A History of Britain, Volume 2 (45 page)

William was perfectly aware of this and, resigned to the coming conflict, set about putting the republic in the best possible position to fight it. The campaign in the field had to be preceded by a campaign of persuasion, and that too had to be fought on two fronts. At home he needed to convince the previously peace-inclined commercial cities, especially Amsterdam, that unless they accepted his war policy they would suffer irreversible harm from French economic and maritime aggression. Then William went on a diplomatic offensive among the German princes, and especially with the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, emphasizing that the incorrigible expansionism of Louis XIV represented so paramount a threat to the stability of Europe that it cut across old lines of confessional allegiance.

There was, of course, yet a third front for William in the public-relations war that had to be won before his military plans could be made operational, and that was the domestic crisis in England itself. Here, his best ally was James II. For by the beginning of 1688 James had committed himself to a collision course with all the good and great who had stood by his brother and himself a decade before. Brushing aside any moderate advice, and dismissing any ministers who had the temerity to offer it, James was reinforced in his own myopic obstinacy by men like Sunderland, who saw in grovelling loyalty a way to make themselves arbiters of power and were prepared, if necessary, to publicize their own conversion to the Catholic Church. Persuasion was abandoned for intimidation. The size of the standing army available to James was almost doubled, much of it drawn from Irish troops commanded by Catholic officers. In April, the king ordered his Declaration of Indulgence to be read on successive Sundays from the pulpit. When a group of bishops, including Sancroft, attempted to explain their refusal to authorize the readings, James exploded in a storm of rage, declaring their objections to be ‘a standard of rebellion'. All those who were not now unreservedly for him were, in effect, to be considered and treated like traitors. The most prominent of the objecting bishops were arrested and tried in what turned into a public-relations disaster for the beleaguered king. They were acquitted, but not before one of the justices had delivered his own stinging verdict on the manifest illegality of the dispensing power. The liberated bishops emerged from confinement to find themselves celebrated up and down the country as the champions of the country's liberties and the guardians of the Reformation. Bonfires were lit, and effigies of the Pope, and of James's confessor, Father Petre, fed to the flames.

None of this affront caused James to hesitate for a moment in his headlong sprint off the cliff. Let the bishops have their day, for he had something incomparably more powerful going for him: a Prince of Wales. For, after years of disappointments, Mary of Modena had actually been delivered on 10 June of a healthy baby boy, baptized with Roman rites as James Francis Edward Stuart. Predictably, and notwithstanding the queen's visible pregnancy over the previous months, the infant was immediately denounced by James's now innumerable enemies as a fraud: some other baby, perhaps produced by one of the royal mistresses, and now deposited in the royal crib to thwart the succession of Mary and her husband, Prince William. At any rate, the shock of the news immediately accelerated the timetable of the Dutch military operation. Just a week after the announcement of the royal birth, and doubtless prompted by the Dutch ambassador Dijkvelt, the ‘Seven' sent their formal invitation to the Prince
to come to England, not as conqueror but as the protector of Protestantism and liberty. It was exactly a century since the launching of the Spanish attack on Elizabeth's kingdom, a fact not lost on the defenders of the queen's legacy. But this would be the Good Armada, and the Protestant wind, this time, would be kind to its ships.

Looking on with increasing dismay and disbelief at what was happening in England, Louis XIV had in fact already offered James military help, but had been brushed off by the Stuart king's unfaltering sense of righteous invincibility. Now, when James could have used it, it was too late, for Louis had committed a sizeable army to the Rhineland where William had made sure the troops would be tied down. But, even at this critical juncture, James was held back from switching his own military resources from domestic intimidation to a posture of national defence. He could still not bring himself to believe that his daughter Mary would allow her husband to launch a full-scale invasion against her own father. And though this seems, in hindsight, a pathetically naïve delusion, the family ties winding about the two chief protagonists of this great drama did, in fact, bind them closely together. James was not just William's father-in-law, he was also his uncle. His sister (also called Mary) had been married to William's father (also called William). And despite the historical divide, which would, after 1688, always separate them, they had much in common beside shared blood. Both were orphans of political upheavals. A year after Charles I had been executed, William's father, the Stadholder William II, had marched on Amsterdam to bend the city to his will – a tactic right out of the Stuart manual on political persuasion. Not long after this
coup
William II died, just before the birth of his son. His political enemies seized the opportunity to revenge themselves and, to preclude any further attempt at Orangist aggrandizement, made William III a ward of state and proceeded to abolish the Stadholderate. The prince had grown up as both pupil and captive of his political enemy Jan De Witt who attempted to turn him into a good republican, in much the same way that there had been talk during the Protectorate of making the youngest Stuart, the Duke of Gloucester, a ‘safe' king.

Both James and William, then, had gone through the experience of loss and humiliation. Both had leaned on surrogate fathers – De Witt and Clarendon – about whom they felt at best ambivalent. Both ended up leading guarded, somewhat secretive lives, hardening themselves against adversity. As Duke of York, of course, James had had an incomparably easier time of it than William III in the Stadholder-less republic. But his position was not so strong that it could protect him against ejection from office as a result of the Test Act or from being sent out of England during
the Exclusion crisis (to Scotland, where he inflicted as much damage as possible on the Presbyterians). The two of them ended up as taciturn, habitually suspicious personalities, despising courtly banter and putting little faith in political negotiation unless backed up by the hard facts of military force.

In one respect, which would in the end prove critical in 1688, James and William differed radically: the value they placed on printed propaganda. Here, their backgrounds told. Although he had come to power over the bodies of the De Witts and was restored as Captain and Admiral General, William still had to contend, over sixteen years, with the complicated, interlocking, highly decentralized institutions of the Dutch Republic. It was no good simply blustering and bullying his way to leadership, because in the last resort money, not princely mystique, spoke loudest in a country that was the prototype of a modern polity, a place where decentralization rather than the concentration of power worked best, where the marketplace of ideas as well as commodities required religious pluralism. Knowing the Dutch Republic's reputation for toleration, James actually tried to trade on it. When, during their many exchanges of correspondence, James tried to represent his own Declaration of Indulgence as a commitment to toleration, he was shocked to find William actually defending the Test Act as a regrettable necessity for Anglican peace of mind about the future of their Church establishment.

William's response suggests that in the summer of 1688 he and his Chief Minister, Grand Pensionary Gaspar Fagel, were paying as much attention to the public-relations end of their enterprise as to military planning. The manifesto, of which a massive 60,000 copies were printed both to herald the arrival of the Dutch army and to justify its presence, carefully avoided the slightest suggestion that William and Mary were coming as conquerors to set themselves up in James's place. The aim, repeated over and again, was a restoration, not a revolution: the restoration of Church, of orderly parliamentary government, of the rule of law, in fact the restoration of a true English monarchy instead of the Catholic ‘tyranny', ruled by Jesuits, arbitrary courts and Irish troops that James was in the process of instituting.

As in 1066 and 1588, though, strategy was the prisoner of providence, otherwise known as the weather. It was three months before the enormous armada and its huge cargo of troops, many of them the cream of the Dutch army, were able to sail from Scheveningen. The chosen landing place, perhaps influenced by the most influential of the English sponsors, Danby, was the northeast coast (where Henry Bolingbroke had begun his campaign against Richard II), far enough from James's
concentration of troops in the southeast to be able to establish some momentum before meeting the king's army. Danby had promised that a supportive rising would begin in his own county of Yorkshire. But while the Protestant winds of late October were kind enough to William's fleet, they blew him the wrong way, from the strait of Dover towards western rather than northeastern England. Eventually God stopped being coy and revealed himself to be a Protestant gentleman, for it was on the anniversary of the deliverance from the Gunpowder Treason, 5 November, that William made landfall near Torbay in Devon.

When he had taken in the full seriousness of his position, James II went from disbelief to consternation. In panic, he threw into reverse almost everything that had given offence. The Declaration of Indulgence was withdrawn; a new election was called, for which Roman Catholics were not to be eligible; the most senior officers of Church and state who had been dismissed were reinstated. But it was much, much too late. As far as the huge coalition of the disaffected was concerned – and especially the Tory gentry and the Church – only the presence of William's army and the prince himself could possibly guarantee that James would keep his word and neutralize his pet standing army. In fact, had he shown some presence of mind, James might still have been able to control the situation or at least contain the damage, for on paper at least his troop strength was easily twice that of the Prince of Orange. But those 40,000 men were dispersed around the country, and James had collapsed back into a realm of ancient nightmares in which nothing, especially not the physical safety of a royal family, could be taken for granted. So he kept at least half his available troops in the south back in London. It was far from certain, moreover, whether the rest of the army sent southwest towards Salisbury would fight when it came to it. Mutinies against Catholic officers were reported as commonplace. And then came another massive blow, which seemed to shock the king more than anything since hearing of the Dutch fleet passing the strait of Dover: his younger daughter, the Lady Anne, had disappeared, re-emerging as a defector in the camp of her brother-in-law.

James now led what was left of his army into Wiltshire. His own condition did not inspire confidence. Insomniac and suffering from chronic nose-bleeds, he seemed as disoriented by his predicament as his army, which lacked any kind of maps. Supposing he decided to tackle William head-on, no one had much idea of how to find him. And James was so nervous of having left the queen and the Prince of Wales behind in a capital depleted of troops that in the end he gave up looking for William and retreated from Salisbury back to London. Before he got there he learned of the defection of the general in whom he had placed most
confidence, John Churchill. It was a betrayal he never forgave or forgot.

Free to advance, his army swelling daily, William played his hand with great care and subtlety. He would advance his army to no more than 40 miles west of London, he let it be known, it being understood that James would withdraw his troops a like distance east. In between, the parliament could deliberate on the fate of the kingdom, free of any kind of intimidation. The moderation of these demands was, in fact, deceptive. As the royal position disintegrated, the Whigs could hardly refrain from the opportunity, not just to disadvantage James but be rid of him altogether. And it was equally impossible for William not to be tempted by his amazing run of luck into seeing himself as something more than an arbitrator. But to keep the Tories in the camp meant making at least a show of sweet reason and hoping that James, true to form, would spurn it. James's only ploy at this point was to call William's bluff and accept the terms. But in the first week of December he was haunted by memories of his father falling into the hands of the enemy, losing all freedom of action and, inevitably, his life. James was, if anything, even more anxious about the Prince of Wales's safety, for in the person of the baby boy lay the eventual redemption of his cause. So he prevaricated just long enough to see the queen and the Prince of Wales safely off to France. A few hours after he had told a meeting of lords that he would remain and continue negotiations with William, James himself made his escape. It was 3 a.m. on 11 December 1688. Burning with furious chagrin at his plight, driven by absurd passions, he enacted one last childish gesture of malice. The writs for the new free parliament were brought to him along with the Great Seal. The writs were promptly burned, the Great Seal dropped into the Thames as he crossed to the south bank. He might just as well have lowered his throne into the muddy water.

For the Whigs, of course, this completely unanticipated turn of events was better than anything they could have imagined in their wildest dreams. Initially, the Tories were appalled, for throughout the campaign they had been in denial that they were in the business of dislodging James from his throne; rather, merely making him heed the law. Before long, however, the most thoughtful Tories realized that the abrupt exit of the king had actually let them off the hook of their own conscience. It remained abhorrent to think of themselves as in insurrection against their anointed monarch. But what if the throne could be said to have been vacated – opening a void that nature and the state abhorred? The argument had been used before, speciously, in 1399 when Richard II's vacation had been spent mostly in the Tower. But this time James had indeed gone on his travels. If they did not want – heaven forbid – England
to relapse into a Commonwealth, a royal solution had better be found, and quickly.