It is almost impossible to evaluate the success or failure of the Societies in their campaign to reform the nation’s morals, given the nature and breadth of the crimes prosecuted. It is also, obviously, rather difficult to ascertain whether society under William and Mary was more or less virtuous than it had been under James II. For contemporaries, however, there was no clearer evidence that God’s wrath at the nation’s sinfulness had not been assuaged than his taking away of England’s blameless Queen. Mary died of smallpox on 28 December 1694. She was thirty-two. The Duke of Newcastle’s chaplain had no doubt that her death was a divine judgement upon the kingdom: ‘God in his goodness sent us such a princess as was both a patroness and an example of goodness: a glass by which this crooked age might have rectified itself; and seeing he has waited divers years, and found no amendment, what was it but just to take the mirror from us? What should they do with a light who will not walk by it?’67
Mary’s funeral procession was the largest and most expensive (at a cost of £50,000) held yet for an English monarch. Henry Purcell, who had enjoyed the Queen’s patronage, composed a special funeral anthem. William had grown much closer to Mary by the end of her life, risking infection to minister to her on her deathbed. Her passing devastated him. For almost a month the King was inconsolable, Burnet recording that his spirits had ‘sunk so entirely that there was great reason to apprehend that he was following her. For some weeks he was so little Master of himself that he was not capable of minding his affaires, nor of seeing any Company. He gave himself much to the meditations of Religion and Prayer.’ Burnet himself was crushed by the Queen’s passing: ‘I never felt my self sink so much under any thing that had happened to me as bey her death … for I am afraid that in loosing her, we have lost both our strength and our glory.’68
There is little doubt that the King’s grief was sincere but he had other, less personal, reasons to mourn Mary’s passing. Through her, William had had a link with both Anglicanism and moderate Tory opinion. The Queen had also been generally popular with the public in a way that he had never been. Significantly, Mary’s death destroyed the argument that the King enjoyed a ‘hereditary right by proxy’ to the English throne and, as we will see in the next chapter, made him more vulnerable to Jacobite plotting. Fighting a war in Europe that was going badly and proving increasingly unpopular at home, with Parliament and Church both often hostile to him, William appeared to be at a crisis point as monarch. His solution was to abandon the attempt to govern by a bipartisan administration and rule in cooperation with a ‘Junto’ of Whig MPs and peers. However, rather than avert catastrophe, the King’s decision brought England close to dynastic, military and economic disaster.
9
WILLIAM ALONE
If the overwhelming reaction to Mary’s death was widespread public expression of grief, in Bristol there was much revelry on the occasion of the Queen’s death as crowds of people celebrated to the refrain of ‘The King [James] shall enjoy his own again’.1 The threat to security potentially posed by a reinvigorated Jacobitism led to a doubling of the guards on the palace of Whitehall in the wake of the Queen’s passing.
Sixteen ninety-four represented not only a personal watershed but also a political and military turning point for William. For the remainder of the Nine Years War the King would govern in cooperation with Junto Whigs, abandoning the attempt at a bipartisan administration. In Flanders the fighting turned in the favour of the Grand Alliance of England, the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the Austrian Habsburgs, though both England and France were struggling to continue to pay and supply their armies and navies. In political and religious terms England was more divided than ever and the burden of war almost brought down the government, as a Jacobite assassination attempt was followed by a coinage crisis that practically brought military operations to a halt in the summer of 1696 and threatened serious civil disorder at home. William emerged from this crisis year with his personal reputation not only intact but enhanced. Public subscription to an ‘association’ to defend his person from Jacobite threats revealed a deep well of popular support for the regime, if little personal affection for William himself. With war on the Continent reaching an effective stalemate, peace was secured in 1697, but the end of war, if anything, exacerbated political divisions, as ‘country’ politicians argued for a return to ‘normality’: a much-reduced military establishment, smaller government and lower taxes.
The King again trimmed his sails, at points favouring the Tories, at others the Whigs, depending on which party was most likely to allow him to keep the largest army and, as the truce between England and France broke down over the Spanish succession, which would support war. However, in the face of renewed French aggression and the sudden death of the heir to the throne, the Duke of Gloucester, it was clear that the political nation was committed to maintaining the Protestant succession, though the experience of the 1690s also left Parliament determined to place greater shackles on the monarchy.
The turning point in the Nine Years War came less as a result of victory on the battlefield than as a product of harvest failure in France. By 1694 one French soldier claimed France was suffering ‘the severest famine known for many centuries’. The food shortages were so severe that the French army was unable to mount offensive manoeuvres for the whole of the 1694 campaign. The following year brought even better news for the Grand Alliance. In 1695 William’s old adversary the Duke of Luxembourg died, depriving Louis of one of his best generals, and William retook the fortified town of Namur after a two month-siege, despite Vauban’s reinforcing the garrison to sixteen thousand men. Britain was also enjoying success against the French at sea. In July of that year Russell’s navy compelled the French fleet to lift its blockade of Barcelona and sent it scuttling back to its base at Toulon, leaving the western Mediterranean, with Russell’s ships overwintering at Cadiz, effectively under English control.
Military success made Parliament more ready to lend money. Equally, the closer alliance that William was forming with the Whig party was mainly intended to help him prosecute his war against Louis more effectively. The Whigs’ ideological opposition to French ‘popery’ and ‘absolutism’, and their greater connections with mercantile and trading interests, made them stauncher supporters of the conflict in Europe than the Tories. However, this alliance came at the price of William’s assent to the Triennial Act of 1694, which ensured regular Parliaments and ushered in a period of feverish electioneering and deeply partisan politics. Between 1689 and 1715 there were twelve general elections: in 1689, 1690, 1695, 1698, 1701 (two), 1702, 1705, 1708, 1710, 1713 and 1715. Each of these saw on average 100 out of 269 seats contested. To modern eyes this may seem a small proportion. However, over that period only nineteen constituencies managed to avoid having contests at all, meaning that in almost every constituency in England the local electorate was at some point asked to decide between rival candidates. Both within and outside Parliament politics was increasingly being governed by loyalty to one or other party. There is strong evidence that after 1695 voting in the Commons was conducted largely along party lines, with only 14 per cent of MPs regularly engaging in cross-party voting, and a similar, if slightly less rigid, pattern was evident in the Lords.
William’s decision to align himself with the Whigs for the time being did not make Parliament any more manageable. The strength of the division between Whigs and Tories made it difficult for the court to establish itself as an alternative power base within Parliament, even though the war, through massively increasing the size of the government, had greatly expanded the opportunities for dispensing royal patronage. There were certainly a large number of ‘placemen’ (men who held government office or enjoyed a royal pension) in the Commons at this time, probably amounting to between 97 and 136 MPs between 1692 and 1698. Yet, though regularly tendered ‘place’ bills reflected Parliament’s concern about the impact of these MPs on legislative independence, very few placemen were prepared to vote consistently with the
court across party lines. Indeed, appointment to government office was now more often used as a way for the majority party to reward its followers after an election victory, and was accompanied by purging of political rivals from their positions.
Parliament continued to display its independence of the executive, even if the strength of an identifiable ‘country party’ had been weakened by the ministerial changes of 1693–4. Between 1691 and 1695 a group of ‘country’ Whigs, led by Robert Harley and Paul Foley, in cooperation with dissident Tories such as Sir Thomas Clarges and Sir Christopher Musgrave, had formed a significant third force in Parliament, the cross-party ties so formed being helped by collaboration on the Commission of Public Accounts. However, after Mary’s death the ‘country’ position was increasingly identified with Tory interests as the Whigs were brought into government and the Bank of England, essentially a Whig enterprise, was founded, while war in Europe drew its main support from Whigs, for reasons of trade and confessional shared interest. Nonetheless, though this led to a weakening of ‘country’ opinion, bills against placemen were again tendered in the 1694–5 session and Parliament undertook a series of investigations into government corruption. The Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir John Trevor, was found to have received 1000 guineas from the City of London to help smooth the passage of a Bill for the Relief of London Orphans. On 12 March he was stripped of his office and expelled from the House, and Foley was put in his place. Thomas Osborne, now Duke of Leeds, was implicated in corrupt dealings over the renewal of the East India Company charter and impeached. Though he was not successfully prosecuted, the impeachment effectively brought to an end his political career.
William’s alliance with the Junto Whigs also raised religious tensions. For supporters of the Church of England it awakened fears of a return to the policies of James II’s reign. The Earl of Sunderland was again involved at the heart of government, though he preferred to have the safety of the role of unofficial adviser rather than accept a titled post that might leave him open to impeachment proceedings. ‘The Church Party’ worried that the ‘oily Earl’ was again counselling the crown to further the goal of securing religious toleration by favouring ‘fanaticks’. They looked askance at the King’s apparent reliance on Scottish Presbyterians like James Johnston, his Scottish Secretary of State, and William Carstares, his chaplain. High Anglican rhetoric adopted a noticeably shriller tone in the mid-1690s, with the slogan ‘Church in Danger’ a popular rallying cry. William Stephens observed that in the ‘sermons Preached at Visitations, and the constant ordinary Discourse of the Clergy … the Church of England is always represented’.2 Debate was further stirred by Francis Atterbury’s famous Letter to a Convocation Man of 1696, in which he argued that the only way to stem the growth of heresy and blasphemy was through Convocation, the Church’s own deliberative and legislative body. Convocation had traditionally sat whenever Parliament had been assembled, but had not met since 1689. The debate revolved around whether Convocation could be summoned only by the King or had to be convened as of right when Parliament sat. The controversy therefore raised questions concerning the autonomy of the Church and the extent of the Crown’s ecclesiastical prerogatives. When the Junto ministry finally collapsed in 1700 William was forced to admit into office the Tory Earl of Rochester and his High Church followers, who successfully demanded that Convocation should sit.
The markedly different character of the Williamite episcopate from its Jacobite predecessors also shifted the targets of High Church rhetoric. Before the Revolution the Whigs and the supporters of dissent frequently directed their invective against persecuting ‘prelates’. Now, with the dominance in the Church of England of latitudinarian figures such as Tenison and Stillingfleet, it was the ‘Convocation men’ who attacked the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In 1694 the High Tory journalist Charles Leslie complained that ‘we see among the newmade Bishops those who were formerly Fanatical Preachers; and those who, of all our Number, are least Zealous for the Church, and most Latitudinarian, for Comprehension of Dissenters, and a Dispensation with our Liturgy and Discipline’.3
Nonetheless, despite the King’s governing over a society that was divided both religiously and politically, the internal threats to his regime were limited given the weakness of domestic Jacobitism as a force – a fact reflected in William’s readiness to leave the country repeatedly, either to go on campaign or to return to the Netherlands. Jacobite insurrections or assassination attempts had little chance of success without French military assistance. However, the stalemate reached in Flanders encouraged Louis to look again at supporting James in recovering his crown. An invasion force of some sixteen thousand troops would be ready by the spring of 1696 but would be deployed only in coordination with English risings. Even so, the leading English conspirator Sir George Barclay correctly decided that there was not enough popular support to foment a serious rebellion and that consequently an assassination plot was the only realistic way to destabilise the regime. Together with his colleagues in the ‘Select Number’, the secret Jacobite organisation modelled on the royalist ‘Sealed Knot’ of the 1650s, Barclay planned to murder William while he was riding in his carriage through Richmond Park.
However, Barclay was betrayed by some of his companions and the plot was discovered. On 24 February 1696 William informed both Houses of Parliament of the attempt upon his life. Three hundred Jacobites were arrested after the plot was revealed, although retribution for the plot was limited, with seven of the plotters executed immediately, a further five sentenced to life imprisonment by Parliament and in January 1697 the execution of Sir John Fenwick (appointed by James to lead the originally planned rebellion) after a failed attempt to implicate Marlborough, Godolphin and Shrewsbury and Russell in Jacobite activity. The involvement of the Duke of Berwick, who had visited London to help organise the plot, implicated James in the scheme. The result was a disaster for James, whose public standing sank to a new low. The diarist John Evelyn recorded that this was a defining moment in William’s kingship: ‘tho many did formerly pitty K. James’s Condition, this designe of Assasination, & bringing over a French Army, did much alienate many of his Friends, & was like to produce a more perfect establishment of K. William’.4 News of the assassination attempt caused a wave of public sympathy for William and a rapid upswing in his popularity. A correspondent of Lord Hatton wrote that it had ‘renewed the affections of the generallite of the people to this King’. Others saw the foiled plot as providing further evidence of God’s providential blessing on William. Sir Richard Cocks, a Gloucestershire JP and MP, stated that there had ‘been almost as visibly the hand of god in our revolution as was in bringing the Children of Israell out of the Aegyptian thraldom’.5
The thwarting of the plot allowed the Whigs to push through a sworn ‘association’ in defence of the King. According to this, the subscribers were to ‘heartily, sincerely, solemnly profess, testify and declare, That his present Majesty, King William, is rightful and lawful King of these Realms’. They promised to assist one another in revenging the King’s death should any assassination plot prove successful.6 Unlike the oaths of allegiance passed in 1689, which were imposed only on the clergy and those in public office, the association was tendered to the public at large.7 In wording and form the oath harked back to the 1584 Bond of Association, and contemporaries noted the parallel.8 In the later instance, however, the anxiety caused by the assassination plot was relatively minimal, owing to its early discovery, and it was even rumoured that the whole conspiracy had been fabricated to serve the government’s purposes.9
The 1696 Association, in the words of one historian, was a ‘bitter faction instrument’. It offered a means for court Whigs to cut off a ministerial challenge from Tories, like the Earl of Nottingham, who felt able only to swear to William as de facto monarch and, by imposing the oath nationally, cripple the opposition in England as a whole. (William himself gave no support to the Association as, despite having abandoned the device of a joint ministry, h
e still refused to tie himself permanently to one party.) Certainly a large number of Tory MPs and peers had considerable problems in swearing to William as a ‘rightful and lawful’ monarch, rather than simply king ‘for the time being’. A total of 113 MPs and more than twenty peers refused to take the oath, though initially there were no penalties for failing to subscribe.10 By April, though, legislation had made the Association mandatory for office holders. Three Privy Councillors were dismissed for refusing, Nottingham, John Sheffield, Duke of Normanby, and Edward Seymour, Lord Treasurer, in 1692. By the end of July one Lord Lieutenant, eighty-six JPs and 104 Deputy Lieutenants had also been dismissed for failing to subscribe.
In the localities the Association was used to oust the ‘disaffected’ from public office.11 Occasionally whole towns deemed politically suspect were left off the Association’s returns. In Radnor, Wales, Sir Rowland Gwyn would only allow ‘friends’ to sign the Association, as a means to help him form a new county committee in opposition to the clients of Sir Robert Harley.12 In a number of returns the inhabitants promised in future to elect only MPs who had subscribed to the Association and/or were deemed loyal to the present government. In Nottinghamshire subscribers vowed only ‘to elect such members, and not other, but those who have before signed the Association made and contrived so loyally and reasonably by the Hon[our]able House of Com[m]ons’.13 Indeed, in the 1698 election, the electorate generally tended to turn their backs on members who had not signed the 1696 Association.
The Glorious Revolution Page 29