Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (61 page)

It was powerful bait. But would the Church of England be prepared to sell its monopoly position for a mess of pottage?

On 27 April 1688, James ordered the clergy to read the Declaration of Indulgence from their pulpits. The archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, who, only three years before, had crowned James in the magnifi-cent ceremony at Westminster Abbey, summoned his fellow bishops to a secret supper party at Lambeth, where seven of them signed a petition to the king against the Declaration.

In it, the bishops contrived both to have their Tory cake and to eat Whig principles. On the one hand, they invoked ‘our Holy Mother the Church of England [which was] both in her principles and her practice unquestionably loyal [to the monarchy]’, and, on the other, they argued like good Whigs that ‘the Declaration was founded on a dispensing power as hath often been declared illegal in Parliament’.

It was a frontal – and, as the petition was soon circulated in print – public challenge to royal authority.

James determined to slap the bishops down by prosecuting them for seditious libel. But the bishops showed unexpected courage and a surprising flair for public relations. First, they stressed their loyalty. When James accused them of rebellion they recoiled in horror. ‘We rebel! We are ready to die at your Majesty’s feet,’ said one bishop. ‘We put down the last rebellion, we shall not raise another.’ Then, by refusing to raise securities for bail, they got themselves imprisoned (rather briefly) in the Tower. It was a terrific coup: crowds of Londoners cheered them from the riverbanks as they were taken there by water; the soldiers of the garrison received them on their knees and the governor treated them as honoured guests.

Even more importantly, the bishops’ trial, in the huge space of Westminster Hall, turned into a public argument about the legality of the dispensing power itself. Decorum broke down as the spectators cheered counsel for the bishops and booed and hissed the royal lawyers, and even the judicial worm turned against the king as one of the bench declared in his summing up that, if the dispensing power were allowed, ‘there will need no Parliament; all the legislature will be in the king, which is a thing worth considering’.

‘I leave the issue to God and your consciences,’ he concluded to the jury. The jurors stayed out all night in continuous deliberation. Then, the following morning, they returned the verdict: ‘Not guilty’.

Instead, it was James’s government which had been condemned.

III

James II’s zealous desire to legitimize Catholicism in England had brought him into open conflict with Parliament, the bishops and now the courts. But it was an unexpected event that took place at St James’s Palace which finally brought matters to a head, an event that would under other circumstances have been an occasion for national rejoicing. Mary of Modena, James’s second, Catholic wife, came from famously fertile stock. And she duly conceived frequently. But all the babies either miscarried or died in infancy, leaving James’s Protestant daughters by his first marriage, Mary and Anne, as his heirs presumptive.

In the late summer of 1687, however, James went on pilgrimage to Holywell while Mary took the waters at Bath. Both medicine and magic seemed to work, and in December her pregnancy was officially confirmed. James was elated. The Jesuit monks who surrounded the pregnant queen promised that she would give birth to a boy. Now, with a Catholic heir on the way, the programme of converting the country could be continued long into the future.

The news was a disaster for English Protestants. There was sheer disbelief that the pregnancy could be genuine. Surely it must be another Catholic plot to subvert the laws and religion of the country? And the most important among these disbelievers were the members of James’s own, Protestant first family: his daughters Mary and Anne and his sonin-law, William of Orange. William had expected that his wife Mary would eventually inherit the throne, thus bringing England on to his side in his struggle against Catholic France. They were now, by the pregnancy, to be dispossessed and disappointed.

Anne, who was still resident at her father’s court despite her marriage to Prince George of Denmark, had also taken a hearty dislike to her stepmother’s airs and graces when she became queen. Now she played a key role in endorsing and disseminating the malicious rumours about her pregnancy. It all looked suspiciously trouble free. Mary of Modena was too well. James, bearing in mind his wife’s previous disastrous gynaeco-logical history, was too confident. And he was too confident in particular that he would have a son.

Anne wrote to her sister Mary to tell her that the queen was only pretending to be pregnant. There was, she said, ‘much reason to believe it a false belly’. Even so, the supposedly fake pregnancy ran its full course. The queen’s pains began at St James’s on the morning of 10 June 1688, and, after a short labour impeded only by the crowd of witnesses crammed into her bedchamber, she gave birth at about 10 a.m.

The baby, christened James Francis after his father and maternal uncle, was indeed the prophesied boy, and once his doctors had stopped feeding him with a spoon on a gruel made of water, flour and sugar, flavoured with a little sweet wine, and allowed him human milk from a wet-nurse, he was healthy and destined to live.

But was he the king and queen’s child or a changeling?

Normally, the birth of a prince of Wales would have crowned James’s attempt to reassert royal authority and re-Catholicize England. When, for instance, such an attempt had been made a century before, under Mary Tudor, it had been shipwrecked by the queen’s failure to produce a child and so guarantee the permanence of her legacy. But the birth of James Francis had the opposite effect. Faced with the prospect of a Catholic succession, James’s opponents decided that they could tolerate the course of his government no longer. Before the birth of a healthy prince, at least James’s actions were reversible when his solidly Protestant daughter, with her husband William at her side, came to the throne. But now they must instead bring him to heel or even bring him down.

The first step was to develop the rumours about the queen’s pregnancy into a full-scale assault on the legitimacy of James Francis. The pregnancy, the story went, had been suppositious all along, as Anne had said, and therefore the child must be a changeling, smuggled into the queen’s bed in a warming-pan by the cunning Jesuits after a carefully stage-managed performance of childbirth. It was all nonsense, of course. But Princess Anne believed it. She persuaded her sister Mary in the Netherlands to believe it. And her brother-in-law, William of Orange, found it convenient to believe it too.

By 1688, William, now in his late thirties, was a hardened general and politician. But his goal to unite the Netherlands and England in a Protestant crusade against the overweening Catholic power of Louis XIV’s France remained unchanged. Bearing in mind his position as both James’s nephew and son-in-law, he had every reason to suppose that Mary would inherit England naturally. But James’s Catholicizing policies and, still worse, the birth of a Catholic son and heir threatened to rob him of the prize. William would not let it go without a struggle.

He needed a decent justification for action, however. He took the birth of Prince James to be an act of aggression against him on James’s part: ‘there hath appeared, both during the Queen’s pretended bigness, and in the manner in which the Birth was managed so many just and visible grounds of suspicion’. In view of these, William was compelled to take action because ‘our dearest and most entirely beloved Consort the Princess, and likewise ourselves, have so great an interest in this matter, and such a right, as all the world knows, to the Succession of the Crown’. He was, in short, fighting not for his own selfish ends, but for his wife’s rights and the rights of the English people.

William made his preparations on two fronts: in England and in the Netherlands. Learning from the mistake of Monmouth’s puny expedition, he realized that he must invade in overwhelming force. During the course of the summer, he assembled a formidable armada on the Dutch coast, consisting of 60 warships, 700 transports, 15,000 troops, 4000 horses, 21 guns, a smithy, a portable bridge and, last but not least since it enabled the pen to assist the sword, a printing press.

William also benefited from Monmouth’s experience in England. Monmouth had struck too soon, before the extent of James’s intentions had become apparent. William, instead, reaped the fruits of the mounting disillusion with the king, which united Tories with Whigs in resistance to the crown and reached its high-water mark with the controversial birth of James Francis. The result was that, on 30 June, three weeks after the birth of James Francis, four Whig peers and gentlemen and three Tories signed an invitation to William to invade Britain, since ‘nineteen part of twenty of the people … are desirous of a change’. They exaggerated, of course. But their sense of the popular mood was right.

But none of this would have been possible but for a fateful decision taken by Louis XIV. There were two crisis points in Continental Europe in 1688: one in Cologne, where the pro-French prince archbishop had been replaced by one hostile to Louis, and the other much further south, where the Habsburg Emperor Leopold was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the Ottoman Turks, who had laid siege to Vienna. If Louis decided to strike against Cologne, which lay near the Dutch border, William could not risk denuding the republic of troops for his English expedition. Instead, in late summer, Louis resolved to pile the pressure on Leopold by invading southern Germany. The fate of James, Louis’s English would-be pupil in absolutism, was sealed.

But at first the weather seemed to offer James the protection that Louis XIV had not. William had intended to sail on the first high tide in October. Instead he was first bottled up in port for several days by adverse winds and then driven back to shore by a storm. Meanwhile, James was still clinging to Divine Providence. ‘I see God Almighty continues his Protection to me,’ he had written on 20 October, after learning that the storm had driven William back to shore, ‘by bringing the wind westerly again.’

But then the wind turned easterly and stayed that way. It blew hard due east, giving William a smooth voyage down the Channel and bottling James’s fleet up in port. It was not lost on people that, a hundred years before, Protestantism had been saved by the destruction of the Spanish Armada. Now, for the hotter Protestants, England would be delivered from Catholicism by a very different sort of armada. But again, it was done by a wind. In 1588, the Armada medals were inscribed ‘God’s winds blew and they were scattered’; in 1688 the breeze that blew William towards England was called ‘the Protestant wind’.

William landed at Torbay in Devon on 5 November – another auspicious date for Protestants – and marched through cheering crowds to Exeter, where he set up camp and his printing press to churn out carefully prepared propaganda. The ‘Protestant wind’ that blew William to England also blew away James’s confidence and with it his authority as the signs, which for so long had been in his favour, turned against him. On 19 November, he arrived in Salisbury, intending to stiffen his army with the presence of their undoubted monarch. Instead, he underwent a psychosomatic crisis and succumbed to repeated heavy nosebleeds. Incapacitated and depressed, on 23 November he decided to retreat to London, his army and his subjects’ loyalty untested.

That night, his up-and-coming general, John, Lord Churchill, fled to join William, whither he was followed twenty-four hours later by James’s other son-in-law, Prince George of Denmark, husband of Princess Anne.

Behind every great man, it is said, is a strong woman. John Churchill’s strong woman was his wife, Sarah. But Sarah was also, as Princess Anne’s principal courtier and closest friend, a power behind the throne. When Churchill and Prince George deserted to the enemy, James immediately ordered the arrest of their wives, Sarah and Anne. But Sarah was ahead of him and she and Anne fled secretly from Whitehall late at night on 25 November. Their flight went undetected for seven hours, and when James re-entered his capital on the afternoon of the 26th he was greeted with the news that his youngest daughter too had joined the rebels. ‘God help me,’ he cried, ‘my very children have forsaken me!’

Abandoned by his God as well as his children, James’s only thought now was for flight. He believed wrongly that history was repeating itself and he was in the position of his father, Charles I. His enemies would execute him and murder his beloved baby son. It was clear that he was suffering a mental crisis and was incapable of judging the true nature of the situation. Outwardly, he conducted negotiations with William. But they were only to provide a cover for his real purpose. He contrived to bungle even this. The escape of the queen with the prince of Wales had to be postponed several days and took place only on 10 December, when she left Whitehall disguised as a laundry woman. James himself quit the capital next day, first flinging the matrix of the Great Seal into the Thames. After his embarrassing capture by the fishermen on the Kent coast, he was taken as a prisoner to Faversham, whence he was rescued by a loyal detachment of his guards and escorted back to London.

There he received a rapturous welcome and, for a moment, thought of making a stand. Many believed that if William ever tried to use force to snatch the throne, the army would rally behind James. This was never put to the test. James’s resolution crumbled when William sent a powerful detachment of his army to occupy London, seize Whitehall and order James to withdraw from the capital. The ultimatum was delivered to James in bed at midnight. Twelve hours later he was sent under guard to Rochester, whence, on 23 December, he was allowed to escape to France. This time, with his son-in-law’s connivance, he succeeded.

As James left London for the second time, William entered it. In six weeks, and without a shot being fired, England was his. But on what terms?

IV

A late-seventeenth-century engraving shows William the Conqueror swearing to the laws of his sainted Anglo-Saxon predecessor, Edward the Confessor, and thus preserving the traditional rights of the English.