by Jane Dunn
He arrived in October and went straight to Newmarket, ‘like a hasty lover’,43 William noted, where Charles and James and much of the court were gathered for the racing. William wrote how well received the young prince was by the king and his brother, although both men were rather surprised and put out by William of Orange’s brusque, soldierly manner and his determination not to discuss any business or even marriage without first meeting the young woman in question. This was not how dynastic marriages were usually conducted.
The prince’s urgency meant they all left Newmarket early for London to allow an informal meeting of the couple to take place. Mary was fifteen, tall like her father and uncle, and indeed like her great-great-grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, after whom she was named and whose good looks and colouring she was thought to have inherited. She was an innocent, not very well-educated young woman with undeniable talents and attractions. She could draw and was musical. With a lively and highly affectionate and expressive temperament, she had impressed Evelyn and all the others who had seen her act in a masque at court, Calisto, or the Chaste Nymph,* three years before. She was loved by her father although she saw very little of him and was aware of the tension between his newly acquired Catholicism and her and her sister Anne’s strictly observed Protestantism.
Her mother Anne, Duchess of York, had died painfully, probably of breast cancer, having just given birth to her eighth child, who did not live. Mary was her eldest surviving child and then only nine years old, a sensitive and emotional girl. Her mother’s life, as far as she could see, was one long pregnancy and illness, shadowed always by death as infant after infant succumbed, followed in the end by her mother herself. Two years later Mary and her younger sister Anne were introduced to their new stepmother, Mary of Modena, a young woman only four years older than Mary herself. She was kind, high-spirited and, at first, hysterically unhappy at leaving her home and country, aged only fifteen, to marry their father, old, wizened and debauched at forty.
Although both Mary and he had lost their mothers when young, William of Orange had had a completely different upbringing. He had been bred as a soldier and was contemptuous of the foppish and dissolute courtiers that hung around his uncle’s court. Mary was unlikely to have seen anyone as plain-dressed and plain-speaking, as unfashionable and un-princely as this prince: a man who seemed old too at nearly twenty-seven, battle-hardened, asthmatic, serious-minded, and not as tall as she. She was a girl with romantic tastes, having gleaned most of her knowledge of the larger world of politics, life and love from her readings of the great romantic epics by de Scudéry, among others, the very writers who had entertained the unmarried Dorothy. But whereas Dorothy was courted in real life by the epitome of the dashing, handsome, passionate lover, Mary found in her William an altogether more prosaic figure. With his plain, unpowdered hair, his simple dark clothes, his beaky nose, he certainly did not look or behave like the heroes of these novels. His guttural Dutch accent too, an accent so often lampooned at court, did not improve his already plain talk. Mary can only have been initially bitterly disappointed with the man her uncle had decided she should marry.
William of Orange had no such qualms. So taken was he with the sight of this good-looking young woman, her character and qualities already recommended to him by Lady Temple, he immediately approached Charles and his brother to ask for Lady Mary’s hand, with an uncharacteristic grace that commended the young man to his sophisticated Stuart family.
However Charles was nothing like as decisive and impatient as his young nephew and there were complex political and personal matters to be resolved before such a match could proceed. William of Orange, like William himself, was uncomfortable spending enforced time around a court so antipathetic to his interests and nature. Unlike William, however, the younger man had not the social skills, natural charm or easy manner to mask his impatience. After four days of frustration, the prince called for William one night and poured out his misery at the delay, possibly even his disappointment at Lady Mary’s obvious dismay at their first meeting, and his growing reservations about the wisdom of the visit generally. ‘Uttering his whole heart, [he] told me, he was resolved to give it over, repenting him from the heart of his journey, and would be gone within two days … and so went to bed the most melancholy that ever I saw him in my life,’44 as William reported to his father.
William took this outburst seriously and went to see Charles first thing the next morning to tell him that something had to be resolved quickly otherwise there would be a breach with his nephew. The king responded by telling him to return to the prince with the words ‘he was resolved on the match, and that it should be done immediately, and in the Prince’s own way’. The marriage was seen as a move away from the hated French influence and a cementing of Protestantism and peace and was greeted with great enthusiasm in parliament and celebration in the country where church bells rang and bonfires flared. Louis XIV was furious, accused James of having given his daughter to France’s mortal enemy and promptly stopped his latest subsidy to Charles.
The marriage was also the last straw for William’s relationship with Lord Arlington. Arlington was jealous of the power of the lord treasurer, Dorothy’s kinsman Danby, and was suspicious that William was somehow in cahoots with him, despite William’s emphatic denials that he was no longer close to the man. Arlington had also lost the prince’s confidence with his politicking in the past and was jealous of William’s own good relations with everyone, but particularly the Prince of Orange, whose position in the power hierarchy would be much enhanced by this marriage. Martha believed that Arlington was particularly irked at being kept in the dark, as he thought, about the marriage and had irritatedly declared, ‘That some things were soe ill in themselves the manner of doeing could not mend them, others soe good the manner they were done in could not spoyle them’.45 Martha added that the latter referred to Arlington’s view of the prince’s marriage.
Having begun his relationship with Arlington with so much real gratitude, affection, even hero-worship, on his side at least, William contemplated its ashes with bitter regret: ‘I must bear [it] as well as I can,’ he wrote to his father. It is most likely that it was the painful unravelling of this friendship that caused William to destroy the first part of his memoirs in which, judging by the tone of his letters of the time, he expressed his undying devotion to a man who subsequently undermined and betrayed him.
Prince William was impatient to return home, so the marriage preparations proceeded rapidly and the modest ceremony was conducted on 4 November. It was not a happy occasion, the bride was miserable, the bridegroom distant and correct, James, the bride’s father, grimly present, his young and heavily pregnant wife in tears beside him, and Mary’s younger sister Anne absent, suffering from smallpox, her life in the balance. Charles seemed cheerful enough but rather too bluff: when the bridegroom and his young bride had finally been put to bed the king drew the curtains himself, announcing, ‘Now nephew, to your work! Hey! St George for England!’46
By the end of November the prince had at last extracted himself from the dullness and inaction of official life and set sail eventually from Margate. He and his new wife, the Princess of Orange, were in different yachts in a crossing that was brutal with wind, high seas and wintry weather. Everyone on board both boats was soaked through with icy rain and seawater, and almost all were prostrate with nausea and vomiting. Of all the passengers and sea-hardy crew, Mary alone remained impervious to seasickness – interestingly, she not only looked like her great-great-grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, but also shared her equilibrium and iron stomach. When the young Scottish queen had first sailed for France as a child, 129 years before, she had amazed the captain with her equanimity, being the only one on board not to succumb to terrible sickness on the rolling seas.
The new Princess of Orange must have been in some state of shock at the unexpected reversal of fate that had overcome her. Within a month of meeting she had been married to an austere stranger and,
within two, wrenched from the side of her sister, only just recovering from smallpox, removed from her father, her uncle and everything she had known, to travel to a land whose people had always been the butt of supercilious jokes at court and where the weather was even more dreary than at home.
It was likely that Dorothy came to Mary’s aid while she was first trying to build her life in this strange new country. After all, as one of the main agents that propelled the prince towards her and marriage, Dorothy had been responsible for the young girl being sprung into a new and alarming world. It would have been evident how much Mary needed some affectionate care, especially as her husband was soon off to war again. The fifteen-year-old girl and the fifty-year-old Dorothy shared a love of epic French romances and of England. Mary was also lively, intelligent and curious and a grandchild of the king that Dorothy’s own father and family had fought to preserve on the throne. A strong friendship grew between them, the motherless girl and the mother who had suffered so much loss. Their intimacy would last until Mary’s death, at thirty-two from smallpox. Once they were back in England again and Mary had become queen both women maintained their relationship through a series of letters, none of which survived. However, judging from the passionate expressiveness of her letters to a girlhood friend that did survive, Mary’s were likely to be highly affectionate. Perhaps Dorothy’s were as sharp and entertaining, as witty and philosophical, as those she famously wrote to William. Mary and Prince William in time became a devoted couple, but the support and affection offered by an older and wiser Dorothy to this uncertain young woman can only have encouraged the process of acceptance and eventual love.
Sir John Temple, William’s robust old father, had finally died the previous November. He had lived to the good age of seventy-seven and, with his death, William lost a stalwart supporter of his career just as he had come to terms with the loss of Arlington as his other mentor and hero. But there was an inevitable freedom too in not having to please his father any more and practical relief in inheriting what remained of his estate. Dorothy and William and the rest of their family were reunited in The Hague in the summer of 1678. William’s last great effort now was to push for the Treaty of Nijmegen to be ratified by all the parties. This he appeared to achieve, with an agreement from Charles that if France did not withdraw from the Flemish towns it had occupied within fourteen days, then England would unite with the United Provinces against it. William was the toast of the Dutch, the Prince of Orange writing to Danby, full of gratitude and praise: ‘no other person but himself could in this country have brought about what he has done; and that the good opinion which everybody here has of him has greatly contributed to bring an affair of this mighty importance to both nations to its conclusion.’47
But things were not so straightforward in England. Charles, as treacherous as ever, had again made a secret treaty with France to remain neutral and this time even to disband his army, on the payment of a French subsidy. But also what became known as the Popish Plot, a complex fabrication that grew with the telling, was causing increasing concern. Titus Oates,* a fantasist and one-time convert to Catholicism, began to tell a tale of Catholic conspiracy to kill Charles, install his brother James as king and forcibly reconvert Britain. There was so much suspicion and fear of Catholicism and French influence already in the country that when news spread that Charles had ordered this conspiracy to be investigated the whole thing gained credence, inflating to terrific proportions. Even as doubts arose as to the truth of what Oates alleged, panicky rumours and counter-rumours circulated around the country, followed by imprisonment and execution of prominent Catholics he implicated. The ramifications of this bizarre confection of fantasy and odd coincidence, given substance by a mass national unease and fear, rumbled on for another three years. There were still many who thought that the Great Fire of London had been the work of Catholic terrorists and were quite prepared to find conspiracy everywhere. In fact the extreme distrust of Catholicism that Titus Oates and his Popish Plot fed on and embellished would help prepare the ground for the second revolution of the century.
William and his family were out of the country for the worst of the national outrage and confusion, and distance made it easier to be sceptical. Writing later, he discussed the power of rumour given legitimacy by fear and, interestingly, his radical view of the necessity of a king taking the lead from his people, the polar opposite of Louis XIV’s absolute power, so envied by Charles:
I never saw greater disturbance in men’s minds at home, than had been raised by the plot, and the pursuit of it in Parliament; and observed, that though it was generally believed by both Houses, by city and country, by clergy and laity; yet when I talked with some of my friends in private, who ought to best know the bottom of it, they only concluded that it was yet mysterious; that they could not say the King believed it; but, however, that the Parliament and nation were so generally and strongly possessed with it, that it must of necessity be pursued as if it were true, whether it was so or no: and that, without the King’s uniting with his people upon this point, he would never grow either in ease at home, or consideration abroad.48
The increased anti-Catholic fervour at home suddenly propelled Charles into a bizarre volte-face in the halting progress of the Treaty of Nijmegen. In order to distract attention from the Popish Plot, the king sent word to the United Provinces that he would declare war on France within three days if they refused to ratify the treaty with France. When William brought this news to the Prince of Orange the exasperated young man threw his hands up in despair and said, ‘Was any thing so hot, and so cold, as this Court of yours? Will the King, that is so often at sea, never learn a word that I shall never forget since my last passage [returning with his bride], when, in a great storm, the captain was all night crying out to the man at the helm, Steady, steady, steady?’49
William could only agree, and thoroughly demoralised by the impossibility of dealing with a foreign policy built on shifting sand and altered hourly by the tides, he asked to be relieved of his duties. He did not wish to return to Nijmegen again, having wasted too much time already in activity akin to attempting to herd cats. His pleas were ignored and dismissed as being due to pique. By January 1679 his deputies had managed to pull the threadbare fabric together long enough to declare that the treaty between France and the Holy Roman Empire was close to conclusion. It was the worst winter anyone could remember and William, already suffering from the gout that would plague him for the rest of his life, was ordered to attend the signing, as a mere formality. As mediator he was not a signatory and his presence was unnecessary: William with extreme reluctance (‘I never obeyed the King so unwillingly in my life’) set off from The Hague to make the eighty-mile journey through snowbound countryside, his comfort – even his life – on the line: ‘The snow was in many places where I passed near ten foot deep, and ways for my coach forced to be digged through it; several postboys died upon the road; and it was ridiculous to see people walk about with long icicles from their noses. I passed both the Rhine and the Waal, with both coaches and waggons upon the ice; and never in my life suffered so much from the weather as in this journey, in spite of all the provisions I could make against it.’50
William arrived at Nijmegen at the end of January and the full treaty was eventually signed at the beginning of February 1679. The following day he turned around and made the freezing and dangerous journey back to The Hague and his family. A month and a half later Charles sent another of his yachts with the demand that William return to England. The king was determined that he should take up the post of secretary of state, a position that had been dangled before and, as before, Charles offered to pay half of the cost of purchasing this from Coventry, the previous incumbent. William’s friends, who had long wished for greater formal honours for him, pledged to club together to raise the rest of the money themselves.
William made this journey with as much of a heavy heart. His sister wrote that he had long wanted to visit his old friend, the G
rand Duke of Tuscany* in Florence and had thought that once his work with the treaty was done he might manage that at last. He also felt melancholic at what he saw as the thwarting of his life’s work in attempting to bring his own king respect and success abroad, while curbing in any way possible the increasingly overweening power of the French. Martha explained his lack of appetite for more public office, ‘haveing so ill succeeded in the designes (wch no man ever had more at heart in 20 years public employments) of doeing his country service & advanceing the Honnour & greatness of the English nation to the degree he thought it was capable off’.51
William arrived in London in early March 1679, in the midst of the continuing uproar and hysteria over the Popish Plot, ‘the most unpleasant scene yt had in many years bin seen in England, the people frighted, the Parliament violent, & the King beleeveing nothing of it’.52
As William returned to court, the Duke of York was on his way out to Holland to stay with his daughter and son-in-law, in an attempt at calming some of the fears of revolution at home. There was time only for a pleasant exchange of greetings and James was gone. Such was the sense of panic and division among the government, the idea of taking on the job of secretary of state seemed even less attractive to William than last time. Danby, once all-mighty as lord treasurer, was now tainted with the discovery that he had conducted secret negotiations with France. His impeachment and incarceration in the Tower quickly followed. Although he remained in prison for six years, it was barely a blip in his career’s remarkable trajectory and his greatest honours were yet to come. The king, growing short of old and loyal friends, pressed William again to accept the secretaryship, saying, ‘he knew not one man besides in England that was fit for it’.53