A History of the World (53 page)

But the British revolution was not over. It would take only one more incompetent Stuart to finish off untrammelled monarchy there for ever.

Britain Invaded

Was she or wasn’t she? The gossip about the queen, a dark-eyed Italian who had suffered many miscarriages, was poisonous. The king’s own daughter Princess Anne wrote to her older sister in Holland: ‘I can’t help thinking the wife’s great belly is a little suspicious. It is true indeed she is very big, but she looks better than ever she did, which is not usual.’ A week later, she wrote again that with all the gossip and jokes about a fake pregnancy, the queen ‘should, to convince the
world, make either me or some of my friends feel her belly; but quite contrary, whenever one talks of her being with child, she looks as if she was afraid one should touch her. And whenever I happen to be in the room as she has been undressing, she has always gone into the next room to put on her smock.’
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This was the tittle-tattle that would take Britain on an altogether different course.

The pregnant Queen was Mary of Modena, wife of James II of Great Britain, a Catholic Stuart who wanted Catholics to be tolerated, and perhaps rather more than tolerated, in his Protestant country. His daughters by his first marriage to an Englishwoman, Princess Anne and her older sister Mary, were Protestants. This second, Italian, wife had failed to provide a son – until now. On 10 June 1688 the queen was delivered of a boy, James Francis Edward Stuart. Fireworks and bonfires were lit. Commemorative cups and dishes were commissioned, pictures painted, just as happens for a British royal birth to this day. Except that this time the national gossip continued, and spread. The so-called heir, it was said, was not the queen’s child at all but a changeling, smuggled into the birth chamber in a warming-pan to ensure a Catholic inherited the throne. In fact the birth had been attended by a small horde of witnesses, cramming the room and the surrounding corridors. But this did nothing to quell the rumour.

Just six months later the Coldstream Guards, one of Britain’s proudest regiments, were ordered to leave their posts guarding the king at his palace in Whitehall. Indeed, all the English soldiers in London were told to leave, the Life Guards to decamp to St Albans, and others to Sussex. Into their places marched an invading army, the crack infantry of the Dutch Blue Guard, in their blue and orang-eyellow uniforms. These were the spearhead of a huge invading force, twice as big as the Spanish Armada. The Dutch fleet of fifty-three warships and about four hundred supply ships had outwitted the Royal Navy, sailing first towards the east coast of England and then using a change in the wind – ‘the Protestant wind’, people said – to sail west, landing at Torbay in Devon.

The Dutch had caught the British and French fleets napping. Many miles from the nearest English defenders, nearly forty thousand troops had disembarked along with fifty cannon, volunteers and extra horses. They were well equipped with everything a modern army needed, from newly made muskets and pistols to supply wagons, bombs and
even wheelbarrows. And this was a truly international invading force. The Dutch monarch William of Orange was leading, along with some Scottish and English renegades, a force of Germans, Swiss, Swedes and even Laplanders. It included, partly just to show that William was a world-conquering fellow, two hundred blacks from the sugar plantations of America, wearing turbans and feathers. The army had marched first to Exeter and then to the Thames, reaching Henley, then Windsor, site of the ancient royal castle. Finally, just as King James was getting into bed at 11 p.m. on 17 December, they arrived in St James’s Park in the middle of London. He could not believe his eyes.

Though James had a bigger army and the support of most of the southern landowners, he had been in a state of abject funk for weeks. His daughter, the chatty Princess Anne, was among those who now abandoned him for William and her sister Mary. So too had Anne’s closest friend Sarah Churchill, wife of the Duke of Marlborough (the two were so close they used nicknames for one another – Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman). The regime was crumbling from within. James had already made one attempt to flee to France six days earlier, deliberately dropping the Great Seal in the Thames from his rowing-boat. He had done this because no Parliament was lawful without it, and he hoped thereby to create a constitutional crisis. He did, but the Lords, pragmatic as ever, formed a provisional government anyway, until James was finally packed off by the Dutch to Rochester. A few days later he left for France, his guards having been quietly instructed to let him go. For the next few months all British regiments were ordered not to go within twenty miles of London while the Dutch and Germans set up their camps inside the capital, at Kensington, Chelsea and Paddington.

The British do not, in general, make much of this invasion. Even quite well educated people believe that England has not been invaded since the Normans arrived in 1066. The impression has been left that William was more or less invited in, to sort out some small constitutional issues. This was not so. William had taken a massive military and personal gamble because the Dutch Protestants were desperate. Had James not panicked and fled, or had the wind veered a little, William might have lost everything. Instead, with his wife, Princess Anne’s confidante and older sister Mary, he became part of the only joint monarchy in modern British history. But the reign of William and Mary was not yet secure. A major attempt to win back the crown
for the Stuarts and Catholicism erupted in Ireland (and to a lesser extent Scotland), and was only thwarted in battle. So this was not even, quite, a ‘bloodless revolution’. But 1688 was truly a turning-point in European history because it established a different way of ruling.

William of Orange had assembled his army and navy, and had taken that gamble, because he felt he had no alternative. When his sister-in-law fed him the gossip about Queen Mary’s pregnancy, it seemed obvious that the British succession had been settled and the London court would stay Catholic. This was terrible news for Protestant Holland, with her north German allies, leaving them exposed to the most dangerous enemy they had, Louis XIV. The Sun King was squeezing them. He had dramatically increased taxes on Dutch exports to France, and banned the import of the pickled herrings so many Dutch fishermen and traders depended on for their livelihood. He had impounded three hundred Dutch trading vessels. His armies seemed unbeatable.

The Dutch had despaired, years earlier, at the failure of Charles II to come to their aid. But the succession of James II, a Catholic like Louis, made their plight worse. The arrival of his son, whether the boy had been smuggled into the birth chamber or not, was the final blow. William of Orange either had to invade Britain and neutralize the threat of a British–French alliance, or watch his Protestant trading nation, brimming with enterprise, science and middle-class prosperity, be choked to death. So he launched an invasion, one that has been described as ‘mounted in defiance of all common sense and professional experience’.
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As the historian Lisa Jardine has conclusively shown, what happened in 1688 happened because the Dutch decided it must, not because the British asked for it to happen.

Yet its consequences went far beyond anything William could have imagined. Once James had gone, and despite his Dutch Blue Guard, William’s position in London was not entirely safe. Strictly speaking, he was only fourth in line to the throne. Most of the big landowners had sat on the fence and waited to see who would win before committing themselves. The army and navy were unhappy, to say the least. Having marched through London, how would he actually establish his authority?

Meeting as a Convention, since in the absence of the Great Seal they could not be a Parliament, the Commons and Lords debated
what to do. They would simply declare new constitutional principles as they went along. James had not been ousted, but had deserted his country, thus breaking his contract. (‘Contract’? What contract? a traditionalist would have asked.) James and his son were then cut out of the succession on the novel principle that they were Catholics, and that they had been found ‘by experience’ to be impossible rulers.
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Next, the peers and MPs offered the crown to Mary alone, a Stuart by blood. This, said William, was not acceptable. He would rather return home with his wife and leave the British to squabble amongst themselves. At which, the MPs backed down and announced a joint monarchy in which William, now William III, would exercise the real authority.

This was a great victory for the Dutchman – or would have been, except that the Commons insisted on something in return. They drew up a Bill of Rights. Agreeing to this meant that William also agreed that in future no British monarch could raise taxes, or have a standing army, without the agreement of Parliament; that he had to allow free and frequent elections; and that he could not be a Roman Catholic. As compared with the absolutist pretensions of continental monarchy, this was the real, the permanent, British revolution. A monarch who controlled neither money nor troops, and whose people dictated his religious views, was no proper monarch at all.

The British parliamentarians had rejected the monarchical tyranny of Charles I and the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. They had little time for James’s Catholic-absolutist dreams, but nor were they prepared to allow themselves to be squashed under the heel of a Protestant Dutchman. They would have monarchy, but on their own terms only; and for a major power this was something entirely new. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ would be the cornerstone of British politics and power for more than three centuries to come. The rights and liberties secured by Parliament gave freedom to publish, argue, probe and experiment. This was the unequivocal, world-changing answer to Rome.

Out of it would come the great thinkers of the British Enlightenment and a flourishing inquiry into nature – what would later be called ‘science’. Isaac Newton, who published his
Principia Mathematica
the year before William’s fleet sailed to Devon, enjoyed his greatest years as a
public figure under the new monarchy. Like Galileo, he was firmly convinced that the heliocentric principle was correct, and like Galileo he combined mathematics and practical experiments in a wide range of fields. He produced the first reflecting telescope, for instance, for which he ground his own lenses. Like his colleagues the chemist Robert Boyle, the polymath Robert Hooke – who invented the word ‘cell’ for the basic building-block of life – and Christopher Wren, he never had to worry about religious orthodoxy or the attentions of the Inquisition.

Under the leadership of the Royal Society, formed during Charles II’s reign, these thinkers argued and disputed constantly, but over the meaning of their discoveries, over who invented what first, and over patents – not over divine authority. They were part of what for a time became more of an Anglo-Dutch milieu than a purely British one. Among the Dutchmen who soon made the trip to London was the same Christiaan Huygens who had picked up and partially solved the problem of measuring longitude with an accurate clock, the man that Galileo had been kept away from by the Catholic Church.

Galileo had been fascinated by microscopes as well as by telescopes, and in Rome in 1624 had shown off the multitude of giant insects revealed by his own compound microscope.
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In London and Leiden, an even greater sense of tiny new worlds being uncovered was experienced when Hooke, Huygens and the renowned Antonie van Leeuwenhoek squinted through their lenses and published some extraordinary pictures of lice, mould and other wriggly, nightmarish tiddlers. If, despite the anxieties aroused by the Inquisition, Galileo did finally arrive in a Christian Paradise, he must have looked down and shaken his head in frustration at being born too far south and a little too early.

What, meanwhile, of that terrible gossip Princess Anne, whose letters had triggered rather more than she bargained for. She became, in good time, plump and stately Queen Anne. Like the Habsburgs, this last of the Stuart monarchs became an unhappy symbol of dynastic weakness: of her eighteen or nineteen pregnancies, all but three produced dead babies – stillborn, miscarried or died very soon after birth. This horrible toll, compounded as a personal tragedy by the death in childhood of the three survivors (two from smallpox) suggests some profound genetic problem. Yet if Anne did not give birth to a successor, her reign does mark the true birth of a modern nation.
In 1707 she became the first monarch to rule over the constitutionally united realms of England, Wales and Scotland – or as it became known, Great Britain. The Scottish Parliament, after a ruinous attempt at creating an empire in central America, had bankrupted the country. It accepted London’s bail-out terms and dissolved itself, thereby creating a single British Parliament. Queen Anne’s friend Sarah Churchill became one of the most influential women in the land, and it was her husband, the Duke of Marlborough, who would lead British armies across Europe, finally freeing the Netherlands from the French and beating back the Catholic threat.

After this, Britain would begin the process of acquiring the greatest empire in the world and, on the back of her original contribution to politics, royal ‘moderatism’ rather than ‘absolutism’, achieve the first industrial revolution too.

The Bourbons of India: From Babur to Bust

The history of India can seem a tangled blur of confusing, romantic names, hidden in thickets of unreliable source materials. We last left her in the political confusion that followed the empires of the Buddhist Mauryans and then of the Hindu Gupta dynasty, which was a golden age for Indian art, architecture and writing. But Hindu India would not be able to maintain its political dominance. The same violent disturbances that shook Eastern Europe, central Asia, Russia and China erupted into India too. The Mongol invaders, coming on the heels of Muslim Turkic armies, would stamp Islam across the northern territories and would dominate the subcontinent until the arrival of the British.