Read Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Online
Authors: David Starkey
Faced with their own William the Conqueror, the men of 1689 determined to tie him down even more firmly; others were resolved not to have him as king at all. As part of the propaganda for his invasion, William had committed himself, irretrievably, to be everything that James apparently was not: a friend of English law and liberties, of England’s religion, and, above all, a supporter of Parliament. He could do nothing, therefore, without a free parliament. The assembly – in the event called a Convention since only a king could legally call a parliament – met on 22 January 1689, a month after William’s entry into London.
The Tories retained a small, but weighty, majority in the Lords. But the Commons was made up of the men of the last parliaments of Charles II’s reign, who had voted to exclude James from the throne in the first place and had subsequently been marginalized during the Tory ascendancy.
For the first fortnight of the Convention, the two Houses fought over the implications of the extraordinary last few months, which had left James still very much alive, if not in full possession of his mental faculties or indeed present in the country itself. Faced with these facts, the Commons made up of James’s Whig enemies and under the chairmanship of Richard Hampden, son of Charles I’s implacable enemy, made a bold resolution. It was also a daring constitutional innovation. James II, they declared, had broken the ‘original contract’ between king and subjects. He had also violated the ‘fundamental laws’ of the realm. And, most importantly, by removing himself from the country, he had abdicated the throne. The country had not been conquered by William; James had not been deposed. The king had deserted his people, not the other way round. It was a piece of fiction, but it was a very convenient one.
Nevertheless, the Tory-dominated Lords hestitated long and hard before they accepted it. But swallow it they did. James II having been disposed of, the key issue was now the succession. What was to become of the monarchy, now that there was no one on the throne? The Tory peers were determined to preserve the principle of Stuart hereditary right by denying William the title of king – a title to which they believed he, as fourth in line, had no right. He must wait his turn, and let the next in line take the throne. But the next in line was the baby Prince James Francis, the so-called ‘pretended Brat’. The implication of sticking to indefeasible hereditary succession was yet another Catholic monarch.
The Whigs were not so wedded to such unyielding principles of monarchy. The Commons neatly sidestepped the problem of James Francis by declaring that it had been found ‘by experience’ that it was impossible for England to have a Catholic monarch. Whether the baby was legitimate or a changeling did not now matter. It was his Catholicism which rendered him ineligible to inherit the throne. The next Protestant in line for the succession was, of course, Mary. But it was clear that William would not accept being second string to his wife. The only realistic solution was to have William the saviour of the country as king, whether it was constitutionally correct or not.
In the event, it took William himself to break the deadlock. The Tories hoped to string out the debates so that they could preserve the principle of monarchy. William threw cold water on their endless constitutional nit-picking. He would act neither as regent for his self-exiled father-inlaw, James II, nor as consort for his wife Mary; instead, he would be king or he would return to the Netherlands and leave England to constitutional squabbles, anarchy and the possibility of a restored James II. Even Tories found that, even if they would rather do without King William, in practice England could not do without the Dutchman now that the country had no legitimate ruler.
Faced with his ultimatum, Lords and Commons agreed to a face-saving compromise. William and Mary would rule as joint king and queen to give the impression that the Stuart line of descent was still valid. But in practice, the exercise of sovereignty would be vested solely in William.
But having given William the crown he wanted, Whigs and Tories united to limit the powers that he or any future monarch could exercise by drawing up the Bill or Declaration of Rights. The rights in question are not so much those of the individual against the government; rather they are ‘the ancient rights and liberties’ of the nation as represented in Parliament against the crown.
So, the Bill declared, the crown could not dispense with or suspend laws made in Parliament; it could not raise taxation except through Parliament and it could not have a standing army without the consent of Parliament. On the other hand, the crown should allow elections to Parliament to be free and parliaments frequent. Finally, and above all, the Bill declared it ‘inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom’ for the monarch to be Papist or to be married to a Papist.
The principle of the Royal Supremacy, that the English should have the religion of their king, had been stood on its head. It was a revolution indeed.
All was now ready for the formal offer of the crown to William and Mary in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. Mary, who had arrived in England only the day previously and, it was widely felt, had stepped into Mary of Modena’s apartments, her possessions and her very habits with indecent glee, joined her husband under the Cloth of Estate. The Lords on the right and the Commons on the left, led by their Speakers, approached the steps of the throne; the clerk read out the Bill of Rights and a nobleman offered William and Mary the crown in the name of the Convention as the ‘representative of the nation’.
William then accepted on their joint behalves, promising in turn to do all in his power ‘to advance the welfare and glory of the nation’, and they were proclaimed king and queen to the sound of trumpets. Two months later, William and Mary were crowned in Westminster Abbey, with the ceremony and the oath in particular having been transformed to reflect the new realities of power.
Each in turn swore to govern ‘according to the statutes in parliament agreed on’; to maintain ‘the Protestant reformed religion established by law’ and to do ‘justice in mercy’ with no damn nonsense about ‘discretion’ as previously. Just as innovatory was the coronation sermon. Ever since the coronation of Henry VIII’s young son, Edward VI, when Archbishop Cranmer had proclaimed that oaths could not bind the boy king nor holy oils add anything to his inherent, God-given sanctity, preachers at the coronation had vied with each other to elevate the monarch-cum-Supreme Head of the Church to an almost God-like plane.
In 1689, however, all this changed. ‘Happy we,’ the preacher proclaimed prosaically, ‘who are delivered from both extremes: who neither live under the Terror of Despotick power [as in Louis XIV’s France], nor are cast loose to the wildness of ungovern’d multitudes [as England had been during the Civil War and Commonwealth].’
As the preacher finished, the congregation broke into ‘infinite applause’. They were responding as though the ancient mysteries of the coronation had transmuted into the inauguration ceremonies of a popular prince-president of a middle-of-the-road republic – as of course William was, in effect, in his native Holland. But not only was the monarchy brought down to a merely human level, so too was the Church, which, since the Royal Supremacy, had been its most stalwart supporter and mouthpiece.
William’s propaganda had promised, and the Convention speedily enacted, freedom of conscience, of worship and security from persecution to all outside the Church of England – Roman Catholics as well as Protestant dissenters – who would live ‘as good subjects’, recognize William and Mary as king and queen and repudiate the temporal authority of the pope.
The effect, and on the part of the Whigs the intended effect, was also to diminish the Church of England. The Church remained uniquely privileged and only its members could hold public office, from the throne down. Nevertheless, it had ceased to be a monopoly and become one church among many.
The Church split over the changes between diehard Tories and Whigs, such as Gilbert Burnet, the preacher at the coronation, who not only accepted the new dispensation but also understood that the Church would have to argue for Christianity, not in the old voice of absolute authority, but by reason and persuasion. Chance and taste played their part too. William (among his many other ailments) was asthmatic and detested the urban, riverside position of Whitehall Palace with its fogs and mists. So too did Mary, who felt able to see nothing but ‘water or wall’. Within a few months, therefore, the royal couple bought Nottingham House, with its extensive gardens and pleasant suburban situation on the edge of Hyde Park, and rebuilt it at breakneck speed as Kensington Palace. The result, described by a contemporary as ‘very noble, though not great’, was exactly the kind of residence that William was used to as
stadholder
and prince in the Netherlands.
Meanwhile, Whitehall, called ‘the largest and ugliest palace in the world’ by the duc de la Rochefoucauld, and seat of all English kings since the time of its builder, Henry VIII, was abandoned for all save ceremonial occasions. Neglected and forlorn, like so many underused buildings, it burnt down in 1698 and was never rebuilt.
Perishing in the flames and ruins was the great dynastic mural of Henry VIII and his family, which, more than any other single image, represented the awesome powers of the Royal Supremacy over Church and state. The painting had survived the destruction of the Supremacy and the royal absolutism it had entailed by less than a decade.
William III, Mary II and Anne
TWO YEARS BEFORE HER DEATH IN 1714,
a statue of Queen Anne was placed equidistant, as wags said, between her two favourite places, St Paul’s Cathedral and a brandy shop. Whether the queen’s preference was for the bottle or the building, certainly St Paul’s was the setting for the high points of her reign.
The queen herself came to the cathedral in solemn procession in 1704 to lead the service of thanksgiving for Blenheim, the great victory won over Louis XIV of France by her general John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, husband of Anne’s favourite, Sarah, who rode in the queen’s coach and accompanied her every move.
The last monarch to come to St Paul’s for a victory service had been Elizabeth I, and the parallels between the two queens were invoked in the celebrations:
So France and Spain shall do to Anna now.
As threatening Spain did to Eliza bow
So France and Spain shall do to Anna now.
But whereas the dire state of Elizabeth’s finances had never allowed the defeat of the Armada to be followed up with a crushing offensive campaign against England’s enemies, each year of Anne’s reign brought fresh victories and another state procession to St Paul’s, until, by 1712, the year Anne’s statue was erected, Britain could name her own terms for peace with France.
And by then it was no longer England, but Britain. She was the dominant power in Europe. Fifty years later, another victorious war was celebrated at St Paul’s. The country’s crushing defeat of France in Europe and the Americas marked Britain’s emergence as the
world
power.
Few countries have risen to great-power status so quickly and so unexpectedly. Why had the England of Anne succeeded where the England of Elizabeth had failed? The answer can be found in the events that followed the revolution of 1688, which had settled most of the political and religious disputes that had torn England apart since the Reformation.
But much of the credit must also go to the man Anne abused in her private letters as ‘Caliban’ or ‘the Dutch monster’: her cousin, brother-inlaw and predecessor, William III. It was William who created a new kind of English monarchy, with a new relationship between crown and Parliament, and in doing so transformed Britain from a divided, unstable, rebellious and marginal country into the state that would become the most powerful on the planet.
I
Soon after their inauguration as joint monarchs in February 1689, William of Orange and his queen, Mary Stuart, escaped from London to enjoy the country air at Hampton Court. It was love at first sight, and the palace and gardens we know today are essentially their creation.
But though William and Mary could flee the capital, they could not escape so easily from the quasi-religious rituals that hedged the divinity of the Tudor and Stuart kings. The dour Calvinist king was not impressed. He had mocked ‘the comedy of the coronation’, which was full of ‘foolish old Popish ceremonies’. But his obligation to enact the spiritual dimension of English monarchy did not stop there. Many of these rituals centred on the Chapel Royal and followed the ancient rhythms of the Church’s calendar. A particularly important group of dates clustered round the great feast of Easter, which in 1689 fell on 31 March.
On the day before Good Friday, the monarch, re-enacting the role of Christ, would wash the feet of as many poor persons as he was years old in the ceremony of Maundy Thursday. Three days later, on Easter Sunday, he would take his place in the Royal Pew, then, at the climax of the service, descend the stairs, process to the altar and receive communion alone to symbolize his unique relationship with God. There was also a clamour for William and Mary, acknowledged now by God and man, to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors and heal the sick by Touching for the King’s Evil.
William and Mary managed to go through the Easter Day ceremonies, though they thought the practice of receiving communion alone a ‘foolish formality’ and changed it as soon as possible. But William baulked at other, more outlandish ceremonies. On Maundy Thursday he refused to wash the feet of the poor, limiting himself instead to giving them the traditional alms. Even more extreme was his reaction to touching for scrofula. Since the Stuart Restoration in 1660, this ceremony had been the primary point of contact between monarch and subject and the symbol of the divine nature of kingship. Charles II had touched vast numbers of the people. James II had gone beyond Charles’s enthusiasm for the practice and had reintroduced the old Latin Catholic ritual as well. For William, this was to add idolatrous superstition to old-fashioned absurdity and he suspended the practice entirely. ‘God give you better health and more sense!’ he mocked the hopeful afflicted.