At that very moment, though, reports were already coming in to the Admiralty. Captain Tennant of the frigate Tiger tumbled down his companionway to check Admiralty orders. ‘We espy a great fleet on the backside of the Goodwin [Sands],’ he wrote in a letter Pepys would receive past midnight on 3 November, ‘not knowing what they are, standing to the westward, but believe they are too many for our fleet.’
They were. In Dover, Mr Bastiock, the Admiralty agent, stared out to sea in disbelief. Sails filled the horizon: great men-of-war, lumbering transports.
‘We now discern the Holland’s fleet very plain just off this place [he wrote to the Admiralty], sailing to the westward. They are about half seas over, and are so thick there is no telling of them, but ‘tis judged above three hundred sail, others say 400 sail; they reach from the westward part of the town to the South Foreland.’22
The invasion of England had begun.
XXI
‘A VAST BODY OF MEN IN A STRANGE LANGUAGE’
John Whittle was a chaplain with the English soldiers in William’s army. He witnessed the army’s first embarkation at the little town of Brill: the transports anchored out in deep water as storm after storm swept down from the North Sea, ‘the poor smaller ships ready to be overwhelmed, shaking their heads, as if they would shake their sails off’; the quayside bustle as lighters were loaded up with ‘provisions for one month, the artillery, magazine, powder, ball, match, tents, tent-poles, sticking-axes, spades and all sorts of utensils convenient in war; and then hay and provender for the horses, fresh water, and a hundred things more, which do not now occur to my memory’.1
By now the invasion had become a national project for the Dutch. Crowds thronged the river ports as the army moved to the coast. Men cheered, women cried, soldiers marched on board the transports to the music of drum, flute and trumpet. ‘When any person came unto a house’, John Whittle recalled, ‘in the heart of their City, concerning any manner of business, the very first question by all was, Sir, I pray how is the wind today? ... The Ministers themselves pray’d, that God would be pleased for to grant an east wind.’2
By Friday 19/29 October, the fleet was ready to sail. There were 50 capital ships, 25 fireships, 26 frigates and lesser naval vessels, and more than 300 assorted ‘pinks’, ‘fly-boats’ and transports. It would take several tides to work this armada out into deep water. Saturday morning saw the great tower of Brill church ‘extremely throng’d, and the beam or place made on purpose to view ships was almost broken down with the great crowd upon it’.3 Telescopes were passed from hand to hand as the ships passed out of sight into the autumn gloom.
The fleet had hoisted anchor about four o’clock. By the time they reached the rendezvous it was dark. Signal lanterns were hoisted in the rigging, two in each man-of-war, three in the Prince’s flagship. The soldiers looked uneasily out to sea. Everyone could sense a spiteful motion in the coastal swell. As the last light faded, the wind began to rise.
Lying in bed in London, that Saturday night, Roger Morrice heard rain rattling on the roof and shutters banging. ‘An extraordinary storm and tempest of wind,’ he noted in his Entring Book next morning, ‘that continued from about ten a clock at night till three or four in the morning, which if it was as violent at sea as it was by land, it must necessarily hazard any fleet that was out at sea.’4
Out in the North Sea conditions were, indeed, terrifying. Waves surged out of the darkness, blowing foam across the decks. Crowded together, ships already dangerously overladen with stores lurched uncontrollably into one another. Horses neighed in terror. The piles of stores, barrels of powder and ball, and pipes of water strained against their lashings. With the ships packed with explosives, all lights were banned below. Seasick soldiers crouched in pitch darkness; when barrels smashed they felt water swilling around their ankles and screamed in fear. John Whittle prayed for morning. One memory from that night stayed with him forever: the sound of musket balls from smashed munitions cases rattling up and down the deck.
Daylight on 20/30 October revealed ships scattered, sails blown out, masts and yards broken. The first attempt to invade England had failed. The signal was given to return to port.
The nearest haven was the tiny fishing port of Hellevoetsluis. A difficult week followed. The little village was packed with troops, lodgings were unobtainable and supplies hard to come by. The church was so small that services had to be held by rota: Dutch prayers at 9am and 2pm, English at 10am and 3pm, French at 11am and 4pm. Meanwhile the sea was still running too high for boatmen to go out to ships anchored in the stream. Worst of all, it must have been hard to suppress the fear that the storm was God’s verdict on William’s adventure. Even Gilbert Burnet was heard to say that Providence was against them. At the very least, the foolhardiness of the attempt had been underlined.
The Prince counted the cost of the storm. Many horses had died, suffocated below decks, or thrown overboard to lighten ships. Miraculously, though, that turned out to be the greatest loss. The States sent out pilot boats to guide in vessels which were lost. Incredibly, it turned out that only one ship was missing, a fly-boat which lost its rudder and was blown onto the coast of Suffolk. Dutch seamanship had saved the armada from disaster.
The attempt was still on. At the church, in their several languages, William’s soldiers prayed for another change of wind.
Today, statisticians tell us, one in five North Sea winds blows from the east. In the late seventeenth century William’s chances were a little better. The Little Ice Age was coming to an end, and weather patterns were changing.* A modern estimate puts William’s odds of an east wind at slightly better than one in three. Had anyone in William’s fleet been able to supply the probability of an east wind lasting the five days William needed, and being of an appropriate strength, and had they been familiar with Huygens’ work on probability, they would have known how to plait together these strands of possibility into a rough calculation of the odds against the Glorious Revolution. The Prince of Orange held to Providence instead, and on 9 November (30 October in England) he received confirmation of God’s support as the vane on Hellevoetsluis church swung round to full east.
At 3pm on Thursday 1 November‡ William was rowed out to a 28-gun frigate called the Brill, and gave the order to make sail. The fleet and army were divided into three squadrons: red (English and Scots troops under Mackay), white (the Prince’s Guard and Brandenburgers under Solms), and blue (Dutch and French Huguenot troops under Nassau). As they reached open sea and night fell, Whittle remembered the ships’ lights winking around him in the darkness. He looked aft and saw a beacon burning on a church steeple miles behind.
William was determined that his armada should not be dispersed. He gave orders for all ships to take in sail at night so the faster men-of-war would not outstrip the transports. At daybreak frigates set out to shepherd the scattered fleet back into order. On Saturday morning they all had their first glimpse of England. Robert Ferguson and Gilbert Burnet, Sir Robert Peyton and William Carstares thronged the rails to watch land appear, ‘as soon as the sunbeams had dissipated the mist and dispersed the fog’. The land might have been Kent, or part of Essex. Either way, the mystery of where the Prince would land was solved that morning. Signal flags broke out from the yards of the Brill. William’s van ‘tack’d about for to see the rear well come up’, and with the wind behind them they headed west. Between Dover and Calais the Prince called a Council of War on board his flagship. Land was clearly visible on both sides, the French as well as the English coast. ‘It was a very clear and pleasant day, as heart could desire’, John Whittle remembered, and the Prince
‘ordered that his own standard should be set up; whereupon the men-of-war set out their colours, and so did every vessel in the fleet. The soldiers were all above deck, for to view the land on each side, and Dover castle; and the whole fleet was resolved to make a bravado: so each vessel kept a due distance from the other, and bespangled the whole Channel with beautiful ships, and colou
rs flying.’5
Tiny figures thronged the white cliffs. Some of the warships steered inshore and fired salutes at Dover Castle. Whittle’s ‘beautiful ships’ must have looked menacing enough from there. When the news reached London, John Evelyn wrote a different story in his diary: ‘so dreadful a sight passing through the Channel with so favourable a wind, as our navy could by no means intercept or molest them. This put the King & Court into great consternation.’6
At night the great fleet’s appearance was almost as impressive. John Whittle would never forget
‘the seas all covered with lights, the lanthorns appearing at a distance like unto so many stars in the water, dancing to and fro, here and there, according to the motion of the ship: but above all, the cabin of that vessel wherein the Prince was, having so many wax lights burning within it, glittered most gloriously, and ... being well gilt and varnished, it seem’d a paradise for pleasure and delight.’
The next day, Sunday 4 November, was William’s birthday. He was thirty-eight. The pious Prince, unwilling to tempt fate, ordered no sail to be set on the Sabbath and all day long the ships wallowed in the swell while services were held on deck. To make up time, the fleet did not strike sail at sunset but sailed on through the darkness. ‘The wind was very favourable’, that night. ‘Many delighted to be above deck, it was so exceeding pleasant, between the stars in the firmament and our stars.’7 And the east wind held.
In Dartmouth’s fleet, meanwhile, the recriminations were already beginning.
Dartmouth had tried to get out to sea when he heard of the Dutchmen’s first sailing. Before first light on Tuesday 30 October he wrote to James, ‘I gave the signal for unmooring, and we are just now under sail with the tide of ebb, and the wind at SSE and hope to get clear of the Galloper before night.’8 He was driven back. The wind that favoured William’s fleet had trapped the English ships against the coast; Dartmouth could not weather the sands. On Saturday morning, through tearing storm clouds, they glimpsed Dutch sails on the horizon. Dartmouth’s outlying frigates, more weatherly than the cumbersome men-of-war, managed to get under way, but achieved little more than to pick up a waterlogged Dutch transport full of cold and wet English soldiers all too happy to be rescued. For another twenty-four hours, wind and tides held Dartmouth on the coast. Not till 4 November did the English fleet finally make it out to sea in a steady east-southeast gale, and beat out into the North Sea to give chase.
It was too late.
‘I have nothing ... to say to your Lordship ... saving that since it has so unhappily fallen out, that the Dutch are in all probability at this hour peacably putting on shore their whole land force and baggage ... consequently their men-of-war will now be at an entire liberty to ... attack you.’
So wrote Samuel Pepys in his most acid civil service vein. At court, Admiral Dartmouth was vilified. Only James* was more sympathetic, ‘[and] I am sure’, he wrote, ‘all knowing seamen must be of the same mind’.’9 The Royal Navy would not fire a single shot against the invasion armada.
For by the time they got out, the Dutch were far ahead of them. Historians since the advent of steam have wasted ink speculating whether William planned to land in the West Country or the north. He landed where the wind blew him. One report said he had twenty English pilots in the fleet, to cover whatever stretch of coastline Providence took him to. On Monday 5 November, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, John Whittle went on deck into fog and a chill grey drizzle. The water over the side was a shallow green; they were close inshore. Fog had killed the wind and the ships bumped gently against each other on an oily swell.
During the night the east wind had carried the fleet well past Torbay. It was an anxious moment. The further west the Prince went now, the further he was from London, and the closer to being driven out into the Atlantic. But like a winning gambler whose luck seems inexhaustible, the Prince’s held. When the first breath of wind arose to dispel the mist, it blew the ships’ banners out astern. The armada put about and reached into Torbay.
‘The sun recovering strength soon dissipated the fog and dispersed the mist, inasmuch that it proved a very pleasant day’, Whittle wrote.
‘Being the fifth of November, the bells were ringing as we were sailing towards the bay, and as we landed, which many judged to be a good omen: before we came into the bay’s mouth, as we were near the rocks, the people ran from place to place after us; and ... a certain Minister in the fleet, on board the ship called the Golden Sun, climbed up onto the poop, opened a bible and flourished it at them ... Whereupon all the people shouted for joy, and huzzas did now echo into the air, many amongst them throwing up their hats, and all making signs with their hands.’10
On shore, Thomas Bowyer, customs officer at Dartmouth, watched the fog clear to reveal an awe-inspiring sight:
‘This morning being very hazy, foggy and full of rain, cleared up about 9 of the clock, at which time appeared the Dutch fleet consisting of about four hundred or 500 sail as near as we can guess, all standing to the eastward with the wind at WSW.’11*
From William’s frigate, a red banner broke out under the ensign which d’Avaux had seen in the flagmaker’s shop in Amsterdam. Boats were hoisted out; Dutch, French and German soldiers, heavily-laden with muskets and ‘snap-sacks’, splashed to the shore. Fishermen had shown William’s officers a place to the south of the bay where the transports could anchor close in. Whinnying with terror, horses were dropped bodily into the water to swim to land. Out beyond the hubbub of creaking blocks and shouted orders, the great men-of-war floated majestically in the bay. Ashore was chaos as officers tried to marshal forces in four languages, troops formed up, and piles of soaked and unidentifiable baggage blocked the beach.
If it was a scene of chaos, though, it was orderly chaos. This was a military project of scale and complexity unprecedented in European history. It was four times the size of the Spanish Armada. It could not, thought one diplomat, have been ‘ny plus grand ny mieux concerté’.12 The schedule of forces published by William in Holland claimed 14,352 men, 3,660 of them cavalry. Most leaders, then and now, exaggerate their forces. William may have done the opposite: his cover was that these troops of infantry, the heavy guns, the sweating horses, were not an invading army, but a kind of glorified bodyguard, ‘utterly disproportioned to that wicked design of conquering the nation’.13 What was not in doubt, though, was the quality of the troops he had brought. The first English Civil War had been fought, bloodily enough, between squads of enthusiastic amateurs clutching weapons they had taken from the wall at home. Cromwell’s New Model Army had shown the power of discipline and training. Since then England had seen little of the disciplined troops which Louis and his opponents had manoeuvred round European battlefields. William had with him 3,000 Swiss mercenaries, 4,000 Brandenburgers, 556 Huguenots.* ‘What an army these brave young men will make against us!’14 the priest at Royan had said to Jaques Fontaine as he watched Protestants emigrating. Now that army was in the field. The English and Scottish volunteers, meanwhile, were mostly veterans of the overseas regiments James had done his best to disband. Greeks and Poles, Hessians and Finns were all among William’s polyglot army. ‘The land’, as Stephen Towgood of Axminster inimitably put it, ‘was invaded by a vast body of men in a strange language.’15 Meanwhile, Dutch artillery was famously efficient. William had with him ‘21 good brass field pieces, some needing 16 horses to pull them’.16 And the army was superbly equipped, with spare arms for volunteers, collapsible boats for fording rivers, 10,000 spare pairs of boots. By seventeenth-century standards William’s forces were supremely professional, and by any standards supremely confident. ‘There is not in Christendom a better army of the number’, wrote James’s ambassador, d’Albeville. ‘You may think what you please, they don’t believe they will meet with great opposition.’17
William and his guard were first ashore. Sailors held the longboat sideways so he could step dryshod onto the beach. To the south of the bay was a little hill. The Prince and
his guard climbed it ceremonially, trumpets blaring and flags flying. One after the other, as they formed up, the regiments followed suit. Looking back, the soldiers could see a vivid panorama spread out below them:
‘On this hill you could see all the fleet most perfectly ... The navy was like a little city, the masts appearing like so many spires. The people were like bees swarming all over the bay ... The officers and soldiers crowded the boats extremely, many being ready to sink under the weight; happy was that man which could get to land soonest. And such was the eagerness of both officers and soldiers, that divers jeopardised their lives for haste; sundry oars were broken in rowing, because too many laid hands on them; some jumped up to their knees in water, and one or two were over head and ears ... The night was now as the day for labour, and all this was done, lest the enemy should come before we were all in a readiness to receive them.’18
At the top of the hill the Prince of Orange took Gilbert Burnet by the hand and smilingly asked him if he still doubted Providence. William Carstares led a service of thanksgiving. They sang the 118th Psalm:
‘It is better to trust in the Lord
Than to put confidence in Princes.
All nations compassed me about:
But in the name of the Lord will I destroy them.’
William spent his first night on English soil in a fisherman’s hut halfway along the beach. He cannot have had much sleep. ‘The soldiers were marching into the camp all hours in the night,’ John Whittle among them,
The Last Revolution Page 18