Civil War: The History of England Volume III (72 page)

Lillibulero bullen a la

By Christ and St Patrick’s the nation’s our own

Lillibulero bullen a la.

The music is still used as a signature tune by BBC Radio.

The king’s departure from England was now interrupted when he was discovered on a customs boat about to sail from the Isle of Sheppey; he was disguised in a short black wig and was at first mistaken for a Jesuit. When he was brought to the port of Faversham he was soon recognized and taken to the mayor’s house where he was guarded by the seamen who had found him; they wanted to claim their prize. He was by now thoroughly frightened and bewildered, at one moment pleading for a boat and at the next weeping over his misfortunes. An eyewitness, John Knatchbull, ‘observed a smile in his face of an extraordinary size and sort; so forced, awkward and unpleasant to look upon that I can truly say I never saw anything like it’.

When informed of James’s enforced sojourn in Faversham, no one in authority really knew what to do with him. He could not stay where he was. James himself then seems to have determined to return to London, where he might hold an interview with William; his messenger, bearing this news to the invader, was promptly arrested and consigned to the Tower. Who was the master now?

James, unaware of his envoy’s fate, proceeded towards the capital; as he approached Blackheath on 16 December he was greeted by cheering crowds who were no doubt hoping for an accommodation between the two parties. They were largely comprised of the ‘king and country’ stalwarts among the people, but they represented a more general sense of relief. A royalist supporter noted after the event that in the streets between Southwark and Whitehall ‘there was scarce room for coaches to pass through, and the balconies and windows besides were thronged’. The king himself was to write that it was ‘liker a day of triumph than humiliation’.

A less enthusiastic welcome also awaited him. While resting at Whitehall that evening, he was advised that all the posts were to be taken up by the Dutch guards of the prince of Orange; he would in effect be a prisoner in his own palace. In the early hours of the next day he was woken by an order from the prince commanding him to leave London by nine in the morning and travel on to Ham House. He was to depart at that time because William himself was to enter London at midday and did not wish the people to be diverted by the sight of their king. The king obeyed the order, with the exception that he wished to remove to Rochester rather than to Ham. The wish was granted but it was still clear that the monarch was a helpless captive in his own kingdom.

William himself entered the capital on 18 December to be in turn greeted by cheering crowds, bells and bonfires. He was heralded as one who had come to redeem ‘our religion, laws, liberties and lives’, but a large element of the jubilation must have come from the fact that the Protestant religion had been restored without war or revolution. They had cheered the king two days before as one who had abandoned his Catholic policies; they could equally well cheer their Protestant saviour.

The king stayed at the house of a local baronet in Rochester for a few days, but every moment he was looking for a means of escape. He feared assassination or, at best, straight imprisonment. Yet he noted that the guards about him were not strict in the performance of their duties. In truth William wanted his rival to escape as the least worst outcome of their conflict. James’s presence in the country caused difficulties of its own but, if it could be said that he had departed by his own wish, then he might be considered to have abdicated. On the night of 22 December he rose from his bed and departed through a conveniently opened back door; he walked through the garden to the shore of the Medway where a skiff was waiting for him.

Thus was accomplished what was variously called the great or prodigious ‘Revolution’ and what was eventually known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’. A supporter of William, Bishop Burnet, wrote of the king that ‘his whole strength, like a spider’s web, was so irrevocably broken with a touch, that he was never able to retrieve what for want of judgement and heart, he threw up in a day’.
It was not a matter of a day, however, but of years. In his obstinacy and fervent piety he had miscalculated the nature of the country; he had advanced where he should have called a halt. He had pitted the power of central government against local government to the ultimate disservice of the nation. By assaulting the sensibilities of both Anglicans and Tories he had alienated his natural supporters, and by advancing the claims of Catholics he had touched upon a very sensitive prejudice. He may not have wanted to become an absolute king, but he acted as if that were his intention. The birth of an heir stretched that prospect indefinitely.

James II spent the rest of his life in France. It was said, in his court at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, that ‘when you listen to him, you realize why he is here’. Thus ended the public life of the last Stuart king of England. We may leave the scene with the words of John Dryden from
The Secular Masque
:

Thy wars brought nothing about;

Thy lovers were all untrue.

’Tis well an old age is out,

And time to begin a new.

Further reading

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of those books the author found most useful in the preparation of this third volume.

G
ENERAL
S
TUDIES

G. E. Aylmer:
The Struggle for the Constitution
(London, 1963).

J. C. D. Clark:
Revolution and Rebellion
(Cambridge, 1986).

Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (eds):
Politics, Religion and Popularity
(Cambridge, 2002).

Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds):
Conflict in Early Stuart England
(London, 1989).

Godfrey Davies:
The Early Stuarts
(Oxford, 1959).

Kenneth Fincham (ed.):
The Early Stuart Church
(London, 1993).

S. R. Gardiner:
History of England, 1603–1642
. In ten volumes (London, 1899).

William Haller:
The Rise of Puritanism
(New York, 1938).

Christopher Hill:
Puritanism and Revolution
(London, 1958).

Derek Hirst:
Authority and Conflict
(London, 1986).

Ronald Hutton:
Debates in Stuart History
(London, 2004).

J. P. Kenyon:
The Stuart Constitution
(Cambridge, 1966).

Peter Lake:
Anglicans and Puritans?
(London, 1988).

Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds):
The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England
(Manchester, 2007).

John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc:
The History of England
. Volumes seven to ten (New York, 1912).

Judith Maltby:
Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England
(Cambridge, 1998).

Brian Manning:
The English People and the English Revolution
(London, 1976).

John Morgan:
Godly Learning
(Cambridge, 1986).

John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds):
Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England
(Oxford, 1993).

J. F. H. New:
Anglican and Puritan
(London, 1964).

Linda Levy Peck:
Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England
(London, 1990).

H. S. Reinmuth Jnr. (ed.):
Early Stuart Studies
(Minneapolis, 1970).

Conrad Russell:
Parliament and English Politics, 1621–1629
(Oxford, 1979).

———
Unrevolutionary England
(London, 1990).

Kevin Sharpe,
Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England
(London, 1989).

———
Image Wars
(New Haven, 2010).

——— (ed.):
Faction and Parliament
(London, 1978).

Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake:
Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England
(London, 1994).

Alan Smith:
The Emergence of a Nation State
(London, 1984).

J. P. Sommerville:
Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640
(London, 1986).

David Starkey (ed.):
The English Court
(London, 1987).

Margot Todd (ed.):
Reformation to Revolution
(London, 1995).

Howard Tomlinson (ed.):
Before the English Civil War
(London, 1983).

Hugh Trevor-Roper:
Historical Essays
(London, 1957).

———
Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans
(London, 1987).

Nicholas Tyacke:
Anti-Calvinists
(Oxford, 1987).

——— (ed.)
The English Revolution
(Manchester, 2007).

David Underdown:
Revel, Riot and Rebellion
(Oxford, 1985).

J. Dover Wilson (ed.):
Seventeenth Century Studies
(Oxford, 1938).

Andy Wood:
Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England
(London, 2002).

J
AMES
VI
AND
I

Robert Ashton:
James by his Contemporaries
(London, 1969).

Bryan Bevan:
King James
(London, 1990).

Caroline Bingham:
James of England
(London, 1981).

Thomas Birch:
The Court and Times of James
. In two volumes (London, 1848).

Glenn Burgess:
Absolute Monarchy
(London, 1996).

Irene Carrier:
James
(Cambridge, 1998).

Thomas Cogswell:
The Blessed Revolution
(Cambridge, 1989).

James Doelman:
King James and the Religious Culture of England
(Cambridge, 2000).

Kenneth Fincham:
Prelate as Pastor
(Oxford, 1990).

Antonia Fraser:
King James
(London, 1974).

S. J. Houston:
James
(London, 1972).

Robert Lockyer:
James
(London, 1998).

David Matthew:
The Jacobean Age
(London, 1938).

———
James
(London, 1967).

W. M. Mitchell:
The Rise of the Revolutionary Party
(New York, 1957).

W. B. Patterson:
King James and the Reunion of Christendom
(Cambridge, 1997).

Linda Levy Peck (ed.):
The Mental World of the Jacobean Court
(Cambridge, 1991).

Menna Prestwich:
Cranfield
(Oxford, 1966).

Walter Scott:
Secret History of the Court of James
. In two volumes (London, 1811).

Alan G. R. Smith (ed.):
The Reign of James
(London, 1973).

Alan Stewart:
The Cradle King
(London, 2003).

Roy Strong:
Henry, Prince of Wales
(London, 2000).

Roland Usher:
The Reconstruction of the English Church
. In two volumes (New York, 1910).

D. H. Willson:
King James
(London, 1956).

C
HARLES
I

G. E. Aylmer:
The King’s Servants
(London, 1961).

Thomas Birch and Cyprien de Gamache:
The Court and Times of Charles I
. In two volumes (London, 1848).

Charles Carlton:
Charles I: The Personal Monarch
(London, 1983).

Hester Chapman:
Great Villiers
(London, 1949).

H. P. Cooke:
Charles I and his Earlier Parliaments
(London, 1939).

E. S. Cope:
Politics without Parliaments
(London, 1987).

Richard Cust:
Charles I: A Political Life
(London, 2005).

C. W. Daniels and John Morrill:
Charles I
(Cambridge, 1988).

Isaac Disraeli:
Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I
. In five volumes (London, 1828–1831).

Christopher Durston:
Charles I
(London, 1998).

J. H. Hexter:
The Reign of King Pym
(Cambridge, Mass., 1961).

Christopher Hibbert:
Charles I
(London, 2007).

F. M. G. Higham:
Charles I
(London,1932).

Clive Holmes:
Why Was Charles I Executed?
(London, 2006).

David Matthew:
The Social Structure in Caroline England
(Oxford, 1948).

———
The Age of Charles I
(London, 1951).

Brian Quintrell:
Charles I
(London, 1993).

L. J. Reeve:
Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule
(Cambridge, 1989).

Conrad Russell:
The Fall of the British Monarchies
(Oxford, 1991).

Kevin Sharpe:
The Personal Rule of Charles I
(New Haven, 1992).

Hugh Trevor-Roper:
Archbishop Laud
(London, 1940).

C. V. Wedgwood:
The King’s Peace
(London, 1955).

———
Thomas Wentworth
(New York, 1962).

G. M. Young:
Charles I and Cromwell
(London, 1935).

O
LIVER
C
ROMWELL

Maurice Ashley:
The Greatness of Oliver Cromwell
(London, 1957).

Hilaire Belloc:
Cromwell
(London, 1934).

John Buchan:
Cromwell
(London, 1934).

Barry Coward:
Oliver Cromwell
(London, 1991).

J. C. Davis:
Oliver Cromwell
(London, 2001).

C. H. Firth:
Cromwell
(London, 1901).

Antonia Fraser:
Cromwell
(London, 1973).

S. R. Gardiner:
Oliver Cromwell
(London, 1901).