*Clarendon had an unsatisfactory interview with Mary’s sister Anne during which she excused her ‘merry’ behaviour by saying that ‘she never loved to do anything that looked like an affected constraint. I answered, that I was sorry her Royal Highness should think, that showing a trouble for the King her father’s misfortunes, should be interpreted by any as an affected constraint.’
III‘A Curtail’d Mungril Monarchy, Half Commonwealth’
*One of the many dishes for a ‘Coronation Feast’ in a version of his Royal Cookery. Unfortunately, Lamb’s name was attached to cookery books for years after his death, so these later recipes are unreliable. But the Dutch Beef, at least, seems likely.
*The Convention had been turned into a parliament on 23 February.
‡William’s own belief that he was there by Providence will be discussed below.
*And he shall be as the light of the morning, when the Sun riseth, even a morning without clouds, as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain. 2 Samuel XXIII 3 & 4.
*Roger Morrice went so far as to copy out the names of every juryman in his Entring Book. ‘From all these Good Lord deliver us!’ he wrote underneath.
‡So Clarendon heard, but he didn’t believe it. ‘Strange blindness!’ he went on. Tories of his stamp could not rid themselves of the notion that William was a Commonwealth puppet.
*Edmund Bohun even found justification for the Revolution in Filmer: ‘If it please God for the correction of the Prince, or punishment of the people, to suffer Princes to be removed and others to be placed in their rooms, either by the factions of the nobility or rebellion of the people, in all such cases the judgment of God, who hath power to give and take away kingdoms, is most just.’
*‘I think this was no ill design,’ was Swift’s acerbic footnote to Burnet’s suggestion, ‘yet it hath not succeeded in mending Kings.’
*Nor did the party system which emerged after the Revolution descend to us in a direct line. One party, the Whigs, would eventually annihilate their rivals and monopolise power, leading to increasing control of politics by a narrow political class until, at the accession of George III, the groupings in parliament had much to do with aristocratic connection, a good deal less with ideology.
IV‘Equal Liberty For All’
*Signed by Mary because William was away in Europe.
V‘The Sad Tidings Of His Own Defeat’
*Although Evelyn made that entry on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution, which always made him moody.
*‘J’ai donc cru, Sire, ne devoir pas attendre plus longtemps à parler fortement, et qu’il seroit trop tard lorsque les affaires seroient entièrement désespérées, de faire des plaintes et des reproches qui ne seroient d’aucune utilité.’
*Ailesbury blamed all the ensuing trouble on the ‘very undigested brains peculiar to that nation’, so demonstrating why Irish MPs found James’s English supporters unspeakable.
*Once or twice, despite herself, she let the mask slip. ‘[Nottingham] brought me your letter yesterday, and I could not hold, so he saw me cry, which I have hindered myself from before everybody until then.’
VI‘An Infinite Desire of Knowledge’
*After a stay at Oates in January 1691, Newton wrote to thank the Mashams ‘for not thinking that I made a long stay there’. Damaris was probably delighted to have the famous scientist in her house. Whether the stay seemed long to Sir Francis Masham is another matter.
*Typical was the story Evelyn excitedly reported from an Italian traveller who told him ‘he had been in the desert of Africa and saw a creature, bodied like an ox, head like a pike fish, tail like a peacock’.
*Locke’s answer was a model of friendship and sensitivity. Newton later blamed his breakdown on insomnia, although some modern scholars have identified a crisis in his relationship with the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatier de Duillier.
*Like several Moderns, Bentley could not read Newton without being inspired to science fiction. ‘God Almighty ... may have made innumerable orders and classes of rational minds’, he mused in his final lecture. ‘We ought not ... to conclude that if there be rational inhabitants on the Moon or Mars or any unknown planets of other systems, they must therefore have human nature.’
VII‘One Hundred Per Cent Immediately!’
*The early word for shares, a direct borrowing of the Dutch actie.
*German Balls were supposed to save leather from damp. Blue Paper was that innovation in interior design, wallpaper.
*Lady Castlemaine was not put off even by Mancini’s seduction of her daughter.
IX‘The Idle and Gay Folk of The Town’
*In one of which he took revenge for an annoying afternoon when Mary summoned Purcell and John Gostling to play for her, only to silence these stars of the musical firmament with a request for the old Scotch ballad, Cold and Raw. Cold and Raw’s melody ran as a continuo through the next birthday ode.
*‘New Tunbridge Wells’ was the selling point: the scientist Robert Boyle had analysed the water and pronounced it identical to Tunbridge Wells water.
*Who had given Mary of Modena English lessons when she came to England. The Queen showed her gratitude by letting Barry wear her coronation robes on stage.
*Almost everything about Dido and Aeneas, including both its political overtones and the date of its first performance, is hotly disputed by historians of music.
*Who had courted controversy in the prologue he wrote for Dioclesian with slighting references to William’s progress in Ireland, female regencies, and political change – it was hastily suppressed.
X‘Reports of an Invasion’
*This was something of a habit, however, and Anne would have tried the patience of a saint. Mary fell dangerously ill in April 1690 and summoned her sister for a deathbed reconciliation after a previous falling-out. When she pledged all future kindness, Anne suggested she could start straight away with £20,000 a year.
*In 1700 Mary would suffer the humiliation of being snubbed by Madame de Maintenon after applying for help. ‘Je vous avoue que je suis estonnée et humiliée ... Hier nous prismes la résolution de vendre quelque pierreirie pour payer les pensions du mois de Septembre.’
XI‘The Whole art of War is Reduced to Money’
*‘ But I resolved to bear all patiently,’ Bohun went on, ‘that I might maintain my eldest and most beloved son in Cambridge, for whom I would willingly have sacrificed my life.’
*The phrase itself was first used in the 1730s.
*Named after Lorenzo Tonti, an adviser to Mazarin, tontines were a kind of lottery in which surviving subscribers to a central fund took dividends which increased year after year as the number of survivors dwindled.
XII‘A Blind Obedience is What a Rational Creature Should Never Pay’
*Some editions of which, by coincidence, Edmund Bohun had translated.
*In 1698 Edmund Bohun was rehabilitated with the post of Chief Justice of South Carolina. The colony suffered hurricane, floods, fire and a smallpox epidemic, and Bohun died of fever within a year.
XIV‘Nothing Is More Fantastical Than Credit’
*Lustring, a fashionable cloth whose technique was introduced by Huguenot immigrants.
*‘I never had a less sum of money in my mouth than three or four hundred thousand pound; I told ‘em I could bring in five or six friends of mine that should lend the Government that and more.’
XV‘A National Reformation of Manners’
*James II issued just such a document in 1688. He had noted, perhaps, that the Religious Societies led anti-Catholic sentiment, and hoped to appease them.
*Some Whigs would eventually migrate into the Tory party. Davenant’s sequel to the True Picture of a Modern Whig saw Tom Double’s ‘Old Whig’ friend Whiglove succeed to the family baronetcy of ‘Comeover’.
XVI‘The Evening of the World’
*With the striking exception of St Mary’s, whose rebuilt tower is one of English Baroque’s int
riguing gothic-baroque experiments, not altogether successful.
The Last Revolution Page 50