The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  ‘I asked him how he came to leave us in this last vote; for he had gone all along with us in every vote: he is a man of great worth. He told me he was of our mind, and thought we had done ill in admitting the monarchy to be elective ... but he thought there was an absolute necessity of having a government; and he did not see it likely to be any other way than this.’19

  Exhausted, Clarendon joined Bishop Turner of Ely afterwards. ‘We had not eaten all day’, he wrote in his diary. ‘I think this was the most dismal day I ever saw in my life. God help us: we are certainly a miserable, undone people.’ Exactly four years before, Roger and Dudley North had raced up to the roof of the Banqueting House to proclaim James King. Now, without division, the Lords passed a motion to offer the crown to William and Mary.

  There remained the question of a scheme of government to accompany this offer.

  There were many, even among radicals in the Commons, who would have been content to let it drop and press ahead with what they had won. But what price then the principles for which so many of them had endured years of exile? ‘People are astonished’, John Locke wrote from Holland.

  ‘They have an opportunity offered to ... set up a constitution that may be lasting for the security of civil rights and the liberty and property of all the subjects of the nation. These are thoughts worthy such a Convention as this ... [If they] think of mending some faults piecemeal or anything less than the great frame of the government, they will let slip an opportunity which cannot ... last long.’20

  Nonetheless, in the spirit of the Painted Chamber compromise, George Treby struck out Whig references to original contract and the fundamental laws from the ‘Heads of Grievances’ he had drawn up, along with any demands which would need new legislation. What exactly was the compromise which had been reached behind closed doors? In essence, that the Whigs would get their King and Queen, but for accepting this kink in the hereditary succession, Tories would be allowed to preserve at least the fiction of their maxims. No one would proclaim a revolution. No one would suggest that England had returned to a state of nature. The year 1688 was a little local difficulty, a touch on the helm of state. The ousting of the monarch would not be allowed to create a precedent.

  The Declaration of Rights would eventually be patched together by a second committee headed by John Somers. It was Somers who tacked Treby’s ‘Heads of Grievances’ to the offer of the throne, and cut and pasted the document into its final form. It began with a catalogue of James’s offences, including his use of the dispensing power, his standing army, and subversion of the electoral process and judiciary. It declared James to have abdicated the government and the throne to be vacant. It listed the ‘ancient rights and liberties’ asserted by the Convention, and expressed confidence that his ‘Highness the Prince of Orange will still preserve them from the violation of their rights’. Then, and only then, did it declare William and Mary joint King and Queen. To William alone was reserved ‘the sole and full exercise of the Regal Power’. The line of succession was established to keep William on the throne in the event of Mary’s death, and then to descend to her sister Anne. Beyond that no one was yet able to see.

  It was hardly a clarion call for freedom. Somers’s committee members were not visionaries but lawyers, not ardent revolutionaries but middleaged men who had lived through too much political trouble. Even so, it was too much for some. Agreement may have been reached in the Painted Chamber, but that did not remove all acrimony from English politics. Bitterness coloured the evil-tempered debate in the Commons which established Somers’s group, and spread when their first draft was blocked in the Lords. On the evening of 8 February the whole agreement came close to unravelling as word came out that Tory bishops were closeted with William persuading him that the Whigs – republicans all – were trying to bind up his monarchy in conditions. The Tories had sprung their trap and Sir Edward Seymour was heard boasting that he had delayed the Proclamation by a fortnight. Whigs were apoplectic. Their enemies seemed to have stolen their Convention, hi-jacked their King. In Holland, of course, William was seen as an autocrat – their republican allies there had always warned them against him. Passive obedience, absolute loyalty, powers untramelled by law – that was the monarchy Tories could offer William. It was hardly surprising the Prince showed himself willing to listen.

  An autocrat William might have been, but he was also a realist. He listened for a time – long enough, perhaps, to show the Whigs he was not their man either – and then bowed to the inevitable. William wanted delay no more than the Whigs did. And so the Declaration of Rights went through the Lords, and Mary was instructed to cross the North Sea from Holland. And with only barely decent haste, arrangements began for a ceremony of proclamation. It would take place in the Banqueting House on 13 February, Ash Wednesday.

  John Locke had been gradually winding up his affairs in Holland ever since news came of King James’s flight. He made no haste. He would not be a member of the Convention. He had friends in Holland like Benjamin Furly and Philip van Limborch whom he was in no hurry to leave. He had papers to arrange, his Epistola, the Treatises on Government (so relevant to the debates in London, but already too late to influence them), a new work on human knowledge. But then came an offer he could not refuse, to accompany Carey Mordaunt with Mary’s party sailing for England. ‘You will, I am sure,’ he wrote to Limborch,

  ‘understand what a convenient opportunity this is for me to make the voyage in a light-hearted company among so many ships of war, when the sea is everywhere infested by pirates ... But neither she [Carey Mordaunt] nor I so much as dreamt of such an early departure ... The lady informed me of this haste two days ago, and warned me to pack my belongings instantly, little prepared as I was for it ... Again and again goodbye and continue to love me, honoured sir, your most obedient and devoted, JL.’21

  And so his luggage was packed up and addressed to Awnsham Churchill, and Locke and Carey Mordaunt joined the Princess at Brill.

  There was a delay, however, when storms blew up in the North Sea. For two days, therefore, Locke had a chance to examine at close quarters in the little coastal town the woman who was about to become England’s Queen.

  Mary was now twenty-six years old, approachable in manner, in appearance stately rather than beautiful – her height made her tower over her diminutive husband. Her years in Holland had been exceptionally happy. The court was informal, while the pious temper of Dutch life suited her. For there was a good deal of her father’s religiosity in Mary. Like him she kept devotional papers in which she castigated herself for moral failings, and like him tended to turn public events into a drama of her own spiritual life. Unlike James, however, she had never involved herself in politics. At William’s instruction she had led public devotions while he set off for England and paraded herself in public, as d’Avaux reported, ‘avec un visage fort gai’.22 She had followed his wishes in refusing to become part of a settlement without him. The English crisis had unfolded without her involvement.

  Yet she had some premonition of the difficulties that lay ahead. When she received her husband’s summons,

  ‘I did not sleep the whole night but lay thinking how much I should suffer in leaving a place where I knew how happy I could be ... then the uncertainty of what might be done [in England], the misfortunes of my father, the thought of coming in his place, the lining all this together made me very loath to leave Holland.’23

  Her doubts returned when she first caught sight of the English coast. Many conflicting feelings must have been at war in her: apprehension, joy at returning home, guilt. Her sister Anne was waiting to greet her at Greenwich, and the Thames was lined with small boats and flags. Ships fired salutes, and guns boomed from the Tower; along the Southwark shore, men in the timber yards loosed off muskets into the air. Mary’s barge carried one of the banners which William’s fleet had flown at Torbay and it was William who met her at the Privy Stair, at the opposite end of Whitehall gardens from the Banqueting House. The last tim
e she had seen him was when he took ship at Brill nearly four months earlier.

  ‘I found him in a very ill condition as to his health, he had a violent cough upon him and was grown extremely lean. He could not restrain, as soon as we were alone we both shed tears of joy to meet, and of sorrow for meeting in England, both wishing it might have been in Holland, both bewailing the loss of liberty we had left behind and were sensible we should never enjoy here; and in that moment we found a beginning of the constraint we were to endure here after, for we durst not let ourselves go on with these reflections, but dried up our tears lest it should be perceived when we went out.’24

  There was a reception planned for the evening. How should Mary behave? The whole court would be there to watch every nuance of expression and unpick every word she spoke. Composing her nerves, Mary took instruction, as always, from her husband. Perhaps William was mindful of the sour impression he had made on the English himself. Mary was ordered to make her entrance ‘as to a wedding, radiant and jolly’ – the shocked description was by John Evelyn, who went on to recount the other jarring reports which soon went around town: that Mary had risen early the next day and gone from room to room, taking stock of the palace; that she slept in Mary of Modena’s bed, played cards, and failed to show even ‘reluctancy, at least, of assuming her father’s crown’, or make ‘some apology, testifying her regret ... which would have shewed very handsomely to the world’.25

  Such tales must have seemed particularly shocking to Evelyn’s circle and the Tories around the Archbishop at Lambeth Palace, Roger North among them.* But perhaps such men would never see any good in Ash Wednesday. The next morning the new King and Queen woke to the same teeming rain which had greeted the Prince’s entrance into the capital. Stagings had already been erected outside the Banqueting House. In Westminster, members of the Convention gathered early. There was no precedent for the ceremony of proclaiming a new King and Queen while the old one still lived. Gregory King, newly made Lancaster Herald, had no tradition to follow. His own sentiments turned him to King James, his biographer thought, and the ‘hereditary descent of the crown’,26 and one can only wonder how many others among the spectators and dignitaries felt their loyalties divided as they watched the members of the Convention troop through the rain to the Banqueting House. They must have noticed the thin turnout among peers – there were fewer than fifty of them. The day may have recalled no precedents to a herald, but there was no end to the memories it aroused in men and women who had lived through the past fifty years in England. It was at the Banqueting House that Charles II had been restored, and here, of course, his father had been beheaded. Did John Wildman glance at the third window on the right as he walked in? The ghost of Charles I, kneeling in shirtsleeves, haunted the ceremony. Peers filed to the right, Commons to the left. Yeomen of the Guard lined the walls. William and Mary, the new King and Queen, stood at the far end of the room, looking tense. William was wearing a cinnamon-coloured suit. The two Speakers, Powle and Halifax, led the Convention towards them in three waves, bowing after each advance. When they stopped, the Clerk of Parliament unrolled the Declaration of Rights and started to read its prescriptions for just government:

  ‘That the pretended power of suspending of laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal.’

  ‘That Elections of Members of Parliament ought to be free.’

  ‘That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.’

  If this was no ringing droits de l’homme, if the fiction on which it rested was of an ancient constitution unchanged, there was still no doubting the drama of what was happening. ‘I would not have our purchase, like the Indians, to give gold for rattles’,27 one Convention member had joked. No previous monarch had stood, as William did, a taut expression on his face, to hear Parliament set out its terms. Upon the demise ... of one King the successor dates his reign – that had been Roger North’s maxim; four years earlier, he and his brother had proclaimed James’s succession from the Banqueting House roof. Instead, these new monarchs would date their reign from the reading of a lawyer’s contract by the clerk of Parliament.

  Mary, junior partner in the dual monarchy, signified her assent by ‘her looks and a little curtsey’. William replied for them both:

  ‘We thankfully accept what you have offered. And as I had no other intention in coming hither than to preserve your religion, laws and liberties, so you may be sure that I shall endeavour to support them and shall be willing to concur in anything that shall be for the good of the kingdom and to do all that is in my power to advance the welfare and glory of the nation.’

  Then it was time for the new monarchs to be proclaimed. Gregory King was waiting with the other heralds and trumpeters at Whitehall Gate. The ceremony would be repeated at Temple Bar, on Cheapside and at the Royal Exchange. That night bonfires blazed all over London. In St James’s Square the pyre towered four storeys high, with ‘a small scaffold aloft, on which were the Pope and the Devil, and ... the Lord Chancellor’ – George Jeffreys, who was now drinking himself to death in the Tower – ‘[and] they were all cast into the fire and burned, with shouts and acclamations of the people’.’28 Outside Watts coffee house another construction was topped by an effigy of Father Petre. It exploded at the climax of the celebration, and the smell of gunpowder drifted through the fashionable streets of the West End. London smelled gunpowder, then – but it was not the destruction which might have been. England had a King again. The crisis was over.

  Or was it? An odd little interruption had marred the proclamation ceremony when the heralds reached Temple Bar. An official knocked on the gates to demand admittance to the City, and from behind them a voice replied, Where is King James the Second? That was unscripted, as was the answer: He is dead, He is dead, He is dead, repeated three times. But King James was not dead, he was in France. And four weeks later, on 12 March 1689, he landed in Ireland to join his army.

  III

  ‘A CURTAIL’D MUNGRIL MONARCHY, HALF COMMONWEALTH’

  ‘Fear and Popery has united us: when that is over we shall divide again.’1

  Henry Pollexfen, 29 January 1689

  James’s landing provided a sombre backdrop to preparations for the new monarchs’ coronation. It was not the only threat hanging over the Revolution. On 17 March, five days after James stepped ashore at Kinsale, a Scottish regiment at Ipswich mutinied. They refused orders to go to Flanders and marched north instead. Dutch troops were sent after them; there was very nearly an armed clash. Roger Morrice picked up stories of soldiers at Ware refusing orders for Ireland, and of numerous desertions. Fourteen regiments of the occupying army paraded before the new King in Hyde Park on 19 February. Was that the only power by which he held the throne? There was great bitterness about William’s treatment of the lawful King, and widespread confusion about what the Convention meant. ‘There was no great hope of a lasting peace from this settlement,’ Halifax told Sir John Reresby as he came out of the final Lords debate, ‘however, it was the best that could be made at this time.’2 There was no reason to think that the Convention was any more than another scene in a long-running political tragedy. Reresby, one of the few who had stood up to the Revolution, found it easy enough to list the causes of popular malcontent: the Prince’s duplicity, the European war into which England would now be dragged, perhaps most of all, the occupying Dutch forces. There were no demonstrations for William now, no waving of oranges on sticks. The English did not find it easy to reject their King. Even before William and Mary were crowned, Halifax told Reresby that ‘as the nation now stood,’

  ‘if the King was a Protestant (viz. King James), he could not be kept out four months; but my Lord Danby went further, for he said that if he would give the satisfactions in point of religion which he might, it would be hard to resist him as he was.’3

  Apart from resentment, uncertainty was the g
reatest emotion in evidence as work on the coronation went ahead. What kind of king would William be? And what kind of political settlement would emerge in the years ahead? For the heralds in charge of the ceremony, planned for 11 April, there was a more immediate dilemma: how to weave a spell of tradition over the Abbey as if nothing had changed, and England’s history stretched back in an unbroken parade of funerals and coronations such as this one. One can only wonder what Gregory King thought of a coronation which had not been preceded by a funeral, and featured two monarchs, two crowns, a replica of King Edward’s chair for the Queen to sit in, and no Archbishop of Canterbury. Sancroft was still hiding in Lambeth Palace, and Henry Compton, Bishop of London, would conduct the ritual instead. We know what William thought of it. ‘Foolish old popish ceremony’, he snapped at Witsen, a newly-arrived envoy from the United Provinces. Perhaps he was embarrassed, or merely anxious not to tell a Dutchman how much he had wanted this prize. We know what Mary, the junior monarch, thought. She could not rid herself of guilt, and was troubled by the ‘worldly considerations’ which decreed a very public communion to underline her difference from her Catholic father.