by Allan Massie
In July 1688, while that trial was still undecided, the Queen gave birth to a son. James had married Mary of Modena in 1673, three years after the death of his first wife. She was then only fourteen, and had not welcomed the prospect of a husband twenty years her senior. Indeed, she was in tears when she arrived in England and found she much preferred her brother-in-law to her husband. Charles, she said, ‘was always kind to me, and so truly amiable and good-natured that I loved him very much’.4 As an Italian and a Catholic she was never popular in England, but at least till 1688 she had not threatened the liberty of Protestant England by producing an heir, her happy failure to do so making it likely that on James’s death the throne would pass to his Protestant daughter Mary. Now, to general dismay, there was a male heir who would undoubtedly be reared as a Catholic.
A rumour quickly spread: the child was not the Queen’s at all. Her own had been born dead, and a substitute brought into the palace in – it was asserted – a warming-pan. The story was widely believed. Burnet, who was in the Netherlands at the time, and whose information was therefore derived at second or third hand, declared in his History that ‘if a child was born, there are further presumptions that it soon died, and another was put in his room. The Queen’s children were all naturally very weak, and died young.’ It was further insisted that the only people allowed into the Queen’s bedroom were Catholics, and that the Protestant Princess Anne had been ordered to Bath by her father to take the waters. The story took some time to die, though no one encountering the new Prince of Wales, James Edward, in adult life could have doubted for one moment that he was a Stuart.
Rebellion was simmering even before the child was born, though the men who plotted treason did not dare to make a move themselves. Instead they sent the Whig Admiral Russell to the Netherlands (where he had the excuse of visiting a sister) to sound out the Prince of Orange. William made it clear that he would require something in the nature of a formal invitation if he was to venture on an invasion of England; meanwhile he sent an envoy to London to congratulate the King, who was both his uncle and his father-in-law, on the birth of the little Prince of Wales. Throughout the summer, rumour and counter-rumour flew, and more English grandees, some of them Tories, committed themselves, if cautiously, to William. Meanwhile Louis XIV, learning of the Dutch military movements from spies, sent a warning to James and with it an offer of French troops. This was rejected. James declared his confidence in his loyal army.
Eventually William sailed with an army of some 24,000 men – the largest force ever to invade England. He had issued a declaration recounting James’s breaches of the law and proclaiming his own intention to restore the liberties of England – though he also stated that he had no intention of deposing his father-in-law. A wind that held the Royal Navy – itself less than wholly loyal – by the Essex coast blew the Dutch through the Channel and William landed safely at Torbay. His admirers called it ‘a Protestant wind’.
If James had moved swiftly and decisively, he might well have checked the invasion, for the grandees who had issued the invitation to William had not yet dared to join him, and it is probable that they were unwilling to act till all risk had been removed, for they were comfortable men with great possessions and much to lose. But James was now himself moving from the ridiculous overconfidence of the previous year by way of self-doubt and distrust towards despair. He remained in London while his army advanced slowly to the west. Soon there came word of the first defection: the young Lord Cornbury. He was of no great significance himself (and failed to persuade his men to cross over to the enemy with him), but as a son of the second Earl of Clarendon, he was James’s nephew by marriage. His desertion dealt a notable blow to the King’s crumbling morale.
James was in a state of high nervous tension. When he joined his army, he suffered a succession of nosebleeds. It was not surprising, for he no longer knew whom he might trust, and the same uncertainty disturbed even those who remained loyal to him. Nevertheless, at this critical moment the King behaved like a man of honour. He told Clarendon that he would not hold either him or any other members of his family accountable for Cornbury’s treasonable desertion. Then he called his generals and senior officers together, among them Churchill, the Duke of Grafton (one of Charles II’s bastards), and generals Kirke and Trelawney. Macaulay, so hostile to James, wrote that:
he addressed the assembly in language worthy of a better man and a better cause. It might be, he said, that some of the officers had conscientious scruples about fighting for him. If so, he was willing to receive back their commissions. But he adjured them as gentlemen and soldiers not to imitate the shameful example of Cornbury. All seemed moved; and none more than Churchill. He was the first to vow with well feigned enthusiasm that he would shed the last drop of his blood in the service of his gracious master: Grafton was loud and forward in similar protestations; and the example was followed by Kirke and Trelawney.5
Macaulay’s account of this meeting was derived from a biography of James, compiled during his exile, which is based, if only in part, on memoirs written by him in his own hand. Given Macaulay’s antipathy to James, anything he recounts favourable to the King may deserve to be trusted. However, his dislike of Churchill and contempt for him were also intense. Churchill’s partisans may therefore choose to reject this story. His descendant, Sir Winston, in his five-volume Life of Marlborough, does so. Others, including A. L. Rowse and Marlborough’s most recent biographer, Richard Holmes, make no mention of it at all.
Be that as it may, it is clear that Churchill was already planning to abandon the King who had been his patron and to whom he owed so much. All that was necessary was to choose the right moment, and to co-ordinate his desertion with that of the Princess Anne, his wife Sarah’s closest friend. Any immediate intention was however put on hold when the King joined his army. Churchill then suggested that James should inspect the outposts of the army at Warminster. He was about to do so when he was overcome by another violent nosebleed, and it was three days before he fully recovered. Subsequently the King was to ascribe this to Providence, having become convinced that there had been a plot to seize him at Warminster and carry him over to the Prince’s camp.
While James was incapacitated, Churchill and the Duke of Grafton rode off to join William. Churchill left behind a letter in which, while admitting that he owed everything to James, he asserted that his devotion to the Church of England made it impossible to remain in his service. ‘Churchill’s conduct at this crisis for the nation needs no defending,’ wrote Rowse, ‘and we need waste no time upon it. He was bound to suffer the charge of ingratitude, then and for ever afterwards; but the responsibility was James’s. In leaving him Churchill was doing what was best for the nation.’6 Or, of course, for John Churchill. The ship was sinking, and he ratted. ‘Est-il possible?’ said Princess Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, on hearing of Churchill’s desertion. ‘Est-il possible?’ he asked again, in perhaps simulated surprise, before he and Princess Anne followed Churchill’s example.
James’s nerve now cracked completely. He had already sent his wife and baby son to France, and was anxious to follow them. His first attempt failed. He was recognised by some fishermen, endured their insults, and was brought back to London. In fact he was in a stronger position than he realised. William was determined to be king, despite his protestations to the contrary, as the only sure way of bringing England into his Grand Alliance against France; and the last thing he wanted was to have his father-in-law in his hands. If James had held his ground, there might have been a compromise, with James retained as king but deprived of control of the government, and with a council of regency established. That would have been an unstable situation, capable of being reversed in the future. The possibility was not to William’s taste. Moreover, James and William, uncle and nephew as well as father-in-law and son-in-law, had previously been on good, even friendly terms. It would have been embarrassing for William to have had the King as his prisoner. So he orde
red that James should be given the chance to flee again. This time he succeeded in getting to France.
Louis XIV received him with kindness and courtesy. The Palace of St-Germains was put at his disposal. The Queen made a good impression. ‘She is judicious and sensible in all she says,’ Madame de Sevigné wrote. However, ‘her husband is quite different; he is courageous but his intelligence is only mediocre. He recounts all that has happened in England with such indifference that that is all one can feel for him.’7 Nevertheless, she thought him ‘a decent sort of man’. Other judgements were more severe. The Archbishop of Rheims, brother of Louis’s war minister, Louvois, remarked: ‘There goes a simpleton, who has lost three kingdoms for a Mass.’ Whatever might be the fear of Catholicism in England, European politics were no longer determined by religious divisions. William’s Grand Alliance against France had the Catholic Habsburg emperor and Catholic Spain among its members. Indeed, when William sailed for England, the Spanish ambassador at the Hague had caused Masses to be said for a successful voyage.
The revolution in England would be called ‘Glorious’ and ‘Bloodless’; there had been almost no fighting. It wasn’t bloodless in Scotland or Ireland, where the King retained support.
Despite criticism of his enthusiasm for watching the torture of Covenanting prisoners, James had been quite popular when dispatched to Scotland by his brother during the Exclusion crisis. Fifty years later, Robert Chambers remembered that ‘old people used to talk with delight of the magnificence and brilliancy of the Court which James assembled [at Holyrood] and of the general tone of happiness and satisfaction which pervaded the town’.8 He had revived the old royal bodyguard, the Company of Archers, created the Order of the Knights of the Thistle, become patron of the Royal College of Physicians and extended his support to the Physic Garden in the grounds of Trinity Hospital. But however welcome his sojourn had been to the nobility, gentry and intelligentsia, the old spirit of the Covenant and suspicion of Catholicism were still alive. When the revolution broke out and the chancellor, the Catholic Earl of Perth, prudently fled from Edinburgh, a mob attacked and destroyed the abbey chapel at Holyrood, which James had converted to Catholic use.
However, the King had supporters in Scotland who, unlike those in England, were prepared to fight for him. Their leader was John Graham of Claverhouse, whom James had made Viscount Dundee. He was a professional soldier who had served in the Dutch army, once indeed saving William’s life when he was unhorsed in battle. He had later commanded the royal army in Scotland against the Covenanting rebels, and now resolved, as Sir Walter Scott’s ballad has it, that ‘Ere the King’s crown shall fall, there are crowns to be broke; / So let each Cavalier who loves honour and me, Come follow the bonnet of Bonnie Dundee.’ As a Graham and a cousin of the great Marquis of Montrose, Dundee had influence with the Highland clans, especially those hostile to the Whig Clan Campbell. He raised an army that met the professional Anglo-Scottish-Dutch troops commanded by General Mackay in the Pass of Killiecrankie on the border between Highland and Lowland Scotland. The Highland charge swept all before them, but a bullet hit Dundee and he died in the hour of victory. No one could take his place. King James’s cause was lost in Scotland, but the exiled Stuarts would find support there for more than fifty years to come.
Ireland was even more promising territory for James. The native Irish were Catholic, and James’s deputy in Ireland, Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell (and Churchill’s brother-in-law) commanded a large predominantly Catholic army. He marched against the Protestant stronghold of Londonderry. It was almost taken straight away, saved only by the prompt action of thirteen young apprentice boys, whose names suggest a Scottish origin, who closed the Ferry Gate against the attackers. The siege lasted 105 days – days of hardship and near starvation – before the city was relieved and a tradition of Protestant defiance was established that has coloured and, some would say, prejudiced the subsequent history of Ulster.
James himself now arrived in Ireland with French troops provided by his cousin Louis, but William defeated him at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. James, blaming the indiscipline of the Irish for his defeat, left them to their fate, which was miserable, and retired in depression to France. He would live another ten years there at St-Germains, in frequent correspondence with English and Scots politicians anxious to maintain some relations with the exiled King, in case a turn of Fortune’s wheel should see him back in Whitehall. Churchill, rewarded for his treason with the earldom of Marlborough, was only one of many, both Whigs and Tories, to keep a line to St-Germains open. No wonder William looked on his leading subjects in England with suspicion and contempt.
As for James, he devoted himself to the practice of the religion that had cost him his throne, and to the recital of complaints about the treachery of his subjects. His mood was morose, his life gloomy. He wrote memoirs full of self-justification and self-pity, and enjoyed only the occasional lighter moment provided by a bottle of his favourite champagne. Some thought the court of St-Germains the most miserable place in France with the exception of the Bastille. He died in 1701, and a few Irish Jesuits maintained that miracles had been performed at his tomb. They might think him a martyr to his faith, but the Pope, more anxious to check the ambitions of France than to restore a Catholic king to the thrones of England and Scotland as a pensioner and ally of Louis XIV, had ordered the bells to be rung in Rome to celebrate James’s defeat at the Boyne, and was indifferent to requests that he be considered as a candidate for canonisation.
Chapter 15
William III (1689–1702) and Mary II (1689–94): Revolution Settlement and Dutch Rule
Despite the disclaimer in the declaration he published before invading England, William was determined to be king. He would not act as regent, either for his exiled father-in-law, as some High Church Tories wished, or for his wife, the legitimate heir if the fiction about the warming-pan baby was accepted. So he held out for sovereignty, and the Convention Parliament,1 having conveniently decided that James’s desertion had left the throne vacant, named William and Mary as joint king and queen. William’s determination was reasonable. Only as king could he achieve his aim of bringing England – and Scotland – into his Grand Alliance against Louis. He was content to share the throne with his wife, because they were now on reasonably good terms; he could be sure she wouldn’t interfere, would do as she was told, and might usefully smooth his relations with the English politicians whom, with good reason, he distrusted and despised. He cared not a jot for the so-called liberties of England he had been invited to preserve. He wanted the English army and navy, and money to finance his wars against Louis, and he made sure he got all of these.
His father had died just before he was born in 1650, and he had been brought up by his mother, Mary Stuart. He had been a sweet-tempered small boy, a favourite of his uncle, Charles, whose pro-French policies he would come to deplore. But the charming affectionate child was soon soured by experience. Mary died when he was only ten, and, with the government of the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the hands of severe republicans who detested the House of Orange, he learned self-sufficiency in his youth. He grew up chilly and reserved in manner, distrustful of all but a handful of intimate friends, chief among them a Dutch nobleman of his own age, William Bentinck, whom he regarded as a brother. The French invasion of 1672 and the revolution in the Netherlands that followed it determined the course of his life. Though only twenty-two he was appointed Stadtholder of the United Provinces and commander of the armed forces, a position less than royal, more than presidential, held by members of the House of Orange since William’s great-grandfather had inspired and led the revolt of the Dutch against Philip II of Spain. Henceforth he devoted his life to the struggle against Louis XIV. He was not a great general, though conspicuously brave in battle, but he was a great leader.
He hoped that the marriage to his cousin Mary would lead to a reorientation of English foreign policy. When his uncle Charles showed no inclination for t
his, but preferred friendship with France, and the pension Louis paid him, William soon lost whatever interest he had had in his wife. He can scarcely be blamed for this. Mary was doubtless a good woman – Bishop Burnet certainly thought so – but she seems to have been a singularly dull one, with less character than any of the rest of the Stuart family. She talked a great deal, but not to any point, and practised her religion faithfully. William was soon bored and took mistresses, chief among them Elizabeth Villiers, whom he would make Countess of Orkney. She was a distant cousin of the Duke of Buckingham, a lively conversationalist but no beauty, disfigured by a hideous squint. Their affair may have been more companionable than sexual. Unlike his uncles, Charles and James, William fathered no children, legitimate or illegitimate. Some thought him homosexually inclined, and he did indeed prefer the company of young officers to ladies. But his friendship with Bentinck was no more than friendship, and only late in life, when he made a favourite of Arnold Joost van Keppel, a pretty young man with, as Macaulay says, a sweet and obliging temper, was there any relationship that might give substance to this rumour; and this principally because Bentinck, now Earl of Portland, was so manifestly jealous of the young man, who had been one of William’s pages and was now made Earl of Albemarle and a Knight of the Garter. The favour shown Keppel ‘furnished the Jacobites with a fresh topic for calumny and ribaldry’,2 but Macaulay could not bring himself to suppose that the calumny was other than baseless. He was probably right, though even Burnet found the young man’s progress unaccountably quick. Yet it is not difficult to explain. Keppel was unfailingly cheerful and lighthearted, eager to please, whereas Portland had become stiff and peevish. Keppel was indeed generally popular; even the English nobility, jealous of foreign favourites, liked him. If William had regarded Bentinck as the brother he never had, then his little Joost took the place of a son. Moreover, he was one of the few people who could make William laugh.