Authors: Richard Holmes
A combination of factors – amongst them the replacement of some officers of the English army, the purging of the Irish army, fears about the army’s role as a political instrument, and mistrust of James’s policy overall – helped focus a military conspiracy against him. In the case of some officers, like Churchill and the Earl of Craven, colonel of the Coldstream Guards and Carolina proprietor, opposition to the king was sharpened by fears that his policies were damaging their interests in North America. In February 1687 Churchill, as a governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, delivered to the king the company’s formal complaint that nothing was being done to protect the North American colonies from French encroachments. The historian Stephen Saunders Webb may overstate the case when he declares that Churchill was ‘the leading exponent of English imperial expansion’. There is, though, no doubt that his belief that English interests in North America were not well served by royal policy was another significant difference between himself and James, and that his views were shared by the influential, efficient and upwardly mobile Blathwayt.
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Those involved in the conspiracies against James II risked their lives and fortunes, and so took good care to minimise written evidence of their deeds, thus complicating the historian’s task. We can easily enough say what the conspiracy was not. There was no attempt to subvert the majority of the army’s officer corps, still less its rank and file. There was never any hope of using the army in a military coup to overthrow the king. In fact the bulk of James’s army never directly opposed him, but the military conspiracy ensured that it was unable to fight against William of Orange because of the paralysing defection of its leaders. This defection, organised by men close to James, who knew his failings, fatally loosened his grip on power. It is possible that a stronger character would have withstood the repeated hammer blows of personal
betrayal, but James did not. The flaws in his character, so clearly revealed during his brief reign, would destroy him.
Bishop Burnet, who had close connections to some of those involved, believed that at the heart of what he called ‘the design’ were ‘three of the chief officers of the army, Trelawney, Kirke and the Lord Churchill. They all went into it, and Trelawney engaged his brother, the bishop.’
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Ailesbury, on the other side of the fence, agreed with this. He tells us that he and Feversham went to the king, and begged him
to clap up seven or eight of the heads of them and with the most humble submission I ventured to name the Prince of Denmark, the Dukes of Ormonde and Grafton, Lord Churchill, Mr Kirke, Mr Trelawney &c., but as it was found, and fatally, that the king could not resolve and, if he had, in all probability the army would have stood by him.
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There were two nerve centres of conspiracy. The ‘Treason Club’, whose members met at the Rose Tavern on Russell Street in Covent Garden to smoke, drink and mutter, included a number of whiggish professional soldiers and politicians like Richard Savage, Viscount Colchester, Thomas Wharton (later to inherit his father’s peerage and emerge as a Whig grandee) and Thomas Langston, sometime major of Churchill’s Royal Dragoons and now commanding Princess Anne’s Horse. Charles Godfrey, who had served with Churchill in France and later married his sister Arabella, kept Churchill abreast of movements in the Rose.
The ‘Tangerines’ were the other main group, although the term strictly speaking comprised all Tangier veterans, given to musing on old times over their tokay and damning the government. Key conspirators included Percy Kirke and Charles Trelawney, as well as Langston, a Tangier veteran and intermediary with the Treason Club. Another Tangerine was John Cutts, a veteran of the Imperial service, where he had been the first man to plant a standard on the walls of Buda, a wholly characteristic act for a man soon to be known as ‘Salamander’, after the mythical creature which lives in fire. He had just published a book of
Poetical Exercises
and was a lieutenant colonel in the Anglo-Dutch Brigade, providing useful contact with disaffected officers in that body.
Some regiments were, naturally, more disaffected than others. The officers of 1st Foot Guards, who might have been expected to provide a mainstay for the regime, seem to have followed the lead of their colonel, the Duke of Grafton, who was not simply a member of the Cockpit circle but Barbara Villiers’ son, and who felt that his performance in 1685
had been poorly rewarded. He was governor of the Isle of Wight, and one of his captains, Lionel Copley, was deputy governor of the important port and arsenal of Hull.
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There were a number of naval officers like George Byng, Mathew Aylmer and Arthur Herbert in the conspiracy, but it was naturally more difficult to get naval plotters together.
Neither of these groups turned its attention to practical treason till the summer of 1688, as they could do little until they knew that William was indeed planning to invade. Events moved fast that summer. On 10 June 1688 James’s queen gave birth to a son, rendering the temporising policies of men like Halifax irrelevant, for there was now a good chance that James would have a successor who would not reverse his policies. Churchill, we are told, ‘was summoned to attend’ the birth as a witness, but although he was ‘sent for in a very particular manner … he had received some intimations before, and was purposely out of the way’.
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The bishops were acquitted on 30 June, and on that very day the Earls of Devonshire, Danby and Shrewsbury, Bishop Compton, Edward Russell and Henry Sidney, sent a letter to William of Orange assuring him that ‘nineteen parts of twenty’ throughout the kingdom wanted a change in government, and ‘much the greatest part of the nobility and gentry’ were ‘as much dissatisfied’. If William acted quickly, they were confident that the army would not fight because its members were ‘so discontented’.
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The army was in camp on Hounslow Heath, and conditions for spreading discontent amongst selected officers could scarcely have been better. Indeed, James’s own policy of canvassing officers for their support for repeal of the Test Acts actually worked against his own interests. The majority of army officers, then as now, were apolitical, and resented being invited to make political choices either way. When James asked Captain Sandys of the Blues, who had fought bravely at Sedgemoor, what he thought of the repeal, the captain replied gruffly: ‘I understand Your Majesty well enough. I fear God and honour the king, as I ought, but I am not a man that is given to change.’
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By mid-1688 the fact that the Prince of Orange was considering an invasion was an open secret. On 19 August Dr Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, warned John Evelyn that ‘there would suddenly be some great thing discovered. This was the Prince of Orange intending to come over.’
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On 18 September Evelyn reported that ‘the Dutch make extraordinary preparations both at sea and land’, and on 7 October he declared that:
To such a strange temper, and unheard of in former times, was this poor nation reduced, and of which I was an eyewitness. The apprehension was (and with reason) that His Majesty’s forces would neither at land or at sea oppose them with that vigour requisite to repel the invader.
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John Churchill was at the very centre of the plot, and this is not a comfortable admission for some biographers. Winston S. Churchill, indeed, described the conspiracy against James as ‘The National Counter-Plot’ so as to stress both its national and its reactive character. Like most of the professional soldiers involved in it, Churchill relied primarily upon his army pay, and so the much-feared purge of the English army after the Irish model would strike at his fundamental interests. He had already seen loyal men who obstructed James have their careers blasted. Then, in early 1688 the Earl of Oxford, ‘the noblest subject in England and, as Englishmen loved to say, in Europe’, refused, as lord lieutenant of Essex, to appoint Catholics to public office. ‘I will stand by your Majesty against all enemies to the last drop of my blood,’ he declared. ‘But this is a matter of conscience and I cannot comply.’ He was deprived of his county lieutenancy and of the colonelcy of the Blues, where the Duke of Berwick replaced him.
In the fate of men like Somerset and Oxford, grandees who could survive well enough without royal favour, Churchill sensed a foretaste of his own. He was not willing to become a Catholic, and had told James so, though in less jocular terms than Percy Kirke, who warned the surprised monarch that he had given the Emperor of Morocco first refusal, and so if he was going to convert to anything it would be to Islam. One evening before dinner in the autumn of 1685, we are told, James and Churchill walked round the Deanery Garden at Winchester. James had that day been carrying out the traditional ceremony of touching those afflicted by scrofula, known as the King’s Evil, and at Winchester he had performed the ceremony attended by Catholic priests.
James asked Churchill what he thought people made of his carrying out the ceremony in this way. Churchill replied that they feared it might be paving the way for the restoration of Catholicism. The angry James snapped back that he had given his word that all he sought was religious toleration. Churchill then said:
What I spoke, sir, proceeded purely from my zeal for your majesty’s service, which I prefer above all things next to that of God, and I
humbly beseech your majesty to believe no subject in all your three kingdoms would venture further than I would to purchase your favour and good liking; but I have been bred a Protestant, and intend to live and die in that communion; above nine parts of ten of the whole people are of that persuasion, and I fear (which excess of duty makes me say) from the genius of the English nation, and their natural aversion to the Roman Catholic worship, some consequences which I dare not name, and which it creates in me a horror to think of.
James then said deliberately:
I tell you, Churchill, I will exercise my own religion in such a manner as I shall think fitting. I will show favour to my Catholic subjects, and be a common father to all my Protestants of what religion soever: but I am to remember that I am King, and to be obeyed by them. As for the consequences, I shall leave them to Providence, and make use of the power God has put into my hands to prevent anything that shall be injurious to my honour, or derogatory to the duty that is owing to me.
James did not speak to Churchill again that night, but during dinner he had a long conversation with Dr Maggot, the dean of Winchester, about Passive Obedience. ‘I myself,’ wrote the anonymous author of this source, ‘was a stander by and heard it; without knowing the occasion of it at the time, till the Lord Churchill told me what words had happened between the King and him.’
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It is as difficult for us now as it was for contemporaries to judge precisely where, in these matters, conscience left off and self-interest began. Amongst the conspirators were some men who were devout, and others (with Percy Kirke as the most notable example) who were not. If the evidence of his abundant correspondence is any guide, Churchill was sincere in his commitment to Anglicanism. In accordance with the spirit of the age, he tried not to march or fight on Sundays, repeatedly affirmed his trust in God and the need to thank Him publicly for His mercies. Twenty years later, in a dark moment before Oudenarde, ill and at a tactical disadvantage, he was discovered by Sicco van Goslinga earnestly at prayer at one o’clock in the morning. In December 1687 Sarah told Mary of Orange that ‘Though he [Churchill] will always obey the King in all things that are consistent with religion – yet, rather than change that, I daresay that he will lose all his places and all that he has.’
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Churchill did not only
believe
that James was wrong: he
thought
that the monarch’s
policy would either wreck his own career or generate a wider insurrection. In the latter event he did not wish to be on the losing side, for he had seen, in his own father’s case, just what that involved.
He was certainly anxious not to break cover too soon. In February 1688 James decreed that the Duke of Berwick’s Regiment of Foot, in garrison at Portsmouth, was to enlist some Irish recruits who were surplus to requirements elsewhere. The regiment’s lieutenant colonel and five of the twelve company commanders begged instead that ‘we may have leave to fill up our companies with such men of our nation as we judge most suitable to the king’s service and to support our honours’. The officers were tried by court-martial at Windsor Castle, and all lost their commissions. Seven of their brother officers resigned in sympathy, and over a hundred private soldiers seized the opportunity to desert. The incident was not in fact a sign of James’s intention to pack English regiments with Irish recruits, but to an army that was already suspicious of royal intentions it looked very much that way.
Churchill sat on the court-martial and voted for the death penalty. By doing so he gave a public affirmation of his loyalty to James, but because courts-martial voted in reverse seniority, with the most junior voting first, he knew that his apparent severity would not actually imperil the lives of the accused. However, he was aware that one of the officers on trial, John Beaumont, was an active plotter and must have been worried that his premature action would risk wider disclosures. Churchill, as we shall see, was responsible for remodelling the army after the Revolution of 1688, and saw that Beaumont was promoted to colonel while at least three of the cashiered captains became lieutenant colonels.
In all this dangerous work Churchill was aided and abetted by his wife. There is a very close correlation between the predominantly Tory Cockpit circle and the often whiggish army conspirators. Henry Compton, the suspended Bishop of London, was not only a signatory of the invitation to William of Orange but a confidant of the Cockpit. In the late summer of 1688 he travelled widely, winning over his nephew the Earl of Northampton, the Earl of Dorset, Lord Grey de Ruthin and the Earl of Manchester.
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At the very heart of the Cockpit was Princess Anne, who assured her elder sister Mary, William of Orange’s wife: