This lack of interest in English military support for the invasion was reflected in the process of determining where the best landing site for William’s fleet might be. Both the King’s and William’s supporters in England appear to have been uncertain as to where the Dutch armada would attempt to land. As we have seen, the Earl of Danby thought they might make landfall at Hull, and the same harbour was targeted as a potential embarkation point by the government. A number of English reports in October carried the news that the Dutch were at sea and preparing to land at Sole Bay in Suffolk. However, at this stage the Dutch fleet remained in dock, while Admiral Herbert, the Englishman nominally placed in charge of William’s invasion armada, counselled against making a landing in the north-east on the grounds that first, its coastline was extremely treacherous in the winter, secondly that it was sparsely populated and would afford less support for an invading army and thirdly that it contained a number of royal garrisons, such as those at Hull and Scarborough, which might slow the progress of the Prince’s forces. Although Herbert’s reasoning was sound, he was little more than a figurehead, designed to give a British face to what was a Dutch naval operation, and his advice held little sway. In fact, it appears that no firm decision was made on where to land the fleet, with the matter largely being left to which direction the wind was blowing in. This reveals again the extent to which the Dutch were relatively uninterested in factors such as the level of support for William’s intervention in different parts of England.
The invasion force first left the Netherlands on 30 October but was beaten back to harbour by a fierce storm in which several ships and five hundred horses were lost. Dutch news-sheets deliberately exaggerated the level of damage caused in order to lure the English into believing that lengthy repairs would be required before the armada could set out again. Such news was greeted with glee in Whitehall, where it appeared to the King that the special prayers he had ordered for the safety of the kingdom had brought the blessings of divine providence down upon him. The King’s reaction to the storm also revealed how far the concessions he had made in September were, in his view, no more than temporary expediencies. James immediately issued orders to stop the process of restoring borough charters. The dissenter Roger Morrice saw this as ‘very instructive to let us know that the Restauration proceeds not from inclination but from necessity and that the Court will change their Councils if the present distresses were over’.25
However, the damage that the Dutch fleet had incurred was quickly repaired and by 2 November the armada was under sail again, the famous ‘Protestant Wind’ blowing it along England’s south coast. For those who caught a glimpse of it, it was an awesome sight, one spectator at Dover recording that the flotilla was so large that while he had seen the first ship at ten in the morning, it was not until five in the afternoon that the last one went past. At this point the Prince ordered the fleet to stretch out in a line across the Channel between Dover and Calais, so that, according to Gilbert Burnet, ‘our Fleet reached within a league of each place … This sight would have ravish’d the most curious Eyes of Europe. When our Fleet was in its greatest splendour, the Trumpets and Drums playing various Tunes to rejoyce our hearts.’26 Lord Dartmouth had been given clear orders by James to ‘burn, take and otherwise destroy and disable’ the Prince of Orange’s boats, but instead the King’s Admiral chose to hang back and await further orders. While he waited the wind shifted direction, blowing south-westerly, leading the Dutch to make a landing at Brixham in Devon, whilst James’s ships were blown north and had to take shelter in the Downs (the stretch of water between Deal and the Woolwich Sands developed as an anchorage by Henry VIII).
The Dutch army disembarked on the auspicious date of 5 November (old style), the anniversary of England’s last deliverance from the threat of popery. An apocryphal local tradition holds that when William landed at Brixham and was asked what his business was he replied in a strong Dutch accent, ‘Mine goot people, mine goot people, I am only come for your goots, for all your goots’, to which, it was reported, a local wit replied, ‘Yes and for our chattels too.’27
It was not only the English who enjoyed poking fun at foreigners. While, over several days, the whole invasion force was gradually landed, William’s secretary and childhood tutor, Sir Constantijn Huygens, used his spare time to record the unusual habits of the local people. He was particularly struck by the fact that Englishwomen seemed to be habitual pipe smokers: ‘At one spot,’ Huygens recorded in his journal, ‘there were five women saluting [the Prince], each with a pipe of tobacco in her mouth, as we very often saw, smoking quite shamelessly, even young children of 13 or 14. We enjoyed studying the way these island people lived, and how addicted to tobacco they all were, men, women, even children.’ Huygens couldn’t stop laughing when his hostess, ‘young and pretty’, breastfed her baby while she smoked a pipe, which she handed to the child when he stopped sucking. The astonished Dutch politician recorded that the baby ‘took it and put in his mouth and tried hard to smoke’.28
On 9 November the Prince’s forces approached the city of Exeter, Burnet having already ascertained the day before that the mayor, Sir Christopher Broderick, would not attempt to resist William’s coming and that the bishop, deans and chapters of the cathedral had already fled. The Prince of Orange’s entrance into the city had all the hallmarks of a royal progress. The invasion force entered in full regalia, led by the Earl of Macclesfield and the other English cavalry. The arrival of the Prince’s troops also provided the people of Exeter with what was probably their first glimpse of black people, the English troops being swiftly followed by two hundred West African attendants, clad with ‘Imbroyder’d Caps lined with Fur, and Plumes of white Feathers’.29 After them came another two hundred Finnish troops dressed even more exotically than the Africans, wearing ‘Bear Skins taken from the Wild Beasts they had slain … with black Armour, and broad Flaming Swords’. William himself came in riding on a white horse, clad in armour and with forty-two footmen following behind him.30
News of William’s landing in the south-west on 5 November had reached James within twenty-eight hours, the messenger apparently killing seven horses (and almost himself) in making his frenetic ride to London. The capital and other towns and cities in England were now gripped by anti-Catholic rioting. The Catholic chapel in St James’s was set upon on 11 November by the mob, who were dispersed only by the promise from ‘Lord Craven and guards’ that they would blow it up the next day. However, as the priests came the following day to remove their possessions, their goods were seized by the crowd, who took two cartloads ‘and burnt them on Holborn Hill and in Smithfield; whereupon the guards were sent to suppress them, with orders to fire with bullet, which they did, and killed 4 or 5, and forced the rest to retreat’.31 On 14 November there were similar anti-Catholic riots in Norwich as a crowd of around a thousand people surrounded the Catholic chapel in the city.32 The rioting in London forced James to reconsider his initial plan to remain in the capital and wait for the Prince to come to him. Instead, he now prepared to go out to meet William’s forces at Salisbury and made arrangements, given the clear hostility of the populace, for the Queen and Prince of Wales to be taken out of the country to the safety of France.
The King left for the west of England on 17 November. Meanwhile the plans for a rebellion against his government led by Whig and Tory peers in the north came to fruition. The northern lords had delayed taking action owing to their confusion as to where William would land his invasion force, which turned to disappointment when news reached them that the Prince’s armada had arrived in the south-west. There had already been one failed pro-Williamite insurrection. A rising in Gloucestershire in support of the Prince had been rapidly put down by the loyal Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Beaufort. Lord Lovelace, a radical Whig peer and former associate of the notorious John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, had attempted to join up with William’s forces, taking seventy armed men to Exeter, but several of them were killed in a bloody skirmish wi
th Beaufort’s militia and Lovelace himself was captured. However, the concentration of the King’s forces in the south and the natural preoccupation of the government with William’s army in the west gave the northern conspirators greater opportunity to organise their resistance unabated. The first to publicly come out in support of the Prince was the hot-headed Whig peer Lord Delamere, who had earlier been implicated in the Monmouth rebellion. On 15 November Delamere urged his tenants and supporters in Cheshire and Lancashire to join him in taking up arms against the King. His declaration put the case for supporting the Prince of Orange in simple terms of choosing between doing nothing and accepting the onward march of Catholicism and slavery or taking up arms and striking a blow for Protestantism and traditional English liberties. ‘No man,’ he said, ‘can love fighting for its own sake, nor find any pleasure in Danger; And you may imagine I would be very glad to spend the rest of my days in peace, I having so great a share of Troubles. But I see All lies at stake, I am to chuse whether I will be a Slave and a Papist, or a Protestant and a Freeman: and the case being thus, I should think my self false to my Country, if I sate still at this time.’33
Delamere had chosen to break ranks with his co-conspirators and, rather than wait for assistance from William, take action independently. The lack of caution expressed in his words and actions contrasted with the more moderate position adopted by the Earl of Devonshire. He had entered Derby on 17 November with a sizeable force of cavalry drawn from his large household at Chatsworth and his tenantry. However, the declaration Devonshire issued in a bid to gather more support in order to seize control of Nottingham avoided any direct statement of support for the Prince of Orange and instead pressed only for a free Parliament which ‘the Army now on foot may not give any Interruption to’.34 Delamere joined Devonshire in Nottingham on 21 November. Having ascertained that the populace were loyal to the rebels (through raising a false alarm that a royal army was approaching, which led the public to hastily barricade the Trent bridge), the two issued a joint declaration which represented a middle-ground position between the demand for a free Parliament made in Derby and the unqualified call to arms issued in Cheshire. The conspirators acknowledged that it was ‘rebellion to resist a King that Governs by Law; but he was always accounted a Tyrant that made his Will the Law; and to resist such an one, we justly esteem no Rebellion, but a necessary Defence’. The King’s concessions, they said, were ‘like plums to children, by deceiving them for [a] while … till this present storm that threatens the Papists, be past, as soon as they shall be resettled, the former Oppression will be put on with greater vigour’. The only way that the constitution and church could be preserved from the threat of Catholic double-dealing was via the resolutions of a free Parliament.35
Delamere then moved south, where he met little opposition, the small force of loyal militia commanded by the Duke of Beaufort having melted away after the Duke chose to drop out of sight as William’s forces marched east. Delamere was able to free Lord Lovelace from Gloucester gaol without difficulty. In Yorkshire the appointment of the loyal Anglican the Duke of Newcastle as Lord Lieutenant in place of the Catholic Lord Fairfax did little to strengthen the Crown’s position in the county. Newcastle had had limited success in fulfilling royal orders to raise a regiment of eight hundred men and, as the invasion force had landed in the south-west, he saw little military value in keeping the regiment together. Newcastle also appeared to be completely unaware of who was involved in pro-Williamite plotting, appointing the conspirators John Darcy and Sir Henry Goodricke to the lieutenancy. The conspiracy in Yorkshire came to a head on 22 November, as the Earl of Danby used the militia to gain control of York. The Deputy Lieutenants had been assembled on the pretext of writing a loyal address to the King but actually so that they could put forward a declaration for a free Parliament and the Prince of Orange. At the meeting itself the signal was given that they were under attack from Catholics with a cry that the ‘papists were risen and had fired at the militia troops’. At this call Danby and his fellow conspirators ‘made a party with their servants of 100 hors, wel armed and well mounted, and rode up to the four militia troops drawn out for another purpas, and cryed for a free Parlament and the Protestant religion and noe poperie’.36 Having taken control of the militia, they then placed the loyalist governor, Sir John Reresby, under effective house arrest. The Yorkshire conspirators quickly moved on to take control of the magazine at Scarborough and then Hull, which was heavily defended and would have been much harder to take. However, a mutiny by the Protestant officers and men led to their taking over the town and placing Catholic officers and men in the gaol.
The closeness that the revolution came to outright war was revealed in Danby’s Thoughts of a private person about the justice of the gentleman’s undertaking at York (1689), in which he insisted upon the limited powers of kings of England and argued that if they acted arbitrarily they could be resisted ‘or else we might not resist the Devil should he creep into the Court in a Jesuits habit and get a comission to cut all our throats’. Danby rehearsed the argument, familiar from the Civil War, that it was not an attack on the sanctity of the King’s person to resist James’s unlawful commands. However, this was armed resistance and ‘if any thing befall his [James’s] person by their hands, it is but a chance and accidental thing, which may happen also in peaceable times’. The agreement made between the northern conspirators formally acknowledged that they were at war with the King, the lords signing an agreement to ‘oblige themselves upon their respective honours and faith to abide by and acquiesce in such expedients as shall be resolved the said subscribers to be sufficient during this time of war’.37
James himself now travelled westwards, accompanied by the French ambassador Barillon, preparing to meet the Prince of Orange’s forces in a pitched battle. Barillon commented on the poor morale of the King’s officers: ‘Even if they aren’t capable of treason it’s still obvious that they won’t fight with a good heart, and the army is perfectly aware of this.’38 James’s intelligence concerning William’s movements was poor, his spies were defecting to the Prince and the Dutch had effectively cut off lines of communication. It was also becoming increasingly difficult for him to know which of his officers he could trust. The regiments sent to make first contact with William’s army contained a number of leading conspirators, Lord Cornbury, the King’s nephew, Thomas Langston, in charge of the Duke of St Albans’ Horse, and Sir Francis Compton, of the Royal Horse Guards. On 16 November Cornbury and Langston went over to the Prince of Orange, Langston taking his whole regiment with him. Compton, however, lost his nerve and returned to the royal camp at Salisbury.
Cornbury’s desertion also brought over to William the Tory Sir Edward Seymour. It was Seymour who suggested that the Prince’s supporters at Exeter should bind themselves together via an association, like those used by the northern conspirators, otherwise ‘we were as a rope of sand: men might leave us when they pleased’.39 In pragmatic terms, the bond of association to the Prince of Orange signed at Exeter was a means of binding together the Prince’s heterogeneous band of adherents while avoiding explicitly stating that William’s supporters were resisting the king.40 Yet it was, in fact, an astoundingly bold political statement. As Burnet commented, the model for it was a document known as ‘Shaftesbury’s association’, used as evidence in the trial of the Whig earl for high treason in 1682 but probably written by the ‘plotter’ Robert Ferguson, who was part of the English contingent in the expedition of 1688. That association had also been drafted to deal with the possible problem of a popish monarch occupying the throne, by urging Protestants to arm and combine themselves against his romanising policies. Here in 1688 was an association made by English subjects to a foreign head of state while the actual sovereign was still alive. The takers promised that they would pursue not only those who attempted to kill or injure William, ‘but all their Adherents, and all that we find in Arms against us’. Even a successful assassination attempt would not divert th
em ‘from prosecuting this cause … but that it shall engage us to carry it on with all the vigour that so barbarous a Practice shall deserve’.41 Nowhere in this association was there mention of the subject’s duty of allegiance to James II and it seems probable that the King was meant to be included in the clause discussing the punishments to be handed out to the adherents of papists in arms. The oath was also tendered to the public as William made his progress east. Later the Assembly of Commoners also subscribed to the association, with, according to the dissenter Roger Morrice, fewer than twenty of 220 members refusing it. It was even rumoured that no one would be allowed to hold public office without joining the Exeter Association.42
The King arrived at Salisbury on 19 November in the middle of a blizzard. He attempted to rally his remaining commanders to him by announcing that he would call a free Parliament. However, if they wished to join the Prince of Orange, he would give them a pass. None of his officers took up this offer. At this crucial time James’s health began to deteriorate. He suffered severe nosebleeds that laid him up for hours and for which he was prescribed opium-based drugs by his physicians. It has been suggested that this affliction was psychosomatic, a symptom of the extreme stress that the King was under. However, at the time it was believed by some that it was the result of a brain tumour ‘which is inward from his nose and up into his head’.43 News of the King’s illness was later spread by defectors from his army and reported in Williamite news-sheets. The story of James’s nosebleeds was much discussed in the Prince’s camp. For Gilbert Burnet they were a physical, bodily manifestation of the disordered nature of James’s government. ‘Much purulent matter comes out,’ Burnet wrote to Herbert, ‘so much it is generally thought his person is in as ill a state as his affairs are.’ Huygens had heard the same lurid account: ‘a dirty stinking mess comes out of his nose’.44
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