s army, was wounded and later died. It was this soldier who was remembered in song and poetry as Bonny Dundee. This Jacobite Rebellion was important for what didn’t happen. Few rallied to Claverhouse’s standard, the Jacobite cause. Not until William showed that he was willing to massacre the Scots to get his way did the Jacobite cause grow. Two decades later, after an Act of Union between England and Scotland had been passed, the Jacobite determination to continue their fight would not be dampened. The battle at the Pass of Killiecrankie would not be the last.