The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  As it happened, England had just had its own glimpse of this future – but for the moment political uncertainty prevented speculation developing any further. In June 1687, as the Magdalen College affair rumbled on and England digested James’s first Declaration of Liberty of Conscience, a ship had dropped anchor in Deal harbour in Kent. The ship was unremarkable in itself – except, perhaps, for the armed guards on the hatches. In its hold, however, was concealed £300,000 in solid silver.

  The ship’s captain, a Bostonian called William Phips, was a treasure-hunter. Phips was larger than life in a way that belongs to his century, ‘tall beyond the common set of men, and thick as well as tall, and strong as well as thick’. (‘Nor’, added his biographer politely, ‘did the fat, whereinto he grew very much, in his later years, take away the vigour of his motions.’) Energetic, rough-mannered, heroic, he came to England in the early 1680s with stories of a Spanish treasure ship which had sunk forty years earlier on the north coast of Hispaniola, in the present-day Dominican Republic. Charles II commissioned him captain of a frigate, the Algier-Rose, and sent him to look for it. Halfway across the Atlantic the Algier-Rose’s crew confronted him on the quarter deck, demanding that Phips abandon the mission and join them in turning to piracy. Ten years later Captain William Kidd would similarly turn from naval officer to terror of the seas. Phips’s response, however, was entirely characteristic: ‘With a most undaunted fortitude, he rushed in upon them, and with the blow of his bare hands, fell’d many of them and quelled all the rest.’3

  That first venture found no treasure, but Phips’s dream persisted. A second expedition was backed by the Duke of Albemarle, dissolute son of the General Monck who had restored Charles II. On a new ship Phips returned to the River Plata with Indian divers among the crew. They anchored near the reef where Phips believed the Spanish ship had gone down, and built a canoe as a diving platform. They then spent sweltering days combing the ocean floor in vain while the ship rocked on the swell, and the canoe returned empty every evening. It was on the very last day that a diver, plunging down for a particularly colourful frond of seaweed, surfaced to report that the seabed was littered with cannon. The next time he came up, it was with an ingot of silver worth £200 triumphantly clutched in one hand. ‘Upon this,’ Phips’s biographer reports, ‘they prudently buoyed the place, that they might readily find it again, and they went back unto their captain.’

  They could not resist playing a trick on Phips – a token, perhaps, of the affection in which the crew held their brave, easy-going leader. They slipped the ingot onto one side of his desk, then gloomily reported another blank till he caught sight of it and ‘cried out with some agony, Why? What is this? Whence comes this?’

  The silver came up from the seabed encrusted with coral. When they broke it away they found silver bars inside, unbroken ingots and ‘whole bushels of rusty pieces of eight which were grown thereinto’4 – in all £300,000, by one account. Perhaps the best testament to Phips’s leadership was that he brought this treasure safely back to England without mutiny.

  ‘[The] treasure ... coming home [John Evelyn wrote in his diary], was now weighed up, by certain Gentlemen & others, who were at the charge of divers &c: to the sudden enriching of them, beyond all expectation. The Duke of Albemarle’s share came (‘tis believed) to 50,000, & some private Gent. who adventured but 100 pounds & little more, to ten, 18,000 pounds, & proportionably.’5

  Word of this financial coup quickly spread around Exchange Alley. The consortium which financed the treasure-hunting expedition had invested something like £2,000 in the venture. London brokers made short work of such calculations. Each investor had made a return of roughly 10,000 per cent.

  There could be no more vivid illustration of what speculation could do. Ten pounds on William Phips – the sort of stake a quite humble family could scrape together – had produced as much as many gentlemen took from their estates in three years. Although England’s political situation was too troubled for this breakthrough to be explored, an astonishing economic possibility had been unveiled.

  Speculation, however, was not the only sign of a change in the conception of risk. Indeed, risk was providing an entirely new way of thinking about the future, and behind it was a mathematical breakthrough. The Moderns had developed a way of calculating chance.

  ‘Chevalier de Méré ... a man of penetrating mind who was both a gambler and philosopher – gave the mathematicians a timely opening by putting some questions about betting ... He got his friend Pascal to look into these things. The problem became well known and led Huygens to write his monograph De Alea.’6

  Thus Leibniz described the genesis of probability theory. The specific question de Méré put to Pascal (tradition locates their conversation in a carriage journeying from Paris to Poitiers) concerned gambling odds. If he rose from the table with the game half completed, was it possible for de Méré to calculate the value of the stake he had put in before the game started? Perhaps he did not see at the time how wide would be the repercussions of this seemingly frivolous question; what it actually opened up was the calculation of complex probabilities. The fifty-fifty chance of a coin landing heads or tails was familar enough, but could such sums be extended into far more difficult areas? An earnest correspondence developed between Pascal and Fermat (proponent of the Last Theorem) in 1654; the wider surge of interest among virtuosi would bring in Huygens and Newton. Huygens’ De Alea, the classical statement of probability theory, would be its eventual result.

  The Probabilistic Revolution is the clumsy name some scholars have used for the general expansion of the culture of probability. There is no doubt that it was a revolution, although Pascal’s breakthrough was, perhaps, as much a symptom of the shift as its cause. To see the future through calculable probabilities was quite new, and probability suddenly seemed to find applications in all areas of life. De Witt used probability theory in a book on annuities. Dudley North took lessons in mathematics from a customs house colleague, Sir John Werden, ‘So at times, when they had leisure, they two were busy at plus and minus, convolution and evolution; and Sir Dudley was extremely pleased with this new kind of arithmetic, which he had never heard of before.’7 Not the least change came at the gambling table where de Méré’s interest had first been aroused. Risque transformed the lives of the fashionable aristocrats at Versailles (the gambling-den, one shocked courtier called the palace); soon the name of gambler, in Montesquieu’s view, became ‘a title which takes the place of birth, wealth and probity [and] promotes anyone who bears it into the best society without further examination’.8 Perhaps, for those impotent aristocrats at the Sun King’s court, gambling was a neurotic reaction to their incarceration, but it also appealed to traditional aristocratic virtues: lavish expenditure, carelessness of danger. Its debts were affairs of honour; its squabbles were settled between gentlemen, in duels. The gambling craze which would run for the next century and more became the last charge of the European aristocracy – not across the jousting field, but over the green baize of the card table.

  Businessmen also saw the possibilities of probability. From the ashes of London after the fire arose not only Nicholas Barbon’s new terraces of brick houses, but new protection against future disaster. Barbon, enterprising as ever, offered fire insurance for the owners of his new homes, based on his ability to calculate the probability of fire breaking out. Between 1686 and 1692, his company, the Phoenix, would insure no fewer than 5,650 houses at rates of 2.5 per cent of value for brick houses and 5 per cent for timber (an actuarial calculation which owed as much to common sense as to Pascal) and was thought ‘likely to get vastly by it’.9 Other insurers came into the market during the 1680s, and both the types of cover available and the nature of risks covered expanded rapidly. The Friendly Society was a club whose members paid into a common fund which supported them in the event of disaster.

  Once, the future had been God’s realm. After the Battle of Mont Cassel in 1677, where a Dutch regiment broke and r
an from the French, the survivors drew lots to select nine men for execution. The drawing of lots was a solemn ritual carried out to divine God’s will. Gambling was confined to religious holidays. The future belonged to God and he ruled it with absolute authority. Probability challenged that dominance. The Moderns did not claim to be able to predict the future, but with this new mathematical tool they could at least measure it. Probability stretched man’s sight in time, just as the telescope and microscope allowed his weak vision to penetrate the great and small. Like microscopists peering at seeds or astronomers at the stars, mathematicians had focused a lens on the future, and glimpsed the hidden uplands of Providence.

  What they saw in the future was not always welcome, of course. In the financial world, risque could mean disaster as well as good fortune. On the morning of 15/25 August 1688 even the most uninitiated passerby must have realised that something unusual was happening on the Dam, for the fevered trading in VOC shares reached an extra pitch of frenzy. By the end of the next day their value had dropped nearly 15 per cent. News had leaked out that William intended to invade England. The Amsterdam stock market had crashed.

  XIX

  ‘PRO RELIGIONE PROTESTANTE, PRO LIBERO PARLAMENTO’

  ‘Only a war, which may God forbid, and then only if it is a fierce one, could endanger [our] operation and intimidate us.’1

  José Penso de la Vega, 1688

  Hence the panic on 15/25 August. Contramine were spreading the word that William of Orange planned to risk the United Provinces’ navy and army and leave its borders undefended, all for an adventure in le païs des révolutions. The resulting crash was the worst since the Year of Disasters. ‘Such a panic,’ de la Vega wrote, ‘such an inexplicable shock was produced that the whole world seemed to crumble, the earth to be submerged and the heavens to fall.’2 By mid-September, VOC stock had slumped from its record level of 17,400 guilders to a price of only 10,950.

  It was astonishing that William had managed to conceal his enterprise for so long. Outside his circle of advisers, d’Avaux thought he had told only Witsen and a few others.

  ‘His plans for this project were so carefully laid that he only needed the States-General’s ships, & laid out whatever payments were needed without the States-General, or any town council, either being called on for any extraordinary expense or even being aware of it.’3

  D’Avaux tracked huge shipments of silver arriving from England. William had toured neighbouring German Princes to prepare the troop hire agreements he needed to defend the Provinces. Only one thing was lacking: the final support of the States-General. The fleet cost 40,000 florins a day, he needed approval of his troop treaties, and he could not commit Dutch ships and soldiers to a war without their backing. It was time to reveal his English project to his own nation.

  A year ago, d’Avaux would have been confident of his ability to stop the Prince. No longer. A diplomatic Cassandra, he had fired off message after message to Paris of troop movements and warehouses full of cannon, of anti-French rhetoric coming even from the trading towns of Holland. ‘I have reliable evidence’, d’Avaux wrote, ‘that he has persuaded a good part of the Amsterdam Council that they can only re-establish their commercial position by immediate mobilisation for war.’ He sent despairing last ditch advice: ‘If the Amsterdam leaders were given satisfaction on the commercial front,’ he wrote, ‘they would never let the Prince of Orange act as he now does.’4 He suggested that Louis move his troops towards the United Provinces to scare the States off sending their forces overseas.

  He was ignored. The ambassador was coldly asked to provide eyewitness verification of the military build-up. He was told – to his astonishment – that the men and arms pouring up Dutch waterways towards the coast were part of a power-struggle between the Prince and the States-General. And on 9 September he was instructed to deliver an ultimatum to the States-General.

  The Regents gathered in the States-General were expecting a retreat in the commercial war. Instead, d’Avaux read out a statement telling them that any attack on James would be treated by the Sun King as an attack on France. D’Avaux knew the Dutch scene quite well enough to see what effect this would have. It was an Anglo-French alliance which had almost destroyed the United Provinces in 1672, and the fear of such an alliance which Caspar Fagel was busily exploiting among the States. Louis had given the impression that such a treaty actually existed. Diplomatically, the statement was a disaster.

  It was a disaster for James as well, who needed, now if ever, to dissociate himself from Catholic France. But it was not in Louis’s nature to see that the rays of the Sun might burn. ‘I am surprised’, he wrote to Barillon,

  ‘at all the steps the said King [James] takes at London and the Hague, to shew that he had no part in the declaration ... He ought not to doubt that if any thing is capable to divert the Prince of Orange from passing into England, it is the interest which I shew.’5

  D’Avaux was outside the chamber on the day Fagel set out William’s case for intervention in England. He watched the delegates of the State of Holland leave with tears in their eyes. They were being asked to set aside all their instincts – peace, appeasement of France, suspicion of the House of Orange. At worst they faced disaster in the autumn North Sea storms. At best William would win and ‘they would be treated as a subject province of [England], which would make use of the forces and wealth of this Republic to wage war on [Louis XIV], and expand its own commerce at the expense of the States-General’. D’Avaux knew that Paris could still profit from such fears if France would only allow him to offer trade concessions. Instead he heard at second hand the news that flew around the Dam on 27 September. Far from backing down, Louis had increased the commercial pressure. In every French port, Dutch ships had been seized and their crews imprisoned. More than 100 vessels – 300 was the horror-struck rumour on the Dam – had been impounded along with their cargoes. ‘The arrest of their vessels’, d’Avaux wrote wearily to his master, ‘will not make them give in. On the contrary, they will become the more angry and unyielding ... I cannot adequately stress how seriously the arrest of the ships is taken in this country.’6 That was what he had been telling Louis for more than a year. Paris signalled its continuing disbelief in the military build-up. D’Avaux could barely contain his frustration. Why, he could not help but ask, had a workshop in Amsterdam been commissioned to make twenty English standards? The standards were to be emblazoned with the words for the Protestant Religion and a free parliament.

  D’Avaux’s game was over, however. Thomas Papillon, in exile in Utrecht, wrote to his friend Patience Ward:

  ‘On the Prince acquainting the States with the Treaties he had made with several Princes &c, they did return him thanks ... approved all, and left all to him ... so that there seems to be a full and perfect understanding.’7

  The necessary conditions for William’s intervention in England were falling into place. On 17/27 September another obstacle disappeared. In a bid to overawe Central Europe Louis launched a military attack on Philippsburg, far to the south. It was another blunder. That day the VOC share price bounced back by 10 per cent. There would be no French onslaught on the United Provinces that year; the Dutch were free to send their own forces abroad. The Prince of Orange had his invitation. Against all the odds he had the support of the States-General; and the French had turned their attention elsewhere. On 10 October (30 September across the North Sea), William made an open declaration of his intention to invade England.

  Caspar Fagel probably wrote it. It was entitled A Declaration of the Reasons inducing [the Prince of Orange] to appear in Arms for Preserving of the Protestant Religion, and for restoring the laws and liberties of the ancient kingdom of England, Scotland and Ireland.

  ‘The public peace and happiness of any State or Kingdom cannot be preserved, where the Laws, Liberties and Customs established by the lawful authority in it, are openly transgressed and annulled ... Those who are most immediately concerned in it are indispensibly bound
... to take such an effectual care, that the inhabitants of the said State or Kingdom, may neither be deprived of their religion, nor of their civil rights.’

  There followed a list (aimed at James’s ‘evil counsellors’) of everything which had alienated the King’s opponents in the three and a half years of his reign, from Godden vs Hales to the arrest and trial of the Seven Bishops, while ‘to crown all ... those evil counsellors have published that the Queen hath brought forth a son’. William would arrive not as invader but as liberator, he said, his army merely ‘sufficient by the blessing of God to defend us from the violence of [the] evil counsellors’. He promised a parliament. He promised ‘such an establishment in all the three kingdoms that they may all live in a happy union and correspondence together, and that the Protestant religion, and the peace, honour and happiness of those nations, may be established upon lasting foundation’. A settlement of that sort had eluded Britain for the past fifty years.

  English exiles in the United Provinces must have opened the document with some excitement. A protector had arrived to defeat popery and arbitrary government once and for all. But the Prince’s declaration was read out in the Croom Elbow coffee house to deathly silence. By no stretch of the imagination could exiles see William’s Declaration as a radical manifesto. There was no statement of principle here, no reference back to past arguments. Furiously, John Wildman, the Civil War Major who had taken part in the radical Putney debates, set out to pen his own alternative document, a Memorial of English Protestants, which set the coming revolution in the great narrative of struggle against popery and arbitrary government. (Since he and his friends were radicals, it could not, of course, be composed without ‘great disagreements’ and before ‘divers draughts [had] been penned’.’8) Ruling without parliaments, invading property, subverting the judiciary – these were the crimes, these the reasons for rebellion which must be spelled out now as a warning to all future tyrants. The grievances listed by William, who lived in the real world, were recent, petty and specific; he did not declare James to have forfeited his executive power, or England to have returned to a state of nature; he did not lay out a programme for free and just government based on a balanced constitution. Ferguson had been allowed to write the declaration Monmouth had issued, and had read it out to fanatic applause at Thomas Dare’s house. This time the fanatics were being set aside – and they knew it.