The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  Crowds thronged to William’s court. The Prince met Serjeant Maynard, veteran of radical politics for more than fifty years, and told him ‘that he had outlived all the men of the law of his time’. Maynard replied ‘I should have outlived the law itself if your Highness had not come over.’7 Sir George Treby stood in for the stricken Lord Mayor to deliver an address from the City:

  ‘GREAT SIR, When we look back to the last month, and contemplate the swiftness and fullness of our present deliverance, astonish’d, we think it miraculous ... posterity will celebrate your ever-glorious name, till time shall be no more.’

  James, meanwhile, received letters from Tory supporters begging him not to absent himself a second time. They reported a turn in the tide. Many had been shocked by William’s exertion of political muscle to remove James from Whitehall. Edward Seymour, a Tory who had been among the first to join William, thought ‘all the West went into the Prince of Orange upon his Declaration, thinking in a free parliament to redress all that was amiss; but that men now began to think that the Prince aimed at something else’.’8 ‘The gentry ... begin to create whispers and mutinies,’ one of Dartmouth’s correspondents wrote to him, ‘which I pray to God increase.’9

  Perhaps that was just Tory wishful thinking. In any case, James’s mind was on France, and it was still inhabited by dark fears. Sly intimidation from London increased the King’s funk. ‘If I do not retire,’ he told Ailesbury, ‘I shall certainly be sent to the Tower ... It is a cruel thing for a subject to be driven out of his native country, much more for a King to be driven out of his three kingdoms.’10

  From the window of Richard Head’s house James could see boats at anchor on the Medway. On the night of 22 December the King told an emissary from London they would talk in the morning, then spent more than an hour writing at his desk. The letter would be found on his table in the morning.

  ‘How could I hope to be safe? ... What had I ... to expect from one, who by all arts hath taken such pains to make me appear as black as Hell to my own people, as well as to all the world besides? ... I was born free and desire to continue so ... [I] withdraw, but so as to be within call when the nation’s eyes shall be opened ... I could add much more to what I have said but now is not the proper time. Rochester, December the 22, 1688.’11

  The King’s evening ‘couchee’ proceeded as normal, an odd little parody of court ceremonial in the upstairs bedroom at Richard Head’s house. Ailesbury gave the signal for everyone to retire. And as soon as they were all gone, James dressed again, crept downstairs, and through a back door in the garden reached the longboat which would take him out to a waiting yacht.

  Even then James’s tribulations were not quite over. They missed the tide and had to hole up on the Swale, praying that Harry Moon didn’t appear again. Not until Christmas morning did James stumble onto French soil just south of Calais. Roger Morrice thought that if James had stayed ‘a great number would certainly have fallen in with him, sufficient very probably to have carried all things for him by vote in the parliament’.12 James was contending, though, not only with questions of state, but with his own guilt and fear, the ruling emotions of his later life. He never saw 1688 as a struggle of Protestant and Catholic, or as a diplomatic coup against the growing power of France. To James, it was God’s punishment for his own failings. ‘[I] do give thee most humbel and harty thanks,’ he wrote in his devotional papers in the sombre monastery of La Trappe,

  ‘that thou werst pleased to have taken from me my three Kingdoms, by wch means thou dids awake me out of the leterge of sin, in wch had I continud, I should have been for ever lost, and out of thy goodnesse wert pleased to bannish me into a forrain Country.’13

  ‘[It is] now all over,’ Philip Frowde wrote to Dartmouth, ‘neither [King James], nor his ... are ever likely to set foot here again.’14

  There had been welcome and acclamation for William the rescuer; there was none for William the usurper. In his diary, on 31 December that year, Clarendon wrote:

  ‘Thus ends this unhappy year, fatal, I fear, to England. God grant the next may prove more fortunate than it seems to portend.’15

  PART TWO

  REVOLUTION PRINCIPLES

  I

  ‘THE THRONE VACANT’

  In the first week of January the Little Ice Age mounted one of its last assaults on the northern shores of Europe. Icebergs were seen in the North Sea; ice froze the puddles in New Palace Yard and seized in great floes around the piers of London Bridge. And an eerie kind of enchantment seemed to have immobilised English politicians as well. ‘We have before us’, Gilbert Burnet had preached on 23 December, ‘a work, that seems to ourselves a dream, and that will appear to posterity a fiction.’1

  Protagonists in half a century of strife, the English factions met again in a capital occupied by foreign troops, in a country with neither King, parliament nor army to call its own. Whatever anyone had expected when James came to the throne – whatever they had expected a year, or even a month before – it was not this:

  ‘The King and Queen fled; all their adherents abandoned; a new Prince invading with a foreign army and without the least opposition. In the whole of history such a thing has never been heard of! A peace-loving King ... with an army of thirty thousand men and a navy of forty warships leaving his kingdom without so much as a pistol being fired!’2

  So wrote a Jesuit to his principal in Rome. Roger and Dudley North had roamed around town together during the last days of Charles II. Now they resumed those long, anxious walks. Their fear four years before had been that the fanatics would rush in to oust the Catholic King and set up another Commonwealth. Now, as they strode along the Strand, past Exeter House, where Shaftesbury’s circle had planned the Exclusion Crisis, and into the narrower streets of the City, it must have seemed as if those very fears had been realised. The men of the Good Old Cause had returned in triumph. Robert Ferguson published pamphlets. Slingsby Bethel held court in the City. Maybe it would be the Norths’ turn, now, to live the desperate, impoverished lives of political exiles, their turn to pack trunks and burn papers, and enter the fugitive’s world of foreign lodgings and Government spies – Roger North who had been lawyer at the trials after the Rye House Plot, and Dudley who had overseen the ceremonies when Russell was executed. For Patience Ward, the ousted Whig Lord Mayor, was reported back in London on 7 January, and Thomas Papillon, the Sheriff Dudley had driven into exile, was ‘expected by the next passage hither’.3 One day, pushing through a throng of exultant Whigs at the Exchange, Roger heard a voice drawl insultingly at Dudley, What, is he not gone yet?4

  Roger North was also busy at Lambeth Palace, on the other side of the frozen river, giving legal advice to the Tory grandees who gathered around Archbishop Sancroft to discuss the future. As Roger looked around the table he saw men who thought of themselves as the guardians of true English values: Sir Edward Seymour, John Evelyn and the Hyde brothers, Earls of Rochester and Clarendon. Clarendon had travelled all the way up to the City and across the bridge ‘by reason the river was so full of ice that boats could not pass’, but he brought news of what was being discussed in William’s private circle. He had met Henry Pollexfen, the wily Whig lawyer who had once helped Archbishop Sancroft win his acquittal but now, on the other side of a widening political gulf, was busily proffering legal advice to the man who would be King. Clarendon had seen him emerge from the Prince’s closet after an hour-long private meeting and had earlier asked him how the crisis was to be resolved. There was no obstacle, Pollexfen had told him. The model was Henry VII’s seizure of power after the Battle of Bosworth ‘by right of conquest’. The Prince of Orange had nothing to do but declare himself King, and issue writs for a parliament. ‘Good God bless me! What a man is this? I confess, he astonished me, and so we quickly parted.’5

  And yet the Prince seemed to have resisted the temptation to cut through the Gordian knot of the English constitution quite as brutally as Pollexfen suggested. He
nry VII had, indeed, rationalised his seizure of power by declaring himself King de facto and enacted a statute to indemnify all those who joined him against the King de jure. It must have been tempting for William to do the same, but he had decided against it. For one thing, William’s position among his European allies would never have survived, for he had promised the Emperor Leopold that he was not there to displace James. Nor could the Prince have felt any more sanguine about likely reaction in the United Provinces. Amsterdam had risked everything on the English expedition, but their backing was not open-ended. They had signed up neither to prolonged civil war, nor to one man’s dynastic adventure. Besides, the messy, unsatisfactory events of December cast a long shadow. William knew how much he had been damaged by James’s ejection from the capital. ‘Compassion has begun to work’, Burnet wrote to Admiral Herbert. ‘The foolish men of Faversham, by stopping the King at first have thrown us into an uneasy aftergame.’6

  Quite how uneasy became apparent on 21 December when the 65 peers he had invited to a conference at St James’s markedly failed to offer William the crown. Their response was typical of English politicians throughout the crisis: they called for legal advice, then adjourned till the next day. Perhaps Roger Morrice obtained his description of their next meeting from Maynard, one of the lawyers they called on. He reported ‘a long unintelligible speech’7 from the Earl of Nottingham and endless splitting of legal hairs. Many refused to sign an Association in favour of the Prince on the grounds that it conflicted with their oaths of allegiance to James.

  William turned for more fulsome support to the lower house. On 23 December the printer Awnsham Churchill, a former exile who had hastily reoccupied premises at the Black Swan in Ave Maria Lane (an ironic address in the circumstances), was instructed to run off hundreds of letters to former MPs inviting them to gather at St James’s on the day after Christmas. Pointedly, the invitations were sent only to those members ‘in any of the parliaments, that were held during the Reign of the late King CHARLES the Second’. Neither of the North brothers would be summoned. As they saw it, this was the return of the Exclusion parliaments in the aftermath of revolution, and the rebel MPs would be reunited with the other fanatics of 1681: fifty London Councilmen would join them.

  Minds focused by this new threat, the Lords met again on Christmas Eve. Halifax took the chair for a fractious and exhausting session which rehearsed many of the questions which would occupy English politicians for the next two months. Had there been an abdication or not? It must be proved, said the diehard Bishop Turner of Ely. Pragmatic Henry Compton spoke of the ‘absolute necessity of a government’. The Exclusion Bill was exhumed. Nottingham, a Tory leader with close links to the Anglican Church, argued that only a reigning monarch could summon a parliament. He went so far as to call for James’s return with restrictions. Would treat with the King, Halifax minuted. A Guardian ... ?8 The word Regent was scored through in his notes. In the declaration he had written a political lifetime ago, William had promised peace, honour and happiness ‘upon lasting foundation’. There can have seemed little prospect of that as a mob of City apprentices approached Westminster ‘in a violent rage against all who voted against the Prince of Orange’s interest’.9 Maybe it was this further tremor of popular unrest that forced the Lords into a decision to which there was, in any case, no real alternative. They asked William to take on a caretaker administration, and to summon a Convention (on the pattern of the Convention which followed the Restoration in 1660) to settle England’s constitutional matters ‘upon such sure and legal foundations, that they may not be in danger of being again subverted’.

  Some among the MPs and London politicians who met next day wanted to go further, and proclaim William and Mary joint King and Queen immediately, the ‘poore King not considered or mentioned’, as Dartmouth’s wife, Barbara, commented when she reported the meeting to her husband; ‘the dore shutt upon him as if he had never bin’.10 Whig and radical MPs knew, as William did, that the Revolution was by no means won. William had taken his decision, however, and the Commons followed the Lords: at a ceremony on 28 December the Prince of Orange was offered the caretaker administration, and circular letters went out demurely requesting elections to a Convention to discuss ‘the best manner how to attain the ends of our Declaration’.11 Having decided on the long game he had learned so painfully in Holland, William would play it with his usual nerve. Soldiers were directed to withdraw from towns ‘so that elections may be carried on with greater freedom and without any colour of force or restraint’.12 The English would have a last chance to thrash out for themselves the differences which had divided them for more than half a century.

  There was one other reason for William to ignore the precedent of Henry VII and subject himself to this waiting game. To be a King in 1689 was not what it had been in 1485. All sides in the English crisis harked back to the ‘ancient constitution’, but the world in which that constitution evolved did not exist anymore. The costs of war, in particular, had risen enormously, ending the relationships between king, baron and knight on which medieval societies had been founded. Government, economy and society had all been transformed. If William had claimed the throne de facto, as Henry VII had done, he would have inherited not working medieval structures of government and taxation but a traumatised system in which kings relied on parliaments for money, but were unable to govern them. For England to fight a modern war in Europe, he would need funding beyond anything Henry VII had required – funding which could only come from a supportive parliament. If William seized the throne too greedily, any chance of such support would be gone.

  Patience, though, was the legacy of his career in the United Provinces, where he had never been able to command, and where for seventeen years he had had to cajole and persuade, and allow the States to think they had made up their own minds. England would be the same. William could not take; he had to be given. And so the Prince settled down to wait as his circular letters spread out across the country, and English politicians prepared for the coming struggle.

  ‘The ArchBp of Canterbury is politically sick’,13 reported Roger Morrice drily when Sancroft failed to attend the meetings of peers over Christmas. All the same, it was to Lambeth that the Tory peers came in the weeks that followed, to discuss strategy and express outrage both at fanatic extremism and Orange nerve – Burnet loftily told Clarendon that William would refuse the throne even if it was offered him. Outside the palace walls, the river was an unbroken plain of ice. ‘Yesterday,’ reported the English Currant, ‘it was passable on foot from shore to shore, and hundreds of people were passing, sliding &c thereon.’14 Indoors, the discussions were interminable. ‘Sorry I was to find’, wrote Evelyn wearily, after dining there on 15 January,

  ‘there was as yet no accord ... There was a Tory part (as then called so) who were for his Majesty again upon conditions, & there were Republicarians, who would make the Prince of Orange like a Stateholder ... Most for ambition, or other interest, few for conscience & moderate resolutions.’

  John Evelyn’s closest friends among the bishops seemed to be ‘for a regency, thereby to salve their oaths’. That was one of the options Roger North weighed up when Sancroft asked him for a legal briefing on the crisis and he produced in response a handwritten memo entitled The Present State of the English Government.

  ‘Maxims:’

  ‘The Government of England is monarchical & hereditary ... & the King is the source of all justice & authority both civil & military.’

  ‘The K. never dies ... Upon the demise (as the law stiles it) of one King the successor dates his reign.’

  ‘The King can do no wrong.’

  These were the foundations on which all Tory thinking was based and Roger North used them to test the three possible outcomes of the crisis: William as King, Mary as Queen, or William as Regent with James declared unfit to govern, most likely on the grounds that Catholicism was a form of lunacy. This last seemed to Roger North the most desirable. He could neither i
gnore the illegal proceedings which had caused the King’s people to abandon him, nor deny the good sense in offering William – ‘the Commander’ – temporary control of the government (‘Nothing more prudent & more justifiable upon the account of necessity could have been done in such a conjuncture.’) To crown him, though, would leave Tory principles in tatters. He did see some virtue in turning to Mary. Danby, one of those Tories who had invited the Prince in, was moving in that direction, and had even written to the Princess requesting her urgent presence. A regency, though, would prevent a living King from being divested of his crown at all. All outcomes to the crisis would involve some fiction; this was the fiction Roger North preferred, for it limited damage to Tory maxims – and that, Roger North thought, was the priority for the coming Convention. At all costs they must resist ‘elective monarchies’ and ‘rights of resistance’. That way led to chaos, ‘for then there remains no law, no property & the rich are exposed to be plundered & all estates & houses are levelled’.’15

  And remarkably, as the Convention came closer, the politicians at Lambeth began to think this Tory agenda might not altogether be lost, for by now it was becoming clear quite how many felt they had been duped by the Prince.

  ‘Let every man lay his hand upon his heart and seriously ask himself for what reason, and with what intent he became a party in this general defection? ... Was it any honest man’s meaning to subvert this government, to make way for his own dream of some poetical Golden Age, or a Fanciful Millennium? ... Was it to frighten the King out of his dominions, and then to vote that he hath abdicated his government?’16

  Clarendon, veering into overconfidence as readily as he had given himself up to despair, approached Dijkvelt, recently arrived from Holland, and pompously informed him that ‘our religion did not allow of the deposing of Kings’.17 Some even began to wonder aloud whether the Dutch intervention had been necessary in the first place. Roger Morrice, heart chilled by every sign of Tory confidence he saw, was assured by one cleric that the danger had been removed from James’s reign when the bishops were acquitted. ‘The dangers of popery were magnified when they were no danger at all.’18 Were a chastened James to be returned, the clergyman told him, it would be easy enough to keep the King in check.