The Glorious Revolution

by Edward Vallance

  The growing power of Nottingham and the Tories led to concerns about the independence of the Commons, fears which MPs attempted to counter through ‘place’ bills, to bar crown officers from sitting in the House, and ‘triennial’ legislation, to force the King to hold fresh elections every three years. However, William resisted this legislation as an infringement of his monarchical authority and used the royal veto to torpedo first a Triennial Bill in 1693 and then a place bill the following year. Disenchantment at the King’s actions was particularly evident among radical Whigs such as John Hampden and John Wildman, the former Leveller leader who lost his office as Postmaster in March 1691. It seemed to show that Algernon Sidney had been right to warn of the danger posed by the dynastic ambitions of the House of Orange in his unpublished Court Maxims. The climax of Whig fury with William followed his use of the royal veto to kill the Triennial Bill in February 1693. It seemed to one writer that the Revolution had merely effected a ‘Change, without an Alteration’. The outspoken Whig peer Henry Booth, formerly Lord Delamere, now Earl of Warrington, an individual who had been one of the first English lords to raise arms for William when Prince of Orange, told the Chester Grand Jury in April 1693 that it appeared that ‘his [William’s] Design in assisting them was only to get into the Throne, and not ease the Nation’s Oppressions. So that in such Cases a Revolution does the People no Good; for he that hath got the Crown, thinks that whatsoever is done for the Good and Security of the People, is so much Loss to him of what he hop’d to get by coming over.’23 The following year, as William again used his veto to kill a place bill, the Commons sent an address to the King which argued that, after the Revolution, the monarch had no power of veto, and which accused him of listening to ‘evil counsellors’. (This was a reference to Sunderland, ‘the oily Earl’, who had managed to ingratiate himself back into royal favour despite having been excluded from William’s Act of Grace in 1690 and exiled in the Netherlands for his role as the main architect of James II’s scheme to ‘pack’ Parliament and repeal the Test and Corporation Acts.)

  Disappointment at the King’s choice of ministers and distrust of his attitude to Parliament led some Whigs to consider more radical courses. There had, ironically, been a resurgence of domestic Jacobitism in the wake of James’s failures in Ireland and after the French naval defeat at La Hogue in 1692. After this point James’s proclamations took on a more moderate air as he began to accept that if he were to return to the throne at all it might be upon conditions.24 James’s subsequent appeals were tailored to suit ‘compounders’ like the Earl of Sunderland, the Earl of Shrewsbury and Admiral Russell, who were prepared to consider James’s return provided that their former monarch would be ready to countenance greater limitations on his prerogative than William was at present. Key defectors to William in 1688 were now tempted to play the turncoat again. John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, was overlooked for commands in the military campaigns of 1691, probably because William, rightly, did not trust him. In January 1692 further humiliation came as Marlborough was stripped of all his court posts and in April of that year sent to the Tower. Churchill was released in September but still ostracised, and the treatment meted out to him drove a wedge between William and Princess Anne, whose close confidante was Churchill’s wife, Sarah. In May 1694 Churchill took the momentous step of disclosing to the French the planned English raid on Brest. Here he may have been animated by personal jealousy: Thomas Talmarsh – the only Englishman given a senior command by William – was in charge of the raid, and he was one of the fatal casualties of Marlborough’s betrayal. Thwarted ambition played a part in the defection of other former Orangists to the Jacobite cause, such as Sir James Montgomery and Robert Ferguson. On the other hand, the intriguing of Shrewsbury, Russell, the Earl of Monmouth (formerly Lord Mordaunt) and John Wildman was largely born of political disgust at William’s apparent betrayal of the Revolution.

  With opposition turning to treason in some quarters, William was not helped by the fact that the court was itself divided. The King’s continued pursuit of a bipartisan ministry meant that Whig members of the administration, such as Wharton, John Somers and Richard Hampden, were keen to get the Earl of Nottingham ousted from the King’s councils. Narrow legislative defeats of place bills and the royal veto of the Triennial Act combined with military defeats in the summer of 1693 (in July William was defeated at Landen in Flanders and the same month a richly laden merchant fleet fell into French hands while en route to the Turkish port of Smyrna) and allegations of maladministration to increase the pressure on Nottingham to resign. On 6 November William asked for the Earl’s resignation, though he assured him that he was convinced of the Earl’s ‘fidelity and zeal to his service’, believing that Nottingham’s continued presence in the administration was beginning to weaken support for war. William told the Queen he thought ‘his case so bad that he was forced to part with the Lord Nottingham, to please a party who he cannot trust’. The Whigs nonetheless returned to office, with Shrewsbury returning to government in March 1694, having won the King’s assurance that he would assent to a Triennial Act.25

  Religious disagreements accompanied these political divisions. The summer of 1688 had seen an atmosphere of détente between the Church of England and dissent as members of James’s episcopate began to recognise the danger they faced from a union of nonconformists and Catholics. Yet the events of 1688 and the demand to swear allegiance to William and Mary in 1689 caused an immediate fissure in this Protestant alliance. Some four hundred Anglican clergy refused to take the new oaths, viewing those who did so as perjured by breaking their oaths of loyalty to James II. As a proportion of the Church of England, with around ten thousand clergy, the non-jurors represented only a small fraction of the religious establishment. In their number, though, they included some of the most high-ranking and intellectually respected churchmen of the age: William Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Frampton of Gloucester, Thomas Ken of Bath and Wells, John Lake of Chichester, William Lloyd of Norwich, William Thomas of Worcester, Francis Turner of Ely and Thomas White of Peterborough. The principled stand that these men had taken, to lose their offices rather than overlook their continuing duty of allegiance to their monarch de jure, was reflected in the fact that five of the non-juring bishops had been among the seven sent to the Tower for refusing to read James II’s second Declaration of Indulgence.

  In contrast, it was noted that the majority of the clergy, who often took the oaths to the new monarchs with the casuistic reservation that they were only recognising William as king in fact, not by law, were increasingly being viewed by the public as ‘partial, cowardly and perjured’.26 The majority of non-jurors were deprived of their posts on 1 February 1690 and some of their number refused subsequent opportunities to conform, by taking further oaths of allegiance, well into the eighteenth century.

  Even greater divisions emerged over the question of what the national church’s relationship should be with nonconformity. After the Revolution most agreed on the need for some form of religious toleration. However, the fact that the pre-revolutionary rapprochement between dissent and the Church was based largely on expediency glossed over major points of disagreement between the parties on religious policy. Whigs argued that toleration should be generous and permanent; Tories felt that it should perhaps be temporary, and certainly that it should be limited to a bare freedom to worship and closely supervised to ensure religious liberty did not encourage sedition, immorality or blasphemy. Secondly, Whigs and Tories disagreed about the need for comprehension, meaning not only the toleration of non-Anglican Protestant worship but also the acceptance of dissenters back into the Church. While many Whigs felt that the Church of England should offer compromises to nonconformists to attract them back, such as modifying the liturgy and softening its line on the need for bishops to ordain ministers, Tories were generally opposed to the readmission of dissenters, viewing the doctrine and discipline of Anglicanism as already a moderate middle way that needed no
further revision. Finally, there was disagreement over the Anglican monopoly upon public office. Tories were adamantly against nonconformists taking up public office and insisted on retaining the test acts of the 1670s, which had ruled that people could be sworn into offices only once they had taken Anglican communion. Whigs, conversely, pressed for the abandonment of the sacramental test.

  There was widespread Tory unease at what William’s plans for the Church might be, and this was not simply as a result of his attachment to a faith, Dutch Calvinism, that appeared to have more in common with English Puritanism than the national church. During the 1680s William had publicly supported the stance of the Whigs in their demands for greater toleration and given Whig exiles sanctuary in the Netherlands. In his declaration he had been careful to avoid any religious controversy, to placate both his English and Continental audiences. The issue of the relationship between Anglicans and dissenters was to be left to a ‘free Parliament’, though he urged it to consider ‘such Laws as may establish a good Agreement between the Church of England and all Protestant Dissenters’.27 To appease his Catholic allies on the Continent, William’s declaration also promised his good intentions to all peaceable English Romanists. The Prince also made sure that he was clearly seen to be a friend of the Church of England, appointing the Anglican Burnet as his chaplain, making sure he was visible at Anglican services such as the act of thanksgiving in Exeter cathedral soon after his landing, attending Anglican prayers and communion regularly once he was in London and making early contact with the clergy of the capital to thank them for their opposition to James over the preceding years.

  This policy was successful in stifling religious debate in the early days of the Convention, but this led William to be overconfident, and in the spring of 1689 the King made his own religious preferences clearer. A group of latitudinarian ministers, including John Tillotson, Simon Patrick and Edward Stillingfleet, with the support of their patron the Earl of Nottingham, produced two parliamentary bills in January and February 1689, one for comprehension that would offer concessions on Anglican liturgy and on episcopal ordination and another that would offer toleration to those Protestants who could not be included in the broader church settlement. Their vision of a national church both more tolerant and more inclusive was pushed forward by William in a speech of 16 March in which he ‘urged the admission to public office of all Protestants that are willing and able to serve’.28 These words, with their explicit hope of bringing to an end the Anglican ecclesiastical and political hegemony, provoked an angry response from Tory MPs, 150 of whom met that evening in the Devil’s Tavern. Over their cups they vowed to fight any further erosion of the Church’s position.

  The Tory backlash scored some immediate successes in reversing William’s declared policy. In the Commons debate over the coronation oath the Tories successfully insisted not only that the King should promise to defend the Church of England but also that he must defend the church ‘as by law established’. This was intended to bind William to uphold the present form of the liturgy and episcopal government. The strength of resistance to a dual policy of comprehension and toleration led William to pull back from his attempt to break the Anglican monopoly on public office. He dropped the idea of repealing the test acts and sacrificed the idea of comprehension by arguing that such changes should be considered by Convocation, not by Parliament. Convocation met in November 1689 but no proposals even reached a vote. William himself made a number of sycophantic public statements about the Anglican Church, describing it as the ‘best constituted in the world’ and an ‘eminent part of the Reformation’. He promised he would ‘venture his life’ in its defence and had resolved to die in its communion. As a further sop to the ‘Church party’, after 1689 William surrendered control of the Church of England to solid Anglicans. During Mary’s lifetime she, not he, essentially handled ecclesiastical patronage and policy. However, William refused to back down on the point of toleration and it was largely royal pressure that ensured that Nottingham’s Toleration Act got on to the statute book in April 1689. The act granted Protestant dissenters the freedom to worship outside of the Church of England, so long as they registered their meetings with local magistrates, kept their doors unlocked during services and swore to uphold the doctrinal (but not the liturgical and episcopal) ideals of the establishment.

  The toleration enshrined in the act was not as extensive as that which James had sought in 1687–8, as it officially excluded Catholics, Quakers and Unitarians from its terms. Yet it was nonetheless welcomed as something little short of miraculous by some dissenters, such as the members of the Axminster Congregational church: ‘O what a mercy is it when kings are nursing fathers, and queens nursing mothers to the churches of Christ; when rulers are ministers of God for good, to encourage piety, that the people of the Lord may lead quiet and peaceable lives in all godliness and honesty under their rule and government.’29 And the actual degree of religious toleration under William’s government was broader than the letter of the law allowed. Both Catholics and nonconformists who fell outside the terms of the act also enjoyed in practice a relatively high level of religious freedom. Again, with his eye on his main goal of overcoming Louis XIV, the King wished to quell religious controversy at home as far as possible, both to avoid it becoming a distraction and to appease his Catholic European allies.

  During the 1690s both religious and political controversy were stirred and prolonged by the cost and conduct of William’s Continental wars. Government propaganda through sermons and monthly public fasts stressed that these were wars to defend Protestantism. Huge amounts of religious literature were published after the Revolution, more than at any time since the 1640s.30 Pro-war divines such as Dean Comber of Durham liked to emphasise the religious elements to this struggle: the sword that the French king brandished against Britain was ‘yet reeking with the Gore of a Sister Reformed Church’, said Comber, meaning the Huguenots. Some even infused this vision of a religious war with apocalyptic elements. Judge Thomas Rokeby said in May 1689 that the ‘cause wherein King William and Q. Mary and the Parliament of England are now ingaged’ was ‘the cause of God and Christ against Satan and Antichrist’.31 Toleration fitted in with William’s war aims and Whigs, albeit unsuccessfully, used national security as an argument for doing away with the Anglican sacramental test, contending that Protestant union was necessary to defend England. Comprehension measures were also argued for in a European context, in that they would show that the Church of England saw itself as part of a broader community of Protestants.

  However, presenting the war as a religious crusade was not without its problems, given that William was in an international alliance with Catholic Austria and Spain. Even those amenable to viewing the war as part of a divine struggle noted the King’s odd military bedfellows: ‘The Lord seemed to be doing great things, great work upon the wheel, the nations in a reeling, staggering posture, Europe seemed to be in a flame, great armies appearing in divers parts, the Lord of Hosts still mustering up the hosts to battle. Contrary interests seemed to be united, papists and protestants combining, and yet agreeing interests were divided, papists against papists, the Lord setting Egyptian against Egyptian, kingdom against kingdom.’32

  Jacobite writers complained that it was nonsense to argue that French popery was ‘so much worse than the Spanish; and the House of Bourbon more an Enemy to Protestants, than the Bloody House of Austria’.33 Rather, they argued, with some justification, England had been dragged into the war simply for the benefit of the Dutch. Indeed, William had largely steered clear of portraying the war as having a confessional purpose in propaganda developed for European consumption. Consequently the argument that this was a war against popery was coupled with warnings about the threat from Louis XIV’s ambitions to become ‘universal monarch’ with pretensions to suzerainty over Europe as a whole. The French king was rechristened as the ‘most Christian turk’, playing on the contemporary image of the Turkish empire as the quintessence of anti-
Christian barbarism, a view strengthened by Louis’s actual diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire, making common cause with Sultan Suleiman II against Emperor Leopold.

  An added difficulty was that, until 1694 at least, William’s land war against Louis was not going well and, with the exception of the cannonball that grazed the King’s shoulder at the Boyne, there was little sign of providential favour to the Orange cause. At sea, it was true, the English navy fared better. Anxiety about a French invasion attempt had been high since the defeat of English and Dutch ships at the hands of Louis’s navy off Beachy Head on 30 June 1690. That victory had given the French effective control of the Channel and fears were raised further by French ships’ bombardment of the Devon village of Teignmouth on 26 July. Aside from this sabre-rattling, the French admiral, Tourville, made little effort to press home his military advantage, to the annoyance of his royal master (who if not contemplating an invasion attempt at this time, still wished his commander to take a more serious toll of English shipping). Meanwhile the defeat gave impetus to a programme of shipbuilding and naval reorganisation: the Commons voted money for twenty-seven new men-of-war, and new shipyards and dry docks were built at Plymouth and Portsmouth. New instructions were issued to commanders which were designed to maximise the strengths of British ships (greater firepower over greater manoeuvrability) by encouraging attack only when there was opportunity for a close-range confrontation in which British ships were at a numerical advantage.