Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (71 page)

This is where Mary II came in. Mary was, of course, a real Stuart, the daughter and (if one believed the warming pan myth about Prince James’s birth) heir apparent of the last king. Therefore, Tories who felt no love for William felt an instinctive loyalty to her. Early in the reign, whenever William was away on campaign and Mary served as regent, Tory politicians encouraged her to assert herself against her absent husband and take a more active role in government. While she ruled, assisted by a Regency Council, ably, she refused to be disloyal to William. Apart from Church patronage, she professed to have no interest in politics. Another advantage which Mary brought to the dual monarchy was that she was English-born of English parents, and a committed Anglican. She therefore had a great deal more in common with her subjects than her husband did. Moreover, she was pious, charitable, a promoter of the arts, gregarious, fun-loving, and pretty. Her piety is often credited with inspiring an Anglican revival and “reformation of manners” among the English people (see Conclusion); and it helped to restore the repute of the British monarchy from the depths into which it had fallen under her uncle, Charles II. Her charitable works made her popular with ordinary people. Her love of the arts led to the renovations of Kensington Palace and Hampton Court by England’s greatest architect, Sir Christopher Wren; their interior decoration by its greatest carver, Grinling Gibbons; and the commissioning of annual birthday odes celebrating the monarchy from its greatest composer, Henry Purcell. Mary’s love of good conversation led her to host frequent receptions. These “drawing rooms” brought the ruling elite to court and helped to attract it to the new regime. Since William III was busy with the war and had neither the time nor the personality for such seeming frivolity, Mary fulfilled a crucial function. No wonder that William remarked before one of his absences, “Though I cannot hit on the right way of pleasing the English, I am confident she will.”
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No wonder that, at her sudden death from smallpox in December 1694, both king and country were plunged into a grief comparable to that felt in our own day over the death of Diana, princess of Wales. William mounted an elaborate state funeral and the crowds outside Whitehall Palace, where Mary lay in state, choked the streets for weeks.

The death of Mary II was all the more lamentable because it left William III alone with his British subjects, most of whom had never really warmed to him. To understand their antipathy, one only has to compare his personality to that of his far more popular, but less ambitious, uncle, Charles II. Both men were exceptionally intelligent. But where Charles expended his brainpower on scientific speculation and witty repartee, William applied his to the practical details of administration and diplomacy. As this implies, where Charles was lazy and indolent, William was driven and hardworking. Where Charles had no long-term plan, William had one goal: to stop France. Oddly, that obsession was born of a formative experience not all that dissimilar from Charles’s. As a young man, William had seen French armies devastate his homeland and overwhelm one Protestant state after another in northern Europe. But where Charles’s experiences had left him with a cynical aversion to commitment and a resolve never to “go on his travels” again, William’s endowed him with a cause and a bold strategic vision. His cause was to preserve the Dutch Republic, the Protestant religion, and the liberties of Europe. His vision was that only a “Grand Alliance of European States” could contain France. By this means, a European balance of power could – indeed, must – be achieved. The British kingdoms, with their growing wealth and mighty navy, were a crucial weight in that balance. William III would do anything to ensure that it remained on the Dutch Protestant side of the fulcrum.

His British subjects, lacking his experience and continental perspective, never really saw it that way. Admittedly, the French were as unpopular as the Dutch, especially among English Dissenters or Scots Presbyterians. But in the experience of most Britons, royal military adventures and foreign wars always meant high taxes, high casualties, and disappointing – sometimes disastrous – results. The British did not see themselves, as William did, as a major European power, let alone a global one. The English, in particular, clung to the island mentality, the notion of “little England,” tenuously attached to the barely tolerated Scots and the loathsome Irish, seeking to have as little as possible to do with the strange and barbaric continent of which they were nominally a part. No wonder that William once remarked, “I see that I am not made for this people, nor they for me.”
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If the British can be accused of never having made a real effort to understand their new king, it must be said that he returned the favor. Again, in contrast to Charles II’s affability and wit, William III was cold and taciturn. Charles may have spent his youth in poverty, but he had picked up the fine manners of European courts. William felt more at home in army camps and could not stand court social occasions. Early in his reign he virtually abandoned Whitehall Palace for more remote and private royal residences at Kensington (on London’s western outskirts) and Hampton Court, Surrey. The official reason was the king’s poor health (another contrast to Charles II): the damp and sooty climate of the palace by the Thames was bad for his asthma. But the change suited his temperament as much as it did his constitution. Though William had highly refined artistic tastes, and loved French fashions in painting and gardening, his rough manners were those of a military man. Though he spoke more than adequate English, his closest friends were Dutch soldiers. Above all, he relied on the advice of his trusted Dutch favorites, Hans William Bentinck, whom he created earl of Portland (1649–1709), and, later in the reign, Arnold Joost van Keppel, whom he created earl of Albemarle (1669/70–1718). These men were given key positions at court, Portland as groom of the stole and keeper of the Privy Purse 1689–1700, and Albemarle as master of the Robes and other Bedchamber offices between 1690 and 1702. As with Somerset’s or Buckingham’s court posts under James I, these offices gave Portland and Albemarle daily access to the king and, therefore, the opportunity to influence him. These positions also gave them the power to facilitate or prevent the access and influence of others. As a result, many Englishmen felt the same resentment toward William’s favored Dutch as their ancestors had directed at James I’s “hungry Scots.” In this reign, Scots and Irishmen, who had had relatively free access under the later Stuarts, felt even more shut out.

William’s relative isolation from his British subjects may help to explain his failure to grasp the English party system. One might think that he would be drawn to the Whigs, given their firm support for him and antipathy to James in the Convention Parliament of 1689. But William III associated the Whigs with radicalism and even republicanism. After all, if good Whigs like Locke and Sidney could argue that English subjects had every right to rid themselves of a “bad” king, what was to stop them from doing so again? William was far more attracted to Tories as natural supporters of royal power. And, since many had been in office for over a decade, Tories had the necessary wartime administrative experience. While his early administrations included both Whigs and Tories, the latter predominated. What William did not understand was that the Tories were so tied to the notion of Divine Right monarchy that, while they all supported the king, the king many supported and felt real affection for was the deposed James II! Their Anglicanism had led them to oppose James’s policies in 1688 and to support William’s invasion. But that did not mean that they were comfortable with the idea of his ascending the throne or with his sympathy for Dissenters. William wanted to trust the Tories, but he eventually discovered that some were secret – and others not so secret – Jacobites. Jacobitism produced the first crises of William’s reign in Scotland and Ireland, and it is to the settlements there that we must turn.

The Revolution in Scotland and Ireland, 1688–92

The Revolution of 1688–9 was seen in Scotland as a chance to undo a divisive Restoration Settlement. As a result, the Scottish Revolution would be more violent and more far-reaching than that in England. Recall that while most English people were Anglicans, the Scots were mainly Presbyterians, with a significant Catholic population in the northern Highlands. After the Restoration, in 1662, an Anglican-style episcopal Church of Scotland was established in the northern kingdom, and the Kirk’s General Assembly and traditional Presbyterian services suppressed. One third of the Presbyterian clergy were forced out of their livings and began to lead secret “field conventicles” in the open air. In 1677, the Scottish government, taking its orders from the duke of Lauderdale, deprived Presbyterians of civil rights and made landlords responsible for the conformity of their tenants. These policies only inflamed the native population. The Presbyterian Lowlands to the southwest simmered with unrest, erupting into open rebellion in 1666, 1678–9, and 1685. After the defeat of the most serious rebellion in 1679 James, as duke of York, “exiled” to Scotland during the Exclusion Crisis, took personal control of the government in Edinburgh. Until his departure in 1682 he worked with the Scottish bishops and Episcopalian nobles to strengthen royal power and crack down on Presbyterian Cameronians (named for Richard Cameron, d. 1680), who had violently renounced royal authority. As king, he extended toleration to Scottish Catholics but made Presbyterianism a capital offense. As a result, the 1680s are known in Scottish history at the “Killing Time.” By the time he sought to buy Presbyterian support with toleration in June 1688, it was too late. At the Revolution, Scotland erupted into violence that was anti-Catholic, anti-episcopalian, and anti-royalist.

Whigs and Presbyterians dominated the Scottish Convention Parliament of 1689. They quickly agreed that James had “forfaulted” his crown, and invited William and Mary to rule. They then disestablished the Church of Scotland, restored the Presbyterian Kirk, and weakened the prerogatives of the Crown. In the countryside, the Revolution continued with the “rabblings” of 1688–9, violent rituals designed to humiliate and drive out some two to three hundred Episcopalian ministers from their pulpits. As a result, one group of Scots in particular began to regret the accession of William and Mary: the Episcopalians. Lowland Episcopalians united with some Highland Catholics (who had always been loyal to the Stuarts) to form the basis of Scottish Jacobitism. In July 1689, a Jacobite force under John Graham, Viscount Dundee (1648–89) defeated the Scottish Williamite army at the battle of Killiekrankie. But Dundee died in the battle, and the Crown gradually crushed the Jacobites through a combination of force and bribery. Most notoriously, early in 1692, toward the end of a mostly successful Williamite campaign to pacify the Jacobite Highlands, some 40 men, women, and children of the MacDonald clan were senselessly massacred at Glencoe. Supported by leading Presbyterians, this atrocity provided one more reason for Highland Scots to hate Lowlanders and the London regime, and helps explain why Jacobitism continued in Scotland much stronger than it did in England or Ireland.

Though James, William, and Louis XIV all saw the Irish campaign as a sideshow to the main event, the Revolution of 1688–9 was to prove of monumental significance to Ireland. It will be recalled that, at the Revolution, James II had fled abroad for the second time, to the court of Louis XIV. Louis soon formulated a plan to restore his friend and cousin to the Irish throne, which could be used as the base from which to invade England. Ireland must have seemed ripe for the taking, for it had chafed at English rule for centuries. Moreover, it was the only one of James’s three kingdoms in which the majority of the population was Catholic. Many Catholic Irish farmers had been deprived of their land during the previous hundred years, resulting in periodic rebellions, most notably in 1641. This had led, in turn, to harsh reprisals, savage repression, and more confiscations and plantations under the Commonwealth and Protectorate. At the Restoration, Charles II promised to restore land to loyal Catholics and Anglicans. Though some did see their estates restored (raising the Catholic percentage to about one quarter of all the land in Ireland), most Cromwellian soldiers and adventurers were allowed to keep the land they had confiscated, if they paid compensation to the dispossessed former landowners. Ultimately, this left both groups with grievances. The duke of Ormond, a Royalist veteran of the Irish Civil Wars, nevertheless managed to govern the island effectively as lord lieutenant for most of the next two decades, maintaining the power of the New English Protestant minority while treating loyal Catholics relatively mildly. Despite his sense of their loyalty, Charles II did little for Irish Catholics because he needed the support of Irish Protestants and the money from Irish parliaments. At the same time, Protestants, knowing the Crown’s sympathies, remained anxious that their hegemony might be overturned. Their fears were confirmed with the accession of James II. He gave control of the Irish army and, later, the deputy lieutenancy to Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell (1630–91), a hard-drinking soldier and Roman Catholic who used his power to fill the army and magistracy with his fellow Papists. By 1688, over half of the Irish army consisted of Catholic, Gaelic-speaking Irish natives. Tyrconnell had also confiscated every borough charter in Ireland, and displaced every Protestant sheriff and numerous judges and JPs. Though these policies disrupted trade and led to an exodus of the New English from the country, Ireland was, nevertheless, the only one of James’s three kingdoms which stayed loyal to him in 1688.

James II landed at Kinsale, with French support, in the spring of 1689 (see
map 7
, p. 86). He immediately convened an Irish parliament, almost entirely Catholic, which set about to revoke the Restoration land settlement and enact Catholic emancipation. In an attempt to extirpate the New English ascendancy, James allowed this Jacobite Parliament to seize some 2,500 Protestant estates. But that does not mean that he had come to free Ireland from
English
control: for example, he balked at repealing Poynings’s Law, which subordinated the Irish Parliament to its English counterpart. Nor did he seek primarily to alleviate the suffering of the Irish people. What James wanted in 1689 was their support for his restoration in England. They gave it by joining a hastily scraped together Jacobite army, manned largely by poorly trained and ill-equipped tenant farmers. Nevertheless, it caught the Protestant landowning class off-guard. Law, order, and deference broke down. Many retreated to the heavily Protestant northern counties of Ulster, holing up in the garrisons of Londonderry and Enniskillen (
map 7
). In April, at Londonderry, Protestant apprentices closed the gates on James’s forces and waited for relief.