Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  A week later Anne returned to the subject. There was ‘much reason to believe it is a false belly’:

  For, methinks, if it were not, there having been so many stories and jests made about it, she should, to convince the world, make either me or some of my friends feel her belly; but quite contrary, whenever one talks of her being with child, she looks as if she were afraid one should touch her. And whenever I happen to be in the room as she has been undressing, she has always gone into the next room to put on her smock.5

  Anne’s suspicions were echoed by Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby. He reported to the Prince of Orange that ‘many of our ladies say that the Queen’s great belly seems to grow faster than they had observed their own to do’.6

  On 10 June, the Queen gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward Stuart, Prince of Wales, who was immediately declared first in line to the throne, ahead of his grown-up half-sisters. Officially, the joyous event was greeted with delight and enthusiasm nationwide. After nearly thirty years of dynastic uncertainty, ever since Charles II’s Restoration in 1660, at last the country had a healthy male heir. Bonfires were lit, gazettes and newsletters were ‘stuffed with nothing but rejoicings from Towns for the birth of the Prince’, and the government spent £12,000 on fireworks with which to celebrate.

  At The Hague, however, the news was greeted less enthusiastically. Prince William banned all public celebrations of the Prince’s birth. Firm statements were issued, insisting on the irrelevance of the new Prince of Wales to the English succession.

  The tide of speculation continued unabated. ‘People give themselves a great liberty in discoursing about the young Prince, with strange reflections on him, not fit to insert here,’ one contemporary commentator wrote. Matters were not helped by the fact that the deeply sceptical Princess Anne had been away at Bath Spa taking the waters at the moment when the Queen went into labour, and was thus unable to testify to the authenticity or otherwise of the birth itself. Writing to her sister on 18 June, Anne expressed her ‘concern and vexation’ that ‘I should be so unfortunate to be out of town when the Queen was brought to bed, for I shall never now be satisfied whether the child be true or false’. Reiterating her suspicions to her absent sister, Anne expressed surprise that the Queen had so miscalculated the date at which the baby was due, and had thereby ‘chosen’ to give birth during her sister-in-law’s absence. Had Anne perhaps, as more than one contemporary pamphlet proposed, been persuaded to leave London for fear that she would be a too ‘vigilant observer’ at the lying in?

  If the timing of the pregnancy had been judged suspicious, the arrival of a hale and hearty male heir now prompted a flurry of publications voicing the opinion that somehow or other a surrogate baby had been substituted for Mary’s sickly or stillborn one – perhaps smuggled into the delivery room in a warming pan by a midwife. Talk of a ‘warming-pan plot’ became so loud and persistent that four months after the birth, on 22 October 1688, the King called a special meeting of the Privy Council, at which forty-two men and women who had attended the delivery, or had access to the Queen immediately prior to it, presented their testimony, giving the reasons and evidence for their sincere belief that the Prince of Wales was the King’s bona fide son. These depositions were lodged in the official records of the Court of Chancery (thereby giving them quasi-legal status), printed and widely circulated – ostensibly the conclusive rebuttal of the malicious rumours.7

  By the autumn, however, reactions to events in England had moved from the domestic setting to an international one, and a fresh wave of rumours from abroad seemed destined to drown out those at home concerning the legitimacy or otherwise of the newborn Prince. Prince William of Orange was reported to be engaged in large-scale preparations for an invasion of England, to defend his wife’s claim to the English throne. It had been suspected for several years that the Dutch Stadholder might eventually use military might to strengthen the dynastic bond between his wife’s country and his own. Whether or not Prince James Francis Edward could be proved beyond a shadow of doubt to be the King’s flesh and blood (and before DNA testing, what mother could ever provide such conclusive proof?), official recognition of the baby as his by James II had put paid to William’s expectations that his marriage to James’s daughter would bring royal status for the house of Orange.

  On 18 September, two months before the actual invasion, John Evelyn went to Whitehall Palace in London from his home in Deptford and ‘found the Court in the utmost consternation on report of the Prince of Orange’s landing; which put Whitehall into so panic a fear, that I could hardly believe it possible to find such a change’.8

  Since his marriage to James I’s eldest daughter Mary in 1677, Prince William of Orange had more or less confidently assumed that his wife would one day sit on the throne of England, and that the country would become, to all intents and purposes, his to govern. William’s own mother, Mary Stuart, was Charles II’s eldest sister (she had died of smallpox when William was only ten). Thus William was his wife Princess Mary’s first cousin, and the reigning English King’s nephew as well as his son-in-law. William and Mary’s joint claim had seemed irrefutable, and the fact that both were staunch and committed Protestants was a major point in their favour in the eyes of the English. By 1686 Mary herself was expressing the hope that William would one day become King of England.9 The marriage in 1677 between the Dutch Stadholder and Princess Mary had been understood at the time by the people of the Dutch Republic as intended primarily to serve a political rather than a dynastic purpose. After the traumatic events of 1672 – when the French had almost overrun the United Provinces, and the Dutch had abandoned the republican rule of the De Witt brothers for the reassuringly militaristic régime of the young Stadholder William of Orange – the northern Netherlands had believed themselves to be under permanent threat of invasion by the French forces of Louis XIV. It had indeed been the actual arrival of French troops on Dutch soil that had driven the States General to reinstate William as Stadholder, as well as head of the Dutch military forces, after twenty years during which the house of Orange had been expressly barred from holding the position. Acclaimed by the Dutch Republic then, after he had successfully driven back the French, Prince William was determined to avoid any future expansionist moves northwards on the part of the French King by creating a counter-balancing alliance with the English and the Spanish. Having tried unsuccessfully to persuade Charles II and his government to become involved in defending the Low Countries from the French predator by diplomacy, the United Provinces (which had definitively won independence from Spanish rule in 1648, after eighty years of bitter struggle) hoped that as Charles’s son-in-law William would have better success in turning English foreign policy in their favour.10

  In this, William and the Dutch were largely mistaken. Charles II remained cautiously neutral as an expansionist France continued to encroach on its anxious European neighbours. In 1678, the Treaty of Aachen extended the French border northwards to include Tournai and Charleroi. In 1681, Louis XIV attacked from his eastern border and took the strategic town of Strasbourg. In 1682, in a move designed specifically to antagonise the Dutch Stadholder, Louis seized Orange in southern France – an independent principality of which William was titular head, and whence the family claim to royal status derived. In 1684, France annexed Luxembourg. Faced with Charles’s continued reluctance to be drawn into the conflict, William was driven practically to despair by England’s strategic isolationism. ‘The insufferable behaviour of England,’ he expostulated in 1681, ‘is the principal cause of our present dangers because of which the situation at the end of this year will perhaps be even worse than in 1672.’11

  The accession to the English throne of the Catholic James II in 1685 removed any further hopes of strengthening the Anglo–Dutch accord by family-based strategic alliance between England and the Protestant Low Countries. Instead, there were now real fears in the Dutch Republic that James would enter into a formal treaty with Louis XIV, significantly strengthenin
g the French King’s power base, thereby allowing France to pursue its dream of universal rule in Europe by taking control of the Netherlands.

  So when news of Maria of Modena’s pregnancy reached William of Orange, it gave concrete form to his growing alarm over England’s intentions regarding, and influence over, the wider political scene. It strengthened his resolve to put into action his ‘Grand Design’ – to invade England, settle the uncertainties over the succession, and assert his and his wife’s joint claim in person. Long before the English Queen’s condition was public knowledge, William’s agents and intelligence-gatherers in England had let him know that his and Mary’s position in the English inheritance stakes might be at risk. Whether plausible or not, the clamour of accusation and counter-accusation concerning the ‘warming-pan plot’ provided William with an excellent excuse for launching his invasion. Indeed, in the ‘invitation’ extended to William by a group of influential Englishmen on the eve of his fleet’s sailing for England, the ‘immortal seven’ who put their names to it reproached the Dutch Stadholder for having sent official congratulations to James following the birth:

  We must presume to inform your highness that your compliment upon the birth of the child (which not one in an thousand believes to be the Queen’s) hath done you some injury. The false imposing of that upon the Princess and the nation, being not only an infinite exasperation of the people’s minds here, but being certainly one of the chief causes upon which the declaration of your entering the kingdom in a hostile manner must be founded on your part. Although many other reasons are to be given on ours.12

  William’s Declaration of Reasons, published on the eve of the Dutch invasion to justify his unprecedented intervention by force in the affairs of a neighbouring nation state, did indeed cite as one of the grounds for what looked, on the face of it, like a piece of unwarranted international aggression, ‘the just and visible grounds of suspicion’ that ‘the Pretended Prince of Wales was not born by the Queen’. Should the invasion succeed, he promised to refer to Parliament ‘the enquiry into the birth of the pretended Prince of Wales, and of all things relating to it and the right of succession’. In the minds of the Dutch Stadholder and the Protestant faction in England, dynastic and political strategic planning thus became closely enmeshed. The claim that the birth of James II’s son was ‘suppositious’, however far-fetched, symbolised the acute concern on both sides of the Narrow Sea at this unexpected disruption of the anticipated train of events.

  By 1688, the Dutch house of Orange had been actively manoeuvring to increase its control in the Low Countries and its wider European influence for three generations (since the turbulent times of William III’s greatgrandfather, William the Silent).13 In the climate of uncertainty that surrounded the birth of James II’s son, one thing is beyond a shadow of doubt: William of Orange acted with characteristic personal decisiveness in seizing the opportunity to intervene in English dynastic affairs while the country was internally in considerable political disarray. William had always taken a keen interest in English dynastic affairs. Third in line to the English throne after James II’s daughters, he himself was known to consider that his claim was technically stronger than theirs. Orphaned at the age of ten, he had been brought up carefully to understand the importance of his English heritage. His mother (James II’s older sister) had been quite clear that her royal line was superior to that of James’s children, since James’s first wife Anne Hyde had been a mere commoner (married hastily, and against his family’s wishes, indeed when pregnant with their first child, who was stillborn).

  Constantijn Huygens junior records in his diary that on a wet and windy day in October 1673, when he and the future King William III were in the field, engaged in military action against the French, the Stadholder talked, at table during the midday meal, about ‘the death of his grandfather the King [Charles I] and affairs in England’. His own line, he insisted, surely took priority over that of James: ‘He said that if the Duke of York [James] died before the King [Charles II], the right of [James’s] daughters to take precedence over himself with regard to the Crown would be disputed.’14

  The opportunity for William to marry James II’s elder daughter in 1677 significantly strengthened his claim to the English throne, since in the dynastic chess-game it united the second and third in line. The claim became a real prospect at another moment when the inheritance rankings of the various possible claimants on the English throne were apparently in the process of reorganisation. Four years into James’s marriage to his second wife (his first, Anne, died in 1671), Maria of Modena had given birth to one daughter who had lived only months, while a second daughter, Isabel, was a year old. Now, in spring 1677, the Queen was again pregnant, and the clear expectation was that she would finally give birth to a boy, who would take precedence over James’s daughters by his first marriage as claimant to the English throne.

  The possibility of Charles II’s brother producing a male heir by his second wife meant that at that moment Princess Mary looked temporarily a less attractive figure dynastically, less of a ‘catch’ on the international royal marriage market, and hence suitable as a bride to a member of the comparatively minor house of Orange. Maria of Modena did indeed give birth to a son, Charles, Duke of Cambridge, just three days after William and Mary’s wedding on 4 November 1677. Princess Mary’s new husband was one of the little Prince’s godfathers. Baby Charles died, however, just a month later, on 12 December.15

  William’s dynastic interests were not merely aspirational in European royal terms. They were inseparably entwined with his political and military aspirations, in particular with a strategy of pressuring England into an anti-French coalition. The ambitious dual purpose of the match with Princess Mary Stuart was simultaneously to advance his chances of inheriting the English crown, and to exploit the favour of the English government, whose expressed desire in 1677 was to assist the Dutch in their struggle to retain their independence in the face of a ruthlessly expansionist France.16

  William of Orange’s marriage was the second occasion within forty years on which the minor royal house of Orange successfully exploited a situation in which a Stuart bride’s currency on the international dynastic market was temporarily reduced by circumstances, in order to move themselves strategically up the European royal rankings, increasing their power inside and outside the United Provinces. The first of these occasions had been William’s own English mother Princess Mary Stuart’s marriage to his Dutch father, the future William II of Orange, in May 1641.

  In the 1630s, a dynastic alliance with the ruling line of the neighbouring Protestant power was an obvious, if ambitious, aim for William III’s grandfather, Frederik Hendrik, and his wife Amalia van Solms. In addition to the obvious strategic advantages of consolidating Protestant influence in the region, an Orange–Stuart marriage was particularly attractive to the Stadholder’s ambitious wife, who had met and married her husband while serving as lady-in-waiting to Charles I’s sister Elizabeth of Bohemia, resident in The Hague with her court since the early 1620s. By marrying her son to the former Queen of Bohemia’s niece, Amalia could reasonably consider herself to have risen to comparable royal status with her former royal mistress.

  The immediate incentive for an Anglo–Dutch match, however, was a pressing political one. In 1639, Charles I, who during the period of his ‘personal rule’ (rule without recourse to Parliament) had drawn increasingly close to Catholic Spain, allowed the Hapsburg Spanish ruler Philip IV to send a large fleet towards Flanders via English waters and harbours, and there was talk of a marriage between Charles’s eldest daughter and the Spanish Crown Prince.17

  In late 1639, the senior Dutch ambassador François van Aerssen, Heer van Sommelsdijck, was sent to England to negotiate closer relations with the United Provinces, including the re-ratification of an existing peace treaty between the two countries. Charles proved reluctant to jeopardise his relations with Spain by throwing in his lot with the Dutch, but in the course of their discus
sions, van Aerssen learned that the King was interested in a marriage between the Stadholder’s son William and one of his daughters. At the end of 1640, after protracted negotiations between representatives of the Stadholder and the English King, it was agreed that Frederik Hendrik and Amalia’s only son, the future William II of Orange, would marry Charles I’s five-year-old second daughter, Elizabeth.

  The Stadholder and his wife would naturally have preferred their son to marry Charles’s eldest daughter, but this was perhaps too much to expect. Indeed, Frederik Hendrik’s ambassadors – first Jan van der Kerckhoven, Lord of Heenvliet, and then van Aerssen – had been trying unsuccessfully to pursue this even more attractive marriage proposition since the previous year. As van Aerssen pointed out to the English King, a marriage between his eldest daughter and the Dutch Stadholder’s son would bring family benefits beyond those of mere strategic political alliance with Spain:

  By this marriage you will gain for yourself a first claim on the affections and interests of His Highness and the United Provinces, while if you seek kinship with a house of greater power than your own [like Spain], you can expect nothing from their ambitions, but will only lose your daughter, whom you will force into wedding interests opposed to your own.18

  When van Aerssen advanced this argument in late 1639, he was roundly rebuffed. The match, he was told, was out of the question. Princess Mary was to become the bride of a member of the ruling house of Spain, thereby securing the ‘Spanish Match’ Charles had failed to secure for himself a decade and a half earlier. The eldest daughter of so elevated a royal line as the Stuarts could, in any case, hardly become the bride of a mere minor princely house like that of Orange.