On 10 December James’s commissioners handed him the reply that William had drafted with his English supporters: the scheduled elections would go ahead (despite the protests of some of the English exiles), papists were to be dismissed from office and all proclamations against the Prince were to be recalled and his supporters set free. The commander of Portsmouth, the Duke of Berwick, was to be replaced by an individual that William could trust not to surrender the port to the French. The Prince of Orange’s army was to be paid for out of the Treasury and both the King’s and the Prince’s troops were to remain thirty miles outside London. Both men would preside over the opening of the new Parliament, either unarmed or each accompanied by the same number of guards. However, by now the King’s wife and son were safely in France (after one abortive attempt at escape had failed) and James was resolved to follow them. He told Feversham that ‘if I could have relied upon all my troops, I might not have been put to this extremity I am in, and would at least have had one blow for it’. Ailesbury, James’s gentleman of the bedchamber, begged the King not to leave and urged him to think of other options: he could go to Nottingham and confront Anne or, failing that, go to York and challenge Danby ‘with his broomsticks and wishtail militia … who will all run away. And then, Sir, secure Berwick and march into Scotland, and … that Kingdom will be entirely yours.’7 It is a moot point whether any of these alternatives was in any way realistic by this time. The King had in any case been pondering his escape for over a fortnight. ‘What would you have me do?’ he said to Ailesbury. ‘My children hath abandoned me … my army hath deserted me, those that I raised from nothing hath done the same, what can I expecte from those I have done little or nothing for?’8
His resolution to leave was confirmed by renewed bouts of anti-Catholic rioting in the capital and elsewhere which increased his fears for his own personal safety and that of his family. By the beginning of December rumours of a massacre of Protestants at the hands of armed papists had reached new heights. On 4 December the people of Southwark rushed to arms fearing they would be butchered by armed papists. On the 7th the Lord Mayor reacted to increasing hysteria by ordering that Catholics should be disarmed. The following day, at news of a reported massacre by fifty thousand Frenchmen, the city’s male inhabitants remained in arms all night. On the 9th, hearing rumours of six barrels of gunpowder being stored in a Catholic house, a crowd demolished it before the magistrate could establish the truth.9 Anti-Catholic rioting was not limited to London. On 7 December mobs in Norwich burnt and pillaged houses of Catholics and demolished the Catholic chapel. An entire regiment of troops was needed to quell the rioters. As the Tory magistrate Sir John Reresby noted of James’s last days in England, ‘ther was scarce an hour but his Majesty received, like Job, some message of some revolt or misfortune or other’.10
On the night of the 11th, James prepared to leave his kingdom, burning the writs which had only recently been issued for the calling of a new Parliament. With Sir Edward Hales, he took a small skiff down the Thames, throwing the Great Seal into the river on the way, before joining the larger vessel that had been arranged to take him to France. (Legend has it that the Great Seal was found in a fisherman’s nets at Lambeth and returned to the Council of Peers, providing further evidence of God’s providential blessing upon the Revolution.)11 However, the King’s attempt to flee was foiled when his boat had to take in sand for ballast at Faversham. Hales, a much-despised local figure (his house and deer park were at this point being ransacked by an angry mob), was recognised by some sailors. The King’s identity was not immediately discovered, the seamen instead taking him for an ‘ugly, lean-jawed hatchet faced popish dog’. James was searched for valuables ‘so indecently as even to the discovery of his nudities’.12
The pair were taken to the Queen’s Arms inn, where the King was finally recognised. However, this did not lead to an improvement in his treatment. The sailors returned James’s sword but kept the three hundred guineas in cash that they had seized from him.13 The pub was soon surrounded by a curious mob, while inside the seamen kept the King under close guard, even following him to the toilet when he had to relieve himself. One of the crowd, a man named Moon, apparently cursed the King to his face. When James found out the man’s name, he remarked that he ‘ought to be called Shimei, for Shimei cursed the Lord’s anointed’. As news of his presence in the inn spread, the gentry of the area also came to James, not to pay their respects but instead to read the Prince of Orange’s Declaration, to which one witness claimed the crowd roared their approval. They told the King that the Governor of Sheerness intended to surrender the fortress and the ships there to the Prince of Orange, ‘which seemed to afflict him’. Rallying himself with an effort, James said piteously that he would agree to anything to avoid bloodshed.14
Having managed to get a message out, James was finally rescued by the still loyal Earl of Winchelsea but by this point he had clearly sunk into a deep despair. His mind dwelt on martyrdom and he combed the Bible that his captors had allowed him for suitable texts, settling on Maccabees 1:10: ‘For I repent that I gave my daughter unto him, for he sought to slay me …’ Winchelsea remarked that at this time James ‘thought there was but one step between his prison & his grave’. Even if he escaped actual martyrdom ‘he would forsake Sceptre & Crowne, & all the world’s glory for Christ’s sake; & he had that inward peace & comfort which he would not exchange for all the interest of the earth’. These words seemed to parallel the words of James’s father, Charles, expressed upon the scaffold. The comparison was noted by the Earl of Ailesbury, too, when he finally arrived on 14 December to take the King back to London. He found James ‘sitting in a great chair, his hat on and his beard being much grown’. Ailesbury was struck by the King’s resemblance to his father, Charles I, in a painting made at his trial.15
James never forgot the rough treatment handed out to him by the inhabitants of Faversham. In a proclamation issued in 1692 he explicitly excluded his captors from the benefit of a royal pardon. It is revealing that the King continued to be dealt with harshly even once his identity was known. The failure of his first attempt to flee the country laid bare the low ebb to which public respect for the monarch had sunk. This was arguably the culmination of a long-term erosion of the sacral aura surrounding the Stuart dynasty. Perversely, the execution of Charles I had gone some way to restoring the religious mystique around the King, witnessed in the fervent cult of martyrdom that his death inspired. This sanctified image of kingship was quickly tarnished by the reign of Charles II. The notorious excesses of his court, and of the King himself, made public knowledge by Restoration poets and wits, were hard to reconcile with the notion of the monarch as God’s deputy on earth. James was a more devout figure than his brother, but he was as sexually incontinent as his sibling (though he felt far more guilt for his infidelities). Most importantly, the King was a Catholic, married to a Catholic wife and increasingly surrounded by Catholic advisers. In prints and pamphlets poor devout Mary Beatrice was transformed into the archetypal Catholic succubus, draining the King of his virility while, cuckoo-like, attempting to present the offspring of an illicit liaison with the papal envoy as actually James’s natural son, the heir to the throne. In the crisis of 1688 the English rebels had been noticeably unconcerned about the potential threat their activity posed to the King’s person. Though, as we will see, there remained a sizeable body of the people who felt a continued duty of loyalty to him, public hostility to the King was sometimes expressed in the frankest terms. In May 1689 rioters in Newcastle, egged on by garrison soldiers, tore down a marble statue of James, erected only a few years earlier by the city’s monomaniacally loyal mayor, Sir Henry Brabant, and hurled it into the Tyne.16
In the King’s absence London slipped into near anarchy. Anti-Catholic riots continued to rage, with attacks on the residences of the representatives of foreign Catholic powers, including Spain, Florence, Venice, Tuscany and the Palatine. The London Mercury reported that ‘Tuesday Night last an
d all Wednesday the Apprentices were busie in pulling down the Chappels and spoiling the houses of Papists; they crying out the Fire should not go out till the prince of orange came to Town’.17 After they had torched the houses the rioters went in a mock procession carrying oranges on the top of swords and staves to demonstrate their support for William. As order disintegrated, key servants of the crown were seized as they attempted to make their escape. William Penn was taken in Whitehall, along with Father Ellis, one of the Catholic bishops. The crowd took greatest pleasure in the capture of James’s hated Lord Chancellor, George Jeffreys, on 12 December in Wapping. Jeffreys had attempted to disguise himself by shaving off his distinctive beetle brows, blackening his face and dressing as a sailor. It was reported, however, that he was recognised by a former solicitor in the Chancery Court who had had his case for repayment of debts bawled out of court by the notoriously ill-tempered Lord Chancellor. An angry crowd surrounded the alehouse in which Jeffreys was waiting to board a ship to France. He was captured by the mob, who ‘threatened to dissect him, saying “now we have the greatest rogue of all”’.18 He was saved from being pulled apart only by the intervention of the trained bands, who carried him to court, still pursued by a mob seeking vengeance. The sight of the angry crowd was enough to cause the Mayor of London, to whom Jeffreys had been sent before, to pass out. (The Mayor died, it was said at the time, from fright a day later.) At the Lord Chancellor’s own request, he was taken to the Tower, where he would be safe from the hostile public that gathered outside, some holding up nooses in front of his window. Jeffreys was later one of the few of James’s servants to be exempted from indemnity for his action on behalf of his royal master, but he died in prison before being brought to trial.
The day after the Lord Chancellor’s capture, the tension that had been increasing over the threat of a massacre by armed Catholics exploded into full-blown mass hysteria. On the morning of 13 December London was gripped by the rumour that the King’s disbanded Irish soldiers would cast off law and discipline and begin a general slaughter of the Protestant population (although the actual number of armed Irish Catholic troops in James’s army was small). News writers reported that an ‘alarm was spread through City and suburbs of “Rise, arm, arm! The Irish are cutting throats”’. Within half an hour more than a hundred thousand men had turned out to resist the anticipated attack and inhabitants lit torches to illuminate their houses. One report claimed that the citizens were up until 5 a.m. waiting for the anticipated massacre. White Kennett described the panic as having been sparked off by word of mouth, by ‘country fellows, arriving before Midnight at Westminster [who] caused a sudden uproar, by Reporting that the Irish in a desperate Rage were advancing to London, and putting all before ’em to Fire and Sword’. Terriesi, the Catholic representative of the Duke of Tuscany, reported that the Londoners were ‘discharging firearms, drums beating rapidly, and women, for greater noise were beating warming-pans, pots and frying pans, and such things’.19
The panic seems to have been sparked off by the disbanding of James’s Irish troops by the Earl of Feversham on the 11th. The nonconformist Philip Musgrave reported that these troops were collecting around Uxbridge ready to ‘burn, kill and destroy all they meet with’.20 Ailesbury, on his way to fetch James from Faversham, found that at Rochester Bridge men were trying to hack down its central arch ‘to hinder the Irish Papists from cutting their throats and of their wives and children, for all that Dartford was on fire and the streets ran with blood’. At the next stop, a post-house in Rochester, he went on to call on an old friend and found him ‘half dead with fear, in a night gown and night cap. He told me he had not been in bed for three nights for fear of having his throat cut by Irish papists.’ Through Chatham and Sittingbourne they saw crowds of people ‘crying at their doors on each side, with their children by them, choosing rather to be murdered there than in their beds’.21
Rumours of Irish risings broke out in Norfolk on the 13th and 14th of the month and in Surrey on the 14th and 15th. In Kingston upon Thames inhabitants cut down trees to block a road against the phantom marauding Irishmen. The news quickly spread to the rest of the country. On 14 December the Mayor of Chesterfield wrote to Danby that seven thousand Catholics and Irish had burnt Birmingham and were marching on Derby. A Leicestershire minister, Theophilius Brookes, heard that the ‘Irish were cutting off throats, Lichfield on fire and Burton attempted upon’ and, steeled with this news, set off with a group of armed men to head the ‘enemy’ off.22 On the 15th the news had reached Yorkshire with reports in Wakefield that Doncaster was on fire. Meanwhile the inhabitants of Doncaster, who had survived their fictitious immolation heard news that Birmingham and Stafford had been looted by the Irish. The Yorkshire antiquary Ralph Thoresby reported that in Leeds the city raised some seven thousand foot and horse soldiers for the defence of their lives and liberties. There were reports that nearby Beeston was burning, which led to a panicked flight from the city, with men and women seeking refuge in fields and barns. However, Thoresby’s pregnant wife kept her head and climbed to the attic to see that Beeston was untouched. Yet another alarm was raised the same night, this time about an attack on Halifax. Thoresby remarked that he could see ‘nothing but paleness and horror in the countenance of all men’. He went to sleep with his clothes on, in case the Irish should come while he was in bed.23
Alarms were reported across the Pennines in Lancashire and in Cheshire too. Warrington Bridge was barricaded and guarded against the anticipated Irish assault. Overall, there were reports of alarms in nineteen counties. The panic was encouraged by the publication of the spurious Third Declaration of the Prince of Orange, allegedly written by the spy and plotter Hugh Speke. This stated that there were many armed papists in and around London bent on fire and massacre and ordered officials to disarm and secure all papists.
Although the imagined massacre of Protestants never materialised, anti-Catholic mobs dished out very real violence to the property and persons of ‘papists’. Ailesbury noted that the Catholic soldiers amounted to no more than twelve hundred men and these mainly hid for fear of reprisals from Protestants. King James’s biographer Clark said of the Irish troops that they did not know where ‘to get a meels meat or a nights lodging and [were] liable themselves to be knocked on the head in every town they came to …’.24 Abraham de la Pryme recalled that the Protestants ‘made most miserable of all the papists’ houses they came near; for, under pretence of seeking for armes, they did many thousands of pounds worth of hurt, cutting down rich hangings, breaking through walls, pulling pieces of excellent ceilings … then they secured all the papists they could get, intending to carry them all away to prison’.25
The violence meted out to Catholics during the ‘Irish Fright’ of December 1688 was a continuation of crowd behaviour in the autumn. In October of that year Catholic chapels were sacked in London and similar attacks were made on Catholic ‘mass-houses’ and the homes of prominent ‘papists’ across England. Occasionally violence was used against Catholics themselves. In Cambridge in December 1688 a Catholic priest was attacked by an angry mob.26 This violence was to some degree given sanction by William’s Declaration of 10 October in which he said that the setting up of ‘severall Churches and Chappells, for the exercise of Popish Religion’ was against ‘many expresse Lawes’. The activities of the crowd were further legitimated both by the decision of London juries that those shot at by troops in October 1688 while ransacking Catholic chapels were in fact ‘loyal persons’ and by James’s own backtracking: on 11 November 1688 he had ordered all Catholic chapels to be closed.27
It has been suggested that the Irish Fright was the product of an orchestrated plan to spread disinformation by post. Certainly the rumour helped William’s cause as individuals looked to the Prince to protect the nation in the wake of James’s flight on 11 December (itself, as we have seen, prompted by his fears for his own and his family’s safety, given the ferocity of anti-Catholic feeling in the capital). Hugh Speke claim
ed that during the Popish Plot he had familiarised himself with Whig sympathisers in the Post Office and the times at which the post arrived in various localities. This information enabled him in December 1688 to send out letters detailing the threat of an Irish massacre to sympathetic postmasters in the country so that they would reach offices at exactly the same time.
There are a number of reasons, though, for believing that the rumour was not spread in this way and may not have been deliberately manufactured at all. First, the evidence of Abraham de la Pryme contradicts Speke’s story that the panic was spread by post, stating that news of the Irish massacre came first by word of mouth: ‘This newse or report ran … quite through the country, and for all it was some weeks a running northward, yet no one letter appear’d out of the south concerning any such thing there till it was always gone past those places where these letters were to go.’ Pryme believed nonetheless that it was an orchestrated plan ‘set on foot by the king and council to see how the nation stood affected to their new king’.28
Yet the vision of an Irish massacre of English Protestants was something of a recurring nightmare in the seventeenth century. Rumours of this kind circulated during the Exclusion Crisis. In early January 1681 the Lords declared that they were ‘fully satisfied’ that ‘for divers years … there hath been a horrid and treasonable Plot and Conspiracy, contrived and carried on by those of the Popish Religion in Ireland, for massacring the English, and subverting the Protestant Religion, and the ancient established Government of that Kingdom’. In the lower house Sir Henry Capel said that although some people ‘smiled at’ the Popish Plot in England, ‘it is plain there was a Plot in Ireland’ and ‘the hopes of a Popish Successor’ were ‘the Grounds of all this’.
The Glorious Revolution Page 16