A History of Britain, Volume 2 (44 page)

At which point a word of warning is in order. What then unfolded was not a simple struggle between the forces of reaction and progress, between benighted absolutism and constitutional liberalism. That was certainly the history of the ‘Glorious Revolution' that the Whigs liked to tell. But the Whigs were only the principal and not the exclusive beneficiaries of that revolution (there was a large bloc of Tories in the post-revolution parliament), and they certainly did not bring it about. What made the difference between the fiasco of the Exclusion crisis and the victory of 1688 was the fact that
Tory
England – the bishops, the peers and the country gentry – was driven, despite its adherence to the doctrines of non-resistance, to resist. Among the famous ‘Seven' who issued an invitation to William to come to England to secure a ‘free parliament' and the Church of England was none other than that ultimate anti-Whig, Danby. For the Tory commitment to obey had never been unconditional. Obedience to
lawful
commands was their watchword. And by January 1688 they had become convinced that it was James who was the real revolutionary, who sought to overturn everything the Restoration had stood for, and who now had at all costs to be stopped. Even the staunchest Tory allowed that it might be possible for a king to unking
himself
(as Edward II had
done), so sundering the bonds of loyalty tying subject to monarch.

Well,
was
James a revolutionary? To consider calmly and dispassionately what the two sides in the confrontation of 1687–8 actually stood for is to scramble all our conventional clichés about the good, the bad and the constitutional. Whatever else 1688–90 may have been it was certainly not, as Macaulay thought, a Manichaean struggle between the forces of light and darkness. Many of the things that are said about James are extrapolations from the received wisdom that he got what he deserved; that the long-nosed face (which actually was no more or less ‘haughty' than any other portrait type of that period) betrays a man of incurably despotic temper. Not all of this image is wrong. James had obviously not graduated from the same charm school as his brother. But he was at least as intelligent as Charles, had shown himself more competent in naval battle and was, without question, a lot more conscientious in his attention to government. Much of the stereotype of the brutal autocrat is a projection backwards from the story written by the winners. There is no question whatsoever, of course, that James was indeed a divine-right absolutist who believed that parliament had the right to offer advice and criticism and even propose legislation, but that he had the right if he so chose to reject all of it and to have that be the end of the matter. But the
cause
for which James was apt to get stirred up was, after all, toleration, that ‘liberty of conscience' that Cromwell had so often warbled about, only extended, unlike the Cromwellian state, to Catholics. No wonder, then, that some of James's warmest allies were not just Catholics, but dissenters like the Quaker William Penn the younger. And by no means all the men of science and reason were to be found in the camp of his enemies. Pepys, for one, James's Secretary of the Navy and the epitome of humane reasonableness, remained loyal to the bitter end. It is odd, in fact, that while in conventional histories the European ‘enlightened despots' of the
eighteenth
century, like Frederick the Great and the Emperor Joseph II, get credit for
imposing
toleration on their subjects, the same benefit is not extended to James II. In Ireland, James was the first English king who actually made a strenuous and politically dangerous effort to reverse the brutal wars of colonization that had disfigured the country and dispossessed its native landowners since at least the reign of Elizabeth I. His cardinal sin, to Macaulay, was that he unaccountably appeared to favour the people whom the Victorian historian called the ‘aboriginals'. Conversely, those who opposed James were essentially held together in a classically Cromwellian alliance of bigotry, as the war of 1689–90 would make unequivocally clear.

But – as so often before in this story of the British wars of religion
– having registered all these caveats, it is equally important to understand what the Whigs got
right.
Their suspicion that James's benevolence in extending toleration beyond Catholics to the ‘fanatick' Nonconformist sects was a tactical rather than a wholehearted gesture was not unfounded. Suppose, those sceptics might have argued, the king's dispensation of the Test Act allowed full and open Catholic practice and teaching, so that the Roman Church would (as James made no secret of hoping) be in a position to reconvert England by persuasion; what would such an England actually look like? Was Louis XIV's France, for God's sake, internationally famous for its tolerant atmosphere? Was France a kingdom where all manner of Christians could peaceably profess their confession? All the sceptics had to do was to point to the most infamous act of Louis's reign, which took place in the same year as James's accession (and together with the usual French hand-out to the Stuarts): the uprooting and expulsion of the entire Huguenot community of France. This was not something that was seen in England as a remote and unimportant act. The saga of the cruelly treated Huguenots, together with their exodus to Protestant lands – especially the Netherlands – was an event which actually
defined
allegiances in the mid-1680s and that seemed to point towards the inevitability of another pan-European war. Among the places in which the Huguenot diaspora settled with its immense treasury of wealth, skill and talent was, of course, London. It was not just fellow Dissenters who made them welcome. Henry Compton, the Bishop of London – who incurred so much of James's displeasure that he had him removed from his diocese – was the foremost organizer of relief for the stricken refugees. And, of course, their story was told and retold over and over again in the pathetic images produced by the Dutch engravers and writers.

Not surprisingly, then, Nonconformists were not at all united in gratitude to James for his efforts on their behalf. Presbyterians in particular warned against accepting favours from the king who, in the end, was committed to a Church and an absolutist style of monarchy that was to its very marrow deeply intolerant. In Ireland, where he had a free hand politically, toleration of Protestant dissent was actually banned. And James's virtual declaration of war on the traditional English institutions that presumed to oppose his will – the universities, the bishops and the judiciary – and the ferocity with which he fulminated against them did not suggest a prince who was truly interested in a tolerant, spiritually pluralist commonwealth. ‘Get you gone!' he told the Fellows of Magdalen College, when he expelled them from their fellowships after they had opposed his nomination of a Catholic to be their President. ‘Know I am your King
I will be obeyed, and I command you to be gone. Go and admit the Bishop of Oxford, Head, Principal, what do you call it, of the College . . . I mean President of the College. Let them that refuse it look to it. They shall feel the weight of their sovereign's displeasure.'

There was a middle way open to James (as there had been for Charles I), and it was urged on him by William Penn. Settle for
de facto
toleration without insisting on the formal repeal of the Test Act, he pleaded, and all those whom you have dangerously alienated in Church and shires will return to their natural loyalty. But James II had, in effect, decided to ditch them in the belief that somehow a coalition of opposites – Catholics, ultra-monarchists and Dissenters – could see him through the crisis. He doubtless imagined that he was imitating his brother's firmness in 1680–81. In that instance, however, Charles had drawn to him the majority of the political country, while James was in the process of alienating it. It had been Shaftesbury who had boxed himself into an untenable corner through his inflexibility. Now it was James's turn to do the same, with equally calamitous results. In hindsight it seems incredible that the king could have seriously hoped to offset the enormous power of both the Whig and Tory gentry and aristocracy by so improbable an alliance of Catholics and Dissenters. But his trump card, he must have believed, was the potency of the royal mystique. By invoking the supreme authority of the Crown, which the Tories had for so long themselves trumpeted, James hoped at the very least to divide them and to take enough of them along with him to dispense with the Test Act, pass his new Declaration of Indulgence, without parliamentary approval if necessary, and agree to accept Catholic officers in the army. And, in fact, the idea was not so fabulously far-fetched. The Marquis of Halifax had been dismissed in October 1685 for refusing to go along with the pro-Catholic plans, but Sunderland stayed. The tug of loyalty to the Stuarts for which so many old Cavalier families had fought and suffered was very strong, and had James exploited it with more cool intelligence and a modicum of flexibility he might yet have prevailed. But something told him, disastrously, that for all their belly-aching the Tories would in the end come round to his way of things. Where, after all, could they go?

The answer was, of course, to the Dutch Republic and to William. This was the critical difference between the failed revolt of 1680-85 and the success of 1688–9. All the Whigs had in play in the earlier crisis, as an alternative to the legitimate heir, was the conspicuously illegitimate Duke of Monmouth. But James's own daughter, Princess Mary, was another matter entirely. And her husband the Prince of Orange was by now legitimate in an entirely different sense: the symbolic figurehead of the
European resistance to French domination. Not that it was in the mind of the ‘Seven' who turned to William in 1688 to have Mary replace James on the throne. Had that been mooted, Tories like Danby would never have dreamed of going along with the plan, nor could they have carried the gentry with them. Rather, they wanted to bring William and his troops in to make James cease his unlawful behaviour. On just what constituted unlawful the Whigs and Tories had some measure of, but not complete, agreement. They could agree, for example, on the illegality of the dispensing power, on the need to force James to liquidate his standing army and its Catholic officers. But while that, together with the retention of the Test Act, was good enough for the Tories, the Whigs wanted to have him accept the ‘fundamental law' of parliamentary government: that parliament was an equal partner in government, not merely a disposable source of advice.

And what about William himself? What did he want? First and foremost, whatever was good for the Dutch Republic. Seen from the perspective of purely British history, the revolution of 1688 seems something spontaneously and indigenously generated. The Victorians, especially Macaulay, saw the event as one of those moments that expressed the glorious peculiarity of the English tradition of liberal parliamentarianism, as if somehow the island itself had choked on Catholic despotism, coughed it up and been returned to health, to normality, courtesy of William and Mary. But the truth is different and altogether more European. As so often in the past – in 1066 for example – a turning point in English history was decided by the forces of international, not national, history. It took an immense foreign armada of possibly 600 vessels, carrying perhaps 15,000 Dutch and German troops, to bring about the fall of James. And even this would not have been decisive without the victory at the battle of the Boyne in Ireland two years later. What happened there was essentially the Irish theatre of a huge international conflict. It was fought mainly between non-English Europeans – the French under the Due de Lauzun on one side, and on the other a force of 36,000, two-thirds of whom were Dutch, German and Danes, and were commanded successively by Field Marshal Schomburg and, when he fell, by King William. The only actor in this military drama who had any decisive effect and who was indisputably English was John Churchill, whose defection in November 1688 from King James to Prince William was crucial, and whose violent destruction of Irish resistance two years later was even more decisive. So it was not surprising that, ennobled as the Duke of Marlborough, he would succeed William as the great commander of the European war against Louis XIV.

The critical event of 1688 is better described as the invasion it undoubtedly was, rather than as a ‘revolution'. It had been contemplated by William in the Netherlands long before he had an official invitation. William was shrewd enough to know that it would be a gamble. But by the spring of 1688 he had come to believe that it would be worse
not
to embark on it. The controlling imperatives were all Dutch. The
rampjaar
or year of disaster in 1672 had been the unforgettable moment that defined William's identity as it had scarred for ever the memory of Dutch history. The republic had come close to being wiped off the face of Europe as an independent power through an encircling alliance of France and England, and whatever it took to prevent that from recurring William would do. His marriage to Princess Mary had seemed to militate against a repetition of the Treaty of Dover. But although her father was now on the English throne, William was not so sure. James was, of course, on the take from Louis XIV just as his brother had been. And if he were unable to get his way with the relief of Catholics, it was all but certain that he would look to French military as well as financial aid. Moreover, William was well aware that, as far as ruining the Dutch Republic was concerned, Louis XIV knew that there was more than one way to skin a cat. The Dutch could be struck at through economic and systematic (though undeclared) naval actions, preying on their colonial trade. Massively dependent on imports of grain and timber from the Baltic, they were critically vulnerable to a concerted attack from both French and English ships. So during the mid-1680s Louis XIV and his more bellicose ministers repudiated their agreements signed at the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1679 and began to let privateers loose. Either way, Louis must have reckoned, he couldn't lose. Either the arrogant Dutch commercial empire would piece by piece fall apart, or else the republic would be forced back into a war that once again it would have to fight on two fronts.