The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  ‘The news of your withdrawing was the greatest surprise of my life ... This looks like so great distrust of me, that many could witness it hath almost broke my heart. Your Majesty knows what condition you left the fleet in, and me in the utmost unsupportable calamity of my life; what could I do but send to the Prince of Orange, when I found the whole nation did?’18*

  A loyal core did its best to secure James’s position. Archbishop Sancroft presided over the caretaker administration which gathered at Guildhall. Clarendon’s brother, the Earl of Rochester, and Bishop Turner of Ely sent out notes to make sure of a strong loyalist showing. Ailesbury was taken into a corner by Sancroft who ‘told me that he confided chiefly in me, that he was sensible that many violent things would be in agitation, and that we might join together with each of our friends to keep all to a moderation’.19 Looking around the room, Ailesbury saw ‘a most mixed constitution. The Archbishop and myself had not many that were wholly united to us in all respects ... Most ... had corresponded with the Prince of Orange in Holland.’ The loyalists lost a clause to bring ‘the King home again with honour & safety’, but succeeded in cooling down the petition despatched to William. ‘We did reasonably hope’, the Peers chided him, ‘that the King having issued his proclamation & writs for a free parliament, we might have rested secure under the expectation of that meeting.’20

  There was no such reticence in the simultaneous declarations issued from Guildhall by the various governing bodies of the City of London. With Sir John Chapman disabled by his stroke, Whigs of the Exclusion Crisis emerged to claim London as their own. Among them were some of the financiers who had long ago signalled their opposition to James; both Houblon brothers were on the committee which drafted the declaration from Common Council, while legal advice was obtained from Sir George Treby, the Whig lawyer who had been suspended as Recorder when London lost its charter.

  ‘Finding ourselves finally disappointed by his Majesty’s withdrawing himself, we presume to make your Highness our refuge, and so, in the name of this Capital City, implore your Highness’s protection, and most humbly beseech your Highness to vouchsafe to repair to this city, where your Highness will be received with universal joy and satisfaction.’21

  Not quite universal. Roger North was watching from the gallery to see how Dudley would get out of signing this treasonable document. ‘Now, thought I ... if my alderman list himself with the company he is not the man I took him for.’22 Feinting behind the speaker’s chair, Dudley pretended to come away with those who had already signed, and so avoided putting his name to treason.

  William was said to be furious at the peers’ equivocal Declaration; those from London delighted him. But maybe the Lords’ foot-dragging no longer mattered. On 13 December, it can only have seemed as if Providence was indeed behind William. Providence had changed winds and stilled storms; now Providence had removed the only obstacle remaining in his path. He had not had to fight a battle. He had neither got bogged down in endless constitutional wrangling, nor broken his promise to the Emperor Leopold. Three kingdoms had fallen gently into his lap.

  XXVI

  ‘I THOUGHT A KING TO BE A BRAVE THING’

  Harry Moon was a fisherman who also traded and smuggled along the north Kent coast. He and his friends had little time for laws that came from the land, but they knew, like no others, the creeks and backwaters of the Thames estuary.

  They had heard stories of Jesuits escaping from London. Perhaps someone had read them one of the papers which were coming off London presses.

  ‘Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Whereas an ill’natur’d, false-hearted, self-minded, insinuating Jesuit has lately withdrawn from the English Court ... these are to give notice, that if any person ... can give any tidings of the said Father [Peters] ... [they] shall have a thousand pounds reward!’1

  Harry Moon and his friends, fifty-nine of them in three small fishing boats, set out to catch a Jesuit. About eleven o’clock on the night of 11 December, with the tide rising as they pulled along the Swale, the muddy creek which divides the Isle of Sheppey from the mainland, they spotted a mast on the west side of Elmley Island. Their leader, William Ames, ordered them to pull towards it. Coming closer they discovered a customs hoy aground on the mud. William Ames hailed her out of the darkness. There were muffled voices, and then a voice called back. In answer to Ames’s questions, the master of the hoy admitted straightaway that he had three fugitives aboard. Harry Moon and the others scrambled up onto the hoy’s sloping deck, Ames heaved up the forehatch and beneath it, huddled in the hoy’s ill-lit, stinking cabin, he saw a face he recognised, the Kent landowner and former governor of the Tower of London, Sir Edward Hales.

  Hales, a Catholic convert, had been correspondent in the case of ‘Godden vs Hales’ which established James’s right to use prerogative powers. Now he sat ‘with a pocket pistol in each hand ready cock’d’, but made no resistance when Ames leaped down to disarm him. In the cabin Ames found two other fugitives, one about Hales’s age, the other an older man shabbily dressed ‘in an old camlet cloak, an ill pair of boots, a short black wig, a patch on his upper lips ... and otherwise extremely plain in habit’.2 Ames took him for a runaway Catholic priest.

  While Ames disarmed the gentlemen, Harry Moon and several others clambered down into the cabin behind him, and relieved them of £200 in cash, sundry rings, their watches and two saddles. Then Ames noticed that Sir Edward Hales was trying to attract his attention. While Harry Moon and his friends were looking the other way, he ‘clap[ped] fifty guineas into [Ames’s] hand, and told him in his ear, he should have a hundred more if he would get him and his two friends off, before they were carried to Faversham’.3 By now the rising tide had floated the hoy off the mud, so Ames, prevaricating, told its master to drop down to the mouth of Faversham Creek. There he informed the gentlemen that he was going ashore to arrange matters, cheerfully warned them not to trust his men, and disappeared with their valuables.

  The three gentlemen were left with Harry Moon.

  The sailors lit pipes. In a spiteful, desultory way, they started to threaten the three gentlemen with ‘such harsh expressions as old rogue, ugly, lean-jaw’d, hatchet-fac’d Jesuit, popish dog &c’. Then, becoming bolder, ‘Harry Moon ... although he had seen them rifled by Ames before, yet not contented with that, searched them over again & particularly the eldest of them ... whose breeches he pulled down & searched even to his privities.’4 ‘So undecently, as even to the discoveries of his nudities’5 was another witness’s quaint phrase. Moon was only held in check by an older man called John Jeffery, a pipe-maker. After that ordeal was over they sat and waited for dawn. By then it was raining hard, and water dripped through open seams in the hoy’s deck. John Jeffery civilly offered to swap places with the older man. The latter asked Jeffery his name, so he could thank him, then he said:

  ‘“Thou art a civil fellow, but let me ask you one question, do you believe that Papists go to heaven?”’

  ‘Says Jeffery, “God forbid but that they should, but they go a great way about, Sir.”’

  ‘“How so?” ... ’

  ‘“Why,” said Jeffery, “suppose that you was to go to Canterbury from this place, the nearest way is by Faversham, but if you go to Sheerness, & then through Milton & Sittingbourne, you’ll come to Canterbury at last, but you go a long way about.”’

  Laughter must have defused some of the tension, but it was still a long night. Not until after nine o’clock the next morning did a borrowed coach appear on the shore. By then the tide was falling again, so the ferryman carried Hales and the other gentleman across the saltings on his back. But when the older man appeared through the forehatch, someone on shore ‘cried out, “Hang him, the old Jesuitical dog, let him walk out himself & be damned.”’ Jeered at by the crowd, the man in the black wig stumbled through the saltings and climbed mud-spattered into the carriage. With the crowd jostling about it, the coach drove to the Queen’s Arms in Faversham, where more people were waiting. And there a curious
incident occurred. A brewer called Marsh started telling people around him that the older man in the black wig was the King. This man, meanwhile, had strode into the inn and started ordering bacon and eggs in an excruciating plebeian accent. By this time the Mayor had arrived, but when he went upstairs he behaved as oddly as Marsh. He immediately fell to his knees in front of the man in the wig who ‘in passion ... cried, “Stand up, what do you mean?”’

  ‘The Mayor rose & went to Sir Edward Hales & said, “Surely this is the King!” Sir Edward turns about and with a low voice answered, ’tis [so], which brought a flood of tears from his eyes.’

  ‘The rabble (who stood all this while at the door) seeing the mayor kneel to him, & remembering Marsh’s report, cried out the King, the King.’6

  And so the deception came to an end. In an upstairs room at the Queen’s Arms, the Mayor of Faversham solemnly kissed James’s hand. For the King it was merely the latest in a sequence of farcical, maybe tragic, mishaps which had pursued him from the moment he left Whitehall.

  When they had first got to Elmley Island there had been no sign of the customs hoy and the weather was atrocious. When the hoy finally arrived, the master announced that he couldn’t go out to sea without more ballast, so with half the ebb to run they ran ashore by the Sheepway to load some stones, then settled down to wait for the tide. Had Ames and his men turned up quarter of an hour later – another link in the Revolution’s chain of happenstance and improbability – the King would have got away to France.

  Even in the Queen’s Arms, with an unruly mob of sailors and townsmen milling in and out of the door, James had not given up hope of escaping. In a whispered conversation with the Mayor he suggested applying to Ames, who he felt (rightly) would ‘do anything for money’. There followed something of a shock for Ames, whose wife called upstairs to say that the Mayor was on his front doorstep.

  ‘The Mayor asked him if he knew whom he had taken. He replied, Yes, Sir Edward Hales & two more, but he knew not who they were, neither did he care. The Mayor told him that one of the two was the King, & that he was sent to bring him to his Majesty. Ames seemed extremely surprised at this, of which his pale looks and violent tremblings gave sufficient testimony. At last said he to the Mayor, I hope you’ll give me leave to fetch my hat ... ’7

  Eventually the King was persuaded not to trust Ames, and settled on another accomplice, but his eye for character let him down again. The old man he recruited turned out to be an old parliamentarian veteran of the Civil War, and ‘in less than a quarter of an hour there was a thousand of the mob got about the house, [and] his Majesty’s voyage was quite at an end’.

  As James dressed in his black wig and cambrick coat, had he thought of the ritual robes in which he had been clad at the coronation? When he sat in the hoy with Moon and the others crowding around him, had he imagined the peers in Westminster Abbey? Now all that was gone, and with it the aura of a King. ‘The more a King shows greatness of spirit in time of danger,’ Louis XIV had written to James at the end of October, ‘the more he gains his subject’s loyalty.’8 But no one, Williamite or Jacobite, could find much greatness of spirit in James II’s conduct at Faversham. At first the King ‘seemed cast down somewhat at the noise of the rabble’.9 Then, picking himself up, he started to bluster.

  ‘He said, the Prince of Orange sought his crown and life; and if he were delivered up, his blood would lie at our doors ... He argued much upon these words, he that is not with me, is against me ... and used all motives proper as he thought, in begging, praying, tempting, arguing, persuading, reproving &c, which was for above three hours.’

  There followed an awful attempt to ingratiate himself with his captors, the result, ‘a smile ... of an extraordinary size & sort; so forced, awkward and unpleasant to look upon, that I can truly say I never saw anything like it’.’10 Then, abruptly and inappropriately, the King tried to stand on his dignity in his absurd black half-wig, blustering that he was the King and ordering his guards to keep their distance, ‘which so enraged them that some of them forgot all decency and reverence to him; insomuch that Sir Edward Hales was desired to take the King off from that discourse, which made him cheap, and proved so unpolitic and unsuccessful’. Early on James had sent short notes to Feversham and to the Earl of Winchilsea, Lord Lieutenant of Kent. Towards evening Winchilsea arrived to escort the King to the mayor’s house. But the sailors, angry, armed and probably drunk, began to object, ‘and as the King passed down the stairs, swords were drawn and threatening expressions used by the guards’. There was a delay of fifteen minutes at the bottom of the stairs while the sailors’ leader, a fisherman called John Hunt, negotiated with the Earl. Eventually the sailors agreed to let the King move on condition they guarded him, and so ‘at length the King was suffered to walk down the dirty street to his private apartment, with the irregular disorderly crew at his heels’.11

  At the mayor’s house James’s mood swung between euphoria and despondency. He babbled about a cross Harry Moon had stolen, saying it had belonged to Edward the Confessor. Then again ‘he was really very melancholy at times, and often shed tears’. His nose started to bleed. The sailors, losing all respect, ‘pursued him from one room to another; and pressed upon him in his privacies, so that he had ... scarce leisure to be devout or retire to the calls of nature’.12 ‘I thought a King to be a brave thing’, Roger North had written, but there was nothing brave about this King seen close up in his moment of crisis. With every outburst, with every plea for mercy or blustering threat, the cloak of veneration which had been draped around the King’s shoulders at his coronation was torn away. His counterfeit regalia had offered no protection against the realities of English politics.

  Thanks to the King’s capture, those realities had just become yet more complex. James’s arrest threw everything back into the balance. The King of England had not fled his throne after all. The Prince had been robbed of his easy outcome.

  News that the King was still in England reached London through a Kent sailor who was known in Archbishop Sancroft’s household. A whisper ran around the council chamber where the peers were gathered in provisional government. Halifax, in the Chair, tried to hold the meeting to order but without success. It was a rare moment in the Glorious Revolution when all pretence dropped away and each party had to confront his own aspirations. When the news was announced, as Ailesbury noted to his mounting fury, instead of loyal cheers, ‘there was a silence of a good quarter of an hour, each looking on the other’.13

  Unable to contain himself any longer, Ailesbury burst out in cavalier fury that they had no choice but to welcome the King back. A passport was prepared for him to go and recover the King, along with Feversham and the Earl of Middleton, but the passport was ‘so worded that I threw it on the table with passion, declaring that I would go without one’. Ailesbury left the Lords to debate this latest convolution in England’s saga – they would be there until two the next morning – and took coach to Kent Street.* ‘Such a night was hardly known for rain, wind, and darkness – Thursday, December the fourteenth 1688. One of my grooms rode before with links [torches] fastened together, which blew out frequently.’ Ailesbury was stopped by mobs at Deptford and Welling; this was the height of the Irish Terror. At Dartford he was forced into the inn to negotiate, and only ‘after two hours reasoning with persons that had no reason’ was he allowed to continue. A friendly constable told him of looters roaming the roads ahead. Exhausted, Ailesbury accepted a bed for the night. He got little sleep ‘by a continued shouting, most being in drink also, and the alarm bell or tocsin continually going’. At Gad’s Hill he passed Monsieur Neuville, a diplomat sent by Jan Sobieski of Poland to congratulate James and Mary on the birth of the Prince of Wales. Neuville’s silent companion in Polish garb later turned out to be an escaping Jesuit. Near Rochester, Ailesbury found a group of workmen hacking sullenly at the supports of the wooden bridge. ‘I, asking them for what reason, they answered surlily, to hinder the Irish Papists from cutting their
throats, and of their wives and children, for that all Dartford was on fire, and the streets ran with blood.’ There was more of that further down the road: the Mayor of Rochester ‘half dead with fear, in night gown and night cap [telling] me he had not been in bed three nights for fear’; his old friend Sir Phineas Pett, in bed with a raging fever, his room ‘filled with [a] sea mob crying out for arms to defend them against the Irish papists, and that London, Dartford &c were on fire, and blood running in the streets. For quiet sake he had given all the arms he had, and those that had none would not leave the room. At entering, I thought the chamber was like a furnace, but a very offensive one for ill smells.’14

  Thirty-eight miles, Ailesbury galloped, in five hours along winter roads. At last he reached Faversham; he asked directions to the mayor’s house; he dismounted. The hall was full of milling seamen. ‘I passed the hall ... and entered into the parlour ... The room was filled with men, women and children, and talking as if they had been at a market.’ The crowd parted; there sat the fugitive King.

  And in that moment Ailesbury was struck by an uncanny likeness. James had not managed to escape his destiny after all. ‘The King was sitting in a great chair, his hat on, and his beard being much grown ... the picture of his royal father.’15 Gaunt from exhaustion, James had become the very image of the martyr Charles I.

  XXVII

  ‘A FOREIGN ENEMY IN THE KINGDOM’

  ‘He rose up to meet me; I bent my knee, not being able to kneel by reason of my jackboots. He took me to the window with an air of displeasure, indeed quite contrary to what I expected, and said, “[I hear] you were all Kings when I left London ... ”’1

  ‘Sir,’ Ailesbury replied, ‘I expected another sort of welcome after the great dangers I ran last night by repairing to you.’ Such stiff ingratitude tried the patience of all those who wanted to love James, but the King was enduring hardships. ‘The bread he had eaten there was so heavy that Platt was forced to toast it to render it less heavy, and the wine he drank was as bad in proportion. I observed his shoulders moved much: I asked him if he was indisposed. He told me, “No, but I hope you can give me a clean shirt.”’2