by Robert Lacey
After three years on the throne, James was arousing widespread suspicion. He had promised not to undermine the established Church, but evidence was mounting that his true purpose was to steer England back towards Rome. By March 1688 a succession of moves favouring Catholics and dissenters had ousted more than twelve hundred members of the Church of England from public office, and though James claimed to be unbiased, even his own family dismissed as a popish ploy his recently cultivated tolerance towards nonconformists.’Things are come to that pass now,’ wrote his daughter Anne from London to her elder sister in Holland,’that if they go on much longer, I believe no Protestant will be able to live.’
James was knocking the stilts from under his own conservative powerbase. The Anglican Tory squires who had welcomed his accession were incensed to see their own kind being replaced on the magistrates’ benches by papists and Puritans — and seriously alarmed when Catholics were given positions of command in the King’s rapidly growing standing army. On 30 June, less than three weeks after the birth of the Prince of Wales, seven senior peers, their signatures in code, sent a secret invitation to Mary’s husband William of Orange to come over to England.
William needed no prompting. He spent that summer preparing an army and an invasion fleet — 463 vessels and forty thousand troops — along with sixty thousand pamphlets to explain his purpose. He did not intend to seize the crown, he said. His expedition was‘intended for no other design, but to have a free and lawful parliament assembled as soon as possible — and to inquire, among other matters,‘into the birth of the pretended Prince of Wales’.
William’s Dutch and German invasion force was larger than Philip of Spain had assembled for the Armada of 1588, but when the Dutch prince landed in Torbay in November a hundred years later, his success was by no means guaranteed. His foreign mercenaries might well have it in them to defeat the twenty-thousand-strong English army that was blocking their way to London. But shedding English blood would have ruined William’s claim to be acting in English interests, and would also have exposed his basic reason for invading England — he wanted England’s military might on Holland’s side in its ongoing battle against Louis XIV.
William was fortunate that, at the moment of confrontation, James lost his nerve. Though debilitated by nosebleeds and insomnia, the King made haste to join his army on Salisbury Plain — only to return abruptly to London, where he discovered that his daughter Anne had deserted and joined the cause of her sister and brother-in-law. Lear-like, James raged against the perfidy of his daughters. Having sent the Queen and the Prince of Wales ahead of him, he fled Whitehall on II December by a secret passage, throwing the Great Seal of England petulantly into the Thames as he left.
At this point a band of overzealous Kent fishermen spoiled the plot. They arrested James at Faversham and dispatched him back to London — to William’s embarrassed fury. The Dutch prince promptly returned his father-in-law to Kent, with an escort briefed to look the other way when they got the King to Rochester. At the second attempt, James made good his escape.
Six weeks later, on 13 February 1689, William and Mary accepted the English crown as joint sovereigns in return for their agreement to the passing by Parliament of a‘Bill of Rights’ — a mutually convenient deal that has gone down in history as’the Glorious Revolution.’ This is generally taken to mean that 1688/9 marked the inauguration of England’s constitutional monarchy — the moment when Parliament finally codified the control over the Crown that it had won in the Civil War, but had failed to secure in the reigns of Charles II and James II.
In fact, the Bill of Rights of 1689 said very little about the rights of individuals, and it would be more than a century before England’s monarchy could truly be called‘constitutional’. In the horse-trading with Parliament that followed James II’s effective abdication, the hard-headed William coolly defended his royal prerogatives, retaining his right to select his own ministers and to control the length of parliamentary sessions. Revolution? The year 1688/9 witnessed nothing so grass-roots or drastic in England — though from William’s point of view his invasion had certainly enjoyed a glorious outcome.
ISAAC NEWTON AND THE PRINCIPLES OF THE UNIVERSE
1687
ISAAC NEWTON WAS BORN IN THE LINCOLNshire village of Woolsthorpe in 1642, the year that England’s Civil War began. A small and sickly baby, he had an unhappy childhood, discarded by his widowed mother at the age of three when she remarried a rich clergyman who had no time for Isaac. But a kindly uncle helped him to school in the nearby market town of Grantham, and in 1661 the nineteen-year-old won admission to Trinity College, Cambridge.
Newton was not an outstanding student.But in 1665 the plague came to Cambridge, the students were sent home, and it was back in Woolsthorpe that he experienced the revelation he loved to recount in later life. Sitting in the shade of an apple tree one day, he watched an apple drop to the ground.’Why should this apple always invariably fall to the earth in a perpendicular line?’ he remembered thinking.‘Why should it not fall upwards, sideways, or obliquely?’
Newton did not publish his ideas about the law of gravity for another twenty years, and some have suggested that his subsequent description of his famous Eureka moment was nothing more than an exercise in myth-making. But Isaac had come up with another big idea during his plague-enforced gap year at Woolsthorpe, and it is not surprising that falling apples should take a back seat while he explored this equally intriguing — and literally dazzling — phenomenon: the structure of light.‘In the beginning of the year 1666… he later wrote,‘I procured me a triangular glass prism, to try therewith the celebrated phenomena of colours… Having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in my window shuts [shutters] to let in a convenient quantity of the sun’s light, I placed my prism at his entrance that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall.’
The prevailing theory at this time was that a prism produced colours by staining, or dyeing, the light that passed through it. But in his study at Woolsthorpe, where we can see today exactly where the twenty-five-year-old boffin played with the colours of the rainbow, Newton set up a second prism. If each prism coloured the light, the hues should have deepened as they passed through the second refraction. In fact, they returned to being bright and clear — Newton had put white light’s component colours back together again.
This was the discovery that made his name. In 1672 he was invited to publish his findings by the Royal Society of London for Improving Knowledge. This fellowship of inquiring minds had started life in Oxford and London during the Civil War when, lacking a fixed base, they called themselves the‘Invisible College’. Science was one of Charles II’s more constructive interests, and in 1662 he had chartered the’Invisible College’ as the Royal Society, bestowing his patronage on the meeting and mingling of some extraordinary minds: Robert Boyle was working on the definition of chemical elements, together with the density, pressure and behaviour of gases; Robert Hooke was publicising the hidden world revealed by the microscope; Edmund Halley was investigating the movement of heavenly bodies like comets; and Christopher Wren, surveying the almost limitless architectural opportunities offered by fire-devastated London, was formulating a fresh vision of the structures required by city living.
Immediately elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work on‘opticks’, Isaac Newton did not, in fact, get on very well with this illustrious fraternity. His troubled childhood had left him a solitary character, untrusting and morose. But it was a gathering of three more sociable Fellows that prompted the publication of his greatest work. Sitting in one of London’s newly fashionable coffee houses one day in 1684, Halley, Wren and Hooke fell to discussing how to describe the movements of the planets, and shortly afterwards Halley visited Newton to put the question to him. Newton replied without hesitation: the planets moved in an ellipse. He had worked it out years earlier, he said, and when Halley asked to see his calculations, Newton promised to write them out for him.
> The result was his Principia Mathematica, often described as the most important book in the history of science. In it Newton set out his three laws of motion, the second of these explaining the power of gravity and how it determined the motion of the planets and their moons, the movement of the tides and the apparently eccentric behaviour of comets. Halley used Newton’s calculations to predict the course of the comet that would make him famous — Halley’s Comet, which passed over England in 1682 and which he linked to reports of previous comet sightings in 1456,1531 and 1607.
Having prompted Newton to write the Principia, it was Halley who extracted the manuscript from him, paid with his own money for its printing, and acted as its chief publicist, preparing reader-friendly summaries of Newton’s often severely complicated ideas. Newton himself expressed his thoughts so dourly that students often avoided his lectures at Cambridge, and he spent his time‘lecturing to the walls’.
Today we see Isaac Newton as a pioneering scientist and the father of physics. In fact, the terms‘scientist’ and‘physics’ did not exist in his lifetime. Newton devoted long years of research to the ancient mysteries of alchemy and how base metals could be turned into gold. The modern scientists and historians involved in the‘Newton Project’, a venture that will put all his ten million or so words on to the World Wide Web, report that more than a million of those words are devoted to alchemy, and another four million to lurid biblical prophecy — and particularly to the book of Revelation: the Whore of Babylon, the nature of the two-horned and ten-horned beasts and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Yet between the lines of this ancient-sounding discourse lurks a radical and forward-thinking vision. Newton eagerly awaits the moment when‘the Word of God makes war with ye Beasts & Kings of ye earth’ to create a new heaven, new earth & new Jerusalem’, This man, born with the Civil War and producing his master work in the years when the absolutist Stuart monarchy finally collapsed, is rightly identified with modernity. He prepared the brief by which Cambridge University would defend its independence against King James II, and in 1689 he was elected to the Parliament that put William and Mary on the throne.
More important, his explanation of how the universe operated by logical mechanical laws was to cause a profound alteration in human thought. The work of Newton, Halley, Hooke and their contemporaries upended the very basis of philosophy and human inquiry, making once divine areas the province of their own earthly research. All things were possible. Reason, logic and deduction would replace blind faith. Old ideas were questioned. New ideas were explored. No longer did God reside in the heavens; he existed in your mind if you could find him there — a transformation in thinking that truly was a glorious revolution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCE NOTES
The excellent general histories of Britain by Norman Davies, Simon Schama, Roy Strong, Michael Wood and others were set out in the bibliography to the previous volume of Great Tales. For the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they are joined by:
Brigden, Susan, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603 (London, Penguin Books), 2000.
Guy, John, Tudor England (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1988.
Haigh, Christopher, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1993.
Kishlansky, Mark, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714 (London, Penguin Books), 1996.
Saul, Nigel (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1997.
For a wide range of original documents, some in facsimile and all usually in translation, visit the following:
www.bl.com
www.fordharmedu/halsall
www.history.ac.uk/iht/resources/index.html
www.library.rdg.ac.uk/home.html
eebo.chadwyck.com/home
This last excellent website, Early English Books Online, is set up for institutions — your local library can apply for a free trial — but not individuals. You can find a backdoors way in, however, if you go to the interface supplied by the University of Michigan on www.hti.umich.edu/e/eebodemo/.
FURTHER READING AND PLACES TO VISIT
1387: Geoffrey Chaucer and the Mother Tongue
You can visit Chaucer’s grave in Westminster Abbey, the memorial that inspired Poets’ Corner. To read the very earliest editions of The Canterbury Tales as printed by William Caxton in the 1470S and 1480S, visit the British Library website, www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/homepage.html — and for a wonderfully bawdy modern English version, read the classic translation by Nevill Coghill.
Coghill, Nevill, The Canterbury Tales (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books), 1951.
1399: The Deposing of King Richard II
Nigel Saul has written the definitive biography. Christopher Given Wilson has pulled together the contemporary sources.
Given Wilson, Christopher (ed.), Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397-1400: The Reign of Richard II (Manchester, Manchester University Press), 1993.
Saul, Nigel, Richard II (London, Yale University Press), 1997.
1399:‘Turn Again, Dick Whittington!’
For an evocative flavour of Whittington’s London, visit the medieval gallery at the Museum of London, or its website: www.museumoflondon.org.uk.
1399: Henry IV and His Extra-virgin Oil
A recent academic conference has assembled the latest research and thinking on this enigmatic king.
Dodd, Gwilym, and Biggs, Douglas, Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime, 1399-1406 (York, Medieval Press), 2003.
1415; We Happy Few — the Battle ofAzincourt
The two English films of Henry V by the Shakespearian giants of their respective generations are regularly rerun on television. Laurence Olivier’s sun-filled idyll was shot in neutral Ireland during World War II, with the Irish army playing the bowmen of England. Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 version presents, surely in deliberate contrast, a dark, brooding and rain-drenched interpretation.
1429: Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans
Marina Warner has written the definitive interpretation; George Bernard Shaw, the classic play. For transcriptions of Joan’s trial, visit: archive.joan-of-arc.org.
Warner, Marina, Joan of Arc, the Image of Female Heroism (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson), 1981.
1440: A‘Prompter for Little Ones’
Nicholas Orme’s playful and original book is the inspiration for this chapter. The metal toys uncovered by Tony Pilson and the Mud Larks are exhibited in the medieval galleries at the Museum of London: www.museumof london.org.uk.
Orme, Nicholas, Medieval Children (London, Yale University Press), 2001.
1422-61,1470-1: House of Lancaster: the Two Reigns of Henry VI
David Starkey’s rereading of the‘Royal Book’ of court etiquette has cast a new light on the supposed shabbiness of Henry VI. The Paston Letters, England’s earliest set of family correspondence, provides a human picture of how the wars disturbed — and did not disturb — ordinary life. To get the flavour of one conflict, visit www.bloreheath.org, which walks you round the site of the 1459 battle. Eagle Media’s DVD (emdv354) has preserved the History Channel’s excellent series‘The Wars of the Roses’.
The original manuscripts of the Paston Letters are in the British Library (Catalogue nos. 27443-58, 34888-9, 43488-91, 39848-9, 36988, 33597, 45099), but you can read them online in several versions from the Old English to the modern abridged edition on various electronic libraries most easily accessed from www.google.com (because individual addresses tend to be long and change frequently). The University of Virginia’s online library at www.lib.virginia.edu has all 421 letters or 1380 kilobytes’ worth!
Starkey, David,’Henry VI’s Old Blue Gown’, The Court Historian, vol. 4.1 (April 1999).
1432-85: The House of Theodore
Knowing that Pembrokeshire is Tudor country gives an extra dimension to visiting this south-west corner of Wales. Henry VII was born inside the dramatic thirteenth-cent
ury curtain walls of Pembroke Castle, www.pembrokecastle.co.uk, ten miles from Milford Haven where he landed in 1485 to claim the throne.
1461-70, 1471-83: House of York: Edward IV,
Merchant King
Warwick Castle, the home of Warwick the Kingmaker, who made and was then unmade by Edward IV, was recently voted Britain’s most popular castle, ahead of the Tower of London. With its gardens landscaped by‘Capability’ Brown in a later century, it is today impressively maintained by Madame Tussaud’s: www.warwick-castle.co.uk.
Seward, Desmond, The Wars of the Roses (London, Robinson), 1995.
1474: William Caxton
Caxton is buried within yards of the site of his printing press, in St Margaret’s, the little church that is so often overlooked in the shadow of Westminster Abbey. Along with his edition of The Canterbury Tales, the British Library has digitised a number of his works on www.bl.uk. To read his charming, often eccentric, publisher’s prefaces, visit www.bartleby.com.
Painter, George, William Caxton: A Quincentenary Biography of England’s First Printer (London, Chatto & Windus), 1976.
1483: Whodunit? The Princes in the Tower
The little princes were lodged by their uncle in the relatively luxurious royal apartments of the Tower. Visit the dungeons and watch the water come creeping under Traitors’ Gate to enjoy the sinister chill of this fortress, prison, and high-class beheading place: www.hrp.org.uk. Dockray presents the contemporary evidence on the mystery, so you can make up your own mind.