The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  ‘and if any straggled from their companies, it was no easy matter to find them in the dark amongst so many thousands; so that continually some or other were lost and enquiring after their regiments. It was a cold frosty night, and the stars twinkled exceedingly besides, the ground was very wet after so much rain and ill weather; the soldiers were to stand to their arms the whole night, at least to be all in a readiness if anything should happen, or the enemy make an assault.’

  Soldiers started to cut down hedges to make fires and took provisions from their snap-sacks to grill them. Others went into villages to buy food, although there was little enough to be had. ‘There was a little alehouse amongst the fishermen’s houses which was so extremely thronged and crowded, that a man could not thrust in his head, nor get bread or ale for money. It was a happy time for the landlord, who strutted about as if he indeed had been a Lord himself, because he was honoured with Lords’ company.’19

  John Whittle’s regiment was stuck on the beach for hours before they could march off. William’s planners had not bargained on the difficulty of moving inland. When they finally did get going, the Dutch troops grumbled about the atrocious West Country roads. All of the soldiers took time to get back their land legs. ‘As we marched ... the soldiers would stumble and sometimes fall because of a dizziness in their heads after they had been so long tossed at sea. The very ground seemed to roll up and down for some days.’20 When they did so, however, the foreigners took stock of the country they had invaded. It would have seemed strange enough to most Englishmen. Roger North had worked the western circuit and remembered how remote it was in those days of poor communications: ‘coming into Dorsetshire the ... people spoke oddly, and the women wore white mantles which they call whittells ... In the west the word them is sunk into ‘n, as heard’n, gave’n, beat’n.’21

  John Whittle camped that night in a cornfield. It had started to rain steadily, and the clay was soon churned to quagmire by the soldiers’ boots. Most were too tired to pitch tents. They fell asleep wrapped in their ‘pee-jackets’. Fires were made of hedges and gates for the officers, who shared snap-sack beef with the men, or ate chickens they had bought on the way. For the first time in six hundred years a foreign army was encamped on English soil. For the fifth time in half a century, England was at war with itself. But what kind of war was it to be? And who – or what – was the enemy? Had the Prince of Orange’s great army come to conquer or to liberate? To displace a monarch or to displace monarchy?

  In the morning, John Whittle woke to the sound of soldiers discharging muskets into the fog.

  XXII

  ‘THE MISERIES OF A WAR’

  In the great narrative of Whig history, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a step so inevitable that it barely counted as a revolution. Nothing seemed quite so clear at the time. In fact, nothing seemed clear at all. Was this the War of the English Succession? A War of Religion? The final episode in the Civil Wars? Or a sideshow in a European conflict? Whatever else, it would be a war of interpretation. William had to present his own troops as liberators, not invaders. He had brought much vital equipment with him, from munitions to money, but there was one crate which must have been landed with especial care. It contained a portable printing press.

  Whatever the war was about, it did not seem to the English like their war – that was one paradox which emerged in the odd, unsatisfactory fortnight after William landed. Professional armies would contest the coming battles, Irishman fighting Dutchman for the soul of England. Somewhere in the fog were principles – defence of the constitution on one side, lawful succession on the other – but to many English men and women they cancelled each other out. ‘We are in an ill condition now in this nation all ways,’ Danby told Sir John Reresby a fortnight before William landed (rather disingenuously, considering he invited William in), ‘for [if] the King beat the Prince, popery will return upon us with more violence than before; if the Prince beat the King, the Crown and the nation may be in some danger.’1

  A good deal of the fog was of William’s making: no one was quite sure what he had come to do. That uncertainty was one reason why news of William’s landing, rushed to London the following night by an express rider who then collapsed from his horse in exhaustion, produced no flood of declarations for Prince or King, no Civil War enthusiasm to get into the field. Daybreak on the morning after the invasion discovered most of England sitting firmly on its hands. Edmund Bohun caught something of the mood:

  ‘About Michaelmas, we first heard of [the Prince of Orange’s] design; and all men then rejoiced at it as a deliverance sent by God. In November the news came he was landed in the west; and I was neither overjoyed nor sad; because I feared the event both ways.’2

  Roger Morrice found himself descending into a tangle of double negatives as he weighed William’s prospects: ‘The people generally ... seem to be very well affected to him, but he cannot expect they will so generally assist him, tho it’s very likely they will generally not oppose him.’3

  In London, rumour had beaten the messenger by two days: forty-eight hours before the first soldier splashed ashore, drums had beaten all night in the capital and columns of Irish troops were seen marching westward. Now was the moment James needed the Tory establishment to swing firmly into line behind him. He had, after all, given in to all the demands that they and the Prince had made of him, a point he reiterated in the proclamation of 6 November which promised a parliament as soon as William departed, thus making the Prince, not James, the block to constitutional progress.

  From the Tories, however, James encountered the same sullen obstructiveness as before. He had already asked the bishops for an ‘abhorrence’ of the Prince’s designs. On 6 November he put this demand more forcefully – and perhaps without the tact that his predicament required. Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, took a private note of the meeting:

  KING Where is the paper I desired you to draw up and bring me?

  BISHOPS Sir, we have brought no paper ...

  KING But I expected a paper from you: I take it, you promised me one. I look upon it to be absolutely necessary for my service.

  BISHOPS We assure your Majesty, scarce one in five hundred believes [William’s statement] to be the Prince’s true Declaration ...

  KING What! must I not be believed? Must my credit be called in question?

  SANCROFT Truly Sir, we have lately some of us here ... so severely smarted for meddling with matters of state and government, that it may well make us exceeding cautious how we do so any more ...

  KING I thought this had been quite forgotten! ... This is the method I have proposed. I am your King! I am judge what is best for me! I will go my own way: I desire your assistance in it!4

  The bishops (among them Henry Compton, who joined the others in denying that he had invited William in) suggested that James publish his own declaration. James’s reply spoke volumes. ‘No’, he replied pathetically. ‘If I should publish it, the people would not believe me.’

  At Lambeth Palace, the Earl of Clarendon joined Sancroft, Henry Compton, and other leaders of the ‘loyal’ party in endless meetings to discuss the King’s request. The Tories were riven by internal disputes, the legacy of James’s three divisive years on the throne. Henry Compton sat across the table from Thomas Sprat, who had helped expel him from his Diocese. ‘Good God!’ Clarendon wrote in his diary after a fractious meeting at Halifax’s house during which Nottingham and Halifax announced that they would not sign alongside anyone who had backed the Ecclesiastical Commisssion;

  ‘Good God! What partiality is this; that two Lords must think to impose what they please upon the rest? We are like to be a happy people: God help us!’5

  George Jeffreys wanted to be involved, but no one else would sign if he did. Halifax and Nottingham pulled out when they realised that a petition calling for a parliament might be the last thing William wanted. ‘These are the beginnings of sorrows,’ John Evelyn wrote in his diary that week,

  ‘unless
God in his mercy prevent it, by some happy reconciliation of all dissensions amongst us, which nothing in likelihood can effect but a free parliament ... I pray God protect, & direct the King for the best, & truest interest of his people.’6

  The petition which the bishops finally returned to James on 17 November, almost a fortnight after William’s landing, forebore to criticise the Prince’s venture. Its eye, instead, was on the horrors of the mid-century, its burden, ‘a deep sense of the miseries of a war now breaking forth in the bowels of this your kingdom’. Civil war – and the dread of it – was at the back of every mind. Like a rumble of distant thunder, rioting broke out in London on 12 November. Crowds gathered at the chapels in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and at Clerkenwell amid macabre rumours that instruments of torture were stored in their vaults. Throughout 1688 fear would fill the vacuum left by the inaction of political leaders; perhaps hatred of ‘popery’ was the only certainty Englishmen felt able to cling to. But to their governors, the spectacle of popular violence summoned up more frightening ghosts: levellers and ranters, soldiers despoiling Anglican churches, the Good Old Cause. James had already ordered that the invasion beacons, so effective in 1588, should not be lit since ‘the rabble ... are so unsteady, & in some parts so ill affected that it might as well guide them where we would not have them go’.7 In London, the authorities called out the trained bands, who opened fire on the crowds and killed four. A sermon preached by Robert Ferguson was widely reported. Its chilling text came from Jeremiah 48.10: Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood.8

  There seemed little appetite for bloodshed on any side, though, in the fortnight after the Prince’s landing. On the march inland John Whittle was struck by the reaction of the country people they met, who seemed all too happy to leave the fighting to others. The determination not to take sides made the ensuing fortnight exceptionally tense for the Prince of Orange. Gilbert Burnet was sent ahead to plan a ceremonial entry into Exeter. He managed a respectable turn-out of crowds, and a parade of ‘two hundred blacks brought from the plantations of the Netherlands in America’,9 but most of the shops were boarded up. The mayor and bishop were both loyal to James, and when the Prince rode in, the aldermen refused to greet him in their official robes. At the service of thanksgiving in Exeter Cathedral the organist had gone missing, and when Burnet stood to read out the Prince’s Declaration, ‘the ministers of the church there present rushed immediately out of their seats, and bustled through all the crowd going out of the church’.10 Robert Ferguson, welcomed with Monmouth’s troops three years before, had to break down the door of the Dissenting House to read the Prince’s Declaration there.

  No one came to William’s standard. No one of any substance declared for him. William wrote back to Holland reassuring the States-General that his reception was as enthusiastic as he had hoped for. It wasn’t true. Dartmouth was later told by Shrewsbury that the Prince ‘began to suspect he was betrayed, and had some thoughts of returning’.11 There was glee in the reports James’s agents sent back to London, desperation in William’s letter to an English supporter:

  ‘I pray you join me as soon as is convenient. It is dangerous to delay too long, and you should also send me as many of our supporters as you can, since that will set a good example to others to come and join us.’12

  Time was not on William’s side. His problem was that if James stalled matters by calling a parliament, he faced weeks, perhaps months, of delay while elections were held (after James’s various manoeuvres the whole system of government was in utter chaos), and further delay while MPs squabbled about exactly what they were supposed to be discussing, and then discussed it. This was the very morass from which Louis XIV was hoping never to see him re-emerge. Less than three weeks after the invasion, d’Avaux reported from the Hague that ‘the most clear-sighted men in the Republic are in a state of consternation, for they see how close they are to ruin. The Prince of Orange has all their sea and land forces with him. He had promised to send the fleet back, in the belief that his business would be complete in no more than a month.’13 Holland had cheered as his soldiers embarked, but William knew better than anyone how fickle the States-General could be.

  He made what preparations he could. He publicised a letter to Protestants in the English army. His troops rested after their slog through the Devon mud, and the artillery and heavy equipment was landed at Exeter by water. To William’s relief the phoney war was, in any case, about to end. As King James went into dinner on 14 November he received the news he must have been dreading ever since William landed: the first defector had gone over to the Prince.

  ‘Oh God,’ the Earl of Clarendon wrote in his diary that night, ‘that my son should be a rebel!’14 Only four weeks earlier he had proudly accompanied his son, Cornbury, to Hyde Park where the King reviewed his regiment.* Now it turned out that Cornbury had marched towards Axminster on pretext of attacking William’s outlying forces, then at the last minute announced his intention to defect. The only good news for James was that large numbers of soldiers refused to accompany him. The men, then as on other occasions, showed markedly more loyalty than their officers.

  James was notably gracious to Clarendon when he arrived at court ‘to throw myself at the King’s feet’ – as he was to many of those who failed him. That could not, however, disguise the significance of Cornbury’s move. ‘Tho the loss was very inconsiderable in itself,’ James recalled in his memoirs,

  ‘yet the consequence was exceeding great, for ... it broke the King’s measures, dishearten[ed] the other troops, and created such a jealousy, that each man suspected his neighbour, and in effect rendered the army useless ... Now not only the discontented party but the trimmers, and even many that wished well to the King went in [to the Prince], merely for apprehension.’15

  In Cheshire, the arch-Whig Lord Delamere called out his tenants with a red-blooded appeal ‘to choose whether [to] be a Slave and a Papist, or a Protestant and a Freeman’.16 Up in the north, Danby raised his standard for the Prince. Pleading a fall from his horse, Sir John Reresby stayed at home when Danby rode in to seize the vital York garrison. Miraculously rising from his bed, he was then arrested by a Williamite, Sir Henry Belasyse, and there followed one of those confusing conversations which must have been taking place all over England. Belasyse said he was for ‘a free parliament, and for the preservation of the Protestant religion and the government as by law established’. Sir John said he was for Parliament and the Protestant religion too, ‘but I was also for the King. He said he was so too.’17

  Whether towards civil war or towards some other unimaginable end, events were now accelerating. On 18 November, the official Gazette announced that ‘for the preventing of false news and reports, it is thought necessary that the Gazette shall for the future be published three times a week’.* Frost bit hard that day. It bit the mud-churned roads from Exeter, from where William’s troops had at last set off, manhandling cannon and stores along icy wheelruts on the road to Axminster. The soldiers sang as they marched, the tune which would become the Marseillaise of the Glorious Revolution, a tune which caught on, as Gilbert Burnet remembered, until ‘the whole army, and at last all people both in city and country, were singing it perpetually. And perhaps never had so slight a thing so great an effect.’18 That tune, Lilliburlero, had first appeared two years earlier in a flute tutor Henry Purcell’s publisher Henry Playford had put out. ‘Cette ville est située dans un fort bon pays,’ wrote one French officer in his notebook, ‘mais les chemins sont fort méchants.’19 The foreigners gazed curiously at the little towns they passed through. At Taunton, liberated, as Jaques Fontaine remembered, by ‘three sorry-looking Dutchmen’, they encountered the depths of English parochialism. A business rival of the Fontaines told the soldiers there was a French Jesuit in town. Fontaine had, in fact, been ordained as a Presbyterian Minister on 10 June, the day the Prince of Wales was born. Fortunately there was a captain from Royan among the soldiers who came to arrest him. ‘We embraced each oth
er with the affection of brothers’, Fontaine remembered – to the horror of the crowd, who ‘had gathered to see the French Jesuit hanged upon the spot. Seeing the officers treat me so kindly they cried out that they were lost since those whom they looked upon as liberators were Papists!’20

  Frost bit on Salisbury Plain as well, where James’s army awaited its commander-in-chief. The plain gave every appearance of military might with its stacks of pikes and muskets. James’s forces numbered 30,000, by most accounts, and his cavalry were ‘the best in Europe’. But this impressive-looking display was hollow. A few days before he left town, the King had been told some uncomfortable home truths by the Duke of Grafton, one of his more independent-minded courtiers.

  ‘I for my own part will fight and die for your Majesty’s service, but I cannot give you assurance that my own regiment will do so ... nay I am confident they will not.’21

  It was not only loyalty James lacked. He had no money for a war. The Scotch regiments in London muttered about pay. An embargo on merchant shipping (to fill berths in the navy) had choked off the King’s cashflow by reducing customs receipts – as well as alienating London’s merchants. The navy’s Surgeon-General turned away sick and injured seamen because he had no funds to treat them. ‘He cannot’, wrote Pepys on his behalf, perhaps reflecting his own exasperation, ‘make brick without straw.’ The rotten condition of James’s fleet, both hearts and hulls of oak, was illustrated by the calamity of Edmund Poulson, captain of the fireship Speedwell, whose Williamite crew mutinied in a storm off Poole and abandoned ship, leaving Poulson adrift on a mastless hulk with three petty officers and five boys – ‘they were so unchristianlike that they would not stay to furl the sails’.22

  The Prince of Orange could easily have ended up clinging to a flooded wreck himself. So often celebrated as an inevitable step in England’s march to freedom, the Revolution of 1688 provides a better text for history’s chances, its risks, the multiple possible outcomes of any sequence of events: if the wind had not changed, or if it had driven William further west into Cornwall; if the Tory magnates had swung behind James, instead of handing him, as he left for Salisbury Plain, their petition that he avoid bloodshed and call a free parliament. As a distinguished writer on the Revolution has observed, it is almost impossible to avoid the game of what if, because the actual outcome of 1688 was so much less likely than any number of others. One is reminded of the Chevalier de Méré’s question to Pascal: If a man rises from the table halfway through a hand, what is the value of his stake in the game?