Tories felt surprisingly confident, therefore, as the Convention loomed. But theirs was not, of course, the only set of maxims available to English men and women in 1689, as a rising clatter of printing presses recalled the fervour as well as the slogans of past crises. ‘All the old traiterous books of 1640 [were] reprinted to justify our revolution,’ Edmund Bohun remembered.
‘And men spoke and writ ... against the divine right of Princes, and against the hereditary succession of the crown ... The old parliamentary rebels, and those that had been hottest for the Exclusion and the Monmouth rebellion, were in greatest esteem and authority, and employed in court, camp, country; and all the rest represented as Jacobites; for now that word was invented.’
In radical London, tracts were discussed in coffee houses whose windows were misted with talk and tobacco smoke. It must almost have seemed as if the Exclusion Crisis had never ended: Titus Oates held court at Kidd’s coffee house; there were rumours that the Earl of Essex’s murderer was about to confess. John Locke, still in Holland, received a letter from his friend Carey, the lively, pretty wife of Lord Mordaunt:
‘Our [King] went out like a farthing candle and has given us by this Convention an occasion not of amending the government, but of melting it down and make all new, which makes me wish you there to give them a right scheme of government, having been infected by that great man Lord Shaftesbury.’19
Locke may have been overseas, but Robert Ferguson, another of Shaftesbury’s protégés, was on hand to rush radical principle into print. Here was the chance to snatch back the initiative from pragmatic William, and ‘fasten in a parliamentary way, a brand of indelible infamy upon their illegal, treacherous and enslaving tenets’.
‘No government is lawful, but what is founded upon compact and agreement, between those chosen to govern, and them who condescend to be governed.’
‘The first and highest treason is that which is committed against the constitution.’
‘The people of England hath the same title unto ... their liberties and properties, that our kings have unto their crowns.’20
Such were the radicals’ maxims, and of such a temper was the talk in coffee houses which Archbishop Sancroft never entered. And as returns to the Convention came in throughout the month of January, the men of the Exclusion Crisis lined up to take their seats, Thomas Papillon at Dover, George Treby for Plympton. London chose four radicals as its own representatives, Patience Ward among them. Isaac Newton, who dined with the Prince on 17 January, was elected for Cambridge University, and John Wildman for Great Bedwin.
And at last the day fixed for the Convention came round. For Tories, it would be a desperate struggle to save England. For the Whigs and radicals, nine years of defeat and exile were at an end. It was their turn to write a constitution according to the principles for which they had suffered.
II
‘AN OCCASION OF AMENDING THE GOVERNMENT’
‘His lordship confessed that there was no great hopes of a lasting peace from this settlement; however, it was the best that could be made at this time of the day ... ’
Sir John Reresby, quoting the Earl of Halifax, 9 February 1688
‘When I arrived I found London much changed’, wrote Sir John Reresby after journeying down from Yorkshire. ‘The guards and other parts of the army ... being sent to quarter ten miles off, the streets were filled with ill-looking and ill-habited Dutch and other strangers [foreigners] of the Prince’s army.’1 Every coffee house in the occupied town seemed full of people promoting their blueprint for the constitution, or debating the endless questions which the past few months had thrown up. What exactly had happened? Had William been invited or had he invited himself? Had there been a war? Had the King fled or been driven away? Was James, in fact, still King? Was his son the heir to the throne or a changeling? Vital questions indeed, but none received a clear answer. The fog at the heart of the Revolution had, if anything, grown even thicker with the events of December. It could only be hoped that the Convention would do something to dispel it.
Meanwhile, no one could ignore the wider context in which this revolution was taking place. Most important to observers in England was the apparent loss of Ireland, where James’s Lord Deputy, Tyrconnel, appeared to be in full control with an army which rumour numbered at 25,000 one week, 35,000 the next. Across the Channel, meanwhile, lay the vaster threat of Louis XIV. On the day after the Lords’ first meeting, the French ambassador had delivered to William ‘a letter from his master’, so coffee house politicians read in the London Mercury, ‘which was written in insulting terms, containing little besides threats’.2 Twenty-four hours later Barillon was escorted to the coast by Dutch troops. When spring came, the Sun King’s fury would be unleashed on the United Provinces. William had perhaps two months left in which to reach a settlement which had eluded England for the past sixty years.
It was haste, therefore, which William most impressed on members of the Convention when he finally opened their proceedings on 22 January. They met in the Palace of Westminster, a ramshackle structure of chambers and courtyards produced, rather like England’s constitution, not by design but by accretion, conversion and ad hoc repair. The House of Lords was reached up steps from Old Palace Yard (two doors down from the cellar where Guy Fawkes had stored his gunpowder). A narrow alleyway up the side of Westminster Hall led to St Stephen’s Chapel, the ‘Commons-House’. That deconsecrated chapel could have told much of the story of England’s turbulent past century. Plain wooden panelling covered walls whose statues and carvings had been stripped out at the Reformation. The great east window had then been smashed and the side windows bricked up. It was here that Charles I had come to arrest the five members, here Pride had purged the Long Parliament, and from here Cromwell had dismissed them. All this was within the memory of many who took their places on its tiers of benches on 28 January for the first major debate of the Convention.
They wasted no time in getting down to business. When Richard Hampden, elected chair of a Committee of the Whole House, called it to order, Whigs pushed immediately to have the throne declared vacant. If it were not, the lawyer Henry Pollexfen pointed out drily, there was nothing for them to talk about. It could not be, responded Tories, because the King never dies; and if it were, who were they to declare it so, or to dispose of it to a successor? Battle had been joined already. George Treby’s imitation of James’s blustering, stiff voice raised a few laughs, while old Sir John Maynard mumbled through a speech and was told to speak up. Tempers started to fray. Radicals argued that James had forfeited the throne by breaking his contract with the people, either by physical departure or by his maladministration (calls of Both! from many in the House). English politicians seemed only too eager to pile back into the old conflict. By one o’clock, one eyewitness wrote, they were ‘got upon such a large subject about the nature of government, and of our constitution in particular ... that many thought they would never have disentangled themselves’.3
For the moment, however, the sheer weight of Whig numbers was bound to tell. Eventually, a motion was put to the vote:
‘That King James the 2nd by endeavouring to subvert the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original compact between King & people, and by the advice of Jesuits & other wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws both of Church & state & by withdrawing himself, has thereby abdicated the government & left the throne vacant.’
The debate entered its rowdy finale about 4pm:
LORD CORNBURY Pray let the question be explained ...
MR COOK I humbly conceive it is 2 questions.
HOUSE No No.
CHAIRMAN Shall I put the Question to this Committee?
HOUSE Ay Ay.
CHAIRMAN As many as are of opinion ... say Ay.
MOST OF THE HOUSE (very loudly) Ay Ay ...
CHAIRMAN As many as are of another opinion say No.
LORD CORNBURY,
LORD FANSHAW,
SIR EDWARD SEYMOUR: No.
/>
CHAIRMAN The Ays have it.’4
In the excitement of the moment some wanted to move straight on to further business, but the House of Lords had already risen, so it was on the next day that Williamites in the Commons presented resolutions both to offer the crown to William and Mary (jointly) and to ban Catholics from the throne. At this point, however, they encountered a dilemma.
They were all too aware of the need for haste. With James gone, the priority, as Robert Ferguson had written in his tract, was ‘to bolt the door after him, and so foreclose his return’.5 Nothing could so effectively accomplish that as to offer the throne to William and Mary. What, then, of the radical maxim, ‘No government is lawful, but what is founded upon compact and agreement?’ Here was their chance – probably their only chance – to define once and for all what monarchs had done wrong in the past, and what principles would govern them in future. ‘I wish you there to give them a right scheme of government’, Carey Mordaunt had written to Locke. Were they now to set a new King on the throne with just such powers, disputed and ill-defined, as James had claimed, and his brother and father before him? There might never be a chance to right such wrongs again.
Unfortunately for the Whigs, the Tories had seen a way to exploit this. Ear close to the ground as ever, Roger Morrice picked up rumours that they would gull radicals into passing restrictions on the King, then urge the Prince of Orange to refuse them, ‘[and] if he concur not ... they will endeavour to give him cheque mate’. Just as Roger Morrice predicted, the Tories now baited their trap. Lord Falkland rose to his feet to propose a discussion about ‘what powers ... to give the crown ... and what not’. Radicals were unable to resist. A committee was appointed to frame the House’s grievances against James II, and draw up conditions ‘to be sworn to by the King or Queen antecedent to their coronation’.6
It was in this committee, chaired by George Treby, that the Declaration of Rights would begin to take shape, but before they could even put pen to paper Whig momentum received a more serious check. The Lords rejected the Commons’ motion of ‘Abdication and Vacancy’.
The upper house was never likely to follow the Commons tamely down a revolutionary path. Ailesbury had made good use of the month before the Convention ‘to confer singly with a great many Lords spiritual and temporal such as I knew’. He could rely on men like Clarendon and Bishop Turner, and knew that even Henry Compton and the Earl of Danby were having doubts.
‘We were about sixty that were against the vote that the King had abdicated. On the first question we carried it by one voice or two, on which the Lord Mordaunt* ... made a great noise according to [his] custom, and gave out as if the militia should be placed in the Palace Yard.’7
The throne was not vacant, the peers decided. The King had not abdicated his crown by flight. The crisis could not be so easily resolved.
Never, in Roger Morrice’s view, would England come so close to civil war as in the week that followed. The Whig Earl of Devonshire shouted that ‘he had drawn his sword for the Prince of Orange, for his religion, his life and estate ... and as long as those were in danger he would keep it drawn’.8 Once again, irreconcilable maxims had clashed, as if the Exclusion Crisis had never ended. There never could be a compromise. England could not escape its past. And chance decreed that as the politicians reached this crisis, they should find themselves wading through the poisoned waters of their own history: 30 January was the day Charles I had been executed. Within the Convention, politicians shouted each other down, argued, restated the same entrenched positions; outside, in coffee houses and taverns, groups pored over the latest illegal transcript of the debates, or made their way to Westminster to pack Old Palace Yard.
And once again, popular discontent could be sensed as an uneasy rumble beneath the politicians’ feet. Hundreds made their way to Westminster to push their way into the anterooms, and gaze over hats and wigs at the doors beyond which the great debates were taking place. ‘The rabble were the masters,’ growled Lord Mulgrave, ‘if the beasts had known their own strength.’9 Was the revolution about to catch light? A man was arrested handing out republican leaflets in the Painted Chamber. James Houblon, the Whig financier, started a petition demanding that William and Mary be put on the throne; 15,000 were said to have signed it. Roger Morrice joined the crowds in Westminster Hall, and in describing the revolutionary atmosphere, betrayed emotion for almost the only time in the pages of his great chronicle:
‘SINE METU [without fear]. Never at Westminster-Hall, nor at the Parliament House since anno 1679 that the second Westminster parliament sat there till Monday Feb 4 instant, nor have scarce ever walked one turn in that hall without fear since anno 1662 till the day aforesaid, when I walked with true liberty and freedom.’10
Behind the doors of the Convention, politicians’ nerves were fraying. Williamites in the Lords moved to offer the throne to the Prince and Princess jointly. The motion was defeated. That was one result which must have been shouted down the steps, rippled across Westminster Hall and immediately filled the town. Alliances were made and broken. Danby now headed the faction which wanted Mary as sole monarch – he went so far as to vote against the throne’s being vacant, and to bring Henry Compton with him. At Devonshire’s house he had a furious row with Halifax, ‘one for the Prince, the other for the Princess’. ‘Nothing yet towards any settlement’,11 John Evelyn wrote anxiously in his diary. Everything seemed to be going the way of the Exclusion Crisis, and of 1640 before it.
There was one additional factor, now, however, which the politicians in the Convention seemed to have forgotten.
‘During all these debates,’ Gilbert Burnet wrote, ‘and the great heat with which they were managed, the Prince’s own behaviour was very mysterious. He stayed at St James’s; he went little abroad; access to him was not very easy. He heard all that was said to him, but seldom made any answers. He did not affect to be affable, or popular, nor would he take any pains to gain any one person over to his party.’12 A Louis XIV might have donned the mask to hide inner tension. William had the nerve to play his long game, but he would never be able to play it to the gallery. His cough worsened. Evelyn remarked his ‘morose temper’13 when he visited court on the 29th. And yet this was the man without whose support none of the furious words exchanged at Westminster would mean a thing. In the end William could choose what role he pleased, Halifax had told him late in December, because ‘nobody knew what to do without him’.14 William’s adviser Caspar Fagel was present during the argument at Devonshire’s house. Eventually Halifax turned to him and asked what the Prince thought of Mary taking the throne. Fagel demurred, saying he knew nothing of William’s thoughts, but at last he agreed to tell them his own opinion: ‘he believed the Prince would not like to be his wife’s gentleman usher’.15 Caspar Fagel said nothing off the cuff. Danby certainly took his words as a hint. ‘“He hoped they all knew enough now,”’ he said, ‘“for his part he knew too much”’, and he stormed out. Was the conversation pre-arranged? Halifax had already been told what William’s terms were: he would not stay in England if James returned; he was not interested in Mary as sole monarch, nor in a regency. With the Convention deadlocked, it was time for the Prince to broadcast these views more openly. Halifax, Danby and a group of other peers were summoned to St James’s, and ushered into the presence of the hunched, sickly figure who held England’s future in his hand. ‘No man could esteem a woman more than he did the Princess,’ William told them coolly, ‘but he was so made, that he could not think of holding anything by apron-strings.’ So much for Queen Mary.* As for a regency,
‘he would say nothing against it, if it was thought the best means for settling their affairs: only he thought it necessary to tell them, that he would not be the Regent: so, if they continued in that design, they must look out for some other person to be put in that post ... If they did think fit to settle [the crown] otherwise, he would not oppose them in it: but he would go back to Holland and meddle no more in their affairs ... wh
atsoever others might think of a crown, it was no such thing in his eyes, but that he could live very well, and be well pleased without it.’16
Baffled and admiring, the politicians were dismissed. William had revealed the Convention’s debates for what they were: ideological, parochial, academic. What good was there in promoting a regency when they had no candidate for regent? Why debate justifications for Mary’s succession, when the Princess herself would write from Holland, as she did soon afterwards, demurely accepting whatever her husband willed? There only ever was one realistic option for England: to make William King. The alternative was a return to civil war: to Edgehill, and Marston Moor and Naseby, to the cycle England could never break, a return to conflict, as the logic of such irreconcilable positions dictated.
The politicians in the Convention had grown up with civil war. They could not return to strife with William’s soldiers patrolling the capital; they would not when there was so much worse to fear than a Williamite monarchy: for Whigs, the return of James, for Tories, the men of the Good Old Cause. The past half century had seen every interest in English politics attempt to monopolise power: crown, parliament, army. All had failed. Compromise was the only option left.
On 6 February, representatives of both houses met in the Painted Chamber at Westminster. The doors were closed. ‘Divers mysteries or secrets there are in our government,’ Roger Morrice wrote, ‘that the wisdom of the nation thought fit to keep so, and never to open nor determine.’17 At the heart of the Revolution there had always been a dense fog, and the central compromise of the Convention would also be lost to sight. Bystanders must have tried to read something from the faces of the politicians emerging after four hours of debate: Henry Pollexfen inscrutable, Clarendon flushed with anger. But when the Lords gathered again to debate the original Commons motion of abdication and vacancy, their resistance was over. William Legge, Dartmouth’s schoolboy son, worked his way next to the woolsack for some of these debates. The peers backed down, he thought, because if they had not ‘it must have ended in a civil war’.18 He heard Halifax and Danby speak for compromise. He heard the furious last ditch expostulations of Ailesbury and Clarendon. At the last vote, about ten o’clock at night, Clarendon took a seat next to the Earl of Thanet.
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